Marxism & religion: 2 articles

A key challenge for socialists - Marxists and Religion - yesterday and today
by Gilbert Achcar, International Viewpoint, 15 October 2004.

I mostly agree. I agree esp. with the criticism of alliances between British Trotskyists and Islamists.

Opiate of the People? - Marxism and Religion
By Michael Löwy
International Viewpoint Online magazine, IV368, June 200.

The historical overview is interesting, but I think Löwy is shallow and wrong. I also think Ernst Bloch is wrong. Löwy's treatment of the Frankfurt School is deplorable.

Roland Boer on Terry Eagleton

Quailing Before the Real: Terry Eagleton on Ethics
[review of Trouble with Strangers: A Study of Ethics]
By Roland Boer, The Hobgoblin, 1 December 2010

Roland Boer makes mincemeat of Eagleton's left Catholicism. I have doubts about Ernst Bloch as well. I will never ever trust the advocates of liberal or left religion.

Earl Browder, the Communist Party, & religion in the 1930s

It must have been at least twenty years ago I looked up what Earl Browder had to say about the Communist Party's policy toward religion: it was in an issue of The Communist published between 1933 and 1935, I think. While I can't find the appropriate issue on the Internet, a web search suggests that what I have in mind is the report of a 1935 discussion with a group of students at Union Theological Seminary. And there is this publication, which almost certainly reprints the article in question:

Browder, Earl. "Religion and Communism," in Communism in the United States (New York: International Publishers, 1935), chapter 22, pp. 334-349.

This is an entirely different publication:

Browder, Earl. Religion and Communism. New York: Workers Library Publishers, 1939. 16 pp. (Address delivered at the regular morning service of the Community church in Boston on March 5, 1939.) Also available via Scribd.

And there is this:

Browder, Earl. A Message to Catholics. New York: Workers Library Publishers, June 1938. 16 pp.

Programmatic statements do not, of course, give us a full picture of the orientation stated here in practice, especially, given that in the USA as elsewhere, the CPUSA had to ingratiate itself with a variety of religious populations. I have not systematically studied this period, so I will confine myself to a few stray references. The Communist Party of the United States: From the Depression to World War II by Fraser M. Ottanelli depicts a sea-change in the Party's style with the advent of the Popular Front. An anti-communist study, Communism and the Churches by Ralph Lord Roy (Harcourt, Brace, 1960) credits Browder with putting a halt to the chronic ridicule of religion in the Party.

Naturally, this would be a treacherous minefield or tightrope to walk (take your metaphor of choice). I'm no fan of Browder, Stalinism, or pandering, but Browder's bold statements of 1935 should be studied today. In comparison to the flabbiness of the left today, they are exemplary.

Paul N. Siegel: The Meek and the Militant

The Meek and the Militant: Religion and Power Across the World by Paul N. Siegel (1986)

    Contents, Preface, chapters 1-3, 9

    Chapter 10: sections "The Castroites and Religion", "The Sandinistas and Religion", "Religion and the Struggle for Socialism"

No one can accomplish everything in one book, but this one is one of the best surveys of the socio-political history of religion that I have seen, from a Marxist perspective.  In this respect, it is far more comprehensive than Alexander Saxton's more recent Religion and the Human Prospect.

Part 1 sets up the philosophical and methodological approach to the analysis of religion. Siegel begins with the French Enlightenment's materialism and critique of religion. He moves on to its criticism by Marx and Engels, and their approach to religion and society. Siegel compares genuine Marxism to Modernist Christianity, agnosticism, Freud, Stalinism, and early Christianity.

Part 2 sketches the social roots and dynamics of the major Western religions, with chapters on Judaism Catholicism, Protestantism, the United States. Part 3 covers the religions of Asia and the Middle East: Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam.

Part 4 covers the relationship between religion and socialist movements, in Russia (Lenin and others), China, Cuba, Nicaragua, with a concluding section on "Religion and the Struggle for Socialism".

I have not read enough to comment on the entirety of the book. Sections 2 and 3 are reasonable in their ambitions to give a view of what historically and socially motivates the major players on the world scene of religion (with the exception of the New Age thought of the 20th century). Siegel's attempt at comprehensiveness will be very useful for readers, who can then proceed to fill in the details and whatever lapses there are, elsewhere.

I would like rather to concentrate on the overall perspective of the book and particularly on Part 1. Siegel's premise is that Marxists must collaborate with religious people while maintaining their independent philosophical perspective. The translation of this general principle, which I think is a no-brainer, into specific circumstances and tactics, by no means yields a clear perspective. Even dodgier, with possibly sinister implications, is Lenin's principle, indicated at the beginning and end of the book, that "the revolutionary party will subordinate the struggle against religion to the class struggle" (emphasis mine). All depends on the meaning and application of the notion "subordinate". First, there's never a uniformity of social development and action, and different individuals play different social roles at different times. It is not the business of any revolutionary organization to subordinate everyone it can get its hands on to a single action and a single goal. Furthermore, in a world degenerating into incoherence, retrogression, and unreason, there is no one movement, let alone organization, that unequivocally embodies the forces of social progress and reason. The politics that Siegel envisions is dead.

There are two other philosophical points on my agenda:

Siegel's exposition of classic dialectical materialism, while it could be worse, should not be taken as is. The notion of dialectical laws and logic touted by both Stalinists and Trotskyists remains crude and logically vulnerable.

The third and most important philosophical point, a problem in all Marxist literature on the subject, concerns the origins of religion and supernaturalism and the mechanisms of superstition and magical thinking. The Marxist insight that religion is tied to mystification and alienation with respect to nature and social relations is essential, articulated front and center in a way that is missing in the mainstream Anglo-American agitprop on the subject. However, this is only a framework from which to begin. Saxton in his unimaginative empiricism criticizes Marxian formulations, and himself attempts to fill in the gaps with evolutionary psychology and an account of the "crisis of consciousness" which engendered religion as a survival tool insulating the human species against the fear of death. The psychological mechanisms, social functions, motivations, rationalizations, social functions, and deployment of magical thinking and superstition are more variegated than the usual Marxist adumbrations and Saxton's supplementary explanation account for.

I emphasize also that a look into the intrinsic mechanisms of supernaturalist mystification should expand Marxist approaches to the subject beyond the instrumentalist attitude towards religion as either reactionary (ruling class) or emancipatory (liberation movements). The issue of social forces and the quality of life is more than what you can use.

With these reservations in mind, I hope we can prepare ourselves for the next stage in the analysis of religion.

Liberal religion vs. the 'new atheists'

"Condescension, and thinking oneself no better, are the same. To adapt to the weakness of the oppressed is to affirm in it the pre-condition of power, and to develop in oneself the coarseness, insensibility and violence needed to exert domination . . ."

-- Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia

Should I Quit Being Christian? Some Questions for the New Atheists
Tikkun / By Be Scofield.
AlterNet, June 28, 2010

"The new atheists negate the contributions of religious people in the reforming of religion and the resisting of injustice."

A long whine about the "new atheists", with some interesting tidbits about Martin Luther King, Jr. Problem is, the historical information adduced here leads to ahistorical conclusions about the future . . . where to go now that we know what we know . . . and so the author ends up being as useless as the historically illiterate Sam Harris.

Scofield does not understand the problem with wishy-washy liberals, whether in religion or other matters. He fixates on certain statements by certain "new atheists", i.e. that moderate religionists pave the way for the extremists. He is so put out by such a blanket assertion, he seeks to disprove it with loads of historical information about the contributions of liberal religionists to progressive political action and social reform. This, I suppose, is consonant with Tikkun's soft and cuddly notion of progressive politics, a milder version of more radical liberation theology.

There is, however, a problem with this argument: the failure to distinguish between yesterday and today. Secular humanism emerged from the long and painful struggle to liberalize religion, passing through the stage of liberal religion and in the USA very much through the medium of Unitarianism. The first Humanist Manifesto of 1933, itself largely a product of social liberalism, already surpassed the level of today's whiny religious liberals. The question is not one of demanding that the past conform to the imperatives of the present and future, but of what our standards should be now.

Scofield fails to attack Dawkins and especially Harris where they are weakest: their ignorance (in the case of Harris, shameless ignorance) of history and indifference to sociological analysis. Harris is the only "new atheist" who is actually new on the scene. The others and their colleagues have been at it for decades and still show no curiosity to learn anything new about history or society. The exception to the rule is of course Christopher Hitchens, who knows more about both than the rest of the organized humanist movement combined, but who has jumped the shark and utilizes his leftist past as petty gossip.

Instead, Scofield obsesses over this one isolated idea about moderate religionists, ignoring the purport of the comment for today's world, instead escaping into the past, including the all-embracing bosom of Dr. King, to justify the squalid middle class feelgood self-indulgence in nicey-nice prettification of ugly reality.

Unfortunately, neither Scofield nor the "new atheists" seem to be aware of what's wrong with upper middle class make-nice liberal religion. What is most noteworthy here is the middle class inclination towards respectable niceness and liberal guilt. (For the panderers to liberation theology, it's radical guilt, which is liberal guilt raised to the nth power.) And characteristically disgusting is the exploitation of Dr. King, the gold standard of the social gospel. Interestingly, Scofield tells us here that the Kings seriously considered joining the Unitarian Church, but realized they could not be socially effective with black Southerners by doing so. If this is so, it's not for us to judge King in hindsight, because he was not a free agent, but what about us? Why must we be shackled with the chains of the past?

It's one thing to be Mr. Nice Humanist walking the plush grounds of the Harvard Divinity School, it's quite another to fight one's way out of the culture of poverty and struggle to transcend the abuse heaped on one by social dysfunction, bad child-rearing practices, fear-based enforcement of social conformity, and degrading assaults on psyche and intellect. Such people don't live in a nicey-nice world and know what the struggle for the human mind is worth. It's war.

Ideological obfuscation does not help anyone, and progressives reveal something about their own weak politics in so indulging. Pompous gasbags like Cornel West and Michael Lerner are quite limited in what they positively have to offer compared to the harmful nonsense they spew and their contribution to the theocratic domination of public discourse.

Roland Boer: Marxist Criticism of the Bible

Boer, Roland. Marxist Criticism of the Bible. London; New York: T & T Clark International, 2003. xii, 265 pp.
ISBN: 0826463274
0826463282 (pbk.)

Extracts provided by Google books:
http://books.google.com/books?id=U--6nb7kKAsC

Contents:
Introduction: why Marxist theory?
Louis Althusser: the difficult birth of Israel in Genesis
Antonio Gramsci: the emergence of the 'prince' in Exodus
Terry Eagleton: the class struggles of Ruth
Henri Lefebvre: the production of space in 1 Samuel
Georg Lukacs: the contradictory world of Kings
Ernst Bloch: anti-Yahwism in Ezekiel
Theodor Adorno: the logic of divine justice in Isaiah
Fredric Jameson: the contradictions of form in the Psalms
Walter Benjamin: the impossible apocalyptic of Daniel
Conclusion: on the question of mode of production.

* * * *

In his introduction, Boer comments on the state of Bible studies and the role of theory within it. Apparently every fashionable theoretical conceit (my language, not Boer's) a la postmodernism is being trotted out these days, with the exception of Marxism, which remains marginalized. It becomes evident that Biblical hermeneutics should be considered a subset of literary criticism, and Marxist approaches merit greater attention.

Marxist studies of the Bible singled out are:

Norman Gottwald, The Tribes of Yahweh (1999)

Richard Horsley (on the New Testament), ed., Semeia 83/84: The Social World of the Hebrew Bible

Mark Sneed on class (1999)

Simkins on the mode of production (1999)

Gale Yee, Marxist-feminist interpretations of Bible, e.g. Genesis (1999).

The bibliography is not part of the Google preview, so this is the best I can do.

Marxist methods address a number of theoretical problems listed by Boer. Boer then summarizes the chapters to come.

* * * *

Boer reserves his highest praise for Adorno. Yay! Just as Adorno finds untenable paradox in Kierkegaard, Boer finds paradox in the attempt to link divine and social justice,a combination that does not compute. Adorno's technique of immanent critique and the teasing out of truth content which constitute dialectical criticism can serve the necessary cause of demythologization. Boer enumerates the various advantages of dialectical criticism. Adorno is relentless in turning Kierkegaard on his head, and in combating Benjamin's attempts to fuse metaphysics and historical materialism (pure theology would better serve the cause of Marxism!). Boer devotes some detail in analyzing Adorno's critique of Kierkegaard. Adorno finds ideological regression in the very theological premises of Kierkegaard's hermeneutics. Adorno links sacrifice to paradox, where Kierkegaard becomes undone. Sacrifice becomes demonic, and the logical conclusion of belief is nonbelief. Boer takes the example of Isaiah to deploy his interpretive method.

* * * *

There are also extracts from the chapters on Frederic Jameson and Walter Benjamin.

* * * *

It seems to me that there are important lessons to be drawn here, whether or not Boer intends the same lessons as I. Though his bottom-line subjective intentions are not clear to me, these are my priorities that I think Boer's work objectively addresses:

(1) The undermining of the legitimacy of liberation theology along with all other theology.

Marx dispensed with the entire future of liberation theology in advance, in the act of dispensing with Bauer and Feuerbach. Not that Marx preempted the need for further hermeneutical work and criticism on our species' symbolic productions, but that historical materialism is the inversion of myth and a permanent supersession of same. Liberation theology, death-of-God theology, process theology--all of this crap remains entrapped within the self-enclosed world of ideology just as surely as Bauer and Feuerbach were so entrapped. As poetical constructions they may be as good or bad as any other, but as truth claims they are all rotten to the core.

Marxist criticism did of course advance. Its most sophisticated stage is embodied in the work of Adorno and the early Horkheimer, committed to the decoding of idealism into materialism, and betrayed by the both of them in their unfortunately over-influential Dialectic of Enlightenment.

(2) The correction of lapses and misguided presumptions of Marxist tradition on the nature of religion, which, as far as I can tell, takes off from and remains largely guided by its relation to Christianity, not religion in general as it often seems to pretend. Furthermore, the notion of religion--Christianity, for all intents and purposes--as alienated compensation for man's thwarted best instincts is a highly limited view of its underlying violence and barbarism.

(3) A reversal of the decline of critical theory into narcissistic petty-bourgeois academic hack-work and absorption into the current climate of cultural decay and obscurantism, exemplified by postmodernism, and--to the point here--the appalling absorption of the work of the Frankfurt School into theology, a reactionary reversal of its original programme.

Rosa Luxemburg on socialism & Christianity

The two texts of primary interest are:

An anti-clerical policy of Socialism (1903)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1903/01/01.htm

Socialism and the Churches (1905)
http://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1905/misc/socialism-churc...

Note this very interesting essay by a prolific scholar of Marxism and religious studies:

Roland Boer, "Socialism, Christianity, and Rosa Luxemborg", Cultural Logic, 2007.
http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Boer.pdf

Boer finds that there has been too attention paid to the more sensational aspects of leading socialist figures' biographies and often not enough on their actual ideas. Such is the case with the martyred heroine Rosa Luxemburg. One biographer termed her linkage of early Christianity and communism a piece of historical sophistry. Boer is interested in a careful if skeptical examination, focusing on two major concerns:

(1) the political myth of an early Christian communism;
(2) the argument for freedom of conscience with respect to religious matters in the socialist movement.

Luxemburg's interventions were hardly merely historically and theoretically motivated. She had to convince Catholic Polish workers and peasants to ally themselves with the Social Democratic movement. The Catholic Church presented a formidable obstacle to socialism, and the triangulation of the Church in its competition and partial alliances with the bourgeoisie and the lower classes was a difficult one to negotiate. This accounts for the contradictions of Luxemburg's position. Sometimes she takes a straightforward anti-clerical position, but as her main enemy is the bourgeoisie, she at times argues that the clergy should take the side of the workers, but this is really to show the workers whose side they should be on were they true to their professed vocation. Boer finds her moralizing arguments questionable. Jeremiads against greed and selfishness in the abstract do not draw attention specifically to the character of social institutions, and concede too much to the theological language of sin and the metaphysical dichotomy of good and evil.

The preponderant balance of this article is devoted to analyzing Luxemburg's imaginative reconstruction of the early church and its similarity to the social democratic movement. Boer begins with a close reading of statements about the rich and the poor attributed to Jesus in the gospels themselves in comparison to the socialist perspective, looking for as close a match as feasible. The upshot, though, is that the fusion of the two perspectives carries over into the supernatural realm of eternal salvation and damnation, thus establishing a myth.

As for the church, the scenario is that the church of the exploited becomes a church of the exploiters. In reconstructing how this came to be, Luxemburg puts all of the Marxist method at her disposal to analyze the class structure and nature of production and distribution that characterized Roman and thus early Christian society. The transition in the church is attributed to the factor of size; at some point the partial sharing of wealth breaks down with the absenting of the wealthy from the poor communities and the growth of an intermediary clergy. The ascent of Christianity to a state religion sealed the deal, and the church has adapted to the rule of private property ever since. Luxemburg's characterizations of Rome (as driven by corruption) and of the medieval church are overly simplified. Yet this is an imaginative rewriting of history for popular consumption that evokes some admiration.

Curiously, Luxemburg repudiates anti-clericalism as a foundational position for socialism, as anti-clericalism historically is a tool of the bourgeoisie (especially in France). Furthermore, the bourgeoisie is inconsistent, for it never carries out a full-blown program of secularization. It may split the Church for tactical positioning, but will favor some church factions over others, empowering both itself and the church in the end. The bourgeoisie will also seek partial alliances with the working class (against feudalism) in the same manner and with the same objective of consolidating its own power. We end up with a contradiction between anti-clericalism and anti-anti-clericalism in Luxemburg's position, for the reasons described.

The argument for Christian communism is a myth, and while Boer shows skepticism for its veracity, he seems to admire its myth-making capacity, especially in the way that Luxemburg finds the early Church's situation analogous to the perspective of the social democratic movement. Apparently opinion has flipflopped as to whether the early church membership was predominantly poor. With close textual analysis Boer reveals the slip-ups in Luxemburg's argument. Neither Luxemburg nor Engels were the first or last to latch onto this political myth for their own social visions. The problem is, that by positing the original Christian community as a model, the degeneration of that mythical original community becomes mystified theologically as a fall, and the desire to enact a restoration, i.e. to look backward, is utterly reactionary.

Luxemburg, however, partially redeems herself by recognizing the distinction between production and consumption. A communism of consumption (merely distributing what has already been produced under the status quo mode of production) such as Christian communism had to be if it existed, is hardly a viable way to organize society, then, now, or in the future.

Finally, we come to the question of freedom of conscience (of belief and religious practice). Boer finds the notion suspect, because he dislikes the idea of the sacrosanct individual, and of liberalism in general. But he's finally willing to concede there's something in it after all, concluding that "only a fully collective program will enable the full realization of freedom of conscience."

All in all, Boer's analysis is quite illuminating. It is not crystal clear, however, exactly where he's coming from, his critique of political mythmaking notwithstanding. Some of the points he makes strike me as off in some way. Quoting Foucault, worries over essentialism, disdain toward liberal individualism (freedom of conscience) are eccentricities that call out for some suspicion.

It also seems that a punchline is missing. For one needs to ask: what is the state of a movement that requires mythmaking in the first place, and what are its prospects if the masses can only be won over on the basis of irrational appeals? And is the vision of Christianity in fact a savory one in the first place, or is it poison through and through, designed to appeal to self-deception, hypocrisy, and the logic of domination? And there's a more pointed question that Boer should have asked: was a Jewish intellectual like Rosa Luxemburg deluding herself that she could appeal to the better instincts of ignorant anti-Semitic Polish peasants by pandering to their religious mythology?

Roland Boer on Marxism & Religion (1)

I've recently discovered Roland Boer, who has written several books and articles on Marxism, politics, myth, and theology. He also has a blog:

Stalin's Moustache
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/

One blog entry to check out:

Marxism and Religion: A Brief Guide
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2009/02/marxism-and-religion-b...

See also:

Criticism of Religion
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2009/01/criticism-of-religion....

Boer has a 5-volume series on Marxism and religion, titled Criticism of Heaven and Earth: On Marxism and Theology. Here he mentions some figures he writes about:

Lucien Goldmann
Fredric Jameson
Rosa Luxemburg
Karl Kautsky
Julia Kristeva
Alain Badiou
Giorgio Agamben
Georg Lukacs
Raymond Williams

Other blog entries of interest:

Criticism of Earth: On Marx, Engels and Theology
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/12/criticism-of-earth-on-...

Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of a Biblical Theme
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/12/i-wrote-most-of-politi...

. . . to which I've added a comment.

Political Grace: The Revolutionary Theology of John Calvin
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/12/political-grace-revolu...

Choice Biblical Morsels from Marx and Co.
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/11/choice-biblical-morsel...

A Communist Confession of Faith (while we wait for further news on NT Wrong)
http://stalinsmoustache.blogspot.com/2008/11/communist-confession-o...

. . . with comment from me.

Of Boer's articles online, to date I've reported on:

"Secularism, Utopia and the Discernment of Myth"
http://www.uiowa.edu/~ijcs/secular/boer.htm

"Socialism, Christianity, and Rosa Luxemborg"
http://clogic.eserver.org/2007/Boer.pdf

The next article up for review is:

"Terry Eagleton and the Vicissitudes of Christology," Cultural Logic, 2005.
http://clogic.eserver.org/2005/boer.html

. . . and there are more to be discussed.

Cornel West, liberation theologian?

Written 19 January 2009

Johnson, Clarence Shole. Book review: Rosemary Cowan (2003), Cornel West: The Politics of Redemption, APA Newsletter on Philosophy and the Black Experience, Volume 03, Number 1, Fall 2003, pp. 52-56.

Johnson points up the contradictions in Cornel West's prophetic pragmatism and sociopolitical perspective. West eschews the label "liberation theologian" because it commits one to a transcendentalism which his allegedly experientially based pragmatism negates. But how can West's Christianity avoid transcendentalism, or the issues of theodicy raised by William R. Jones? Christian theodicy is logically at odds with an empirically based conception of sociopolitical causality.

I think this highlights the bankruptcy of West's left bourgeois theophilosophy.

Martin Luther King, Jr. as secular humanist

Jeff Nall,
“Remembering the Humanism of Martin Luther King.”
Toward Freedom, July 12, 2005. Feature article (alternative version of Humanist piece);
Reprint: Theocracy Alert, Online Journal, July 16, 2005.

Those invoking the name of MLK in the cause of left/liberal theocracy had better reconsider.

Another source with some information on MLK and the religious issue in the civil rights movement (including defamation of secular Jews) is:

Jacoby, Susan. Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004.

On the role of existentialism in black thought and the civil rights movement, see:

Cotkin, George. Existential America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003.

For further background, see:

Allen, Norm R., Jr. “Religion and the New African American Intellectuals,” Nature, Society, and Thought, vol. 9, no. 2 (1996), pp. 159-87.

Away With All Gods! (1)

I'm not accustomed to sober, measured argumentation from Maoists, but the 21st century holds many surprises:

Away With All Gods! Unchaining the Mind and Radically Changing the World by Bob Avakian (Chicago: Insight Press, 2008).

That's right, Bob Avakian, chairman of the Revolutionary Communist Party. Regardless of what you think of the party line in general or on various matters, there is much material on this web site of interest, under the rubrics:

Atheism & Religion

Christian Fascism

I'll cite two specific pieces which appear in the book's bibliography:

"A Leap of Faith" and a Leap to Rational Knowledge: Two Very Different Kinds of Leaps, Two Radically Different Worldviews and Methods by Bob Avakian

God the Original Fascist Series by A. Brooks.

Note also this debate on YouTube:

Atheism, God and Morality in a Time of Imperialism and Rising Fundamentalism, An Exchange Between Chris Hedges and Sunsara Taylor (23 April 2008).

Womanism revisited

In an earlier entry I criticized Alice Walker's airheaded New Age ideology. I won't pass judgment on her fiction, but her opinion pieces get more and more ludicrous as time goes on.

More generally, in a commodity society every issue becomes an identity and every empirical concern is turned into metaphysics, with a proliferation of idealistically conceived isms. We need not doubt that there is a race issue, and a gender issue. I am also convinced that the whole is more than the sum of its components in this instance, as I know quite well the special characteristics of black women's situation in American society. But aren't there enough problems as it is without adding obscurantism to the mix?

Black feminism is a commonly accepted concept, but why "womanism"? Why must a specific nexus of human experience be converted into a metaphysical concept? First, let's take a look at the definition:

Womanism - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

If the notion were not pretentious enough, note that by the time we get to the third paragraph, we are in the realm of womanist theology. What could be more priceless?

The fun is only beginning. Now look at this:

Womanist Theology, Epistemology, and a New Anthropological Paradigm by Linda E. Thomas.

If the black liberation theology of James Cone et al were not bad enough, here we have a new wrinkle on the theme. Furthermore, the goal is to link the existential situation of black American women with "women of color" all over the world. Added to this is the slumming mentality of anthropologists and one gets a particularly self-indulgent provincial ideology. Both expand and limit your social identity in a metaphysically defined fashion and glorify folk experience to concoct a fictional essence to be categorically distinguished from the essence of other groups, and you get the obscurantism of a race and sex based epistemology that is somehow insulated from the rules of evidence, inference, verifiability and rational accountability that apply to everyone. And if black women did not already have religion up the wazoo, they need a new theology to keep them just where they are.

Here is another blog entry on the subject:

Womanism/ Black Feminism

Here there is more nonsense about womanist theology. Walker is quoted as claiming that "womanism" is not exclusive and sounds more inclusive than "black feminism".

One can of course play with terminology however one likes. Furthermore, a new ideological concept also presents a new opportunity to consolidate a power base. However, no power base nor any constituency nor any identity can be shielded from critical scrutiny. A politically organized movement to achieve rationally accountable goals is one thing; ideological mystification is something else.

Jeremiah Wright, MLK, black theology & Obama (5)

Sorry to keep you waiting for my review of Rev. Wright's notorious speech at the National Press Club and the subsequent fallout. While some of the attacks on Wright and/or Obama are askew, defense of Wright can be equally repugnant. Case in point: tonight's episode of the racial Twilight Zone:

Barack Obama, Reverend Wright and Black liberation theology
By Malik Miah
Links: International Journal of Socialist Renewal.
"Malik Miah is editor of the US socialist magazine Against the Current, where this article first appeared."

This is one specimen of unbearable stupidity that shows that hard leftists no more than black nationalists or mainstream liberals have a firm grip on reality in their minds. First, there is the admonition to other leftists not to think like sectarians and reject mainstream electoral politics. Then Miah projects "a possible shift in political consciousness" when Obama disillusions his young supporters when he proves to be just like any other mainstream politician. Those hoping for a change might be motivated to seek a more serious change. Well, maybe, but one would have to investigate more carefully the composition and perspectives of Obama's supporters to assess this potential intelligently. Then Miah acclaims this "outstanding speech", though it doesn't go as far in denouncing institutional racism as many on the left would like to see. Obama is alleged to reveal himself as different from the run-of-the-mill mainstream politician. Well, Obama, as the would-be president of neoliberal America, said what he had to say without excessively humbling himself by disowning his pastor, and made some conventional sops to his white audience in order to defend at least a basis for a different social perspective on the part of blacks. Logically speaking, the speech left much to be desired, but it hit the right note under the circumstances.

Then Miah's argument goes south as he defends Wright, insisting that Wright is no hate-monger and that Wright preaches "in the best tradition of Black liberation theology." Miah did not intend this to be a backhanded compliment, of course. It gets worse when Miah makes the disgusting move of equating Wright with King, concluding: "Wright and King delivered the same message of truth." Here Miah shows himself to be a liar. King resolutely opposed black anti-Semitism and never would have had anything to do with the likes of Farrakhan or any black separatist. King would not have exploited black paranoia and illiteracy by spinning conspiracy tales about AIDS unsupported by evidence, or by peddling crackpot notions about black developmental psychology and brain hemispheres.

Miah asserts a linkage of the black liberation theology that arose in the '60s with a tradition going back to slavery. "It is rooted in Black nationalism and the traditions of Black radicalism. It goes back to the resistance to slavery. The modern version arose during the civil rights movement. It basically combines the philosophy of the Black Christian church and Black nationalism." The "modern version", however, has little in common with the pre-black-power phases of American history. Miah quotes Cone; I'll take Miah at his word for now; Cone:

The Black theologian must reject any conception of God which stifles Black self-determination by picturing God as a God of all peoples. Either God is identified with the oppressed to the point that their experience becomes God's experience, or God is a God of racism... The Blackness of God means that God has made the oppressed condition God's own condition.

It can be seen at a glance that King would never identify himself with this drivel. King might have identified God with the oppressed, but he never would have advocated God as a black God and not the God of all peoples. This obscurantist metaphysical fol-de-rol is of no value to black liberation; the only black power it promotes is that of the manipulation of the masses by self-aggrandizing leaders. Interestingly, Miah argues that Wright's perspective is mainstream, neither anti-American nor anti-capitalist.

In Wright's speech before the National Press Club, he identifed himself with Black liberation theology and pointed out that the attack on Obama and him by the corporate media and others is in reality an attack on the Black community.

This is doubly reprehensible. Aside from identification with the hocus-pocus of black liberation theology, Wright commits the sin of all black nationalist demagogues, including his pal Farrakhan: instead of establishing a rational, verifiable connection between his own interests and the interests of others, he arrogates to himself the right to equate his own agenda with that of the "black community", wrapping himself in the black nationalist flag to ward off criticism of his individual responsibility for crackpot ideas and a manipulative racial-mystical world view.

Finally, Miah warns his fellow socialists not to be sectarian and turn their backs on mainstream electoral politics. But the fact that he has to issue this admonition already proves the bankruptcy of his peers. Interestingly, Miah demonstrates awareness of the limitations of black capitalism by identifying Wright, Jesse Jackson, and Obama with it, and by highlighting the trend towards integrating minorities into the management of corporate America. Miah thinks that Obama's candidacy is an indicator of a post-racial society in germination, because of the willingness of a number of whites to accept Obama and not succumb to race-baiting. Well, it does indicate something, but precisely what and how far it goes is a matter for discussion. Miah suggests that the Obama candidacy opens up an opportunity for consciousness-raising on race. Well, I wonder. What we see, in Obama's "landmark" speech as well as all the hand-wringing over the "Wright" scandal, is not so much a penetration of the race situation on the ground as the usual insipid contrast of two opposing perceptions: "whites see the world this way, and blacks see the world that way, and whites don't know how the world looks from the other side of the racial divide." Well, the last part is true, but the media propaganda environment does not admit any deliberation beyond the pluralist ideology of showing us a diversity of viewpoints. The occasional showcasing of the "black perspective" is predicated on the curious form of integrated segregation to which the American racial order has evolved. Without the maintenance of de facto racial social segregation, the "black perspective" would not have to be peddled as some exotic foreign country that requires ambassadors to speak in its name. "Diplomacy", in fact, is an apt metaphor for this shell game, for diplomacy is all about understanding the perspective of the leaders of another country enough to negotiate with them . . . diplomatically. Diplomacy, however, is not designed to pursue truth beyond appearances.

Curiously, once Miah links black liberation theology to black nationalism, which he links to black capitalism, he fails to draw a number of conclusions therefrom. He seems quite unconcerned with the irrationalism and obscurantism of the black liberation theology of Cone and his successors, nor does he broach the subject of the stunting of the intellectual growth of black people under segregation, reflected in the power of the black church to inculcate hocus-pocus and the authority of preachers over a rationally accountable investigation of social reality. Here Miah succeeds in demonstrating the mental confusion and mediocrity of the American left.

Jeremiah Wright, MLK, black theology & Obama (6)

So much transpired in the few days following Bill Moyers’ interview with Jeremiah Wright, not to mention the fallout afterward. Wright spoke at a meeting of the NAACP, followed by an infamous engagement at the National Press Club, after which Barack Obama forcefully dissociated himself from Wright, citing outrageous statements by Wright.

How outrageous was Wright, exactly? Is he the total maniac the brief video clip of him shouting “God damn America!” purportedly shows him to be?

Moyers gave Wright the opportunity to contextualize his remarks and explain his views. Moyers addressed the double standard by which Wright and right-wing white preachers are judged owing entirely to race and provided some needed balance in his follow-up statement:

Bill Moyers: Welcome to the Journal, May 2, 2008.

Moyers contrasted the reasonable and rational dialogue he had with Wright on April 25 with what he called the “politics of personal destruction” on May 2, the likes of which he had never seen. Moyers was on target in redressing the imbalance, yet he did not delve to the bottom of the Wright affair. No one in the mass media I have yet encountered has systematically addressed just what is wrong with Wright.

Obama himself declined to explain the discrepancy between the Wright he knew and the “outrageous” behavior he witnessed in this press conference. Wright is so outrageous that his remarks are shunned by “every American”. Obama must know this is not quite true, but this is politics. Wright’s denunciation of American foreign policy is hardly outrageous. However, his characterization of the cause-and-effect relationships between American actions and the terrorist attacks of 9-11-01 is highly imprecise, and furthermore, mystified by his transmutation of the facts into theology. Offensive, though not necessarily crazy, is Wright’s characterization of 9-11 as the “chickens coming home to roost.” Perhaps Wright is a Malcolm X wannabe, Malcolm having characterized the JFK assassination in just this way. A more accurate descriptive term for 9-11 would be “blowback”. The phraseology of “chickens coming home to roost” in conjunction with the tone in which it was delivered carries the connotation that the people killed in 9-11 got what they deserved, but in fact, the chickens have faulty navigation skills and never quite arrive at home to roost. People in power don’t often pay for their crimes: cannon fodder and civilians do.

We can fault Wright for his offensive remarks, though not for his hostility to American foreign policy, which hardly is anathema to every American as Obama claimed. Where, then, does Wright definitively cross the border into outrageousness? Objectively, his offenses are these:

(1) His unsubstantiated folk paranoia about the U.S. government giving AIDS to blacks;

(2) His crackpot remarks about black learning style and left brain/right brain thinking;

(3) His defense of the anti-Semitic, separatist fascist Louis Farrakhan;

(4) His megalomaniacal claim that an attack on him is an attack on the black church.

Bill Moyers, while otherwise commendable, does not venture into these telltale signs of the underlying ideology of Wright and the numerous black nationalist crackpots among and outside of the black clergy who think like this.

Wright’s outburst at the National Press Club may have singlehandedly cost Obama the presidency. White people are, after all, chronically insecure, and panic more at the slightest aggressive gesture on the part of a black person than at the Caucasian monsters and lunatics that abound in their midst. The post-mortem conducted by Charlie Rose is worth scrutinizing with care:

A discussion about Barack Obama & Rev. Jeremiah Wright with James Clyburn,
04/29/2008.

Sally Quinn, Floyd Flake. Further discussion about Race, Religion and Politics.

Flake and Clyburn were quite measured and precise in their statements, knowing well what damage Wright was wreaking upon Obama. Flake was a congressman and remains a minister. Clyburn is a congressman and—my memory is shaky—may be a preacher as well. Flake denied that Wright could claim the right to equate himself with the black church as a whole. Naturally, none of the participants in the discussion were about to criticize the institution of the black church per se.

Sally Quinn of The Washington Post, a white woman who monitors the current dominance of religion in public discourse, was remarkably sympathetic to the black situation, but she missed the mark on a couple of important points. She contrasted the rational content of Wright’s speech with his responses during the Q & A during which he went haywire. He seemed to be off-center in his outlandish responses to questions posed to him. Quinn’s sensitivity to this discrepancy, however, fails to account for its root cause. Quinn made one other remark that proves that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing. When the question of Obama’s biracial composition was brought up, Quinn responded with her knowledge of the one-drop rule: in America, if you’re part black, you’re black. Flake nodded. This remark, however, is not as sophisticated as Quinn would like to think. Even if both your parents are black, and you are definitely black according to our racial classification system, your viewpoint is not thereby automatically secured. But if one your parents is not classified as black, even if other people classify you as black, you definitely do not experience your world in the same way as “real” black people, especially if you are raised by the white side of your family. Quinn’s remark, in this light, is actually quite stupid. Obama’s association with a nationalist like Wright most assuredly requires some explanation. Maybe Obama’s nonbelieving white mother is up in heaven as Obama assures us, but what must she think of her son joining an Afrocentric church whose preacher is a fan of Louis Farrakhan. No biracial child is going to put up with the likes of a separatist crackpot bigot like Farrakhan. Either Obama is a total opportunist and his conversion to Christianity is a pose, or the impact that Wright had on him exposes another weakness in his character. There is much about Obama’s attitude towards an institution he originally must have found quite alien that is probably not too distant from that of the typically stupid white liberal or white leftist who feels obligated to underwrite black ignorance out of a sense of political or moral deference. This weakness hardly disqualifies Obama for the presidency, especially given the demonstrably low standards of both the American presidency and the white American electorate, but it is a pressure point worth probing. Note, then, this discussion of the question:

Why'd Obama Join Trinity in the First Place?
The New Republic, 29.04.2008.

In the next installment I shall continue to pursue the fallout from the Wright-Obama affair, with an emphasis on the difference between the analysis of two irreligionists, Adolph Reed, Jr., a black leftist, and Christopher Hitchens, a white former leftist turned warmonger and unprincipled gasbag.

Jeremiah Wright, MLK, black theology & Obama (4)

Bill Moyers' Interview with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, April 25, 2008.

Resuming the narrative: Wright reviews his life and times--his sojourn in the military, during which he attended President Johnson in the hospital, his changing perceptions of what the church is and should be, the dominance of white cultural superiority even in black institutions, which persisted until 1968, and so on. Then Wright denies that Black theology is a race-based theology, explaining the meaning of the church slogan "unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian". His narrative makes sense from the perspective of the '60s, when the aggressive public assertion of black culture was a novel and bold move. However, the more one asserts "our culture", the more one is tempted to impose uniformity and conformity among its members. There is much more to consider between 1968 and 2008. But not to worry, says Wright: his church is multiracial and multicultural as well as unashamedly black.

Then Moyers and Wright get involved in a discussion of Bible stories, and Wright makes a number of proclamations about what God and the Bible tell us to do and not to do. Here the cherry-picking and brazen arbitrariness of the assertions are ridiculous. But Moyers is eating it up. The Bible stories and its teachings are universal, but oddly the God of a billion galaxies decided only to speak to one nationality lodged in a narrow patch of desert and the rest of the universe--maybe even the multiverse--has to accept all this bubba meises without proof. So, while interrogating verifiable human history, Wright opposes, to the false values of the state, fairy-tales about what God ordains. And when he enumerates the injustices done to various peoples by modern empires, including those committed by the United States, he converts these earthly insights into theological principles, and thus explains his remarks about the chickens coming home to roost on 9-11-01. There is indeed a cause-and-effect relationship between the actions of American foreign policy and the terrorist attacks, which can be explained in rational terms. "Chickens coming home to roost", though, is neither precise as an assertion nor does it explain anything. Wright is indignant about the willful misrepresentation of his perspective and his church, recounting all the social services and good works the church performs, complaining that his vilifiers know nothing of the black church. Yet an outsider not just to the black community but to religious institutions can't help but notice the schizoid nature of Wright's mind as he feels compelled to translate rational knowledge into theological mumbo-jumbo and practical social service and political action into a supernatural mission, just as surely as he originally sought to make religion relevant to the real world.

In the course of explaining his relationship with Obama, Wright says:

. . . he goes out as a politician and says what he has to say as a politician. I continue to be a pastor who speaks to the people of god about the things of God.

That's quite a cheeky assertion. And with what justification can Wright speak in the name of God about the things of God? Why not, without just being a politician, just speak of the things of the world as they are? His theology is already selective and politicized to the hilt.

It is also revealing how Wright justifies the crackpot fascist anti-Semite and black separatist Louis Farrakhan. He simply waves Farrakhan's ideology aside and says, well, look at all the great things he's accomplished, keeping black men off drugs, etc. etc. A purely opportunistic, pragmatic exculpation without any accountability for the ideology and institution of Farrakhan's gutter religion. But even more revealing is the corporate metaphor: "Louis Farrakhan is like E.F. Hutton. When Lewis Farrakhan speaks, black America listens. They may not agree with him, but they're listening." This assertion is idiotic on several counts. What does it mean to listen and not agree? Who says they're all listening? And if they do listen, then what does that say about their susceptibility to manipulation? What an absolutely corrupt justification!

Now get a grip on this:

Your theology determines one's anthropology. And how you see humans determines your sociology. To look at how we've come to see race, and in others of other races, based on our understanding of God who sees others as less than important. Less than my people. And where in our religious traditions are there passages in our sacred scriptures that are racist? They're in the Vedas, the Babylonian Talmud, they're in the Koran, they're in the Bible. How do we grapple with these passages in our sacred texts? The same way you grapple with Judges:19, where it's alright for a preacher to have a concubine and cut her up into 12 pieces. We gotta argue with our texts that are, as we've been struggling with, battling with, wrestling with, anti-Semitic. The Christian, "The Jews killed Jesus." No, we gotta come to grips with, you know, these texts were written by certain people at certain times with certain racist understandings of others who are different.

Well, the way to come to grips with these deficient sacred texts is to strip them of all authority and divine sanction, as these very admissions prove none of them can possibly be the word of God.

This man appears to have assassinated his own intelligence. So why was biracial, middle class, atheistical Barack Obama so impressed with him? A Harvard graduate couldn't do better than this? Naked pragmatism without rational accountability for one's nonsense--like attracting like?

Jeremiah Wright, MLK, black theology & Obama (3)

Wow! I have five days of media extravaganzas to catch up on. OK, I need to retrace my steps to Saturday 25 April, when Jeremiah Wright appeared on Bill Moyers Journal.

First, for more background on black liberation theology, see:

Bill Moyers' Interview with James Cone, November 23, 2007.

Now, for the good stuff:

Bill Moyers' Interview with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, April 25, 2008.

Let us disassemble the ideological basis of this presentation step by step. First, we have a review, replete with video clips, of the course of Wright's career with his church, emphasizing the social services provided to the working class black community and political agitation against injustice. Then, we are introduced to Barack Obama, who began his association with Wright as a religious skeptic, with a purely pragmatic political motive to join up with Wright, but later allegedly becoming a religious believer. And then we are introduced to yet another ingredient: a clip of black children dressed in dashikis, with a voice-over indicating Wright's inculcation of allegiance to the "black value system" and and to black Americans' alleged African roots. And here is where the wool begins to be pulled over our eyes.

What is wrong with doing this in the current period, say 1989 or 1999 or next year in 2009 as opposed to 1969 or 1959? What is different about de facto segregation in post-apartheid America compared to the rigid segregation imposed by the state and civil society in the period during what we call the modern civil rights movement revved up in the '50s, reached a turning point with the landmark legislation of 1965, and mutated to a new level of militancy as the civil rights legislation failed to alter the intransigent economic and social institutions that kept black America down? Before the protean black power ideology came to the fore in the late '60s, any "black value system" that existed was not a metaphysical entity but a system of social arrangements imposed by white violence and black strategies of both adaptation and resistance given the conditions imposed. As such, the situation fostered the affirmation of both cultural particulars and universal values. This was the mental universe in which Martin Luther King, Jr. moved, with all the expansiveness and limitations that his historical moment embodied, to become a leader of a real movement and the symbolic representative of the greatest political expression of human dignity the world has ever seen.

The nebulous ideology of "Black power" also reflected a historical moment, and MLK grappled both with this mutation in the movement and the objective conditions that engendered it. On the 40th anniversary of his assassination, the media opened up to the point where the average person today could delve further into the depths of King's courage and greatness than the mainstream media would ordinarily foster on such occasions. Had King not been cut down in Memphis the day he readied himself to lay down his life for black garbagemen, he surely would have never been allowed to survive the Poor People's Campaign then in the planning stages. The Poor People's Campaign was not about the maintenance of a separate "black value system" but multiracial class warfare on the march to smash through the ghetto walls of economic, social, political, educational and cultural segregation, grinding them to dust beneath a blitzkrieg on institutional privilege and intransigence. In comparison to this, the prospective of black liberation theology is a petty-bourgeois piss-ant.

All the documentation of all the politicized black churches that provide social services cannot evade the essential duality of the role of petty bourgeois preachers who minister to the underprivileged. Their role is to firm up their power base and their position atop their power base, ideologically bolstered not merely by a rational rationale and function, but via an irrational and essentially authoritarian legitimation via religion turned provincial and nationalistic, which gives us black liberation theology.

Thus the "black community" and the "black value system" become metaphysical entities, and the black political preachers who survived King, whatever good works they do, have never risen and never will rise to his level but rather ideologically decay and ultimately stink once the historical moment that vivified them has passed and their mode of adaptation is drained of growth and life.

Stay tuned for more to come!

Jeremiah Wright, MLK, black theology & Obama (2)

Given Obama’s situation, he handled the Wright “scandal” well. Obama's speech on race tipped me in his favor, but only out of alarm at how easily he could be jimcrowed out of the presidency. Obama’s speech was not one for the ages, but he delved deeper than the average politician, declining to relinquish an aspect of his previous social identity, while pandering to white people more than they deserve.

This was not enough for Caucasian talking heads concerned with whether Obama had sufficiently distanced himself from Jeremiah Wright. A few were put off by his reference to his grandmother exhibiting the questionable attitudes of a "typical white person". Imagine that! And then there was the question of Wright himself. White journalists grappled with the allegedly shocking and horrifying remarks of Wright, apparently never having before witnessed a black man in a dashiki spouting off.

Some black commentators, for their part, attempted to contextualize Wright’s “inflammatory” soundbites, in many cases defending him tout court and placing him solidly within a black tradition of political “prophetic speech”. In several instances, Wright was legitimated by a linkage to the civil rights movement and even to Martin Luther King, Jr. One typically obnoxious example is:

Ralph E. Luker, Jeremiah, History News Network, March 17, 2008.

Before we examine any specific linkages, let us note the objectionable assumption that no one in the news media (mainstream or “progressive”!) has questioned: why should the theological interpretation of secular social issues be considered legitimate under any circumstances? It is one thing to use cultural or symbolic metaphors as ingredients in one’s rhetorical appeals; it is something more to convert a political argument into theologically legitimated metaphysics. Luker, for example, is blind to how thoroughly ridiculous it is to argue politics on a theological basis.

True, Luker’s defense is not quite as ludicrous as the overblown white response to Wright, who exemplifies a fairly commonplace social type and hardly a shocking novelty. To be shocked and scandalized reveals how poorly white Americans still apprehend the social reality of their own society. The black response is disappointing in a different way. It too is "mainstream"—or maybe I should say conventional—in another sense. This is a highly anti-intellectual country and one with a very restricted ideological discourse, a discourse which excludes not only the left but freethought and secular humanism (i.e. Obama's mother!). As such, the real problems with Wright's rants and with the defense of them cannot be publicly discussed, because in so doing one would have to challenge the current theocratic temper of American politics and the entire tradition of Protestant preaching, black and white.

The problem is not with this or any preacher's specific comments, but of the very genre of prophetic discourse, especially in the mouth of a religious leader with a claim to a special authority. Like it or not, a “civilian” may damn America as he pleases, but by what right does a clergyman claim divine authority to utter such a pronouncement? That is the authority to be challenged, denied, and ultimately obliterated.

Theology and liberation have been intertwined since slavery days, but does this imply that every black preacher that has combined the two has participated from the same perspective in the same category—a construct known as black liberation theology? The blowhard pop intellectual Michael Eric Dyson on Meet the Press lumped Wright and King together in the same tradition, evidenced by the fact that at the time of his assassination King was scheduled to deliver a sermon about America being damned to hell. I would like to read the text of this sermon, if it has been preserved, to determine just what he planned to say and how he planned to say it. Even the similarity cited fails to convince me that King’s message was at all the same.

What kind of authority did MLK claim for himself? Was his invocation of religious language identical to that of his contemporaries or of ours? How did he see the role of religious discourse in a society presumed to be more secular in the '60s (at least outside of the South) than ours is today? Did King resort to demagogy and mystification in making his political points?

These are the questions that no one has posed, as they lie outside the boundaries of the visceral thoughtlessness and ideological superficiality that saturate every corner of the popular media.

Furthermore, is it valid to classify MLK under the rubric of a socially recognized ideological movement known as "black liberation theology", formulated by McCone and others in the '60s and after? King’s engagement with theology should by all means be studied so that his precise commitments can be ascertained, but the liberation theology of the black power movement strikes me as fulfilling a purpose not envisioned by King. Black liberation theology does not merely exploit religious metaphors, it squanders much mental energy in the construction of a racial metaphysics, which I can’t see as being useful to King. Black people are like the children of Israel, but then who isn’t? King was aggressively militant and became ever more so after the initial aims of the Southern civil rights movement were attained, but while solidly rooted in his Southern black heritage, he remained a universalist to the end. That is a principal reason he is not with us today. He was not the first militant black preacher and he won’t be the last, but few are of King's caliber.

Now, here are a few essays on MLK’s relation to black theology:

“Martin Luther King, Jr., Black Theology—Black Church” by James H. Cone, Theology Today, Vol. 40, No. 4, January 1984

“The Word That Moves: The Preaching of Martin Luther King, Jr.” by Richard Lischer, Theology Today, Vol. 46, No.2, July 1989

“Preamble to A Critique of James Cone” by Stephen C. Rose, OpEdNews.com, April 2, 2008

“Is Reverend Wright a Black Liberationist?” by Clare L. Spark, History News Network, April 7, 2008

Cone, an architect of black power theology, argues that King belongs to the tradition as he construes it, Cone does raise an interesting point about a putative difference between King's pitch to black and to white audiences, but otherwise I find his argument unconvincing.

Lischer downplays the influence of the thinkers King studied in seminary and argues for the primacy of the oral tradition rooted in black culture. Lischer nonetheless admits that King balked at fundamentalism and expanded on the traditional repertoire of black preaching. King’s amalgam of different influences was pitched to all of his audiences, not neatly segregated into black and white, but a different mood can be detected in his relationship to black and white audiences. In the wake of the landmark civil rights victories, as a rift grew between political strategies and the possibility of a transracial political consensus, King’s synthesis of diverse elements was strained to the breaking point. King’s preaching becomes more visibly “blacker” in the last phase of his life. Lischer, however, does not extrapolate the implications of this logic beyond a celebration of King as black America’s prophet. However “black” King’s discourse, it seems to me from this description that King did not aim at constructing a metaphysical doctrine for black people, but that he combined improvisation tailored to circumstance (a practice, incidentally, much explored in the work of Zora Neale Hurston) with ideas borrowed from the world beyond the segregated culture in which King was reared.

Suppose King’s ideology died so that Cone’s could live. Is that a good thing? If we are all the products of historically delimited circumstances, what are we to say for ourselves when we run up against our historical limitations? Cone outlived King physically, but suppose he failed to elevate himself ideologically? Whose path is then a dead end?

Rose claims contact with both MLK and Malcolm X, claims that both moved beyond race, and argues that Cone’s theology, which purports to synthesize both, is entirely misguided. As a theologian himself, he should know that much.

Spark’s underlying agenda as well as several particulars of her exposition are questionable, but let’s focus on the relevant points: Spark distinguishes the universalist claims of MLK from the particularist world view of cultural nationalists and the irrationalist basis of Cone’s ideology in particular (i.e. the rejection of logical reasoning and accountability).

Can any theology withstand the test of critical thought? There is another permutation in the domain of black liberation theology—that of religious humanism, most notably exemplified in the work of William R. Jones (featured in two blog entries here). Religious humanists work within a theological framework though they dissent from established theism and theological traditions. It’s an odd enterprise but useful as far as exploring the logical possibilities and implications of various doctrines goes. A black religious humanist more recently on the scene is Anthony Pinn, author of Why Lord? and other books.

Now that Jeremiah Wright in the flesh has the media spotlight, I shall continue to explore these issues in a follow-up entry.

Jeremiah Wright, MLK, black theology & Obama (1)

I could not be more indifferent, nay, even contemptuous, of the Obama-Wright “scandal” as a political football. Since John Edwards dropped out of the race, this campaign cycle has been devoid of content, reduced to the manipulation of the voting public on the basis of personalities and superficial symbolic issues. We are guinea pigs in a high-stakes experiment in electoral market research. The union of electoral politics and the advertising industry is hardly a novel subject for research, but the accelerated irrationality of American politics on the threshold of the final breakdown of American democracy is cause for even more alarm.

For those of you inclined towards social theory, here’s one reference that crosses this issue with the work of the Frankfurt School on the culture industry:

Adorno, Theodor W. "Opinion Research and Publicness (Meinungsforschung und Offentlichkeit)", translated with an introduction by Andrew J. Perrin & Lars Jarkko, Sociological Theory, vol. 23, no. 1, March 2005, pp. 116-123.

For a recent diagnosis of the American disorder, see:

Sargis, John. “The American Celebration of Democracy,” The International Journal of Inclusive Democracy, vol. 4, no. 2, April 2008.

Let us remember that prior to Super-Tuesday, focus groups, assembled by “experts” (most notably campaign consultant Frank Luntz, a Republican) in analyzing the minutiae of audience response to the slightest political gestures, showed a highly favorable attitude toward Hillary Clinton, including the response of black voters charmed by her rhetoric on race. Obama’s television commercials for Super-Tuesday constituted the most brilliant manipulation of political visual imagery I've seen since Leni Riefenstal. But look how the symbolic fortunes of both candidates have seesawed in only two months. The black electorate dropped Clinton like a hot potato and she and her supporters were forced to pander shamelessly to white racist sensibilities in order to stay in the race, irreparably damaging the Clintons’ reputation in Black America, a disenchantment long overdue.

This is not to downplay the fundamental fraudulence of Obama’s campaign, his obviously superior basic decency and progressive past notwithstanding. I am a firm practitioner of the depressing principle of the lesser-of-two-evils, so nothing I say here I think matters in the slightest in choosing a candidate. However, what seems to matter to a nation of brainless couch potatoes is another story, yet the underlying ideological structure of even that is a tabooed subject for public discourse. Both the detractors and defenders of Obama’s pastor Jeremiah Wright have missed the boat.

There is, of course, a fair amount of cynicism about Wright and Obama not predicated on white America’s exaggerated outrage.

“Obama Is No King” by Christopher Hitchens, SLATE, Monday, April 7, 2008
(Today, the national civil rights pulpit is largely occupied by second-rate shakedown artists.)

On April 7 Lenni Brenner (BrennerL21@aol.com) circulated a hilarious put-down entitled “Obama's Constitution, His Pastor, & His Unbelieving Mom In Heaven”. It is not yet posted among his online essays, but hopefully it will be added before too long.

Brenner’s point of departure is this article:

“Obama Suggests Jesus Christ Not the Only Way to Heaven” by Jennifer Riley, Christian Post Reporter, March 27, 2008.

The dominance of faith-based electoral politics is a bottomless swamp. The real questions cannot be posed, because both Obama's supporters and detractors have a vested interest in avoiding them—more fundamentally they do not even understand them. Obama is a middle class progressive community activist turned mainstream politician on the make in a neoliberal, i.e. anti-working-class, Democratic Party. The nature of this transformation is the fundamental question. While people fuss over his choice of a pastor, they can't and won't ask the more interesting question as to why the biracial offspring of a white atheist mother found Jesus and joined an Afrocentric church—let alone any Christian church, its political orientation notwithstanding. The sincerity of middle class progressive activism and this particular transformation may be impossible to determine sans telepathic access to personal motivation, yet there is enough to be disgusted by without impugning Obama’s personal or political motives. Perhaps, though, Obama as progressive community activist in the bosom of an Afrocentric Jesus is not so different from Obama as Democratic presidential candidate bending over backwards to placate white people in his effort to gain the top position in the management of the neoliberal political order.

Chris Hedges slurs 'new atheists'

Tavis Smiley interviews Chris Hedges
original airdate April 15, 2008

"I don't believe in atheists"
Foreign correspondent and intellectual provocateur Chris Hedges explains why New Atheists like Christopher Hitchens are as dangerous as Christian fundamentalists.
By Charly Wilder
Mar. 13, 2008

Note also this commentary from the Black Sun Journal (27 March 2008):

The Misanthropic Fury of Chris Hedges

The theocratic left is getting ever more irrational and dishonest. I need to compose an analytical response, but to put it briefly: Hedges is most dishonest in framing his attacks on the so-called "new atheists". The worst aspect of this is that he conflates their politics with their atheism and brands them fanatical fundamentalists as reactionary as the Christian right. He should be called out for this defamation. But also: most of the "new atheists" are politically bankrupt, but their political and/or sociological bankruptcy requires an analytical framework in order to render it comprehensible, whereas Hedges' fraudulent slanders just feed the right-wing onslaught.

Chris Hedges & left theocrats today

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America, Chris Hedges, New York: The Free Press, 2006.
Reviewed by Gregory Zucker
Logos 7.1 - winter 2008
http://www.logosjournal.com/issue_7.1/zucker.htm

Note some telling statements from this review:

"While providing a few insights and interesting anecdotes, he never moves beyond description into the realm of solid analysis."

"Each chapter begins with a tone-setting quote from a political thinker on the appeal of fascism or else from a theologian espousing the Christian beliefs that Hedges argues represent the true essence of Christianity in contrast to its widespread right-wing perversion."

"Hedges’ treatment would have benefited greatly by bringing in Marx, Durkheim, Weber, or Freud, to name only a few preceding analysts of this sort of angst or anomie. These thinker understood that modernity decimates religion’s capacity to explain or ‘enchant’ the world. At the same time, modernity increases religion’s appeal as a shield should society fail to shield people from harmful repercussions. Unrestrained capitalism, social fragmentation, and bureaucratization are only a few of modernity’s products that, in the absence of social forces buffering their effects, might drive people back into the eager arms of the priest, rabbi, or mullah."

"Rather than undertake a critique of religion, Hedges compares the religious right to non-religious movements."

"Ironically, Hedges does argue for upholding the Enlightenment values that engendered modernity, but is unclear exactly what aspects of the Enlightenment need to be upheld. The religious right’s success is due in no small way to the fact that it embraced two legacies of the Enlightenment: capitalism and liberalism. It aligned itself with capital and used liberal language to defend the right of its flock to doctrinaire belief. What it vehemently opposes is the Enlightenment’s ethical vision and devotion, if that’s the word, to reason. These legacies are problematic for Hedges too since part of his program for confronting the religious right is a renewal of progressive Christianity. The rub is that the Enlightenment, and the modernity it helped usher in, poses a challenge to faith in general, not just to one specific politicized manifestation of it."

"Hedges is not only a journalist, but a graduate of Harvard Divinity School. So perhaps the book might offer an immanent critique of the movement. There is an argument to be made that modernity and faith can be reconciled, that is, if Hedges had given progressive theologians like Niebuhr more attention. But Hedges doesn’t bother to expose internal contradictions in evangelical arguments. Instead, he tells readers to accept that “God is inscrutable, mysterious and unknowable.” (p. 8) Recommended is the Christianity that Hedges’ says informed his father, a progressive pastor, in support of the Civil Rights Movement, homosexuals, and opposition to the Vietnam War. "

"Hedges is correct to fear the threat that the movement poses to democracy. But, sharing anecdotes and describing a few features of the movement does little to help. The real task is to provide viable solutions for confronting the movement, which Hedges fails to do. This cannot be done without more studies that explain why this socio-historical moment has produced a successful Christian fundamentalism and requires a multi-leveled analysis that engages the history, sociology, politics, and ideology of the movement. Of course, the most difficult part is providing reasons for why these faithful should embrace a progressive political alternative instead."

This is a rather polite critique of Hedges' faulty perspective. I attended here in DC Hedges' book talk on American Fascists. He conspicuously omitted any mention of secular humanists and atheists as part of an anti-fascist coalition. He's making the rounds again with his new book I Don't Believe in Atheists, basically a defamatory assault on the "new atheists" such as Dawkins, Hitchens, etc., labelling them "fundamentalists" as others are now doing.

Here's a slightly edited piece I wrote on his crowd in the wee hours this morning:

In re:
"God's Politics?" by Katha Pollitt
http://www.somareview.com/godspolitics.cfm

The religious leftists of today are quite different from their forbears: today's crop consists of frightened, opportunistic theocrats exploiting the collapse of liberalism and radicalism and attempting to capitalize on the hegemony of theocratic discourse instead of contenting themselves with adding a religious voice to a secular conversation as happened in yesteryear. I will have more to say about other such ideological charlatans as Chris Hedges. It is important to understand the distinction I've made as we approach the 40th anniversary of the heartbreaking assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, a man of quite a different caliber than the characters prancing around today.

Pollitt points out the lapses in Wallis' argument. It is also important to note the authoritarianism of Wallis' politics. There is, for example, a difference between MLK who injected religious metaphors and imagery into secular arguments in the public sphere and today's religious left who arrogate to themselves the right to order us around based on their version of scriptural authority, telling us what God commands, and predicating public policy and governmental action on a theological basis.

I should add that as obnoxious as devotees of other religions are, such as the Jewish liberal blowhard Michael Lerner, minorities are not majorities. Many Jews retain the psychology of a persecuted minority, while these Christian "progressive" ideologues embody all the arrogance of a majority assuming the right to cow everyone else. But all these m-f's deserve to be put in their place.