Posted by
InchDeep on Tuesday, April 29, 2008 10:53:42 AM
A "Christian Farrakhan." Wish I had thought of it.
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright has taken Barack
Obama’s critically acclaimed race speech in Philadelphia, ripped it
into bits, and tossed it in the air to serve as confetti for his parade
through the media.
In that speech, Obama said Wright had been
taken out of context, a defense the pastor has made himself. If only we
knew the true Wright, Obama complained, instead of just “the snippets
of those sermons that have run on an endless loop on the television and
YouTube.” In his interview with Bill Moyers on PBS, Wright said the
playing of his sound bites was “unfair,” “unjust” and “untrue.”
Then cometh the good reverend to step all over the out-of-context
defense in a speech at the National Press Club. He defended his
“chickens come home to roost” statement about 9/11 in exactly the same
terms as in his original sermon: “You cannot do terrorism on other
people and expect it never to come back on you.” He stood by his
damnation of America and his contention that the U.S. government had
created AIDS: “I believe our government is capable of doing anything.”
For
good measure, he dishonestly denied Louis Farrakhan’s infamous
denunciation of Judaism as a “gutter religion” and called him “one of
the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century.” The more
Wright talked, the more he sounded like a Christian Farrakhan.
Near
the end of his majestically awful performance, he corrected reporters,
telling them that Obama “did not denounce me. He distanced himself from
some of my remarks.” About this at least, Wright was sober and precise.
“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community,” Obama
said in Philadelphia. At the Press Club, Wright similarly insisted that
the attacks on him were an attack on the “black church.”
Obama and Wright thus slander both the black community and black church. As Stanley Kurtz of the Ethics and Public Policy CenterNational Review,
Trinity United Church of Christ “is arguably the most radical black
church in the country.” Its black liberation theology has been rejected
by mainstream black churches, a source of frustration for its
adherents. This theology is at the root of all that Wright says, so the
“context” is as radical as his highly publicized fulminations.
James
Cone, the founder of black liberation theology, forged a worldview
mingling Malcolm X-style revolutionary black nationalism and
third-world Marxism with prophetic Christianity. He calls it “a
theology which confronts white society as the racist anti-Christ.” In a
war against “white values,” black pastors must — as Wright has — reject
“white seminaries with their middle-class white ideas about God, Christ
and the church.”
When Wright came to Trinity Church in Chicago
in the 1970s — invited to give the worship a more black inflection and
foster stronger ties to the community — the middle-class parishioners
who had beckoned him left when they got a dose of his radicalism. The
national United Church of Christ denomination considered distancing
itself from the Wright-led church. Yet Obama came — and stayed.
In
search of an identity and a community, Obama found it in Trinity, where
he was converted by Wright’s signature “Audacity to Hope” sermon and
its black-liberation themes of the suffering of blacks merging with
that of the ancient Israelites (not to be confused with today’s
condemnable Israelites). Obama can’t be begrudged his youthful
initiation, but remaining at the church for two decades? Wright is a
canker on his candidacy, raising questions about who he really is and
about his honesty.
In a slippery dance, Obama maintains that he
was thoroughly shocked by Wright’s original radioactive statements and
hadn’t heard him say such things, although he did hear other (always
carefully unspecified) “controversial” things. The threat to Obama as
the paladin of the “new politics” is that, as he dodges and distances
on Wright, people will come to agree with his former pastor’s newly
dismissive evaluation: “He says what he has to say as a politician.”
© 2008 by King Features Syndicate reports in the latest