Liberation Theology, Anti-Colonialism, and Fiscal Conservatism
The New York Times has an interesting juxtaposition of articles in yesterday’s edition. One, Billionaire Finds New Role in Effort to Defeat Obama, was about Joe Ricketts and both his backing of a movie based on Dinesh D’Souza’s book The Roots of Obama’s Rage and his considering a $10 million effort to finance an advertisement linking Obama with his former spiritual adviser, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. The other, A Campaign Pitch Rekindles the Question: Just What Is Liberation Theology?, describes the liberation theology which has so negatively influenced Rev. Wright and, by extension, Barack Obama.
It is unfortunate that Mr. Ricketts does not seem to be going through with his attempt to brand Obama with Rev. Wright’s rants and with the liberation theology that inspired them. Liberation theology is left-wing babble, un-American and not in keeping with the Christian gospel as we understand it. Granted, the author was able to get a liberal theologian from a liberal theological school to say some benign words about what liberation theology is, quoting Shannon Craigo-Snell of the Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary describing it as, “It’s what your Sunday school teacher taught you if you grew up in a church. It isn’t something people should be afraid of, unless they’re invested in poor people not getting fed or sick people not getting healed.” This was also the message of the discredited Social Gospel of the early 20th century. Fortunately, as the article so aptly points out, later theological greats like Karl Barth and Reinhold Niebuhr focused on other issues like sin, war and violence, and salvation, rather than on the poor.
As Mr. Ricketts so rightly understands, we are currently in ‘“a most dangerous time,” when “people begin to second-guess the American experiment” and “flirt with dead-ends like socialism.”’ He further adds, “Our Republic is under assault from our government,”, in large part because of the banking and auto bailouts organized under the Bush administration. Mr. Ricketts and his PAC are financing a book, The Fiscal Cliff: How America Can Avoid a Fall and Stay On Top, by economists Ayse and Selahattin Imrohoroglu, urging an embrace of the bipartisan Bowles-Simpson debt reduction plan, a plan that failed to pass by the necessary super majority in 2010, with congressional Republicans and Democrats on the committee each splitting 3-3 on the vote, and which mustered 38 votes, 16 Republican, 22 Democrat, in a March 2012 House vote.
Which explains Mr. Ricketts’ fear of Barack Obama and the damage he has done and would continue to do to the country if reelected, and his financial support of the film 2016: Obama’s America, to highlight that damage. The film, based on D’Souza’s book, argues that “Obama has a dream, a dream from his father, that the sins of colonialism be set right and America be downsized.”
The anti-colonialism of Barack Obama is a danger to our country, and to the fiscal conservatism required to rescue it. We fight this anti-colonialism by maintaining and increasing our strength around the world. Only in this way will we be able to cut government expenditures and bring our budget more in balance, and assuage the fears that Mr. Ricketts has that we are head off a fiscal cliff.