The speech is up on Chicago Public Radio, the hometown station giving voice to its favourite son.
A delicate dance here. It's hard to smooth over the incendiary words of a powerful preacher in full flight. I bet a lot of people in the Democratic base probably agree with what the pastor has to say too. Obama has to distance himself from the flame-throwing without tossing over the church he's belonged to for 20 years.
He's trying for sure. Actually, he's doing a pretty good job, all things considered. Some truth-telling going on about the myriad small ways race works in the American psyche, and the big ways that race still haunts the country. A history lesson, an attempt at contextualizing, re-framing the discussion.
One line jumped out at me.
"The most segregated hour in America is between 11:00 and 12:00 on Sunday mornings."
Quade and I saw that last year.
We were on day-three of our drive back from Mexico and spent a day in Memphis. On the Sunday morning we planned to take in a service at a Baptist mega-church off the interstate. We were staying in a Days Inn, the free breakfasts and pet-friendly policy were big draws. When we got to the "dining room" such as it was, there was a church service in full swing in the adjoining banquet room. It was a black service. The music was great, a palpable buzz coming through the walls. A preacher was on our side of the door getting prepared to deliver his sermon. Impeccably dressed, dignified, clearly focused.
We finished eating, loaded up the car and hit the road.
When we got to the church we were greeted by traffic marshals directing traffic in an emormous parking lot, comparable to a good sized mall.
The church building was equally impressive: modern, clean, sprawling. From outside it didn't exactly code "church" in the classical way, but it did project wealth and a certain piety. Inside it overwhelmed. High ceilings, wide staircases, signs directing you to the church itself, meeting rooms, the bookstore, the restaurant.
The church itself was like a high-end theatre. It seated about 5,000 and was about two-thirds full on a mid-July Sunday. The seats were large and comfortable, the sightlines excellent from anywhere. If you wanted a close up of the pastor, two jumbotrons duly provided. There was a baptismal pool located above the choir and altar at the back of the sanctuary. When we came in, some new congregants were being dunked whole-body into membership, again, visible on the big-screen.
For a high-Anglican like me, the morning unfolded in a decidedly casual way, one of the attractions, I suspect, of these sorts of places. The church had its own airs for sure; the attire of the front-row parishioners, the well-thumbed Bibles with weekly sermon notes. But on balance, it was a pretty open place. It was also overwhelmingly white.
The choir was excellent, smoothly moving from old-time stemwinder hymns to more contemporary Christian sounds.
Then there was the sermon.
The preacher was a middle-aged white guy, a former football player at the University of Arkansas, as he reminded us a few times. His subject was "Spiritual Warfare" and his main source was, of course, that paragon of tolerance, Paul. The essence of his message this day is that Christians of his flavour have to battle for souls against those who would snatch them first. There were segues into football imagery, Biblical stories, current events, a riff on anti-Christian imagery in Harry Potter. A nice package, compellingly delivered. But about two-thirds the way through, he lost us.
"I do not believe there is such thing as a homosexual," he said.
He went on to talk about how gays choose their lifestyle and that choice can be reversed. He talked about the threat it posed. Threat to what?
One of the undercurrents of the sermon was victimhood, the idea that Christians are in a battle to hold ground against their enemies. They are not the majority culture, but somehow oppressed. It is a common refrain among evangelical Christians. The sky is falling, head to the ramparts! The "gays aren't gay" passage drove that home for me. It is a preposterous position, but has enormous emotional power in a hermetically sealed community of the like-minded.
When it was over, another hymn and then a few more announcements. The pastor prayed for a parish group that was doing missionary work and community building in Africa. I don't know what sort of evangelizing they are doing, but it is clear they are doing aid work of some sort. A living faith.
When we left the service and made our way back to the car, we talked about what we'd seen and heard and were both struck by the extremes. The hard moral core, the intolerance of genetic difference, the monochromatic congregation. Also the good works. I was prepared to be appalled by what I saw, but I wasn't. It was a caring community that clearly looked after the souls who committed to it, and was prepared to look after those who had not. It also needed a strong dose of tolerance in areas where misunderstood theology works hand-in-hand with fear of difference. Like all of us, it is a work in progress.
I guess the point here is a version of the one Obama was making today. You can take the U-Tube moment and run with it, or you can attempt to view a place in its fuller context. I'm grateful for having gone to the service, I learned a lot about that part of America, I got a better picture. I still think they're wrong on some things, but there are a lot of good people in there.
I understood what Obama was trying to do today, it is a nuanced argument. Let's see if there is room for nuance in this electoral cycle.
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