Jeremiah Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ
[Portions of this post were originally part of the social justice post below. During the editing process, I determined that though they were related, this was sufficiently off of my central thesis in that post to deserve its own.]
If the Rev. Jeremiah Wright ever makes it into Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, it will undoubtedly be for "God Damn America."
If you listen to the 5 1/2 minutes leading up to the fateful words, Wright is making a valid point: America is far from perfect.
The United States government, and the British colonial government before it, certainly didn't treat blacks in a Christ-like fashion for the vast majority of its history. The lies and double-dealing with Native Americans as the nation expanded westward was also not a shining moment in our history.
But while there's plenty to criticize, Wright does go off the rails with his rant. Wright's claims that the government provides drugs to inner-city blacks is based on nothing more than racial animosity and victim politics. While one can disagree with three-strikes laws as a matter of policy, they were enacted as a response to a dearth of common-sense when it came to judges offering little more than slaps on the hand to dangerous, career criminals. Wright's complaints about the prison population is also troubling, since the number one victims of young male blacks are ... other blacks. If the government wasn't putting these people behind bars, Wright would be complaining about the government's failure to protect the black community from crime.
On other occasions, Wright has also peddled the conspiracy theory that the United States' "white" government invented AIDS in a lab in an effort to kill black people. Apparently President George W. Bush's unprecedented efforts to treat African blacks with retroviral drugs to the tune of billions of dollars a year is just a clever con job.
America is far from perfect, but Wright's zeal to "damn" this country is obscene. If the yardstick for measurement is the Kingdom of God, then yes, America falls infinitely short of that standard. No human government can achieve that standard -- nor should it aspire to. But, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, it's better than all the others.
The Sunday after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Wright gave his infamous "chickens are coming home to roost" sermon. As the rubble of the Twin Towers still smoked, Wright's first instinct was to blame the victim.
Among the crimes committed by the United States over the decades leading up to our "payback" on Sept. 11, according to Wright, were such things as the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II and -- probably more centrally connected to the attacks -- our support of "state terrorism" and "genocide" against the Palestinians.
You can disagree with Israeli security policy, but to accuse Israel of "genocide" against the Palestinians is nothing less than anti-Semitic. If Israelis laid down all their arms tomorrow, by Friday every Jew in the Middle East would be dead. If the Palestinians laid down all their arms and stopped with the suicide bombers, there would be peace in the Middle East.
Jeremiah Wright, Trinity United Church of Christ and Barack Obama are on the leftmost edge of Christian thought -- if you can even call what they preach Christian thought. In fact, the the days and weeks following the widespread airing of Wright's sermons, you had many black pastors inviting reporters into their churches to show that Wright's preaching was an aberration, not the norm.
I was talking to a Christian once who allies himself along the social justice lines and he told me that he was familiar with the United Church of Christ -- a largely white denomination -- and he felt he understood Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright's Christianity better than John McCain's.
I was genuinely befuddled. I wasn't sure whether he was expressing an ignorance of McCain's faith or the belief that Obama/Wright's faith was closer to true Christianity than McCain.
(For the record, you can find a Christian Science Monitor article on McCain's faith here. And here's an BeliefNet interview on McCain's faith.)
What was most odd about that statement was, from a social justice Christian's standpoint, actions are paramount evidence of Christian faith. And if you're going by actions, it would seem that John McCain's faith is the more substantive.
Jeremiah Wright is moving into a $1.6 million mansion (when you include the value of the land) and an unexplained line of credit for his use to the tune of $10 million more.
I'm not opposed to pastors who've served their working lives to being provided with a home in retirement -- but if Wright was on TV regularly (read: televangelist) this would raise a stink. And for someone who preaches against "middle-classness" and rails against "white man's greed that runs a world in need," you'd think that a $300k or $400k home would be sufficient.
And then there's Barack Obama.
Obama spends tens of thousands of dollars to send his girls to private schools. According to his wife, Michelle, they spend thousands more on camps, piano lessons and the like. They also purchased a home valued at more than $1.6 million several years back.
I begrudge the Obamas none of it. But, when you have a beloved aunt living in run-down public housing in Boston and a half brother subsisting on less than $1 per month in Kenya, you'd think that you'd find some way to help them if you're making several hundred thousand dollars annually. That's not to mention helping the school in Kenya named after you that you promised to help, but haven't.
Even when the book revenues started flowing in and the Obamas income climbed into the million dollar range, their charitable giving never reached the 10 percent threshold. (Just for fun, you can compare the Obama's charitable giving to that of Darth Cheney and see who comes out ahead there.)
Compare Obama's "fruits" to those of John McCain's and I think McCain's come out better. McCain gave 26 percent and 18 percent of his income to charity in 2006 and 2007 respectively. McCain has also donated the royalties from his books since 1998 to charity -- a total of more than $1.8 million.
And that's not all. The McCain's youngest daughter Bridget, was adopted from Mother Theresa's orphanage in Bangladesh. Bridget would have died if it weren't for Cindy McCain's action to bring her to the United States for medical treatment. And then there's this story, recounted by Karl Rove:
What I did not know, and what I learned from Doris, is that there was a second infant Mrs. McCain brought back. She ended up being adopted by a young McCain aide and his wife.
"We were called at midnight by Cindy," Wes Gullett remembers, and "five days later we met our new daughter Nicki at the L.A. airport wearing the only clothing Cindy could find on the trip back, a 7-Up T-shirt she bought in the Bangkok airport." Today, Nicki is a high school sophomore. Mr. Gullett told me, "I never saw a hospital bill" for her care.
And then there's this, from McCain's time in captivity in North Vietnam, also in the Rove story:
Another story I heard over dinner with the [Medal of Honor recipient Bud and his wife Doris] Days involved Mr. McCain serving as one of the three chaplains for his fellow prisoners. At one point, after being shuttled among different prisons, Mr. Day had found himself as the most senior officer at the Hanoi Hilton. So he tapped Mr. McCain to help administer religious services to the other prisoners.
Today, Mr. Day, a very active 83, still vividly recalls Mr. McCain's sermons. "He remembered the Episcopal liturgy," Mr. Day says, "and sounded like a bona fide preacher." One of Mr. McCain's first sermons took as its text Luke 20:25 and Matthew 22:21, "render unto Caesar what is Caesar's and unto God what is God's." Mr. McCain said he and his fellow prisoners shouldn't ask God to free them, but to help them become the best people they could be while serving as POWs. It was Caesar who put them in prison and Caesar who would get them out. Their task was to act with honor.
I've said before that I'm loathe to judge the veracity or the quality of someone's Christian faith. But if it is by their fruits you will know them, then I know which one has some recognizable fruits.
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Why does Wright need to have such an expensive home? He's certainly profiting big-time from those of us who pay taxes. He rants and raves about the white community being racist, how our government supposedly provided drugs to young blacks and complaining about a huge population of blacks in prison. Why isn't he ministering to them in prison? He's just like the rest of the liberal, illuminati, greedy nitwits whose mantra is "What can I do for me at everyone else's expense?" Wright is a disgusting minister and definitely no Christian!