American Madrassas

In reading through the transcript of Barack Obama’s speech on race this week I was struck by what he didn’t say. He didn’t say that we have an opportunity to improve race relations in this country and we could start by toning down the rhetoric. He didn’t say that it’s time to rethink the Black Liberation Theology developed forty years ago to provide a moral basis for the black power movement. Maybe I’m the only one but I see parallels with the hate speech being spewed from so many Muslim pulpits around the world, and in the attitudes of American Muslims toward that speech. Ok, blacks haven’t made a habit of going around blowing things up, at least not lately, but that is how the movement got started. If we’re not careful that’s where it could go again. Liberation Theology in all its forms has tended to do just that. Obama has said before that he didn’t see anything particularly controversial about his church. I think that’s probably true. Liberation Theology is main stream in black circles. Its two most distinguished academics teach at very well known divinity schools, Dwight Hopkins at the University of Chicago, and James Cone at New York’s Union Theological Seminary. Most Christians might have a hard time reconciling the Beatitudes with the fiery sermons of Jeremiah Wright but many blacks hear it every Sunday. It has become part of the culture. We get intemperate remarks from the Christian right too, but I don’t hear it in my church. We’ll all be better off when Barack Obama’s daughters stop hearing it in theirs. It will be a better world when blacks, whites, Muslims, Christians, Jews and everybody else learn to keep the discourse civil, in public and in private. Senator Obama attempts to explain the attitudes of many black people in the context of a familiar litany of racial injustice. But those attitudes are shaped too by growing up with an unceasing drumbeat of oratory blaming all social ills on a bigoted society, just as many Muslim attitudes are shaped by a never ending tirade against the Great Satan. It doesn’t help black people get along better with whites any more than it helps Muslims get along with their neighbors. Obama has learned better than most how to speak in polite society. But as long as he and others tolerate and explain away hate speech from the broader black community the underlying attitudes won’t change and will be an obstacle to real progress. They don’t even understand how offensive it is. American Muslims have a similar problem. Many of them don’t see much wrong with the rhetoric of their co-religionists, or see it as understandable in context, or don’t think it has any bearing on them. They are wrong. It taints them all I am irreconcilably opposed to abortion but when someone vandalizes an abortion clinic I must speak out against it if I am to support a rule of law. When a Christian denounces Islam I cannot expect Muslims to distinguish the speaker from me. When a white supremist burns a cross in a black churchyard I can’t simply look the other way, not if I expect the black community to have a high opinion of me. And when Barack Obama’s pastor makes unpatriotic remarks Obama can’t just say he wasn’t at church that Sunday. Don’t tell me the comment was taken out of context. What context am I to put it in? Don’t tell me I can’t judge Jeremiah Wright by a single sound bite. I don’t. I looked at his church’s web site. It is not the web site of a patriot, of a peace maker, or of any Christianity that I recognize. It is the web site of a Black Liberationist. It is separatist, designed for the consumption of blacks who see themselves as a community apart. It is not what I would expect to see from the church of a serious presidential candidate.