Black Church, Black Theology, and the Politics of Religion in America: A Reflection on the Theology-Race Controversy

April 30, 2008 By Development

by Lee H. Butler, Jr., Ph.D. Professor of Theology and Psychology, Founding Director of the Center for the Study of Black Faith and Life at Chicago Theological Seminary, and President, Society for the Study of Black Religion

I am deeply affected by the attitudes that have recently been expressed against the Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. and the Trinity United Church of Christ. Instead of seeking understanding, there has been a blatant disregard for the simple rules of conversation. Developing a story against a person and a people, and then asking a person and people to speak in defense against that closed-ended story does not advance understanding. The controversy that bears the pejorative language of “hate,” “racist,” and “anti-American” is not a simple and isolated indictment of one man and one congregation. This controversy disparages the African American preaching tradition and the African American Church heritage.

When David Letterman and Bill Maher “splice and dice” video footage which typecasts President George W. Bush, people don’t condemn the President and scream impeachment on the grounds of those portrayals. Furthermore, we don’t charge and judge the American people with incompetency for living beneath the administration of a President who has been typecast and caricatured as incompetent. And yet, from a single, isolated sound bite, African American theology and the African American prophetic preaching tradition have been judged and condemned.

For as much as I am dismayed by judgments based upon sound bites, I am aware of the “American way” of using sound bites to define a person’s life. A few sound bites that come to mind are: “Give me liberty or give me death;” “I cannot tell a lie;” “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country;” “My fellow Americans;” “I have a dream today;” “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Even as most know the personages who spoke each of those phrases, we recognize that those important moments-frozen in time and impressed upon the American consciousness-do not sum up the lives of the speakers. We do not allow phrases to totally define a person’s whole life story. In most instances, we respond to these phrases because they represent our self understanding as a nation. Just as some phrases support our self understanding, there are also phrases that challenge our image.

Consequently, I am deeply disturbed by the way thirty seconds of sound bite have come to represent 36 years of ministry at the church known as Trinity United Church of Christ. The absurdities of this reductionism can be viewed in one of the earliest media reports that prompted the first firestorm. A news journal interviewer identified the church as “Trinity Unity Church” and “Trinity United” during the same interview/report, and further suggested the church to be a separatist cult. Trinity United Church of Christ is neither a part of the Unity Church nor is it a nondenominational or separatist community of believers that stands outside the Christian heritage as a cult might. There was not enough integrity in the early reporting to respectfully identify the church as the Trinity United Church of Christ, a member congregation of a predominantly white denomination, that is, the United Church of Christ (UCC) that has its national offices in Cleveland, OH. This same disregard for respectful detailing continues to mark the controversy that grips and disenfranchises so many today.

Who is the man at the center of this painful moment? The Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr. lives an Africentric-practical-theology of liberation. His theology is an interdisciplinary construction with its roots-deep, woven and inseparable-in the gospel of Jesus the Christ, the African American Christian Church, and the United States of America’s founding principles of “freedom and justice for all.” To the extent that theology is a reflective declaration of who God is and what God is doing in and among human relationships, Wright does not want to deny any part of his African American being as he reflects on the activities of God throughout human history. His theology is Africentric, meaning, he places African peoples, philosophy, spiritual traditions, and the history of African colonization at the center of his analyses. His theology is Practical, in the disciplinary sense, meaning he focuses on homiletics, education, pastoral care, and evangelism. His theology is Liberationist, meaning, his reflections are praxis directed as he seeks to transform human suffering, caused by social injustice, in order for people to live with dignity and joy.

Rev. Dr. Wright’s theology embraces and embodies the Black preaching heritage, which is a synthesis of the African offices of chieftain, priesthood, and griot with American revivalism. He is not the originator of African American preaching rhetoric; and Trinity UCC, as a worshiping congregation, is not uniquely different from most African American worshiping congregations. Within the passion of worship, through the pedagogy of call-and-response, Rev. Dr. Wright preaches prophetically with a phenomenological understanding of his listening audience. With keenly developed diagnostic insights into the United States of America’s social malaise, he declares we have more systemic atrocities to overcome. As a public theologian, he does not shy away from the tough challenges facing African American communities today. This is a tradition he was nurtured into by his Baptist pastor father. Wright’s style of preaching-which is expositorily descriptive and prophetic-is representative of an African American preaching legacy that is nearly two centuries old.

What does his preaching have to do with the political landscape it is now being dragged across? For the most part, critics have said Wright’s message doesn’t match the contours of the nation, that he misrepresents American life. This perspective is epitomized by one interviewer who prefaced his question to Wright by saying, “Let’s not talk Black, let’s talk American,” as though they are mutually exclusive categories. Perhaps that is the lynchpin of the controversy. To “talk Black” stands in contradiction to the integrationist-assimilationist American identity, an identity that vanquishes Africanity. The contemporary understanding of the American identity believes we have overcome, and are beyond, the injustices of the past. But America, in its efforts to be a colorless or color-blind society, is unconscious to the ways it locates “black” outside its description of citizenship. We can celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day by augmenting each of our surnames with “Mc” and declare, “There’s a little bit of Irish in all of us.” But the same doesn’t hold true during African American Heritage Month. We have never heard non-Blacks state proudly, “There’s a little African in all of us!”

There is more than one social history and more than one way to be authentically American. No one would deny the diverse life experiences-including the religious experiences-of Senators Clinton, McCain, and Obama (named in alphabetical order) that make them uniquely different. Aspects of their commitments are contained within their political party affiliations. We further would not identify those differences to say that one is more authentically human-Qr one party more authentically American-than the others. Similarly, we cannot deny the uniquely different life experiences of African American Christianity and European American Christianity. They are two different stories that converge and diverge throughout their respective histories.

Acknowledging a context as uniquely different does not necessitate the context being seen as better or worse than other contexts. Recognition of the uniqueness of a context, however, is exactly what is called for to appropriately engage those who live within a particular context. For example, no public speaker ever speaks to an audience without an awareness of the audience to which she or he is speaking. No speaker will address a women’s gathering as though he or she is speaking to a men’s gathering, or vice versa. The persons who have been identified as “great” speakers are generally those who speak insightfully to their listeners’ experience and not those who only speak from their own experience. In fact, when one generally encounters a speaker who only speaks from her or his own experience, the listener’s response is usually one that says: “He/She talked at me. She/He didn’t talk to me.” Our popular rhetoric has suggested that the European American experience and European American Christianity are superior and should be the only frames for interpreting American religious life as it speaks from its own experience. The response to the rhetoric from the African American side has been an experience of others “talking at” the African American Church and the African American community.

One reporter asked the question, “Can you at least understand why people were so upset with Rev. Wright’s comments?” The question assumes, however, that Rev. Wright was wrong and everyone who reacted negatively was right. To that extent, it was the wrong question because it placed the burden of change on Wright. The question ignores the different kinds of work that needs to be done by all parties on both sides of an historical experience. We should not assume that all have been totally healed from the atrocities of the past. For people to declare, “I’ve always been proud to be an American,” completely ignores the many shameful actions by Amer1icans against people within America that have been historically documented. Should Americans be proud of the slaughter of women during the Salem witch hunts? Should we be proud of the capricious carnage of the War between the States? Should we be proud of the genocide of Natives during Western expansion? Should we be proud of the false imprisonment of Japanese Americans in concentration camps during WWII? Should we be proud of a history of firebombing Churches in the 20th century? The person who has been brutally victimized, although restored to living life with hopefulness, never actually forgets the trauma. When the remembrance of the traumatic event, however, is coupled with the energy that empowers one to live with creativity, we live life with authenticity and integrity.

Mis-perception and misinterpretation have informed and influenced this controversy and have caused pain at very deep levels. Sensational reporting and sound bite responses will not help us to have a greater appreciation for one another. In order to open the closed-ended story that has become the sole talking point, we all must be wining to make ourselves vulnerable and engage in open conversation, with all sides wining to listen with mutuality to hurtful stuff.

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Posted in UCC, Theology, Social Justice, Culture