Conservative Victory

Sean Hannity

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062011855
• Topic: Politique et relations internationales
• Subtopic: Civisme et citoyenneté

Barack Obama and his radical team of self-professed socialists, fringe activists, and others are trying to remake the American way of life. They have used their new Democratic majority to launch an alarming assault on our capitalist system—while abandoning the war on terror, undermining our national security, and weakening our position in the eyes of our enemies. The "candidate of change" is threatening to change our country irreparably, and for the worse—if we don't act to stop him now.

Sean Hannity has been sounding the alarms about Obama and his agenda from the start. Now—in his first new book in six years—he issues a stirring call to action. Hannity surveys all the major Obama players—from the president's affiliation with radical theology to his advisers' history of Marxist activism, repression of the media, support for leftist dictators, and worse. He exposes their resulting campaign to dismantle the American free-market system and forfeit our national sovereignty. But he draws on the examples of Ronald Reagan and the GOP's Contract with America to show how conservatives can unite behind this country's most cherished principles and act now to get America back on the right track—while we still can.

PART I

Why Victory Is So Important

ONE

OBAMA’S HISTORY OF RADICALISM

When it comes to Barack Obama’s now well-known history of associating with far-left radicals, I can modestly say I was way ahead of the curve. During the 2008 presidential campaign, I took some criticism for probing the past of this little-known candidate. But I trust that now most can see the relevance of the associations he has made throughout his life, and how they’ve shaped the policies he pursues today. The connection is undeniable.

On February 28, 2007, I pointed out a discrepancy that troubled me. The media had been making great hay over Mitt Romney’s affiliation with the Mormon Church. But little interest had been shown in candidate Barack Obama’s membership in a different religious organization: the Trinity Unity Church in Chicago. At a time when we knew little about Obama’s past—other than what he’d revealed in his own writings—it struck me that this chapter in Obama’s past deserved deeper scrutiny.

That night I interviewed columnist Erik Rush, who had written a piece on Obama and his church.

In his piece, Rush pointed out that the biography appearing on Obama’s official U.S. Senate website disclosed that he and his family “live on Chicago’s South Side where they attend Trinity United Church of Christ.” When Rush checked into that church, however, he discovered that this was no conventional American religious gathering. Trinity, he wrote, was “not simply afrocentric, it’s African-centric. In fact, one could argue this organization worships things African to a far greater degree than they do Christ, and gives the impression of being a separatist ‘church’ in the same vein as do certain supremacist ‘white brethren’ churches—or even Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.”⁹

Rush cited the church’s mission statement, which was displayed on its website (www.tucc.org):

We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian…. Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.

Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee chaired by Vallmer Jordan in 1981. We believe in the following 12 precepts and covenantal statements. These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered. They must reflect the following concepts:

1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the Black Community
3. Commitment to the Black Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the Black Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting Black Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of the “Black Value System.”

Rush added that the church’s vision “more resembles a cult than a church. Only this one has as one of its most prominent members a serious contender for the White House.”

These weren’t my personal assessments, keep in mind: They were Rush’s reporting, based on the characterizations of church insiders themselves. The Chicago Tribune reported that “Vallmer Jordan, a church member who helped draft the [church’s] precepts, said they were designed to empower the black community and counter a value system imposed by whites.”¹⁰

During my interview with Erik Rush, I said to him, “You know, if there were a presidential candidate, and they were part of [this] church—and, as you point out in your column, you substitute[d] the word ‘black’ for the word ‘white’—there would be an outrage in this country. There would be cries of racism in this country.”¹¹ And I meant it. It was troubling to find that a serious presidential candidate had long attended a church that seemed so racially oriented.

The following night, I interviewed the pastor of the church, Dr. Jeremiah Wright. I wanted to get to the bottom of this issue and find out if the church was as race-centered as its precepts made it sound—and, if so, why Barack Obama would attend such a church.

I opened the interview with direct questions, citing the church’s tenets and asking Reverend Wright whether he believed that, if another church had adopted those tenets but had substituted “white” for “black,” we would call that church racist.

Without skipping a beat, and certainly without apology, Wright responded: “No, we would call it Christianity. We’ve been saying that since there was a white Christianity; we’ve been saying that ever since Christians took part in the slave trade; we’ve been saying that ever since they had churches in slave castles. We don’t have to say the word ‘white.’ We just have to live in white America, the United States of white America. That’s not the issue; you’re missing the issue.”

As I tried to pursue my line of questioning, Reverend Wright cut me off, telling me that Erik Rush “doesn’t know anything more about theology than I know about brain surgery…. If you’re not going to talk about theology in context, if you’re not going to talk about liberation theology that came out of the 1960s…black liberation theology, that started with Jim Cone in 1968, and the writings of Cone, and the writings of Dwight Hopkins, and the writings of womanist theologians, and Asian theologians, and Hispanic theologians…[Once you’ve done that,] then you can talk about the black value system.”

As we continued, Reverend Wright seemed to grow increasingly combative. He kept bringing up the writings of Cone and Hopkins, suggesting, in effect, that unless I was familiar with their theological writings I couldn’t understand, much less intelligently discuss, the church’s theology. “Let me suggest that you do some reading before you come and talk to me about my field,” he scolded.

When my cohost, Alan Colmes, picked up the conversation, Wright basically admitted that his church was African-centered. But he denied that that carried any suggestion of superiority or separatism. “It assumes Africans speaking for themselves as subjects in history, not objects in history.”

“MARXISM DRESSED UP AS CHRISTIANITY”

In the course of our exchange, Reverend Wright had advised me to read up on several things—Black Liberation Theology, and the writings of James Cone and Dwight Murphy—and I took him up on his advice.

As the New York Times reported in a piece on Obama and Wright, Black Liberation Theology, as its name suggests, is a race-centered theology—one that “interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, who by virtue of their oppression, are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less.”¹²

In the Concise Dictionary of Christian Theology, we learn that Black Liberation Theology is one of the several liberation theologies that put “more emphasis on deliverance of human beings from various types of temporal bondage—economic, political, and social—than on personal redemption from sin. It tends to draw upon social sciences rather than biblical and theological bases.” Also known simply as “black theology,” it “regards God’s concern for the salvation of humans as not being exclusively spiritually oriented, but as also pertaining to political, economic, and social deliverance. James Cone is the major theologian of the movement.” The Moody Handbook of Theology illuminates that idea further: “According to Cone, Jesus did not come to bring spiritual liberation but to liberate the oppressed.”

The more I read about this theology, the more it became clear how politically, socially, and economically driven—rather than spiritually driven—it is. The Moody Handbook of Theology describes the broader category of “liberation theology,” of which Black Liberation Theology is a type: It does not “approach the concepts of God, Christ, man, sin, and salvation from an orthodox, biblical perspective, but reinterprets them in a political context.”¹³

Many argue that adherents of this theology tend toward a Marxist worldview and harbor a disdain for capitalism and capitalist systems. Writing in the National Review, Stanley Kurtz has pointed out that “a scarcely concealed, Marxist-inspired indictment of American capitalism pervades contemporary ‘black-liberation theology’”—a point Erik Rush also made in his piece on Obama. And Reverend Wright, it turned out, had quite a number of troubling associations with other radical figures: He had publicly hailed Reverend Louis Farrakhan, and in 1984 even traveled to Libya with Farrakhan to visit Colonel Muammar Qaddafi.

One writer who was concerned about Obama’s church was Kyle-Anne Shiver, a writer for American Thinker. After making her own study of the tenets of Black Liberation Theology—which she likened to “Marxism dressed up to look like Christianity”—she visited Trinity United herself and was more surprised by the church bookstore than by Wright’s controversial preaching, which she had already witnessed on video. Having visited some one hundred Christian bookstores before, she said that there was one common denominator among all the books for sale: Christianity. That was not the case with the Trinity store. There, instead, she was surprised to find as many Muslim—specifically, Black Muslim—books as Christian ones. Even the books that were Christian-oriented, she said, were more political than religious, such as those by James Cone. The theme that tied those books together, she concluded, was neither Christianity nor any other real religion, but Marxist philosophy.¹⁴

Even those passingly familiar with Black Liberation Theology would find it difficult to deny that it promotes racial deliverance even above Christ-centeredness. As its godfather, James Cone, wrote in his treatise Black Theology and Power:

As in 1969, I still regard Jesus Christ today as the chief focus of my perspective on God but not to the exclusion of other religious perspectives. God’s reality is not bound by one manifestation of the divine in Jesus but can be found wherever people are being empowered to fight for freedom. Life-giving power for the poor and the oppressed is the primary criterion that we must use to judge the adequacy of our theology, not abstract concepts. As Malcolm X put it: “I believe in a religion that believes in freedom. Any time I have to accept a religion that won’t let me fight a battle for my people, I say to hell with that religion.”

Yes, Cone does begin by saying that Jesus Christ is “the chief focus of [his] perspective on God.” As we read on, however, we see that he contends that Christianity is not exclusive—which runs counter to every Christian principle—and that there are other “manifestations of the divine” on par with Jesus, a notion I find difficult to reconcile with mainstream Christianity, whether Catholic or Protestant. Beyond that, Cone seems to demand that the Christian religion conform to his political beliefs and racial aspirations, not the other way around.

Cone also approvingly quotes Malcolm X invoking the well-known vernacular of Karl Marx:

The point that I would like to impress upon every Afro-American leader is that there is no kind of action in this country ever going to bear fruit unless that action is tied in with the overall international [class] struggle.

And there is further proof that Cone views Christianity through racial and Marxist lenses. Take, for instance, his blasphemous assertion: “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” (emphasis added).¹⁵ Furthermore, writes Cone, if Jesus is not seen as being part of the Marxist class struggle, he must be viewed as a “white Jesus,” and they must “destroy him.”¹⁶

Cone viewed liberation not as merely consistent with the gospel, but as the gospel. “There is, then, a desperate need for a black theology…whose sole purpose is to apply the freeing power of the gospel to black people under white oppression.”¹⁷ The task of black theology, he said, is “to analyze the nature of the gospel of Jesus Christ in the light of oppressed black people so they will see the gospel as inseparable from their humiliated condition, bestowing on them the necessary power to break the chains of oppression.”¹⁸

For Cone, “black power and black religion are inseparable.”¹⁹ Black religion was only authentic when coupled with the struggle for black freedom,²⁰ such that the black theology of Malcolm X is an indispensable corrective for Christianity.²¹

Why is this important? Because James Cone, the man spewing these thoughts, was the primary spiritual mentor of Reverend Jeremiah Wright—who in turn was the primary spiritual mentor of Barack Obama.

Theologian John S. Feinberg describes liberation theology as one of four main forms of postmodern theology.²² Feinberg notes that liberation theology took root in Latin America but has spread throughout the world in various forms. “In North America, it has expressed itself as black theology.” He describes it as more of a practical than intellectual theology. “As opposed to earlier theologies, whose aim was to reflect on the being and attributes of God or to apply reason to natural and special revelation to discern what can be known about God, liberation theology is concerned with critical reflection on praxis (the practical).”

“AMERICA’S CHICKENS ARE COMING HOME TO ROOST”

Over time I began to look deeper into Reverend Wright’s particular beliefs, read some of his writings, and watched some of his taped sermons. I soon concluded that he definitely embraced, wholesale, the tenet...