Hoystory

Tomorrow morning, Democrat presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama is going to give a major speech in Philadelphia that will touch on the subject of race and his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Obama has attended Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago for 20+ years. Wright married Barack and his wife Michelle and baptized their two daughters. Obama describes Wright as a close friend and adviser.

Obama also says that he never heard Rev. Wright make any of the following statements:

• “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
• “We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”
• Wright told his congregation that the U.S. government (controlled by whites) supplies drugs to the black community for its destruction.
• Wright claims that the AIDS virus was created by the U.S. government (controlled by whites) in order to kill blacks.
• “No black man can ever be President. I don’t care how hard you run Jesse. No black woman will ever be considered for anything outside of what she can give with her body.”

And there undoubtedly are more.

Obama’s “I never heard him talk this way” explanation is laughable, and I don’t see how anything short of an outright denunciation and condemnation of Rev. Wright can save Obama in a general election. [Sen. Hillary Clinton's campaign appears unwilling to touch this issue in the primary.]

Political considerations aside. Trinity United Church of Christ, and the Rev. Wright’s “black liberation theology,” is the most disturbing bit of “Christian” religious news I’ve heard of since the shakedown racket that is Fred Phelps’ Westboro Baptist Church made news a decade ago.

Pseudonymous columnist Spengler at the Asia Times has a very informative article on the background of this “black liberation theology” that shows that it is mostly about “black liberation” and very little about “theology.”

During the black-power heyday of the late 1960s, after the murder of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr, the mentors of Wright decided that blacks were the Chosen People. James Cone, the most prominent theologian in the “black liberation” school, teaches that Jesus Christ himself is black. As he explains:

Christ is black therefore not because of some cultural or psychological need of black people, but because and only because Christ really enters into our world where the poor were despised and the black are, disclosing that he is with them enduring humiliation and pain and transforming oppressed slaves into liberating servants.

Theologically, Cone’s argument is as silly as the “Aryan Christianity” popular in Nazi Germany, which claimed that Jesus was not a Jew at all but an Aryan Galilean, and that the Aryan race was the “chosen people”. Cone, Hopkins and Wright do not propose, of course, to put non-blacks in concentration camps or to conquer the world, but racially-based theology nonetheless is a greased chute to the nether regions.

Biblical theology teaches that even the most terrible events to befall Israel, such as the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, embody the workings of divine justice, even if humankind cannot see God’s purpose. James Cone sees the matter very differently. Either God must do what we want him to do, or we must reject him, Cone maintains:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love. [1]

This “theology” requires perhaps the most torturous reading of the Bible that I’ve ever come across. It’s very little about Jesus Christ. The question of who “thy neighbor” is in the golden rule appears to be “blacks and other victims only.”

As I’ve read and watched the various YouTube videos of Wright’s sermons, I’ve tried to imagine what the flipside of Wright’s theology would look like. I’ve become convinced that it would be the institutional racism of the pre-1960s South. There I can imagine pastors in their pulpits warning against animalistic blacks who only want to rape white women. That was wrong — and evil — then, and Wright’s race-based attacks are no different. (See the Trinity United’s “Black Value System” and swap in “White” and see if that doesn’t sound like the racist “World Church of the Creator”.)

Wright is a bigot. The fact that 8,000 attend his church saddens me. The fact that Obama’s daughters — and hundreds of other children — have been raised in that poisonous atmosphere is a tragedy.

Obama has said that Wright led him to Jesus Christ. I am loathe to opine on the quality or legitimacy of anyone’s conversion experience and it certainly shouldn’t be part of the political debate in this country. However, I’m not sure I’d recognize the Jesus that Wright represents. A Jesus who is a victim — not the Son of God. A Jesus who hates his political opponents — not the guy who restored the chopped-off ear to a soldier who had come to arrest him. A Jesus who is about payback — not one who is about forgiveness. A Jesus who is about politics — not one who is about saving souls.