Family Research Council’s new vice president Jerry Boykin has a penchant for making bizarre, conspiratorial claims about President Obama and extremist attacks on Muslims, and at a Massachusetts synagogue last week even wondered whether President Obama is a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. Responding to a questioner who asked if Obama is “a member of the Muslim Brotherhood,” Boykin replied, “you probably don’t know, and my answer is, I don’t know.”
He went on to allege that Jeremiah Wright brought Nation of Islam theology into the United Church of Christ, and that the NOI is based on the teachings of James Cone, a Christian theologian who was born after the founding of the NOI. Boykin denied that Obama attended a real Christian church and instead claimed Wright surreptitiously preached Cone’s crypto-Islamic theology, and so for Obama “it wouldn’t of mattered whether he was in the Nation of Islam or was in a Christian Church, he got the same theology, which was James Cone’s Marxist, liberation theology, which runs parallel to the whole doctrine of Islam.”
Update: Wil Gafney writes in Religion Dispatches that not only did Boykin grossly misrepresent black liberation theology, but also that Wright was never a member of the Nation of Islam.
