Obama's Black Theology

Aim has a great article that is partially referenced below.

From WND, “Obama mentor identified as communist: Frank Marshall Davis 'discussed American imperialism, colonialism, exploitation”

The mysterious "Frank" cited as a friend and adviser by Democratic president contender Barack Obama while he was growing up in Hawaii has been identified as Frank Marshall Davis, a member of the old Moscow-controlled Communist Party USA.

The identification comes from Cliff Kincaid in his column, "Obama's Communist Mentor," which was made available on the Accuracy in Media website.

"Let's challenge the liberal media to report on this," he wrote in his column. "Will they have the honesty and integrity to do so?"

Kincaid, who earlier reported on Obama's pending plan to ship $845 billion overseas to battle "global poverty" as evidence of his socialist leanings, said the newly revealed connection is even more worrisome.

A very in-depth article about Barack Obama’s Church can be found at this link. It is very important that people understand who they are getting as a possible President. I will post at the end a response by myself to a person with whom I debated many yearn ago. It deals with slavery and the like. I will also link a paper I did on a class my son had in sixth-grade. It will tie everything here together. One commentator

says:

The nagging question begs to be answered. Why would the top Democrat presidential candidate feel more comfortable attending an Afrocentric church? Obama's attendance at a church that encourages blacks to separate themselves from the rest of American society must be explained. How can he claim to be able to unite and reach across to all the people in the nation?...

…Is black theology one of hope or does it purposefully dredge up painful feelings of victimization? If that be the case, it would be wiser to consider a church where it is fully understood that God is no respecter of color or gender. (Acts 10:34)

The author then references a decent article by Dr. Robert Morey that explains a bit about Black Theology, but to be honest, Ron Rhodes does a better job that is well referenced (PART I, PART II), as well as an article by H. Wayne House, one of my professors. If you truly wish to gain an in-depth understanding of Liberation Theology and Barack’s “guiding light,” you should read all these links and articles.

Other blogs on the matter can be found at Church and State, and Faultline USA, and New Zeal. An even more important connection can be found in a report about Obama’s connection to the IAF (Industrial Areas Foundation). At any rate, this blog should wrap up any unsolved or answered questions… hopefully.

Here is the debate I promised:

Before I begin, Philip, I would like to recommend a book on the history of the modern liberal view, it is entitled The Betrayal of Liberalism: How the Disciples of Freedom & Equality Helped Foster the Illiberal Politics of Coercion & Control (Ivan R. Dee Pub; Chicago: IL [1999], edited by Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball).

I find people simplifying of the Civil War very intriguing. The reason being that less than one-quarter of the landowners in the Antebellum South were slave owners. And I know of no one that would go to that kind of war over just slavery when less than a quarter of its people practiced it. There were, as well, in the Antebellum South, 3,000 [+] African-Americans who owned slaves, many, treating the slaves worse than their white counter parts.

You mention that some used the Bible to back slavery. People also use the Bible to prove that aliens exist? Are they right? Or are they merely misapplying the Bible, using bad hermeneutics. Practicing isogesis rather than exegesis. The Bible has always, let me repeat, always been against any persons enslavement. Keep in mind though, that the Bible is a history of the "fallen" cultures and times in which it was written, so it does record cultural practices... such as slavery. That being said, I wish to digress a bit and use some info from a paper I did for my son’s fifth grade class (passed out to all the parents as a supplement to counter the terribly one-sided [Howard Zinn type] take on the history between the explorers/settlers and the Native-American), and I will borrow a few quotes from it as well as adding some.

Author and talk show host Larry Elder (an African-American, for the curious) rightly notes:

“We need historical perspective. Yes, slavery is America’s horror and shame. But slavery, unfortunately, appears throughout the whole of human history. Europeans enslaved Europeans. Asians enslaved Asians. Those we refer to as Native-Americans enslaved other Native-Americans. Black Africans enslaved other black Africans. Slave traders brought more African slaves to the Middle-East and to South America than to Colonial America. Yet this country fought a civil war that resulted in the eradication of slavery, no other nation can say that.” Larry Elder, Ten Things You Can’t Say In America, (St. Martins Press; New York: NY [2000], p. 9.)

This fight to end slavery and the fight for civil rights in the 60’s were in large part due to the Christian faith. Ministers and believers mainly manned the Underground Railroad, as well as the marches of the sixties. To quote Dinesh D’Souza (an Indian-American [from India]):

“Slaves developed a communal life too, much of it built around the two central institutions of the black church and black family. For a people oppressed, a deep religious faith helped to create autonomous spiritual space that even the master had to respect, and it offered hope that the travails of the slaves would someday end….” D’Souza continues, “The slaves embraced the white man’s Christianity…. Identif[ying] with Christ as the suffering victim who would rise again” Dinesh D’ Souza, The End of Racism, (The Free Press; New York: N.Y. [1995], p. 96.)

Far from being the repressive religion, Christianity became one of the major catalysts that helped create the autonomous African-American that yearned for the promise of liberation that always follows salvation. I heard a challenge on the radio by Michael Medved once that was telling. Someone called in to say that Christianity had caused the enslavement of blacks and that they fought tooth and nail against it being removed. Michael Medved then went through some historical matters and ended with challenging the caller as to whether there were any “free-thinkers” in the Underground Railroad.

After the person named one, Michael pointed him to the fact that this person was in fact a Christian. The abolitionist movement in America and Britain was headed by and had its ranks filled with Christians. And if this religion had somehow been removed prior to this fight, we very well may still have slavery, like the African continent and the Middle-East do today. I want to dispel any misconceptions about the conservative and liberal movements of today, so we can see where the marrying of conservativism and religion propelled the civil rights movement.

Thomas Sowell, another African-American author (sociologist, economist, and historian), shows the misconception of modern day understandings as well:

Roots has a white man leading a slave raid in West Africa, where the hero Kunta Kinte was captured, looking bewildered at the chains put on him as he was led away in bondage. The village elders were likewise bewildered as to what these white men were doing, carrying their people away. In reality, West Africa was a center of slave trading before the first white man arrived there -- and slavery continues in parts of it to this very moment. Africans sold vast numbers of other Africans to Europeans. But they hardly let Europeans go running around in their territory, catching people willy-nilly. Because of the false picture of history presented by Roots and by other sources, last year we had the farce of the president of Nigeria making demands on the United States because of the enslavement of people whom his own countrymen had enslaved, and on behalf of a country where slavery still persists, more than a century after emancipation has occurred throughout the Western world. Roots also feeds the gross misconception that slavery was about white people enslaving black people. The tragedy of slavery was of a far greater magnitude than that. People of every race and color were both slaves and enslavers, for thousands of years, all around the world. Europeans enslaved other Europeans for centuries before the first African was brought across the Atlantic. Asians enslaved other Asians, as well as whatever Europeans they could get hold of. Slavery existed in the Western Hemisphere before Columbus ever got here.”

( http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/sowell013002.asp )

Today even, all the marches of the sixties with Martin Luther King, Jr. and the like were Christians, and they were marching against the southern democrats,

But it was the southern democrats who formed the line to defend Jim Crow. Georgia governor Lester Maddox famously brandished ax handles to prevent blacks from patronizing his restaurant. He was a democrat. Alabama governor George Wallace stood in front of the Alabama schoolhouse in 1963 and thundered, ‘Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.’ He was a democrat. Birmingham Public Safety commissioner Eugene ‘Bull’ Conner sicced dogs and turned fire hoses on black civil rights demonstrations [that were manned primarily by Christians]. He was a democrat. In 1954, Arkansas governor Orville Faubus tried to prevent the desegregation of a Little Rock public high school. He was Democrat. President Eisenhower, a Republican, sent in federal troops to prevent violence and enforce a court order desegregating the school. As a percentage of their respective parties, more republicans voted for the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 than did Democrats! A Republican president, Richard Nixon, not John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson, instituted the first affirmative action program with goals and timetables…. And it was during the Kennedy administration that FBI head J. Edgar Hoover sought and received permission to wiretap Martin Luther King. The person granting him permission? Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. (Larry Elder, Ten Things You Can’t Say In America, (St. Martins Press; New York: NY [2000], pp. 14-16)

“President Kennedy avoided engagement with the civil rights movement for as long as possible…. Tellingly, it had been Vice President Richard Nixon who fought for the 1957 Civil Rights Act in the Senate, not Kennedy.” (Kenneth J. Heinman, God Is a Conservative: Religion, Politics, and Morality in Contemporary America, New York Univ; New York: NY [1998], pp. 34-35)

A very sober and insightful quote, from a Brit, found in the opening pages of a book by historian Paul Johnson entitled, A History of the American People:

. . .can a nation rise above the injustices of its origins and, by its moral purpose and performance, atone for them? All nations are born in war, conquest, and crime, usually concealed by the obscurity of a distant past. The United States, from its earliest colonial times, won its title-deeds in the full blaze of recorded history, and the stains on them are there for all to see and censure: the dispossession of a indigenous people, and the securing of self-sufficiency through the sweat and pain of an enslaved race. In the judgmental scales of history, such grievous wrongs must be balanced by the erection of a society dedicated to justice and fairness. (Harper-Collins; New York: NY [1997], p. 3.)

Back now to the topic at hand, the patron saint of conservatism is Edmund Burke. The patron saint of modern liberalism (not “classical-liberalism,” this is what the founders were known as, and I consider myself one) is Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The two ideologies seep from these two men. These two philosophies that undergird modern politics have two different views of human nature. One of my favorite, little known, authors is Dale A. Berryhill, he made this distinction clear, as the following shows:

One night, after I had spoken to a church group about the liberal contradiction, a young woman approached me with fire in her eyes.

Are you saying,’ she demanded, that you cannot be a liberal and be a Christian?

On the contrary, I replied, I don’t think you can be a Christian and not be a liberal, if by liberal you mean being compassionate for the underprivileged, treating everyone equally because they are equal in the eyes of God, and being a good steward of Gods earth. But if you mean by liberal that there are no absolutes, or that we may take away people’s rights in order to ensure progress, then I’m afraid you’re caught in the liberal contradiction.

The Judeo-Christian world view has plenty of room for compassion, tolerance, and individual rights, but it has no place for either relativism or progressivism. Judeo-Christian theology offers a distinct alternative to the progressive vision. According to Genesis, man was created in the image of God – so he will always strive to do better – but he also has a fallen, sinful nature. History tells us that this sinful nature is not improving as man grows in knowledge and technical capability [or monetarily]…. the greatest flaw in contemporary liberalism is its failure to take this aspect of human experience into account. The progressive vision requires a belief in the inherent goodness of man…. This flawed vision leaves the liberal perplexed over the continuing ‘rebirth’ of racism, corruption, and other human ills. The progressive sees racism and other evils as stages to move beyond; they are national problems to be solved, not human problems to be guarded against and punished. In fact, these evils are often made possible by the odd progressive belief that man will stop being bad if he is no longer restricted from being bad. (The Assualt: Liberalism’s Attack on Religion, Freedom, and Democracy, Huntington House; Lafayette: LA [1995], pp. 30-31)

Rabbi Dennis Prager and Rabbi Daniel Lapin both have written and spoken on the true nature of the liberal vs. conservative views in regards to human nature (see for instance America’s Real War, Multnomah pub; Sisters: OR [1999]).

And I wish to be very clear about who the abolitionists were, they were classical-liberals, which are now known as conservatives (Russell Kirk, The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot, Regnery Pub; Washington: DC [1995 ed]).

(Update) A great book by my favorite black author, Thomas Sowell, is a book called Black Rednecks and White Liberals.