First, the candidate of unity attacks
Christian conservatives last year before
the Wright story became an issue....
OBAMA: CONSERVATIVE CHRISTIAN LEADERS HAVE HIJACKED FAITH HARTFORD, Conn. (AP) Senator Barack Obama has told members of his denomination that some conservative Christian leaders have exploited and politicized religion to sow division.
In a 30-minute speech before the national meeting of the United Church of Christ, which supports gay marriage, the Democratic presidential candidate said,
"Faith got hijacked, partly because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, all too eager to exploit what divides us." Obama said, "They've told Evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their church, while suggesting to the rest of the country that religious Americans care only about issues like abortion and gay marriage, school prayer and intelligent design." Obama said a growing number of evangelicals are concerned about poverty and the environment.
http://www.kxmb.com/News/137946.asp This article appeared in the mainstream news today.
McClatchy actually reported that Obama's church merges
Marxism and Christian Gospel and preaches that the white
church in America is the Antichrist because it supported
slavery and segregation. And, the founder of the modern
black liberation theology James Cone announced that Obama's
Church most embodied his message.
McClatchy reported:
Jesus is black. Merging Marxism with Christian Gospel may show the way to a better tomorrow.
The white church in America is the Antichrist because it supported slavery and segregation.
Those are some of the more provocative doctrines that animate the theology at the core of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Barack Obama's church.
Obama's speech Tuesday on race in America was hailed as a masterful handling of the controversy over divisive sermons by the longtime pastor of Trinity United, the recently retired Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.
But in repudiating and putting in context Wright's inflammatory lines about whites and U.S. foreign policy, the Democratic presidential front-runner didn't address other potentially controversial facts about his church and its ties.
Wright has said that a basis for Trinity's philosophies is the work of James Cone, who founded the modern black liberation theology movement out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s. Particularly influential was Cone's seminal 1969 book, "Black Theology & Black Power."
Cone wrote that the United States was a white racist nation and the white church was the Antichrist for having supported slavery and segregation.
Today, Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, stands by that view, but also makes clear that he doesn't believe that whites individually are the Antichrist.
In an interview, Cone said that when he was asked
which church most embodied his message, "I would point to that church (Trinity) first." Cone also said he thought that Wright's successor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, would continue the tradition...
...Wright, who hasn't been giving interviews since the controversy broke, told conservative TV talk-show host Sean Hannity last year that Trinity's black value system also had parallels to the liberation theology of laypeople in Nicaragua three decades ago. There, liberation theology became associated with Marxist revolution.
http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/31079.html And one final tidbit in the McClatchy article...
plagiarism, borrowed or what?
But Cone stands by his message, and sometimes Obama echoes it.
Consider this passage: "Hope is the expectation of that which is not. It is the belief that the impossible is possible, the 'not yet' is coming in history."
Those words sound as if they were pulled from Obama's latest campaign speech. Instead, they're from a memoir Cone wrote in the 1980s. In it, Cone said blacks shouldn't limit their hope to what the Republican and Democratic parties stand for. Then he posited a thought that voters are unlikely to hear from Obama:
"Together, black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us the way to build a completely new society."
Hmmmm, shines a different light on Obama's
Hope and Change campaign.