Obama's Loose Cannon Pastor

03/16/2008

By John Bloom

It got so bad on Friday that Barack Obama felt compelled to go to the blogosphere and denounce some of the anti-American statements made in the past by his pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which were being widely circulated on YouTube and the news networks. Have we entered an era where you’re held responsible for everything your pastor says? If so, my pastor is Ole Anthony, so I’m screwed.

To give the story a little perspective, though, Wright has long been the head of Trinity United Church of Christ, nestled in the mostly black South Side of Chicago and, according to their own press materials, very much “African” in orientation, although “radically welcoming” toward “Euro-Americans”—whatever all that means. (The church has also been radically welcoming toward Louis Farrakhan, which is what got all this scrutiny started in the first place.)

What this seems to mean is that Trinity is a place where pastor Wright, as head of a 6,000-member megachurch that has been called the “flagship” congregation of the Cleveland-based United Church of Christ, feels comfortable enough to toss off the occasional Angry Black Man epithet to the delight of his mostly black listeners. Does he really mean it? Probably. Does he mean it to the point of exciting people to take out their hostilities in destructive ways? Probably not. Does it constitute the main teaching of the church? Again, probably not.

But does it have a place in the man’s theology? Yes. We know that simply from knowing that Wright studied at Union Theological Seminary, where Black Liberation Theology holds enormous sway. A big part of that theology is that repressed blacks are “prophets” in the tradition of Frederick Douglass, speaking hard words to the hard-hearted, afflicting the comfortable. In theory, at least, this is exactly what a preacher is supposed to do. In practice, this is what the United Church of Christ has been forced to do, since the denomination itself has always represented outcasts and immigrants.

The whole United Church of Christ denomination has only 1.4 million members, and many people have assumed because of this controversy that it’s either a) mostly black, or b) narrow-mindedly fundamentalist in the manner of its namesake, the unadorned music-less churches of the Deep South. Both assumptions are wrong. The United Church of Christ is perhaps the most authentically American of all denominations, gathering together the old Congregationalists going back to Puritan times, the German Reformed Church of the First Awakening, the German Evangelical Church of the Second Awakening, the fiercely independent “Christian” churches of the American frontier which were the first to accept both black and female leadership, plus all the most radical Protestant denominations of the Hungarians, the Armenians and, most recently, the Japanese, especially those churches that flourished in the Japanese internment camps of World War II.

That all of these denominations were successfully merged in 1957 into the United Church of Christ means that this is the only church that can claim both Jonathan Edwards and Reinhold Niebuhr. And any church with a door that wide can probably accommodate Jeremiah Wright, even at his most loose-tongued moments. What should be emphasized here is that Obama was allowed to formally challenge the man who married him, a man who has been his friend for most of his life, without any break in fellowship (we hope!). Could a Catholic as easily denounce the teaching of the Pope, or his cardinal? Would we even ask him to? Could a Mormon as easily denounce the Latter Day Saints president, to whom he’s sworn allegiance?

So, as far as it goes between Wright and Obama, it played out exactly as it should have played out. Wright made some off-center remarks that, by the way, had nothing to do with the gospel, and Obama called him on the carpet for them. Would Obama have done that if he weren’t running for president? Of course not. Normally we simply cough and move on when our pastor starts having senior moments. Fortunately for Obama, Wright is retiring this year. It’s like one of those family crises when you have to take away Grandpa’s driver’s license.

What was decidedly not needed was the defensive, borderline angry news release sent out from denomination headquarters trying to do damage control. If Christ is the head of the church, as the denomination claims in its literature, then I don’t think he authorized any self-justifying news releases. There has also been an effort, especially among blogospherians, to defend Jeremiah Wright on prophetic grounds. Their argument would go like this: Okay, he’s way off base on some of his facts and on the implications of what he’s claiming, but the reason he’s being attacked is that he’s speaking hard words to the white man. The gist of what he’s saying, if it’s not picked apart like a lawyer, is still correct.

Okay, I’ll take that on, with those assumptions. In order to be a political prophet, as Wright seems to think he is, you need a nation to prophesy for and about. His nation is the United States. On the most literal level, if he speaks falsehoods about the United States, he would be worthy of the death penalty, as a false prophet. Did he say anything demonstrably, literally false? Actually, in re-reading the remarks, probably not. I’ve read similar remarks in The Nation, including the idea that American foreign policy brought on the events of 9/11. For that matter, if you want to get picky about it, the specific actions of the United States that led to 9/11 were first outlined by Michael Scheuer, who ran the Al Qaeda desk at the CIA. No one has said Scheuer, who tried for ten years to kill Osama Bin Laden, wasn’t a patriot. So did Jeremiah Wright lie about anything? I don’t think so. And I’m not even going to address those bloggers who say the reason we don’t understand Wright is that white people can’t understand black preaching—that’s just insane.

But there’s a more fundamental way that Wright is wrong. The United States is not Israel. In the spiritual sense, modern-day Israel is not Israel, either. We’re about 150 years past the time when politicians or preachers could say that the U.S. is the New Israel and claim Godly sanction for either its progress or its sinfulness. Prophecy has gone global. If Wright is going to speak like his namesake, the only Israel he can speak to is the New Israel of the faithful. And in that context, speaking hard words of prophecy to a comfortable but sinful nation means not seeing black skin at all. The hard words would be to say that Barack Obama is neither black nor white—in fact, as a factual matter, he’s half black, half white—and that the Christian is neither black nor white, and that the oppression that Christ hated was not the oppression of the white against the black but the oppression of all men toward all others, the ineradicable hatred in our hearts for those who need our help. That’s what He comes to change. That’s the only kind of politics we should be getting behind.

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