Note: I have to apologize for late and light posting this weekend. I've had a series of calamaties, leaving me, at one point with no car, no computer, and--seemingly, at least--no electricity. My prep work for several diaries is on a copmuter I'm just about to take to the shop, and a good 8 hours of lost time means, well, like I said, light posting this weekend. But I did save the beginnings of this in draft form just before my electricity went off around 3 AM, and I've just whipped together the rest...
Reverend Jeremiah Wright appeared on Bill Moyers Journal (video and transcript), and proved yet again-as if we needed it-how utterly disconnected from reality our politics has become. I've defended Reverent Wright on this website before, but what was fundamentally refreshing about Wright's appearance with Bill Moyers was how far beyond all that he was, how utterly undefensive, how open, and how centered he was.
In fact, he was so centered, so equinanimous-which is not to say self-satisfied or smug-that at first I was disappointed. I had fully intended to blog about his appearance, but it was all so normal that it seemed there was nothing to blog about at first: "News Flash! Jeremiah Wright appears on Bill Moyers-He does not have horns!" But, of course, that's the point. We've become so accustomed to phony-controversy, junk-food tv that plain, old-fashioned honest truth-telling bores us, or at least makes it difficult to find a place to engage.
In retrospect, though, here's an excellent place to start, because it shows Wright recalling an incident, which was, in one sense, a typical reminder that blacks are constantly under suspicion. Yet Wright did not tell the story to make that point, nor did he recall it in bitterness. He was, in fact, a bit bemused by it. And yet, it was there. And that simply fact of witnessing to what is so-ultimately that has been Wright's great sin in the eyes of the Versailles media. He has not become complicit in his own brainwashing, and that is something that Versailles simply cannot forgive:
BILL MOYERS: He served six years in the military: two as a marine, and four in the Navy as a cardiopulmonary technician. That's where our paths crossed for the only time.
That's Jeremiah Wright, behind the I.V. pole, monitoring President Lyndon Johnson's heart as he was recovering from gall bladder surgery at Bethesda Naval Hospital. And right behind him is a very young me. I was the President's Press Secretary.
REVEREND WRIGHT: As you know, the President had to be operated on and out of surgery by 9:00 when the stock market opened. And talking and wide awake. So, we scrubbed in, like, 3:00 in the morning.
When he awakened, unlike other patients, you did not move him to recovery. You didn't move him to ICU. They kept him right there for security reasons. Secret Service all around, there was secret service in the whole operating suite and nobody else allowed in the operating suite except Secret Service.
So, after about an hour and a half, I went to get some coffee. And as I was coming back from the lounge where the coffee was, going back to monitor, I saw the guys talkin' into their wristwatches and I was nodding, speaking to them. So, I turn to go into the room to check the pace. And secret service guys standing there grabbed me, knocked the coffee outta my hand, burned me with the hot coffee, twisted my arm up behind my neck and screams into his phone, "I got him." And I was, "Got him?" And I'm screamin' in pain. And my assistant comes running out of the booth. He sees me jacked up and he starts laughing. I said, "Joe, don't laugh. Tell him who I am." And he said, "He's been here all morning."
BILL MOYERS: Standing above the President.
REVEREND WRIGHT: Guy looked at me, pulled my mask up over face, "Oh, yeah." And that was it.
But, of course, what Reverend Wright can afford to be bemused by is but the tip of the iceberg that can casually crush a young child in his congregation. And so he is not complacent when it comes to saving the lives of those entrusted to his care. This makes him even more unforgivable....
Here, Moyers asks Wright about the beginning of his ministry, which should help make it clear exactly what he is all about:
BILL MOYERS: After the military, Wright graduated from Howard University, then went to the University of Chicago Divinity School for a Masters in Religious History.
But his path took a turn back to his first calling - when he was asked by that struggling little church on the South Side of Chicago to become its pastor.
BILL MOYERS: So, when you looked out on that handful of worshippers that first Sunday morning, 87 members, I'm sure all of them weren't there--
REVEREND WRIGHT: Oh, yeah. They all knew they heard this new kid was there with a big natural. So, they came to see--
BILL MOYERS: They were there.
REVEREND WRIGHT: Yeah.
BILL MOYERS: So, what did you see and what did you think you had to do?
REVEREND WRIGHT: Well, actually a good friend of yours, I believe, and one of my professors, got me in the predicament I'm in today, Dr. Martin Marty, one of my professors at the University of Chicago--
BILL MOYERS: One of the great distinguished historians of religion in America.
REVEREND WRIGHT: He put a challenge to us in 1970, late '69, early '70, I'll never forget. He said, "You know, you come into the average church on a Sunday morning and you think you've stepped from the real world into a fantasy world. And what do I mean by that?" He said pick up the church bulletin. You leave a world, Vietnam, or today you leave a world, Iraq, over 4,000 dead, American boys and girls, 100,000, 200,000 depending on which count, Iraqi dead. Afghanistan, Darfur, rapes in the Congo, Katrina, Lower Ninth Ward, that's the world you leave. And you come in; you pick up your church bulletin. It says, there is a ladies tea on second Sunday. The children's choir will be doing. He said, "How come our bulletins, how come the faith preached in our churches does not relate to the world in which our church members leave at the benediction?" Well, it hit me. And it hit me several different ways. Number one, I know there's a church publication, the bulletin, the weekly bulletin. But what about the ministry? And what about the prophetic voice of the church that's not heard? We're talking about things that our members are wrestling with a whole bunch of other things. And the sermons and the ministries of the church don't touch those things.
That sets the table. And from what's been said so far-please note-there is nothing specific to being black in America. Wright continues speaking, and the story moves on, taking us inside the origins of contemporary black liberation theology, on a very down-to-earth level. Contrary to the sound of the terminology, it's remarkably bland and commonsensical, when you get right down to it:
So, when, I looked and said this church had said to me, in fact not just to me, the church, the congregation has said, "OK, we were started by a white denomination. We were started in this community to be an integrated church. Ten years, that hasn't happened. Are we gonna be a black church in this community? What are we doing for this community?" They put together a statement that shows all the candidates for the pulpit. I was one of the candidates. They said, "Can you lead us in this new direction? How do we minister to this community in which we sit?" Not just on Sunday, first you have to attract people to come-- or even be interested in our worship experiences on Sunday. But what do we do in ministry that speaks to the community and the world in which we sit? That's Martin Marty. That's Martin Marty.
BILL MOYERS: Marty told me that you launched a strenuous effort to help the members of that church overcome the shame, and I'm quoting him, "they had so long been conditioned to experience." What was the source of that shame?
REVEREND WRIGHT: What Carter G. Woodson [a favorite of social conservatives] calls the miseducation of the Negro. That Africa is ignorant, Africans are ignorant; there is no African history, there is no African music, there is no African culture, anything related to Africa is negative, therefore you are not African. Chinese come to the country, they're still Chinese-American. We have Chinatown. Koreans come, they're still Korean. They have Koreatown. Africans come, they're colored. They're Negro. They're anything but Africa. In fact, we don't even call them Ebbu, Ebibu, Fulani, Fanti, Ga, no, no, no -- they're all "Negro." Portuguese, "Negro" Spanish. They're all gettin' lumped into black, but we're not black, we are Negro with a capital N.
The shame of being a descendant of Africa, was a shame that had been pumped into the minds and hearts of Africans from the 1600s on, even aided and abetted by the benefit of those schools started by the missionaries, who simply carried their culture with them into the South and taught their cultures being synonymous with Christianity. So that to become a Christian, you had to let go of all vestiges of Africa and become European, become New Englanders and worship like New England, worship God properly and right. Well, that shame was a part of the shame that many Africans in the '60s and the '70s were feeling.
Dr Reuben Sheares is my predecessor -- he was the interim pastor at Trinity -- coined the phrase "unashamedly black," where blacks coming outta the '60s were no longer ashamed of being black people, nor did they have to apologize for being Christians. Because many persons in the African-American community were teasing us, Christians, of being a white man's religion. And no, we're not ashamed of Christianity. And we don't have to apologize for who we are as African-Americans. So that, I think, is what Marty was talking about.
Okay, here's the money shot:
BILL MOYERS: So, when Trinity Church says it is unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian, is it embracing a race-based theology?
REVEREND WRIGHT: No, it is not. It is embracing Christianity without giving up Africanity. A lotta the missionaries were going to other countries assuming that our culture is superior, that you have no culture. And to be a Christian, you must be like us. Right now, you can go to Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and see Christians in 140-degree weather. They have to have on a tie. Because that's what it means to be a Christian. Well, it's that kind of assuming that our culture, "We have the only sacred music. You must sing our music. You must use a pipe organ. You cannot use your instrument." It's that kind of assumption that in the field of missions, people say, "You know what? We're doing this wrong. We need to take Christ and leave culture at home. We need to learn the culture of people into which we're moving, and preach the methods of Jesus Christ using the culture that we are a part of." Well, the same thing happened with Christians in this country when they said, "You know what? Because those same missionaries who went south, they didn't let us sing gospel music." That was not sacred--
Of course, the vast majority of ministries around the world have adopted this approach today-"to take Christ and leave culture at home." It's regarded as common sense. And yet, it still remains controversial, when it suits certain political purposes.
Skipping down a bit-even though they're already talking about black liberation theology, Moyers now brings it up by name:
BILL MOYERS: Lots of controversy about black liberation theology. As I understand it, black liberation theology reads the bible through the experience of people who have suffered, and who then are able to say to themselves that we read the bible differently, because we have struggled, than those do who have not struggled. Is that a fair bumper sticker of liberation theology?
REVEREND WRIGHT: I think that's a fair bumper sticker. I think that the terms "liberation theology" or "black liberation theology" cause more problems and red flags for people who don't understand it.
BILL MOYERS: When I hear the word "black liberation theology" being the interpretation of scripture from the oppressed, I think well, that's the Jewish story--
REVEREND WRIGHT: Exactly, exactly. From Genesis to Revelation. These are people who wrote the word of God that we honor and love under Egyptian oppression, Syrian oppression, Babylonian oppression, Persian oppression, Greek oppression, Roman oppression. So that their understanding of what God is saying is very different from the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians. And that's what prophetic theology of the African-American church is.
BILL MOYERS: Yeah. But talk a little bit about that. The prophets loved Israel. But they hated the waywardness of Israel. And they were calling Israel out of love back to justice, not damning--
REVEREND WRIGHT: Exactly.
BILL MOYERS: Not damning Israel. Right?
REVEREND WRIGHT: Right. They were saying that God was--in fact, if you look at the damning, condemning, if you look at Deuteronomy, it talks about blessings and curses, how God doesn't bless everything. God does not bless gang-bangers. God does not bless dope dealers. God does not bless young thugs that hit old women upside the head and snatch their purse. God does not bless that. God does not bless the killing of babies. God does not bless the killing of enemies. And when you look at blessings and curses out of that Hebrew tradition from the book of Deuteronomy, that's what the prophets were saying, that God is not blessing this. God does not bless it- bless us. And when we're calling them, the prophets call them to repentance and to come back to God. If my people who are called by my name, God says to Solomon, will humble themselves and pray, seek my faith and turn from their wicked ways. God says that wicked ways, not Jeremiah Wright, then will I hear from heaven.
Which, of course, is a lead in to playing an extended clip, so that we get the full context of the notorious "God damn America" soundbite. And I urge folks not to just read this transcript, but to clip the link above, and to see and hear it for yourselves, because that's the only way you'll see exactly how it was presented, the only way that you will really get it in context:
BILL MOYERS: One of the most controversial sermons that you preach is the sermon you preach that ended up being that sound bite about Goddamn America.
[TAPE]REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT: Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I'm through now. But let me leave you with one more thing. Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate - the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed. And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into position of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing God bless America? No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That's in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizen as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme! [END TAPE]
BILL MOYERS: What did you mean when you said that?
REVEREND WRIGHT: When you start confusing God and government, your allegiances to government -a particular government and not to God, that you're in serious trouble because governments fail people. And governments change. And governments lie. And those three points of the sermon. And that is the context in which I was illustrating how the governments biblically and the governments since biblical times, up to our time, changed, how they failed, and how they lie. And when we start talking about my government right or wrong, I don't think that goes. That is consistent with what the will of God says or the word of God says that governments don't say right or wrong. That governments that wanna kill innocents are not consistent with the will of God. And that you are made in the image of God, you're not made in the image of any particular government. We have the freedom here in this country to talk about that publicly, whereas some other places, you're dead if say the wrong thing about your government.
Now, you may not think this is politic to say such things. And you'd be right. Wright is not a politician. He's a preacher. And that is what preaching is.... Or maybe, even, a little bit of prophesy.
And that is, at bottom, why the religious right is so keen on joining church and state--so that they can use the power of the state to utterly extinguish competing religious views, particualarly ones that hew so closely to the original intent of the Hebrew prophets and the Gospels.
