This is now a very old story, of course, but I don't think it's going to go away anytime soon. I've been turning it over in my mind, trying to find ways of disregarding it, but it simply cannot be ignored, because the charismatic religious quack you see on the right, Jeremiah Wright, was the pastoral mentor of a major contender for the presidency of the United States.
It is both sad, and startling, that 45 years after the "I have a Dream" speech, an educated, articulate Columbia and Harvard graduate, Barack Obama, could still claim guidance from someone who is clearly a racist nut. It is alarming that Obama could have endured five minutes in this church, let alone twenty years. Of course, political expedience has required Obama to repudiate some of the pastor's words, if not the pastor himself, but I see more to fear in two lingering realities about America that are highlighted by the "Reverend" Wright's rhetoric: 1) the rhetoric has no small following and 2) a large portion of the American electorate is apparently willing to ignore a theology that would earn anyone else immediate "kook" status. It doesn't even appear, among progressives, that "Change we can believe in" has turned into "Change--gulp--we can believe in." The Audacity-of-Hope crowd is willing to hope their guy really doesn't believe anything he heard for twenty years. (Patrick Henry: "we are apt to listen to the sound of that siren--hope--until she turns us into beasts.")
If Jeremiah Wright were merely a whack-job who spoke to a very small band of the urban disaffected, he might be worth ignoring, but as you can see from the congregation's response, this pastor is not exactly
crying repentance to a stony-faced band of worshippers who are rejecting the pastor's interpretation. This message of hate is being embraced with smiles and amens and upraised arms of praise. The pastor according to one report, is being given by his congregation a 10,000 square foot golf course home as a retirement present. Certain kinds of hate, apparently, are profitable in America.
I've had a few months to think about it, and here, as I see it, is the problem: almost all of us are born suckers for being told "it's somebody else's fault."
That doesn't mean we don't sometimes face real instances of injustice. If your ancestors were tied together with chains and brought over in the hulls of infernal slave ships, it would certainly leave a cultural scar. If you had to watch your father being called "boy," it might make you a very angry young man. In my own case, on a completely different front, my father worked his way out of the onion fields and was completely unbothered by government regulation until he started to become successful, and then the vultures descended, en masse, hungry for wet meat. (He told stories of a certain federal agency that appeared angry he had broken no law.) He talked about members of his own church who were cultural snobs, because dad didn't have a college degree. He talked about knowing that he was completely, economically, on his own when his own father died when he was seventeen. He talked bitterly about unscrupulous produce brokers that flooded the market and left his family without income. My dad had a keen sense of injustice, and he didn't ignore it. He fought it. But he didn't live for it either. He didn't make a religion out of it. He didn't purposely ignore the good around him, simply because there was a lot of evil.
The damning reality of Reverend Wright's theology, and the true mark of its hatred, is that it revels so completely in victimhood that it lashes out against anything handy, and remotely plausible, as a target for its anger, including the very virtues it should be embracing. In his oft-quoted "G-d D*mn America" sermon, Rev. Wright lamented a "three strikes law," as being one of the "chickens come home to roost." Preposterous! Unless you believe that murderers and rapists and thieves should be protected from punishment, and that the innocent should be exposed to their cruelty, only a fool could lament that the just penalty of the wicked would bring on God's just condemnation. The Bible clearly indicates that unpunished crime, not punished crime, causes divine condemnation. ("So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it." Num 35:33)
More Rev. Wright insanity: A feudal, emperor-worshipping Japan bombed our country on December 7, 1941. The same band of barbarians committed some of the worst outrages against humanity in Nanking, prior to the war, and Rev. Wright references our use of nuclear weapons as another "chicken come home to roost." Talk to some of the Marines who had to fight every inch of disputed ground in Okinawa and see if you don't think our use of the bomb was not, in fact, deeply humanitarian to both Americans and the Japanese. The fact that Rev. Wright would use Hiroshima as a sign of America's injustice is a sign of more than just bad theology. It's a sign of stupidity. A congregation who wants to ignore the Islamic Jihad of 9/11, simply because it might offend fellow-travelers among the Nation of Islam, by comparing the twin towers to Hiroshima is a congregation deeply invested in "blaming someone else at all costs."
A unifying message--a message a REAL man of God might give-- is this: we are ALL sinners. We all have the blood of the unborn on our hands. We all have hatred and covetousness and adultery in our hearts, and it is up to ALL of us--black, white, brown, and yellow--to take responsibility for our own sins, to rebuke each other for those sins, and to have victory over them by loving each other in Christ. That's a true Christian message.
But the message you will hear from Rev. Wright, and--God Forbid an Obama presidency--is one of selective victimhood, because, depending on your community, it can be more profitable, and it may register more voters.
