Obama, Black Liberation Theology, and Karl Marx
What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.
Very well then! Emancipation from huckstering and money, consequently from practical, real Judaism, would be the self-emancipation of our time.”- Karl Marx; essay, The Jewish Question; 1844
Not having a theology degree, nor even a Ph.D., and being, too, a bit naïve
regarding matters of high-brow philosophical currents throughout the ages, I
have to admit that when I first read Karl Marx’ essay, The Jewish
Question, I was actually stunned by its contents.
First off, my rather cursory education in various philosophies and in
Marxism, particularly, did not prepare me for the bitter thrust of old Karl’s
potent anti-Semitism. In fact, until reading this particular essay, I
would have never, in a million years, connected much of anything whatsoever
Marxian with Jew hate.
Who would?
After all, Karl Marx, himself, was a Jew. Hitler and many others blamed the
Jews for Communism, thanks to the number of Jews who played prominent roles in
the Russian Revolution. I naturally associated twentieth century Anti-Semitism
with Adolph Hitler and the Nazis.
Ironically, if Karl Marx had still been alive and residing in Germany or
any of the Nazi-occupied countries during WWII, he would have perished along
with his brethren, despite his own “self-loathing-Jew” status.
Marx envisioned a society “which would abolish the preconditions for
huckstering, and therefore the possibility of huckstering,” because this
classless society “would make the Jew impossible.”
Personally, I find the opinion of some that Marx was a genius, to be
downright laughable. Regarding his opinions on the Jews, one is
left to ponderously consider which ones were dumb, and which were
dumber.
Evidently Karl Marx was as utterly ignorant of the true tenets of Judaism
(Self-sufficiency does not equate to “huckstering.”) as he was of the
diabolical possibilities inherent in his own words, once they were in the hands
of one Adolph Hitler.
This atrocious irony might be merely a historical oddity if old Karl’s
words were not still bouncing around in the heads of those who wish to lead new
revolutions based upon them. But Marx’ words still dominate much of what
happens on the world stage today, even in our own republic.
The word emphasis has changed a bit. The industrial proletariat is no
longer the focus. But as a newly prominent American politician is wont to remind
us: words do matter.
Yes, of course, words matter, as many leaders of ambitious movements have
mightily declared.
…the power which has always started the greatest religious and political avalanches in history rolling has from time to immemorial been the magic of power of the spoken word, and that alone.Particularly the broad masses of the people can be moved only by the power of speech.- Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf.
The Oppressed Vs. the Oppressors
Just words.
But where do they come from, and what do they mean in America today?
I might never have delved into the subject of the oppressed vs. the
oppressors if I had not gone to Chicago in January seeking answers about a man
who would be president.
When I visited Obama’s church, still under the directorship of Jeremiah
Wright, I came away with far more questions than answers, and one thing leading
to another, have spent the last several months trying to fathom how Marxist
political philosophy wound up emblazoned with a cross and a pulpit, and
pretending to rely on the Bible for its authority.
It is somewhat difficult to imagine a more contorted blasphemy, with the
single possible exception of Hitler himself claiming to be acting by divine
decree in the interests of Christianity. Which is precisely what Hitler
did do, while hoodwinking the German people into electing him
Chancellor.
Hitler sprinkled Mein Kampf with Christian language, most likely
to fit with the predominantly Christian German population, and appealed to
voters on the strength of his Christian “calling”:
“I believe that I am acting in accordance with the will of the Almighty Creator: by defending myself against the Jew, I am fighting for the work of the Lord..”
As most junior-high Sunday schoolers know, however, a Christian is judged
on actions, not words, and Hitler was no Christian. He was a bamboozler of
the lowest imaginable order.
Jeremiah Wright is the tiny tip of Obama’s spiritual
iceberg
The phenomenon that raised so many questions for me in January, when I
visited Trinity United Church of Christ, was not Jeremiah Wright’s sermon, which
turned out to be just a call for all good congregants to support Barack Obama
for President. It wasn’t the sermon that caught me off guard; I was
prepared for that. I had watched video of Wright, giving five of his fiery
sermons.
The thing that really got me to thinking, reading and searching for answers
was the church bookstore.
Having been a practicing Christian for more than 40 years now, and a
practicing Catholic for 26 of those years, I have visited perhaps 100 various
Christian bookstores, both Protestant and Catholic. In all of those
places, one thing tied together the books for sale:
Christianity.
Not so in Obama’s church bookstore.
I spent more than an hour perusing available books, and found as many
claiming to represent Muslim thought as those representing Christian
thought. Black Muslim thought, to be specific.
And the books claiming to support Christianity were surprisingly of a more
political than religious nature. The books by James H. Cone, Wright’s own
mentor, were prominent and numerous.
Now that I have read a number of the books that presumably Wright’s
congregants (including Barack Obama) have also read, I can only conclude that
the thing tying these volumes together is not Christianity, nor any real
religion, but the political philosophy of Karl Marx.
“Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.” (emphasis mine)
- Marx and Engels; The Communist Manifesto; 1848
If Marxism can be summed up in only a couple of phrases, now familiar to
nearly every modern person, they would be “class struggle” and “oppressed vs.
oppressors.”
James H. Cone, the unquestioned modern-day mentor of all the black power
preachers, claims to have created a new theology, uniting the Muslim black power
tenets of Malcolm X and the Christian foundations of Martin Luther King,
Jr.
All he has really done, in my opinion, is take original liberation theology
from Latin America, developed in the early 1960s by Catholic priests, and
painted it black.
Liberation Theology vs. Traditional Christianity
The teaching authorities of the Catholic Church, have for more than 20
years now, been attempting to stamp out these heretical liberation theologies,
denouncing them as vehemently antithetical to the Catholic Christian faith, and
have been strenuously combating this Marxist counterfeit Christianity on many
fronts within the Church herself.
Of course, the Medieval, iron-fisted clamp of the Catholic Church’s
authority, even within the Church herself, is routinely overstated, and there
are renegade priests all over the place (more on another of Obama’s spiritual
mentors, a liberation theology Catholic priest in Chicago, in Part Two next
week).
Not to mention the fact that the Catholic Church has no authority
whatsoever over those claiming to represent protestant interpretations of the
Christian faith, such as Cone and Wright.
But it is important to note here that liberation theology, including black
liberation theology, has not gone unnoticed by the learned biblical scholars
within the Vatican, and liberation theology has been roundly denounced as both
heretical and dangerous, not only to the authentic Christian faith, but even
more so to the societies which come to embrace it.
Just one nugget from the Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith,
“Instruction on Certain Aspects of the ‘Theology of Liberation’:
“…it would be illusory and dangerous to ignore the intimate bond which radically unites them (liberation theologies), and to accept elements of the marxist analysis without recognizing its connections with the (Marxist) ideology, or to enter into the practice of the class-struggle and of its marxist interpretation while failing to see the kind of totalitarian society to which this process slowly leads.”
- (Author: Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect, now Pope Benedict XVI; written in 1984)
Understanding that black liberation theology is Marxism dressed up to look
like Christianity helps explain why there is no conflict between Cone’s
“Christianity” and Farrakhan’s “Nation of Islam.” They are two prophets in
the same philosophical (Marxist) pod, merely using different religions as
backdrops for their black-power aims.
As Cone himself writes in his 1997 preface to a new edition of his 1969
book, Black Theology and Black Power:
“As in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God’s reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts. As Malcolm X put it: ‘I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won’t let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion’.” (p. xii; emphases mine)
And, to drive his Marxist emphasis even further, Cone again quotes Malcolm
X:
“The point that I would like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that there is no kind of action in this country ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied in with the overall international (class) struggle.” (p. xiii)
(Ironically, considering the formal Church teaching regarding liberation
theologies, this book of Cone’s was published by Orbis, owned and managed by The
Catholic Foreign Mission Society of America, a Maryknoll religious entity.
So much for the totalitarianism of the Catholic Church.)
It is this subjugation of genuine Christianity to the supremacy of the
Marxist class struggle, which marks the true delineation between traditional
Christianity and black liberation theology, as Pope Benedict XVI (writing in
1984 as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) sums up thusly:
“For the marxist, the truth is a truth of class: there is no truth but the truth in the struggle of the revolutionary class.”
Which is precisely why Cone and his disciples are able to boldly proclaim
that if the Jesus of traditional Christianity is not united with them in the
Marxist class struggle, then he is a “white Jesus,” and they must “kill him.”
(Cone; A Black Theology of Liberation; p. 111)
And Cone brings it all the way home with this proclamation of liberation
from traditional Christianity itself:
“The appearance of black theology means that the black community is now ready to do something about he white Jesus, so that he cannot get in the way of our revolution.”
Move over Jesus and make way for Cone, Wright and Obama.
The revolution is at hand.
And presto-chango, once we’ve followed Marx, Cone, Wright and Obama down
the yellow brick road to revolution, Christianity as we’ve known it for
millennia ceases to exist.
Obama was raised by his mother, the agnostic anthropologist, to regard
religion as “an expression of human culture…not its wellspring, just one of the
many ways — and not necessarily the best way — that man attempted to control the
unknowable and understand the deeper truths about our lives.” (Audacity of
Hope; p. 204)
However, when Barack Obama met Jeremiah Wright in the mid-eighties, between
his years at Columbia and Harvard Law, he found a “faith” perfectly
accommodating to his already well-formed worldview.
From The Audacity of Hope:
“In the history of these (African people’s) struggles, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death; rather, it was an active, palpable agent in the world.” (p. 207)
As Obama explains further, it was Wright’s (and presumably Cone’s, as
required of new members at Trinity) peculiar form of Christianity that Obama
found palatable:
“It was because of these newfound understandings (at Trinity under Wright) — that religious commitment did not require me to suspend critical thinking, disengage from the battle for economic and social justice…that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity…and be baptized.”
Wright’s vision of Christianity was perfectly appetizing to Barack Obama;
he didn’t need to change a thing.
Liberation Theology and the New Order of Things
James Cone devotes many words in all of his books to instructing his disciples to beware of those resistant to the necessary change in the power structure, warning that,
”those who would cast their lot with the victims must not forget that the existing structures are powerful and complex…Oppressors want people to think that change is impossible.” (James H. Cone; Speaking the Truth; p. 49)
Pope Benedict XVI (writing as Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger) give an equally
stringent message to Catholics about liberation theology regarding the
perversion of the Christian understanding of the “poor”:
“In its positive meaning the Church of the poor signifies the preference given to the poor, without exclusion, whatever the form of their poverty, because they are preferred by God…But the theologies of liberation…go on to a disastrous confusion between the poor of the Scripture and the proletariat of Marx. In this way they pervert the Christian meaning of the poor, and they transform the fight for the rights of the poor into a class fight within the ideological perspective of the class struggle.”
According to Pope Benedict’s instruction on liberation theology, our
understanding of the virtues, faith, hope and charity
are subjugated to the new Marxist order:
Faith becomes “fidelity to history.”
We are the ones we’ve been waiting for, to bring about the final
fruition of the class struggle.
Hope becomes “confidence in the future.”
Yes, we can change the world; we don’t need God. Our
collective redemption comes when we engage in the Marxist class struggle.
Charity becomes “option for the poor.”
All are not created equal. Special political privilege for the
oppressed, socialism, will set us free.
It’s the dawn of a new age.
Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American
Thinker. She welcomes your comments at commonsenseregained.com/.
