Black Liberation Theology

Since the dinosaur media was finally forced to acknowledge the issue of Jeremiah Wright and the UCC Trinity Church,the phrase `black liberation theology' has surfaced. Obama himself referred to this obliquely, talking about the sort of conversations he claims routinely occur in black churches -a stereotyped generalization if ever I've heard one.

But what exactly is meant by the phrase 'black liberation theology'? Where did it come from? And what does it reveal about who Barack Obama is?

Black liberation theology is an ethnocentric outgrowth - some would call it a tumor - of 'liberation theology', which was essentially a highly selective interpretation of the Gospels in an attempt to co-opt Christianity to promote communism and marxism. Liberation theology began with the Catholic Church in Latin America and elsewhere, and was used by radical priests and nuns who supported Fidel, Che Guevara, the Shining Path terrorists in Peru and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. Later, it spread to some of the mainstream Protestant denominations in other areas.

Black liberation theology mixes this ideology with racist rhetoric derived from the black power movement back in the 1970's.

Jeremiah Wright himself was originally a member of the Nation of Islam, but later returned to Christianity as he latched onto the views of two race based theologists who became his mentors, Dwight Hopkins and James Cone.

Wright himself acknowledged this in a bizarre interview with Fox News on March 15th with Sean Hannity.

Both Hopkins and Cone are now tenured radicals in academia. Hopkins is a professor at the University of Chicago's Divinity School; Cone works out of New York's Union Theological Seminary.

Back in the late 1960's and the early 1970's theologians like Hopkins and Cole essentially decided that blacks were the Chosen People. James Cone, the dean of the 'black liberation' theological school of thought, teaches that Jesus Christ himself is black, rather than a Jew:

"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. "

(from William R Jones, "Divine Racism: The Unacknowledged Threshold Issue for Black Theology, in African-American Religious Thought: An Anthology")

Or, to put it more simply, unless G-d hates whitey, black people have no use for him!

Movements like black liberation theology reject the idea of G-d's universal nature in favor of race based superiority. The largely secular Nazis used a similar logic to co-opt the German churches with the "Aryan Christianity" movement in Nazi Germany, which claimed that Jesus was not a Jew but an Aryan Galilean, and that the Aryan race was the "chosen people".

Substitute `black' or `Afro-American' for Aryan and that is exactly where the UCC Trinity Church and Jeremiah Wright are coming from.

And this is what Obama was referring to in his March 14 speech when he said: "I knew Reverend Wright as someone who served this nation with honor as a United States Marine, as a respected biblical scholar, and as someone who taught or lectured at seminaries across the country, from Union Theological Seminary to the University of Chicago."

Interesting the way the dots connect, isn't it?

Unfortunately for Barack Obama, leftist academia is by its very nature a lot more tolerant of racism and anti-Semitism when it comes from people like Cone, Hopkins and Wright than America as a whole.

So the question remains...does Barack Obama actually believe this claptrap?

Impossible to say.

Political life in black America is centered around churches, and Obama had political ambitions. Trinity United happens to be Chicago's largest and most politically active black church, and as a black man in that part of Chicago with political ambitions, it may be that he merely used the Trinity United Church of Christ as a political stepping-stone for his election to the Illinois State Senate.

On the other hand, he and his wife have been active members for two decades, and have a long standing close personal relationship with Jeremiah Wright..or as Obama himself put it, this racist and anti-Semite is `like family.' Even more damning as far as I'm personally concerned is that he allowed his children to listen to and be indoctrinated by Wright during their formative years. One customarily doesn't do that with one's children unless one agrees with what is being taught on a deep level.

I think the answer lies in the conflicted nature of Barack Obama himself.

Growing up almost entirely outside of the perspective of an American black, by his own admission Obama deliberately sought that kind of militant black street cred back in his college years, almost as if he were trying to fill a hole within himself by pretending.

It would be ironic, but quite fitting if Obama, the great pretender now gets bitch slapped because of what he may have been pretending to be for years.....selah.

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