Such is the nature of politics in 2008, that the views of one fiery Chicago preacher have become national campaign fodder, and his appearances across the country have been deemed so newsworthy that they commanded live, end-to-end coverage.
News organizations that never visit a Black church, fell all over themselves to report every utterance of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Certainly, this is all because of Rev. Wright’s most famous parishioner, one Barack Hussein Obama, who has been a member of Trinity United Church of Christ for the past 20 years.
In this past six weeks of the Democratic presidential nomination process, Obama’s relationship with Wright has become the central issue of the campaign.
While gas prices have soared through the roof, and jobs are being lost and shipped overseas, while foreclosures continue to leave vast wastelands in many Black communities, while health care is unattainable for too many Black and poor people, and while the war in Iraq claims even more lives, five years after we declared victory, we’re told Rev. Wright is what is wrong with America? Obama has had to publicly denounce and separate himself from Wright, who decided to unburden himself with a road trip of selfdefense last week.
Wright, explained who he is, and what his church is, during a sit-down with Bill Moyers on PBS. He then defended himself, and derided his critics while explaining the difference between Black and white churches while speaking before 12,000 guests at the Detroit NAACP Freedom Fund dinner. Finally, he went to the National Press Club to talk about the Black church, where he also took questions from a press corps that could not understand his experience, or the experiences of his members.
While his answers to those questions reiterated some of his more controversial pronouncements, he could not deny those comments any more than he could deny his own experience. They are things he believes to his heart, and he stands by those beliefs, even as they further imperil the political fortunes of his parishioner. He couldn’t do the politically correct thing and go away and shut up. That would be denying who he is.
He had to keep being Jeremiah Wright. Anything else would have been selling out. The argument is being made that Obama’s relationship with Rev. Wright speaks to his judgment, and that if he did not agree with Wright’s peculiar view of America, then he should have left the church. I find that to be a curious argument, because there is no perfect church.
While you may disagree with individual tenets of your church (tithing, speaking in tongues, ordination of women, marrying homosexuals), there may be a preponderance of other things upon which you agree.
Do you walk out on the church that has become a beacon in the city and provides ministries that help a multitude of citizens because your pastor thinks AIDS was a government conspiracy? Do you walk out on your church because you disagree with the idea that America’s saber-rattling foreign policy might be angering enough people overseas that they might want to exact some vengeance through terrorism? The odd thing is, I have no idea which church Sen. Hillary Clinton attends regularly, and I couldn’t name her pastor.
Same with Sen. John McCain. We have seen McCain cozy up to such right-wing loonies as the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, who opined that 9-11 was retribution from God, and Rev. John Hagee who says the Catholic church has “thirsted for the blood of the Jewish people” throughout its history and that Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans to prevent a gay pride march.
Most people stay affiliated with their home church not because they agree with everything that happens in that church, but because they agree with enough of it that it is more comfortable than visiting church after church hoping to find that one church which agrees with every one of our own individual beliefs. I don’t plan to vote for Rev. Jeremiah Wright in November, and he won’t be on the ballot. Anyone who thinks he is there in spirit should examine their own spirit.
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