Obamination
By Erik Rush

This column originally appeared in The New Media Journal on February 20, 2007

How many Americans would vote for a presidential candidate who was the member of a church that professed the following credo? 

 1.       Commitment to God

 2.       Commitment to the White Community

 3.       Commitment to the White Family

 4.       Dedication to the Pursuit of Education

 5.       Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence

 6.       Adherence to the White Work Ethic

 7.       Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect

 8.       Disavowal of the Pursuit of "Middleclassness"

9.               Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the White Community

10.           Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting White Institutions

11.           Pledge allegiance to all White leadership who espouse and embrace the White Value System

 12.   Personal commitment to embracement of the White Value System.

The question is rhetorical, of course. The answer is that such a candidate wouldn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting elected dog catcher (apologies to America’s animal rescue and public safety personnel) let alone President, because that candidate would be instantly branded a racist, among the most vile and frightening of white supremacists.

And those holding the branding irons would be 100% right. 

Yet, in the “About” section of the U.S. Senate website for Barack Obama, Democratic senator from Illinois and contender for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States, it states that Obama and his family “live on Chicago's South Side where they attend Trinity United Church of Christ.”

So…?

Well, to say that the Trinity United Church of Christ (http://www.tucc.org) is afrocentric in the extreme would be a gross understatement. It’s not simply afrocentric, it’s African-centric. In fact, one could argue that this organization worships things African to a far greater degree than they do Christ, and gives the impression of being a separatist “church” in the same vein as do certain supremacist “white brethren” churches – or even Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam.

Shocking? An overstatement? An overreaction?

One can see for oneself on the Trinity United Church website, which is replete with confirmation of what I present here. What follows is an excerpt from their Mission Statement: 

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

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

   1. Commitment to God

   2. Commitment to the Black Community

   3. Commitment to the Black Family

   4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education

   5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence

   6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic

   7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect

   8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of "Middleclassness"

   9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing and acquired skills available to the Black 

       Community

  10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and    

       Supporting Black Institutions

  11. Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value        

        System

  12. Personal commitment to embracement of the Black Value System.”

Sound familiar? Of course it is, since it’s identical to the 12-point list at the beginning of this column – the one from the theoretical white supremacist candidate’s church; the only difference is the substitution of the word “Black” for “White.”

Trinity United Church of Christ’s congregation also claims to hold to a “10-point Vision” which is similarly afrocentric, or if you will, separatist. Again, like the Nation of Islam, a white separatist church or the Branch Davidians, Trinity United more resembles a cult than a church. Only this one has as one of its most prominent members a serious contender for the White House.

And George W. Bush’s born-again Christian status scares people?

These revelations, of course shed all the light we need on Obama’s inscrutability; since before he announced his candidacy, both the Right and Left have commented on the lack of information vis-à-vis just who Barack Obama is and what he’s about.

From The Chicago Tribune, February 06, 2007, Column: Against Middleclassness? by Rich Lowry. “Vallmer Jordan, a church member who helped draft the precepts, said they were designed to empower the black community and counter a value system imposed by whites. ‘The big question mark was racism,’ he said. ‘Black disempowerment was an integral part of that historical value system. It became increasingly apparent to me that we black people had not developed our own value system . . . to help us overcome all we knew we had to battle.’”

“A value system imposed by whites…” Is Jordan speaking of the value system that kept families together and promoted morality, industry and integrity, or the one imposed by liberal dependency pimps since the Civil Rights Movement?

True enough that many blacks did abandon values; again, this was due to the corruption of the black clergy by white socialists and their black foremen. Trinity United seems to have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Gravitation toward an Africanized “year-round Kwanzaa”-based pseudo-Christianity seems less of a solution than returning to the moral and social conservatism Blacks held prior to the aforementioned socialists gaining their stranglehold in the black community. 

So is Obama seeking to be our first black president, or our first stealth black nationalist president? You see, were he a run-of-the-mill insincere Christian of convenience like Bill Clinton, Obama might belong to a run-of-the-mill, lukewarm, large nondescript church. But he doesn’t. He belongs to a church which is (as I indicated before) blatantly afrocentric and even suggests the supremacy of Africa’s descendants in America. 

Granted that the Left will have no qualms about this highly questionable affiliation, but what about all of the American swing voters to whom Obama has built broad appeal by presenting himself as sort of a generic, open-minded moderate Democrat (as Bill Clinton also did, by the way)? Are they going to go for a candidate whose heart is actually closer to that of a refined Black Panther?

Trinity United clearly embraces things African above things American. The content of their website makes this undeniably clear. Aside from this tack being divisive, separatist and calls into question its adherents’ identification as Americans, if they’re looking for values, they – and Obama – would be better served by looking to modern political conservatives and traditional Christianity than retrograde African precepts and the Democrat Party.

Obama’s affiliation with this church, if I must call it that, should be as alarming to the American voter as a Republican candidate for president belonging to the Aryan Brethren Church of Christ. Any argument against this assertion is politically-correct delusion, reverse discrimination and a hypocrisy – a very dangerous one.