As liberalism is to Christianity, Obamanism is to black liberation theology

At the Vdare blog, a reader of Steve Sailer’s book on Barack Obama makes an interesting point that has been made before,—that Obama’s rhetoric and politics are a sanitized, secularized version of Jeremiah’s Wright’s blacks-are-good-whites-are-evil sermons—but the reader fleshes it out with further insights. For one thing, he provides an explanation of how Obama could sit comfortably in that disgraceful church for 20 years. Here are key passages from the comment:

I agree that the Senator is likely to be agnostic, wrapping the cloak of religiosity around himself only as needed to insulate himself against criticism of insincerity: he certainly doesn’t appear to have the religious gene, either phenotypically or by judging his paternal or maternal DNA. …

This is where the black liberation theology comes in. If you strip away the religiosity and view it as simply a political position—it is the appropriate function of the state to impose Christian virtues on the citizens of the state, whether it be alms (forcible redistribution of wealth), pacifism, a call for personal responsibility, health care as a natural right (as a physician I have somewhat different views on this), glorification of the poor and rejection of materialism (in the form of antipathy towards capitalism), all tending toward special privileges for Africans—it comes much closer to defining his political philosophy than Socialism….

From Trinity and Rev Wright then, and again as you and others point out, all he does is substitute more politically conventional and less inflammatory terms for the subjects and objects of the sermon: the structure of the argument, the rhetorical style, the romantic and religious promise of it all remain intact and create his Messianic image. So call it black liberation politics.

My points are that belief, or at least an acceptance of, black liberation theology as taught by Wright 1) explains his political positions quite well, better than a belief in Marxism, 2) explains just why he sat in that pew all of that time, and 3) is antithetical to a belief in the American idea of limited government as expressed in the Bill of Rights (as confirmed by his recently discovered radio comments).

Posted by Lawrence Auster at November 02, 2008 09:56 PM | Send