Can that conversation on race, um....wait?

The either/or is, ultimately, what protects us from ourselves. It is the ethical, we say, and it is on our side; so we bear no responsibility when things go wrong. Individuals who are hurt, we say, are caught on the wrong side of the either/or; and that's never our fault. Not 45 years ago, what Dr. King described was the norm in America, but the "either/or" of our public ethics said it was okay, or it was human nature, or it would change, but until it did, it was unethical to ask for something that sounded too much like a "both/and," which is always the only alternative we see to the either/or. The either/or cuts the both/and, as we all know, and leaves us with no choice but to wait:

For years now I have heard the word "wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This "Wait" has almost always meant "Never." We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that "justice too long delayed is justice denied."

We have waited for more that 340 years for our constitutional and Godgiven rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, "Wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking, "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored" when your first name becomes "Nigger," your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when your are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness" then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience.

But now the either/or has ended all of that, and either we are a racist country, or we are not; and we all agree, we are not:

MR. RUSSERT: When you announced your candidacy back in February of '07 in Springfield...

SEN. OBAMA: Mm-hmm.

MR. RUSSERT: ...the same place Abraham Lincoln announced his candidacy--and we're showing it there on the screen--Reverend Wright was going to give the invocation, he was disinvited. He told The New York Times that you said to him, "You get kind of rough in the sermons, so we decided it's best for you not to be out there in public." And you cited a Rolling Stone interview...

SEN. OBAMA: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: ...where he said that one of the essential facts about the U.S. is, "We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God." Now, that is so contrary to a speech I heard you gave yesterday about one nation, one people.

MR. RUSSERT: So you knew in '07...

SEN. OBAMA: Right.

MR. RUSSERT: ..."This guy's a problem. I have to keep him out of the spotlight involving my campaign."

SEN. OBAMA: Right. Sure.

MR. RUSSERT: Why didn't you just say then, "You know, Reverend, we're going on different paths because this country does not believe in white supremacy and black inferiority."

At least, we didn't until we discovered the white rural voters of Pennsylvania, a "swing" bloc of voters who apparently didn't exist in any other state in the Union, but who now hold the key to the Democratic primary in their racist...no, wait, they aren't racist, though the pundits kept telling us they won't vote for a black man...well, now I'm confused. I thought we didn't believe in white supremacy and black inferiority. Maybe we don't believe in it, but we practice it anyway.

But racism is an either/or, a matter of ethics, a clear bright line. And as long as we declare that line clear and bright and deny any of us are on the wrong side of it, there is no both/and being practiced here, and we can cheer when Samuel L. Jackson shows up at the end of "Iron Man" in the character of Nick Fury, a white man in the comic books, a black man on screen. Because we don't believe in white suprmacy and black inferiority. Even though blacks still underperform in public schools due to poor funding of those schools. Even though blacks represent a majority of the prison population, all out of proportion to their numbers in the community; even though blacks are are more likely to get the death penalty for killing a white, than whites are for killing blacks. Even though the Dallas County D.A. now admits the prosecutions of blacks in Dallas County in the '70's and 80's was racially biased. We don't believe in white supremacy and black inferiority.

We just continue to practice it. But the either/or says our hands are clean, so we reap the benefits of the both/and. We get to eat our cake and have it, too. No wonder Tim Russert is so concerned about the opinions of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Rev. Wright wants to take us beyond the either/or to another place entirely.

Funny; Martin Luther King wanted to do the same thing, 45 years ago:

I must honestly reiterate that I have been disappointed with the church. I do not say this as one of those negative critics who can always find something wrong with the church. I say this as a minister of the gospel, who loves the church; who was nurtured in its bosom; who has been sustained by its spiritual blessings and who will remain true to it as long as the cord of life shall lengthen.

When I was suddenly catapulted into the leadership of the bus protest in Montgomery, Alabama, a few years ago, I felt we would be supported by the white church. I felt that the ministers, priests, and rabbis of the South would be among our strongest allies. Instead, some have been outright opponents, refusing to understand the freedom movement and misrepresenting its leaders; all too many others have been more cautious than courageous and have remained silent behind the anesthetizing security of stained-glass windows.

In spite of my shattered dreams, I came to Birmingham with the hope that the white religious leadership of this community would see the justice of our cause and, with deep moral concern, would serve as the channel through which our just grievances could reach the power structure. I had hoped that each of you would understand. But again I have been disappointed.

I have heard numerous southern religious leaders admonish their worshipers to comply with a desegregation decision because it is the law, but I have longed to hear white ministers declare: "Follow this decree because integration is morally right and because the Negro is your brother." In the midst of blatant injustices inflicted upon the Negro, I have watched white churchmen stand on the sideline and mouth pious irrelevancies and sanctimonious trivialities. In the midst of a mighty struggle to rid our nation of racial and economic injustice, I have heard many ministers say: "Those are social issues, with which the gospel has no real concern." And I have watched many churches commit themselves to a completely otherworldly religion which makes a strange, un-Biblical distinction between body and soul, between the sacred and the secular.

I have traveled the length and breadth of Alabama, Mississippi, and all the other southern states. On sweltering summer days and crisp autumn mornings I have looked at the South's beautiful churches with their lofty spires pointing heavenward. I have beheld the impressive outlines of her massive religious-education buildings. Over and over I have found myself asking: "What kind of people worship here? Who is their God? Where were their voices when the lips for Governor Barnett dripped with words of interposition and nullification? Where were they when Governor Wallace gave a clarion call defiance and hatred? Where were their voices of support when bruised and weary Negro men and women decided to rise from the dark dungeons of complacency to the bright hills of creative protest?"

Yes, these questions are still in my mind. In deep disappointment I have wept over the laxity of the church. But be assured that my tears have been tears of love. Yes, I love the church. How could I do otherwise? I am in the rather unique position of being the son, the grandson, and the great-grandson of preachers. Yes, I see the church as the body of Christ. But, oh! How we have blemished and scarred that body through social neglect and through fear of being nonconformists.

There was a time when the church was very powerful -- in the time when the early Christians rejoiced at being deemed worthy to suffer for what they believed. In those days the church was not merely a thermometer that recorded the ideas and principles of popular opinion; it was a thermostat that transformed the mores of society. Whenever the early Christians entered a town, the people in power became disturbed and immediately sought to convict the Christians for being "disturbers of the peace" and "outside agitators." But the Christians pressed on, in the conviction that they were "a colony of heaven," called to obey Gad rather than man. Small in number, they were big in commitment. They were too God-intoxicated to be "astronomically intimidated." By their effort and example they brought an end to such ancient evils as infanticide and gladiatorial contests.

Things are different now. So often the contemporary church is a weak, ineffectual voice with an uncertain sound. So often it is an archdefender of the status quo. Far from being disturbed by the presence of the church, the power structure of the average community is consoled by the church's silent -- and often even vocal -- sanction of things as they are. But the judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century. Every day I meet young people whose disappointment with the church has turned into outright disgust.

Left there, you might think Dr. King was simply hate-mongering. You might criticize what he had to say, and even denigrate his use of tactics of civil disobedience, of actually breaking the law and conspiring with others to break the law (something Rev. Wright has not yet been even accused of). Which would explain why this letter is titled "From Birmingham Jail." But you would also leave out all the scholarly references Dr. King makes, makes while in jail, to Reinhold Niebuhr and Thomas Aquinas, Martin Buber and St. Augustine, Paul Tillich and St. Paul. Like Rev. Wright, Dr. King grounded his arguments in authority, both scriptural and secular, theological and philosophical. Rev. Wright mentioned the provenance of the AIDS virus in the context of a book on the subject; he mentioned the responsibility for 9/11 by quoting a former US ambassador. But take all that away, and you would have Dr. King saying something very different. Deny Dr. King the opportunity to explain himself, or reduce that explanation to soundbites, you might even think he was dangerous. As, indeed, many people did.

I do not mean to glibly compare Dr. King and the Rev. Wright; but as a nation, we've been down this road once or twice before. By the way, we knew King was a "Commie" in that picture, because it showed white people sitting next to black people.

Certain ideas, you see, are not acceptable until they are...acceptable. And that this the either/or at work again. Thomas Kuhn describes its function in science as the paradigm, which satisfies all questions with acceptable answers, until the questions shift significantly enough that the paradigm no longer holds, and a new one must take its place. Thus the Newtonian universe is not displaced by the Einsteinian, but still it is changed; and the relative universe remains, but gives ground to the quantum universe. And so on, and so on. And in the middle of these transitions, we are caught by those who prefer to control the discussion, rather than explore alternatives that might provide better answers. And we certainly shoot the messenger:

Here was a distinguished man with an exceptionally great career watching his whole life being reduced to a few sound bites created by some political trash. He finally had enough. He was interviewed by Bill Moyers, and he made two great speeches, one at the National Press Club and one at the NAACP national convention. Now let's look at the media trick involved in this.

With the exception of public radio and television, America's media are all private, for-profit corporations. There is no democracy in media world. Nobody on the outside – not the readers or viewers – has any say at all in what the corporate media decide to cover and decide to ignore. Ordinarily, NAACP keynote speakers are not given much coverage. People speak at the National Press Club all the time and get ignored or have just a snippet broadcast. Both of Wright's speeches were broadcast in full, and cable-TV pundits pontificated for almost a solid week about him.

"Why did he choose to go public now? Why seek out all of this publicity?" the pundits cried. Well, the answer is, he didn't. He agreed to one interview, and he agreed to make two speeches. The corporate media decided to shine the spotlight on him. They could have ignored him. They didn't. Instead, they gave him exceptional coverage and spent literally hours of airtime exposing their ignorance and stupidity by talking about him.

Why is the media so focussed on Rev. Wright? Because it hurts Obama? Or because it hurts the ideas he espouses? Or because the conventional wisdom resents a new either/or, which may actually be neither either/or nor both/and, but something transcendent. And what would that look like?

Johannes de Silentio imagines it as the voice that calls Abraham to take Isaac to Moriah. But what he imagines he can only understand as a teleological suspension of the ethical, and it isn't that. The critics of Rev. Wright imagine that is what he is proposing, too; because that is what they would propose, a new end which would justify the means they use to get there. That is the way of the children of this world, and they want you to believe that they alone can welcome you into the eternal homes. So the attacks begin, persist, continue unabated:

As for the Rev. Wright's views, they are not that radical taken in context. The attack on the World Trade Center was a direct result of our policies in the Middle East. We do have blood on our hands. Some years ago, I corresponded with a respectable doctor who was convinced the AIDS virus had been created in a laboratory. Don't be like some spoiled Mafia brat who wants to enjoy the fruits of crime while pretending not to know how it was acquired. And know that being "uppity" is the most American of all traits.

There is little Jesus says in the gospels that isn't a direct challenge to the status quo of most church goers in America, and nothing that he said which isn't grounded in the Hebrew scriptures.yet we never hear it that way. There was nothing Rev. Wright is reported to have said which he wasn't quoting from some other source, and yet the first way of dismissing his message is consider him the source alone of those questions and comments. "Is he right?" is a less relevant question than: "Shouldn't we think about that?" But thinking about almost anything that challenges the status quo is almost anathema to church goers, as Chris Hedges points out in his new book:

The liberal church is a largely vapid and irrelevant force...[that]...may not support the violent projects of apocalyptic killing championed by the atheists such as [Sam] Harris or [Christopher] Hitchens...but it also does not understand how the world works or the seduction of evil. The liberal church is a largely middle-class, bourgeois phenomenon, filled with many people who have profited from industrialization, the American Empire, and global capitalism. They often seem to think that if 'we' can be nice and inclusive, everything will work out.

And why is this?

What grips the heart most powerfully is not the peaceful possession of a precious object but the imperfectly satisfied desire to posses it and the constant fear of losing it.

It is, in other words, as American as apple pie. The question is: can we be Christian, and still be Americans? Aye, there's the rub; because our "precious object" is not God, and it is not other people. It is what we own and what we can hang on to. So when whites loot a flooded store in New Orleans for food, having been abandoned by their useless governments, they are feeding their families; when blacks do it, they are looting. But we don't believe in white supremacy and black inferiority, oh no, not us. We ignore the fact that we live in Omelas; we resent the person who shows us the child in the basement, and decry him as the heretic. We don't even want anyone to ask for a second opinion: as

So where do we go from here?

What we want is to be free from the burdens of history. We want to believe that if enough of the right people agree, then as a nation we no longer belief in white supremacy and black inferiority, even though that is the lesson written in blood and memory in this land for almost 400 years. But 45 years and a couple of laws and a national holiday later, we are free to act like that history never happened. The "sundown towns" never happened; the restrictive covenants on land never blocked certain people from purchasing property; the conditions Dr. King described in 1963, have all been swept away. Haven't they?

The conditions, yes; the consequences, no. Just look at New Orleans today. What other major city in the US would still be in such shambles? Where is our national sense of shame, our resolve to help our neighbors? Where is the proof that we don't believe in white supremacy and black inferiority? How can you have one without the other, and it is abundantly clear to we have, at least, the "other."

Rev. Wright upsets that vision, too; he presents something that cleaves the both/and of "Can't we all just get along?" It is something that could be simply a new either/or (merely continuing the cycle of the dialectic), or it could be, like Dr. King's offer, something completely different, something outside the theme and variations of "both/and" and "either/or." And while the pundits would like to treat the Rev. Wright as the blush on the cheek of a dying age, he is actually the present as it is, rather than the present Barack Obama would like us to simply believe in:

Anyone who does the math knows that America is on track to become a white-minority nation in three to four decades. Yet if there’s any coherent message to be gleaned from the hypocrisy whipped up by Hurricane Jeremiah, it’s that this nation’s perennially promised candid conversation on race has yet to begin.

What do we do now? Maybe we should stop waiting for salvation to come to us; maybe we should start moving toward salvation. Seems to me that's the kerygma of the gospels.

But of course, I could be wrong.

Hallelujah! He is Risen, Indeed!

Like many good things, this comes from Wounded Bird. I am taking it out of the context of the problems of the Anglican Communion because it is such a true and good thing:

Communion is never created and developed by the letter. The true communion is nurtured by the Spirit. The true communion is life. The paschal mystery that we live in this liturgical season is an unmistakable demonstration of what we need to re-affirm. Faith in the Risen Christ does not presuppose text, but rather an open heart and a humble faith. It was the event of the Resurrection and the affective perception of it that generated a Community, a Communion.

Brazilian Bishops respond to the St Andrews's Draft of the Covenant

I post this, not to emphasize the Christian confession and so set boundaries around my audience, but to emphasize the fundamental importance of human experience, especially the human experience that arises from humility and an open heart. That will allow us to discard some of those boundaries we all set up in order to make ourselves feel safer.

Besides, I just like the way they put it.

The Sin of Jeremiah Wright

"The sin, the sin, eating in..." A snatch of poetry suddenly bubbling up from memory; but Google doesn't recognize it, so maybe I remembered wrong...

Anyway, I have finally decoded the sin of Jeremiah Wright, the thing that made him so wrong, so Not Ready for Prime Time TeeVee. He forgot the cardinal rule of Media Figures (not to be confused with Public Figures, which he has been for decades now): Never Forget You Are On TeeVee. And the corollary to that rule, the one that makes this cardinal rule inviolable: TeeVee is the only Reality.

It's been this way for so long now we've stopped thinking about it. Harlan Ellison told the story in one of his collections of stories about Dan Blocker, the actor who played "Hoss" on "Bonanza," back when that show was on the air and as important to people as "The Sopranos" or "Battlestar Galactica" are now (yes, Gen X'ers and all you post Baby Boomers, hard as it is to believe, someday people will not recall your favorite TeeVee shows with any more importance than you have forgotten "Gunsmoke" and "The Rifleman" and "Have Gun, Will Travel," a particular favorite of my grandfather's and mine, when he was alive and I was wee. We also loved "professional wrestling," but that's another confession entirely. We dearly enjoyed comedy.)

Back to Dan Blocker: Ellison was with Mr. Blocker one day when an elderly woman approached him and reproached him for the condition of the Ponderosa, for the way Ben Cartwright (Lorne Greene, for those of you too young to know) was running the house, and the food "Hop Sing" (their Chinese cook) served. Mr. Blocker tried in vain to dissuade this ardent fan; he could not convince her he was an actor, that he had no familial relationship to Mr. Greene, nor was he really "Hoss Cartwright." That TeeVee show was her reality, and she wouldn't be shifted from it.

And she was too old to have grown up watching TeeVee.

When Rev. Wright preached his "controversial" sermons, he wasn't preaching to America, or anyone beyond his congregation, and they seemed to not only agree with his sentiments, but to understand just what he meant. I have learned from my brief time preaching (too brief, but that's yet another story) that sermons are aimed at a particular audience, at a congregation you come to know, and one that comes to know you. Sermons develop out of a conversation with that congregation, they develop their own vocabulary. The sermons of Martin Luther King we remember were delivered to an audience he knew was not his congregation. Whenever I give a sermon to a strange group, one, that is, strange and new to me, it's never the same sermon or experience, as a sermon I might give to a congregation I have pastored for many years. The differences are subtle but important, and the main one is this: I know who is listening to me when I preach to "my" congregation. Put that sermon on tape and send it out for the world to see, and I don't know who is listening to me, or how they will take what I say.

The other main criticism against Rev. Wright, the one that has achieved the imprimatur of "conventional wisdom," (and my thanks to Grandmere Mimi for the link) is that Rev. Wright did alright in his speech to the National Press Club, but it was in the Q & A afterwards where he "failed." Note that the criticism of that portion of his presentation is all based, again, on it being on TeeVee.

TeeVee is not reality, it is a camera: it is a small, narrow aperture, a tiny particular eye through which many people at once can see: and because of its narrowness and particularity, it presents an imitation of intimacy. It appears that the speaker before us is speaking to us, even though he can't possibly be aware who is watching him. It's a one-way conversation, which our celebrities and politicians are trained in using. They are experts at the mimicry of intimacy, when the intimacy is sometime not even with a questioner (who may be in a studio) but only with an instrument, a device, a lens and a box held on an unspeaking person's shoulder. We've all learned this, by now. Watch old footage of "man on the street" interviews, and people seem awkward and stiff with this glass eye sucking at their attention. They try to talk to the person holding the camera, not the persons watching the image the camera captures. Today everyone knows how to "act" on TeeVee.

I cannot describe to you how odd it is to first stand in front of a group and give a sermon. In many churches, no one responds, nor do they expect to. You can feel like you are casting pebbles into a very deep well, and not even hearing the splash, sometimes, until weeks later. Sometimes you hear nothing at all, ever. I imagine speaking to a TeeVee camera is like that: it's a one way conversation that we, the audience, imagine is two-way. Rev. Wright, of course, is used to a congregation that does respond; that is evident from the briefest clips of videotape. And even reading the transcript, you can see the audience responding at the National Press Club. But they respond with laughter, and applause, and even questions from the floor, which he tries to answer but which get cut off. Rev. Wright tries to establish the intimacy with the interrogators, not with the moderator: he tries to take the audience in the room seriously and personally, when the TeeVee Audience imagines it is the audience he should be playing to. Thanks to the narrow vision of the camera, we don't see that audience; and since we are not there, their presence is not present to you and me. Only the man before the camera is real, and since he does not pretend to be real to you and me, we take umbrage with his responses aimed at an audience we can't see.

That audience laughs, applauds, responds to what the speaker says, and the speaker responds to them. But that audience doesn't go on the evening news and pundit shows. The audience that does that, even if they were in the room, understand the rules of this "cool" medium, and they freeze out the man used to the "hot" medium of personal responses from an audience he can see. Those responses are even removed on the sound bites and clips shown on the evening news: the frame is narrowed further, the focus tightened until only the central figure can be seen, and his movements and expressions, isolated from context and meaning, become bizarre and weird and the unreality of TeeVee becomes the only reality we can see.

Which is still tangential, but then again not quite, to the either/or we are still pursuing.

The Rich Are Different

A palate cleanser between rants about the treatment of Jeremiah Wright (I take attacks on pastors, especially UCC pastors, rather personally, it seems) and getting back to the question of the "either/or" (which will return us to Jeremiah Wright, but not in the ways we've become accustomed to).

In America, the passion for material well-being is not always exclusive, but it is general. While not everyone experiences it in the same way, all feel it. Minds are universally preoccupied with meeting the body's every need and attending to life's little comforts.

Something similar is becoming more and more apparent in Europe.

...

When wealth is settled on certain families by inheritance, we find large numbers of men who enjoy material well-being, but not as an exclusive taste.

What grips the heart most powerfully is not the peaceful possession of a precious object but the imperfectly satisfied desire to posses it and the constant fear of losing it.

In aristocratic societies, the rich, never having known any condition different from their own, have no fear of changing it. They can scarcely imagine anything else. For them, therefore, material well-being is not the purpose of life. It is a way of living. They look upon it, in a sense, as synonymous with existence and enjoy it without thinking about it.

Since the natural and instinctive taste for well-being that everyone shares is thus satisfied without difficulty and without fear, the souls of men [sic] turn elsewhere and harness themselves to some grander, more difficult undertaking which animates and engages them.

...

In nations where the aristocracy dominates society and keeps it immobile, the people eventually become accustomed to poverty as the rich do to opulence. The latter do not concern themselves with material well-being because they possess it without effort, the former do no think about it because they have no hope of acquiring it and do not know it well enough to desire it.

In those kinds of society, the poor man's imagination is directed toward the other world. Though gripped by the miseries of real life, it escapes their hold and seeks it satisfactions elsewhere.

By contrast, when ranks lose their distinctions and privileges are destroyed, when patrimonies are divided and entitlement and liberty spread, the longing to acquire well-being enters the imagination of the poor man, and the fear of losing it enters that of the rich. A host of modest fortunes are amassed. Those who possess such fortunes enjoy sufficient material gratifications to conceive a taste for them and not enough to be content with them.

Hence, they are forever seeking to pursue or hold onto pleasures that are as precious as they are incomplete and fleeting.

In casting about for a passion that might be natural in men spurred on as well as constrained by the obscurity of their origins and the modesty of their fortunes, I find none that suits them better than the taste for well-being. The passion for material well-being is essentially a middle class passion. It grows and spreads with that class; it becomes preponderant when the class does. From there it reaches up into the upper ranks of society and descends among the people.

In America I found no citizen so poor that he did not gaze with hop and longing upon the pleasure of the rich, or that his imagination did not savor in advance goods that fate obstinately refused to grant him.

On the other hand, I never found among wealthy Americans that proud disdain for material well-being that can sometimes be seen even in the most opulent and dissolute of aristocracies.

Most of those wealthy people had been poor. They had felt the spur of need. They had waged a long battle against hostile fortune, and though victory was now theirs, the passions that had accompanied the struggle survived. They remained as though intoxicated amid the petty pleasures they had pursued for forty years.

Not that one does not find, in the United States as elsewhere, a fairly large number of wealthy people who, having inherited their property, find themselves effortlessly in possession of an opulence they did not acquire. Yet even they seem no less attached to the gratifications of material life. Love of well-being has become the national and dominant taste. The mainstream of the human passions runs in this direction and sweeps everything along with it.

--Alexis DeTocqueville

Nobody's Wright, if everybody's wrong

"Young people speakin' their mind/Gettin' so much resistance from behind..."

There. I succumbed to a Wright pun. I'm so done with this topic I never want to hear about it again. Last one; I swear. Really. I can quit anytime I want to. I just don't want to yet.

So I'm looking at this, by Eric Boehlert:

Here's another first: the press's unique push to get a competitive White House hopeful to drop out of the race. It's unprecedented.

And I'm thinking: what about the other "first"? Since when did the media get to decide who a candidate's pastor should be, and what that pastor should say? Because there's really no question the media did a hatchet job on Rev. Wright, chopping up his statements and playing selected bits and pieces of them over and over again, always refusing to respond to the truth and responding, instead, to what they said he said.

Of course, the sinister and unspoken notion here is that pastors tell their members what to think. Interestingly enough, NPR found people in North Carolina who can respect a pastor without agreeing with all of his ideas, a thing apparently unpossible among our pundit class, for whom the thought and the personality are one. Unless, of course, you are Pat Buchanan. But while paid pundits are no reflection on their employer when they make blatantly racist statements (where is the gratitude, Pat?), pastors clearly reflect precisely what their members think, else why go to that church?

Does anybody else see a really demented, self-centered, and consumerist mentality disguised as ecclesiology, in that assumption? Not that there aren't plenty of people who pick the church they attend on precisely that basis, but the irony, again, is that Rev. Wright pastors a UCC church, a congregationalist denomination which places great emphasis on the conscience of the individual, and individual responsibility for one's spiritual life. So while the UCC all but champions attending a congregation where you feel comfortable with what is preached, that freedom of conscience is also precisely why Obama could be a member of that church, without agreeing with everything the Pastor said.

Too bad Obama didn't want to explain that. Or maybe he was just more worried about the kind of conversation res ipsa loquitur imagines. Maybe he decided the medium is the message, not the message itself, and he'd rather play their game than be a different kind of politician. Did Obama have a choice? Yes, he did. He could have done something besides throw Wright "under the bus." This wasn't Obama's "Sister Souljah" moment. It was closer to Clinton's Lani Guinier moment. Closer than that, actually, considering Obama famously said "I could no more disown this man than I could disown the black community."

So now who has he disowned?

Political expediency is all; even for a non-political politician.

This New York Times article buttresses my point, that this wasn't about Wright's jealousy of Obama. When Obama made his famous "race speech":

Mr. Wright was on a long-planned cruise... he returned to find his name a term of opprobrium all across the nation. Mr. Obama and his advisers decline to say if they attempted a reconciliation. Mr. Obama himself has acknowledged talking with Mr. Wright after the Philadelphia speech, and people close to both men tried to caution the pastor to remain silent.

Mr. Wright, however, wanted only to explain himself.

And that went well, so long as he was "scholarly" and quiet. (Or so the Times article says; many of us, however, recall the screams of outrage when a 30 second excerpt from the Moyers' interview was available before that interview aired. No matter what Rev. Wright said, the pundits were determined to hew to their narrative that he was dangerous for Obama.) But it was his answers to questions at the National Press Club that apparently upset everyone. Which brings this back to an earlier topic, about a generational divide. All of the "serious" pundits were quite sure Rev. Wright was terribly "unserious." But all those pundits are, or at least appear to be, my age or older. It was the unserious Jon Stewart who admired Wright's attitude; and it was also Jon Stewart who pointed out this issue is not only racial, it's also about the media's obsession:



And that obsession has made the narrative they've crafted inconsistent in ways that can only be understood as matters of style, and race:



This may be, as the New York Times article paints it, merely Obama's Oedipal moment, his need to kill his "father" in order to reject the father's influence and be his own man. It may have started that way (as the article points out, this didn't begin with YouTube), but it's gone far beyond that now, and the news coverage that led to that race speech was not concerned with Obama's psychic well-being. It has become simply another political weapon wielded by people with their own agendas and inconsistencies. As Stephen Colbert pointed out last night, Catholics like Sean Hannity and Bill O'Reilly understand that the church you attend is a matter of choice, and when you attend church, you are agreeing with everything the priest or pastor not only says, but does.

Aren't you?

So let the words of my mouth/and the meditations of our hearts/be acceptable in thy sight/over I

I had decided to post the rest of Rev. Wright's comments, the answers he gave to questions put to him at the National Press Club. The Wounded Bird is right, I do write long, and this has grown longer the more I meditate on it; but I promise to stop after I get this out of my head. I had decided, as I say, to post this, and then I read the NYT lead editorial this morning:

Mr. Wright has not let that happen. In the last few days, in a series of shocking appearances, he embraced the Rev. Louis Farrakhan’s anti-Semitism. He said the government manufactured the AIDS virus to kill blacks. He suggested that America was guilty of “terrorism” and so had brought the 9/11 attacks on itself.

Keep that in mind. It's from the "liberal" New York Times, and honestly, I don't know where to start with it. But read the following comments, and those posted earlier, and tell me where Rev. Wright "embraced the Rev. Louis Farrakhan's anti-Semitism." Tell me where he said the US "manufactured" the AIDS virus. Tell me where how he is wrong about the US being guilty of terrorism. Oh, never mind; you might as well take on the world. Let's get back to what Rev. Wright said, and ignore the ignorance of his critics for a moment.

As I started to say, some of the questions Rev. Wright answered are in a prior post. I want to start with the rest of them, here, edited only slightly, and include some commentary on them as we go along:

MODERATOR: What is your relationship with Louis Farrakhan? Do you agree with and respect his views, including his most racially divisive views?

WRIGHT: As I said on the Bill Moyers’ show, one of our news channels keeps playing a news clip from 20 years ago when Louis said 20 years ago that Zionism, not Judaism, was a gutter religion.

And he was talking about the same thing United Nations resolutions say, the same thing now that President Carter is being vilified for, and Bishop Tutu is being vilified for. And everybody wants to paint me as if I’m anti-Semitic because of what Louis Farrakhan said 20 years ago.

I believe that people of all faiths have to work together in this country if we’re going to build a future for our children, whether those people are — just as Michelle and Barack don’t agree on everything, Raymond (ph) and I don’t agree on everything, Louis and I don’t agree on everything, most of you all don’t agree — you get two people in the same room, you’ve got three opinions.

So what I think about him, as I’ve said on Bill Moyers and it got edited out, how many other African-Americans or European-Americans do you know that can get one million people together on the mall? He is one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century. That’s what I think about him.

I’ve said, as I said on Bill Moyers, when Louis Farrakhan speaks, it’s like E.F. Hutton speaks, all black America listens. Whether they agree with him or not, they listen.

Now, I am not going to put down Louis Farrakhan anymore than Mandela would put down Fidel Castro. Do you remember that Ted Koppel show, where Ted wanted Mandela to put down Castro because Castro was our enemy? And he said, “You don’t tell me who my enemies are. You don’t tell me who my friends are.”

Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains. He did not put me in slavery. And he didn’t make me this color.

I will confess to you, I don't know which part of that I'm supposed to be offended by. It is, as was stated in comments in the post below, a nuanced answer. It is not an embrace of Louis Farrakhan, and in fact it offers a challenge to the commonly accepted (quick: quote precisely what he said and the context in which he said it) "quote" that Louis Farrakhan called Judaism a "gutter religion." Frankly, that may not be any more accurate than Marx calling religion "the opiate of the masses" (he did, but "opiate" has a very different meaning today than it did for Marx in the 19th century; and he made the difference clear in the full quote, which is hardly ever used). As Rev. Wright says, Farrakhan is not Wright's enemy, and he won't let the media make them enemies. Apparently, however, that puts everyone's nose out of joint. "Never share my hearth, never think my thoughts, whoever does such things."

MODERATOR: What is your motivation for characterizing Senator Obama’s response to you as, quote, “what a politician had to say”? What do you mean by that?

WRIGHT: What I mean is what several of my white friends and several of my white, Jewish friends have written me and said to me. They’ve said, “You’re a Christian. You understand forgiveness. We both know that, if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.”

Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever’s doing the polls. Preachers say what they say because they’re pastors. They have a different person to whom they’re accountable.

As I said, whether he gets elected or not, I’m still going to have to be answerable to God November 5th and January 21st. That’s what I mean. I do what pastors do. He does what politicians do.

I am not running for office. I am hoping to be vice president.

And this is an offense against Sen. Obama precisely how? Because we are childish enough to believe politicians don't do anything that is political? Are we really that immature and ignorant? Is it any wonder we are offended, if Rev. Wright points that out to us? Which is back to the role of a pastor, v. the role of a politician; something Rev. Wright, as we will see below, understands better than the politicians. But we would do well to remember we are in the land of either/or: there is politics, and there is that which opposes politics; and the latter must never be permitted entry into the hallowed halls of the true polis: "Never share my hearth, never think my thoughts....."

MODERATOR: In light of your widely quoted comment damning America, do you think you owe the American people an apology? If not, do you think that America is still damned in the eyes of God?

WRIGHT: The governmental leaders, those — as I said to Barack Obama, my member — I am a pastor, he’s a member. I’m not a spiritual mentor, guru. I’m his pastor.

And I said to Barack Obama, last year, “If you get elected, November the 5th, I’m coming after you, because you’ll be representing a government whose policies grind under people.” All right? It’s about policy, not the American people.

And if you saw the Bill Moyers show, I was talking about — although it got edited out — you know, that’s biblical. God doesn’t bless everything. God condemns something — and d-e-m-n, “demn,” is where we get the word “damn.” God damns some practices.

And there is no excuse for the things that the government, not the American people, have done. That doesn’t make me not like America or unpatriotic.

So in Jesus — when Jesus says, “Not only you brood of vipers” — now, he’s playing the dozens, because he’s talking about their mamas. To say “brood” means your mother is an asp, a-s-p. Should we put Jesus out of the congregation?

When Jesus says, “You’ll be brought down to Hell,” that’s not — that’s bombastic, divisive speech. Maybe we ought to take Jesus out of this Christian faith.

Let me interrupt right there. When Falwell and Robertson and Hagee condemn the US and claim natural disasters are the direct evidence of God's wrath; when they speak openly of damnation of this country because of it's culture; that's okay. When a black man does it from a Christian pulpit, however....

No. What I said about and what I think about and what — again, until I can’t — until racism and slavery are confessed and asked for forgiveness — have we asked the Japanese to forgive us? We have never as a country, the policymakers — in fact, Clinton almost got in trouble because he almost apologized at Gorialan (ph). We have never apologized as a country.

Britain has apologized to Africans, but this country’s leaders have refused to apologize. So until that apology comes, I’m not going to keep stepping on your foot and asking you, “Does this hurt? Do you forgive me for stepping on your foot?” if I’m still stepping on your foot.

Understand that? Capiche?

I'm guessing the problem here is that Jesus is black, because white people don't know how to play the dozens. Or because we're all supposed to realize slavery ended in the 19th century, and making Martin Luther King's birthday a holiday proves we're past the scars of the century after that, and civil rights is now the law, so what's the problem here? At least, that's all I can figure. Or maybe Rev. Wright is just not "post-racial" enough. We are "post-racial" now, aren't we? That little mess in New Orleans where we left poor blacks to drown, and called the black victims of that storm "looters," while the whites were "trying to feed their families," that's all behind us now, right? Because we're ready to support a black man for President. Well, most of us, but not white rural voters in Pennsylvania, apparently. But still, we're post-racial, right? And if we aren't, it's Rev. Wright's fault, isn't it?

MODERATOR: Senator Obama has been in your congregation for 20 years, yet you were not invited to his announcement of his presidential candidacy in Illinois. And in the most recent presidential debate in Pennsylvania, he said he had denounced you. Are you disappointed that Senator Obama has chosen to walk away from you?

WRIGHT: Whoever wrote that question doesn’t read or watch the news. He did not denounce me. He distanced himself from some of my remarks, like most of you, never having heard the sermon. All right?

Now, what was the rest of your question? Because I got confused in — the person who wrote it hadn’t –

MODERATOR: Were you disappointed that he distanced himself?

WRIGHT: He didn’t distance himself. He had to distance himself, because he’s a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American. He said I didn’t offer any words of hope. How would he know? He never heard the rest of the sermon. You never heard it.

I offered words of hope. I offered reconciliation. I offered restoration in that sermon, but nobody heard the sermon. They just heard this little sound bite of a sermon.

That was not the whole question. There was something else in the first part of the question that I wanted to address.

Oh, I was not invited because that was a political event. Let me say again: I’m his pastor. As a political event, who started it off? Senator Dick Durbin. I started it off downstairs with him, his wife, and children in prayer. That’s what pastors do.

So I started it off in prayer. When he went out into the public, that wasn’t about prayer. That wasn’t about pastor-member. Pastor- member took place downstairs. What took place upstairs was political.

So that’s how I feel about that. He did, as I’ve said, what politicians do. This is a political event. He wasn’t announcing, “I’m saved, sanctified, and feel the holy ghost.” He was announcing, “I’m running for president of the United States.”

But this is America, and everything is political; or at least, it should be. Don't make journalists and pundits think there are important parts of life that can't be explained in terms of politics and power; because they will just resent that. In fact, isn't there something Jesus said about feeding pearls to swine, and how they will just turn on you?

MODERATOR: You just mentioned that Senator Obama hadn’t heard many of your sermons. Does that mean he’s not much of a churchgoer? Or does he doze off in the pews?

WRIGHT: I just wanted to see — that’s your question. That’s your question. He goes to church about as much as you do. What did your pastor preach on last week? You don’t know? OK.

The dream response of every pastor who has ever stood in a pulpit, and been criticized later for what he or she said; usually by someone who wasn't in church that Sunday. No, it's not a model of Christian charity; but it is satisfying.

MODERATOR: In your sermon, you said the government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. So I ask you: Do you honestly believe your statement and those words?

WRIGHT: Have you read Horowitz’s book, “Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola,” whoever wrote that question? Have you read “Medical Apartheid”? You’ve read it?

(UNKNOWN): Do you honestly believe that (OFF-MIKE)

WRIGHT: Oh, are you — is that one of the reporters?

MODERATOR: No questions -

(CROSSTALK)

WRIGHT: No questions from the floor. I read different things. As I said to my members, if you haven’t read things, then you can’t — based on this Tuskegee experiment and based on what has happened to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing anything.

In fact, in fact, in fact, one of the — one of the responses to what Saddam Hussein had in terms of biological warfare was a non- question, because all we had to do was check the sales records. We sold him those biological weapons that he was using against his own people.

So any time a government can put together biological warfare to kill people, and then get angry when those people use what we sold them, yes, I believe we are capable.

We might also mention here that while we associate the Chinese with opium use in the 19th century, the poppy does not grow in China, but in Afghanistan. And the British controlled Afghanistan, and used the opium addiction against the Chinese. It's called "The Opium Wars." So countries doing such terrible things against people, is not exactly unknown. Consider the effects of depleted uranium in Iraq today; or 100 years from now, John McCain's favorite time-frame. Because 100 years from now, it may still be having an effect on Iraqis; we've used that much of it there. And it's having an effect on American soldiers right now. Does the government seem to care? And is any of that intentional genocide? Or just collateral damage? And the difference to the dead is?

Does anybody really doubt governments are capable of such inhumanity? Does anybody know how many natives lived in this country before Europeans started arriving? Does anybody realize the slave trade was legal, and the number of corpses that arrived on these shores was actually quite high? Is it really such a leap from that, to thinking AIDS was deliberately used against people? Is that possibility really beyond the pale, really simply impossible?

MODERATOR: You have likened Israeli policies to apartheid and its treatment of Palestinians with Native Americans. Can you explain your views on Israel?

WRIGHT: Where did I liken them to that? Whoever wrote the question, tell me where I likened them.

Jimmy Carter called it apartheid. Jeremiah Wright didn’t liken anything to anything. My position on Israel is that Israel has a right to exist, that Israelis have a right to exist, as I said, reconciled one to another.

Have you read the Link? Do you read the Link, Americans for Middle Eastern Understanding, where Palestinians and Israelis need to sit down and talk to each other and work out a solution where their children can grow in a world together, and not be talking about killing each other, that that is not God’s will?

My position is that the Israel and the people of Israel be the people of God who are worrying about reconciliation and who are trying to do what God wants for God’s people, which is reconciliation.

Much too sensible an answer. Easier by far to simply vilify him; better yet, ignore this answer altogether. Everyone else in the media has.

MODERATOR: In your understanding of Christianity, does God love the white racists in the same way he loves the oppressed black American?

WRIGHT: John 3:16, Jesus said it much better than I could ever say it, “for God so loved the world.” World is white, black, Iraqi, Darfurian, Sudanese, Zulu, Coschia (ph). God loves all of God’s children, because all of God’s children are made in God’s image.

Religion question, and one without any conflict. How can the media report on a religion question that doesn't involve conflict? Best to ignore that one, too; especially since it contradicts the "Wright is a hater" meme that some are still trying to stir up (like Gingrich on The Daily Show last night). It also reduces the conflict in the story; and we can't talk about religion without talking about conflict. No conflict, no story; let's find some other answer to report on.

MODERATOR: Can you elaborate on your comparison of the Roman soldiers who killed Jesus to the U.S. Marine Corps? Do you still believe that is an appropriate comparison and why?

WRIGHT: One of the things that will be covered at the symposium over the next two days is biblical history, which many of the working press are unfamiliar with.

The reference is to "some theological conference", as Richard Wolffe put it on Countdown the other night. And never, NEVER, tell reporters there is something they are unfamiliar with! Because obviously, if they are, unless it's a matter of "national security", it's too unimportant for anyone to know anything about. Much easier to call a man a clown (Olbermann, Tuesday night), or a "freak show" (Wolffe, same show) than to pay attention when he's trying to educate you. But I interrupted....

In biblical history, there’s not one word written in the Bible between Genesis and Revelations that was not written under one of six different kinds of oppression, Egyptian oppression, Assyrian oppression, Persian oppression, Greek oppression, Roman oppression, Babylonian oppression.

The Roman oppression is the period in which Jesus is born. And comparing imperialism that was going on in Luke, imperialism was going on when Caesar Augustus sent out a decree that the whole world should be taxed. They weren’t in charge of the world. It sounds like some other governments I know.

That, yes, I can compare that. We have troops stationed all over the world, just like Rome had troops stationed all over the world, because we run the world. That notion of imperialism is not the message of the gospel of the prince of peace, nor of God, who loves the world.

This, by the way, is not exactly a radical view of Biblical history. Indeed, it was the well accepted view until a generation or so ago, when any knowledge of Biblical history became hopelessly passé and unscientific (for what reason I cannot for the life of me imagine, since even educated non-believers should understand the importance of the Hebrew and Christian scriptures in Western culture, and so the history those texts reflect should be equally important. But then, today, how many people have heard of Socrates or Aristotle?). That didn't start with the rise of the "prosperity gospel," either; it has always been a part of Christian teachings, where the church is closely allied with the power structure of the society it is in. Which takes us back to "liberation theology, so let's just call Wright "crazy" and move quickly on.

MODERATOR: Former President Bill Clinton has been widely criticized in this campaign. Many African-Americans think he has said things aimed at defining Senator Obama as the black candidate. What do you think of President Clinton’s comments, particularly those before the South Carolina primary?

WRIGHT: I don’t think anything about them. I came here to talk about prophetic theology of the black church. I’m not talking about candidates or their positions or their feelings or what they have to say to get elected.

Oops! I was told Rev. Wright was injecting himself into this campaign, that like John McCain, the press HAD to talk about Rev. Wright because he declared himself fair game with these press conferences and speeches. Somebody obviously didn't get him the memo!

MODERATOR: Well, OK, we’ll give you a church question. Please explain how the black church and the white church can reconcile.

WRIGHT: Well, there are many white churches and white persons who are members of churches and clergy and denominations who have already taken great steps in terms of reconciliation.

In the underground railroad, it was the white church that played the largest role in getting Africans out of slavery. In setting up almost all 40 of the HBCUs, it was the white church that sent missionaries into the south.

As I mentioned in my presentation, our denomination all by itself set up over 500 of those schools. You know them today as Howard University, Fisk, LeMoyne-Owen, Tougaloo, Dillard University, Howard University.

So they’ve done — Morehouse, Morehouse. Don’t forget Moorhouse, Spelman — that white Christians have been trying for a long time to reconcile, that for other white Christians to understand that we must be reconciled is to understand the injustice that was done to a people, as we raped the continent, brought those people here, built our country, and then defined them as less than human.

And more Christians, more of us working together, not just white Christians, but whites and blacks of every faith, ecumenically working together.

Father Flagger (ph), by the way, he might be one of the one –

(APPLAUSE)

– models out what it means to be reconciled as brothers and sisters in Christ and brothers and sisters made in the image of God.

I should mention he left out Huston-Tillotson College, in Austin, Texas. And there are several hospitals, nursing homes, mental institutions, and orphanages in the St. Louis area and other parts of the midwest, as well as a ministry to the poor in Biloxi, Mississippi, begun by the German Evangelical church, the "other branch" of the United Church of Christ.

MODERATOR: You said there is a lack of understanding by people of other backgrounds of the African-American church. What are some of those misunderstandings? And how would you purport to fix them, particularly when some of your comments are found to be offensive by white churches?

WRIGHT: Carter Godwin Woodson, about 80 years ago, wrote a book entitled “The Miseducation.” I would try to fix it starting at the educational level in the grammar schools, as Dr. Asa Hilliard did in his infusion curriculum, starting at the grammar schools, to tell our children this story and to tell our children the true story.

That’s how I go about fixing it, because until you know the true story, then you’re reacting to my words and not to the truth.

Once again, calling reporters ignorant. If they don't know it, it ain't worth knowin', bub!

MODERATOR: Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man cometh unto the father but through me.” Do you believe this? And do you think Islam is a way to salvation?

WRIGHT: Jesus also said, “Other sheep have I who are not of this fold.”

(APPLAUSE)

MODERATOR: Do you think people of other races would feel welcome at your church?

WRIGHT: Yes. We have members of other races in our church. We have Hispanics. We have Caribbean. We have South Americans. We have whites.

The conference minister — please understand the United Church of Christ is a predominantly white demonstration. Again, some of you do not know United Church of Christ, just found out about liberation theology, just found out about United Church of Christ, the conference minister, Dr. Jane Fisler Hoffman, a white woman, and her husband, not only are members of the congregation, but on her last Sunday before taking the assignment as the interim conference minister of California, Southern California Conference of the United Church of Christ, a white woman stood in our pulpit and said, “I am unashamedly African.”

(APPLAUSE)

Obviously another "wackadoodle." Obviously all those "other races" in the Rev.'s church hate themselves and their "race," because we all agree the Rev. preaches race hatred. How sad for those deluded white folks....

MODERATOR: You first gained media attention, significant media attention for your sermons several weeks ago. Why did you wait so long before giving the public your side of the sound bite story?

WRIGHT: As I said to Bill Moyers — and he also edited this one out — because of my mother’s advice to me. My mother’s advice was being seen all over the corporate media channels, and it’s a paraphrase of the Book of Proverbs, where it is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.

The media was making a fool out of itself, because it knew nothing about our tradition. And so I decided to let them make a fool as long as they wanted to and then take the advice of Paul Laurence Dunbar, “Lies, lies, bless the lord. Don’t you know the days are broad?”

Don’t make me come across this room. I had to come across the room, because they start — understand, when you’re talking about my mama, once again, and talking about my faith tradition, once again, how long do you let somebody talk about your faith tradition before you speak up and say something in defense of — this is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright.

Once again, let me say it again. This is an attack on the black church. And I cannot as a minister of the gospel allow the significant part of our history — most African-Americans and most European-Americans, most Hispanic-Americans, half the names I called in my presentation they’ve never heard of, because they don’t know anything at all about our tradition.

And to lift up those — they would have died in vain had I just kept quiet longer and longer and longer and longer. As I said, this is an attack on the black church. It is not about Obama, McCain, Hillary, Bill, Chelsea. This is about the black church.

This is about Barbara Jordan. This is about Fanny Lou Hamer. This is about my grandmamma.

You'll notice none of those people were mentioned by Juan Williams or Eugene Robinson or Bob Herbert. It's as if Rev. Wright never said these words; all three of them stopped much earlier, and left his words there. Not coincidentally, precisely at the point they were cut off for the sound bite on the evening news. And now that is the critique endlessly repeated by everyone, including Barack Obama. "Fair and balanced:" it's not just for FauxNews anymore.

MODERATOR: Do you think it is God’s will that Senator Obama be president?

WRIGHT: I said I would offer myself for candidacy for vice president. I have not offered myself for candidacy of God. I can’t presume to know what God would want.

In my tradition, however, what everybody has been saying to me as it pertains to the candidacy is what God has for you is for you. If God intends for Mr. Obama to the president, then no white racists, no political pundit, no speech, nothing can get in the way, because God will do what God wants to do.

Which is just crazy talk! Everybody knows God is supposed to do what we say God is gonna do! who's in charge here? Us? Or God?

MODERATOR: OK, we are almost out of time.

.... And we’ve got one more question for you.

(APPLAUSE)

We’re going to end with a joke. Chris Rock joked, “Of course Reverend Wright’s an angry 75-year-old black man. All 75-year-old black men are angry.” Is that funny? Is that true? Is it unfortunate? What do you think?

WRIGHT: I think it’s just like the media. I’m not 75.

(LAUGHTER)

(APPLAUSE)

Yeah, nobody made a soundbite out of that, either. Why am I not surprised?

There is very little in some of this that Walter Brueggeman hasn't said, or wouldn't say. I don't know Dr. Brueggeman's position on AIDS or Louis Farrakhan, but he agrees with Rev. Wright on the oppressions represented in Biblical history, and the very biblical and thoroughly unremarkable principle that "those to whom evil is done do evil in return."

The current spasm of "righteous indignation" concerning Jeremiah Wright, Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, smacks of embarrassing ignorance. Such a critique of Wright is ignorant of black preaching rhetoric and the practice of liberation interpretation. It is also disturbingly ignorant of the prophetic traditions of the Bible that regularly expose the failures of society in savage rhetoric. I am grateful for the ministry of Wright, a colleague of mine in the United Church of Christ, who for a very long time has been a faithful pastor and a daring prophetic figure. It is odd when right-wingers misconstrue this belated Jeremiah as they do the original Jeremiah, who knew about God's passion for truth-telling in risky places.

As we have seen, however, condemnation of the Rev. Wright is not limited to "right wingers." Dr. Brueggeman is Professor Emeritus at Columbia Theological Seminary. He's also written more than a few well-regarded scholarly works on the Hebrew Prophets, including several on Jeremiah. But since he's never been publicly associated with a politician, his views have never disturbed the delicate sensibilities of the pundit class. They are, however, wholly unremarkable within modern theological circles. Oh, they might antagonize John Hagee or Pat Robertson, might be unrecognizable to Joel Osteen or Rick Warren; but they are hardly radical because of that. But the media had to report on Rev. Wright's views, and the media can't do that without a conflict, so the narrative was tacitly agreed upon: Jeremiah Wright is jealous of the attention being given to Barack Obama. Richard Wolffe mentioned it on Countdown two nights ago. Eugene Robinson picked it up yesterday, Keith Olbermann relied on it as gospel last night, and Newt Gingrich passed it on to Jon Stewart as if it were received wisdom later that same evening. Much easier to report on that conflict than to consider precisely, and carefully, what Rev. Wright actually said. But then, as Rev. Wright said: "until you know the true story, then you’re reacting to my words and not to the truth." And clearly no journalist or pundit reporting or opining on this story wants to know the true story, since it's so much easier to react to his words, and not to the truth.

We couldn't fit Rev. Wright into the mold of the kindly black preacher who speaks benignly and perhaps slips some arsenic into the vanilla pudding, at his most challenging; or the preacher who calls for fire and brimstone and repentance, clearly "religious" topics which have nothing whatsover to do with politics (and so are "safe" for public consumption); so the media has put him in the mold of "crazy scary bomb-throwing race-baiting black man," the better to dismiss him. And that's just based on the barest references to his "black liberation theology." I can imagine what they'd have done with Dr. Brueggeman's theology of scarcity. It might have started a new Red Scare.

When we remembered Zion

Well, that was pretty sad:

“I’m outraged by the comments that were made and saddened over the spectacle that we saw yesterday,” Mr. Obama said, speaking to reporters here today. He added, “I find these comments appalling. It contradicts everything that I’m about and who I am.”

I guess he means the dancing for the NAACP. Or maybe he means the comments before the National Press Club. Comments like these:

Maybe now, as an honest dialogue about race in this country begins, a dialogue called for by Senator Obama and a dialogue to begin in the United Church of Christ among 5,700 congregations in just a few weeks, maybe now, as that dialogue begins, the religious tradition that has kept hope alive for people struggling to survive in countless hopeless situation, maybe that religious tradition will be understood, celebrated, and even embraced by a nation that seems not to have noticed why 11 o’clock on Sunday morning has been called the most segregated hour in America.

We have known since 1787 that it is the most segregated hour. Maybe now we can begin to understand why it is the most segregated hour.

And maybe now we can begin to take steps to move the black religious tradition from the status of invisible to the status of invaluable, not just for some black people in this country, but for all the people in this country.

Yeah, didn't get that context from Eugene Robinson or Bob Herbert this morning on the op-ed pages, did you? No mention of the work of the United Church of Christ, of which Rev. Wright is an unashamed member, and which he has referred to frequently over the past few public appearances. No, no, Rev. Wright is a loose cannon, the leader of an independent mega-church that rises and falls on his shouting and damning, a mad cult of personality off on its own personal crusade against white folk, and "good" black folk like Juan Williams and Eugene Robinson and Bob Herbert, and now Barack Obama, want to be sure we understand him just that way. That N***er is crazy!

Feh. Color me disgusted.

Here's what Obama said, too:

But after watching three days of Mr. Wright’s commentary in televised speeches and interviews, Mr. Obama said, “there are no excuses.”

“They offend me, they rightly offend all Americans and they should be denounced,” he said. “That’s what I am doing very clearly and unequivocally here today.”

Again, still not sure exactly what remarks Sen. Obama is referring to. Perhaps that Sunday morning has been the most segregated hour in America since 1787. Perhaps that the UCC is going to engage a dialogue on this issue, one the Senator tried to open a few weeks ago. Perhaps it was the dancing, or maybe it was this:

Now, in the 1960s, the term “liberation theology” began to gain currency with the writings and the teachings of preachers, pastors, priests, and professors from Latin America. Their theology was done from the underside.

Their viewpoint was not from the top down or from a set of teachings which undergirded imperialism. Their viewpoints, rather, were from the bottom up, the thoughts and understandings of God, the faith, religion and the Bible from those whose lives were ground, under, mangled and destroyed by the ruling classes or the oppressors.

Liberation theology started in and started from a different place. It started from the vantage point of the oppressed.

In the late 1960s, when Dr. James Cone’s powerful books burst onto the scene, the term “black liberation theology” began to be used. I do not in any way disagree with Dr. Cone, nor do I in any way diminish the inimitable and incomparable contributions that he has made and that he continues to make to the field of theology. Jim, incidentally, is a personal friend of mine.

I call our faith tradition, however, the prophetic tradition of the black church, because I take its origins back past Jim Cone, past the sermons and songs of Africans in bondage in the transatlantic slave trade. I take it back past the problem of Western ideology and notions of white supremacy.

Was it denouncing white supremacy that upset the Senator? Was it the claim that liberation theology sees the faith tradition from the side of the oppressed, from the kind of people Jesus of Nazareth lived with all his life? I'm asking a serious question here, because those are hard words by the Senator, and as an American who apparently should be offended, I want to know what I'm offended by. Maybe it was this:

The prophetic tradition of the black church has its roots in Isaiah, the 61st chapter, where God says the prophet is to preach the gospel to the poor and to set at liberty those who are held captive. Liberating the captives also liberates who are holding them captive.

It frees the captives and it frees the captors. It frees the oppressed and it frees the oppressors.

The prophetic theology of the black church, during the days of chattel slavery, was a theology of liberation. It was preached to set free those who were held in bondage spiritually, psychologically, and sometimes physically. And it was practiced to set the slaveholders free from the notion that they could define other human beings or confine a soul set free by the power of the gospel.

The prophetic theology of the black church during the days of segregation, Jim Crow, lynching, and the separate-but-equal fantasy was a theology of liberation.

It was preached to set African-Americans free from the notion of second-class citizenship, which was the law of the land. And it was practiced to set free misguided and miseducated Americans from the notion that they were actually superior to other Americans based on the color of their skin.

The prophetic theology of the black church in our day is preached to set African-Americans and all other Americans free from the misconceived notion that different means deficient.

I'm serious; I'm trying to find it. Here, maybe?

Black learning styles are different from European and European- American learning styles. They are not deficient; they are just different.

This principle of “different does not mean deficient” is at the heart of the prophetic theology of the black church. It is a theology of liberation.

That one set off George Will this morning, though it seems unremarkable in this age where we recognize "standardized" tests can be culturally biased, and that culture can certainly influence "learning styles" (a vague term, but clear enough for this discussion, eh?). Well, maybe this was it:

These two foci of liberation and transformation have been at the very core of the United Church of Christ since its predecessor denomination, the Congregational Church of New England, came to the moral defense and paid for the legal defense of the Mende people aboard the slave ship Amistad, since the days when the United Church of Christ fought against slavery, played an active role in the underground railroad, and set up over 500 schools for the Africans who were freed from slavery in 1865.

And these two foci remain at the core of the teachings of the United Church of Christ, as it has fought against apartheid in South Africa and racism in the United States of America ever since the union which formed the United Church of Christ in 1957.

These two foci of liberation and transformation have also been at the very core and the congregation of Trinity United Church of Christ since it was founded in 1961. And these foci have been the bedrock of our preaching and practice for the past 36 years.

There is is again, the "United Church of Christ," which is, need I point out, a predominantly white church, a church with roots as deep in European Protestantism as it is possible for those roots to go? But please don't repeat that, because Eugene Robinson and Juan Williams want to assure us Rev. Wright is on the lunatic fringe, a distaff church lead by a distaff pastor, and representative of no one, certainly not part of a mainstream Christian denomination responsible for many important institutions and acts in American history. No, no, no, no; that man is craaaazy!

Well, this must be the offensive language, then:

The prophetic theology of the black church is a theology of liberation; it is a theology of transformation; and it is ultimately a theology of reconciliation.

The Apostle Paul said, “Be ye reconciled one to another, even as God was in Christ reconciling the world to God’s self.”

God does not desire for us, as children of God, to be at war with each other, to see each other as superior or inferior, to hate each other, abuse each other, misuse each other, define each other, or put each other down.

God wants us reconciled, one to another. And that third principle in the prophetic theology of the black church is also and has always been at the heart of the black church experience in North America.

Maybe not? Sounds like Obama's kind of language, doesn't it? Gotta keep looking:

How we are seeing God, our theology, is not the same. And what we both mean when we say “I am a Christian” is not the same thing. The prophetic theology of the black church has always seen and still sees all of God’s children as sisters and brothers, equals who need reconciliation, who need to be reconciled as equals in order for us to walk together into the future which God has prepared for us.

Reconciliation does not mean that blacks become whites or whites become blacks and Hispanics become Asian or that Asians become Europeans.

Reconciliation means we embrace our individual rich histories, all of them. We retain who we are as persons of different cultures, while acknowledging that those of other cultures are not superior or inferior to us. They are just different from us.

We root out any teaching of superiority, inferiority, hatred, or prejudice.

And we recognize for the first time in modern history in the West that the other who stands before us with a different color of skin, a different texture of hair, different music, different preaching styles, and different dance moves, that other is one of God’s children just as we are, no better, no worse, prone to error and in need of forgiveness, just as we are.

Only then will liberation, transformation, and reconciliation become realities and cease being ever elusive ideals.

Maybe this was it; this is certainly what riled Mr. Herbert and Mr. Robinson and Mr. Williams:

MODERATOR: Some critics have said that your sermons are unpatriotic. How do you feel about America and about being an American?

WRIGHT: I feel that those citizens who say that have never heard my sermons, nor do they know me. They are unfair accusations taken from sound bites and that which is looped over and over again on certain channels.

I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did Cheney serve?

(APPLAUSE)

MODERATOR: Please, I ask you to keep your comments and your applause to a minimum so that we can work in as many questions as possible.

Senator Obama has — shh, please. We’re trying to ask as many questions as possible today, so if you can keep your applause to a minimum.

Senator Obama has tried to explain away some of your most contentious comments and has distanced himself from you. It’s clear that many people in his campaign consider you a detriment. In that context, why are you speaking out now?

WRIGHT: On November the 5th and on January 21st, I’ll still be a pastor. As I said, this is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright. It has nothing to do with Senator Obama. It is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition.

And why am I speaking out now? In our community, we have something called playing the dozens. If you think I’m going to let you talk about my mama and her religious tradition, and my daddy and his religious tradition, and my grandma, you’ve got another think coming.

That must be it. Either it was the dis on Cheney, or it was the desire by Rev. Wright to defend himself against scurrilous, ignorant, and unfounded charges.

Or maybe it's that reference to "playing the dozens." Maybe that's too "street" for Americans like Barack Obama. You think?

Later:

Fair is fair: a transcript of Sen. Obama's remarks reveals that Rev. Wright's comments on Louis Farrakhan, AIDS, and 9/11 are the "objectionable" comments. Feh, still, says I. Daniel Schorr points out we are not yet a post-racial society, and that the past isn't over, it isn't even past. If Daniel Schorr can figure that out, why can't Barack Obama? And the letters to NPR? They blame the media, not Wright or Obama. No word on any planned repentance by the media, though.

Yeah, I just love politics....

Finally: and the cap on the day was hearing Richard Wolffe on Countdown say that Wright is in D.C. at "some theological conference," that last two words pronounced with as much polite disdain as Mr. Wolffe could muster, as if the very idea was either so ludicrous or distasteful his RP British accent couldn't bear to utter it.

I'll retire to Bedlam.....

Either/Or: Why is this man dancing?

I was going to start this on a better note, but then I listened to Juan Williams giving us his expertise on the "black church", and if there was any better evidence that the two parties to this national conversation are talking past each other, that "analysis" is surely it. Just listen to him re-write King's history and theology. The person Williams describes doesn't sound at all like the person who wrote these words from jail attacking the "white church." Nor does Williams include room for the vilification of King that followed his speech on Vietnam, a speech that attacked both war as a tool of statecraft, and economic injustice. Williams fails to note that King's stance was considered so radical that even the Washington Post turned against him, as did many of his supporters who thought the fight for civil rights had nothing to do with war or economic policy. And when King died he was in Memphis to support a garbage worker's strike; very likely that is the straw that broke the camel's back, since civil rights and voting rights had been passed into law years earlier. Williams pointedly draws the distinction between King and Wright by saying that King always "preached the gospel," and neglects the fact that the preaching of that gospel led King to promote economic justice, not just civil rights. To hear Williams tell it, Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated for being too inspirational and bringing too many people together. Just the kind of plaster saint Jeremiah Wright refuses to be.

But it isn't even plaster saints the pundits are looking for. Indeed, I was going to start out saying I think they're actually jealous of Wright, because he refuses to acknowledge the the status quo is "okay," and that politics alone will cure whatever else might ail us. That is certainly not consistent with the stance of a Jerry Falwell or a Pat Robertson, a James Dobson or a John Hagee. As radically right wing as those public preachers might be, they understand one thing that the pundits understand too: the real power is in politics, not the pulpit. Richard Wolffe pointed out on Countdown last night that there is "real tension" between Obama and Wright, tension Wolffe attributed to jealousy on Wright's part. It's a daring leap of psychoanalysis, but a leap of faith TeeVee pundits are quite comfortable with and accustomed to making. After all, everything in politics is about the pursuit of power, and everything that matters in America is political. Right?



Of course, the problem with Wolffe's frame is that it can only consider one motivation for all human actions. Indeed, all the pundits seem perplexed that Wright is not, as Wolffe ends saying, trying to position himself to grab a piece of the power Obama may be doling out in January. He blamed Wright for damaging Wright's causes by not sucking up to Obama now, because patronage is the name of the D.C. game. Dobson and Hagee would never make that mistake, so it's perplexing to see Jeremiah Wright speaking, forcefully, to the NAACP and the National Press Club, to be unapologetic about positions he's held for decades, to continue to insist on speaking truth to power, rather than cultivating a relationship with the powerful. The pundits truly don't understand Wright's attitude. It is a kind of madness to them.

Wright apparently (and it seems in keeping with the Rev.'s character) told Obama that when Obama took political office, Wright would go after him as he does anyone with power and the responsibility to wield it for the poor and the powerless. Contrary to the theological musings of Juan Williams, that is precisely in keeping with both the Gospels and the preaching of the Hebrew prophets. It doesn't, according to the polls and even some politicians, mean much to the people. But it means a great deal to the pundits, because Rev. Wright refuses to apologize or go away. Having been thrust into the spotlight by the media, he refuses to go quietly away. As Rep. Emanuel Cleaver told Melissa Block, the problem isn't Rev. Wright. We may engage in a discussion with people like Rep. David Price (who, ironically, is an Obama supporter) about what it means to engage in a "loving critique" of America, but we can put it all in context and understand the difference, as I said before, between what a pastor says and what a politician says. What the pundits want is to have only one voice heard in the national discourse, and that is the voice that cherishes the power politics represents, and that politicians worship. We have become accustomed to the blurring of those worlds, a blurring that didn't begin with modern TV evangelists, that is indeed as American as violence and cherry pie. So this is not a new situation in America, nor even a new argument.

Indeed, Rep. Cleaver makes an excellent point: Rev. Wright was talking to his church family, not the country. As a pastor, I am always aware of the audience I am speaking to, and tailor my remarks accordingly. So simply taking the sermon out of the worship service is to take it out of context. But that's yet another topic, isn't it?

I do wonder how many people, especially "young" people (which term seems to mean "anyone younger than me," so it's a very flexible one), have a completely different take on Rev. Wright. It seems to me the worst thing he is doing is being a human being, being his own man: unrepentant and unapologetic, because he has nothing to repent for, nothing to apologize for. He is enjoying his time in the spotlight, not because it acrues more power to him (how many pastors are ever the subject of death threats?) but because he is a man of God, a man convinced of the rightness of what he is doing. It certainly left a good impression on Jon Stewart:



Muy picante, indeed. How much of that did you hear about from Juan Williams? How much of that critique of government policy did you hear on Countdown? As Stewart says: "If I had a rabbi who brought that much game...." The contrast with Obama in that segment presents a man who is substantive and thoughtful, but who is also, well....dull. Perhaps that's a lesson for Barack Obama, and for the rest of us. Perhaps a little confidence and a little personality is not such a bad thing, either. Perhaps a little more reverence for what matters, and a little less for the political system which thinks it matters, wouldn't be a bad thing. Perhaps we should consider what it is that makes this man so confident he would dance for the NAACP:



Doesn't that man know he's an object of derision? Doesn't he know he's hurting the politics of this country?

P.S. Dare I say the critique of Rev. Wright here and here, (and even here, where the WaPo continues it's "liberal" editorial stance towards black pastors), seems to be that he's gonna get the white folk all stirred up and angry and blow the black man's chance of being President? Politics really is all that matters; to some people.