What Obama should have said

Andrew Sullivan thinks thought that Barack Obama “did well” in his Fox News interview on the Jeremiah Wright fiasco. [UDPATE: He's changed the post, and now it says that he "seemed as cool as ever".] I have to disagree.

There’s a pair of things that Obama said in that interview that troubled me. The first was his continued insistence on the rather incredible claim that he had not personally encountered, in the sermons that he heard Rev. Wright give, the kind of rhetoric that so many of us are finding so objectionable, and indeed that he had not even known about Wright’s habit of saying these sorts of things until it was brought to his attention at the start of his presidential campaign. This strains credulity, and sets Senator Obama up to find himself in much deeper trouble as soon as meticulous observers (like Mark Steyn, for example) manage to pull out some sufficiently inflammatory stuff from more recent sermons (like this one, which obviously was given after the presidential campaign had started) at which Obama and his family were probably present. What’s he going to do then? Will he tell us that he was in the bathroom during the offending portions?

The second thing that troubled me was Obama’s willingness to cave in to the interviewer and agree that if he had heard Rev. Wright saying these sorts of things, or at least had heard him saying them with sufficient frequency, then he would have stopped attending Trinity Church. In the first place, as with the avowals of ignorance I discussed above, this kind of statement strikes me as politically imprudent: by agreeing that, had he heard enough of the rhetoric in question, he should have left the church, he is setting himself up to have a lot to answer for if it is revealed that he did, in fact, hear or know about more than the tiniest bit of it. But secondly, there is something that strikes me as cowardly, or at least uncourageous, about this response: as I’ve said before, it is arguably entirely appropriate for Senator Obama to have continued to attend the church where he first became a Christian even if there were aspects of its pastor’s sermons that he found, or began at some point to find, objectionable. Jeremiah Wright is, after all, the man who led him to Christ, and for a Christian there can really be no gift greater than that. As I seem to recall someone – I can’t remember whom, though – saying, demanding that Senator Obama turn his back on his spiritual father is no more appropriate than requiring Mel Gibson, in order to prove that he is not anti-Semitic, to denounce or disavow his biological one.

Part of what I find so frustrating about this situation is that, despite my distaste for many of his political stances and my more-than-occasional frustration with the, well, rhetorical character of his rhetoric, I have very often been struck by Senator Obama’s articulateness when it comes to speaking about matters of faith. Here, for example, is a passage from a June, 2007 speech that Sullivan quoted in his Atlantic cover story:

One Sunday, I put on one of the few clean jackets I had, and went over to Trinity United Church of Christ on 95th Street on the South Side of Chicago. And I heard Reverend Jeremiah A. Wright deliver a sermon called “The Audacity of Hope.” And during the course of that sermon, he introduced me to someone named Jesus Christ. I learned that my sins could be redeemed. I learned that those things I was too weak to accomplish myself, he would accomplish with me if I placed my trust in him. And in time, I came to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world and in my own life.

It was because of these newfound understandings that I was finally able to walk down the aisle of Trinity one day and affirm my Christian faith. It came about as a choice and not an epiphany. I didn’t fall out in church, as folks sometimes do. The questions I had didn’t magically disappear. The skeptical bent of my mind didn’t suddenly vanish. But kneeling beneath that cross on the South Side, I felt I heard God’s spirit beckoning me. I submitted myself to his will, and dedicated myself to discovering his truth and carrying out his works.

For me, at least, this is powerful stuff. It is not very often that I encounter someone who can articulate so effectively what I for one have gone through as a Christian: the activeness of faith, the centrality of redemption, the emphasis on willful submission, and the acknowledgment that skepticism and the temptation to unbelief will always remain. And while there has been a bit of this in Obama’s responses to the criticisms of his pastor, he has by and large gone on the defensive, hiding himself behind that implausible appeal to ignorance instead of focusing on why he does, for all its faults, continue to bring his family to the church that first brought him to Christ.

Here, then, is a (probably very clumsy) sketch of what a more effective – and honest, and courageous – “Checkers speech” might have looked like:

In the last few days, many Americans have been made aware of a number of deeply offensive statements made by the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., who has served for three-and-a-half decades as the pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ. I have been a parishioner at Trinity since the early 1990s, and in fact it was there that I renounced the atheism of my youth, knelt before a cross, and first gave my life to Jesus Christ. Since my days as a community organizer in the city of Chicago, I had long been an admirer of this church and others like it: their commitment to serving the poor, and to working for peace and justice in our communities, has for me been the most powerful example of Christ’s transforming power, and it was the witness of this service that brought me to acknowledge him as my Savior.

My church is, however, no more perfect in its Christianity than I have been in my own. The occasional, but still too frequent, lapses into hateful, divisive, and conspiratorial rhetoric by Rev. Wright and others have always been a part of life at Trinity. But while I have always been very deeply pained by these outbursts, I do not feel myself to be in any more of a position to reject or lash out publicly against my church and my pastor than they have felt entitled to do the same to me in my own failings. The community at Trinity accepted me in my brokenness and brought me to Christ; I do not see how my awareness of the ways in which they, too, fall even very radically short of the demands of the Gospel gives me the right to turn my back on them.

Indeed, my encounters with this kind of anger and resentment in the attitudes of Rev. Wright and many of my fellow church-goers have made me only more committed to the message of hope and unity that has been the focus of my campaign. Seeing, as I do so often, the tragic consequences of the things that divide us has made me even more aware of the depth of the reconciliation that we need. This is the community from which I come to you: it is fallen, broken, in need of tremendous healing. The torment that plays itself out in the heart of a church like Trinity – at once committed to Christ’s justice and yet preyed on by the demons of hate and division – is present in the lives of every one of us. I can only speak for myself in apologizing for the ways in which I have been insufficiently courageous in carrying out my devotion to hope and healing. I pray that you will recognize the earnestness of my desire to help this country move beyond its divisions, and come together as one nation under God.

Clumsy, perhaps, but there’s my attempt. And I would hope, at least, that Senator Obama would be able to say all or most of these things in good faith. Whether or not it would win him the election, it seems to me that a speech like this one would do more to advance our public discourse than most of what I, at least, have seen of the things he has said so far.

Filed under: politics, religion