UCCtruths

Sources tell ABC News that Obama felt that as the campaign continued, the media would continue to focus on the church, to the detriment of the church community, that Obama would be held responsible for what happened in the church, and that the Church would be held responsible for his campaign. It would be best, Obama felt, to simply cut ties. He has not yet joined a new church.

As he distanced himself from Wright on April 29, Obama expressed disappointment in how the media maelstrom had intruded on the church.

"When I go church it's not for spectacle, it's to pray and to find to find a stronger sense of faith, it's not to posture politically it's not to, you know, it's not to hear things that violate my core beliefs," he said. "And I certainly don't want to provide a distraction to those who are worshipping at Trinity. As of this point I'm a member. I haven't had a discussion with Rev Moss about it so I can't tell you how he's reacting and how he's responding ... there’s been great damage."

Obama will address the matter this evening at a campaign stop in South Dakota.

Low interest rates are one big factor in the temptation to greed found among mortgage lenders. Alan Greenspan, when he was Federal Reserve Chairman, was not being evil in continuing to lower interest rates; he wanted to keep the economy growing even though the country was pursuing a war and paying for that war on credit. Perhaps his political bosses told him, “Keep the economy humming.” Who knows? All we know is that, for example, in 2001, we saw news stories that stated, “In an effort to battle U.S. market conditions this year, Greenspan has been forced to roll up his sleeves and unleash five 0.5 percentage cuts in the Federal funds rate. This drop from 6.5% to 4% is unheard of and the current rate is at its lowest level in seven years!” In the beginning, these rate cuts were necessary to help the market in the post 9/11 recovery. The thing that opened the door for the predatory lenders was keeping the rate so low for such a long time and lack of oversight.

‘Hurray!’ said the banks. 'Let’s make money off of these low interest rates and package lots of attractive mortgages.' But the banks added to the conditions that made for the sin of greed, because they didn’t just sell people on the idea of low fixed interest rates, they tempted home buyers with the idea they could get even lower interest rates by choosing variable rate mortgages and even interest-only mortgages.

Meanwhile, there were these two wars still going on and the wars were being paid for on credit. This disastrous run-up in debt, in turn, lowered the value of the U.S. dollar abroad. The falling dollar meant that the U.S. had to pay for its oil abroad with ever more devalued currency. At the beginning of the Iraq war, oil was selling for $25.00 a barrel, but remember those were dollars worth far more than the dollar is worth today.

The Internal Revenue Service has concluded that the UCC did not violate tax laws when U.S. Sen. Barack Obama addressed the denomination's 50th anniversary General Synod in Hartford, Conn., in June 2007.

• The individual speaks only in a non-candidate capacity;
• Neither the individual nor any representative of the organization makes any mention of his or her candidacy or the election;
• No campaign activity occurs in connection with the candidate’s attendance; and
• The organization maintains a nonpartisan atmosphere on the premises or at the event where the candidate is present.

In addition, the organization should clearly indicate the capacity in which the candidate is appearing and should not mention the individual’s political candidacy or the upcoming election in the communications announcing the candidate’s attendance at the event.

The Rev. Debra Hepburn, who is black and from the Pentecostal tradition, was asked by the church’s pastor to engage the congregants in what the UCC calls a “sacred conversation” about race.

In the impassioned and powerful cadences associated with black spiritual traditions, Hepburn spoke to the small, white congregation at the Brecknock Township church about the meaning of sacred conversation.

She was accompanied by Sister Bernice Greene, a gospel recording artist from Bethlehem who performed two solos in a traditional style.

“The sacred conversation is not between you and me, but between us and the divine one,” said Hepburn, who is ecumenical director for the Lehigh County Conference of Churches.

She spoke of how the sacred conversation should inform conversations between people who have differences.

Hepburn told a story about dealing with severe racial intimidation aimed at her 16-year-old son, who is a student at Liberty High School in Bethlehem.

“My husband and I went to God and prayed as to how we could touch the lives of the parents whose son had perpetrated horrible things against our child,” she said.

The couple opted to meet with the perpetrator’s family, Hepburn said, using independent mediation.

“We met last Sunday for three hours, and we talked about hard journeys from both ways,” she said. “And we left the room with peace and resolutions that everyone could live with.”

Hepburn urged her listeners to be what God intended them to be.

“Our natural course is to be loving,” she said.

The ugliness we watched on television as media manipulators tried to scare people from voting for a black candidate by presenting a deliberately frightening caricature of his black pastor reminds us how ugly the conversation on race can be.

Wilson, pastor of Healing Stream United Church of Christ in Kensington, staunchly defended Wright in a May 6 Philadelphia Daily News column, and he offered a similar justification with the Wayne congregation during coffee hour yesterday.

He asserted that, like Wright, some African Americans believe the U.S. government is responsible for instigating the AIDS epidemic, even though there is no evidence to support that view. He said many blacks feel that way because of the nation's history of slavery and oppression of minorities.

"For 400 years, we were slaves in this country, we were ripped from our homeland," Wilson said. "So as black people we have lived in situations where you might well say, 'Well, that never happened.'

"Do I believe that the U.S. government put AIDS in our communities? I don't know," Wilson went on. "I wish that I could say no, but I know the government has done other things in the past."

Some members of the congregation gently pushed back.

Phil Clark, a scientist who works in the pharmaceutical industry, said that there was no evidence that the government had anything to do with starting the AIDS epidemic and that it did not have the technology at the onset of AIDS to create the virus.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.