The website for Sen. Barack Obama's church -- Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago -- not long ago described the "Black Value System" in the "About Us" section of its website.
And it used to provide a link to the Trumpet Magazine that once gave an award to Louis Farrakhan -- a magazine published by Rev. Jeremiah Wright's daughter.
Disappearing from the site was information about the church's "Black Value System" and black liberation theology. Why might the church want to hide this information? Here's the crux of the underpinnings of the theology, as recounted by one James Cone, who Wright credits with "systemitizing" this theology:
Black 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.
Love your neighbor as yourself, it's not.
So, have the discarded Trinity United website details dissipated into the ether, lost forever down some unknown tube of the internet? Not so fast. Let me introduce you to the Internet Archive:
The Internet Archive is building a digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form. Like a paper library, we provide free access to researchers, historians, scholars, and the general public.