Okay, everyone. Move along. The AP says there’s nothing to worry about.

The AP is diving into damage control, assuring us that, not only is Pastor Wright just your ordinary black improvement activist, but his style of rhetoric is dying away anyway:

As shocking as they may be, the provocative sermons of Barack Obama’s pastor come out of a tradition of using the black church to challenge its members and confront what preachers view as a racist society. Yet while the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s racially tinged messages still resonate in some black churches, evidence also suggests his style is receding into the past as civil rights-era pastors retire. Sermons in other congregations now focus less on societal divisions and more on the connection between spirituality and a materially prosperous life.

Also, AP assures us, Wright, who just happens to have the largest church in his denomination (so it’s not dying out any time soon) is all about the Bible and social welfare:

More than three decades ago, Wright took over a small, demoralized congregation on Chicago’s impoverished South Side and built it into the largest church in the liberal, mostly white United Church of Christ.

At the 8,000-member Trinity United Church of Christ, the slogan “Unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian” has meant preaching about divestment during South Africa’s apartheid era. It has also meant fighting poverty, homelessness and AIDS at home. The religious message has been anything but watered down, with Wright dissecting Bible passages line-by-line.

Nor is black liberation theology anything about which you should worry, since it’s just another way of dealing with the all American battle to do away with the evil that is racism:

The pastor’s experience is grounded not only in the civil rights movement, but also in 1960s black liberation theology, which applies the Christian Gospel to contemporary struggles against race-based oppression.

I guess the AP religion writer forgot to read about the way in which black liberation theology describes itself:

James Cone, the most prominent theologian in the “black liberation” school, teaches that Jesus Christ himself is black. As he explains:

Christ is black therefore not because of some cultural or psychological need of black people, but because and only because Christ really enters into our world where the poor were despised and the black are, disclosing that he is with them enduring humiliation and pain and transforming oppressed slaves into liberating servants.

Theologically, Cone’s argument is as silly as the “Aryan Christianity” popular in Nazi Germany, which claimed that Jesus was not a Jew at all but an Aryan Galilean, and that the Aryan race was the “chosen people”. Cone, Hopkins and Wright do not propose, of course, to put non-blacks in concentration camps or to conquer the world, but racially-based theology nonetheless is a greased chute to the nether regions.

Biblical theology teaches that even the most terrible events to befall Israel, such as the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem in 586 BCE, embody the workings of divine justice, even if humankind cannot see God’s purpose. James Cone sees the matter very differently. Either God must do what we want him to do, or we must reject him, Cone maintains:

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. [1]

In the black liberation theology taught by Wright, Cone and Hopkins, Jesus Christ is not for all men, but only for the oppressed:

In the New Testament, Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted of society, and against oppressors … Either God is for black people in their fight for liberation and against the white oppressors, or he is not [Cone].

While the AP’s watered down version of the Christianity Obama has been absorbing for 22 years shouldn’t worry any reasonable person too much, the movement’s own beliefs and goals should worry a great deal those who envision a MLKing-esque society in which black and white walk are considered equal and given full equality of opportunity.Understanding the whole black liberation theology thing makes me less sanguine about the AP writer’s reminder that:

Often lost in the attention paid to Wright’s fiery sermons is the typical conclusion, Hopkins said—that despite all obstacles, you are a child of God and “can make a way out of no way.”

As far as I can tell, I’m not a child of God. You are, if you’re black, but I’m not, because I’m white and, worse, Jewish. No comfort there, Mr. AP religious writer.

Anyway, the real problem lies with white people, who are so immature and sensitive that they just don’t cope well with being abused, insulted and threatened:

While Trinity United Church of Christ is more Afrocentric and slightly more political than most black churches, “even conservative black churches talk about racism in a way that many whites would find wounding or offensive,” said Gary Dorrien, a religion professor at Columbia University in New York.

“Most white Americans have a very limited capacity for dealing with black anger or acknowledging their own racial privileges,” Dorrien said. “Wherever white people are dominant, whiteness is transparent to them. In black church communities, dealing with that problem is an every-week issue.”

Aaack!  Gotta get the kids.  I don’t know if I’ll be able to revisit this post today, but I trust that, if you check out the AP story, you’ll discern more of the same after the point at which I left off.