'Context,' you say? A guide to the radical theology of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright

National Review, May 19, 2008 by Stanley Kurtz

The 1988 "Audacity to Hope" sermon invoked the privation and oppression of "black and brown" citizens in Africa and the rest of the world. To a superficial ear, the sermon may seem simply to call for aid to the world's hungry. For those attuned to Wright's theology, however, it contains a scarcely veiled attack on Western capitalism, which Wright believes is the true cause of the suffering and privation of the "black and brown" world.

There are several different transcripts of the "Audacity" speech--Wright gave it multiple times, changing it along the way, and some published versions may be toned down for general consumption. But the one included in What Makes You So Strong?, a collection of Wright speeches, attacks "white America's corporate dollars that hold and pull the purse strings of so many national black organizations." For Wright, this corporate money turns middle-class blacks into "slaves."

So Wright believes that American capitalism is both the underlying cause of the poverty and suffering of black people abroad, and the sinfully tempting apple that lures deluded middle-class blacks to enslave themselves to corporate white America. In this he follows Cone. Attacks on capitalism are scattered throughout Wright's sermons, and it is difficult to believe that someone as sharp as Obama could have failed to pick up on this radical message. Indeed, it's difficult to read or hear almost anything by Wright without figuring it out.

Wright's Cone connection remains strong. Cone's recent work argues that the crucifixion of Jesus was essentially a public lynching, with the Romans anticipating the role of modern white Americans. This analogy shapes the recent sermon/article in which Wright refers to ancient Roman "garlic noses." Wright's invocation of Thomas Jefferson's "pedophilia" (i.e., Jefferson's relationship with Sally Hemings) also echoes recent remarks by Cone.

Sadly, the excesses of "middle-class black assimilationism"--such as denying choirs access to greats like Duke Ellington and Count Basie--provoked in Cone and Wright a still more extreme and damaging counter-response. The tragedy is that the members of the old Trinity seem to have genuinely sought a middle way. They were ready for a shift away from assimilationist extremes, yet they refused to repudiate "middle-classness" or embrace a radical rejection of American culture.

Wright, Cone, and the academics and politicians who excuse and enable them are stuck in a late-Sixties time warp. To Wright, middle-class blacks are abandoning poor blacks to gain a piece of the capitalist pie. The tragedy of the 1990s, says Wright, is that "most African Americans have now given psychological assent to their oppressors and to their enslavement. We have gotten the chains off our bodies and put them on our minds!"

FALSE ANALOGIES

Defenders of Trinity's Africentrism compare it to the harmless Celticentrism of Catholic churches that are predominately Irish. This analogy is flawed--such churches do not insist that Jesus was Irish, that his ministry was identified solely with the sufferings of the Irish oppressed, that non-Irish churches are the Antichrist, or that middle-class Irish who foolishly ape mainstream American ways are collaborating in their own enslavement to an intrinsically oppressive capitalist system. If Irish Catholics had been Celticentric in this sense, the great success story of Irish-immigrant assimilation would never have been written. And had Wright expanded the elements of black culture at Trinity without actually repudiating black aspirations to fully join the American middle class, as the original congregants had hoped, it might have opened up a far better solution for Chicago's blacks. That road not taken would have been the real analogue to the Celticentrism of Irish Catholic churches.