On 30 March 2012, Obama appeared in a campaign speech in Vermont where he spoke about helping others and the Biblical story of Cain and Abel. In his address, Obama condemned what he sees as “you’re-on-your-own economics” and argued, as CNS News alleges, for policies that would transfer wealth from one group to another.
In Genesis, Adam and Eve’s first-born son is Cain and their second-born son is Abel. Cain becomes a farmer and Abel becomes a shepherd. When Cain offers the fruit of his farming to God and Abel offers a lamb, God is pleased with Abel’s offering but not Cain’s. Cain then kills Abel. When God asks Cain where Abel is, Cain says: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”
But Obama’s focus on that particular episode in the book of Genesis is instructive. This use of the Cain and Abel story is classic liberation theology, the tasty slurry of Christian teachings and Marxist class struggle that was characteristic of the Church the Obama family attended in Chicago for 20 years. The story of Cain and Abel has a special meaning to liberation theology that sets it apart from most mainstream Christian denominations. In most Christian churches, the idea of original sin is usually associated with the narrative of Adam and Eve, who disobeyed God when they fell to temptation and ate the forbidden fruit. In Liberation theology, on the other hand, Adam and Eve’s original sin is largely abandoned and replaced by an increased significance on Cain’s betrayal of his brother.
Further explanation of this significance comes from Christopher Rowland and Mark Corner’s 1989 book Liberating Exegesis: The Challenge of Liberation Theology to Biblical Studies:
The story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4) is read as an example of the kind of struggle which goes on in society between the landed and the landless, the farmers and the shepherds…The cause of Abel’s death is the division of labour, which creates social classes and the ensuing struggle for land.
As a central theme of the class-struggle preached at church while Obama attended, the liberation theology of Reverend Jeremiah Wright, he’s clearly drawing from a familiar well.
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