Kuo: No Checkers speech needed

(Self-editing note: Please imagine that there is a comma between "other" and "redeeming" in my last sentence. It changes the meaning substantially.)

Why does anybody stick with any church -- or any group -- when its leader, or certain members, do things that are profoundly distasteful?

Perhaps for the same reason any of us don't disown any of our parents or siblings when thay do patently moonbat, offensive things with disturbing frequency. I imagine any number of us have had legitimate, serious reasons that we could have pulled a Prodigal Son act and told our parents, in effect, "You are dead to me. Give me my inheritance now, and I'm out of here."

But we don't. Why is that?

Barack Obama regards Jeremiah Wright as a sort of spiritual father who took him in when he was a relative nobody and adrift. Why would he throw the man under the bus just because the man has proved himself profoundly human . . . and screwy?

I supposed it all depends on how you regard church. Is it just a voluntary association of like-minded people with like sensibilities?

Or is it an incredibly diverse, messy, f***ed-up family -- And aren't all familes pretty f***ed-up on some level? -- centered on Jesus Christ, the Divine Physician who does what He can with who He has to work with?

If church is, ultimately, a family -- and if you've come to love that church family like your own nuclear one -- you're gonna bail if some of them are, shall we say, eccentric? Particularly Dad.

Not to say that what Rev. Wright has preached isn't in some cases loathesome. But in other instances, it's just what we might suspect is true . . . what we'd rather believe isn't true . . . but MIGHT be true, preached without nuance and with the amps turned up to 11.

But I think that Obama turning his back on his church family over what his then-soon-to-retire pastor said about politics would be about as reasonable as my deciding to damn the Catholic Church to Hell every time some nutty-ass Jesuit fills in for Father on the rare Sunday and -- through his egotistical liturgical freelancing -- does violence to the sacrifice of the Mass and lies to the congregation about the nature of celebration and what it tells us about the right relationship between God and man.

Andrew Sullivan has the full text of Jeremiah Wright's 1990 sermon "The Audacity of Hope" posted on his Daily Dish blog. I see why Barack Obama was inspired by it.

I would be surprised if David Kuo were to give the same assessment if someone were attending the Rev. Phelps "God Hates Fags" Church. If someone were to say, "You know I part ways with the Rev. Phelps when he protests at the funerals of military men and women killed in battle. And I find his lude and crude discussion of homosexuality to be distasteful, even though I share his moral condemnation of homosexual acts. But I sure do like his exegesis of Romans, and his rhetorical flourishes. His sermons inspire me."

There's an amazing irony here that I don't think anyone has caught. What attracts Obama to his pastor is what attracts Obama's followers to him: inspiring rhetoric for which getting dirty one's hands with assessing it spoils the high. It's the same reason why men go to strip clubs: the illusion of intimacy without the hard work of loving a real person. I will call this phenomenon "pastorbation."

About the only thing I find interesting about this is that Obama is the first black politician we've seen who reaches out to white voters without completely buying into the dominant white pov. Up to now we've pretty much only seen clowns like Jesse Jackson who clearly had no interest in having anyone on board who didn't back his view of America and only appealed to african americans. Or we've seen people like Clarence Thomas or Alan Keyes who have adopted the dominant white pov as their own and see their experience of being black in America as primarily about overcoming and ultimately rejecting a dysfunctional african american perspective in order to attain success.

It seems to me that while Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton came to represent the bad black politician and Clarence Thomas and such the "right" way of being black leader, Obama is working out a third way (or at least trying to). While abandoning the angry, divisive rhetoric of the Jesse Jacksons of the world, he seems to view the more angry, bitter elements of african american perspective the way that many conservatives view Ann Coulter or Glenn Beck - usually overheated and excessive in rhetoric, often wrong, while also containing pieces of truth people don't usually want to talk to. He's not about to adopt their rhetoric or take his ideas to the extremes that some one like Wright on the left or Coulter on the right would. But at the same time, he doesn't see their overheated, over extended rhetoric as requiring him to completely part ways.

In this way, much of the concern over Obama seems to be based on the fact that he's not adopting the "right" way of being a black leader as exemplified by people like Clarence Thomas or Alan Keyes. However, if this is the case, it almost seems that one of the requirements for being a "good" black leader is accepting that the black perspective is dysfunctional and forcefully rejecting anything and anyone which is working from that perspective. Which is extremely presumptuous and condescending on the part of whites who would like Obama to carry out their very white vision of "transcending race". I just think it is wrong for the people who have born the lesser portion of the burden and damage of our racial history to insist on being able to define what racial reconciliation must look like. I may be wrong, but this is exactly what a lot of this conversation looks like to me.

As for the idea that we're seeing what passes for normal in the black community, there's some truth to it. But consider that if he has stood up and railed about forced sterilization, government experiments worthy of the Nazi Mengle, terrorism, infiltration their community groups, assassinations, etc he would be telling the stone cold truth. Heck, even the introduction of drugs into inner city neighborhoods was done with the full knowledge of certain government officials. So the AIDS thing may be self-obviously wrong, but I think we can give black folks a bit of leeway for being paranoid. It's not like there isn't a long history of truely outrageous stuff to back it up.

Oh, but I forgot - black people are supposed to forget about all that stuff because we white folks said so. How dare they not do what we say! IJS.

What Michelle Norris said was even worse news. Is she really serious? Does everyone in Afro-American Churches "amen" this kind of stuff and sing God d--m America?

I have to agree with tags. Having read Rev. Wright's sermon about the audacity of hope at Andrew Sullivan's blog, it's easy to see how Obama was inspired enough to use it for the title of his book.

If anyone is interested, it can be read . The painting that Rev. Wright keeps referring to is this one, BTW.

Another thing worth noting is that the United Church of Christ is now coming out in defense of Trinity, which is the church that Obama attends:

http://www.ucc.org/news/chicagos-trinity-ucc-is.html

rebeccat: You said what I was trying to say. Thanks.

bd rucker: I would say a sizable majority of the 8500 congregants are not upper class Kenyan/Kansans with political aspirations, y'know?

My understanding is that this is a megachurch whose people represent the whole gamut of class and income. By being located in and serving an inner-city populace not surprisingly Trinity sees its mission to stand with the poor.

From Trinity's mission statement:
Trinity United Church of Christ has been called by God to be a congregation that is not ashamed of the gospel of Jesus Christ and that does not apologize for its African roots! As a congregation of baptized believers, we are called to be agents of liberation not only for the oppressed, but for all of God’s family. We, as a church family, acknowledge, that we will, building on this affirmation of "who we are" and "whose we are," call men, women, boys and girls to the liberating love of Jesus Christ, inviting them to become a part of the church universal, responding to Jesus’ command that we go into all the world and make disciples!

We are called out to be "a chosen people" that pays no attention to socio-economic or educational backgrounds. We are made up of the highly educated and the uneducated. Our congregation is a combination of the haves and the have-nots; the economically disadvantaged, the under-class, the unemployed and the employable.

It struck me this morning at church that Obama's "Checkers" speech ought to go like this:

"Okay, everyone, now that I've heard and read some of the stuff my pastor's been saying and writing, I get that there's a problem. And I don't agree with it, like I said. But hey, all this negative and inflammatory stuff was said in church. In church! During the sermon. I mean, I probably heard one word in ten. If I asked you what your pastor preached about three weeks ago, could you tell me? Without looking it up?"

And everybody would nod as the blinding flash of the obvious illuminated the whole situation.

:)

bd rucker: I would say a sizable majority of the 8500 congregants are not upper class Kenyan/Kansans with political aspirations, y'know?

Have you ever been to a black church in a large metropolitan area?

Many black churches with sizable, affluent memberships are located in the inner city and have a socio-economically diverse congregation. Maybe such a phenomenom doesn't exist so much in "the white community" (LOL) but a lot of black churches are this way, especially in big cities.

My mom's church, Abyssinian Baptist Church in NYC, is one such church. It's located in Harlem. Down the block from it you can see boarded-up buildings and drunk men hanging out on the corner, while inside during service you have many doctors, lawyers and business folks as well as "regular" people. My mom's pastor, Calvin Butts Jr., is very politically connected. Hillary Clinton went to speak there right before Super Tuesday.

It is a fact that a lot of people join my mom's church not just for the spiritual teachings and the fellowship but also because the "right" people go there. I'm not saying that's a good thing but it's a dynamic that exists. I can see why Obama, as a grassroots organizer with political ambition, would join such a church, given its deep involvement in the community.

And please don't assume that I'm an Obama supporter just because I'm black because I'm not. I'm actually a Republican. I just have a slightly different perspective on the matter.

I am curious if anyone sees a double standard being applied here.

Many ministers, strongly affiliated with Republicans, have made outrageous and reprehensible comments. Yet, their phone calls continued to be accepted at the White House, and appearances by ranking Republicans at the ministers' universities are considered de rigueur.

While comments made by the Republican ministers were widely publicized and criticized, the ministers continued to appear on Sunday morning shows, and they continued to exercise their power. Why are Republican ministers considered an authentic expression of vox populi while Democratic ministers are just bad and evil?

I recently finished David Kuo's fascinating spiritual and political autobiography. Isn't this an example of what he was talking about? Even a minister, regardless of policial persuasion, can get politics and Jesus mixed up, and we need to take it down a notch before we make the same mistake.

bd_rucker: Yes, I have been to black inner-city churches. I am a white (ethnic) Catholic but have been close to and "adopted" by at least one black family. My ex-boyfriend's grandfather had his "own" church, and the political/social/economic entwinement of church in the black community was shown to me. I understand it's not really all of that different in white protestant churches, where people know what church to belong to in order to network with the right people. I grew up with a cruder version of this phenomenon in my own hometown where people hooked into the Catholic parish serving members of their ethnic groups who had just got off the boat, so to speak. Poles, Italians, Irish, etc., received what we would call social services, etc., from these churches, and the same idea continues with our latest arrivals from Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries.

Also, don't assume just because I'm defending his church that I would vote for Obama. He's too enthusiastic about infanticide for me, but I do appreciate that there is some racist overtones and paternalism in the criticism of Obama and his church, and this was well articulated on this thread by rebeccat.

nepat: As a Christian woman, all I can say is AMEN! Good heavens, AMEN. You should go over the the "God Damn America" post and put this up there as well.

Thank you so much for putting it that way. Bless you!

Really NO ONE agrees with EVERYTHING that their pastors say if they DID it wouldn't be a NEED for pastors. They are trying to CONVINCE most of the people sitting in the pews. I had a pastor preach a sermon about the "righteousness" of the war in Iraq- there isn't much righteousness in killing but you didn't see me getting my panties in a bunch about it. Just move on.