The Speech: Obama, Race, Religion

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

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That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. Full Text.

It is a bit early, and I am not sure I know what to make of Obama’s speech except that it is well crafted for placing emotion above reason, as usual. I do understand embracing a community, a Church, in all its contradictions. Communities of people are complex, individuals are complex and we love them and commune with them anyway despite their contradictions.

But the Church is something else. Perhaps I am in the minority of Catholics. But I dont have have a partial relationship with the Church. While Catholics are a pile of contradictions, Catholicism is not. Rather, Catholicism is supremely coherent and intellectually vital from generation to generation. Catholicism abhores a contradiction in its teaching and strives to reconcile contradictions in our living through the sacraments. In my experience, one disagrees with the Church to his peril.

So, in a real way I cannot imagine a Rev. Wright in the Catholic Church. Preaching ideology at the expense of theology is simply untenable. Remove the glad rags and gesticulations, the customs, and the affect of the black Church to which I am NOT referring. I cannot imagine the intellectual equivalent of Rev. Wright in the Catholic Church. If I met such in the Church, I would denounce him to the bishop.

So, Obama supports a minister who plays fast and loose with the facts, who so distorts the truth of things as to make it unrecognizable, who is himself an unrestrained, unrepentant demagogue, and who foments racial hatreds. And we still consider Obama for the highest office in the land? the world? I don’t think so. We need a true post racial ideology candidate. Obama is far, far from that.

But, as I say, it is early after his speech. What do you all think?