Friday, May 2, 2008

One sermon, two voices

This is going to be a long entry, I’m afraid. It shouldn’t have to be, but sometimes restoring context takes some time.

Barack Obama has been getting ripped for a couple of short snippets of a sermon of Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s for weeks now. Everyone seems to have piled on, including Senator Clinton.

Now, I don’t know about you, but as a thoughtful Republican, I’m suspicious of outrage over a sound bite. Nuance is important. Context is important. Reality is crucially important. That’s why I’m going to suggest that it might be a good thing not to let some moronic talking head try to use a tiny snippet of videotape to unfairly shift your emotions.

So to that end, I started tracking down the sermon Wright delivered—and the first thing I discovered is that the sound bites that have been playing over and over and over were from two separate sermons. The media not only removed the context, but also did some cherry picking. Lovely. Nice going, media! Way to present an accurate picture!

So far, I’ve been able to track down the first sermon. It’s on odeo.com if you want to hear the whole thing. The sermon was delivered on September 16, 2001, at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Illinois, and is entitled The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall.

If you’d rather read it—and I suggest that might be an easier way to think about it—I’ve transcribed the entire thing here. (The punctuation and paragraph structure in the transcript is a bit arbitrary; like many good preachers, Reverend Wright’s sermons have a tendency to move along, building a cadence, so I’ve taken some gentle liberties with periods and paragraphs.)

It is an intensely beautiful sermon. It talks about the urge for revenge that can infect even the most devout of God, as told in an ancient psalm, and what the faithful can do now to transform that urge into something more uplifting, something more productive, something better. It does include some criticism of America’s policies and priorities, and while I find it uncomfortable to listen to, that discomfort is because it is boldly stated, unnuanced, and—largely true.

Now, you’ll note that one thing this sermon doesn’t include is the phrase “God damn America.” In fact, that snippet was pulled out of the context of a sermon given two years later, which I’ll address in a future post. The point I want to make is that this is a remarkable sermon—passionate, heartfelt, hopeful and worshipful. It is so good I want to hear the other sermon.

The “controversial part” of this sermon is usually quoted thusly:

This would be inflammatory if this were the entire context. It isn’t. Let me give you a more complete quote:

What Reverend Wright appears to be saying in the quote isn’t so much a condemnation of America, as it is a condemnation against violence and vengeance: that violence and vengeance merely breed more of the same, and that Edward Peck, a respected diplomat, recognized that and used Malcolm X’s famous phrase to summarize the issue.

So yes, there is criticism of the actions of the American government and some of its people here. Is any of it actually untrue?

Any of it?

Of course, you can argue the specifics of some of the assertions. For example: bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII with atomic weapons was seen, at the time, as a necessary act in order to save hundreds of thousands of American lives, and probably millions of Japanese military and civilian. At the time, atomic weapons were seen as just another bomb, without the stigma that we now have regarding radiation or massive civilian casualties. Given that the Japanese were, by some accounts, remarkably close to having their own atomic weapon, and would certainly have unleashed it on American forces if they’d had a chance, I’m not sure this nation can really be painted as the designated villain in that particular case.

Much harder to defend is how the America of the last few hundred years has treated the indigenous peoples of North America. Starting with Jonestown:

Too early for you? Okay. Fast forward 254 years:

Colonel Chivington was a former minister, believe it or not. He said that just before launching an attack on a camp of Cheyenne who were peacefully assembled at Sand Creek in Colorado. Over 50 men were killed, 110 women and children as well. Most of their bodies were mutilated, and Chivington and his men dressed their gear with body parts and fetuses.

And it went on. The massacre at Wounded Knee took place in 1890—500 troops supported by four pieces of lightweight rapid-fire artillery killed more than 300 men, women and children of the Lakota Sioux. The reason the troops were there in the first place? To move them off their South Dakota lands into a train so that they could be deported to Nebraska. And why was that? Because the United States government decided to break their contract with the Lakota, in order to make room for more homesteaders.

In between those years, the French, the English, and the Americans had devastated Native American communities, carried out extermination campaigns, even going so far as to use biological weapons (blankets infected with smallpox). Most of the atrocities commonly assigned to Native Americans, such as “scalping,” weren’t even their idea—they learned them from the French, the English . . . and us.

Violence begets violence.

This sort of thing is, unfortunately, a permanent, heartrendingly black mark on our national history. There are others as well. They can never be erased—only overcome. And while we have managed to overcome some of these in many respects, the legacy we have left is often uncomfortable, unsatisfying, and in many cases, probably unresolvable.

But note that what Reverend Wright is saying is not that we “deserve” what happened on 9/11, nor is he saying that the attacks were carried out because of these things. What he is saying is that we should not be surprised or indignant that violence and vengeance has reached our shores, and that we need to think about how we want to respond to this.

During the 24-hour television marathon I found myself in after 9/11, it was heartbreaking to see so many nations, so many people around the world, mourn with us. And it was also infuriating to see images of Palestinians dancing in the streets after the attacks. They weren’t the ones who attacked us, mind you. They wouldn’t benefit from the actions of a few zealous criminals who carried out a senseless and tragic massacre. They were simply delighted that a nation that—from their perspective—had been behaving like a bully was now reeling from a blow of vengeance.

This nation has passed up some unique opportunities in the last twenty-odd years. We could have been building diplomatic prestige. We could have been cementing a reputation for helping rebuild counties we’d had a part in tearing down. We could have taken a chance on repositioning ourselves not as the planet’s police officer, but as a nation who leads by example rather than by force, who talks first rather than invades, who develops long-term relationships rather than fleeting and unreliable partnerships.

Or perhaps we just needed to tend to our own business a little more, and take a long, hard look at our own priorities. Reverend Wright touches on that later on in this sermon:

Whatever your take on the specifics of such programs, it’s hard to argue with the underlying sentiments of compassion. Indeed, a Christian is under an obligation to emphasize this sort of compassion—it is a natural extension of the exhortation of Christ: feed the hungry, clothe the naked.

However, all of this aside, the bulk of Reverend Wright’s sermon that day—the majority of that message—was the struggle with the urge for vengeance, and how to replace it with love and gratitude. It spoke to the heart of what should be the Christian response:

Which brings us back to the focus of the controversy: Senator Obama, who has been getting beaten up on this for weeks now.

We have seen how the underlying message of the words of Reverend Wright have been distorted by the news media. This alone should bring about fury—the news media can and must do better than this if they have any hope of redeeming themselves in the eyes of an increasingly skeptical American public.

Whether or not you agree with everything Reverend Wright has to say, either within the context of these sermons, or in some of his more provocative statements, he is an articulate, thoughtful man. For Senator Obama to have included him on his campaign’s spiritual advisory committee was a reasonable thing to do—clearly, Reverend Wright has earned his credentials as a spiritual advisor, and he is widely respected.

I suppose the other thing that’s bothered me in this ongoing idiocy is the assumption that just because someone is an advisor in one area that they assume that Senator Obama will be slavishly devoted to everything else they have to say. Reverend Wright wasn’t appointed as a medical advisor, or a scientific advisor, or a policy advisor, and so his dubious views on the origin of AIDS, for example, were not part of his purview. Moreover, he was one of many advisors, one voice out of many, for the Senator to weigh appropriately and synthesize his own opinions so informed.

The GOP—and, it seems, Senator Clinton, and ABC News, among others—are seriously trying to convince you that Senator Obama is incapable of forming his own thoughts, of judging the words of those around him, of weighing carefully what his advisors say. It is an insipid and insulting accusation. It is, in short, a lie. By taking Reverend Wright’s words out of context, they have deceived; by portraying Senator Obama as a mindless groupie, they have deceived. They have done a disservice not just to the Obama campaign, but to the voters, both Republican and Democratic.

They should be ashamed. They should apologize. But they won’t, and that, I’m afraid, is another small black mark in our nation’s history.

We can do better than this. We must do better than this.