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We won’t know who wins this year’s
presidential election till November, of course, but I can declare one
winner already: Mike Huckabee’s defense of Democratic candidate
Barack Obama’s pastor on television last week was a class act. Of course Huckabee could politically afford to do it,
because he’s withdrawn from the race for the Republican presidential
nomination. But he brought a moment of clarity and grace to the coverage of
an increasingly ugly, divisive campaign season.
On MSNBC’s Morning
Joe program, Huckabee pointedly declined to
condemn the Rev. Jeremiah Wright for sermons that many whites found racist
and unpatriotic. He compared Wright’s sound bites, as aired on
YouTube, to out-of-context quotes from the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, another
ministerial firebrand, and he spoke with authority because he’s a
Southern Baptist preacher as well as a politician. Huckabee knows about
sermons in a way most of us do not.
So, in a real sense, Huckabee was ministering to the
MSNBC audience. “Sermons, after all, are rarely written
word-for-word by pastors like Rev. Wright, who are delivering them
extemporaneously, and caught up in the emotion of the moment,” he
said. “There are things that sometimes get said, that if you put them
on paper and looked at them in print, you’d say, ‘Well, I
didn’t mean to say it quite like that.’ ”
Program host Joe Scarborough broke in, reciting some
of Wright’s statements and asking, “What’s the impact on
voters in Arkansas? Swing voters.”
“[I’m] not defending his
statements,” Huckabee replied. So far it was typical
point-counterpoint political television. Then he lifted the moment out of
the ordinary. “And one other thing I think we’ve got to
remember,” he added. “As easy as it is for those of us who are
white to look back and say, ‘That’s a terrible
statement,’ I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that
you have to cut some slack.”
I grew up in the South, too. I remember what it was
like when black kids couldn’t go to high school in my county and the
White Citizens Council burned crosses in people’s yards. So when I
watched Huckabee on YouTube, I wanted to clap my hands and shout back at
the computer, “Amen, preach, brother!”
“I’m going to be probably the only
conservative in America who’s going to say something like
this,” Huckabee continued, “but I’m just telling you:
We’ve got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names,
being told, ‘You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie.
You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant — and you
can’t sit out there with everyone else. There’s a separate
waiting room in the doctor’s office. Here’s where you sit on
the bus.’ ”
In other parts of the country where people
haven’t had to think through racial issues like we have down home,
maybe Wright’s sound bites sounded racist. I don’t know. I
can’t sit in judgment on others.
But I did notice that the people who know Wright best
say the media frenzy painted a false picture of his ministry at
Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ. Theologian Martin Marty,
who is white, flatly told New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof that Wright and his church are
“not anti-white” and added, “I don’t know anybody
who’s white who walks out of there not feeling affirmed.”
Marty, an emeritus professor at the University of
Chicago Divinity School who has written more than 50 books on church
history, added, “The big thing for Wright is hope. You hear
‘hope, hope, hope.’ Lots of ordinary people are there, and
they’re there not to blast the whites. They’re there to get
hope.”
I’m not a divinity-school professor, so
I’ll leave it to others to parse the language of the black church.
Historically it grew out of slavery and oppression, and it has fulfilled a
unique role in the black community that I don’t have the expertise or
the heritage to interpret. But I know that it honors the legacy of Old
Testament prophets such as Jeremiah who spoke truth to those in power and
called on them to repent. So do many white churches.
Even Wright’s most controversial sound bites
are intended to be prophetic. Here’s a 17-second jeremiad that got 34,900
hits on YouTube: “The government gives them [black youth] the drugs,
builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing
‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s
in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating
our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts
like she is God and she is supreme.”
Many found that unpatriotic, and I did, too, at first
— but as Dwight Hopkins, a member of the congregation and University
of Chicago Divinity School professor explains, it is based on
“theological wordplay.” To damn is to condemn, he said, and
Wright speaks of “a sacred condemnation by God to a wayward
nation.” It was prophetic: Wright was calling on America to repent. Here, by way of comparison, is what Jeremiah said to
the rulers of Jerusalem. “Thus saith the Lord: Execute ye judgment and
righteousness, and deliver the spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor:
And do no wrong, do no violence to the stranger, the fatherless, nor the
widow, neither shed innocent blood in this place; if ye will not hear these
words, I swear by myself, saith the Lord, that this house shall become a
desolation . . . And many nations shall pass by this city, and they shall
say every man to his neighbour, Wherefore hath the Lord done thus unto this
great city? Then they shall answer, Because they have forsaken the covenant
of the Lord their God, and worshipped other gods, and served them.”
Try putting that in a 17-second sound bite.
Peter Ellertsen teaches journalism in Springfield. He was 13 when the Tennessee National Guard was
called out to integrate the county high school in Clinton, Tenn.
This article appears in Mar 20-26, 2008.
