Your GetReligionistas do not, as a rule, offer much comment about editorials and op-ed page columns. However, we do, from time to time, point out columns and commentaries that add actual insight and information to ongoing news stories.
Honest, in a few days, we hope to be past the firestorm about the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. But, at the moment, some journalists are actually focusing on the content of a crucial religious issue linked the story — which is the style and content of the black church. Thus, I would like to point to two essays that will be of interest to those reading and writing about the hottest story — at the moment — in American culture.
The first is by Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson, who pounds home the main point that GetReligion has been trying to make for a month or so. Here is a long chunk of that piece:
The problem is that Wright insists on being seen as something he’s not: an archetypal representative of the African American church. In fact, he represents one twig of one branch of a very large tree. …
The reality of the African American church, of course, is as diverse as the African American community. I grew up in the Methodist church with pastors — often active on the front lines of the civil rights movement — whose sermons were rarely exciting enough to elicit more than a muttered “Amen.” They were excitement itself, however, compared with the dry lectures delivered by the priest at the Catholic church around the corner. And what I heard every Sunday was nothing at all like the Bible-thumping, hellfire-and-damnation perorations that filled my Baptist friends with the Holy Ghost — and even less like the spellbinding, singsong, jump-and-shout sermonizing that raised the roofs of Pentecostal sanctuaries across town.
Wright claims to represent all these traditions and more, but he does not. He also claims universality for the political aspect of his ministry. It is true that the black church, writ large, has been an instrument of social and political change. But most black churches are far less political than Wright’s — and many concern themselves exclusively with salvation.
I point all this out not to say that one tradition is better than another; as Wright said, different doesn’t mean deficient. But what Wright did was to try to frame the issue in such a way that to question him or anything he has ever said was to question the long, storied tradition of African American religion.
And all the people said, “Amen.” Thus, it is logical to say that Barack Obama, when he made his profession of Christian faith, was joining a particular congregation within the wider black church tradition or traditions.
Over at The New Republic, Noam Scheiber has written a piece that probes the content of that decision by the young and rising politician. This leads us to a long, long quote from the book “Obama: From Promise to Power” by David Mendell:
Wright remains a maverick among Chicago’s vast assortment of black preachers. He will question Scripture when he feels it forsakes common sense; he is an ardent foe of mandatory school prayer; and he is a staunch advocate for homosexual rights, which is almost unheard-of among African-American ministers. Gay and lesbian couples, with hands clasped, can be spotted in Trinity’s pews each Sunday. Even if some blacks consider Wright’s church serving only the bourgeois set, his ministry attracts a broad cross section of Chicago’s black community. Obama first noticed the church because Wright had placed a “Free Africa” sign out front to protest continuing apartheid. The liberal, Columbia-educated Obama was attracted to Wright’s cerebral and inclusive nature, as opposed to the more socially conservative and less educated ministers around Chicago. Wright developed into a counselor and mentor to Obama as Obama sought to understand the power of Christianity in the lives of black Americans, and as he grappled with the complex vagaries of Chicago’s black political scene.
“Trying to hold a conversation with a guy like Barack, and him trying to hold a conversation with some ministers, it’s like you are dating someone and she wants to talk to you about Rosie and what she saw on Oprah, and that’s it,” Wright explained. “But here I was, able to stay with him lockstep as we moved from topic to topic. … He felt comfortable asking me questions that were postmodern, post-Enlightenment and that college-educated and graduate school-trained people wrestle with when it comes to the faith. We talked about race and politics. I was not threatened by those questions.” …
But more than that, Trinity’s less doctrinal approach to the Bible intrigued and attracted Obama. “Faith to him is how he sees the human condition,” Wright said. “Faith to him is not … litmus test, mouth-spouting, quoting Scripture. It’s what you do with your life, how you live your life. That’s far more important than beating someone over the head with Scripture that says women shouldn’t wear pants or if you drink, you’re going to hell. That’s just not who Barack is.”
Now there are all kinds of things going on in that passage, including the assumption that Obama truly found that there are no traditional, doctrinally conservative African-American priests or pastors in the Chicago area who hold graduate degrees from solid, even upper-tier seminaries and were opposed to apartheid. Also, please do not click “comment” in order to state what we all know — which is that the hottest social issues in American church life are not drinking or the moral implications of women wearing pants.
The larger point, a key piece of the puzzle that reporters are failing to see, is that Obama clearly wanted to join a church. All of those “He’s a secret Muslim” emails be damned, his own testimony underlines the sincerity of his spiritual search and commitment to a liberal brand of Christian faith.
But, if Mendell and Wright are right, Obama was also searching for a black church that would allow him to avoid or even reject the vast majority of the other black churches around him. He was looking for a black church that would actually — on several crucial hot issues — help him fight the larger black church or, as I am sure Obama would state it, help him lead a crusade to liberalize the conservative moral teachings of the larger black church. (Andrew Sullivan has been making this point for weeks, but it is hard to find a specific topic within his massive site.)
Is that true? That’s a question that, sooner or later, someone is going to ask Obama and I would imagine that there are African-American conservatives who would love to have a chance to do so.
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Comments (12) |
April 30, 2008, at 3:31 pm
Or to reframe it: was he looking for a church that could avoid the failures of the larger black church that espoused conservative moral teachings but failed its community? By the time Obama began looking for a church, it’s easy to argue that the landscape of Chicago was littered with “socially conservative” Black churches that were utterly failing to serve their communities. Many would argue that AIDS became an epidemic in the Black community because of the failings of the socially conservative Black church establishment.
These are interesting questions for journalists to examine. But I also think it’s worth asking whether journalists have done a disservice for focusing too much attention on this story to begin with? In an election with pressing and profound policy concerns, is the public well-served by journalists probing the inner religious life of Barack Obama (or any politician) to such an extent. Just because the conservative media is obsessed with the story doesn’t mean the mainstream media needs to follow suit.
April 30, 2008, at 4:31 pm
Terry, the way you framed that question in the end of the your piece “allow him to avoid or even reject the vast majority of the other black churches around him” emphasizes your opinion quite well. Michael’s reframing further illustrates that. I would state that Obama had found a church and pastor who fit with who he is. To state it another way, I could say that your personal choice of a church allows you to avoid or even reject other churches. Thus we come down to the political question: who is going to control the narrative?
April 30, 2008, at 4:42 pm
Whoa, Terry, what an ungracious and cynical interpretation of Obama’s choice in churches: “He was looking for a black church that would actually — on several crucial hot issues — help him fight the larger black church.”
Another way to see it is that Obama recognized two things: First, he needed grounding in the church in order to connect with and help the people he had moved to Chicago to serve as a community organizer. (He says this explicitly in his book.) Second, he needed to find a church in which he could feel comfortable.
You can dislike liberal Christianity all you want, but the fact that Obama found a church that he could relate to even prior to his own conversion experience isn’t nefarious: It’s how it is for millions of people who want to be churchgoers but cannot sign on to the intellectual or moral agenda of many conservative churches. For most of those people, choosing a church that doesn’t provoke comprehensive cognitive dissonance is an affirmation of moderate or liberal Christianity, not an act of overt rejection of conservative Christianity.
April 30, 2008, at 6:48 pm
I will side with Andrew Sullivan on this one.
Obama has, on a number of occasions, confronted black church audiences with what he sees as the wider sins of the majority of black churches. The church he joined shows the churches that he has rejected.
And, yes, I would say that by joining an Eastern Orthodox church — when there are many others that I could have joined — it is logical to say the same for me.
And for Michael, as you can clearly see through his remarks here.
I have made it clear that I think Obama’s faith is sincere. I agree that he has every right to join a church in which he feels comfortable. But I also agree with him, that he believes the vast majority of black churches are wrong on the social issues that matter the most to him.
Sullivan has cheered for Obama’s willingness to confront black churches with their errors. Your are saying that it is not his goal to change their minds? To convince them to reform their teachings?
April 30, 2008, at 7:28 pm
It may be his goal now—given his bully pulpit and cache—when it comes to individuals in his audience, but that doesn’t mean his decision to join TUCC 20 years ago was part of some “crusade.”
May 1, 2008, at 12:19 am
What intellectual snobbery on the part of Obama! As with stereo-types of white Christians, the more traditional black Christians are the less educated—including their unqualified pastors, according to your post.
May 1, 2008, at 3:32 am
He wouldn’t say “liberalize” he’d say “modernize” or “bring into postmodernity”.
And Philo, I’m curious what the “intellectual agenda” and “comprehensive cognitive dissonance” you mention entail.
May 1, 2008, at 6:43 am
Michael:
So you disagree with the biography and TNR?
Charles:
He would probably say “reform.” But that would be the wrong word, since you would be asking these churches to change 2000 years of teachings, not return to an earlier teaching.
May 1, 2008, at 7:37 am
I agree with the bio and TNR, I disagree with your spin and analysis.
May 1, 2008, at 9:16 am
One thing I’ve noticed with recent press coverage of religion (including black liberation theology) is the increasing use of “tradition” to describe various types of religious thought and observance. There doesn’t seem to be any differentiation between Tradition as understood by Jews and Catholics and tradition that is now being used to describe Protestant denominations and strains within denominations - as well as Catholics and Jews and Orthodox.
This seems to be a fairly recent development. Does “tradition” represent a new understanding of theology in Protestant seminaries or is it just sloppy media short hand? It seems to reduce serious theological differences to accidental (in an Aristotelian sense) cultural anomalies, like folk beliefs and ethnic artifacts.
What’s the deal? Is it a result of changes in media style books or a PC effort to depict all religious thought as basically the same at bottom with only surface differences? Is Jung influencing this development?
May 1, 2008, at 9:54 am
Why are the African-American ones calling whites racist? I think it should be the other way around??
May 1, 2008, at 11:21 am
May I recommend a blog by a Black Pastor and author I have been reading. Pure Church is the blog of Thabiti Anyabwile who wrote the book “The Decline of African American Theology.” His posting (scroll down), “Irreverent Wrongs” is excellent reading and good for all both black and white.