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Liberation Theology in Kenya and the U.S. Elections
By David J. Jonsson
This is the sixth of a series of articles on The Clash of Ideologies and Leftist/Marxist – Islamist Alliance
We are seeing first hand the role Liberation Theology is playing in the Ideological conflicts in Kenya led by Barack Hussein Obama and the opposition leader, Raila Odinga. In spite of Obama’s and to some extent Hillary Clinton’s objections to involvement in the political situations in foreign countries we are see the fingerprints of Obama in his support of Raila Odinga and the implementation of Shariah law in Kenya.
Similarly, we are seeing within the theme of “The Election of Change” the increasing role of Liberation Theology and Black Liberation Theology espoused by Barak Obama following the teaching of Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.
Judaism and Christianity aim to solve the problems of an unjust world, but they reject revolution as a solution since the roots of evil and injustice lies not in economics but in man himself. Consequently, Judaism and Christianity are religions designed to change individuals before it and they can ever hope to succeed in perfecting the world. This is admittedly a considerably slower, hence less romantic process than fomenting revolutions, and many people will find its demands restrictive compared with the personal moral anarchy of revolution making. But Judaism’s and Christianity’s methods are infinitely more effective in achieving its results, for when Marxist revolutionaries attain power they are at least as cruel as their predecessors.” The promise of liberation theology is a grotesque lie. As a cynical perversion of language it ranks with the slogan posted above the portals of Auschwitz by another revolutionary movement: Arbeit Macht Frei – Work frees. The freedom which liberation theology proffers is the oblivion of the crematoria.
As I commented in my article From the Mosque to the Schoolhouse to the White House of November 9, 2008 on the Global Politician:
“The West has a worldview based on the analysis and actions influenced by looking through the lenses of politics and economics, whereas the Islamists look at the world through the lens of ideology. It is time for the West to place importance on looking at events happening around the world through the lens of ideologies. In the case of the Muslims, their worldview and subsequent actions are shaped by their vision for world domination, the establishment of Islamic kingdom of God on Earth – the creation of worldwide Caliphate and the End Times.”
The Growth of Dhimmi Doctrine
The contribution of dhimmi (http://www.dhimmitude.org/) Christian collaborationism to Islam is even more important. It satisfies three objectives: 1) its propaganda shores up the mythology of past and present peaceful Islamic-Christian coexistence and confirms the perfection of Islam, jihad, and Shariah; 2) it promotes the demographic expansion and proselytism of Islamic propaganda in the West; 3) in the theological sphere it eliminates the Jewish Jesus and implants Christianity in the Muslim Jesus, in other words it facilitates the theological Islamization of all Christendom. See: Bat Yeor writing in the National Review on September 18, 2003, Eastern Christians Torn Asunder.
Liberation Theology and Marxism
In the days when the Superpowers were locked in a Cold War, Latin America seethed with revolution, and millions lived behind an iron curtain, a group of theologians concocted a novel idea within the history of Christianity. They proposed to combine the teachings of Jesus with the teachings of Marx as a way of justifying violent revolution to overthrow the economics of capitalism.
Religion will become obsolete, when humanity rejects the supernatural G-d of antiquity for the new dialectical deity, fathered by historical forces, leading its chosen to the land promised by Marx and Lenin. In this secular messianic vision, clearly there is no place for Judaism or Christianity, with its insistence on a G-d above and outside of history and obedience to His dictates, revealed in the Oral and Written Law.
Liberation theologians agree with Marx’s famous statement: “Hitherto philosophers have explained the world; our task is to change it.” They argue that theologians are not meant to be theoreticians but practitioners engaged in the struggle to bring about society’s transformation. In order to do this liberation theology employs a Marxist-style class analysis, which divides the culture between oppressors and oppressed. This conflictual sociological analysis is meant to identify the injustices and exploitation within the historical situation. Marxism and liberation theology condemn religion for supporting the status quo and legitimating the power of the oppressor. But unlike Marxism, liberation theology turns to the Christian faith as a means for bringing about liberation. Marx failed to see the emotive, symbolic, and sociological force the church could be in the struggle for justice. Liberation theologians claim that they are not departing from the ancient Christian tradition when they use Marxist thought as a tool for social analysis. They do not claim to use Marxism as a philosophical world view or a comprehensive plan for political action. Human liberation may begin with the economic infrastructure, but it does not end there.
The biblical notion of salvation is equated with the process of liberation from oppression and injustice. Sin is defined in terms of man’s inhumanity to man. Liberation theology for all practical purposes equates loving your neighbor with loving God. The two are not only inseparable but virtually indistinguishable. God is found in our neighbor and salvation is identified with the history of “man becoming.” The history of salvation becomes the salvation of history embracing the entire process of humanization. Biblical history is important insofar as it models and illustrates this quest for justice and human dignity. Israel’s liberation from Egypt in the Exodus and Jesus’ life and death stand out as the prototypes for the contemporary human struggle for liberation. These biblical events signify the spiritual significance of secular struggle for liberation.
The church and the world can no longer be segregated. The church must allow itself to be inhabited and evangelized by the world. “A theology of the Church in the world should be complemented by a theology of the world in the Church” (Gutierrez). Joining in solidarity with the oppressed against the oppressors is an act of “conversion,” and “evangelization” is announcing God’s participation in the human struggle for justice.
In an article by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger – Benedict XVI, Liberation Theology written in 1984, he commented.
“The moral challenge of poverty and oppression presented itself in an ineluctable form at the very moment when Europe and North America had attained a hitherto unknown affluence. This challenge evidently called for new answers which were not to be found in the existing tradition. The changed theological and philosophical situation was a formal invitation to seek the answer in a Christianity which allowed itself to be guided by the models of hope — apparently scientifically grounded — put forward by Marxist philosophies.”
“[In] the new philosophical climate of the late sixties… the Marxist analysis of history and society was largely accepted as the only “scientific” one. This means that the world must be interpreted in terms of the class struggle and that the only choice is between capitalism and Marxism. It also means that all reality is political and has to justify itself politically. The biblical concept of the ‘poor’ provides a starting point for fusing the Bible’s view of history with Marxist dialectic; it is interpreted by the idea of the proletariat in the Marxist sense and thus justifies Marxism as the legitimate hermeneutics for understanding the Bible.”
Liberation Theology and Nazism
In the U.S. elections cycle, we are seeing an increase in the influence of religiosity, however simultaneously we are seeing many diverse positions presented. Bruce Walker writing in his November 17, 2007 article on American Thinker, The Nazis and Christianity comments that: “Many atheists presume that the Nazis were a weird variation of Christianity.”
”Christianity had declined severely in Germany at the time the Nazis came to power, which is why the Nazis were able to come to power. In his book, The Dictators, Richard Overy states that in the decades preceding the First World War Germany was becoming increasingly secular, and that after that war, from 1918 to 1931, 2.4 million Evangelical Christians formally renounced their faith as well as almost half a million Catholics. In Prussia, only 21% of the population took communion and in Hamburg only five percent of the population took communion. Before Hitler, German religious leaders were publicly condemning the rise of moral relativism and decline of traditional religious values.”
“Weimar Germany largely had abandoned Christianity and increasingly was embracing hedonism, Marxism and paganism. There, decline of Christianity in Germany led directly to the rise of Nazism. Professor Henri Lichtenberger in his 1937 book, The Third Reich, describes the religious life of the Weimar Republic as a place in which the large cities were “spiritual cemeteries” with almost no believers at all, except for those who were members of the clergy. The middle class went through the motions, but lacked all living faith. The workers, influenced by socialism, were suspicious of the church. Even in the countryside, preachers had little influence on the people. In the 1938 book, The War Against God, by Sidney Dark and R.S. Essex, describes pre-Nazi antipathy toward Christianity by noting that churches had lost all their vitality and that their services were lifeless. Mower, in his 1938 book, Germany Puts the Clock Back, wrote that by 1920, God and Christianity had been in steady decline, a process that had begun in 1860. Mower talks about a culture not so much casual as vicious about sexuality. He writes of art sickened into atonal music, about the absence of any sense of sin, about entire graduating classes in high school turning up for birth control devices, and about the commonplace occurrence of abortion.”
Within a year of taking power, Hitler was saying:
“Christianity was incapable of uniting the Germans, and that only an entirely new world-theory was capable of doing so.”
Also within a year of the Nazis taking power, The Twenty-Five Theses of the German Religion, a conscious modeling of the twenty-five points of the Nazi program, was published in Germany. Thesis XV of that Nazi publication states:
“The Ethic of the German Religion condemns all belief in inherited sin, as well as the Jewish-Christian teaching of a fallen world. Such a teaching is not only non-Germanic and non-German, it is immoral and nonreligious. Whoever preaches this menaces the morality of the people.”
Liberalism and Fascism
To quote Daniel Pipes in his article from the Jerusalem Post of January 10, 2008: Fascism’s Legacy: Liberalism, “Liberal fascism sounds like an oxymoron – or a term for conservatives to insult liberals. Actually, it was coined by a socialist writer, none other than the respected and influential left-winger H.G. Wells, who in 1931 called on fellow progressives to become “liberal fascists” and “enlightened Nazis.”“
“Jonah Goldberg points out in his brilliant, profound, and original new book, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left from Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning (Doubleday), First, he offers a “secret history of the American left”“:
- Woodrow Wilson’s Progressivism featured a “militaristic, fanatically nationalist, imperialist, racist” program, enabled by the exigencies of World War I.
- Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “fascist New Deal” built on and extended Wilson’s government.
- Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society established the modern welfare state, “the ultimate fruition” (so far) of this statist tradition.
- The youthful New Left revolutionaries of the 1960s brought about “an Americanized updating” of the European Old Right.
- Hillary Clinton hopes “to insert the state deep into family life,” an essential step of the totalitarian project.
“To sum up a near-century of history, if the American political system traditionally encouraged the pursuit of happiness, “more and more of us want to stop chasing it and have it delivered.”“ [Economic Parity]
“Second, Goldberg dissects American liberal programs – racial, economic, and environmental, even the “cult of the organic” – and shows their affinities to those of Mussolini and Hitler.” [Deep Ecology movement]
David J. Jonsson is the author of Clash of Ideologies —The Making of the Christian and Islamic Worlds, Xulon Press 2005. His next book: Islamic Economics and the Final Jihad: The Muslim Brotherhood to the Leftist/Marxist – Islamist Alliance will we released in spring 2006. He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees in physics. He worked for major corporations in the United States and Japan and with multilateral agencies that brought him to more that fifteen countries with significant or majority populations who are Muslim. These exposures provided insight into the basic tenants of Islam as a political, economic and religious system. He became proficient in Islamic law (Shariah) through contract negotiation and personal encounter, and presently writes on the subject for the Global Politician. Mr. Jonsson can be reached at: djonsson2000@yahoo.co.uk
Filed under: Following Hillary | Tagged: Barack Obama, black liberation theology, Dhimmi Doctrine, Hillary Clinton, jeremiah wright, Raila Odinga, Shriah Law | 17 Comments »
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