94 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized BiographyJEREMIAH WRIGHT AND THE THEOLOGY OF HATE
But if Obama was a megalomaniac, we was not the only megalomaniac on the south side of
Chicago. There was also the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the central figure of an affluent
congregation that called itself the Trinity United Church of Christ. Even before going to Kenya,
Obama had come into contact with Jeremiah Wright. Obama had often been questioned about his
religious faith during his years as a community organizer. During this time Obama, who said he
“was not raised in a religious household,” was asked by pastors and church ladies, “Where do you
go to Church, young man?” (Dreams) The guess here is that he was not a Moslem during those
years, but rather an existentialist like his idol Frantz Fanon, and therefore most likely an atheist on
the model of Nietzsche and Heidegger. Obama now realized that membership in a church was a
political necessity. He chose Wright’s church not merely because it was very large, very influential,
and very wealthy, but also because it professed black liberation theology, which Obama certainly
would have known by that time to be the brand preferred by his backers in the foundation world, of
which the Ford Foundation was the flagship. Another name for Wright’s church might have been
the Foundation Church of the Counter-insurgency, since those were the doctrines that were taught
there. It was a church based on Afrocentrism, on black nationalism, and on the rejection of western
civilization. Ironically, it was also a church frequented by some of the most successful practitioners
of affirmative action, meaning the small minority of the black community who had benefited
immensely from quotas, set-asides, and racial preferences, while the majority of the black inner-city
ghetto sank deeper and deeper into poverty and despair. Indeed, Wright’s doctrines were designed
to soothe the consciences of the upwardly mobile black overclass even as they were co-opted into
the financier power structure of the city.
Obama experienced some friction with Wright at their first meeting: ‘“Some people say that the
church is too upwardly mobile.” It was in fact the richest black congregation in Chicago. Wright
shot back: “That’s a lot of bull. People who talk that mess reflect their own confusion. They’ve
bought into the whole business of class that keeps us from working together.”’ (Dreams 283)
Wright means that racial unity is everything, and socioeconomic class is nothing. With this, the
essence of Wright’s method is exposed: he is a follower of the proto-fascist German sociologist
Ludwig Gumplowicz, whose main work was Der Rassenkampf (The Racial Struggle, 1909).
Gumplowicz was a product of the decaying Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose nationalities policy is
one of the models for the Ford Foundation’s current doctrines of multi-culturalism. Gumplowicz
taught that the main clash in human society was the racial one, and not class struggle – not Plato’s
authentic class struggle, and not Marx’s fake version either. It is a tune repeated by many a
reactionary, irrationalist, and obscurantist.
Here are some impressions of Trinity United and of Wright personally: ‘The Trinity United
Church of Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago, is at once vast and
unprepossessing, a big structure a couple of blocks from the projects, in the long open sore of a
ghetto on the city’s far South Side. The church is a leftover vision from the Sixties of what a black
nationalist future might look like. There’s the testifying fervor of the black church, the Afrocentric
Bible readings, even the odd dashiki. And there is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a sprawling, profane
bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution, with his own radio shows and guest
preaching gigs across the country. Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday.... This is as openly
radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much
Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama’s life, or his
politics. The senator “affirmed” his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a “sounding
board” to “make sure I’m not losing myself in the hype and hoopla.” Both the title of Obama’s