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Barack Obama’s speech on race and Jeremiah Wright yesterday is part of an issue that, should Obama do as expected and win the Democrat nomination, will certainly come up over and over again in the fall, like the YouTube videos he referred to yesterday.  Jeremiah Wright and his Liberation Theology is something that no American poltician–except from from a safe inner-city district–really wants to deal with, and when you mix it with race, it’s just too much.

But the sad truth is that, had Barack Obama played his cards differently in life, he probably could have avoided it altogether.

This year marks the 200th anniversary of the end of importation of slaves into the United States.  The Founding Fathers brought themselves to do that much in the original Constitution of 1789, while leaving the rest for the horrible later.  In most parts of the Western Hemisphere, slavery was so gruelling and inhuman that slaves were unable to reproduce themselves even at a survival level, forcing a continuous importation of Africans to keep the “negro yards” full of negroes.  The Fathers probably figured that slavery would die out in the U.S. without replenishment from Africa.

The Founding Fathers didn’t figure on two things, though.  The first was the mechanisation of cotton production through the cotton gin, which made this fibre economically attractive to produce.  The second was the rather strange nature of American slavery.  Driven by people who brought with them a weak work ethic at best, slavery in the South, dehumanising and demoralising as it was and needful of abolition, was light enough to permit the proliferation of black people without more coming from Africa.  The long-term result of all of this was the development of African-American culture, which is unique even within the diversity of cultures of those people who are descendants of sub-Saharan Africans.

With Obama, though, his father was a Kenyan immigrant, whose ancestors never knew slavery.  Obama himself is only half-black; in cultures with a more realistic view of race than ours, he would be viewed as “creole.”  (Some of my ancestors were referred to with the same term, but South Louisiana had a still broader view of the use of the term.)   He wasn’t raised in an African-American culture; indeed, his upbringing was partly outside of the U.S., which is why many Americans have a hard time understanding him.

It was only when he got to Columbia, and was exposed to the racial identity politics and sociology that obsesses this country, that he felt he was forced to find his “black identity,” which in turn led him to become a community activist in Chicago and drew him to Jeremiah Wright and his church.  And, of course, one must never underestimate the influence of his wife Michelle, who is a true product of the African-American community here.

But that was his choice, all of it.  He could have ignored it; that process would have been easier if he had a conservative ideology than a liberal one.  This year’s election cycle has shown that the Republicans are driven by ideology and the Democrats by racial and gender identity, with economics the undertow of both.  But he didn’t, and now the “chickens have come home to roost,” as we would say here in the hills.

I have deep misgivings about Barack Obama as a President.  But it’s unfair to characterise him as a “black” candidate in the context of the experience of African descended people in this country.  The community had their misgivings too, which is one reason why Obama’s candidacy took some time to catch fire with American blacks.  On the other hand, he’s culpable for the label of the “black candidate” to the extent that he’s cultivated the African-American community.  Such cultivation is most likely the act of a politician, as Dick Morris points out, but politicians have to carry the burden of their opportunism as well as their ideology, as Mitt Romney found out the hard way.

So we plough on.  It’s time that we as Americans come to the understanding that, no matter what past discrimination has taken place, our God has put us in one country for a reason, and the only way we’re going to make it is if each and every one of us seeks to find for ourselves and draw out in others the potential that our Creator has placed in each and every one of us and to look to him for the supernatural endowment that only comes from above.  Jeremiah Wright’s Liberation Theology won’t do that.  Does Barack Obama know this?  His speech indicated he does, but now he must demonstrate that it’s more than a speech.

Frankie Schaeffer evidently doesn’t like some of the things some of us have been saying about Obama and patriotism:

Dad and I were amongst the founders of the Religious right. In the 1970s and 1980s, while Dad and I crisscrossed America denouncing our nation’s sins instead of getting in trouble we became darlings of the Republican Party. (This was while I was my father’s sidekick before I dropped out of the evangelical movement altogether.) We were rewarded for our “stand” by people such as Congressman Jack Kemp, the Fords, Reagan and the Bush family. The top Republican leadership depended on preachers and agitators like us to energize their rank and file. No one called us un-American.

Consider a few passages from my father’s immensely influential America-bashing book A Christian Manifesto. It sailed under the radar of the major media who, back when it was published in 1980, were not paying particular attention to best-selling religious books. Nevertheless it sold more than a million copies.

Here’s Dad writing in his chapter on civil disobedience:

If there is a legitimate reason for the use of force [against the US government]… then at a certain point force is justifiable.

My guess is that, if he bothers to poke around this site (and especially this,) he’ll probably come to the same conclusion about me too.  But he needs to consider a few things.

The first is that a Christian’s first allegiance is to God, not his or her country or any other human institution.  Orthodox caesaro-papism (Frankie Shaeffer is now Orthodox) doesn’t change that.  (And that can get ugly, too.)

The second is that the whole “religious right” business, for its abysmal failure in “bringing America back to God,” has at least put the stall on many of the uglier forms of statism that we have seen in, say, countries that claim to be based on Marxist-(fill in the blank) principles.

Third, with Mike Huckabee’s failure, Evangelicals don’t have a “dog in the hunt” this year.  So Schaeffer and others of his idea can rest easier.  Evangelicals will have to vote defensively this year, which I can live with, if others can’t.

As far as Francis Schaeffer (Frankie’s dad) is concerned, the only book of his I have read is Escape from Reason.  I don’t like Schaeffer’s Reformed theology, which is why I haven’t gone into his works further.

Alan Greenspan tells us the obvious:

"The current financial crisis in the US is likely to be judged in retrospect as the most wrenching since the end of the Second World War," Greenspan said in a Financial Times commentary.
   
"It will end eventually when home prices stabilise and with them the value of equity in homes supporting troubled mortgage securities," he said, referring to the meltdown in the US subprime home loan market and subsequent massive losses for the banks holding the debt instruments.
   
"The crisis will leave many casualties," he said, his remarks coming after Bear Stearns, the fifth largest US investment house collapsed Friday and was taken over by JPMorgan Chase for a fraction of its value of only a week ago.

But he can’t absolve himself of the responsibilty of  being what Henry C.K. Liu called the "wizard of Bubbleland."  The bubble has now burst.

Planned Parenthood assures us that the following was a mistake:

Planned Parenthood of Idaho officials apologized Wednesday for what they called an employee’s "serious mistake" in encouraging a donation aimed at aborting black babies.

But such "eugenics" were the original intent of Margaret Sanger, Planned Parenthood’s founder.

The more I watch Barack Obama’s campaign, the more I’m coming to realise that the basic problem that his opponents have is that he is beyond the normal "rules" of American politics.

Let’s start with the Jeremiah Wright business: people go back and forth on his video clips as to whether they’re representative of his thinking, how much Obama actually believes this, etc.  But, on the interview he did last year on Hannity and Colmes, he made one thing clear: he was an advocate of Liberation Theology.  And if that doesn’t come out often in his sermons, he’s lying, either to Sean Hannity or to his church.

Problem here, of course, is that most Americans are just too flat provincial to know what Liberation Theology is.  (I give some explanation here.)  If they did, they would understand where Rev. Wright was coming from, and certainly how much his thinking is indebted to Marx et. al.  (Personally, I think that Karl Marx is a big improvement over most of what passes for left wing thought these days, but I digress…)

What Jeremiah Wright thinks and says is significant to Barack Obama and what we might think of him.  Wright was his pastor and spiritual mentor for many years; Barack "hung around" Wright a great deal.  It’s reasonable to say In the case of John McCain and John Hagee/Rod Parsley, McCain just picked these guys up along the way.  I’ve been in Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity long enough to know that John McCain isn’t one.

This relates to the fracas I got myself into a couple of weeks ago about Obama’s apparent lack of patriotism and how this hostility to country was instilled in him by his mother.  I got the civics teacher type of objection that bringing this up wasn’t quite "according to Hoyle," to put it politely.

Now you’d think that any self-respecting, far-left (and those two may be an oxymoron) liberal would jump at the chance of putting forth someone who a) was strongly influenced by his mother (as opposed to father) in a political sense and b) who really didn’t like the country.  And I’m sure that they’re happy about this.  The problem with is is that most Americans won’t vote for someone with this kind of conviction if they thought it was true, any more than they would vote for an advocate of Liberation Theology.  So we end up in a game of deception.

The "civics teacher" approach tells us that we need to examine a candidate’s positions and come to a conclusion based on that and that alone.  But that doesn’t take into consideration that American politics is in reality a game of bluff, where candidates work on appealing to people’s pre-conceived ideas and emotions while concealing who they really are, even sometimes to their own bases.  When we’re dealing with a person like Barack Obama, raised outside the U.S. with a different set of experiences, the vetting needs to be a little different.  But our electorate is not prepared for this.  The results could be great, or more likely disastrous, but we need at least to be equipped to know one way or the other.