Diatribune

Cone's book has been around since 1969. It hasn't been hidden under a rock, traded secretly in underground communities. You have just found out about him and now you know everything from one paragraph? Hmm. Again, I ask you: if Cone was such a giant purveyor of killing, why does he teach at Union Theological Seminary? Last time I heard, UTS was one of the most respected Seminaries in the country. I'm sure they let crazed killers on their staff. Not.

Black liberation theology partly comes out of 1969, after James Forman delivered his "Black Manifesto" to the Riverside Church. The Black Manifesto expressly targeted Protestant churches demanding reparations for blacks. Here's what Forman said about the Church later in life in order to elucidate the Manifesto and the feelings at the time of the church as an oppresor of blacks at the time:

Four: The dogma and practice of the white Christian churches. As far as I’m concerned, this has been one of the most consistent and effective control mechanisms operating upon us. I happen to be old enough to remember my mother telling me: “Well, don’t worry about the white man, son; he’ll get his in hell. We will have everlasting life, so don’t worry about him; these 60 or 70 years of hard times which we face will be nothing compared to our eternity of peace and his eternity of damnation.” As long as this kind of psychology and ideology is spread by the Christian churches, people will not go on to struggle for their liberation.

During the period of slavery and even today, in most instances the practices and dogma of the Christian churches are in fact made to order for an enslaved group of people. Let us examine it: Here we are slaves inside the United States, and so the man comes with the Bible and says “Blessed are the poor, for they shall inherit the earth, or they shall see God. Blessed are the meek for they shall see the kingdom of God.” Here we are the poor—toiling in the fields, chopping the cotton and the man says to us, “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than it is for a rich man to go to heaven.”

So all of these things were comforting in many ways to our ancestors and even to some of us. Now I don’t take the position—and this is something that we have to argue about—that the Christian church was in fact a survival element for black people. That’s just a hypothetical argument. We have no way of proving it; but I do know that the ideology, practices, and involvement with the Christian church helped to control us and make us submit more and more to the tyranny of this country.

Now the same thing is true today because many people believe the racist Christian ideology, believe that there is an eternity, believe there is life after death, that God is all powerful and that even the sufferings on this particular earth will be rewarded by eternity.

1969 was the height of black anger and demands for true equal rights, particularly at the height of the Vietnam War. Black power was translated into black liberation and based on the black soul being freed from mental and spiritual oppression. In that, it's similar to liberating the Christian soul from sin.

At the time, it and is for those who follow it, an attempt to turn their backs on the larger society that would reject them in the first place while lifting up their blackness as a thing of pride, which is not necessarily found in the larger society. Morally, they believe that God, as a just savior, is on their side because he is the true liberator of those who are oppressed. It's a theory and I challenge you to find a black church that has actually killed a white church based on your limited knowledge of black liberation theology.

From Wikipedia: Cone has responded to the controversy by noting that he was generally writing about white churches that did nothing to oppose slavery and segregation and not about white people as individuals.[1]

In addition, you post a paragraph from a book. Great. But you keep claiming that Obama is guilty by association. This is a stretch to say the least.

I ask you again, if the only message from Cone's idea are you posted in a single paragraph, please, tell me where the black church in America is that has killed a white church lately?

Black liberation theology is theoretical; it posits that if blacks cannot get justice from the larger community that they are in, that they create their own community and their own God by metaphorically "killing the oppressor" thereby liberating themselves to be able to live in the larger society. Again, I ask you, where is the black church that you have found that actually has killed a white church in America?

And again, I ask you, what does this have to do with Obama? I'm not saying Cone's theories are not over the top. I agree with you on that, but it comes at the height of a history that you have idea about. And the guilt by association thing is laughable. Where have you seen or read Obama saying anything that comes even close to what Cone posits? You haven't and you can't.

Forbes did an interview with Cone on liberation theology's origins.

Cone: I don't think people have done much reading about black liberation theology, and I think what they think--what they've heard--of what's been in the media is often only a sort of--how can I say it?--kind of a distortion of it.

Black liberation theory emerged out of the ministers: out of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the late 1960s.

What we were trying to do is to show that one can be black and Christian at the same time. That one can love oneself as a black person. And also, in fact, that that's the only way you can learn how to love other people.

And one of the problems in a racist society is that blacks who are the victims of that white supremacy often develop self-hatred. To see that self-hatred is to see what violence we do against each other. …

The violence that blacks do to each other is a violence that is the result of not liking who you are.

Now, Martin King was certainly aware of that, but he was addressing the social and political things in the society that made blacks feel less human. … He changed the laws of the society so that blacks could be more effectively functional in that society.

Now, Malcolm X. He was a cultural revolutionary. He changed the way black people thought about themselves. He helped black people to love themselves.

So black liberation theology is an attempt to bring Martin and Malcolm together. The "black" in black theology stands for Malcolm X. The "theology" in that phrase stands for Martin Luther King. …

King taught us how to be a Christian, to love everybody. And it's important. But Malcolm taught us that you can't love everybody else until you love yourself first.

And so black theology wanted to interpret the Christian gospel in such a way that black people will know that their political and social liberation is identical to the gospel and also identical to them loving themselves. That is, we are a part of God's creation.

God created us black. And because of that, that blackness is good. So in a world in which values are defined by white domination and white supremacy--in that kind of world--then God sides with those who are the victims in it.

And so black liberation theology was an attempt to make the gospel accountable to the black community, who were struggling for a more just society in America.

What you have in Jeremiah Wright is someone trying to bring together Martin and Malcolm. He's a Christian preacher in a white church, by the way. He is speaking to the hurt in the African-American community. The suffering.

You know, when King spoke to the black community, he spoke with language very similar to Jeremiah Wright. …

When King spoke out against the war in Vietnam, he said, and this is a quote, he said America[n government] is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." This was in 1967 at Riverside Church. And the media came down hard on him.

King said [he] gets [his] credentials from the gospel, and not from the government. He was speaking out against the war in Vietnam. Wright was speaking of the war in Iraq and all that. He was speaking to the same kind of reality. The language gets extreme.

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