Yes, yes, I know. Two Daily Crazy posts in one day. It's too much to be endured. But you wouldn't have wanted to wait until tomorrow to hear this one.

As we all know, Jesus came back last Tuesday. But what perhaps we didn’t know was that Barack Obama—he of the pretentious website and the “Office of the President Elect”—is also to become the Holy Father of the United States. Allow me to explain.

Today, the Washington Post blog “On Faith” has a fantastically absurd post that holds up Obama as the leader of a new “spiritual moment” in America. Our nation is so ravenous for vague, non-religious spiritualism that Obama won simply by “modeling the qualities of a spiritual leader.” Until this very year, the big spiritual question regarded the tension between faith and science, a debate that “spilled over into politics, making for a little progress and a lot of division.” But now, all of that is irrelevant; this year, because Americans have decided to get over all that and move toward a non-divisive spiritualism, they need a president who will “channel the spiritual surge toward action.”

What? There’s so many fluffy “what does that even mean” phrases here I can’t even count: “pastor in chief,” “faith moment,” “spiritual surge.”

About the only fact in these 850 words is the fire-is-hot observation that “spiritual hunger is everywhere.” Of course it is. But Shriver’s evidence—“Spiritual teachers like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra draw huge crowds and write multiple bestsellers. The megachurches are exploding. The internet offers millions of searchers new ways to find prayers, inspirational readings and rituals”—is somewhere in the neighborhood of laughable. Only in 2008 are throngs of people interested in fad churches and pop spirituality? These are all new trends? Where exactly have you been hiding?

Next, let’s watch this incredible leap of logic: “With a growing spiritual hunger also comes a need for a community of support and belonging. That's where President-elect Obama comes in.” Unfortunately for us, Shriver doesn’t gives us the pleasure of watching the elaborate mental gymnastics it must have taken to jump off of that point A and land on that point B. Sure, Obama was calm and level enough to be the ideal sort of pastor. Were this scenario true—and there’s no evidence Obama thinks anything of the sort—it would be appalling and frightening.

Thankfully, there’s no way anyone can defensibly claim that Obama “led a spiritual surge.” Lots of spiritual people voted him, but he led a very anti-spiritual political surge—away from the Bush-era notions that private faith should permeate the public sphere and that the president’s faith should guide his policy. Shriver could have made a respectable point about Obama leading a movement toward civic community and political participation—a surge of interest in the political process, where the newly initiated are motivated to make their voices heard for the first time. But a church of America with Obama as it's pastor?

As it is, this is a bunch of nice, puffy hearts-and-clouds nonsense. Make no mistake: the Christ-president is, in fact, a politician, and his reign will be about politics. It will be dirty when it has to, and it will flex its ideological muscles the moment it gets the opportunity. Those are hardly reasons to fear Obama (that's what politics are about, after all), but they are reasons to avoid this sort of blather about his coming godlike rule. Barack Obama isn’t, shouldn’t be, and doesn’t want to be America’s Dalai Lama.

PS: The best part of crazy blog posts is when their own commenters are incredulous. A few very representative samples:

• “Ewwww … What utter sick-making and also confused nonsense.”
  
  
• “Tim—please grow up. … The Commander in Chief is not my pastor. I love him. I voted for him. I repsect him. He is NOT my pastor and you should really take a hard look at yourself for saying that he is.”
  
  
• “You have to be kidding me. Pastor in Chief?”
  
  
• “The word ‘pastor’ comes from the word pasture, the place where a shepherd watches over his sheep. Citizens are not sheep. We do not need a pastor. The armed forces have a Commander in Chief, and citizens have a President.”
  
  
• “Are you kidding me? President Bush, he of the ‘faith-based’ initiatives and constant references to the Bible, WASN'T a Pastor-in-Chief?”