Listening to Rev. Wright: On Point (NPR, April 29, 2008)
Please listen to the above show!!!
(Political Rant Warning!)
There was a really great show on Michigan Radio (NPR) on Tuesday night which seemed to be devoted to discussion of Rev. Wright. I loved it! It was a white (I assume, but I guess I'm just going by accent and presupposition) NPR pundit letting two black religious scholars (as in each is ethnically black and part of historically/predominantly African American religious groups and students of African American religious groups) do most of the talking. It was overwhelmingly positive - maybe not "balanced" in the sense of having totally opposing sides represented on the same show, but it was a nice antidote to all of the sound bytes rebounding across the media lately about Obama and Rev. Wright. The discussion that I heard (I didn't stay to listen to the entire show) focused on talking about the prophetic or Jeremiatic (as in the prophet Jeremiah) tradition of preaching in American Christianity (African American and otherwise)--speaking truth to power, in other words. And they played *really long* clips of Wright's speeches and sermons, including a very long, unedited clip of the sermon from which the "God d**n America" sound byte comes from.
Basically, the context of that sound byte is that Rev. Wright talked (briefly) about how various world governments have failed and fallen (Germany, Russia, Japan), but God doesn't fail and doesn't change or go away. Then he spends considerably more time talking about the U.S. government. And he is explicitly and consistently talking about the *government* of the U.S., not Americans or America in general. He condemns historical events that are very recent and don't get talked about much: putting Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII, for example, and racism against blacks in public policy during the last generation (yes, the Civil Rights Era was only a generation ago). He also mentioned U.S. government treatment of Native Americans in a longer-ago context.
Basically, Wright said that we shouldn't say "God Bless America" in the context of the U.S. government doing bad things, but "God D**n America" whenever/as long as America does horrifically unjust things--not just against African Americans. He *always* qualified the "God D**n America" statement in that way: it was "D**n America for...", etc.
The commentators talked about how the point of prophetic preaching is to use striking, no-holds-barred rhetoric to point out ways in which a nation is falling short of what it is supposed to be, and holds up that ideal not only as a condemnation, but as a call to repentance. And it was clear that that was what Wright was doing in the larger context of his sermon. White fundie pastors do this all the time (James Dobson, Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson)...and it's not "racist" then! Or compare Stanley Hauerwas.
My somewhat off-the-cuff reaction to the whole discussion is: white Americans are showing off their ignorance and their influence in the media, and their lack of willingness to listen and learn from Black Americans by construing righteously-angry speech with racist hate speech against whites, or as anti-American speech. *That* is why many of the attacks I have heard could be called attacks on the black church; because it is attacking the rightness of the black church's righteously-angry speech.
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"Make me a channel of Your Peace."
-St. Francis
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Listening to Rev. Wright
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2 comments:
Thanks for the link, Scott!
I must admit that I have not been following politics as of late, so I had not heard much about this until you brought it up. Yet another reason why I pretty much ignore media soundbites.
On one of the issues raised in the program: What are your thoughts on the place of a specifically black church, rather than intentional intercultural communities which try to avoid catering too much to any one group?
I think that intentional intercultural communities are the Christian ideal.
But I think that there are legitimate reasons why the black church came into existence in the States. As said on the program, black Christians--whether slaves or blacks living during legalized segregation or blacks today--have often heard from white Christians behind the pulpit about a Jesus that looks very different from the Jesus of their experience and of their reading of the Bible. Because the white-dominated american churches were not hearing or addressing the grievences of black Americans, dominantly black communities, organized around the black church and the black preacher, came into existence to fill the gap, to address the need, to preach the part of the gospel that was not being preached.
There is certainly a place for intentionally intercultural churches and Christian communities. But they are hard to find and hard to get started. As we preach and live out the gospel in our daily realities, living within the world, the divide of "the black church" and "the white church" is a reality, for better or for worse. And one legitimate and much needed context for racial reconicilation is for Christians in white churches and Christians in black churches to engage in dialogue, and to listen to each other.
Many black Christians get tired of interacting with guilty white Christians who don't listen, and try to be in control. In their experience nothing comes of such inter-church activities than appeasing the white people's consciences without anything really changing in anyone's minds or actions. Creating contexts for real, down-and-dirty reconciliation conversations--whether through inter-church forums or inter-cultural church communities--designed explicitly for the purpose of racial reconciliation is one way to try to address the problem. This method has been tried, and has experienced some successes and some failures.
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