[quote]
Professor X wrote:
What? Someone could call any one of us “insincere” about our religion if they put our every action and every statement under a microscope. It isn’t your place or anyone else’s to analyze or define any other man’s journey in spirituality. That is for him alone.
Honestly, what is wrong with some of you?
BostonBarrister wrote:
The other logical alternative is that he is sincere, and the central tenets of what he is sincere about are reflected in Wright’s teachings. Which do you prefer?
Professor X wrote:
Please, do tell about what Wright’s teachings were outside of “God Damn America”. I am still waiting on that “destroy all white people” quote. I see blogs and what other people think about blogs that are about this man and what he believes, but when asking for direct quotes, it sure does seem to get dry in here.
I want to know what this man’s teachings actually were on most Sunday’s. I do not want someone cherry picking 30 years of sermons and binding them together into a 5 minute segment and then claiming this was all the man talked about.[/quote]
Well, as I said, I’m not buying copies of his sermons - I’m not donating money to that church (Obama already gave them plenty anyway).
However, I did find some more Wright from a positive Rolling Stone article from February 2007, originally titled “The Radical Roots of Barack Obama” but retitled “Destiny’s Child” a little while ago - the author is obviously excited at the prospect of getting a radical into office.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/13390609/campaign_08_the_radical_roots_of_barack_obama/print
Here’s an excerpt of that article:
[i]The Trinity United Church of Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago, is at once vast and unprepossessing, a big structure a couple of blocks from the projects, in the long open sore of a ghetto on the city’s far South Side. The church is a leftover vision from the Sixties of what a black nationalist future might look like. There’s the testifying fervor of the black church, the Afrocentric Bible readings, even the odd dashiki. And there is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a sprawling, profane bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution, with his own radio shows and guest preaching gigs across the country. Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously declares that he will recite ten essential facts about the United States. “Fact number one: We’ve got more black men in prison than there are in college,” he intones. “Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!” There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. “We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!” The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: “And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!”
This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama’s life, or his politics. The senator “affirmed” his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a “sounding board” to “make sure I’m not losing myself in the hype and hoopla.” Both the title of Obama’s second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright’s sermons. “If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from,” says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, “just look at Jeremiah Wright.”
Obama wasn’t born into Wright’s world. His parents were atheists, an African bureaucrat and a white grad student, Jerry Falwell’s nightmare vision of secular liberals come to life. Obama could have picked any church �?? the spare, spiritual places in Hyde Park, the awesome pomp and procession of the cathedrals downtown. He could have picked a mosque, for that matter, or even a synagogue. Obama chose Trinity United. He picked Jeremiah Wright. Obama writes in his autobiography that on the day he chose this church, he felt the spirit of black memory and history moving through Wright, and “felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams.”
Obama has now spent two years in the Senate and written two books about himself, both remarkably frank: There is a desire to own his story, to be both his own Boswell and his own investigative reporter. When you read his autobiography, the surprising thing �?? for such a measured politician �?? is the depth of radical feeling that seeps through, the amount of Jeremiah Wright that’s packed in there. Perhaps this shouldn’t be surprising. Obama’s life story is a splicing of two different roles, and two different ways of thinking about America’s. One is that of the consummate insider, someone who has been raised believing that he will help to lead America, who believes in this country’s capacity for acts of outstanding virtue. The other is that of a black man who feels very deeply that this country’s exercise of its great inherited wealth and power has been grossly unjust. This tension runs through his life; Obama is at once an insider and an outsider, a bomb thrower and the class president. “I’m somebody who believes in this country and its institutions,” he tells me. “But I often think they’re broken.” [/i]
However, we can also look at Wright’s source material.
[i]WRIGHT: If you’re not going to talk about theology in context, if you’re not going to talk about liberation theology that came out of the �??60s, (INAUDIBLE) black liberation theology, that started with Jim Cone in 1968, and the writings of Cone, and the writings of Dwight Hopkins, and the writings of womanist theologians, and Asian theologians, and Hispanic theologians…
HANNITY: Reverend, I’ve got to get this in.
WRIGHT: Then you can talk about the black value system.
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: I’m going to tell you this. Listen…
WRIGHT: Do you know liberation theology, sir? Do you know liberation theology?
HANNITY: I studied theology; I went to a seminary. And I studied Latin.
WRIGHT: Do you know black liberation theology?
HANNITY: I’m very aware of what you’re calling black liberation, but let me get my question out.
(CROSSTALK)
WRIGHT: I said, do you know black theology?
HANNITY: Reverend, I’m going to give you a chance to answer my question.
WRIGHT: How many of Cone’s books have you read? How many of Cone’s book have you read?
HANNITY: Reverend, Reverend?
(CROSSTALK)
WRIGHT: How many books of Cone’s have you head?
HANNITY: I’m going to ask you this question…
WRIGHT: How many books of Dwight Hopkins have you read?
HANNITY: You’re very angry and defensive. I’m just trying to ask a question here.
(CROSSTALK)
WRIGHT: You haven’t answered �?? you haven’t answered my question.
HANNITY: And it seems to be, when you say the black community, black family, black work ethic, black community…
(CROSSTALK)
WRIGHT: It seems arrogant, ignorant…
(CROSSTALK)
WRIGHT: I’m asking you…
(CROSSTALK)
WRIGHT: … how many books of Dwight Hopkins have you read?
HANNITY: Sir, I’m going to say this whether you like it or not. I’m going to get my words in, and I’m going to tell you right now…
(CROSSTALK)
HANNITY: As a Christian, sir, I think, as a Christian, you should not separate by race in this day and age. And that’s why a lot of people are going to look at that and say, “We’re all supposed to be united under Christ, aren’t we?”[/i]
So, why don’t we take a look at the “black liberation” theology that came out of the 60s - the Hopkins, the Cone.
Here’s the link I posted before, asking for any critiques of its take on the black liberation theology:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JC18Aa01.html
Here’s an excerpt of a Cone article I found online:
[i]�?? The church�??s most vexing problem today is how to define itself by the gospel of Jesus�?? cross as revealed through lynched black bodies in American history. Where is the gospel of Jesus�?? cross revealed today? Where are black bodies being lynched today? The lynching of black America is taking place in the criminal justice system where nearly one-third of black men between the ages of 18 and 28 are in prisons and jails, on parole, or waiting for their day in court. One-half of the two million people in prisons are black. That is one million black people behind bars, more than in colleges. Through private prisons, whites have turned the brutality of their racist legal system into a profit-making venture for dying white towns and cities throughout America. One can lynch a person without a rope or tree.
The civil rights movement did not end lynching. It struck a mighty blow to the most obvious brutalities, like the lynching of Emmett Till and the violence of the Ku Klux Klan. But whenever society treats a people as if they have no rights or dignity or worth, as the government did to blacks during the Katrina storm, they are being lynched covertly. Whenever people are denied jobs, health care, housing, and the basic necessities of life, they are being lynched. There are a lot of ways to lynch a people. Whenever a people cry out to be recognized as human beings and society ignores them, they are being lynched.
�?? People who have never been lynched by another group usually find it difficult to understand why blacks want whites to remember lynching atrocities. Why bring that up? That was a long time ago! Is it not best forgotten? Absolutely not! The lynching tree is a metaphor for race in America, a symbol of America�??s crucifixion of black people. It is the window that best reveals the theological meaning of the cross in this land. In this sense, black people are Christ-figures, not because we want to be but because we had no choice about being lynched, just as Jesus had no choice in his journey to Calvary. Jesus did not want to die on the cross, and blacks did not want to swing from the lynching tree. But the evil forces of the Roman State and white supremacy in America willed it. Yet God took the evil of the cross and the lynching tree upon the divine self and transformed both into the triumphant beauty of the divine. If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy, with repentance and reparation, there is hope beyond the tragedy �?? hope for whites, blacks, and all humankind �?? hope beyond the lynching tree. [/i]
At the end of the day, this doesn’t sound post-racial to me. This sounds like the same radical left-wing crap that gets spewed at university campuses - the kind that encourages the continuance of racial hatred. The kind of stuff that Obama said he disagrees with in his speech yesterday - but which was absolutely central to the doctrines of his church and pastor of two decades - the stuff that was important in the choice of the church in the first instance. It’s not simply the manner of expression of these ideas that people find troubling - it’s the tone and the focus of the ideas themselves.