Not So Fast On Making Brotherman The Bogeyman
With the continued hand-wringing over the "explosive, controversy" remarks Jeremiah Wright made on the pulpit to a chorus of "Amens" and "Preach Pastor," a backlash of humongous proportions is beginning to surface.
The sermons courtesy of Youtube by Senator Barack Obama's former pastor have critics charging that the US mainstream media have distorted Wright's comments, failed to understand the African American church, and sought to punish the Democratic Party presidential hopeful through "guilt by association" while ignoring equally incendiary remarks made by white clergy on the religious right.
At the center of the storm that engulfed Barack Obama's presidential campaign is his spiritual mentor, the reverend who once presided over Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago's south side. Someone who married Barack and Michelle Obama and who baptized his two little girls.
Wright's comments prompted Obama to give a groundbreaking speech on race in the United States - the first time in decades that this issue has been addressed by a candidate for the presidential nomination. In the speech, Obama said he rejected Wright's more inflammatory statements, but refused to disown his longtime spiritual advisor.
Among the former US Marine's remarks: The government gives them [African Americans] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike [felony] law and then wants us to sing "God Bless America". No, no, no, Goddamn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people. Goddamn America for treating our citizens as less than human. Goddamn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.
We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now [post 9/11] we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost.
Both have other pastors been given a free pass? Dr George Hunsinger of Princeton University, an ordained white Presbyterian minister, believes the mainstream US media has distorted Wright's remarks.
"I think we are looking at some basic questions of fairness," he told Inter Press Service. "Is it really fair to take a minister's remarks, no matter how provocative or ill-advised, out of context and to broadcast them incessantly, as if they were the only thing that minister ever said or believed? What purposes are served by this sort of propaganda?"
Another prominent theologian, Reverend Martin Marty of the University of Chicago Divinity School, said he "does not excuse some of the indefensible comments of Wright that have now been bludgeoned into our consciousness to the exclusion of all else.
But he says, "The four s's charged against Wright - segregation, separatism, sectarianism and superiority - don't stand up." He said Trinity "has made strenuous efforts to help black Christians overcome the shame they had so long been conditioned to experience. People do not leave Trinity ready to beat up on white people; they are charged to make peace."
In his March 18 speech, Obama called on the country to begin a national conversation on race and ethnicity. Most polling data suggest that the Wright controversy has not damaged Obama's presidential bid.
But Harold Ickes, a senior advisor to Senator Hillary Clinton, his competitor for the Democratic Party nomination, is quoted as saying that the Clinton campaign would use it as a way of persuading party insiders - known as superdelegates - that Obama is not electable. And this is why Hillary is losing and has completely lost any hope of connecting with African American voters.
Meanwhile, theologians in Texas expressed support for Wright at a symposium last weekend on the "State of the Black Church". Dr Stacey Floyd-Thomas, associate professor of ethics and director of black church studies at the Brite Divinity School at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, said, "What is eminently clear is the degree to which the black church is still largely misunderstood and routinely caricatured in US popular culture."
In contrast to the Wright-Obama furor, criticism of right-wing clergy has been muted or nonexistent. For example, Mike Huckabee, a former candidate for the Republican nomination for president and an ordained Baptist minister, has said, "I got into politics because I knew government didn't have the real answers, that the real answers lie in accepting Jesus Christ into our lives ..."
Also attracting little attention in the US mainstream press are endorsements by prominent conservative clergy of the presumptive Republican nominee for president, Senator John McCain of Arizona. One of them, Reverend John Hagee, has said Roman Catholicism is "A Godless theology of hate that no one dared try to stop for a thousand years." He said that the Catholic religion has "produced a harvest of hate". Hagee has confirmed that McCain sought his endorsement. McCain has said he was proud to have Hagee's support.
Another prominent McCain supporter, Reverend Rod Parsley, has said, "America was founded, in part, with the intention of seeing this false religion [Islam] destroyed, and I believe September 11, 2001, was a generational call to arms that we can no longer ignore." (Inter Press Service)