The Question: Jeremiah Wright's sermons continue to be an issue in the presidential campaign. Why? What do you think of his preaching style? What do you wish you understood better about it?
I can't help but wonder if the surfacing of Jeremiah Wright -- and his
recent resurfacing on PBS and other venues -- didn't send a shiver of fear
through campaign central in the Obama camp. In himself Sen. Obama
exemplifies the success of racial integration, having lived in both worlds
and understanding each with unaffected sympathy. Rev. Wright is not such a
person. His manner was gentler when talking to Bill Moyers -- you wouldn't
recognize the firebrand from those YouTube video clips -- and he attempted
to sound reasonable without backing down, however, from anything he has said
in the past.
Wright's idea of racial progress is to keep alive the memory of past
injustice and the rage and shame they caused. He is typical of a certain
theological movement that stresses social involvement in the black
community, but not many people are buying that smokescreen. Wright uses his
words, gentle or inflammatory, to promote Africanism as being the heart and
soul of the Bible. He identifies with the oppression of the Jews in the Old
Testament as a model for black oppression today, and he calmly equates
Jehovah's damning of sinners with his own damning of America for segregation
and racial intolerance. In Wright's world view, there is us and them, going
back thousands of years. Therefore, he belongs, or so the public perceives,
to the divisive camp in racial politics, not the uniting camp. A great many
people, black and white, are firmly entrenched in the same camp, and if
Obama wants change, he couldn't have gotten a more perfect challenge than
his own pastor, who seems as committed today to his views as he ever was.
I think Obama can meet the challenge. His speech on race from Philadelphia
was almost universally acknowledged as a great speech, and the man who was
capable of writing it will be capable of doing more in the same vein.
Comparisons to Abraham Lincoln aren't misplaced. Lincoln was a lighthouse of
truth but a lightning rod for attack at the same time. In retrospect his
defense of America as one people united by one purpose seems like the only
path. It didn't at the time, however. Periodically the American union gets
beset by divisiveness for the same reasons as in 1860: economic inequality,
regional ambitions, backward traditions fighting the tide of modernism, and
simple mean-spirited prejudice. We've become trapped in such a time once
again, and the process of extricating ourselves will echo what happened
after 1860.
Emotions will erupt; heads will knock (rhetorically if not physically). The
dark matter hidden inside the body politic will spew out on the surface.
Obama is experiencing that eruption, and like Lincoln, his response to it
can't be perfect. The fact that he is willing to be both lighthouse and
lightning rod speaks to his innate integrity. Will that be enough? No one
can tell. He faces Wright on his left and wrong on his right. Or perhaps we
can take a page from Obama's book and look beyond right and wrong. A house
divided against itself cannot stand -- that's the message uniting Obama and
Lincoln. He needs to keep repeating the message, and if it's our historical
destiny to listen, we will.
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