Irvine511 said:
you know how churches love to take credit for the civil rights movement? that's 'cause of the black churches.
Yes. And not every preacher who inspired people to risk their lives by becoming actively involved in the Civil Rights Movement was as measured and reflective in their sermons as MLK.
I do understand and appreciate where people are coming from who feel sincerely troubled about what Obama's longtime membership at Wright's church might say about his judgment concerning social and political alliances. While I'm less sympathetic to the idea that other candidates' political ties to ministers who've said some pretty ugly things about Catholics, gay people, and America having "deserved" Katrina or 9/11 on account of "sin" can be safely dismissed simply because said candidates don't actually belong to said churches, I do appreciate the point that closer social ties = greater concern about undue influences. And I do agree with deep that it's inaccurate to suggest that some of Wright's more controversial assertions are merely garden-variety "black church rhetoric."
Still, I share Irvine's sense that there may be some pretty major disconnects at work here in grasping certain tendencies in how members of historically disadvantaged communities recognize and support each other and manage the identity balancing act of integrating those influences on self and community with a simultaneous sense of oneself as part of the broader community of American society. I can't speak from experience about being black nor a longtime member of a black church, but I can speak about growing up Jewish in a community whose elders' sense of Jewish identity was strongly shaped by the Holocaust on the one hand, and the often-uncomfortable 'white...sort of' social space Jews in the Deep South historically occupied on the other. As late as the 1970s, there were quite a few synagogues out there where it wasn't at all uncommon to hear what many today might consider paranoid or even hostile attitudes towards 'mainstream American society' expressed--from the pulpit, from the pews, in Sabbath school classes and at tea-and-pastries gatherings after services...from hyperbolic gossip about politicians, celebrities and organizations suspected of anti-Semitism to outright goyim-bashing, Arab-bashing, and obsessive preoccupation with Holocaust study as the
sine qua non of Jewish identity. This despite the fact that the Holocaust had ended 30 years before and that nothing remotely like it had ever happened
here to begin with. Now, most all of that has entirely faded away by this point in time, and certainly *one* reason for that was growing discomfort and alienation towards those who expressed such sentiments on the part of younger Jews, who'd grown up in a different world and held quite different perceptions of where the truly dangerous faultlines in US society and the world were. But those changes, for the most part, took place slowly, over generations, and through gradual, subtle shifts in what kinds of internal debates and discussions went on and what changes in the community's sense of its place and potential in American society occurred, through assimilation and advancement and so forth. None of which erased that sense of collective identity, but it
did alter the collective sense of what sort of world we inhabited and, as a result, what a "Jewish" way of being and participating in and giving back to that world might look like. It certainly didn't happen primarily through individuals definitively and defiantly proclaiming, "Let's all talk love and uplift and self-reliance and Torah only, all the time--no more doom-and-gloom negativity, or I'm leaving!" Because those are your people, your blood, the ones who suffered and forged ahead with their heads held high through indignities you never had to deal with and clung tenuously together in order to make a better world for
you, and though you often chide their resentments and pessimism and even sometimes feel like they're grappling with phantoms, you respect and admire and feel loyal and indebted to them nonetheless. That's not to say there are never lines drawn in the sand or refusals on principle to compromise, but it's never as simple as "I really didn't like a few of those spiteful accusations my rabbi's made towards Southern Baptists over the years--time to move on." That is a very individualistic, free-agent-monad-with-no-obligations-to-anyone-but-God way to think about it, and for better and for worse that just isn't a self-explanatorily, always and everywhere Wisest and Truest way to approach life or faith or community.
Again, I'm
not saying there isn't a time and place for drawing a line in the sand, or that there's something innately noble and righteous about prioritizing loyalty to your "brothers," your faith community, or "the man who brought me to God." Just that it isn't as tidy and simple as "A good and wise man always cuts himself off from 'friends' with fears and resentments and distrusts he doesn't share--period." And that we need to be mindful of the paucity of references we sometimes have with which to make fair and reasonable analogies to other situations. Jeremiah Wright is certainly not much "like" Martin Luther King Jr., he isn't much "like" Louis Farrakhan either, and he certainly isn't just like Barack Obama. Who is, after all, the one who's seeking the Presidential nomination, and his books and speeches and voting record have been out there for many months now for all the world to see. This was, at most, a case of poor judgment about social alliances...with, I hope, the above qualifications about the kinds of alliances we're talking about taken into account.
Huckabee
