21AR26-47

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )

pdf = www.bit.ly/3ECBBsochimp
chimp = www.bit.ly/3gJ0VTj

AR 26:47 - Planned Parenthood, Margaret Sanger, and the Klan

In this issue:

ABORTION - the racist contradictions of Planned Parenthood and its allies

AFRICAN TRADITIONAL RELIGION - how animism mingles with the prosperity gospel and Western progressivism

Apologia Report 26:47 (1,552)
December 9, 2021

ABORTION
"Planned Parenthood's Excuse for (Margaret Sanger's Speech to) the Ku Klux Klan" by Howard Isaac Williams (Salvo, 57 - 2021) -- "Last fall, in the wake of the renewed national debate on race, black and Latina employees of Planned Parenthood of Greater New York demanded that the abortion organization review its racist history and some of its current practices. The chapter did so, and afterwards decided to delete Margaret Sanger's name from its flagship abortion clinic, and it even went so far as to state that Sanger, Planned Parenthood's founder, was a racist. ... And just this past April, PP deleted its entire 20-page biographical profile of Sanger from its website."

In digging more deeply, Williams discovered "the tip of an iceberg." He reveals that the "recently deleted [online] profile of Sanger acknowledged that she spoke to a women's auxiliary of the Ku Klux Klan in 1926." An accompanying "Note" describing the event explained that "In the 1920's, the KKK was a mainstream movement and was considered a legitimate anti-immigration organization with a wide membership that included many state and local officials. At that time, it defined its enemies as Blacks, Catholics, and Jews. Planned Parenthood today denounces Sanger's address to the Ku Klux Klan." ...

"The fact sheet containing the Note went up in October 2016, when Planned Parenthood was apparently so confident that its endorsed candidate would become America's first woman president that it felt free to describe the KKK, the worst terrorist group in our nation's history, with tepid words. ...

"Note the absence of any words condemning the Klan. Nowhere do we see such appropriate words as 'terrorists,' 'murderers,' or 'bigots' applied to it. ...

"Of all the excuse-making words, 'mainstream' may be the trickiest. PP's Note echoes the conventional narrative that the Ku Klux Klan was a powerful and popular group in the 1920s." Yet "when Sanger visited and spoke to the women's auxiliary in May 1926, the Klan was past its prime.... By 1926, national scandals and local defeats had crippled the New Jersey Klan and left it with a much smaller audience to hear Sanger's message. But apparently not a less appealing audience. ...

"Another bizarre excuse in the Note is its description of the KKK as 'a legitimate anti-immigration organization.' ...

"[M]erely calling the KKK 'anti-immigration' understates its terrorism and dehumanizes its many victims. ...

"The Note then says that the KKK 'defined its enemies as Blacks, Catholics, Jews and others.' The Klan did much worse than 'define' blacks, Catholics, Jews, and immigrants as enemies; it terrorized and murdered them" - a characterization that renders its victims' "sufferings and personhood unimportant."

"But should anyone really be surprised that an organization that explicitly denies the personhood of unborn babies would implicitly deny it to other humans? ...

"Sanger's speech and PP's quasi-apologetic Note are actually just the tip of a white-supremacist iceberg that lies beneath the surface of abortion advocacy. ...

"In 2013, when Kermit Gosnell, a black abortionist since pre-Roe days, faced prosecution for infanticide and other crimes ... the pro-choice side abandoned its loyal black servant even before his case went to trial." However, "That same year ... white abortionist Douglas Karpen was investigated for similar crimes" and has yet to be brought to trial. ...

"And consider ... the legacy of the black civil rights heroine Fannie Lou Hamer (1917–1977)." Gloria Steinem wrote an essay in 2002 on Hamer and in it "she cynically claims Hamer for the pro-choice side because this cheerful and courageous Christian woman — who ... complained bitterly about her state-imposed hysterectomy. Steinem mutes the fact that Hamer was angry about losing her right to have children," and not abortions which Hamer called "legal murder."

"Pro-lifers have often called attention to the disproportionate number of abortions committed on black women. ...

Not surprisingly, "Planned Parenthood also supported the Communist Chinese government's long-standing one-child policy (revised somewhat in recent years), which forced abortion on almost all Chinese women who had a second pregnancy."

Williams' conclusion: Planned Parenthood is like an "iceberg which wrecks lives in the present [and] will not be melted by a few virtue signals regarding its past." <www.bit.ly/3DPmlbq>

---

AFRICAN CHRISTIANITY
With "African Traditional Religion, Black Lives Matter, and the Prosperity Gospel," Anne Kennedy offers insight into the incorporation of West African occultism into Black Lives Matter rituals by Patrisse Cullors, one of the movement's co-founders, and from there introduces readers to the surprising syncretism of African traditionalism with Neo-Pentecostalism.

Kennedy describes Africa's "cracking edifice of Judeo-Christian belief [which] collapses under the weight of bad to non-existent discipleship and Western Christianity in turmoil, explaining that the study of African Traditional Religion (ATR) "is not merely academic." Instead, "It presses a fresh relevance on Christians in a post-Christian world." Kennedy shows the reason why by discussing "ATR's view of God, the spirits and ancestors, power and magic, time, and some cultural mores, particularly shame and rite of passage." She concludes that "ATR is symbiotically sympathetic to the American version of the prosperity gospel and progressivism."

Kennedy's description of ATR includes "the cultural and spiritual assumptions that arose from within Africa itself" as well as "all the indigenous religious traditions of Africans south of the Sahara Desert. ... [I]t represents a view of life that acknowledges the existence of an invisible world, believed to be inhabited by spiritual forces that are deemed to have effective powers over one's life" and which are quite different from our experience in the West.

The ATR view of God begins with his remoteness in "a realm that is far off. ... He cannot be approached personally or directly." He is "disappearing from the world," though made "immanent through the mediation of the spirits and ancestors. ...

"Many African cultures recount that God was once close to men, but then something broke their close communion." Nevertheless, in his "most important role as Creator," Kennedy notes that "the Supreme Being and the lesser beings are part of the same cosmic community. ...

"Spirits are those invisible spiritual beings who relate more closely to God and are generally bound to a particular location - a grove of trees, a stream, or some part of the highway. ...

"Ancestors, likewise, live in an unseen world that is very close to ours. ... An ancestor isn't just your grandfather who died last year whom you miss and whose same features you see in your own son. Your ancestors - plural - are a living and active part of your life now, though they have gone to live in the 'village of the dead.' They, like the spirits, are tied to the land where they lived before they died and were buried. ...

"The question of power is uppermost for Traditionalists in Africa. Life is precarious. Illness and trouble lurk in every shadow. Like so many religions of the world, making life all right now and getting safely into the next one are the preoccupying considerations of most practitioners." To assist you in all this, "there are ways to get what you need and want out of God and all the spirits and ancestors....

"Just as the spirits and ancestors have real and sometimes malign power, and gain power by sacrifices and ablutions poured out on the ground, so practitioners of magic are to be feared. ...

"[S]piritual power is bound to the material and physical realm. The separation between the visible and invisible is very thin, in some cases non-existent. ...

"One's life is a delicate dance to discover what the unseen community desires for one to do. Practically speaking, rites of passage solidify communal norms and assumptions from one generation to another. ...

"Alongside the necessary rites of passage that bind a person to his family - both living and dead - are the guardrails of honor and shame. These are powerful controls that a community exerts over its members [and a] bewildering maze for the Westerner." Note: "shame and honor often have to do with forgiveness and reconciliation." Kennedy also emphasizes the significance of the African view of time on top of everything else - for the simple reason that it is far less important for African Traditionalists than it is to Westerners.

The jump to how all this mixes in with the Prosperity Gospel seems abrupt - especially when one learns that it "is sweeping across Africa and transforming religious life more than almost any other [movement] in recent memory." And this, to the degree that "African Christianity risks being co-opted and corrupted" by it.

Kennedy reports that Prosperity Gospel teaching was "introduced to Africa largely through [the late] Rienhard Bonnke's Christ for All Nations crusade which has been active in various centres throughout Africa" and has since been taken up by countless indigenous preachers. (Others identify Nigerian televangelist Benson Idahosa [1938–1998] as the movement's key forerunner. For a more detailed and nuanced account, see the chapters by Nigerian evangelical scholar Matthews Ojo in The Abandoned Gospel [1].)

"If you have enough faith, God will give you money and health. It is possible, in this kind of world, to twist God's arm into giving you what you need or want by various acts of prayer and devotion, though chiefly by sending money. It is no wonder that the prosperity gospel has swept across Africa. ...

"Prosperity theology provides such an answer, and in this way has been (almost paradoxically) linked with liberation theology, which provides rather a different answer." (Unfortunately, this goes undiscussed.)

Near the end of this piece, under the heading "Progressivism," Kennedy warns that "Post-Christian America is ripe for a syncretistic fascination with ATR. The Otherworldly Oracle, for example, has a primer on 'The Seven African Powers for Beginners,' which, the author (aka Kitty) claims, originated in Yorubaland in Nigeria, Benin, and Togo. He claims these spirits - Orishas - are invoked by other religions, including folk Catholicism, and provides instructions for how to summon these spirits and benefit from their spiritual power." Kennedy helpfully adds: "No Westerner should imagine that the 'Seven African Powers' divined on a website will truly resemble what Africans believe." Christian Research Journal, 44:3 - 2021, pp30-37. <www.equip.org>

-------

SOURCES: Monographs

The Abandoned Gospel: Confronting Neo-Pentecostalism and the Prosperity Gospel in Sub-Saharan Africa, Philip W. Barnes, Bazil Bhasera, Matthews A. Ojo, Jack Rantho, Trevor Yoakum, and Misheck Zulu, eds. (AB316, 2021, paperback, 308 pages) <www.amzn.to/3D8GxUq>

( - previous issue - / - next issue - )