The Racist Theology of Obama’s Church: Breaking The James Cone Of Silence

As noted by Spengler in The Asia Times (3/18/08) Senator Barack Obama’s Reverend and mentor, the bigoted Jeremiah Wright, invoked James Cone, repeatedly, during a now infamous interview with Sean Hannity on Fox News:  

“Wright: How many of Cone’s books have you read? How many of Cone’s book have you read?
Sean Hannity: Reverend, Reverend?
(crosstalk)
Wright: How many books of Cone’s have you head?”  

Cone, a Distinguished Professor of Theology at New York’s Union Theological Seminary, is “Distinguished” only for the unabashed racism of his crude theology. These quotes epitomize Cone’s noxious views, embraced by Obama’s pastor and confidant, Jeremiah Wright. 

James Cone, quoted in William R Jones, “Divine Racism: The Unacknowledged Threshold Issue for Black Theology”, in African-American Religious Thought: An Anthology, ed Cornel West and Eddie Glaube, Westminster John Knox Press, 2003, pp. 850, 856.   

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community … Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.    

From James Cone’s own, Black Theology and Black Power, 1997, Orbis,  p.150:   

For white people, God’s reconciliation in Jesus Christ means that God has made black people a beautiful people; and if they are going to be in relationship with God, they must enter by means of their black brothers, who are a manifestation of God’s presence on earth. The assumption that one can know God without knowing blackness is the basic heresy of the white churches. They want God without blackness, Christ without obedience, love without death. What they fail to realize is that in America, God’s revelation on earth has always been black, red, or some other shocking shade, but never white. Whiteness, as revealed in the history of America, is the expression of what is wrong with man. It is a symbol of man’s depravity. God cannot be white even though white churches have portrayed him as white. When we look at what whiteness has done to the minds of men in this country, we can see clearly what the New Testament meant when it spoke of the principalities and powers. To speak of Satan and his powers becomes not just a way of speaking but a fact of reality. When we can see a people who are controlled by an ideology of whiteness, then we know what reconciliation must mean. The coming of Christ means a denial of what we thought we were. It means destroying the white devil in us. Reconciliation to God means that white people are prepared to deny themselves (whiteness), take up the cross (blackness) and follow Christ (black ghetto).