For anyone who bought into Rick Warren’s “kinder, gentler” brand of know-nothing fundamentalism, I recommend you reflect on some truly disturbing comments he made in a recent sermon. In essence, Warren longingly describes the passionate fanaticism that such esteemed historical figures as Adolf Hitler, Lenin and Mao inspired in their followers:

“In 1939, in a stadium much like this, in Munich Germany, they packed it out with young men and women in brown shirts, for a fanatical man standing behind a podium named Adolf Hitler, the personification of evil.

And in that stadium, those in brown shirts formed with their bodies a sign that said, in the whole stadium, “Hitler, we are yours.”

And they nearly took the world.

Lenin once said, “give me 100 committed, totally committed men and I’ll change the world.” And, he nearly did.

A few years ago, they took the sayings of Chairman Mao, in China, put them in a little red book, and a group of young people committed them to memory and put it in their minds and they took that nation, the largest nation in the world by storm because they committed to memory the sayings of the Chairman Mao.

When I hear those kinds of stories, I think ‘what would happen if American Christians, if world Christians, if just the Christians in this stadium, followers of Christ, would say ‘Jesus, we are yours’ ?

What kind of spiritual awakening would we have ?

It probably didn’t cross Warren’s mind, but the examples he cites are two of the world’s most classic cases of totalitarianism. The products of their regimes — beyond millions of people dead — included the forced regimentation of thought and no press or free-speech protections whatsoever.

If that’s the kind of fervent “radicalism” he admires, then we badly need to ought to take a long look at just what his agenda really is. And so ought Barack Obama.