WASHINGTON (ABP) — Sen. Barack Obama's former pastor — at the center of one of the biggest religious controversies in presidential-campaign history — culminated a four-day media blitz April 28 with a combination of erudition and combativeness.
“This is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright; it has nothing to do with Sen. Obama,” Wright said of the recent criticism he has received for provocative statements in the past. “This is an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition,” he said during a question-and-answer session following a speech at the National Press Club in Washington.
The retired pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago became a household name earlier this year after controversial snippets from several of his sermons were publicized on YouTube and picked up by the mainstream media. The senator is a longtime Trinity member and has credited Wright with bringing him to faith in Christ.
The sound bites contained rhetoric that some have interpreted as anti-American and anti-white, such as the declaration that God condemns America for its treatment of blacks. But many have defended Wright, saying that the comments were better understood in the context of the entire sermons in which they appeared and in the broader context of the African-American tradition of prophetic preaching that challenges the powers that be.
Wright — who has kept an extremely low profile since the furor surrounding his sermons erupted in March — attempted to explain that tradition to many representatives of the very “corporate-owned media,” as he has described it, that fanned the furor.
“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,” he said. “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.”
Wright added that the black-church prophetic tradition also has reconciliation at its heart and “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.”
That, he told the assembled journalists, has always been difficult to do, because Christianity has been used to liberate blacks but also has been used to justify slavery, segregation and other forms of oppression. “[T]he Christianity of the slaveholder is not the Christianity of the slave. The God to whom the slaveholders pray, as they ride on the decks of the slave ship, is not the God to whom the enslaved are praying, as they ride beneath the decks on that same slave ship,” he said.
Wright continued: “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.”
That difference in religious traditions has often caused African-American preachers to view America's past actions differently than their white counterparts — which may explain the widely divergent reactions to some of Wright's most inflammatory rhetoric.
He has drawn withering fire, in particular, from many commentators for passages from two sermons.
In a 2003 message, Wright recounted the historically inequitable treatment of African-Americans by state and federal officials. “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.' No, no, no. God damn America — that's in the Bible — for killing innocent people,” he exclaimed. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”
A sermon Wright delivered the Sunday after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks noted that Americans seemed shocked and bewildered that anyone would want to visit their country with violence.
“We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye,” he said in the Sept. 16, 2001, sermon. “We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.”
In often-fiesty responses to reporters questions at the press-club event, Wright defended those remarks. “Jesus said, ‘Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.' You cannot do terrorism on other people and expect it never to come back on you. Those are biblical principles, not Jeremiah Wright ‘bombastic,' ‘divisive' principles,” he said.
Asked about the “God damn America” sermon, Wright said that, in context, was also biblical. “God doesn't bless everything. God condemns some things…. God damns some practices and there's no excuse for the things that the government — not the American people — have done. That doesn't make me not like America or unpatriotic.”
Asked how he felt about being accused of a lack of patriotism, the former Marine launched a broadside at the current vice president, who managed to avoid service in the Vietnam War. “I served six years in the military. Does that make me patriotic? How many years did [Dick] Cheney serve?” Wright asked.
He also defended statements suggesting that government entities helped create the inner-city drug epidemics of the 1980s and 1990s and intentionally infected its own citizens with the virus that causes AIDS. He referred to an infamous medical experiment that began in the 1930s in which government doctors, in order to study the disease, failed to treat poor African-American men with syphilis or even inform them that they were infected. “Based on the Tuskegee Experiment, and based on what has happened to African-Americans in this country, I believe our government is capable of anything,” he said.
But many pundits, journalists and critics of Wright said his edgy question-and-answer session belied the conciliatory efforts of the speech that preceded it.
“On any level, the speech was a train wreck,” wrote James Hutchins, on the blog UCCTruths (ucctruths.blogspot.com). “By deflecting the controversy as commentary against the black church, Wright has also ignited a completely manufactured racial conflict and has unfairly cast a negative view of the black church and the United Church of Christ. Wright has effectively sabatoged the black church, the United Church of Christ and Obama's candidacy to protect his own ego.”
Hutchins said it distracted from an earlier speech Obama gave in which he distanced himself from Wright's more controversial comments and called for a national dialogue on race relations. “While I personally agree with the spirit of Obama's call for a national conversation on race, it can not and should not be orchestrated as a defense of Wright's sermons,” Hutchins wrote. “The controversy is not about race; it is about Jeremiah Wright. If we are going to have a real national conversation on race, it should be done in the spirit of Obama's unifying optimism that we can overcome our shameful history.”
Whatever his effect on it, Wright may not have had Obama's candidacy in mind when he planned his recent round of appearances, which in addition to the speech and PBS interview also included a sermon at a Baptist church in Dallas the morning of April 27 and a speech to an NAACP meeting in Detroit that night.
Asked if he thought America is still damned even if it elects Obama president, Wright said his prophetic role wouldn't change. “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.'”
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Read more:
Transcript of Jeremiah Wright's speech at the National Press Club
Obama's controversial pastor submits to first TV interview (4/25)
Pastor's role in Obama campaign spotlights race, pulpit freedom (3/19)