Lost in the admiration of Obama’s stunning speech on race was the emerging MSM consensus on Jeremiah Wright: the preacher's comments were too political, the pundits tell us, too inflammatory, and uniquely out of bounds for a preacher–-an anomaly, something freakish in the history of the Christianity. On CNN, a shocked Tony Perkins told us that Christianity makes us respect our government and respect authority. This isn’t the religion of Christ or the prophets, of course; it’s the religion of Karl Rove, whose specialty is crucifying others, not getting crucified for others.
So in the interest of marshaling a defense of the prophetic, I'm providing a sourceblog of "inflammatory," prophetic Christian quotes so that we can set the record straight on the history of Christianity in this country. Feel free to comment in any way on this diary, but I’d love it if you could supply some good quotes in your comments, so that I can update the diary as a source for all of us to defend the prophetic voice of religion from getting snuffed out by the Karl Roves of the world.
This is a diary to set the record straight.
Though I don’t agree with a good deal of the substance (and timing) of Wright’s rhetoric, there is ample historical precedence for "inflammatory" rhetoric on behalf of the suffering throughout American history. When those who are silenced, oppressed–those whose voices go unheard against injustices that go unnoticed–there is often the need to shock an audience, a congregation, a community, a nation out of its stupor. For the powerless, voice must be heightened to the point where utterance itself becomes a concrete thing, where words create a palpable theater of dissent. As abolitionist and prophetic evangelical Christian William Lloyd Garrison put it back in the 19th century: "reform is commotion." And he knew what he was talking about: on Independence day, Garrison shocked audiences by holding the Constitution aloft, cursing it as "the source and parent of atrocities," and then lighting it on fire. "And let all the people say, ‘Amen,’" he concluded. Now that’s inflammatory preaching. "The prophets," Gary Dorrien writes, "were the ones who dared to speak God’s moral and justice-seeking word against the complacency, indifference, and selfishness of the ruling order."
So when MSM drone Michael Gerson says Wright "ignored the message of Martin Luther King Jr. and introduced a new generation to the politics of hatred," he has remade Martin Luther King Jr. into a safe prophet. And a safe prophet is a contradiction in terms. Gerson apparently has forgotten the Martin Luther King Jr. who said the following in the middle of the Viet Nam war:
"I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today– my own government" ("A Time to Break the Silence")
Now that just might be more "inflammatory"–a more sweeping condemnation– than Wright’s statements. I imagine Foxnews would put that quote in an eternal youtube loop and demand all Americans renounce and reject King Jr. for his shocking anti-American hate-speech. Certainly, we’d have a much different idea of King if all we knew of him was this statement.
But the history of commotion– of inflammatory rhetoric on behalf of the poor and oppressed – begins with the Bible itself. "Instead of cursing the enemy," Abraham Heschel writes, "the prophets condemn their own nation." Somebody please alert CNN to this fact. "Pull them out like sheep for the slaughter, and set them apart for the day of slaughter" Jeremiah calls out to God of the "den of robbers" and broken cisterns which is his nation. "From the least to the greatest of them," he cries out to the powerful, "Every one is greedy for unjust gain; There is nothing but oppression within [my nation]." I suppose the equivalent of the MSM back in the day spent hours lambasting Jeremiah for his anti-Israel sentiments without pausing to consider the injustice that he damned in the name of God.
Hosea says of Israel: "For they sow the wind and they shall reap the whirlwind. . . Israel is swallowed up; already they are among the nations as a useless vessel." Damn. That would get Hosea on O’Reilly for sure. As would this:
Because you have trusted in your chariots [SUV’s]
And in the multitude of your warriors, [army]
Therefore the tumult of war shall arise among your people,
And all your fortresses shall be destroyed.
In prophetic religion, shock is a weapon of the powerless to wake the conscience of the powerful: "there is in my heart as it were a burning fire shut up in my bones," Jeremiah says in a line Fred Shuttlesworth would quote during the Civil Rights era, "and I am weary with holding it in." In prophetic religion, to think only of self and self-salvation in a time of oppression is a damnable offense. This is true when Amos says that God will punish (e.g. "damn") Israel (dragging the people away by "fishhooks"!) for selling "the righteous for silver, and the needy for a pair of shoes," for "trampling the head of the poor into the dust of the earth." This is true when Jeremiah says "woe to him who builds his house by unrighteousness and his upper rooms by injustice," or "Those who are for the sword, to the sword; those who are for captivity, to captivity." This is true when Isaiah says:
"The spoil of the poor is in your houses.
What do you mean by crushing the people,
by grinding the face of the poor?"
This is true when Jesus says it’s harder for rich men to get into heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, or when he tells this vicious little story about rich folks going straight to hell:
"There was a rich man who was dressed in purple and fine linen and lived in luxury every day. At his gate was laid a beggar named Lazarus, covered with sores and longing to eat what fell from the rich man's table. Even the dogs came and licked his sores.
"The time came when the beggar died and the angels carried him to Abraham's side. The rich man also died and was buried.In hell,where he was in torment, he looked up and saw Abraham far away, with Lazarus by his side. So he called to him, 'Father Abraham, have pity on me and send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, because I am in agony in this fire.'
"But Abraham replied, 'Son, remember that in your lifetime you received your good things, while Lazarus received bad things, but now he is comforted here and you are in agony. And besides all this, between us and you a great chasm has been fixed, so that those who want to go from here to you cannot, nor can anyone cross over from there to us.'
"He answered, 'Then I beg you, father, send Lazarus to my father's house, for I have five brothers. Let him warn them, so that they will not also come to this place of torment.'
"Abraham replied, 'They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them.'
" 'No, father Abraham,' he said, 'but if someone from the dead goes to them, they will repent.'
"He said to him, 'If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, they will not be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.' "
This was true when Roger Williams, an alienated and persecuted Baptist, said that linking the state to religion would turn the church into a "filthy dunghill and a whorehouse of rotten stinking whores and hypocrites" (imagine Sean Hannity interviewing Williams about THAT comment!). This was true when Ralph Waldo Emerson said of the terrorist, John Brown, that "the gallows is as glorious as the cross." And this is true when Jeremiah Wright says that God will damn America for treating its citizens as unequal and unworthy.
Here’s your "inflammatory" prophetic Christian primer (please help me out here, this list is woefully incomplete--especially when it comes to prophetic women's voices):
- Abolition
"What to the American slave is your Fourth of July? . . . a day that reveals to him more than all other days, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is a constant victim. . . Your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; . . . your denunciation of tyrants, brass-fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, your religious parades are . . . bombast, fraud, deception, impiety and hypocrisy." – Frederick Douglass: 4th of July speech
"I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels..." – Frederick Douglass, "Narrative"
"This is an age of the world when nations are trembling, and convulsed. . . And is America safe? Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion. . . But who may abide the day of his appearing? 'For that day shall burn as an oven: and he shall appear as a swift witness against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger in his right: and he shall break in pieces the oppressor.'
. . . . Not by combining together to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin, is this Union to be saved -- but by repentance, justice, and mercy; for not surer is the eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean, than the stronger law by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on nations the wrath of the almighty God." -- Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin. . . and yes, she just said God damns America for injustice
"When a government puts forth its strength on the side of injustice. . . it reveals itself a merely brute force, or worse, a demoniacal force." – Henry David Thoreau
"We talk about a representative government; but what a monster of a government is that where there the noblest faculties of the mind, and the whole heart, are not represented. A semi-human tiger or ox, stalking over the earth, with its heart taken out and the top of its brain shot away. . . .The only government that I recognize, – and it matters not how few are at the head of it, or how small its army, – is that power that establishes justice in the land, never that which establishes injustice. What shall we think of a government to which all the truly brave and just men in the land are enemies, standing between it and those whom it oppresses? A government that pretends to be Christian and crucifies a million Christs every day?" – Henry David Thoreau, "A Plea for Captain John Brown"
Theodore Parker on the Fugitive Slave Act, after Harper’s Ferry: "If you were attacked by a wolf, I should not only have a right to aid you in gettng rid of that enemy, but it would be my duty to help you in proportion to my power. . . If it were a murderer, and not a wolf, who attacked you, the duty would still be the same."
"The essence of Christianity is its practical morals" Parker said. "Either it has ethical use or no meaning: "It is there for use, or it is nothing; and if you combine it with sharp trading. . . or private intemperance, or successful fraud, or immoral politics, or unjust wars, or the cheating of Indians, or the robbery of frontier nations. . . it is a hypocrisy, and the truth is not in you."
- The Social Gospel
Walter Rauschenbusch, after witnessing children’s funerals in NYC wrote: "The religion which allies itself with injustice to preach down the natural aspirations of the masses is worth [less] than atheism"
"This war trade is not for patriotism but for profit. . . . Capitalism has often sacrificed the higher values of humanity to make big profits" – Walter Rauschenbusch
"I say it takes a higher brand of patriotism to stand against the war clamor than to bellow with the crowd" – Walter Rauschenbusch
". . . it is possible to hold the orthodox doctrine on the devil and not recognize him when we met him in a real estate office or at the stock exchange" – Walter Rauschenbusch
"It must be recognized that extreme individualism is immoral" – Walter Rauschenbusch
"If any one holds that religion is essentially ritual and sacramental; or that it is purely personal; or that God is on the side of the rich; or that social interest is likely to lead preachers astray; he must prove his case with his eye on the Hebrew prophets, and the burden of proof is with him" – Walter Rauschenbusch
On tenements and poverty, Rauschenbusch wrote: "The preventible decimation of the people is social murder"
"It would be unfair to blame theology for the fact that our race is still submerged under despotic government, under war and militarism, under landlordism, and under predatory industry and finance. But we can justly blame it for the fact that the Christian Church even now has hardly any realization that these things are large-scale sins" – Walter Rauschenbusch
Washington Gladden on war: "If you eat poisonous or indigestible food, the retribution is not deferred until after death and judgment, nor is there any scheme of substitution by which you may evade the penalty; it follows the transgression instantly and inevitably" -- Translation: the chickens will come home to roost.
"There are tremendous financial combinations involving billions of capital, which stand to make immense profits out of war, and out of the preparation for war, and they are moving heaven and earth today to drive this nation into the complications which will put money in their purses" – Washington Gladden
Washington Gladden in 1907: "It is idle, it is fatuous, to hide from ourselves the fact that we are facing, here in the United States of America, a social crisis. The forces which are at work here–the forces whose operation I have been gathering strength since the Civil War–the tendencies to the accumulation of power in the hands of a few; the tendencies to use this power predaceously; the tendencies to boundless luxury and extravagance; the tendencies to the separation and the antagonism of social classes – must be arrested and the that speedily, or we shall soon be in chaos. A social order which makes possible the rise of a Harriman or a Rockefeller is a social order which cannot long endure. These swollen fortunes that many are gloating over are symptoms of disease; they are tumors, wens, goiters; the bigger they are the deadlier. They are not the reward of social service; they are the fruit of plunder. . . . Inequalities of the most glaring sort, oppressions, that are continental in their reach, a race of plunderers more powerful and more cunning than ever before appeared in history, with great lawyers to aid them in their predatory schemes; a reign of debilitating luxury that would put to the blush the Romans of the decadence, and, as the fruit of the tree, misery and poverty at the other end of the social scale, and deadly class hatreds steadily deepening, and threatening revolution–this is the logical, natural, inevitable outcome of the moral individualism on which we have been trying to build society. Instead of its being true that democracy will transfigure egotism, we have found that no form of society can march hellward faster than a democracy under the banner of unbridled individualism"
"The true atheist is the one who denies God's image in the 'least of these'" -- Dorothy Day
Woody Guthrie, "Jesus Christ":
Jesus Christ was a man who traveled through the land
Hard working man and brave
He said to the rich, "Give your goods to the poor."
So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
Jesus was a man, a carpenter by hand
His followers true and brave
One dirty little coward called Judas Iscariot
Has laid Jesus Christ in his grave
He went to the sick, he went to the poor,
And he went to the hungry and the lame;
Said that the poor would one day win this world,
And so they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
He went to the preacher, he went to the sheriff,
Told them all the same;
Sell all of your jewelry and give it to the Poor,
But they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
When Jesus came to town, the working folks around,
Believed what he did say;
The bankers and the preachers they
nailed him on a cross,
And they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
Poor working people, they followed him around,
Sung and shouted gay;
Cops and the soldiers, they nailed him in the air,
And they nailed Jesus Christ in his grave.
Well the people held their breath when
they heard about his death,
And everybody wondered why;
It was the landlord and the soldiers that he hired.
That nailed Jesus Christ in the sky.
When the love of the poor shall one day turn to hate.
When the patience of the workers gives away
"Would be better for you rich if
you never had been born"
So they laid Jesus Christ in his grave.
This song was written in New York City
Of rich men, preachers and slaves
Yes, if Jesus was to preach like
he preached in Galillee,
They would lay Jesus Christ in his grave.
III. The Civil Rights Era and Black Liberation Theology
"When the underprivileged demand freedom, the privileged first react with bitterness and resistance." – Martin Luther King Jr., "Pilgrimage to non-violence"
"Any religion that professes to be concerned about the souls of men and is not concerned about the slums that damn them, the economic conditions that strangle them and the social conditions that cripple them is a spiritually moribund religion awaiting burial." – Martin Luther King Jr., "Pilgrimage to non-violence"
"A Nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death" – Martin Luther King Jr., "A Time to Break the Silence"
"It is not too much to say that whoever wishes to become a truly moral human being (and let us not ask whether or not this is possible; I think we must believe that it is possible) must first divorce himself from all the prohibitions, crimes, and hypocrisies of the Christian church. If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of him." -- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time.
"Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community ... Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy." – James Cone
IV. The New Evangelical Social Gospel
"If we were to set out to establish a religion in polar opposition to the Beatitudes Jesus taught, it would look strikingly similar to the pop Christianity that has taken over the airwaves of North America." -- Tony Campolo
"People do not get crucified for charity. People are crucified for living out a love that disrupts the social order, that calls forth a new world. People are not crucified for helping poor people. People are crucified for joining them." -- Shane Claiborne, The Irresistible Revolution
"What I often get branded is 'radical.' I've never really minded that, for as my urban-farming friends remind me, the word radical itself means 'root.' It's from the Latin word radix, which, just like a rad-ish, has to do with getting to the root of things. . . I lament the dreadful seduction which has resulted in Christians becoming so normal." -- Claiborne, Irresistible Revolution