Recently in Wright Category

Jeremiah Wright is back, and plastered all over the front page of today's Hartford Courant. He appeared at Kingdom Life Christian Church in Milford under the auspices of Hartford's Theological Education Institute, a rather rather conservative Protestant outfit, to give an address on "The Bible, Race and American History." So far as can be told from reporter Rinker Buck's story, Wright's central point was that, as he put it, "How a country sees God determines how they see humans," and that therefore, racism and sexism are inevitable in a country that sees God as white and male. It's a proposition worth debating, including on empirical grounds. To what extent do Americans see God as white and male?

Naturally, it was the image of Wright the Inflamer that drew the media attention. Local Fox News was on the scene (its report embedded in the on-line version of the Courant story), and--perhaps to its dismay--found the pastor "devoid of demonization." He only addressed the election of his former congregant in the q and a, and Fox showed a bite suggesting that he considered it not a bad thing: "We've come a long way but still have a long way to go." Buck chose to quote a more typically Wrightian remark:

"My biggest fear is that we will take what's just happened in this country and think a whole lot has changed," Wright said.

"If you take a Tiger Woods, a Michael Jordan or a Barack Obama, their success should not lull us into thinking society has changed."

But no white people were ever called upon to elevate Woods or Jordan to their positions in the firmament of national achievement. In 1960, only 34 percent of white Protestants voted for John F. Kennedy, but the election effectively wiped out anti-Catholic prejudice as a force in American public life. On Tuesday, 34 percent of white Protestants (and 43 percent of all whites) voted for Barack Obama. The question is not whether American society has changed, but how much it will.

It's obvious that the alleged anti-Semite that McCain apparatchik Michael Goldfarb cannot name is Jeremiah Wright, who has made statements sufficient to warrant considering him less than friendly toward the State of Israel. Why can't Goldfarb name him? I have little doubt that he's under orders from the campaign not to--and the question is why. I can think of a few reasons, all mutually reinforcing. Let me list them, a la Letterman, in what I suppose to be reverse order of importance.

4. The Right Thing. It's wrong to criticize your opponent's religious commitments. The Constitution says there shall be no religious test for office. Blah blah blah.

3. Been there, done that. If Americans remember any particular about Obama's candidacy during the primaries, it's Jeremiah Wright and "God Damn America." There's only a downside to bringing that up again now--such as to give Obama another chance to talk sensibly about race.

2. The Honor of McCain. John McCain said he wasn't going to bring up Wright during the general election campaign, and what John McCain says, John McCain does. To be sure, if independent groups choose to do so, that's out of our control.

1. Sauce for the Goose. Putting Wright on the table runs the risk of the media (egged on by the Obama campaign) taking a serious look at Sister Sarah's religious associations and convictions. Better not to go there.

Update: Here's JTA's take.

Jeff Sharlet has a response to my earlier "Jejeune?" post that I'll respond to here. He begins as follows:

We don't really have the data to say whether the public reacted to Wright as the media did. Here's what we know: the story began as the youtube adventure of a group of conservatives, less interested in understanding the black church than in wounding a charismatic Democrat. At which point the press could have swept in and said, Ok, we'll take these charges seriously, and investigate them. Instead, it said -- Look at that Angry Black Man! Hey, everybody, look! It said this so insistantly that "the public" began to rebel. Certainly that part of "the public" familiar with the black church was not well-served by this narrative.

As for the "hall monitor" designation, I didn't define my terms clearly enough (not surprising, since I just made them up). A hall monitor is not one who says, I think you should learn this. A hall monitor is one who enforces the ideas of others. If there's someone else out there whose ideas I'm enforcing -- someone saying that there's a powerful religious movement that belongs to neither the right wing nor the left wing but the empire wing -- let me know so I can curtsy to this mastermind of my unwitting days.

On the course of the Wright story, I think it's fair enough to say that there should have been better earlier coverage of the story by journalists--coverage that placed Wright and Trinity UCC in a broader, truer context. Having just looked back over the emergence of the story, it looks like what happened was pretty typical in these matters: those publications and journalists capable of doing such coverage were late to the party, and joined it at first only to 1) report on the uproar; or 2) monger opinions of their own.

But would it have made any difference had the New York Times, the Washington Post, the newsweeklies, etc. run the kind of thoughtful, insightful contextualizing stories that Jeff's looking for? I doubt it--in part because they would have disclosed that Wright is indeed a pretty radical guy who says things that a parishioner in the midst of a heated presidential campaign was going to have to answer for. But more importantly, because in the present media environment, which includes ideologically driven talk radio and cable TV, the old MSM gatekeeping function is pretty much moribund. What happened re: Wright is what happened re: Hagee. Partisan investigators operating on their own found stuff, and got it into play with the help of partisan online media. I've argued here 1) that Hagee's anti-Catholicism has more to do with the on-the-ground story of his church than with his End Times prophesying; and 2) that his Hitler/Holocaust comments should not be construed as anti-Semitic. No one's been interested in looking into the former, and people I respect (including Jeff) differ on the latter. So it goes. I try to call it as I see it, whether the idea is mine or someone else's, whether it's tossing a bomb a monitoring a hall, whether anyone's paying attention or not.

Jeff Sharlet has a long response to my unsolicited slap at him--a friendly, thoughtful response, which deserves the same. Here's the money quote:

Those are my sour grapes, yes, but they grow along a fence dividing two very broad camps of journalists: bomb throwers and hall monitors. Both camps contain all kinds of good and bad, but it's the second, the hall monitors, who drove the Wright story and who are now busy burying the evidence. They do so without an untoward thought in their happy heads; indeed, they believe, deeply, that the press is a great, self-correcting organism, always, if slowly, moving toward truth.

Jeff is squarely in the bomb thrower camp. For my part, I think there's a place for both types--and the place is truth-telling. I don't think that journalism always self-corrects, though I think that over time many media narratives improve greatly on the first-day stories. But as someone who has worked both the journalistic and the academic sides of the street, I have a pretty high regard for the difficulty of getting the story right, on either side. And religion is particularly not easy to get right. To take a tiny example, it's a commonplace of media criticism that reporters don't make the proper distinction between evangelicals and fundamentalists. But I can't tell you the number of different versions I've heard of that distinction from long-time academic students of both, not to mention the religious insiders themselves.

Elsewhere in the post, Jeff takes me to task for suggesting that "we" (what do you mean we, kemo sabe?) are all in this media thing together. I have to say that, as a participant-observer in daily journalism for 10 years I was always struck with how responsive we were to popular prejudices and attitudes. So that's my prejudice--that the media and the vox pop share far more attitudes and postures than they don't. Should professional journalists do a better job? Of course. Do they deserve to be smacked when they get it wrong? Absolutely. But, to come down to specifics, the media reacted to Wright the way the public reacted to Wright. And in the midst of a hot political campaign, it's just very difficult to create a nuanced, contextualized, differentiated picture and to suggest that the real story lies somewhere else. But that's not because of ignorant hall monitoring, in my view. It's because the Grand Guignol of ideologues and yakkers and bloggers and the MSM and ordinary YouTubers that constitute what is now an electronic public square had their carnival, in which Wright himself donned cap and bells for a time.

One final thing. It could be argued that Jeff's saying, "don't look at that sideshow, look HERE, at the man behind the curtain," he's not throwing a bomb, but trying (albeit unsuccessfully) to monitor the hall, to get the kids to behave and attend to their lessons. That's fine. It's just that it's hard to police a riot.

New poll numbers are emerging that are show some indication that Rev. Wright's comments have hurt Obama. Michael Barone tells a story with the numbers "Gallup showed him [Obama] tied with John McCain 45 to 45 percent before the Wright appearance and trailing 47 to 43 percent afterward; at the same time, it shows Hillary Clinton tied with McCain 46 to 46 percent. Similarly, Rasmussen has McCain now ahead of Obama 46 to 43 percent and McCain tied with Clinton 44 to 44 percent" Worse for the upcomming IN and NC contests is a Fox News Poll that says 36% of Dems wont vote for Obama because of Wright.

Rev. Wright continues to dominate the media cycle with remarks made to the National Press Club. Here is the video of Wright defending the infamous "9-11 were America's chickens coming home to roost" line. Wright went on to say that the Black Church was really the victim of attacks directed at him. His remarks at the press club followed a speech in front of the NAACP where Wright rejected the notion that he was divisive.

Anyone who pronounces on Jeremiah Wright without having seen Bill Moyers' Journal last night doesn't deserve a hearing. My mother-in-law--a nice 83-year-old Jewish lady--put it this way: "Rev. Wright was fantastic--after listening to 5 minutes of what preceded God Damn America I'm ready to join the church." I'm not sure I'm quite that ready, but there can be no better answer to the question, posed repeatedly over the past weeks, of why Obama didn't leave Trinity U.C.C. There are few clergy I've ever seen or heard more impressive--intellectually, spiritually--than Wright in this conversation. Judge for yourself.

Be sure to check out this week's Bill Moyers' Journal with guest Jeremiah Wright.

Jeremiah Wright delivered his first public sermon since stepping down from TUCC, today. He urged a congregation in Norfolk, VA. not to "quote Jeremiah Wright" but to instead "quote Jesus." Otherwise the controversial spiritual leader avoided discussion of Obama or the firestorm surrounding previous sermons .