War Brings Focus On Presidential Candidate Cornel West, A Key Religious Left Voice
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(OPINION) Never assume that America’s third parties don’t matter. Especially in a topsy-turvy political season like this one.
After all, some figure that Jill Stein’s 1% in three swing states produced Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, or that Ralph Nader’s 1.6% in Florida elected Bush 43 in 2000, or that Ross Perot’s 19% elected Clinton over incumbent Bush 41 in 1992.
More obviously, Republican rebel Theodore Roosevelt’s 27.4% meant Wilson beat incumbent Taft in 1912. The newborn Republicans were kind of a third party in the crucial 1860 election when Abraham Lincoln managed to win the White House with only 39.9%.
Last week, a CNN poll showed this current four-way split for 2024: Trump 41%, Biden 35%, Robert Kennedy Jr. 16%, and Cornel West 4%.
Might the two independents determine which of the other two wins? Also, Stein is back in it now that West has quit his Green Party flirtation. Who knows what Sen. Joe Manchin or his No Labels pals will do?
America’s painful, binary voting-booth vise is clearly under attack.
The Guy puts the focus on West, a rich topic for coverage as a celebrity of the Religious Left due to multi-media activities. West suddenly becomes more significant with the Hamas terrorists’ slaughter of civilians and Israel’s furious military response in Gaza, where civilians are trapped next to, or above, Hamas military outposts.
West’s campaign will presumably help focus sympathy for the Palestinian cause among fellow Black and liberal Protestants — even as some other Americans’ anti-Israel stance turns to antisemitism.
West’s hard-left “truth, justice & love” platform would flatly “cease military funding to the State of Israel.” Along with that, he would “end Israeli apartheid of Palestinian people and press the U.N. to establish a program for Palestinian dignity and liberation.”
(Otherwise, West outdoes the anti-Reagan isolationists among Trump-Era Republicans. He would “disband NATO,” cut off all weapons and money to help Ukraine repel Russian invaders, “dismantle the U.S. empire,” “slash” the military budget, order the “closure of global U.S. military bases,” and bar outside intervention to stabilize Haiti.)
West, 70, understandably takes pride in being the first Black recipient of a Princeton doctorate in philosophy. If The Guy has this right, his academic career took him from a Harvard University fellowship to Union Theological Seminary, thence to Yale Divinity School, to Union again, to Princeton University, to Harvard Divinity School, to Princeton again, to Union again, to Harvard Divinity again, and to his current post as Union’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer Professor of Philosophy & Christian Practice.
Writers who dig into the related vagaries in “mainline” Protestant thinking will recall that one-time Union student Bonhoeffer was a singular ally of Jews in his native Nazi Germany and was executed for joining a plot to assassinate Hitler. One of Bonhoeffer’s mentors was star public intellectual Reinhold Niebuhr, Union’s best-known theologian in that era (which can probably be said of West today). He was a leading proponent of Christian Zionism and creation of the modern state of Israel. Niebuhr’s stand was a practical moral calculation — minus the literal reading of Bible promises and prophecies so popular with evangelicals.
During the 1930s, Niebuhr’s concern escalated as oppression of Jews in Germany and elsewhere worsened and many sought refuge in British-ruled Palestine. His 1938 address to Hadassah, the organization of women Zionists, advocated support for a Jewish homeland there, culminating in a 1941 speech to the Zionist Organization of America and the 1942 article “Jews After the War” written for the American Palestine Committee. In that same era, Niebuhr famously discarded his onetime pacifism.
On Monday, Niebuhr’s own denomination, the United Church of Christ, joined a statement that decries both Hamas atrocities and Israel’s “apartheid policies” and “ethnic cleansing” of Palestinians. It demands an immediate ceasefire, which Israel contends would only aid efforts to rid the Holy Land of its Jews. Click here for a UCC collection of similar recent declarations from “mainline” Protestants and others.
Resources: This 2009 academic article by Carys Moseley, then at the University of Edinburgh, surveys Niebuhr’s thinking on modern Israel. Journalists might want to tap conservative Mark Tooley, whose Providence magazine seeks to offer a 21st Century application of Niebuhr’s “Christian Realism” in foreign policy.
Contacts: Tooley can be emailed off the magazine’s website or phoned at 202-682-4131 or for after-hours media inquiries 202-413-5639. United Church of Christ offices at 216-736–2100 or for media contacts, at newsteam@ucc.org. For West, his seminary email is cwest@uts.columbia.edu or media contact for the West presidential campaign go to press@cornelwest2024.com.
This piece first appeared at GetReligion.org.
Richard Ostling is a former religion reporter for The Associated Press and a former correspondent for TIME Magazine. He’s also worked in broadcast TV and radio journalism covering religion and received a lifetime achievement award from Religion News Association.