From Glenn Beck, Fox, and HNN: Obama no Jeremiah Wright!
Tue Apr 08, 2008 at 03:50:51 AM PDT
The Acton Institute is a conservative think tank with the goal of "Integrating Judeo-Christian Truths with Free Market Principles (see http://www.acton.org/... )
Professor Anthony Bradley (Assistant Professor of Apologetics and Systematic Theology, Covenant Theological Seminary) is a research fellow at the Institute and is a favorite of Glenn Beck and other Fox flunkies (HNN video with Beck here: http://youtube.com/... )
Bradley is the one most likely to be quoted when someone tells you that Wright’s religion is anti-white and anti-American.
So that makes it especially powerful for us to cite back to them Bradley’s statement below that Obama does not believe in what Reverend Wright preaches. It will also help with that "he sat there for 20 years so he must believe it" argument.
It’s About Obama’s Economics, Not His Faith
By Anthony B. Bradley
Attempts to align Barack Obama with the views of his recently retired pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are distracting us from Obama’s actual platform. Obama’s membership in Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ may not actually tell us much about what Obama believes personally. Charges of guilt-by-association miss the mark and expose general ignorance about Protestant liberalism and mainline black churches. Concerned voters should instead focus on Obama’s economic policies, which are troubling enough.
In a recent statement, Obama’s campaign said he "does not think of the pastor of his church in political terms. Like a member of his family, there are things he says with which Senator Obama deeply disagrees." In the context of black church life, this makes complete sense. Unlike white evangelical churches, many black congregations do not typically tie personal religious convictions to public policy prescriptions. This explains the phenomenon that puzzles some observers: Many blacks can be culturally conservative and yet vote with liberal democrats.
Jeremiah Wright’s embrace of black liberation theology and Afro-centrism does not necessarily mean that Barrack Obama does. The only part of Obama’s campaign rhetoric that sounds remotely like black liberation theology is his belief that government will solve all of America’s problems by redistributing wealth from the upper classes to the proletariat and erecting government as a surrogate decision-maker for the masses. It is possible that Obama does not take the faith principles he learned under Wright as seriously as he claims.
Instead of straining a gnat through a straw to make a connection between Obama’s beliefs and those of Wright, the pertinent question remains: What initiatives does Obama plan to spearhead in our Republic? Obama is not running a campaign that is "unashamedly Black and unapologetically Christian," as Trinity UCC’s website professes. Afro-centrism does not win primaries but promising government as the cure-all does.
(See rest of article at http://www.acton.org/... )
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