Obama at prayer

President Obama spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C. this morning. The White House has posted the text of Obama’s remarks here. I’ve embedded the White House video below; Obama’s speech begins at about 01:49:00 and runs to 02:17:00. C-SPAN has posted the video here. I transcribed quotes from the video before the White House posted the text; they may not be perfectly accurate.

Those who say that Obama must be a Muslim are clearly wrong. Obama can’t be a Muslim. He worships himself.

To some extent Obama’s remarks this morning constituted a continuation of his remarks at the mosque of the Islamic Society of Baltimore. Toward the end he invokes “the peaceful spirit of Islam,” as he did yesterday in Baltimore. Speaking as a professed Christian, however, aspiring to a gospel style, Obama occasionally employs his fake Southern accent and rasping voice. He testifies that he’s seen the faithful “just helpin’ people,” for example.

I don’t see much in the way of spirituality or humility before the divine in Obama’s words. He seems to find Jesus of use for his own political purposes. Obama finds time to play his vaunted role as a media critic as he disapproves our “ever shrinking attention spans.” He holds himself out as a “student of history.”

He counsels us on the wages of fear. “Fear does funny things,” he says. It “can lead us to lash out against those who are different or try to get some sinister other under control and if we let it consume us, the consequences of that fear can be worse than any outward threat.” You know who you are.

He holds out faith as “the great cure for fear. Jesus is a good cure for fear….His love gives us the power to resist fear’s temptations….He gives us the courage to go against the conventional wisdom and stand up for what’s right even when it’s not popular….”

When it comes to praying for relief of Christian persecution and Christians driven from ancient homelands by unspeakable violence, he sounds like a bystander instead of a protagonist in the chain of events or a passive tool of forces beyond his power to affect.

Quotable quote: “…terrorism, eroding shore lines, those things are real.”

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