Obama's Church Faith In Its Own Words

Kathryn Jean Lopez says:

This Would Make Me Angry -- Either at My Church, or, If I Believed it, at America

This comes from a document explaining "The Black Value System" on the website of the Obamas' Trinity Church:

Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”

Classic methodology on control of captives teaches that captors must keep the captive ignorant educationally, but trained sufficiently well to serve the system. Also, the captors must be able to identify the “talented tenth” of those subjugated, especially those who show promise of providing the kind of leadership that might threaten the captor’s control.

Those so identified as separated from the rest of the people by:

Killing them off directly, and/or fostering a social system that encourages them to kill off one another.

Placing them in concentration camps, and/or structuring an economic environment that induces captive youth to fill the jails and prisons.

Seducing them into a socioeconomic class system which while training them to earn more dollars, hypnotizes them into believing they are better than others and teaches them to think in terms of “we” and “they” instead of “us”.

So, while it is permissible to chase “middle-incomeness” with all our might, we must avoid the third separation method-the psychological entrapment of Black
“middleclassness”: If we avoid the snare, we will also diminish our “voluntary”
contributions to methods A and B. And more importantly, Black people no longer will be deprived of their birthright, the leadership, resourcefulness, and example of their own talented persons.

I'm not a fan of cherrypicking from someone's religion, taking religious stuff out of context, etc. Heaven knows I sometimes hear things from a Catholic pulpit or read something in a Catholic church's bulletin that I don't agree with (and is not actual RCC doctrine, etc.). But Trinity Church has been an influence on Barack Obama — or so he has told us. And it so happens that we know very little about Barack Obama's core. So the questions have to be asked. Is this his core? What is his core?

How many times, Senator, have you heard the phrase "this racist United States of America!" at church? Did it ever bother you? How and why?

These are not questions about undergarments here.

And more:

Politics and Religion Together [Kathryn Jean Lopez]


Barack Obama might wish this June 24 New York Times piece — "Faith Has Role in Politics, Obama Tells Church" — could be deleted from their archives:

Some highlights of this politician giving a speech in a church:

But Mr. Obama said that religion has a rightful role to play in American politics, and he praised people of faith who he said are now using their influence to try to unite Americans against problems like poverty, AIDS, the health care crisis and the violence in Darfur.

“My faith teaches me that I can sit in church and pray all I want, but I won’t be fulfilling God’s will unless I go out and do the Lord’s work,” he said, speaking before more than 9,000 people at the Hartford Civic Center in front of a red and black backdrop with the church’s marketing slogan: “God is still speaking.”

...


Mr. Obama told the audience he had been a spiritual skeptic raised in no particular tradition. In his 20s, as a community organizer working with churches in Chicago, ministers there told him, “If you’re organizing churches it might be helpful if you went to church sometimes.”

He joined Trinity United Church of Christ, moved by sermons by its senior pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who runs a megachurch — with 8,500 members — in a denomination where many churches are country steeples-on-the-green with memberships of 100 or less.

...


“But somehow, somewhere along the way, faith stopped being used to bring us together,” Mr. Obama said. “Faith started being used to drive us apart. Faith got hijacked.”

He attributed this partly to “the so-called leaders of the Christian right, who’ve been all too eager to exploit what divides us.” Yet he said that in traveling around the country he had sensed an “awakening” of an interfaith movement of “progressives.”

He received one of several standing ovations when he pledged that by the end of a term as president, “I will sign a universal health care bill into law.” And he received sustained applause when he called for closing the prison at Guantánamo Bay and withdrawing troops from Iraq.

He said he would push for another effort next week to pass an immigration bill. He said that illegal immigrants must have a chance to “earn their citizenship.”

I know this is not just a matter of taste or denominational differences: When I listen to Rev. Wright, it is Rev. Wright who is hijacking Christianity. God damn America, Reverend?