What Change Will Obama Make?

Rev. Jeremiah Wright

If Barack Obama is known by the company he keeps, that profile is clearly revealed in his long-standing relationship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ. Wright’s profile rose dramatically in 2008 when excerpts of his sermons surfaced on both the Internet and news broadcasts. In those excerpts, Wright is seen ranting against the United States, screaming “God damn America.” Chief among his comments was the view that, in light of the September 11, 2001 attacks on the Trade Towers, “the chickens were coming home to roost.”

Initially, Barack Obama tried to argue that the portrayal of Reverend Wright was unfair, and that the film clips were being endlessly looped for dramatic effect. Obama also contended that he had not been present when Wright’s inflammatory sermons were delivered and was, thus, unaware of their content. However, an examination of Wright’s other sermons and underlying religious philosophy revealed a dark secret about his theology which Obama could no longer ignore. This ultimately led Obama to terminate his family’s membership in the church to protect his political viability.

But just who is Reverend Jeremiah Wight and what does he actually preach? Wright was born and raised in a racially-mixed section of Philadelphia called Germantown. He graduated from the largely white Central High School of Philadelphia in 1959, and was recognized as a congenial member of the class. From 1959 to 1961, he attended Virginia Union University in Richmond, but left to join the United States Marine Corps. In 1963, he joined the United States Navy and entered the Corpsman School at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center where he was trained as a cardiopulmonary technician at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland. The medical team to which he was assigned was charged with care of President Lyndon B. Johnson after his 1966 surgery. In 1967, he left that position to enter Howard University in Washington, D.C., earning a bachelor's degree in 1968 and a master’s degree in English in 1969. He also earned a master's degree from the University of Chicago Divinity School and a Doctor of Ministry degree in 1990 from the United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, where he studied under Samuel DeWitt Proctor, a mentor to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Wright became pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago on March 1, 1972, when it had about 250 members. By 2008, Trinity had more than 10,000 members and was the largest church in the United Church of Christ, a predominantly white denomination.

During the course of his tenure at Trinity, Wright increasingly came to embrace the views of black liberation theology, particularly as enunciated by such radical black political thinkers as Stokely Carmichael, Malcolm X, and Franz Fanon, and black liberation theologians James Cone and Dwight Hopkins. Under Wright’s leadership (he is now officially retired), Trinity proclaimed itself “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.” His sermons repeatedly emphasized themes critical of the United States and its political and economic system. Among his more outrageous statements is his assertion that the U.S. government created the AIDS virus as a means of committing genocide against people of color, an incendiary notion he picked up from books by Leonard Horowitz (AIDS and Ebola) and Harriet Washington (Medical Apartheid). Similar charges have also been made by Louis Farrakhan. Clifford Kincaid, who edits the Accuracy in Media Report, discovered that the charge has its origins in a Soviet-era disinformation campaign by the KGB to direct media attention away from its own biological weapons program. According to Kincaid, “former KGB officer Oleg Gordievsky admitted the Soviet KGB role in spreading the AIDS charge against the U.S. in his 1990 book, The KGB - The Inside Story. Gordievsky called the charge a “fabrication” that “also took in some of the Western media.” (See AIM Report, April 28, 2008).

Black liberation theology advances the view that the historical Jesus was black and that he was oppressed by the ancient Romans who were the white imperialists of his day. It argues that the Biblical teachings of Jesus are radical and revolutionary and that, to achieve liberation, black people need to overthrow this imperialist oppression. Black liberation theology reinterprets Biblical history and the teachings of Jesus to advance a revolutionary racial message. The growth of black liberation theology may be traced to the same impulses which drove the formation of the black power movement in the civil rights era of the 1960s. James Cone’s Black Theology and Black Power, published in 1969, was an application to the religious sphere of what Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton’s Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America was to the political sphere. Black power and black liberation theorists assign this imperialist oppression to the American capitalist system. Black churches which embrace black liberation theology constitute about 25% of the total.

Critics of black liberation theology contend that it turns religion into sociology and Jesus into a black Marxist rebel with the goal of achieving income redistribution under the cover of religious teaching. They also argue that it promotes a poor self–image among blacks as being helpless victims of forces beyond their control, while attacking whites and Asians. Moreover, it serves the aims of Marx who rejected religion as the “opiate of the people,” while neglecting the central role of spiritual salvation. Other scholars have argued that it takes advantage of the centrality of the religious impulse within the black community to impose an alien and radical economic philosophy based on an oppressor/victim dichotomy. Such is the goal of non-Marxist socialist, scholar and activist Cornell West whose writings are consumed by a focus on matters of race, class and gender.

Sadly, the Jeremiah Wright controversy, particularly in light of the Obama presidential campaign, has not been conducive to the promotion of mutual understanding between white and black churches. Whites who are not familiar with the extent of black liberation theology’s impact within the black community are more likely to be suspicious of attitudes which may be harbored within black churches, while more traditional black churchgoers may feel themselves unfairly painted with the black liberation brush.

Stanley Kurtz, who writes for National Review, criticizes black liberation theology on the grounds that it is "a scarcely concealed, Marxist-inspired indictment of American capitalism.” He points out that the black intellectual's goal, according to Cone, is to "aid in the destruction of America as he knows it." Such destruction requires both black anger and white guilt. The black-power theologian's goal is to tell the story of American oppression so powerfully and precisely that white men will "tremble, curse, and go mad, because they will be drenched with the filth of their evil."

This was the religious environment to which Barack Obama was drawn shortly after he moved to Chicago to begin community organizing efforts. Obama’s selection of Trinity was made precisely because its theology was tightly bound up with its politics, a politics which conformed to the Saul Alinsky school of community organizing. Ironically, from his elitist perch, Alinsky would have viewed the black churches in the same manner as he viewed white churches, as archaic representatives of middle class identity and values. He would also have argued that he could achieve his revolutionary results only by convincing the middle class to side with him in its own destruction.

Obama had to have been aware that Trinity embraced black liberation theology and that the sermons of Reverend Wright were reflective of this underlying religious philosophy. This was emphatically driven home time and time again for twenty years as Obama sat in the pews and soaked in Wright’s words. It defies belief that a Harvard educated lawyer could have failed to grasp the core of Trinity’s theology under Wright’s leadership. Indeed, it was only when the national spotlight was shone on Obama’s pastor that he was ultimately forced to disown his radical views. But outside the glare of media scrutiny, when Obama sat alone with his conscience, he willingly embraced the black liberation theology of which he now claims he was unaware.

This entire episode calls into question Barack Obama’s judgment in embracing a radically and racially divisive theology for twenty years, as well his veracity in failing to admit to it. It also paints him as far to the left of the vast majority of Americans who profess a religious faith.

In addition, there is strong evidence that Obama was not even religious when he joined Trinity and that his motivations in doing so were almost entirely political. Whether he has undergone a religious conversion over the course of his attendance is a matter of some speculation. However, the fact that he has adopted the most extreme views on the subject of abortion, evidenced by his actions in the Illinois state legislature condoning what amounts to infanticide, suggests that his religious beliefs are merely a cover for his political ambitions.

More on Wright:

YouTube exherpts from Rev. Wright's "preachings" from the pulpit
Washington Post article
Wikipedia