Fewer Broken Pieces

In 100 years, all that will be remembered about this election is that a black man was elected to the Presidency for the first time.  Republican, Democrat, irrelevant.

Some political action committee has started airing ads which highlight the connection between Senator Obama and Reverend Wright.  The hope is that Americans will decide Obama has bad judgment (or hates America, or somewhere in between) and choose to vote for the other guy.  I don’t really care, though I find the silence on Senator McCain’s religious life deafening by comparison.  Obama did indeed denounce Wright, just as Wright had predicted would happen some time ago.  This instance of a politician severing ties with a church for political expediency has probably made me more cynical about politics than anything else.

Perhaps I have some latent bias towards Obama, but try as I may, I just cannot find anything particularly scandalous in the preaching of Jeremiah Wright.  He espouses some opinions which I think are best regarded as “conspiracy theories,” such as the US government introducing drugs or AIDS to black populations, or the government causing levies to fail in New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.  However, given the nature of the Tuskegee experiments, I can hardly fault black people for expecting the worst from the government.  Moreover, I myself have been quite enamored with conspiracy theories at times (something which I attribute to being brought up on the X-Files).  Yes, I acknowledge that some of Wright’s ideas are wrong or questionable, but I do not think those errant views invalidate his overall message.

Yet these are not what the media typically focus on.  What they focus on are the more inflammatory of Wright’s statements, including “God damn America,” and “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” (concerning the causes of 9/11).  These out-of-context clips are characterized as “hate speech” or “anti-American” or “having nothing to do with the gospel.”  The essence of Wright’s rhetoric can be summarized thus: “God is not pleased with America when it does bad things” and “America should obey the golden rule.”  I don’t object to either of those messages.  What most people are reacting against is the shock-value of Wright’s statements and tone.  Once again, I do not object to these.  Wright is loud and fiery, and he preaches provocatively.  When presented in isolation, his sermons can be passed as “hate speech” by commentators.  However, when taken in context, his sermons are a powerful prophetic witness.  So I do not count Wright against Obama.

But Obama severed his ties nonetheless.  A presidential candidate cannot affirm an association with someone who speaks against America.  This elucidates the problem of Christian participation in electoral politics.  If we as Christians have something critical to say against the United States, that sentiment cannot be shared by any mainstream candidate for the Presidency.  Therefore I fear voting can at times be an affirmation of patriotism above faith.

Barack Obama invoked the following scripture at the close of his speech at the convention:

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess.

Of course, there is a bit more to it than what Senator Obama quoted:

Let us hold unswervingly to the hope we profess, for he who promised is faithful.

I, for one, am hoping on Jesus Christ, not on America’s national destiny.  Typically I take it easy on politicians who invoke scripture.  But when you replace the hope of Christ with the hope that America can be a better place, I have to stand up and say something.

Barack Obama’s campaign has some materials printed in Hebrew.  For example, here is a button with his name:

I had presumed that “Barack” was an Anglicization of an Arabic cognate of the Hebrew word ברך (”barak”), meaning “blessing.”  However, the spelling on his campaign materials - ברק (”baraq”) - means “lightning.”  That certainly comes off differently than “blessing.”  I thought I had heard that his name indeed means “blessing,” so I am guessing that the desire to transliterate his name more accurately from English to Hebrew overrode the desire to use a cognate with the same meaning, thereby producing an ironic result.

Dobson on Obama:

“I think he’s deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology,” Dobson said, adding that Obama is “dragging biblical understanding through the gutter.”

Dobson’s spokesman added:

“Evangelicals are people who take Bible interpretation very seriously, and the sort of speech he gave shows that [Obama] is worlds away in the views of evangelicals,” he said.

So, apparently Obama said something outrageous about the Bible, right?  Well, here is what CNN says:

In the speech, Obama suggested that it would be impractical to govern based solely on the word of the Bible, noting that some passages suggest slavery is permissible and eating shellfish is disgraceful.

Emphasis mine.  Obama makes a statement about the Bible being an insufficient metric for governing the US and cites some Old Testament laws as an example.  Then Dobson says Obama’s theology is bad because everyone knows that Christians are not responsible for the whole Old Testament.  One man talks about the application of the Bible in politics, the other about the Old Testament’s relevance in Christian theology and practice.  Here we have a manufactured controversy.

I highly doubt that Dobson really thinks that the Bible as a whole, if interpreted properly, can be a sole foundation for government.  Perhaps he does.  Indeed, there are aspects of the Old Testament which are the foundation of a nation.  But as Obama and Dobson note, these are largely no longer applicable.  And the idea of the New Testament as a manual for sound governance is more than a little bizarre to me.

Since I doubt Dobson really holds the opposite view of Obama, I think that he simply seized on some statements which can be construed as non-evangelical to fill the airwaves.  That makes sense to me.  Scandal increases ratings and ratings increase ad revenue.

And here is one last gem from the article:

In the speech, Obama said, “Even if we did have only Christians in our midst, if we expelled every non-Christian from the United States of America, whose Christianity would we teach in the schools? Would we go with James Dobson’s or Al Sharpton’s?”

In response, Minnery said, “Many people have called [Sharpton] a black racist, and [Obama] is somehow equating [Dobson] with that and racial bigotry.”

No, Obama is pointing out that Christianity is not a monolith, even in the American Protestant tradition.  He is not calling Dobson racist.  I think Minnery here invented some sort of new logical fallacy.

What I would like to see in this situation is reconciliation.