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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Rev. Wright does not speak for the black church |
| 2008-05-07 |
| Stephan and Abigail Thernstrom, Real Clear Politics In his recent incendiary remarks, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. claimed that criticism of his views is nothing less "an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition." Can it really be that millions of black Americans regularly choose to listen to viciously anti-white and anti-American rants on Sunday mornings? Happily, Chicago's Trinity Church is an outlier in that regard. Most black churchgoers belong to congregations that are overwhelmingly African-American and are affiliated with one of the historically black religious denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) or the National Baptist Convention. Rev. Wright's Trinity Church, on the other hand, is a predominantly black branch of a white denomination that is not part of "the African-American religious tradition." The United Church of Christ (known until 1957 as the Congregational Church) has a little over a million members; a mere 4 percent of them are black. Fewer than 50,000 blacks in the entire nation worship at a UCC church. In contrast, 98 percent of the National Baptist Convention's 4 million members are African Americans. Add in black Methodists and Pentecostals, as well as other black Baptists, and the total comes to more than 14 million members of an organized, predominantly African-American church. These churches include a substantial majority of all black adults today. In terms of sheer demographic weight, they clearly represent the "African-American religious tradition"-as Rev. Wright's branch of a overwhelmingly white denomination does not. There are also a non-trivial number of black Americans who are members of the Catholic church. Even among traditionally "ethnic" parishes*, the Catholic church has always been "salt & pepper" integrated as a matter of official policy. These churches vary in many respects. . . . Some of these churches are led by figures like Rev. Wright, an adherent of what is called black liberation theology, which rejects racial integration and stresses the experience of black bondage. But not many. C. Eric Lincoln's mid-1980s survey of the leaders of 2,150 black churches found that two-thirds of them said they had not been influenced by "any of the authors and thinkers of black liberation theology." Indeed, 63 percent did not believe that the black church had "a different mission from the white church." A third did not even think it was "important have black figures in [their] Sunday school literature." This integrationist vision is at one with the values of most Americans. A glance at the National Baptist Convention and the AME web sites is revealing. They feature what one might expect of any religious denomination-a statement of their creeds, the tenets of the theology and worship practices that distinguish their faith from others. There is almost no indication that these churches are predominantly African American. The closest they come to mentioning race is the AME's statement that its basic beliefs do not "differ from what all Methodists believe." The church, we learn, separated from the main Methodist body two centuries ago because of "man's intolerance of his fellow man, based on the color of his skin." The web sites of Rev. Wright's Trinity Church and the national body to which it belong stand in shocking contrast. Before the Trinity site was sanitized in early 2008, its material seethed with racial animus and hostility towards America. . . . It is no accident that Rev. Wright's Trinity Church is affiliated with the Clearly, Rev. Wright does not speak for mainstream black churches-and he has done them a gross disservice by claiming to do so. He shares neither their vision nor their values. Why their relative silence in the face of Rev. Wright's rants? Perhaps they believe they are protecting Sen. Obama, but if Wright convinces white Americans that his hateful speeches reflect the ways African-American churchgoers think and worship, the quest for racial equality will be set back decades. *Where I grew up, as a consequence of 19th-century immigration, there was a part of town where you had St. Patrick's (the Irish parish), St. Stanislas' (the Polish parish), St. Cyril's (the Slovak/Ukranian parish), St. Francis of Assisi (the Italian parish), Our Lady of Hungary (obvious ethnicity) and the Greek Orthodox church all within a six- or eight-block space. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #3 "Terrorism antiIslamic!" |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2008-05-07 12:12 |
| #2 there are folks who want reparations for slavery who dont agree with liberation theology in general. |
| Posted by: liberalhawk 2008-05-07 11:22 |
| #1 I googled "Black church" and the Wright agenda appears consistent with the rest of the movement. The common theme is: reparations. Wright and Obama are chasing the biggest ambulance of all: American private wealth. |
| Posted by: McZoid 2008-05-07 08:56 |