Jeremiah Wright and his Church

With Jeremiah Wright and Trinity UCC much in the news due to clips of rather radical statements in sermons, statements that Barack Obama has "denounced" and suggests he did not hear in person. I have been blogging on this issue the last few days, trying to help provide a context for these comments. I write of this context not as one show shares it, but as one who seeks to understand it. Trinity UCC is part of the Christian community. It has a powerful witness in the community and it is under attack. I needn't agree with the tone or even all the message to appreciate the locus of the message.
Jeremiah Wright is being accused of preaching hate, bigotry, separatism, Black supremacy, and anti-Americanism. I don't believe any of this is true. Yes, some of what he speaks of is outside the boundaries -- especially conspiracy theories -- but he's not alone in spreading conspiracy theories. Remember Jerry Falwell selling films that suggested that Bill Clinton had authorized murders. How soon we forget.
As I was going through a stack of magazines, I came across the May 23, 2007 issue of The Christian Century. The cover story of this issue concerns Trinity UCC, precisely because it is the home church of the Obama's. The article is written by the Century's Assistant Editor, Jason Byassee. You can read the article in its entirety here, and I encourage you to do so. In fact, if you have any questions or concerns, this article will help you understand what is happening, and why the church is under attack.
Byasee writes:

Critics have pounced especially on the church's "Black Value System," by which members affirm their commitment to God, the "black community," the "black family" and the "black work ethic," and disavow "the pursuit of 'middle-classness.'" One hatchet-job report in Investor's Business Daily, pointing to the Black Value System (a statement written not by Wright but by church members in the early 1980s), concluded that there is "little room for white Christians at Obama's church." Black conservative pundit Erik Rush said the church has embraced "things African above things American," and he claimed that this should be as alarming as a Republican presidential candidate "belonging to the Aryan Brethren Church of Christ." Tucker Carlson of MSNBC described Trinity as having a "racially exclusive theology" that "contradicts the basic tenets of Christianity." Sean Hannity of Fox News confronted Wright on TV and asked how a black value system is any more acceptable than a white value system. Hannity also suggested that Trinity's emphasis on black values contradicts Martin Luther King's famous hope that people would be judged "not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character."

Such charges are really aimed at Obama, rather than Wright or Trinity. By trying to link Obama to black radicals, they attack one of Obama's political assets: his seeming ability—shared by Colin Powell, Oprah Winfrey and Michael Jordan—to "transcend" race. Because Obama is able to do this, he invites the white support that Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson lack (which perhaps explains the decided coolness of some black leaders toward Obama's candidacy).

He then writes that the critics "ignore America's history of racism as well as the impact of the civil rights movement and the struggles of the black church to communicate the gospel's relevance n the Black community" (Byassee, pp. 18-19).
If you read the essay you will have a better understanding of the complexity of a man who is being made out to be a monster by a largely white press that has no understanding of the Black church or the Black experience. To give you a good example, the other night Anderson Cooper, whom I generally respect, was focusing on this issue. He had on three commentators, Roland Martin, a Black talk show host, David Gergen, and Tony Perkins. Martin gets it, Gergen gets it to a degree, but I couldn't understand why Perkins was there. He kept saying that Wright is wrong and that he isn't preaching the Gospel and that Christians shouldn't damn America, etc. Why was this right wing guy there commenting on Wright? Why not get someone theologically responsible? Perhaps someone who is Black who is theologically trained. What we were left with was Wright being labeled a bigot whom Obama would have to denounce. Even then, Obama is left as a wounded candidate.
Fortunately, Jason's article offers us another set of lenses!

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