The Origin of Obama's Pastor Problem

[DeepModem Mom]

TIME: The Origin of Obama's Pastor Problem
By JAMES CARNEY AND AMY SULLIVAN
Thursday, Mar. 20, 2008


(In Philadelphia Obama called for blacks and whites to move beyond the "racial stalemate"
Alex Brandon/AP)

....Much of white America is unfamiliar with the milieu of the black church. When clips from Wright's sermons began circulating, many whites heard divisive, angry, unpatriotic pronouncements on race, class and country. Many blacks, on the other hand, heard something more familiar: righteous anger about oppression and deliberate hyperbole in laying blame, which are common in sermons delivered in black churches every Sunday. The Rev. Terri Owens, dean of students at the University of Chicago Divinity School, says the black church tradition has its roots in the era of slavery, when African Americans held services under trees, far from their white masters. "Churches have always been the place where black people could speak freely," she says. "They were the only institutions they could own and run by themselves."

In his books, Obama says he might not have become a Christian — his mother was a skeptical secularist and his absent father an atheist — if not for the special character of the black church. "Out of necessity, the black church had to minister to the whole person. Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation," he writes in The Audacity of Hope. It also matched his intellectual curiosity. "Perhaps it was out of this ... grounding of faith in struggle that the historically black church offered me a second insight: that faith doesn't mean that you don't have doubts."

That desire for a more challenging faith helps explain the appeal of Trinity, despite its potential for controversy. The church, which has ministered to poor South Side families and Oprah Winfrey alike, isn't fringe, but neither is it a likely home for someone plotting a political career in Chicago....

As Obama's political career blossomed, he could have quietly left Trinity for one of those more staid black churches, but he chose to stay. In his speech, he said he disagreed with Wright strongly, and yet he didn't leave the church (or even criticize his pastor until Wright's sermons became a campaign issue). He didn't explain why he stayed, but by trying to show black and white resentment as the backdrop for Wright's comments, Obama suggested that his response to controversy isn't to walk out of the room but to try to understand what's fueling the fire. He also drew a distinction between political advice and spiritual guidance, arguing that many Americans know what it's like to disagree with something their pastor or priest or rabbi says.

By asking voters to understand the context of Wright's anger, though, Obama is counting on voters to accept nuance in an arena that almost always rewards simplicity over complexity. Politicians tend to offer deliberately banal choices: Either we move forward or we fall backward, either we let the economy falter or we help it grow, either we succumb to our enemies or we defeat them — the choice is up to you, America! Obama's formulation was different. Explicitly asking Americans to grapple with racial divisions and then transcend them — that's a bolder, riskier request.

After he delivered his speech, Obama found his wife Michelle backstage. She was weeping. He shared a quiet, emotional moment with her. Then Obama was all business again. "What's next?" he asked, as if anyone knew the answer.

http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1723990,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner

[annabanana]

1. Obama's "Pastor Problem" is America's race problem.

It is an entrenched disinclination of white America to own up to the history.

[theredpen]

2. I think the lukewarm (overall) response to Obama's speech backs you up on that

Sadly.

[greeneyedstone]

3. What a Crock...

Awfully funny how no flags until now??? The man has basically demanded that White Americans view that full-tilt lunatic as comparable to the grandmother who raised him and paid for the first-class education that allowed him to be where he is in the first place. No, I'm sorry, but all he did was evade the issue.. That Wright is a hateful, and divisive Seperatist akin to Louis Farrakhan. He also tacitly confessed to lying about hearing the remarks in the first place. Senator Obama has received the most tender treatment for a Presidential Candidate that I have yet to witness from the MSM, and I applaud the efforts of those online who seek to expose all facets of his character to the light of day. Were he a white man, he would have been burned at the stake for this, it is a gross double-standard he is being afforded, and it turns my stomach to see it.

[annabanana]

6. You mean like Hagee was "burned at the stake" for calling

the Catholic Church "The Great Whore"?

[frazzled]

4. Everyone really needs to read this long article on Trinity from a year ago

It takes some time, and is very balanced, but it's also illuminating. I will only quote a few brief passages. It's called "Africentric church: A visit to Chicago's Trinity UCC," by Jason Byassee, and it appeared in the May 29, 2007, edition of "The Christian Century."

Africentrism (that's the term Trinity prefers to Afrocentrism) is wholeheartedly embraced at Trinity. One of the church's mottos is "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." Its choir is regularly decked out in brightly colored African dress, as is Wright when he preaches. The church emphasizes its connection to the African diaspora: it sponsors trips to western and southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Latin American countries with significant African populations. Julia Speller, a leader at Trinity and author of Walkin' the Talk: Keepin' the Faith in Africentric Congregations, notes in her book that the church offers courses in Swahili and that its youth programs, Intonjane and Isuthu, take their names from Swahili words for coming into manhood and womanhood

<...>

Trinity did not set out to be an Africentric church when it was founded. The goal of United Church of Christ leaders was to create an integrated church at a time when whites were not much interested in integration. But the UCC was also interested in finding "the right kind of black people," according to Speller—those who were middle class and "high potential" enough to integrate easily into the majority-white denomination. Congregationalist missionaries who established black colleges and universities throughout the South in the late 19th century insisted that educated blacks eliminate displays of emotion in singing and preaching. That's why graduates of Morehouse College and Howard University (where no gospel music was allowed until the late 1960s, according to Wright) abandoned black ways of worship.

In a recent essay, Wright summarized the early 1960s vision of integration: "Blacks should adopt a white lifestyle, a white way of worship, European values, and European American ways of viewing reality" (in Growing the African-American Church). One of the UCC's few black ministers in the 1960s actually said from the pulpit, "We will tolerate no 'niggerisms' in our services." This meant, Wright explains, that "no one could shout. . . . There would be no hand waving. There would be no displays of emotion."

Wright dates the collapse of this vision to 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. "was enough to make a negro turn black," he says, borrowing a phrase. By this point, a large segment of the black community had turned against King's Christian, nonviolent challenge to racial segregation. Chicago was an organizing center for militant black religious groups like the Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrew Israelites. Ironically, these groups, with whom conservatives today would like to lump Obama and Wright, are the very ones against which the young Jeremiah Wright was arguing while in graduate school in the 1960s—trying to make the case that Christianity is not a white racist religion.

<...>
Understanding Trinity's social context helps one understand the church's critique of middleclassness. With increased access to prosperity and social status, blacks can imitate the white families who fled the area in the 1950s for the greener pastures of the suburbs.

Obama's first book, Dreams from My Father, recounts an exchange he had with Wright over black middleclassness. A church secretary was planning a move to the suburbs so her son could have a better life. Wright's response was: "That boy of hers is gonna get out there and won't have a clue about where, or who, he is." Obama defended the secretary, suggesting that the boy would be safer outside the inner city. Wright replied, "Life's not safe for a black man in this country, Barack. Never has been. Probably never will be." Black flight, Wright seemed to be saying, is no better for those who flee than for those who are left behind.

<...>
Dwight Hopkins, a member of Trinity and a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, argues that the church is within the mainstream of black churches and as such is socially conservative. Its emphasis on education harkens back to the days when black parents worked two and three jobs to educate their children, since schooling was one thing "they can't take from you." Moss, noting the church's tutoring, SAT preparation and scholarship programs, said, "We place more African-American students in college than any other organization in Chicago." Hopkins pointed to the church's annual marriage retreat, in which "500 black couples study the Bible's views on marriage together," as more evidence of the church's focus on traditional concerns: the Bible and the family. Obama himself believes that he could explain the Black Value System to people in Iowa and "get a few Amens."

<...>
When I asked Otis Moss and Dwight Hopkins about the attacks on Trinity, they both noted that ethnic versions of Christianity are commonplace among white Christians—Greek Orthodoxy, Irish Catholicism, German Lutheranism. Why, they wonder, is that kind of ethnocentrism permissible for whites, but Africentric Christianity is not legitimate for blacks?

Wright's preaching regularly draws attention to standards of beauty in America that drive black women to use beauty products and hair styling to make themselves appear more white. "The church should be the place where children of color see themselves in a positive light," Moss has written (The Gospel Remix: Reaching the Hip Hop Generation). It is hard to see any Christian disagreeing with these tenets of black Christianity.

<...>
Conservatives may find the Africentric church too political, and liberals may squirm over its revivalist emotion. But the black church continues to makes converts in unlikely places, reflecting a God who makes a way where there is no way.

http://www.christiancentury.org/article.lasso?id=3392

In sum, after reading this article--the bad and the good--it made more sense to me why Obama would be attracted to this Church--because of its relatively conservative social values and personal responsibility teachings, and because of its very pointed Africentrism (a way to connect with his absent African father?). It also contained a surprising account of Obama, indeed, challenging Pastor Wright, on at least one issue--his condemnation of the black Church secretary for moving her son to a suburb. In the least, it sheds a lot more light on the background of this church, and is well worth reading in full.

[DeepModem Mom]

5. Thanks so much for your post, frazzled -- and for the link. Interesting and valuable info. nt