catapult magazine

I don’t normally have access to cnn but today I did, and today happens to be the day when Obama had to make a speech on racism because of video clips from his pastor which are being played over and over on American networks. Now I listened to those soundbites which are supposedly so horrible, and even out of context as they are, I can’t see what’s so bad about them. Kinda nice to hear a pastor say it like it is: that rich white people control the economy and that people should make the connection between 911 and america’s support for terrorists around the world throughout the cold war years. sounds like a church i could attend. i’m disappointed that obama felt he had to say his pastor was wrong when he is clearly right. and i’m shocked that everyone from slate.com to cnn is unwilling to see the pastor as anything but a nutcase. it almost seems like the problem was the oratory style, not what was being said. was obama distancing himself from the preaching style of his pastor rather than the content? i feel there is something powerfully racist going on but i can’t put my finger on it. also, is it still taboo in the US to say that US foreign policy had anything to do with 911? any comments?

Several of the people at my church are former members or know people at Trinity church. In fact, when we went to church on Sunday there were a bunch of national news crews outside Rev. Wright’s church trying to catch something scandalous. The problem is that there’s nothing scandalous about this. The sermons, taken out of context, appear divisive, but Wright is trying to empower African-Americans by invoking biblical prophetic speech. I’m interested to see Christian Republicans condemning Wright’s supposedly "anit-American" speech which is very much in the tone of the Old Testament prophets. I can imagine many Jewish folks of the Old Testament accusing the prophet Jeremiah for being anti-semitic when he suggests the woes of the Israelites are a result of their not obeying God. That’s essentially what Wright is saying when he says we need to be confessional about our duplicity in the 911 attacks.

But Obama is a politician who is running on a platform of unity. Wright’s comments appear divisive when displayed on a national stage so it is important for Obama to stress that Wright’s criticisms in terms of race are a reduction of the true problem, which is divisiveness itself. I respect Obama’s desire to transcend the old language of race division even while I agree with many of Wright’s points about our racist institutional sins.
Black Liberation Theology has its benefits to society, but it is not a unifying force for American politics as a whole.

Yeah, I would like you to conduct the interviews on CNN next time, ok grant? The questions being asked assume that this pastor is a crazy extremist with the terrorists. When the questions are posed like that it doesn’t matter who is being interviewed, the judgment has already been made.

Then again, there’s Christopher Hitchens’ take on it. What poisons everything again? Oh yeah, religion! http://www.slate.com/id/2187277/

The gospel is good news for people from all nations and tribes and people groups. Anytime we make the gospel good news for a particular people group we are rebuilding the dividing wall of hostility Jesus torn down and contradicting the gospel. The Lord is on the side of his people, but his people are those who fear him and put their hope in his unfailing love, regardless of race or nation or people group.

Paul confronted Peter for not having table fellowship with other believers. Rightly so, because Peter was relying not on Christ but on belonging to this particular group of people. He was saying, "I am saved because I am a circumcised Jew," not because I trust in the name of Jesus.

Doesn’t liberation theology contradict the gospel when it pits one group of people against another and says God saves me because I belong to my group and not theirs? This particularizing nature of liberation theology goes against unity and union with Christ. I think Obama was right to call these particular teachings of his former pastor wrong, not as a presidential candidate but also as a Christian.

It’s not liberation theology that polarizes people. liberation theology is a response to a polarized world in which a few have a lot and a lot have very little. jesus had a similar response to his own polarized world, saying blessed are the poor. and if it so happens that the poor are black then jesus is with them, don’t you think? jesus was also on the side of peacemakers, which put him in opposition to warmongers. he blessed the hungry and said its nearly impossible for a rich man to enter god’s kingdom. polarizing words? yes, they got him crucified, as would have been obama if he had defended his pastor.

The Chicago Tribune ran an interesting story concerning Reverend Wright this weekend; it briefly covers what we’ve been talking about here.

No, you’re right, Dan. God does have a special place in his heart for the poor and the oppressed. The world, when it broke, left them especially vulnerable. Sitting in suburbia I feel distant from the poor and oppressed, but God is terribly angry when the strong devour the weak. James tells the rich to weep and howl for the miseries that will be repaid them for withholding the wages of their laborers.

I guess part of the problem is that in my neighborhood there are about an equal number of black and white people. If there’s any tension I don’t see it. There’s an elderly black couple across the street I’m looking forward to getting to know better. We exchange tips on yard care and invite each other over for tea (okay, they invited me for tea; I’d rather drink beer). Jeremiah Wright’s hostility doesn’t make sense in my neighborhood. It seems like there’s hostility wherever people make too much of the color of the skin, where people cirlce the wagons, and require loyalty to their particular people. They say God is on their side, not because by sheer grace, but because of some incidental, distinguishing matter. Wright seems to be perpetuating the problem. It’s hard for me to imagine the great evil of the rich white man today against the black community, but then again, I don’t live in Chicago. That story doesn’t make sense.

Agreed. But I think Rev. Wright’s message was not primarily about race but about injustice. Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think he’d speak out just as strongly on behalf of factory workers in China and Arabs in France.

Rev. Wright mostly does focus on injustices against blacks and there’s good reason for that. As a pastor at Trinity Church, he was speaking to his mostly black church on the south side of Chicago. The hermeneutical problem here is that Wright’s sermon to a particular community was cast into a broad national political context that it was not intended for. Everyone knows the experience of saying something among friends or family that you would never say in a larger context. It’s not that you’re hiding what you think. It’s just that you have that trusting relationship to fall back on, whereas a broad audience demands a more moderate tone.

So if we want to criticize what Wright said, I don’t think we can do so outside of its context. I think Anton’s example is helpful, though, to understand that this particular tension in America is about the place where you live. It is difficult to universally speak about black people as having equal opportunities in America if you know the living situations of urban descendants of slaves. Many Chicago blacks came from extreme economic poverty in Mississippi, Memphis and Alabama one or two generations ago and were intentionally kept from participating in the life of white Chicago (and also kept from the same economic opportunities). They inherited neighborhoods whose tax base disappeared with the fleeing whites. Even now, you can drive many miles on the south side without seeing a neighborhood grocery store. Instead, you see expensive and unhealthy convenience/liquor stores on every corner. Slavery had already broken up families and welfare programs and housing projects helped support the formation of gangs and continued the trend of fatherless families (the Robert Taylor homes that were recently torn down only allowed women and children to live there and were a way for Mayor Daley Sr. to keep blacks out of white neighborhoods). And then of course there are the public schools in economically disadvantaged neighborhoods which suffer not only from the damage already done to African-American families, but also from the lack of financial resources in the neighborhoods (which is where these schools get much of their funding).

Yes, some African-Americans may have made better use of opportunities than others. But we can’t deny the reality that Wright (and many voices of rap and hip hop) are expressing. In Chicago, we have a long way to go before our societal institutions are supportive foundations for justice and (America’s version of) equality.

Finally, I think Wright’s "rich white people" comment did not go far enough. This is not just an issue of individuals who have a lot of money holding positions of power. Blacks and whites are competing with an entire institutional framework which allows corporations to use laws meant to insure property to ex-slaves for their own impersonal and sometimes immoral ends. This is an issue of economic policy—a moral issue. And it reveals a very unChristian view of who we are as people. We should be very suspicious of any "pull yourself up by your own bootstraps" language. It assumes all people need to do is "capitalize" on the opportunities they’ve been given. This is "rich white people" language. It is the language born in industrialized Europe and married with Darwin’s "survival of the fittest" logic. The heritage of this language can be found in the view that human beings could be turned into mere economic resources as slave labor only because they were less "civilized" than Europeans. This is clearly not Christian. It’s not even true to Adam Smith’s original principles for capitalism. Smith counted on the ability of human beings to see other humans in need, to sympathize, and then to develop goods and services to meet those needs. I think this Rev. Wright controversy reveals what Obama calls the true poverty in America, a poverty of empathy. If people who do not live in or near urban ghettoes are not able to at least empathize with the problems these people are faced with, the American people are in deep crisis indeed.

Thanks for those examples of ongoing injustice, Grant. It helps me see where Rev Wright is coming from, and reminds me of the continued need for progress. I admit social justice against blacks is not on my radar screen, given where I live.

Can we recognize the legitimacy of those problems and the need for social justice, and still say that Rev. Wright is not pursuing the right path? Even with greater empathy I can’t see how his message is helpful.

First, from a Christian perspective, his church requires commitment to Christ and to black culture. Isn’t this basically what some Jewish Christians erroneously did in the early church? They were proud of their Jewish heritage, and wanted Christians to be loyal to Christ and to their culture. The early church rightly said this additional requirement wrongly divided the body of Christ. It is enough if someone is Christian without also requiring them to be Jewish.

Second, from a political perspective, Rev Wright draws excessive attention to race, which undermines his call for social justice. Which is it: just vs. unjust or black vs. white? MLK wanted people to be judged not on the color of their skin but the content of their character. It was character he stressed, even though racism was far more rampant in his day. It is one thing to be proud of the color of your skin and another thing to be proud in the kind of way that perpetuates an "us vs. them" attitude. Rev Wright’s rhetoric does not foster a culture of empathy, but tends to harden people into their people groups. Obama recognizes his pastor’s comments aren’t helpful, aren’t part of the solution, and I don’t think it’s just political posturing. Do you disagree?

I’ve been thinking about your post for the last week, anton, and I think it should be said that Wright and many African-Americans are not willing to give up all this "race talk" because it is part of their history. It is, unfortunately, an identifying characteristic. We cannot tell Jews to just forget about the Holocaust and what was done to them, to quit talking about "anti-semitism". That is their history, their narrative which informs who they are and who they are trying to become.

It is much easier for a white person whose grandparents or great-grandparents chose to come to the U.S. and who had the help of other wealthier or more established fellow Dutchman or Germans or Irish or whatever, who are not victims of generations of forced family broken-ness to apply a Protestant work ethic to their situation in the U.S. African-Americans did not come here with the same set of opportunities, with the same situation.

I don’t believe race is the sole reason for the problems of the urban ghetto, but for those who Rev. Wright spoke to at Trinity Church, it is a palpable enemy. Wright’s task as a pastor was to help support and train leaders in his church to work in the community to reverse generations of wrongs. It makes sense that he would remind people of the wrongs committed in the past and in the present, racist acts, so that people are aware of what they are battling against. As recent as the New Orleans disaster, we are reminded of the poverty besetting former slaves in America. As long as the consequences of racism are still visible in the urban ghettos of this nation, racism is worth talking about, is worth naming as an evil.