Obama and the Christian Wright
By Monte Kuligowski (04/15/08)
Speaking at a national, social-progressive religious conference on June 23, 2007, in Hartford, CT, presidential primary candidate, Barak Hussein Obama recounted his encounter with Trinity United Church of Christ – his church home for the last 20 years. Sometime after Obama had moved to Chicago in 1985 to work as a community organizer for a group of churches, certain pastors approached the organizer with the following advice: “‘If you’re organizing churches,’ they said, ‘it might be helpful if you went to church once in a while.’ And [Obama] thought, ‘Well, I guess that makes sense.’” Shortly after, on one apparently random Sunday Obama went over to Trinity and listened to a sermon entitled, “The Audacity of Hope,” delivered by one Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright. The pastor’s sermon provided the necessary understanding for Obama to affirm his “Christian faith;” and would provide the title for a book and a presidential campaign theme.
In his June 23rd speech, Obama went on to explain how he “heard God’s spirit beckoning [him]. I submitted myself to His will, and dedicated myself to discovering His truth and carrying out His works.” Obama doesn’t believe in a complete separation of church and state, so long as the Lord’s work involves a collective, social justice gospel that redresses the sins (and perceived sins) of America. Obama cites a disjoined potpourri of “prison reform and temperance, public education and women's rights - and above all, abolition,” as examples of the battles of faith. Additionally, people of faith “took on the problems of an industrializing nation - fighting the crimes against society and the sins against God that they felt were being committed in our factories and in our slums.”
When Obama speaks of the sins being committed in the “slums,” I don’t think he is speaking of epidemic sexual promiscuity, or larceny, robbery and murder, but of a system that fails to repair dripping roofs and faucets. Obama’s gospel doesn’t seem to concern itself with personal sin and responsibility as much as with the sins of the system against “society.”
According to Obama, “doing the Lord's work is a thread that's run through our politics since the very beginning.” Alas, all was well until those rascally Republican religious conservatives materialized out of nowhere.
“But somehow, somewhere along the way,” explains Obama, “faith stopped being used to bring us together and started being used to drive us apart. It got hijacked. Part of it's because of the so-called leaders of the Christian Right, who've been all too eager to exploit what divides us [can you feel the love?]. At every opportunity, they've told evangelical Christians that Democrats disrespect their values and dislike their Church [what has Rev. Wright told liberal Christians?] 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.”
Of course, conservative Christians don’t need “so-called leaders of the Christian Right” to inform them that liberal Democrats disrespect their values. Considering that liberal Democrats effectively endorse homosexual behavior and abortion as they stand opposed to reinforcing traditional religious morality in the classroom, I think conservative Christians can figure things out for themselves.
Obama believes that faith got “hijacked,” but fails to explain what he means by hijacked. Supposedly, conservative Christian leaders are “eager to exploit what divides us,” but he fails to explain what he means by exploit. Apparently, in Obama’s world, when religious traditionalists placed the issue of so-called gay marriage on the ballot boxes across the country, faith was hijacked and religion was exploited to divide the country (of the Christian Right’s issues cited by Obama, gay marriage remains the only one the People were actually allowed to vote on. Liberals control the others – and have divided the country – by force of the federal courts).
Of course, there are a number of moral issues that should divide the country so long as a significant number of people remain on the wrong side of the issues.
When slavery was an issue did the religious Republican abolitionists hijack faith and seek to exploit what divided the country? Of course not. To the abolitionists it was simply a matter of right and wrong based on the realization of Christian principles. “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3: 28). So it is with today’s Christians, black and white alike, who believe in right and wrong based on what the Bible has to say about the issue.
Obama’s frenzied fan club holds him out as a post-race, post-partisan savior who has the audacity of hope to unite the country. Translation: he can unite liberals while maligning and marginalizing conservatives. In view of what has recently come to light regarding Obama’s idea of Christianity, i.e., Rev. Wright and his hate-filled separatist and racist religion, we may conclude that on June 23, 2007, Obama was throwing divisive stones at religious conservatives while smugly abiding in Wright’s stained-glass house.
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