I've noticed some similarities between Barack Obama's pastor, Jeremiah Wright and Yale's activist chaplain during the Vietnam War years, William Sloane Coffin. They both draw on the strong social reform traditions of the Congregational Church, known since 1957 as the United Church of Christ. If Wright's oratory and style derive from his black religious heritage, they've been reinforced by a style of social critique stretching back to the jeremiads of the Puritan divines who originally fathered modern congregationalism.
There is much to admire in Wright's words and actions, however incendiary and divisive his language. Wright has turned his church, Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, into a leading exponent of "the social gospel." What this means, in essence, is that God's kingdom is best reflected and anticipated through efforts to improve life on earth. It's a millennial impulse resembling that which gave rise to the temperance, anti-slavery and women's rights movements of the nineteenth century. For preachers like Wright, black liberation theology adds a special perspective. Developed initially by the theologian James Cone (http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/11232007/profile.html), it argues that African-Americans, long subjected to the religious interpretations of slave masters and white supremacists, need to interpret Christianity for themselves and to take fuller control of their own spiritual development. Afrocentric adherents like Wright embrace the devotional, musical, and ritual traditions that sustained African-Americans through slavery and Jim Crow. For William Sloane Coffin, this would have been a welcome development. His deep involvement in the civil rights movement of the 1960s showed him, again and again, how social justice movements were infused and propelled by black expressions of spiritual power.
In Wright's Chicago church then, we have a confluence of religious perspectives intensified when the Congregational Church merged with the German Evangelical and Reformed Churches to form the United Church of Christ (UCC). The loose Congregational structure persisted enough to allow component congregations to shape many of their own worship practices. Afrocentric traditions flourish but also those of other ethnic groups with a heritage to sustain. In several UCC congregations, for instance, Christmas Eve is associated with sausage and sauerkraut dinners and the singing of "Stille Nacht."
While Wright's sermons seem angry and excessive, they are not as idiosyncratic as they first appear. Many people subscribe to the idea that our government made an indirect deal, when combating anti-American forces in Central America, that allowed America's inner-cities to be flooded with crack cocaine. The informal pact, outlined by Gary Webb in a San Jose Mercury News series of articles (1996), was regularly discussed in black media as "The Plan."
Wright's belief that aids is a conspiracy against blacks becomes easier to understand if we remember that our government collaborated in infecting blacks with syphilis, which it did without telling them in the Tuskegee Experiment. (http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0762136.html) Also, the disproportionately high rate of incarceration of black males, resulting in part from sentencing discrepancies in federal drug laws, exposes young men to HIV in prison and contributes to the rampant spread of AIDS inside the black community.
That Wright damns America falls well within the prophetic tradition practiced throughout American black and Puritan church history. Condemning one's country while working hard to redeem it is not necessarily an unpatriotic contradiction.
I don't mind Wright's assumption that Clinton cannot understand certain things because she has not experienced them. The biographies I have read about her suggest that her approach to poverty issues, even as a girl, was well-meaning but naive. This is not her fault, but she cannot lay claim to what she has not known.
Though American people did not deserve what befell them on 9/11, we have been shortsighted in NOT examining what motivated the murderers. Hate by itself is not a satisfactory motive; it is only a symptom. Stereotypically anti-white comments in Wright's sermons are inexcusable and unworthy of defense, but we must explore what lies at the base of hatred.
I once did fieldwork in the black churches of Waterbury Connecticut for a folklore degree from the University of Pennsylvania. After immersing myself in the prayer meetings and praise services of black churches, mainstream churches seemed tepid by comparison. Here are some of the key elements that crossed the many different churches I visited, ranging from storefront congregations to established African Methodist Episcopal (AME) institutions.
First, black churches draw on a rich, improvisational body of music that sucks an involved congregation into shared, participatory worship.
Second, there is a lot of attention given to praising and thanking God as opposed to just asking him for forgiveness or desirable outcomes.
Third, the sermons are designed for catharsis and address feelings not easily expressed elsewhere. In this way, they resemble the blues or even some of the psalms. The congregation shouts out its reactions as in a reading of the megillah on Purim. People get up and testify, delivering narratives with a positive outcome about how they were lost, or down, or broken-hearted, or desperate. The sense of collective empathy and acceptance is overwhelming.
Fourth, aspects of ritual and informal custom in the black church have analogues not only in Africa but elsewhere in the black diaspora. Swooning, dancing in the aisles, big hats, charismatic traditions, and call-and-response gospel singing are some that spring readily to mind.
Black churches resemble white Christian evangelical churches but may emphasize different things. Many seem more allegorical than literal in biblical interpretation; there is a typological and metaphoric sensibility that aligns the poetic with the mundane and allows spiritual and earthly concerns to coexist in worship. Often, there is an emphasis on healing that, at the very least, fortifies people with a positive spirit for survival.
If you haven't been to a prayer meeting with old dying people swooping you into a shared embrace as they wheel about the room praising God for one new day of breath in their body, you haven't fully lived! That's how powerful the spirit engendered in black churches can be.
The United Church of Christ, heir to the old Congregational churches, played a special role in
black church history as the spiritual home of many
abolitionists. Long before the civil war, it served as a meeting place for blacks and whites. It had little presence in the South but did reach out to establish black colleges such as Howard and Fisk Universities. Eventually, it helped train many black intellectuals and attracted members from the black middle class. The United Church of Christ has an inter-racial membership and there are some white members in Obama's own congregation.
The United Church of Christ's congregations were critical to the civil rights movement and remain an important node of connection between black and white communities within the denomination as a whole. Black and white congregations often work together to implement their joint heritage of social reform. UCC members throughout America journey to Trinity United Church of Christ to study its formidable social outreach programs that improve life in the larger black community.
Obama's church is a natural link to his childhood years at Hawaii's Punahou School, founded by Congregational missionaries. Joining Trinity must have allowed him to embrace black experience without having to divest himself of the familiar.
Why don't blacks go to inter-racial churches more frequently? Until recently, blacks were not welcome in "white churches," though during America's early religious revivals they helped shape American forms of worship. Black ministers held thousands of camp-meeting participants spellbound. Blacks and whites often sang together at those gatherings. Soon, however, whites tightened control over religious worship and black spiritual leaders were stripped of power and influence. African-Americans founded their own denominations or worshipped informally together as slaves when and wherever they could. Excluded from formal education, slaves and freemen relied heavily on oral tradition to impart biblical teachings --story, dance, dramatization, and chanted sermons became vital narrative devices for putting a story or concept across.
Blacks did not form their own congregations because they rejected whites but were pushed into them because they were not welcomed by whites on equal terms. On their own, they shaped spiritual traditions that flowered into the powerful religious oratory and community-organizing skills so instrumental to the civil rights movement.
When blacks go to inter-racial churches, they usually abide by the devotional practices already established by those congregations. This leaves little space for their own observances. Sometimes a rupture results: George Augustus Stallings, an African-American priest in Washington DC, was excommunicated by the Catholic Church
after founding the Imani Temple to practice an Afrocentric version of Catholicism. While his form of worship shifted theologically over time, the dispute started initially over incompatible styles of ritual and worship.
Congregational Ministers, white and black, have spoken in defense of Wright's ministry and his practice of the social gospel. One can't fault Obama, married to an African-American woman and raising two
African-American children, for finding an anchor in Trinity United Church of Christ. I'm glad he rejected what was racist and hurtful in the language of his pastor; I hope he took public issue with that pastor's biased expressions; but I completely understand why he did not reject either his church, its community, or the imperfect pastor who nevertheless provided him with so much spiritual inspiration. William Sloan Coffin would have understood.