Thanks to talk radio and town halls, we all knew that Barack Obama was the Messiah. But until this week we didn't realize that he had his own religion -- complete with prayer services!

Or so it seemed, as video of a prayer service in support of universal health care went viral. It apparently first appeared on the right-wing outlets, Breitbart.tv and Naked Emperor News, with captions to make sure you were hearing what they were hearing. And what was that?

Nothing less than liberal Christians chanting the prayer petitions, "Deliver Us, Obama!" and "Hear Our Cry, Obama!"

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Whoa. The video starting ricocheting around the blogosphere, gaining credibility as it gained momentum. As the normally reliable Rod Dreher put it at his Beliefnet blog, it's "100 percent uncut Beck bait." It's not fake, he wrote, adding: "Ah, the Religious Left at prayer. This is sacrilegious, yes, but it's also asinine."

Well, turns out it was also not quite true. That started to dawn on some as they listened for themselves, and realized the people were chanting, "Deliver Us, O God!" and "Hear Our Cry, O God!" and not "O Bama!"

At Commonweal's blog, where Mollie Wilson O'Reilly has a good roundup of the affair, prayer service organizer Drew Astolfi wrote in about what occurred at the event nine months ago:

I was the organizer for [the liberal religious advocacy group] Gamaliel for this action -- we were trying to get the attention of a large insurance company (UHC). I voted for Obama, and most of us in Hawaii like him -- but praying to him would be crazy, not to mention sacrilegious. We never did it, and never would -- the idea of it is silly at best.

Here's the liturgy we used for the record:

With the prophet Jeremiah, we cry out, Is there no balm in Gilead? Is there no physician there? Why then has the health of my poor people not been restored?

Hear our cry, oh God!

With the prophet Martin Luther King Jr., we cry out, Of all the forms of inequality, injustice in health care is the most shocking and inhumane.

Hear our cry, oh God!

From health care systems and industries that place profit over people,

Deliver us, oh God!

The rowback on the right has been something less than vigorous. Rod Dreher did two updates, finally agreeing to "take [Astolfi] at his word" even though he held out that the audio is not completely intelligible.

Breitbart posted a longer version of the video, without captions but with an ambiguous "editor's note":

As you'll see in the comments and related links there is a debate over what is actually being said. Does the crowd say, "Hear our cry, Obama" and "Deliver us, Obama?" Or are they saying "Oh God?" In the longer version the first two repetitions seem to have a distinct "uh" sound at the end that resonates as "Obama." The later repetitions are a little fuzzier. Did some of the religious leaders present become uneasy? Or was there a mix of what was being said? Read some of the blogger analysis below. What do you think?

At his blog Mark Shea also delivers an agnostic's mea culpa:

So I chalk this one up to a slight advantage for the organizers of the rally in the video who are, thank God, not such fools as to actually bid their followers to pray to Obama (though some of the followers sound to me like they are doing so).

On the other hand . . . there could well be a religious element to this tale, though on the other side. Much as some folks will see Jesus in a Cheeto or the Virgin Mary in a coffee stain, so too we can hear what we want to hear -- and that is in many ways a religious impulse, as religion scholar Jeremy Biles explained in an essay:

Some believe that seeing the Holy Mother in a stain on the wall is an instance of wish fulfillment; it confirms faith. But I think that another level of wish fulfillment is at work. Humans partake of a desire for what astonishes -- the irruption of the heterogeneous into the monotonous, the transformation of the everyday into the extraordinary. Coincidences, resemblances, and repetitions respond to a wish for the paranormal, the supernatural. And this desire compels a religio-aesthetic interpretation of life that engages the imagination and invigorates the soul.

In other words, as readers of Dan Brown know, there are no coincidences. Something else must be at work. Right?

Watch the video here:





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