The main problem with Jeremiah Wright isn’t that he’s anti-American.
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ has lit up the radio and television airwaves with his youtubed comments on conspiracy theories regarding American “state-sponsored terrorism.” Almost everyone this week has seen Wright call on God to damn America. Almost everyone has heard his echo of Malcolm X, that the September 11 terrorist attacks on the nation were simply America’s “chickens coming home to roost.”
Wright’s comments make for easy discussion fodder because they are shocking, angry, and, frankly, well on the way to delusional. Some of the talking heads have discussed Jeremiah Wright as though his kind of rhetoric is essential to the African-American church, a claim that is patently untrue, and easily verifiable as such. At the same time, many of the pundits seem to assume that Jeremiah Wright’s style of ministry is unique in America’s pulpits. Truth is, Jeremiah Wright’s name is Legion, and one is just as likely to hear his kind of preaching in a white congregation as in a black church.
Wright, after all, is not simply making this stuff up. What he is preaching is a form of liberation theology, leftover Marxist theory baptized in the narrative of Scripture and applied to a set of political goals. The tenor of the Trinity United Church of Christ ministry is one that is defined by race and politics. The church is “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian,” it says, and the language of black liberation theology is everywhere in the public presentation of the mission and identity of the church.
What is disturbing to me is that too many Christians have been diagnosing the particular political aims of Reverend Wright and his church as though this were the preeminent problem.
But what is the root? Liberation theology has been with us since the 1960s, in too many incarnations to count, always offering a version of the same message. The liberation theologians see the Gospel of Christ crucified and resurrected, the message of deliverance from the reign of sin and death through repentance and faith, as too “pie in the sky.” In contrast, liberation theology offers economic and political salvation in the here-and-now, sometimes through pulpit rhetoric and sometimes at the point of a gun.
Liberation theology is seeker sensitive. The first waves of this movement, in Latin America, were designed to make Christianity appealing to the people by addressing their felt needs, the desire for armed revolution and Marxist economics. Liberation theology only works if one can connect with real or perceived oppression and then make the Scripture illustrative of how to navigate out of that situation. The Kingdom of God is a means to a social, economic, or political end.
This is not the Gospel as proclaimed by the prophets and apostles, a Gospel that centers on Jesus Christ and Him alone. We should be outraged by the clips of the Wright sermons. But we should be outraged first as Christians, not first as Americans. The most egregious aspect of the Wright sermons is not what he is saying about America, but what he is not saying about the Gospel.
But one does not have to be a political radical to bypass Jesus at church. And it is certainly not true that liberation theology is the exclusive domain of those who have suffered oppression. White, upwardly mobile, pro-American preachers do it all the time, preaching liberation theology with all the fervor of Jeremiah Wright, if not the anger.
Just take a look at the best-selling authors in evangelical Christian bookstores. Listen for a minute or two at the parade of preachers on Christian television and radio. What are they promising? Your best life now. What are they preaching about? How to be authentic. How to make good career choices. How Hillary Clinton fits in Bible prophecy.
How many times have we all heard from pulpits the Bible used in exactly the way that Jeremiah Wright uses it, except perhaps in reverse? Jeremiah Wright uses the Scripture as a background to get to what he thinks is the real issue, psychological or economic or political liberation from American oppression. Others use the Scripture as a background to get to what they think is the real issue, psychological or economic or political liberation through the American Dream. Either way, Jesus is a footnote to get to what the preacher deems really important, be it national health care or support for Israel. Either way, apart from the Gospel, the end result is hell for the hearer, regardless of whether God damns or blesses America.
This past Sunday, Easter Sunday, the new pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ preached from the biblical account of the crucifixion of Jesus, but did so as illustrative of the controversy over Wright. In some other churches all over the country this past Sunday, the account of the crucifixion and resurrection was utilized as illustrative of finding hope when you’re hopeless, of finding a light at the end of your tunnel. In both cases, the preacher is fitting Jesus into a preexisting storyline. He is not calling his hearers to find themselves in the storyline of a crucified, buried, resurrected Jesus. Jesus is a mascot, just for different agendas, none of which will last a minute past the Judgment Seat.
There is a liberation theology of the Left, of the kind of politicized movement we see right now in the newspapers and on our television screens. There is also a liberation theology of the Right, one represented by prosperity gospels and grinning consumer Christianity. Both are at heart Mammon worship. The liberation theology of the Left often wants a Barrabas, to fight off the oppressors as though our ultimate problem were the reign of Rome and not the reign of death. The liberation theology of the Right wants a golden calf, to represent religion and to remind us of all the economic security we had in Egypt. Both want a Caesar or a Pharaoh, not a Messiah.
Preachers will always be tempted to bypass the problem behind the problems: captivity to sin, bondage to the accusations of the demonic powers, the sentence of death. That’s why so many of our evangelical superstars smile at crowds of thousands, reassuring them that they don’t like to talk about sin. That’s why other evangelical superstars are seen to be courageous for their culture wars, while they carefully leave out the sins most likely to be endemic to the people paying the bills in their congregations.
Where there is no Gospel, something else will fill the void: therapy, consumerism, politics, crazy conspiracy theories of the left, crazy conspiracy theories of the right, anything will do. The prophet Isaiah warned us of such conspiracies replacing the Word of God centuries ago (Isa 8:12-20). As long as the Serpent’s voice is heard, “You shall not surely die,” then the powers are comfortable.
American citizens are rightly outraged by Jeremiah Wright’s conspiratorial rants, of course. But Christians should recognize that we have even more at stake here, and that Jeremiah Wright is neither novel nor alone.
The clips of Jeremiah Wright’s pulpit pronouncements are tragic. But they are tragic not just because of what is being said, but where they are being said. He’s standing in the place of Jesus, but he’s channeling Che Guevera. On the television dial next to him is a smiling, non-threatening preacher, also in the place of Jesus, but he’s channeling Ayn Rand.
The answer to both is for an alternative, churches that preach Christ, and Him crucified. Where the Gospel is preached, the whole story of Scripture as it is summed up in Jesus Christ, people will find authenticity and wholeness and, yes, liberation. Maybe that’s why the vitality of Christianity is increasingly found in the Global South with believers too pinned in by Islamic persecution to fall for Mammon worship, whether of the covetous revolutionary or jealous consumerist kinds.
Where anything other than Christ is preached, there is no truth, and there is no freedom. There may be shouts of affirmation or silently nodding heads in response, there may be left-wing politics or right-wing politics, there may be culturally liberal psychotherapy or culturally conservative psychotherapy, but there’s nothing but judgment in the air.
You might even say that it’s like chickens, coming home to roost.
