The insanity of "black liberation theology"

The more you know about Jeremiah Wright, the more appalling he is. Spengler today digs up a televised interview between Wright and Sean Hannity in which Wright upbraided Hannity for not having read the black liberation theologian James Cone, with whom Wright identifies. Who is James Cone? He's the theologian who wrote this:

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.

Wow. Either God wants to destroy white people, or He is not worthy of worship. This is racist idolatry.

Here is an excerpt about Cone and his influence on Trinity UCC, Obama's church, from a sympathetic profile in The Christian Century:

There is no denying, however, that a strand of radical black political theology influences Trinity. James Cone, the pioneer of black liberation theology, is a much-admired figure at Trinity. Cone told me that when he's asked where his theology is institutionally embodied, he always mentions Trinity. Cone's groundbreaking 1969 book Black Theology and Black Power announced: "The time has come for white America to be silent and listen to black people. . . . All white men are responsible for white oppression. . . . Theologically, Malcolm X was not far wrong when he called the white man 'the devil.'. . . Any advice from whites to blacks on how to deal with white oppression is automatically under suspicion as a clever device to further enslavement." Contending that the structures of a still-racist society need to be dismantled, Cone is impatient with claims that the race situation in America has improved. In a 2004 essay he wrote, "Black suffering is getting worse, not better. . . . White supremacy is so clever and evasive that we can hardly name it. It claims not to exist, even though black people are dying daily from its poison" (in Living Stones in the Household of God).

Wright agrees. When I asked him whether white Americans are right to maintain that the racial situation has improved since the days when Africentric Christianity was born, Wright pointed to the racist remarks by radio host Don Imus: "And you say things have improved?"

Yes, well, we've gone from legal segregation and lynching to a time when not only does none of that exist, but a nationally famous radio host can be hounded out of his job for using a racial epithet. Clearly, nothing has changed one bit in this country. Ha. This is the same church that on Sunday compared criticism of Rev. Wright to one of the most infamous crimes in American history, the murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. I'm sorry, but what?!?! Utter crackpottery.

How much of this does Barack Obama take seriously? Why would he go to a church whose pastor embraces and extols the vile racist theology of James Cone, which is, as Spengler puts it, "a greased chute to the nether regions"? I'm not asking rhetorically; I honestly don't understand it.

As Spengler says, most nations have been tempted to confuse the Almighty's purposes with their own (I would add that just because America is defined by an idea, and not an ethnos, we are not immune). One of the problems Orthodoxy has had in reaching out to America is that too often, its immigrant congregations don't understand why anybody else would be interested in Orthodoxy. When Julie and I worshiped with the Maronite Catholics in Brooklyn, they could hardly have been more welcoming to us, but they really didn't understand why we, as non-Lebanese, would want to worship with them. Christianity is far more than a tribe at prayer, or it isn't Christianity, it's ethnic idolatry.

Still, I have never met a Lebanese, a Russian, a Greek or any other "ethnic Christian" who would assert on behalf of their ethnos the sort of thing James Cone teaches. "If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him," James Cone wrote. Substitute the word "black" for white, or "non-Russian," "non-Greek," etc., and see how much sense that makes -- and ask yourself how far a white candidate for the presidency would get if he came within 100 feet of a church that embraces that kind of theology.

Anyway, Obama's going to give a major speech on this issue tomorrow in Philly. Good luck trying to square this circle. As Spengler puts it:

What played out last week on America's television screens was a clash of two irreconcilable cultures, the posture of "black liberation theology" and the mainstream American understanding of Christianity. Obama, who presented himself as a unifying figure, now seems rather the living embodiment of the clash.

UPDATE: I won't go as far as Derb and say that Obama is done for, but I think he's right on everything else here:

The MSM can't smother this, not in the age of the web, though they are trying mightily. (The Sunday New York Times "Week in Review" Section had nothing about Wright; neither did the main news section.) Americans are a fair-minded people, who find double standards obnoxious. A guy who says "nappy-headed ho's" in an irreverent radio show is dragged round the city walls behind a chariot to the delighted howls of a mob of self-righteous "anti-racists"; yet a man who uses the authority of the cloth to damn our country and curse white people, is praised as a "biblical scholar" by a candidate for the presidency? I don't think so. This won't stand. The man is toast.