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Africentric church: a visit to Chicago's Trinity UCC
Christian Century, May 29, 2007 by Jason Byassee
A sympathetic profile of Obama in Rolling Stone quoted this jeremiad from one of Wright's sermons: "Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run! ... We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God ... And. And And! Gawd! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!" This may be the kind of passion that Obama now finds a bit embarrassing. The sermon was actually delivered as part of the inauguration of a new dean of the chapel at Howard University, whom Wright was encouraging to take on a prophetic role, not just a priestly one. But all that was posted on YouTube was a video of Wright shouting the words above.
Ironically, Wright says that in that part of the sermon he was quoting white evangelical preacher Tony Campolo, who has long railed about social ills in front of evangelical audiences. One of Campolo's signature rhetorical gestures is to use colorful language and tell his listeners that he fears they are "more concerned that I said 'shit'" than with racism in America. When Campolo makes this move, he's regarded as a prophetic figure. When Wright does it, his opponents call him a militant.
Trinity did not set out to be an Africentric church when it was founded. The goal of United Church of Christ leaders was to create an integrated church at a time when whites were not much interested in integration. But the UCC was also interested in finding "the right kind of black people," according to Speller--those who were middle class and "high potential" enough to integrate easily into the majority-white denomination. Congregationalist missionaries who established black colleges and universities throughout the South in the late 19th century insisted that educated blacks eliminate displays of emotion in singing and preaching. That's why graduates of Morehouse College and Howard University (where no gospel music was allowed until the late 1960s, according to Wright) abandoned black ways of worship.
In a recent essay, Wright summarized the early 1960s vision of integration: "Blacks should adopt a white lifestyle, a white way of worship, European values, and European American ways of viewing reality" (in Growing the African-American Church). One of the UCC's few black ministers in the 1960s actually said from the pulpit, "We will tolerate no 'niggerisms' in our services." This meant, Wright explains, that "no one could shout.... There would be no hand waving. There would be no displays of emotion."
Wright dates the collapse of this vision to 1968. The assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. "was enough to make a negro turn black," he says, borrowing a phrase. By this point, a large segment of the black community had turned against King's Christian, nonviolent challenge to racial segregation. Chicago was an organizing center for militant black religious groups like the Nation of Islam and the Black Hebrew Israelites. Ironically, these groups, with whom conservatives today would like to lump Obama and Wright, are the very ones against which the young Jeremiah Wright was arguing while in graduate school in the 1960s--trying to make the case that Christianity is not a white racist religion.
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