Days before the grand opening of former President Barack Obama’s presidential library in Chicago, pastor, author and “Wretched” host Todd Friel says the center’s design is “anti-Christian” and an “intentional slight to God.”
Set to officially open later this month, the $850 million Obama Presidential Center will include a public library, basketball courts, ball fields, gardens, a playground and eight-story museum, according to a photo preview from NPR.
Featuring a 225-foot-tall tower with a largely concrete exterior dubbed the “Obamalisk,” the 19-acre property will hold an open-house style grand opening with live performances, family-friendly activities, food, art, and other activities starting Friday.
But in a “Wretched” segment published June 9, Friel, a pastor at Alpharetta Bible Church in Georgia, wondered aloud about the center’s exterior design, calling it “downright ugly, noting recent media comparisons of the museum to a “Klingon prison” or the nefarious “Death Star” battleship planet from the Star Wars movie franchise.
“It looks like a World War II-era German anti-aircraft tower. It belongs in the Hunger Games. It was designed by Minecraft,” he said. “In other words, the thing is downright ugly.”
Friel suggested the Obama Presidential Center design — which was reportedly led in large part by the former president himself — carries a meaning that transcends mere aesthetics or architectural preference.
“His new presidential center, I think, can be described as atheistic, anti-Christian, Marxist, and just another effort from Barack Obama to do what he’s been endeavoring to do now since he was nominated president, and that is to fundamentally change America,” said Friel.
Pointing to Obama’s personal involvement with the center’s design, Friel believes the building is a “tangible symbol” of Obama’s “utterly destructive worldviews” and an “intentional slight to God.”
“You don’t walk into a building and decide what it means; the building decides what it wants you to feel about reality,” said Friel. “Why? Because buildings preach, and the Obama Center is a really lousy sermon.”
To make his case, Friel touched on various architectural philosophies as expressions of worldview, including the architectural tradition rooted in Greco-Roman ideals and later Christianized to reflect objective truth and beauty. Deconstructionism, on the other hand, said Friel, draws on postmodern ideals and rejects notions like objective truth, beauty and form.
Linking the Obama Center with deconstructionist ideals, Friel called the tradition “atheistic with a healthy heaping of post-modernism” and tied it directly to Marxist ideology. “Traditional architecture affirmed order. Deconstructivism destabilizes it,” Friel said.
He concluded his message by acknowledging the impact of Obama’s voice even out of office.
“He doesn’t speak with his lips. He speaks with architecture. And what he is saying is as odious as ever,” said Friel, adding the center’s design could be summed up as, “‘I hate this America. I hate tradition. And I reject God’s ordering of reality.’”
Located in the Jackson Park neighborhood of Chicago, the city where Obama’s improbable political ascension began nearly three decades ago, the Obama Presidential Center has also drawn criticism from President Donald Trump, who shared a Truth Social post on May 30 depicting the museum as a gigantic trash can.
Earlier this year, Trump also accused the state of Illinois of spending “hundreds of millions of dollars” to help fund what the president called “Obama’s badly delayed and tremendously over budget ‘library.’”
@The Christian Post
