Obama's Church and it's Doctrine
This article goes over the claim of Obama's Christianity and its doctrine.
Is Obama really a true Christian?
Feb 27 2012Scholars say liberation theology's black MarxistJesus 'distorts' GospelRev. Franklin Graham last week revealed thatPresident Obama confided to him and his father during a recent visit to North Carolina:
“I don’tgo to church.”
Publicly, Obama insists he’s a practicingChristian.“I have no idea what he really believes,” Graham said during an appearance on MSNBC.It’s a deepening mystery. Pundits on both the left and right question the president’s faith. The growingdebate marks a turning point in American politics, where discussing the personal religious beliefs of anelected official or candidate is taboo. Bill Maher, host of HBO’s “Real Time,” doubts Obama is a practicing Christian. “I just don’t believe it,” he said recently. Maher suspects the president is an atheist.GOP presidential contender Rick Santorum says Obama follows a “phony theology” not based on theBible and preached by radicals. “He went to Rev. Wright’s church for 20 years,” the former Pennsylvaniasenator pointed out this week in an interview with Fox News host Sean Hannity.Obama’s longtime church, Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago, preaches anAfrocentric, and at times anti-American, doctrine.Wright gave a sermon the Sunday after 9/11 inwhich he thundered, “America’s chickens! Cominghome! To roost!” He also condemned America,using the phrase “God damn America!” “It wasthere – at the Trinity United Church of Christ onthe South Side of Chicago – that I met Rev.Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who took me on another journey and introduced me to a man named JesusChrist,” Obama told black preachers gathered in2007 at the Hampton University Annual Ministers’Conference in Hampton, Va. “It was the besteducation I ever had,” the then-Democratic presidential hopeful added. The question is, ask skeptics, what kind of “journey” did he take? Andwhich “Jesus Christ” did he meet? Four years later, Obama still has never publicly shared details. And thefew media who have asked for them have been stonewalled. As a result, recent polls show at least 4 in 10Americans have no idea what Obama’s religious beliefs are. The mystery surrounding his faith has led togrowing interest in a subject normally considered too private to debate in politics.What is known, thoughrarely covered by the Washington press, is that Obama’s longtime pastor and “spiritual adviser,” as he’s
Trinity's stained-glass rendering of a black Jesus
called him, preached the radical doctrine of black liberation theology while Obama sat with his family inthe pews. Black liberation theology, according to Wright, has been at the “center” of Trinity’s“theological perspective” since 1972. And the teachings and writings of the father of black liberationtheology – Professor James H. Cone – were required reading at Trinity, which features stained-glassdepictions of a black Jesus. This was true when Obama worshiped there over a period spanning twodecades. Black theology was outlined in the church’s new member packet and taught in its new member classes. Cone said Wright was “really the one who took it from my books and brought it to the church.”Cone’s doctrine is steeped in socialist ideology. He believes merging
Marxism
with the Gospel willliberate African-Americans from the supposed economic slavery of “white” capitalism. “Together,” hesays, “black religion and Marxist philosophy may show us the way to build a completely newsociety.”One of
chief disciples, Dwight N. Hopkins, has taught classes on black liberationtheology at Trinity and was one of Obama’s teachers there.Hopkins is a former community organizer, as well as acolleague of Obama from the University of Chicago. He gavehis first recorded political donation to his friend and co-religionist in 2008, according to FEC records. BetweenFebruary 2008 and October 2008, Hopkins contributed $1,538to Obama’s campaign. He, too, favors socialism over capitalism.“Dr. James Cone continues to envision the actuality of equalityamong people, challenging white and black churches alike torecognize U.S. capitalism’s oppressive character throughout theworld,” Hopkins has written of his mentor. Communist officialsin China and Cuba have invited Hopkins to speak aboutliberation theology in their countries, according to hiscurriculum vitae.Obama has not found another church since quitting Trinity in2008, when video of Wright’s anti-American sermons surfacedduring the presidential campaign. “This was a very dangerousscandal for Obama,” said Hoover Institution research scholar Dinesh D’Souza. “It threatened to expose him as a radicalmasquerading as a mainstream centrist.” While Obama’s relationship with his controversial Chicagochurch has been severed, his belief in its doctrine appears to remain intact. He has never denounced thechurch nor disavowed any tenet of black liberation theology. “I am not denouncing the church,” Obamasaid even after footage of its radical sermons aired. “I am not interested in people who want me todenounce the church, because it’s not a church worthy of denouncing.” The president insists he’s stillreligious in the absence of a home church and says his Christianity comforts him amid all the doubtssurrounding his faith. “My Christian faith has been a sustaining force for me over these last few years – all the more so when Michelle and I hear our faith questioned from time to time,” Obama said last year.While the White House press corps still avoid asking Obama about his black liberation theology beliefs,religious scholars contend it is a politically charged theology that distorts the biblical teachings of Christianity. They say it diverges from both Scripture and ancient Middle Eastern history. “The goals of black liberation theology are to turn religion into sociology, Christianity into a political agenda, Jesus intoa black Marxist rebel and the Gospel into violent revolution,” said religious scholar Robert Morey, whoholds a doctorate in ministry from Westminster Theological Seminary in Pennsylvania. “They are moreinterested in politics than preaching the Gospel.”
Cone disciple Dwight N. Hopkins, oneof Obama's Bible teachers
Among other things, black liberation theology espouses:
•
Africans were “God’s chosen people,” not the Israelites.
•
Ethiopia was the “promised land” instead of Israel.
•
Adam and Eve, as well as Noah, were black.
•
Abraham and Moses also were black.
•
Jesus Christ himself was black. (“Jesus is a black man,” Cone claims, explaining that whiteChristians “reinterpreted Jesus so he looked like them.” Wright has preached in at least onevideotaped sermon: “Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and in a culture that wascontrolled by rich white people.”).
•
Christ wasn’t a deity but a “black revolutionary,” who rebelled against the oppression of “whiteRomans” and delivered a liberating message of social and political change.
•
Christ was only for the poor, not for all mankind.
•
Christ was a political liberator, not a personal redeemer.
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Christ wasn’t crucified on the cross, but was lynched on a “lynching tree” (Cone explains thiscurious factual discrepancy as “transvaluation.”)
•
Heaven is “pie-in-the-sky, by-and-by slave mentality” – a white “fantasyland” – that ignores the plight of blacks and other oppressed people in the here and now. (“Don’t tell me about Heaven,”Wright fumed in a 2008 interview with PBS. “What about this life? … We can change policy.”)
•
Repentance is something required exclusively of whites, who Cone demands “need to give back what you took – and white people took a lot from black people.”
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Original sin is “whiteness,” or being Caucasian.
•
The epistles of Paul and other apostles are doctrinally insignificant and rejected, since they acceptthe institution of slavery that existed at the time. (“God who allows slavery, who allows murder of a people, lynching – that’s not the God of the people being lynched and sodomized and raped, andcarried away into a foreign country,” Wright told PBS.)
•
The Bible is “not the infallible word of God,” according to Cone, and is therefore pliable.Before campaigning for president, Obama expressed doubts about the inerrancy of Scripture. In a 2006“Call to Renewal” keynote address in Washington, he said: “Even those who claim the Bible’s inerrancymake distinctions between scriptural edicts – sensing that some passages are central to Christian faith,while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life.” Obama alsois not sure there is an afterlife – a Heaven or a Hell – which also is in keeping with the beliefs of black liberation theology. He has confessed that he is not “sure what happens when we die.” In a 2008interview defending his church, Obama suggested political activism and a “spirit of justice” is moreimportant that a spirit of peace and a focus on salvation in the hereafter. “I don’t consider Christianity a place to avoid the real problems in the world,” he said. “Now, my faith tells me that we have to engage inthose real problems in the world. And, you know, sometimes, when you are engaging in the real problemsthat are out there, there is going to be some conflict and some controversy. And I would expect that Iwould have a pastor who would not shy away from speaking out on those issues.” In a 2007 speech,Obama explained his reasons for joining Trinity. “Rev. Wright’s sermons spoke directly to the socialgospel – the need to act and not just to sit in the pews,” he said. “And so I found that very attractive andended up joining the church.” A more detailed explanation is found in his 1995 memoir.I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses andthe Pharaoh, the Christians in the Den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones,” Obama said of the stories he heardat Trinity. “Those stories became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood.”
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