Jeremiah Wright or Wrong

We respond at last to the clamor of our gentle readers for our take on Barak Obama's pastor problem. We warn our readers that we are likely to frustrate their desire for red meat.

In short, we think that the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and especially his parishioner Senator Obama should be given a pass on this one. Mostly, that is. We don't deny that Wright has made multiple statements that are highly provocative, even offensive, and sometimes just silly. We don't deny that Obama has some explaining to do about his relationship with Wright. We just aren't as exercised about this as are many of those who share our wish that a candidate besides Obama be the next POTUS.

But here's the deal (and we say it with massive love and respect for the profession we are about to characterize, as we are one ourself): Wright is a preacher. Saying stuff like this is what preachers do.

OK, now that most of our readers are as mad at us as they were at Wright, we will hasten to explain our intemperate remark.

Preachers orate. Oratory involves highly charged, provocative rhetoric, intended less to describe or inform than to summon to commitment and action. When Wright referred to the US of KKKA or said that America deserved the 9/11 attacks for its own terrorism or suggested that because of the country's many sins of oppression the appropriate song would be "God Damn America," he was doing what preachers do as they reach the emotional climax of their messages: having gained the congregation's trust and carried them to the point of decision, he was crystalizing the message in sharply ironic language that left no room for indifference.

It has been widely observed that Wright's remarks on 9/11 were similar to Jerry Falwell's except that their cited proximate causes were on different sides of the political spectrum (for Falwell it was abortion and homosexual behavior that left America deserving what it got). Let's say further that (a) the same could be said for thousands of obscure sermons preached in the wake of 9/11 from varying political perspectives; (b) any of Wright's other remarks could find parallels from various preachers on the religious right (e.g., "United States of Infanticide" has probably been uttered in more than one American pulpit). These observations have been widely employed to argue whether a politically conservative candidate would be called to account for his pastor's similar remarks (and the obvious answer is yes). We cite them merely to illustrate that there's nothing unique about Wright's language.

Further, many of Wright's remarks were particularly expressive of frustrations about racial issues in the United States. We are not terribly shocked that an African-American preacher would be so blunt on the subject. It is not so long ago that rampant racism produced lynchings, Jim Crow laws and various other acts of systematic exploitation of African-Americans. Though the worst of racism blessedly is now history, its legacy is hardly erased in the day-to-day experience of many. By definition, SWNID is not an object of racist attitudes, but we find it hard to imagine that our being otherwise would be less than a source of outrage for our otherwise placid self.

All that having been said by way of excusing the Rev. Wright, we nevertheless offer some less charitable evaluations.

By all accounts, Jeremiah Wright is an enormously talented preacher, powerfully charismatic (in the non-theological sense). In our experience, preachers of exceptional talent are sometimes seduced by their talent into a habit of intemperate and inconsiderate expression. Seeing only a glimpse of Wright through media reports and clips of recordings, he might just fit that category.

What's obvious about the Rev. Wright, however, is that his commitment to making the gospel relevant in the here and now is a commitment to the political agenda of the radical left. For that, we find fault. The failures of American society are many, but the solutions of the left can only deepen those failures. When concern for the plight of the oppressed glibly equates to pacifism and socialism, critical judgment has failed.

Some of Wright's failures of critical judgment are pretty obvious. While it's not at all outrageous to suggest that the higher legal penalties for the usage of crack cocaine over powder cocaine have had a disproportionate impact on African-Americans, it's silly to suggest that the government created crack to oppress blacks. Same goes for suggesting that the government created AIDS for the same reason. And giving an award to Louis Farrakhan is the epitome of silliness.

So we SWNIDishly judge Jeremiah Wright guilty of being an uncritical thinker who lets his talent get the better of him, but in largely harmless ways. That's a venial sin, not a mortal one. We absolve him. Preachers do that kind of thing. We reserve the privilege of nominating him as Most Embarrassing Christian, but that's about the worst of it.

Now, where is Obama in all this? He's been a member of Wright's church for 20 years, is reported to have donated $20,000 to the church in that period (a figure that Thomas Sowell cites as considerable but which should be a source of shame for someone with Obama's family income), and names Wright as his spiritual mentor. Why is Jeremiah Wright's church Barak Obama's church? Should Obama be castigated for his long-time association with Wright?

Well, we ask SWNIDishly, why is your church yours? We suspect that the answer is more complex than we are inclined to admit. It always has to do with much more than our agreement with what we hear from the pulpit. People choose churches for all kinds of reasons, but in general I suspect that most would say "It feels like a place where I can belong."

For the Obama family, prominent and ambitious members of Chicago's African-American community, Wright's church would present a place where they could "belong" in many respects. It was a church where being black is the norm (those who think it reprehensible that Wright's church is avowedly "Afrocentric" should consider how "Eurocentric" are other churches, without their admitting it openly). It had plenty of members like them, black folk on the move to power and prestige. It was big enough that their celebrity would not be an enormous distraction. There are lots of churches in Chicago, but probably not many that offered all that.

And Wright's church was a place where the Obamas could network with other members and with the church's powerful pastor. If Barak Obama wanted a mentoring relationship with an older man of color who had used his talent to gain influence and who could help him think about how to process his life in politics from the perspective of faith, he could have that relationship by joining Jeremiah Wright's church.

In making that move, Obama was in no sense endorsing or agreeing with everything that his pastor might say, let alone his offensive-to-many way of saying it. He took the bad Wright with the good Wright. And SWNID actually thinks that's typical and decent. Leaving a church every time you have a disagreement with the preacher is not exactly what we call good churchmanship.

We actually wonder whether Obama hasn't all along realized that to accomplish what he seeks to accomplish, he will need a very different rhetoric than his pastor's. As Lincoln was to Garrison, so perhaps is Obama to Wright.

Still, it's hard to believe that Obama didn't see this one coming. How could any professional politician with national ambitions expect not to be called to account for his pastor's incendiary remarks? Perhaps Obama's habit of mind, week by week filtering Wright's rhetoric, was so deeply established for him that he couldn't hear what others would hear. Perhaps his loyalty to a friend was so strong that he ignored an issue that he should have at least thought through in advance. Perhaps he thought that anything that didn't come up in a Chicago or Illinois political campaign, where political hardball was perfected, wouldn't come up in a national election. Whatever the cause, not having a planned-in-advance response to the pastor problem was a political mistake that any good politician shouldn't have made.

So for us, the rap on Obama coming out of the Wright imbroglio is not that Obama might be as radical as his pastor. It's that it may show him to be as naive as his opponents suggest he is.