Martin Marty defends Jeremiah Wright
Barack Obama has been villified in the United States -- mostly by Hillary Clinton's campaign -- for attending the church in Chicago pastored for 36 years by Dr Jeremiah Wright. Mrs Clinton says she would have resigned her membership of Trinity United Church of Christ congregation in protest at the sermons preached there by the pastor. The fact that Barack Obama has refused to resign from the church (or to dismiss his former mentor as a race warrior) is evidence, according to the Clinton campaign, that Mr Obama is not fit to be president. Step forward Professor Martin Marty, America's most distinguished historian of Christianity. In in the Chronicle of Higher Education, Professor Marty defends the record of Jeremiah Wright and does so as one of the ten thousand members of the same congregation in Chicago.
He writes: "Yes, while Trinity is "unapologetically Christian," as the second clause in its motto affirms, it is also, as the other clause announces, "unashamedly black." From its beginning, the church has made strenuous efforts to help black Christians overcome the shame they had so long been conditioned to experience. That its members and pastor are, in their own term, "Africentric" should not be more offensive than that synagogues should be "Judeocentric" or that Chicago's Irish parishes be "Celtic-centric." Wright and colleagues insist that no hierarchy of races is involved. People do not leave Trinity ready to beat up on white people; they are charged to make peace."
Martin Marty is not uncritical. Trinity's honouring of the controversial preacher Louis Farrakhan was, according to Mr Marty, "abhorrent and indefensible, and Wright's fantasies about the U.S. government's role in spreading AIDS distracting and harmful." These are failures of judgment by the pastor, but not in themselves indications of a racist trajectory in his thinking. These comments from one of the most respected scholars of religion and culture in American public life go some distance in counteracting the challenge to Senator Obama's judgement. Time will tell if these words, and other replies, will be enough.
Comments
Hillary is a disgrace. She has tried to destroy Obama and in the process has destroyed the Democratic hope of taking the White House. It's interesting that even John McCain thnks Obama can't be held responsible for his pastor. Hillary plays dirty. She seems willing to let McCain win in the hope that she can come back in 2012 with a second run for the presidency.
I continue to hope, as Cal Thomas suggested on your programme last Sunday, that the superdelegates will feel obliged to support Obama. If he is selected as the candidate, then his problems really begin because the GOP will use every attack already minted by Hillary to destroy him.