UCCtruths

Mollie over at GetReligion.org sees the double standard on mixing religion and politics in advertising:

Do you remember back in December when all hell broke loose because Mike Huckabee put out a television ad wishing Iowans “Merry Christmas” while seated in front of a bookcase that looked like a white cross? There were dozens of broadcast reports and newspaper stories analyzing whether it was proper to evoke a cross in a political ad. Well, apparently crosses are fine in political ads now. And you don’t even have to use the subliminal ones. Barack Obama has been using fliers in southern states that really pound home his Christian bonafides, touting himself as a “committed Christian” who has been “called to Christ.” Kentucky has a primary on Tuesday and the fliers have been sent out far and wide to evangelical voters.

More than a few folks on the message board were a little perplexed about why I was making an issue out of Obama's brochure and I think Mollie sums it up pretty well. I would add that the hypocrites at Americans United for the Separation of Church and State pounced on Huckabee's Christmas television advertising last year:

Huckabee, by contrast, has been specific, said Barry Lynn, executive director of the advocacy group Americans United for the Separation of Church and State. "Jesus and Mike Huckabee are both products being sold by this commercial. And I don't see how anyone could view it otherwise," Lynn said.

As expected, Lynn is silent about Obama's brochure.

By Pastor Ted Weis, Congregational Church, Little River, KS

It may not be the way the United Church of Christ wants a sacred conversation on race, but Stanley Kurtz rummaged through several issues of Rev. Jeremiah Wright's Trumpet magazine to better comprehend Wright's world view:

I obtained the 2006 run of Trumpet, from the first nationally distributed issue in March to the November/December double issue. To read it is to come away impressed by Wright's thoroughgoing political radicalism. There are plenty of arresting sound bites, of course, but the larger context is more illuminating-- and more disturbing-- than any single shock-quotation. Trumpet provides a rounded picture of Wright's views, and what it shows unmistakably is that the now-infamous YouTube snippets from Wright's sermons are authentic reflections of his core political and theological beliefs. It leaves no doubt that his religion is political, his attitude toward America is bitterly hostile, and he has fundamental problems with capitalism, white people, and "assimilationist" blacks. Even some of Wright's famed "good works," and his moving "Audacity to Hope" sermon, are placed in a disturbing new light by a reading of Trumpet.

After you finish reading Kurtz's article, you get the sense that for Rev. Wright, everything is black and white-- an "us" verses "them" race mentality where liberation for blacks is available only through religiously baptized left-wing politics.

Kurtz goes on to ask:

Is Wright an anti-white racist? He would certainly deny it... Wright, however, rejects the notion that "black racism" is even possible. That is why he prefers the term "white supremacy" to "racism." "Racism," says Wright, is a "slippery" and "nebulous" term, precisely because it seems potentially applicable to blacks and whites alike. The term "white supremacy" solves this problem, and Wright deploys it at every opportunity.

While Kurtz doesn't buy Barack Obama's plea of ignorance about Rev. Wright's extreme political views, Kurtz's review confirms what Obama said about his now famous pastor in his Pennsylvania race speech:

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s [is]... that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past.

Since Wright is the only reason the UCC is calling for a "sacred conversation" this Sunday, it's appropriate we ask questions not just of ourselves, but also about him:

Does Wright yearn for true reconciliation between the races? Or, the defeat of one race and triumph of another? What, if any, progress does he see in America's race relations?

That's what I'll be asking Sunday.

Any bets that the hypocrites over at the Americans United for the Separation of Church and State will, again, have nothing to say about this?

The "sacred conversation on race" called by our denominational leaders is a farce because it only came about to blunt the criticism we received because of Jeremiah Wright's comments. No honest person can claim that this conversation would have happened otherwise. I'm glad that at least one minister with standing in the United Church of Christ recognizes the disingenuous nature of this "sacred conversation on race" albeit for different reasons. From Rev. Dennis Sanders:

The United Church of Christ, the denomination that Wright is ordained in, has decided to make next Sunday, May 18, a day to have a "sacred conversation on race." On the surface it seems to make sense; let's talk about this issue that has had such a prominent role in American history. I've heard others talk about having a conversation about race and again, it sounds good. But in the end, this conversation ends up not really being a conversation at all. In some ways, it seems more like a play, where persons of color and whites have roles to play, where the script has already been written well in advance.

The pastoral letter on racism from the leaders of the United Church of Christ is interesting, in that it paints an extremely dark view of race relations in the United States circa 2008. This is a sample:

The Pastoral Letter on Racism documented what it called “a sobering truth” – namely, that despite the meaningful progress achieved during the civil rights era, “quality of life for the majority of racial and ethnic people is worse today in many ways than it was during the 1960s.” The letter went on to name a number of disturbing trends that signaled growing racial intolerance and hostility: increasing inequities between the rich and the poor; charges of “reverse racism”and attacks on affirmative action; a resurgence of racially motivated hate crimes and; fear of “foreigners” surfacing in movements such as “English Only.” Seventeen years later, in 2008, we might wish to believe that we have made significant progress in addressing and reversing those alarming trends. Lamentably, that claim cannot be substantiated.

We have witnessed a systematic assault on affirmative action policies at the state and national level. In the wake of the “war on terror,” our Arab American and Muslim brothers and sisters contend daily with discrimination, racial profiling,and misunderstanding about the true nature of Islam. As unemployment rates soar and jobs are outsourced overseas, frustration and rage are unleashed upon the most vulnerable within our borders – immigrants and those who some call “illegal aliens.” After more than two years, thousands of dispossessed residents of New Orleans are still in diaspora, awaiting our government’s promise to help rebuild their homes and neighborhoods. The divide between rich and poor is greater than at any time since the Great Depression. Despite the rise of a Black middle class over the past 40 years, the average net worth of White families in 2008 remains 10 times greater than the average net worth of Black families. Racial segregation in our public schools has intensified and has now been condoned by the United States Supreme Court.

There is a lot here to agree with in some case and a lot to disagree. On the belief that the quality of life for persons of color is worse than it was in the 60s, I have to respectfully disagree. I've said this before, but back in the 50s, my father could not get a hotel room or eat in a restaurant when he made trips to his native Louisiana from Michigan. Black people were getting killed by whites and all-white juries let them get away with it. Is life a racial utopia? No. We still have problems. We still have cops shooting unarmed blacks and too many who think hanging a noose is funny. But we are not the America of the 50s and 60s where whites were trying hard to keep blacks down.

The letter also seems to ignore the most important change of the last 40 years: a political party is on the verge of nominating a black man for President and all indications point to this same black man becoming the 44th President of the United States. A nation that once treated its African immigrants as property might very well elect someone of African heritage.

Barak Obama's historic run for the presidency can't by itself atone for America's racist past, but it is important and can show that we have come a long way. To not hold this up is puzzling.

But maybe what is most puzzling about this letter is that this isn't as much a conversation as a monologue. It lists a litany of problems and says white people don't care and that life is hard for persons of color. I'm not saying any of this is a falsehood, but there isn't much room in this letter for a conversation on race. It has one view and one view only.

Indeed it has only one view because this is not an authentic call for a conversation on race. I talk to a number of different ministers all over the political and theological spectrum of the UCC and I don't get the sense that there is any enthusiasm at all for this "conversation". This Sunday we will be a denomination of mostly white people pretending to have a conversation on race and we'll pat ourselves on the back for this phony gesture of social justice.

U.S. News and World Report had an interesting conclusion in it's article on the United Church of Christ:

Whether an unabashedly progressive church can become a growing part of the American religious landscape is still an open question. "They may become the refuge for liberals from all sorts of denominations, " says University of California-San Diego sociologist John Evans, though he sees no evidence that the UCC's liberal branding campaign has worked. In the meantime, just as leaders of evangelical churches tend to be more politically conservative than most people in their pews, so the leaders of the UCC will probably continue to be to the left of most of their flocks. And that may only contribute to the view, particularly among many younger Christians who are leaving both mainline and evangelical churches, that overly ideological leadership is one of the weaknesses of contemporary institutional Christianity.

I don't make it a habit to post entire articles, but this article needs to be posted in it's entirety to be understood. From RealClearPolitics.com:

Examining the United Church of Christ

By Stephan Thernstrom and Abigail Thernstrom

In his recent incendiary remarks, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. claimed that criticism of his views is nothing less "an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition." Can it really be that millions of black Americans regularly choose to listen to viciously anti-white and anti-American rants on Sunday mornings?

Happily, Chicago's Trinity Church is an outlier in that regard. Most black churchgoers belong to congregations that are overwhelmingly African-American and are affiliated with one of the historically black religious denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) or the National Baptist Convention. Rev. Wright's Trinity Church, on the other hand, is a predominantly black branch of a white denomination that is not part of "the African-American religious tradition." The United Church of Christ (known until 1957 as the Congregational Church) has a little over a million members; a mere 4 percent of them are black. Fewer than 50,000 blacks in the entire nation worship at a UCC church.

In contrast, 98 percent of the National Baptist Convention's 4 million members are African Americans. Add in black Methodists and Pentecostals, as well as other black Baptists, and the total comes to more than 14 million members of an organized, predominantly African-American church. These churches include a substantial majority of all black adults today. In terms of sheer demographic weight, they clearly represent the "African-American religious tradition"-as Rev. Wright's branch of a overwhelmingly white denomination does not.

These churches vary in many respects. Some-by no means all-played a crucial role in the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. The civil rights movement, as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "came not from secular forces but from the heart of the Negro church." The movement's glory days are long gone but black churches remain more politically engaged, on the average, than their white counterparts. A 1998 study found that 35 percent of them had projects to increase voter registration, five times the rate of white congregations. Almost half informed their congregants of opportunities for political activity, double the white rate. They were also far more likely to have had political candidates and elected officials as guest speakers.

Some of these churches are led by figures like Rev. Wright, an adherent of what is called black liberation theology, which rejects racial integration and stresses the experience of black bondage. But not many. C. Eric Lincoln's mid-1980s survey of the leaders of 2,150 black churches found that two-thirds of them said they had not been influenced by "any of the authors and thinkers of black liberation theology." Indeed, 63 percent did not believe that the black church had "a different mission from the white church." A third did not even think it was "important have black figures in [their] Sunday school literature."

This integrationist vision is at one with the values of most Americans. A glance at the National Baptist Convention and the AME web sites is revealing. They feature what one might expect of any religious denomination-a statement of their creeds, the tenets of the theology and worship practices that distinguish their faith from others. There is almost no indication that these churches are predominantly African American. The closest they come to mentioning race is the AME's statement that its basic beliefs do not "differ from what all Methodists believe." The church, we learn, separated from the main Methodist body two centuries ago because of "man's intolerance of his fellow man, based on the color of his skin."

The web sites of Rev. Wright's Trinity Church and the national body to which it belong stand in shocking contrast. Before the Trinity site was sanitized in early 2008, its material seethed with racial animus and hostility towards America. It described itself as "Afrocentric"; its motto was "Unashamedly Black, Unapologetically Christian." Its quasi-literate foundational document, "The Black Value System," devoted much more attention to blackness than to Christianity. It is the manifesto of a church for people of the black race, designed to be an "instrument of Black self-determination." Blacks were depicted as a race apart-the scurrilous perspective that pervaded Rev. Wright's April 27 Detroit speech, in which he contended that blacks and whites had completely different brain structures, one left-dominant, the other right-dominant. This is nothing more than an updated version of the pseudo-science once used to defend segregation in the Jim Crow South.

It is no accident that Rev. Wright's Trinity Church is affiliated with the highly progressive United Church of Christ. The UCC had its first Jeremiah Wright back in the 1960s, when it tolerated the activities of Rev. Albert Cleage of Detroit, a pioneer preacher of the gospel of Black Power. Cleage was determined to "dehonkify" Jesus. Jesus was black, he insisted, and a black revolutionary. He went on to form his own Black Christian Nationalist Church, later renamed the Pan-African Orthodox Church. This racist conception did not trouble the leadership of the United Church of Christ, which saw it as helping to "make the church more sensitive to and aware of its need to respond to the agenda of black people."

The web site of the UCC currently features plans for a May 18 "sacred conversation on race" in which white participants will need to acknowledge "the sins" of their "ancestors" and their own "failures to confront racism." Non-whites who have "suffered the ravages of racism" will be expected only to keep their "rightful indignation" and their "temptation to despair" under control. The conversation is desperately needed, we are told, because "the quality of life for the majority of racial and ethnic people is worse today in many ways than it was during the 1960s"-a ludicrous claim.

Clearly, Rev. Wright does not speak for mainstream black churches-and he has done them a gross disservice by claiming to do so. He shares neither their vision nor their values. Why their relative silence in the face of Rev. Wright's rants? Perhaps they believe they are protecting Sen. Obama, but if Wright convinces white Americans that his hateful speeches reflect the ways African-American churchgoers think and worship, the quest for racial equality will be set back decades.

Stephan Thernstrom is Winthrop Professor History, Harvard University. Abigail Thernstrom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and the vice-chair of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights.

Just got this in a broadcast email from United Church of Christ President, John Thomas:

While there is high regard for Rev. Wright's ministry and leadership at Trinity UCC in Chicago during the past thirty-six years, and for his prophetic, scriptural preaching, many of us today are troubled by some of his controversial comments and the substance and manner in which they have been communicated, both by him and as characterized by the media.

Following Rev. Wright's insightful interview with Bill Moyers on Friday, many in the UCC hopefully anticipated that the prophetic voice of the church would be more clearly understood by the public and affirmed. But, unfortunately, following widespread critique of his handling of questions and answers at the National Press Club, that deep hope has turned now to unsettling despair for many. There is a collective and abiding sadness and anger in the present moment, regardless of theological or political persuasion.

I guess I shouldnt be surprised, but I am.

Some people think I'm kidding about supporting Jeremiah Wright for United Church of Christ President and General Minister - I'm not. Maybe the way I posted on it while taking jabs at our current leadership made it look less than serious, but I am completely serious.

I receieved a gracious email last night from Lynne Simcox acknowledging receipt of my suggestion and that it would be forwarded to the search committee. I would encourage others to send respectful emails to Lynne suggesting Wright as well by emailing GMPSEARCH@aol.com.

I will also start adding banners and other material to this site to promote Wright - feel free to use the graphics as needed to promote Jeremiah Wright for UCC President and General Minister.