TUCC's radicalism down the memory hole

Obama's church is scrubbing its website of controversial material (e.g., the fulsome praise of Louis Farrakhan). And Rev. Wright has disappeared from public view (hurry up and build his palatial manse so he can live in a comfortable exile till November, people!).

Ah, if only it were that easy to erase decades of radicalism. The New Yorker has a piece up today referencing Good Friday sermons at Trinity UCC. Excerpt:

Seven preachers, seven sermons: that’s either a celebration or an endurance test. Inevitably, it’s a competition. The first at the pulpit, the Reverend Dr. Eugene L. Gibson, Jr., from Olivet Fellowship Baptist Church, in Memphis, set the bar high. His sermon came from Luke 23:34, which records the first words of Christ during the crucifixion: “Then said Jesus, Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” It’s one of the best-known lines in the New Testament, an eloquent expression of grace in extremis. But Gibson added his own rejoinder: “Yes, they do!” And, in case anyone missed the heresy, he spelled it out: “I. Dis-a-gree. With Jesus.”

The momentum was building. Gibson talked about tormentors who knew exactly what they were doing, making implicit reference to Wright’s detractors and explicit reference to the petty naysayers of everyday life. Only near the end did he draw back, admitting that—as usual—Jesus was right and he was wrong. “It’s not what they were doing,” he said. “It’s who they were doing the what to.” They knew exactly what a crucifixion was; they just didn’t know who Jesus was. Even so, his caustic reproach hung in the air all afternoon: “Yes, they do!”

The Reverend Dr. E. Dewey Smith, from the Greater Travelers Rest Baptist Church, in Decatur, Georgia, based his sermon on Jesus’ dying words, as recorded in John 19:30: “He said, ‘It is finished.’ ” Smith urged the congregation to be strong and smart in the face of the onslaught, and his sermon built to an exuberant, sung finale: worshippers cried out, rejoicing in their own fortitude. Pfleger, taking up the question that is Jesus’ last utterance during the crucifixion in the Gospel of Mark (“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”), inveighed against BET, “prosperity-pimping preachers,” and rappers. He also delivered one of the day’s most impassioned calls to arms: “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sit back while you tear down Farrakhan and Jeremiah Wright. How dare you!” During each sermon, the non-preaching preachers lounged on pews next to the pulpit, joined by the Reverend Otis Moss III, a thirty-seven-year-old Yale Divinity School graduate who will succeed Wright as Trinity’s senior pastor. Moss and others sometimes swarmed the pulpit when they heard a particularly heated cadence, pantomiming gestures of restraint that came to seem indistinguishable from encouragement.

You could hear Wright’s influence in every sermon. His life and work can’t be accurately extrapolated from a few video clips, and, at the church now, “sound bite” is uttered like a curse word. But there’s nothing on YouTube that seems likely to scandalize anyone who has spent time at Trinity. Even Obama does not claim to be surprised by what he called, in his “A More Perfect Union” speech, which he gave on March 18th, Wright’s “profoundly distorted view of this country.” (Despite such disavowals, there is no evident resentment toward Obama at the church; on Good Friday, every mention of his name and reference to his candidacy was greeted with applause.) Few of the preachers resisted the temptation to draw parallels between the man on the Cross and the man on the news, though most of them found ways to do so indirectly. The Reverend Dr. Rudolph W. McKissick, Jr., from Bethel Baptist Institutional Church, in Jacksonville, Florida, looked suggestively around the room as he described the last days of Jesus: “He does not retire in celebration, but he retires with a crucifixion.” Worshippers were free to think about any retiree they liked.

Great. Criticism of Wright is tantamount to murdering God. And on Easter Sunday, TUCC's new pastor said that Jeremiah Wright was a victim of "lynching."

Are we really going to have a political culture in which serious criticism of a black political and culture figure who says shocking things is racialized in extreme terms, even compared to racist murder and deicide? Because you know, that's crazy.

(And yes, I think it was offensive when Clarence Thomas deployed the word "lynching" to describe the smear on his character during his confirmation hearings. What happened to Thomas was deplorable, in my view, and an outrage. But to compare it to murder -- and murder done in such a way as to have shocking historical resonance in this culture -- is playing with fire.)