Obama’s pastor speaks

In this must-see five minute segment, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago speaks over and over of what it’s like being a “poor black man living in a country and a culture run by rich white people.” (Among the poor black men, he makes clear, is Obama himself!) Then, after using that phrase over and over, invoking more and more righteous rage against white America, which he compares to imperial Rome ruling Judea in Jesus’ time, he says that Jesus is so great, because Jesus tells us not to hate anyone (no matter how much they oppress us), and the sweetest sound in the world is the sound of Jesus’ name. So Wright gets it both ways. He gets to invoke and build up black anger against white America, and he gets to claim piously that as a follower of Jesus he doesn’t hate anyone.

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Rachael S. writes:

If B. Obama can reconcile the two worlds of thought that his church and his campaign represent, what does that say about the rest of black America, and what the majority of blacks think about the white people around them?

If a white pastor was making comparable speeches from a white supremacist perspective, a white person who attended that church would not then go out into the world and campaign to blacks. If he did he would be one or all of the following: psychotic, sinister, parasitic, predatory, inscrutable, poisonous, opportunistic.

Bill Carpenter writes:

That’s what inspired Nietzsche’s contempt for Tertullian—an apostle of “love” seething with hatred for Rome. The slave masses resent their masters and use the discourse of love to bring them down.

We can juxtapose such hypocrisy with a proper, non-liberal Christianity. Proper Christianity is based on charity towards all, but also regards recognition of the differences between one’s own and others—and between all the different spheres and provinces of being—as a part of that charity. A popular billboard here in Minnesota runs, “Would Jesus discriminate?” The answer is he did and he would, for he encounters each person in the fullness of that person in all his dimensions, not as an abstract, disincarnated human unit.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 13, 2008 11:53 PM | Send