The Gospel According To Wright

[Jim Watt]

“*TWO ARE BETTER THAN ONE” MINISTRIES*

*Jim & Marie Watt*

*Tel: 253-517-9195 - Email: jmbetter at gmail.com*

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December 19, 2011


  Feature <http://spectator.org/departments/features>
The Gospel According To
Wright<http://spectator.org/archives/2011/12/09/the-gospel-according-to-wright>

By Charles C. Johnson <http://spectator.org/people/charles-c-johnson> from
the December/January <http://spectator.org/issues/decemberjanuary> issue
(The American Spectator Archives 2011/12/09)

How much of Pastor Jeremiah Wright's race-based "theology" does Barack
Obama really share?


In 2008 America elected a president whose pastor for 20 years preached
anti-Semitic conspiracy theories, advocated bizarre pseudo-scientific
racial ideas, opposed interracial marriage, praised communist
dictatorships, denounced black "assimilation," and taught Afrocentric
feel-good nonsense to schoolchildren. When Americans discovered the Rev.
Jeremiah Wright's views during the 2008 campaign, they rightly wondered if
Barack Obama, like his pastor, really believed that HIV/AIDS was created by
the American government to kill black people. Even to this day, no one
knows for sure whether Obama shares the views of Wright, whom the *Chicago
Sun-Times* once described as Obama's "close confidant."


Candidate Obama tried to dismiss his support for Wright, telling Charlie
Gibson of ABC News, "It's as if we took the five dumbest things that I ever
said or you ever said…in our lives and compressed them, and put them out
there, you know, I think that people's reaction, would be understandably
upset." And rightly so. In sermon after sermon, Wright's radical black
nationalist ideas were clearly and emphatically stated. They were not an
aberration, but the focal point of Pastor Wright's Trinity United Church of
Christ in Chicago, where Obama was an active member for 20 years.


Nor has Wright renounced any of his anti-Americanism. In a sermon last
September 16 marking the 10th anniversary of 9/11 entitled, "The Day of
Jerusalem's Fall," Wright seemed to celebrate white America's comeuppance.
"We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki. And we nuked far more than the
thousands in New York and the Pentagon--and we never batted an eye!" Wright
preached. "We supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black
south Africans and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done
overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards." He closed,
invoking Malcolm X's statement about the assassination of J.F.K, "America's
chickens! Coming home! To roost!" White America, he was saying, had gotten
its just deserts.


Candidate Obama tried to distance himself from Wright's more damning
comments. But, crucially, he didn't disown the pastor himself. In fact, in
his rise to political fame, he had made Wright's sermons his own, drawing
on Wright's "Audacity to Hope" sermon and appropriating its theme for his
political coming-out speech at the Democratic National Convention in Boston
in 2004. He even borrowed the sermon's title for his second autobiography, *The
Audacity of Hope*, in a bid to get Wright and other black churches to
support his candidacy.


The question is why Barack Obama, raised without any faith at all, chose
one of the most incendiary preachers in Black America to preach the word of
God to him. Wright became, in Obama's words, "like family to me. [Wright]
strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children."
Obama told a group of ministers in June 2007 that Wright helped "introduce
me to my Christian faith." But what, exactly, is Barack Obama's faith? Just
as important, what is Jeremiah Wright's?


JEREMIAH WRIGHT WAS BORN on September 22, 1941, in Germantown, a racially
mixed, middle-class Philadelphia suburb. His father, Jeremiah Wright, Sr.,
became the minister of the local Grace Baptist Church in 1938 and served
there for 42 years. His mother, Mary Elizabeth Henderson Wright, was a
schoolteacher who eventually became the first black vice-principal at the
Philadelphia High School for Girls, one of the city's top-performing magnet
schools.


Education mattered deeply to the Wrights. They helped their son with his
homework while they bettered themselves with part-time courses. They
enrolled him at Central High School, an all-male magnet establishment
considered among the nation's best public schools at the time. It was 90
percent white. The class yearbook announced, "Always ready with a kind
word, Jerry is one of the most congenial members [of his class]." But
Wright himself dismissed that period of congeniality in a later sermon. "I
used to let my behavior be determined by the white world's expectations,"
he recalled ruefully.


The young Jeremiah was off to a promising start, but at age 15 was arrested
for grand larceny auto theft. His parents sent him to the all-black
Virginia Union University. But Wright quit after two years and joined the
Marines. Wright later said he hated being educated at "black schools
founded by white missionaries." Still, during his short time at VUU he met
fellow students who made a lasting impression: a young PhD student named
John Kinney who had studied under both Martin Luther King, Jr., and James
Cone, the founder of black liberation theology; and Samuel DeWitt Proctor,
a longtime friend and mentor of King.


After quitting the Marines, Wright joined the Navy, where he served for
four years. He was stationed mostly in Washington D.C., and was there to
help operate on President Lyndon B. Johnson as a cardiopulmonary technician
before enrolling in college again at Howard University, earning a
bachelor's degree in 1968 and a master's in English in 1969. At Howard,
Wright heard firebrand Stokely Carmichael, a.k.a. Kwame Ture, lecture on
black power. He was further influenced by Cheikh Anta Diop's racialist
tomes advancing Afrocentrism, the theory that Africa was the cradle of
modern civilization. After that, it was off to the University of Chicago
Divinity School for six years. Then Wright, 31, joined Trinity United
Church of Christ as pastor on March 1, 1972. In his provocative words, "the
fun began."


Trinity, on its last legs when Wright joined it, was an odd choice. After
all, as Bill Moyers of PBS recalls in his new book, *Bill Moyers Journal:
The Conversation Continues*, Wright "could have had his pick of large,
prosperous congregations, but instead chose one with only 87 members in a
largely black neighborhood" of Chicago. Wright often compared Chicago to
apartheid-era South Africa: "Just as Blacks could not be caught inside the
city of Johannesburg after dark…the same held true for Blacks on the
Southside of Chicago." Breaking with his parents' Baptist denomination,
Wright recognized that at Trinity he could have complete authority to
implement his vision.


There were, of course, impediments to that goal, not least his white
colleagues. Many couldn't understand his love of black-style worship or
emphasis on the role of Africans in biblical history. Wright recalls nearly
coming to blows in 1978 with a white associate minister who called his
church a "cult" and derided him for having a "big ego."


TWENTY-TWO BLACK church members who did not like the direction in which
Wright was taking Trinity lodged a complaint with the UCC, then left the
church. Wright attacked them as Uncle Toms "running to ‘massa' to tell a
white man what they thought was happening to their Negro church." He had
nothing but contempt for these middle-class blacks. They were, he noted,
"bourgeois Negroes who wanted to be white." Wright considered himself a
"new Black who is not ashamed of his Blackness."


Wright had come under the sway of the writings of James Cone, a professor
of divinity, father of the black theology movement and author of the
seminal *Black Theology and Black Power* (1969). Cone taught that
Christianity needed to be freed from "whiteness." He and Wright conceived
of a Christianity in which black rage and the black power ideology fused
with Marxist thought. According to Cone, "black people must find ways of
affirming black dignity which do not include relating to whites on white
terms." Integration was impossible because it was brought about by "black
naïveté" and "white guilt." Cone approvingly quoted Malcolm X: "The worst
crime the white man has committed has been to teach us to hate ourselves."
Freeing blacks would require getting them to love their inner African and
Wright would do just that--Trinity's longtime parishioners be damned.


Trinity gave Wright a chance to introduce ordinary blacks to these
writings. During the initial media dustup over Wright's views in 2007, the
media couldn't understand Wright's, or Obama's, Christianity because they
couldn't understand the underlying phenomenon of black liberation theology.

It didn't help that the mainstream media had decided to take the issue of
Obama's faith off the table. The *New York Times* ludicrously editorialized
in 2008 that Obama's "religious connection" with Wright "should be none of
the voters' business." Unlike George W. Bush, Obama wouldn't "carry
religion into government," the *Times* promised. In fact, Obama often
invokes religion in areas--health care and economics--where it isn't
normally mentioned. An analysis by *Politico* found that Obama invoked
Jesus far more than George W. Bush did, and cited the Sermon on the Mount
to make the case for his economic policies.


Wright was Obama's missionary in a sense, so it is worth looking at how he
educated his parishioners. "I had as my goal in starting a weekly Bible
class the idea of connecting the study of God's Word to where it is we
lived as Black people in Chicago in 1972," he recalled. It would be the
Gospel according to Wright. Trinity's slogan would be "Unapologetically
Black and Unapologetically Christian." It was to be black first and
Christian second. Preaching black theology, Wright made his dashiki-wearing
flock the largest--and blackest--church in the largely white UCC.


In his church-associated Kwame Nkrumah Academy, the congregation's children
learned such canards as the claim that "[h]istorically, Europeans tried to
build themselves up by tearing down all that Africans had done." Obama
biographer David Remnick notes that Obama approved of this
"African-centered" grade school, where Wright's God loves all people, but
black people especially. And why shouldn't he? Jesus, Wright taught, was
"an African Jew," as were most of the figures of the Bible. As Wright said
in *Africans Who Shaped Our Faith* (1995), "evidence exists within and
outside of the Bible to support the notion that the people of Israel…were
of African descent!"


It is in this context that Wright's comments on Zionism should be seen.
Attacking Israel's right to exist, Wright held that "[t]he Israelis have
illegally occupied Palestinian territories for more than 40 years now."
America, by defending Zionism and its apartheid-like regime, had too long
practiced "unquestioning" support of Zionism. Given his hostility to
Zionism and non-"African" Jews, it wasn't surprising that Wright's
anti-Semitism reared its ugly head in June 2009. "Them Jews ain't going to
let him talk to me," he told the *Daily Press* of Hampton Roads, Virginia.
They were "controlling" Obama and therefore preventing the United States
from sending a delegation to an anti-racism United Nations conference.
(America boycotted it on the grounds that it would descend into an anti-Jew
hate fest as it had in previous years.)


Wright remained loyal to Malcolm X (Trinity United Church celebrates his
birthday) and to Louis Farrakhan.


Wright even joined Farrakhan on a trip to meet with the latter's
benefactor, Muammar Gaddafi, in 1984. (Wright has also routinely bragged
about his trips to Castro's Cuba and Ortega's Nicaragua. He predicted that
his trip to Libya would cause trouble for Obama in 2008: "When [Obama's]
enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit [Gaddafi] with
Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball
in hell," he said.)

To further his claim that the white man was an active enemy of the black
man, Wright has often recommended a favorite book of the Nation of
Islam, *Emerging
Viruses: AIDS and Ebola: Nature, Accident, or Intentional?* (1996), a
self-published screed by Leonard G. Horowitz, a conspiracy theorist and
former dentist, who argues that HIV began as a biological weapons project.
"Based on this Tuskegee syphilis experiment and based on what has happened
to Africans in this country, I believe our government is capable of doing
anything." As white people were responsible for the makeup of its
government, white America bore a collective guilt, Wright said. It could
not accept a black man as president of "this racist United States of
America," "the United States of White America," and "the U.S. of KKK-A."


WRIGHT GOT ON OBAMA'S BUS early, in the mid-1980s, when he supported
Obama's efforts to organize blacks for "social change" (i.e., to increase
government welfare), and only left in 2008 when there was an increasingly
serious chance of his winning the Democratic nomination and becoming
president. It was, after all, Hillary Clinton--not John McCain--who used
Wright as a campaign issue against Obama.


Wright had remained on the bus for so long because his friendship gave
Obama an authenticity on the South Side that he otherwise lacked as a
highly educated black man who grew up in white and multiracial
environments. Had Obama not successfully defined himself as an ordinary
African American, had he not worked the streets on poverty wages, his
political career probably would have gone nowhere.


Obama came to join Wright's church in a roundabout way, as Stanley Kurtz
argues in his well-researched *Radical-in-Chief* (2010). We don't know if
he encountered Wright before he moved to Chicago, but it seems safe to
assume he had. David Remnick recounts a significant meeting between the
young Obama and Pastor Alvin Love of Lilydale First Baptist Church in
Chicago. Obama and Love had organized blacks through the churches starting
in 1985, so "[Obama] knew it was inconsistent to be a church-based
organizer without being a member of any church, and he was feeling that
pressure," according to Love. "He said, 'I believe, but…I want to be
serious and be comfortable wherever I join.'" A pastor whom Love
recommended--Pastor L. K. Curry--suggested that Obama meet Jeremiah Wright.
Obama apparently liked what he saw at their meeting and he began to attend
Trinity in 1988.


Obama's decision to join Trinity was very much one of convenience. Even
though he plotted his every move, we're supposed to believe that he just
happened to join the largest black church in America, whose pastor had a
record for getting blacks elected to higher office. (In 1983, Wright led a
coalition of black churches to help elect Harold Washington as the first
black mayor of Chicago.) Obama liked to try out his ideas on Wright. "What
I value most about Pastor Wright is not his day-to-day political advice,"
he told the *Chicago Tribune* in January 2007. "He's much more of a
sounding board for me to make sure that I am speaking as truthfully about
what I believe as possible and that I'm not losing myself in some of the
hype and hoopla and stress that's involved in national politics." Wright
was a means to an end.


Steeped in Marxist thought and the community organizing tactics of the
radical Saul Alinsky, Obama was probably comfortable with the view that
religion was the opiate of the masses and black liberation theology the
opiate of blacks. Trinity Church is a place where black movers and shakers
congregate. "My commitment is to the church, not to a pastor," Obama said
in May 2008. But left unsaid was just what the members of that church
believed.


According to Wright, leading members have included Jawanza Kunjufu (author
of *Countering the Conspiracy to Destroy Black Boys*, which blames, among
other things, interracial marriage), Iva Carruthers (who coined the term
"Afrocentric" and whose work at the Jew-hating Durban Conference on Racism
Wright enthusiastically endorses), and Bobby Wright, psychologist and
author of *The Psychopathic Racial Personality*, which argues that white
attitudes toward blacks are psychopathic. Other influential members include
the black entertainment elite, like the rapper Common and Oprah Winfrey.


Winfrey, who joined the church in the mid-'80s, eventually left in the
early '90s. An article entitled "Something Wasn't Wright" in the May 12,
2008, issue of *Newsweek* explains that she knew Wright's rants were too
radical for her fans. Interestingly, though Oprah endorsed Obama and helped
catapult his books to the top of the bestseller lists, she has declined to
endorse him for 2012.


Common frequented Wright's pews, occasionally rapping for its congregants.
With Wright's approval, Common even "free-styled sermons" against
interracial marriage in 2005 when the Obamas were attending Trinity nearly
every Sunday. (Perhaps that's why Michelle Obama invited Common to perform
at the White House in May 2011.)


Growing up in a heavily "segregated" Chicago, Common noted, you had to
"enforce" black culture.


Ironically, Wright's Afrocentrism, implicit segregationism, and explicit
reverse racism didn't prevent him from retiring to a $1.6 million home his
church built for him in the lily-white Tinley Park neighborhood in 2008.
The luxurious four-bedroom house features an elevator, a butler's pantry,
exercise room, four-car garage, master bedroom with a whirlpool, and spare
room for a future theater or swimming pool. It abuts the Odyssey Country
Club and golf course. (Its mortgage was paid for by the corrupt ShoreBank,
with which Wright, along with most of the Chicago black elite, always had a
cozy relationship before it went bust in 2010.)


WHERE DID OBAMA FIT in all of this? It seems he too rejected assimilation
in favor of Wright's separate-but-equal-yet-superior status for black
Americans. A December 1995 article, "What Makes Obama Run," by Hank De
Zutter in the *Chicago Reader*, a local black newspaper, suggests as much
in its profile of Obama's first bid for the Illinois Senate. Obama, thanks
to Reverend Wright's Trinity Church, "learned that integration was a
one-way street, with blacks expected to assimilate into a white world that
never gave ground." Obama bristled at the "unrealistic politics of
integrationist assimilation which helps a few upwardly mobile blacks ‘move
up, get rich, and move out.'"


Obama was merely following the teachings of Wright when he railed at
Trinity against corporations that, Wright explains in his history of
Trinity, "discriminated against women, corporations that discriminated
against Blacks and Browns, corporations that supported sweatshops in Third
World countries and corporations which stood in direct opposition to the
Gospel of Jesus Christ." Capitalism was part of what led to slavery, Wright
had argued. He often mentioned the black sociologist Chancellor Williams's
jeremiad, *The Destruction of Black Civilization*, which argues that
African civilization was destroyed by the acquisitiveness--the capitalist
nature--of white European civilization.


But when Wright became too embarrassing, it was time for Obama to distance
himself from him. That was the not so subtle message behind Obama's "More
Perfect Union" speech in March 2008 in which he rejected Wright, not
because he disagreed with him, but he had to protect himself from the
charge that Wright and Trinity disliked white people. "Not once in my
conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in
derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but
courtesy and respect," Obama improbably claimed. The speech, much
celebrated and quickly forgotten, did what it had to do: it derailed the
whiteness issue as a campaign issue.


And yet Obama never explicitly rejected the black power, anti-capitalist
core of Wright's teachings. That includes beliefs like Wright's credo that
"White folks' greed runs the world in need." For all Obama's talk, he can't
claim to never have heard Wright say it. Obama titled his second book, *The
Audacity of Hope*, after the very sermon where that line appears. Candidate
Obama's declared intention to "spread the wealth around" echoed what he had
absorbed at those Trinity sermons. Now President Obama's thinking clearly
shows the same imprint, as when he preaches that "at a certain point you've
made enough money."


"Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, Jr., took me on another journey," Obama once
said. He merrily went along, every step of the way.


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