In politics today the question increasingly comes up "should religion play in to your decision to vote for a candidate". This to me seems like a silly question. Since you are voting for a person to represent you should naturally want to know how he makes his/her decisions. And religious conviction or lack thereof, being a large part of a person's worldview, affects decision making directly.
Of course since over %80 of the people in this nation profess to be some flavor of Christian you can't turn around without seeing a candidate standing in a sanctuary. It is very fair to examine the religious stance of each candidate, if only to detect political pandering from the pulpit, But more to get an idea of how the candidate would govern.
Looking at Barack Obama's church reveals some very disturbing attitudes and activism. And it is responsible to ask how closely Obama agrees with these stances and how much they will affect his decision-making should he be elected.
In 1991, when Obama joined the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, he pledged allegiance to something called the Black Value System, which is a code of non-Biblical ethics written by blacks, for blacks.
It encourages blacks to group together and separate from the larger American society by pooling their money, patronizing black-only businesses and backing black leaders. Such racial separatism is strangely at odds with the media's portrayal of Obama as a uniter who reaches across races.
The code also warns blacks to avoid the white "entrapment of black middle-classness," suggesting that settling for that kind of "competitive" success will rob blacks of their African identity and keep them "captive" to white culture.
In short, Obama's "unashamedly black" church preaches the politics of black nationalism. And its dashiki-wearing preacher — who married Obama and his wife and now acts as his personal spiritual adviser — is militantly Afrocentric. "We are an African people," the Rev. Jeremiah Wright reminds his flock, "and remain true to our native land, the mother continent."
Wright once traveled to Libya with black supremacist Louis Farrakhan to meet with terrorist leader Muammar Qaddafi. Last year at a Chicago gala, Wright honored his old pal Farrakhan, who's fond of calling whites "blue-eyed devils," for lifetime achievement.
It comes as little surprise then that Wright would think Israel a "racist" occupier of Palestinians, while describing the 9/11 attacks as a "wake-up call" to "white America" for ignoring the concerns of "people of color."
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Still, his Muslim heritage is not the signal issue before the electorate. It's his Afrocentric church, which preaches black socialism and black nativism, and his family ties to an African tribe that's fanning the flames of Marxism and militant Islam in a country once considered strongly democratic and a friend of the U.S.
"I believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change," Obama has asserted. He also says his faith has led him to question "the idolatry of the free market."
If a President Obama's foreign and domestic policies are anything like the Afrocentric doctrine he's pledged to uphold, Americans will pay a hefty price, including those among the growing black middle class.
Remember this nativism the next time you hear someone call Obama a uniter.
