Gleanings from National Review and The New Yorker are starting to put the puzzle together for me: Rev. Wright is to black churches what Marty Haugen music is to Catholicism and what megachurches are to Protestantism: in all cases it is Christianity desperately (and unnecessarily) trying to hold on to people. A large part of this desperation is likely due to we Christians not exhibiting the faith, hope and charity we ought, but Christianity can only be held together by Christ and certainly not by the duct tape of dumbed-down Masses or megachurches preaching the prosperity gospel or by disdaining whitey. What good is it to gain the whole world (in terms of adherents) but lose our soul?
From NR:
Personally, culturally, and politically, Obama is an academic. That is his ethos and appeal...My point of late has been that the whole Reverend Wright fiasco has its roots in the nexus between the radicalism of elite university divinity schools and the lives of urban African Americans. Wright’s infamous remarks are not a fluke or "out of context," but part of the consistently hard-left political worldview nurtured by Wright’s elite divinity-school mentors. Wright’s ability to give a popular and hard-edged spin to the sophisticated academic theology of black liberation is what drew Obama to Wright — who was the perfect bridge between Obama’s radical intellectual world and the ethnic authenticity he lacked.Related, from a New Yorker article on Rev. Wright and his spiritual mentor James Cone:
In the same way a good college lecturer makes political radicalism unthreatening and appealing to freshmen, Obama sees his task as smoothly introducing the sometimes radical or off-putting vision of the Democratic left to Americans. And in just the same way, Obama means to "bring us together" with Ahmadinejad, Chavez, Asad, and the rest of the world’s rogue gang.
There was, for [James] Cone, another motivating force in the rise of black liberation theology. In black neighborhoods across America, the spiritual marketplace was getting crowded, and churches seemed in danger of being edged out. Politically inclined young people who wanted no part of “the white man’s religion” could turn instead to Marxism, or to various strains of black-nationalist thought, or to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, the group that groomed Malcolm X. Cone found himself on the wrong side of a growing divide—as he puts it, “We were Martin Luther King, Jr., people”—and he realized that not just the sales pitch but the product had to be changed; the urgency in his prose reflected his anger but also his fear that the black Church was becoming obsolete. Preachers who had helped lead the civil-rights movement were being outflanked by black nationalists who mistrusted any belief system that claimed to be universal. The historian and theologian Gayraud Wilmore contends that the Nation of Islam “kept fire at the feet of the historic black churches.”
* * *
Wright seems to have a complicated relationship with Farrakhan, whose national headquarters are in the South Shore neighborhood, a few miles from Trinity. His remarks about Farrakhan veer from the fulsome (the minister’s analysis of America’s racial ills is “astounding and eye opening”) to the equivocal (he is “sincere about his faith and his purpose”), but for the most part Wright chooses his words with tactical care, the way Cone did when he wrote about Elijah Muhammad. It is the language of a respectful, and possibly anxious, rival. Like Cone in the nineteen-sixties, Wright may have worried that he would be judged, and found wanting, by purer and less forgiving forms of black nationalism. Farrakhan represented the threat; his followers—particularly the young black men whom churches sometimes had trouble reaching—represented the prize.
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