102 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographyBlack theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black
community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had
better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black
community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the
destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power,
which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at
their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.” And
again: “In the New Testament, Jesus is not for all, but for the oppressed, the poor and unwanted
of society, and against oppressors ... Either God is for black people in their fight for liberation
and against the white oppressors, or he is not.” (See William R. Jones, “Divine Racism: The
Unacknowledged Threshold Issue for Black Theology,” in African-American Religious
Thought: An Anthology, ed. Cornel West and Eddie Glaube [Westminster John Knox Press];
cited by Spengler, “The peculiar theology of black liberation,” Asia Times).
Christianity allows and indeed requires class distinctions, with a preferential bias in favor of the
poor and the destitute, as expressed in the imperative to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, house the
homeless, visit the sick and prisoners, and bury the dead. It is easier for a camel to pass through the
eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven. But the apostles are commanded
to preach the gospel to all nations, without exception, and St. Paul is adamant that there can be no
difference between Jew and Greek, Jew and Gentile, Syrian, or Samaritan. What Cone is preaching
here is a new synthetic religion which can only be described as satanic, since it is most explicitly
based on hatred. If Obama claims that he reached Christianity thanks to Reverend Wright, we can
only conclude that he never became a Christian, since as a disciple of Cone, Wright himself could
never be classified as a Christian. What Cone has elaborated is a religion of hatred which is the
opposite of Christianity.
DISTURBING PRECEDENTS FOR ETHNIC RELIGION
Cone’s work calls to mind the outlook of Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the racist and anti-
semitic friend of the German Emperor William II and later a supporter of Hitler. Chamberlain was
an Englishman who chose to become a German; he was a relative of Sir Neville Chamberlain, who
appeased Hitler at Munich in an attempt to turn him east against Russia. Chamberlain was one of
only four persons whom the National Socialists acknowledged as their ideological forebears: the
three others were the composer Richard Wagner, the anti-semite Lagarde, and the philodoxer
Nietzsche; Chamberlain was the only one who did not come from the German-speaking area of
central Europe. Chamberlain’s argument was that the Germanic master race was the bearer and
originator of all civilization and culture and admirable in all things save one: it did not have its own
ethnic religion, and was saddled with an alien Christianity, a religion which Chamberlain rejected
for racist reasons since so many of the main figures were Jews, and also because of doctrines like
charity, which were incompatible with the way of the Germanic warrior. Chamberlain called for the
creation of a specifically and exclusively Germanic ethnic religion, he called this “eine arteignene
Religion” or “eine artmäßige Religion.”
Cone’s work can be most clearly understood if we view him as a new Houston Stewart
Chamberlain, attempting to create a new and synthetic ethnic religion in the service of the
oligarchical foundation community, with the same kind of reactionary and anti-human intent which
animated Chamberlain. Cone’s talk of killing God also puts him in a class with another proto-Nazi,
Nietzsche. In modern America, the intent of all this is a transparent strategy of divide and conquer,
splitting the population into more or less fictitious subject nationalities, each with its own ethnic