Friday night’s interview by Bill Moyers of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright was another of those signature conversations that Moyers is rightfully so famous for. While Moyers is a skilled and erudite interviewer across a wide range of topics, he really seems at his best when discussing religion and theology. (If you haven’t seen Moyers interviewing Salman Rushdie on the lessons learned on the intersection of faith and politics after 9/11, do yourself a favor. This is one towering conversation.) And the Moyers and Wright conversation was no less riveting.
Wright discussed a wide range of topics – history, hermeneutics, exegesis, the blues, and gospel music among others and the long-form format of the interview let Wright reveal his commitment to the main lesson of the New Testament in a way that that the right-wing telepreachers never do. (And are never required to do.) It also let Wright place himself in a long line of fiairly traditional African American pastors whose churches provide not just a place for spiritual sustenance and growth, but also a place of mutual acceptance as well as emotional and material support. Moyers played the sound bites used to demonize Wright and to try to damage Obama in their context – not just getting in the complete rhetorical thought, but also reminding viewers that this was part of a sermon, a lesson based on or derived from specific scripture (Deuteronomy and Psalms for the curious).
Moyers asked Wright this:
What is your notion of why so many Americans seem not to want to hear the full Monty – they don’t want to seem to acknowledge that a nation capable of greatness is also capable of cruelty?
Wright responded to this key question with a critique on how Americans are taught their own history, but one of the things that I think he missed is how the Black social justice movement – starting with David Walker’s Appeal – has always been concerned with this question. It is in wrestling with how to live with the ramifications of this question that is one of the historic cornerstones of African American churches — and one reason why much of the civil rights movement came from these churches.
What is decidedly clear is that Reverend Wright is no Christian nationalist. Black Liberation Theology is not concerned with changing American rights to be inline with some Christian form of sharia law. It is not concerned with achieving some dominion over your fellow citizens based on some superiority of belief or interpretation of some End Times mumbo jumbo. This is not the narcissistic and craven Christianity of many conservatives, which is one of the two reasons wingnuts have worked overtime to keep the created Wright controversy alive.
Wingnuts and Democratic concern trolls (mostly supporters of Hillary) won’t see this interview and nor will they go to see the complete versions of Wright’s sermons (on You Tube). Their only agenda is to extend the dog-whistle politics of racial politics of division – wingnuts because that is one of their long-time core strategies and the Hillary supporters because they think this is somehow positive for their candidate. Which for Hillary supporters is pretty damned short-sighted. Most Dems stood up for Bill and Hillary in the face of the right-wing media lynching that they were subject to – not because either one of them was particularly virtuous or even right. We stood up for them because the entire right-wing project being unfurled was just plain wrong. Now we see the Hillary concern trolls make common cause with these same morally bankrupt wingnuts to use one (presumably) angry black man as a proxy to remind the rest of the US that there is, you know, a Black Man some white people won’t vote for running for President.
It may be that the US is not ready to elect a black man to the Presidency. It may also be that the US is not ready to elect a woman to the Presidency. And it may also be that people will decide that Bill Clinton back in the White House is worse than a third term of George Bush. Americans cast (or don’t cast) their votes for all kinds of irrational reasons – but for the better part of my lifetime, Democrats have worked (in the main) to disassociate themselves from a politics that would make your race, your gender, your sexual orientation a political liability. Democrats need to remember to let the right conduct this kind of political thuggery on their own – one of the big reasons why Dems can run the board this cycle is because many Americans are really tired of this kind of crap getting more attention than the fact that we are caught up in wars that are not going well and costing us too much; that many Americans are living under an unsustainable economic strain; and that it is harder and harder for us to see how to make sure our kids do better than us. Getting distracted from the game we are supposed to play is just fatal.