The Church of Obama

At the University of Chicago Law School, famous for its faculty of
conservative jurists, like Antonin Scalia, now a Supreme Court justice,
Barack Obama, senior lecturer in constitutional law, is still listed as
being on leave of absence. Six miles from the university, down Interstate 84, on Chicago’s far
south side, in the nondescript, low-rent, mostly low-rise neighborhood
of Brainerd, is the Trinity United Church of Christ, which Obama
attends and where his pastor, the Reverend Dr. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr.,
apostle of black liberation theology, delivers magnificently cranky
sermons on how the “African diaspora” struggles under the yoke of the
“white supremacists” who run the “American empire.” Obama’s membership
of both institutions, the radical black church and the conservative law
school, is a measure of the chasm that this latest candidate of hopes
and dreams, uplift and national reconciliation, is trying to span. It’s
also a measure of his political and intellectual agility that the
senior lecturer in law has managed to recast the language of black
liberation theology into an acceptable—even, conceivably, a
winning—creed for middle-of-the road white voters.

Obama is cagey, in a lawyerly way, about the supernatural claims of
religion. Recounting a conversation about death that he had with one of
his two young daughters, he wrote, “I wondered whether I should have
told her the truth, that I wasn’t sure what happens when we die, any
more than I was sure of where the soul resides or what existed before
the Big Bang.” So I think we can take it that he doesn’t
believe—or at least doesn’t exactly believe—in the
afterlife or the creation. His conversion to Pastor Wright’s brand of
Christianity was “a choice and not an epiphany,” born of his admiration
for “communities of faith” and the shape and purpose they give to the
lives of their congregants. “Americans want a narrative arc to their
lives. They are looking to relieve a chronic loneliness,” along with
the reassurance that “they are not just destined to travel down that
long highway towards nothingness.” As for himself, and his enlistment
at Trinity United, “Without a vessel for my beliefs, without a
commitment to a particular community of faith, at some level I would
always remain apart, and alone.” It’s typical of Obama that such a
cautiously footnoted profession of faith rings sympathetically to both
the atheist and the true believer.

To become a virtual congregant at Trinity United (via www.tucc.org) is to enter a sleight-of-hand
world of metaphor, in which the manifold trials of the Children of
Israel at the hands of emperors and kings are transformed by Jeremiah
Wright into the self-same sufferings of African Americans today. As
Obama, describing his own moment of conversion in Wright’s church,
when, as a community organizer in Chicago, he was still a virtual
stranger to black culture, put it: “At the foot of that cross, inside
the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of
ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath,
Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of
dry bones. Those stories of survival, and freedom, and
hope—became our story, my story.” (Whatever private comfort Obama
found in his membership of the church, it helped to give him both
credibility and a political base inside the black community, which even
now harbors the suspicion that he is “too white.”)

In a Christmas sermon on the theme of “Good News in Bad Times,” the
Reverend Wright marvelously fuses Nebuchadnezzar, Caesar Augustus, and
George W. Bush into a single being, and the American occupation of
Iraq, the Babylonian occupation of Jerusalem, and the Roman occupation
of Galilee into one event. Under a universal tyranny of “corporate
greed and rampant racism,” AIDS flourishes (“it runs through our
community like castor oil”), so do gang-bangs, murders, injustices of
every kind. Slavery is here and now, and fifth columnists, traitors to
their own kind, are all about us—like the black Republican Alan
Keyes and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. On the issue of
affirmative action, recently visited by the court, “Uncle Remus—I
mean Justice Thomas—nodded his Babylonian head in agreement
before pulling off his Babylonian robe and going back home to climb
into bed beside his Babylonian wife.” (Thomas’s wife is white.) Bad
times. “But right now ain’t always,” and “Great joy is coming in the
morning.” Wright abruptly shifts gear, from a giddy tour of 2,500 years
of oppression and tribulation, to the good news, bringing his
congregation to near-rapture as he launches on a rapid-fire,
high-decibel riff on the salvation to come:

The good news that’s coming is for all people! Not white
people—all people. Not black people—all people. Not rich
people—all people. Not poor people—all people. I know
you’ll hate this… not straight people—all people!
Not gay
people—all people. Not American people—all people. …God’s
good news isn’t just for Americans, it’s for all people. Say “all
people”! Jesus came for Iraqis and Afghanis. Jesus was sent for
Iranians and Ukrainians. All people! Jesus is God’s gift to the
brothers in jail and the sisters in jeopardy. All people! The Lord left
his royal courts on high to come for all those that you love, yes, but
he also came for all those folk that you can’t stand. All
people!

It’s a piece of rhetorical wizardry, this conjuring of hope from the
grounds of despair, the oldest trick in the preacher’s book, but Wright
carries it off with exhilarating command, and one sees immediately how
much Obama has learned from him.

The title of Obama’s book The Audacity of Hope is an
explicit salute to a sermon by Wright called “The Audacity to Hope,”
and his speeches are peppered with Wrightisms, like his repeated claim
that “There are more young black men in prison than there are in
college,” but his debt to the preacher goes much deeper. While Wright
works his magic on enormous congregations, with the basic message of
liberation theology, that we are everywhere in chains, but assured of
deliverance by the living Christ, Obama, when on form, can entrance
largely white audiences with the same essential story, told in secular
terms and stripped of its references to specifically black experience.
When Wright says “white racists,” Obama says “corporate lobbyists”;
when Wright speaks of blacks, Obama says “hard-working Americans,” or
“Americans without health care”; when Wright talks in folksy Ebonics,
of “hos” and “mojo,” Obama talks in refined Ivy League. But the
essential design of the piece follows the same pattern as a Wright
sermon, in its nicely timed transition from present injustice and
oppression to the great joy coming in the morning.

The speech that brought Obama into the national limelight, his
keynote address to the Democratic National Convention in Boston in
2004, is a fascinating exercise in translation, in which he tailors the
rhetoric of Trinity United to fit the needs of America at large. First,
the bad times: the Constitution abused, the nation despised around the
world, joblessness, homelessness, crippling medical bills, a failing
education system, veterans returning home with missing limbs, young
people sunk in “violence and despair.” Then, the good news: “There’s
not a liberal America and a conservative America—there’s the
United States of America. There’s not a black America and a white
America and a Latino America and an Asian America—there’s the
United States of America….” The voice of Jeremiah Wright haunts both
the sentiment and the metrical phrasing of the speech as Obama comes to
a climax with his unveiling of “the politics of hope”:

I’m not talking about blind optimism here… I’m talking about
something more substantial… The hope of slaves sitting around a fire
singing freedom songs. The hope of immigrants setting out for distant
shores… The hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes that
America has a place for him, too. Hope in the face of difficulty, hope
in the face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope! In the end, that is
God’s greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in
things not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead.

God gets the obligatory mention, and Obama smuggles in a near
quotation from Hebrews 11:1, but the true divinity here is America
itself, a mystical entity that holds out the same promise of miraculous
liberation as Jesus does in Wright’s sermon.

That address, received with rapt applause at the convention, remains
the template for Obama’s grand set pieces on the stump, where his
adaptation of “Good News in Bad Times” continues to play to packed
houses. When he has the stage to himself, and turns his audience into a
congregation, he can be an inspiring preacher, but he shrinks when
lined up alongside his fellow candidates in televised debates, where
he’s often looked more like an embattled PhD student defending his
thesis in an oral exam. He’s far better taking questions in town
meetings, where he listens gravely, thinks out loud, and comes up with
answers that are at once complex and lucid, sometimes a shade too
professorial, but always seemingly unrehearsed, and lit with occasional
shafts of irony.

Barack Obama’s transparent intellect, his grasp of legislative
detail, the fine points of his health-care plan as against Hillary
Clinton’s, or his views on early childhood education, are not what draw
the big crowds to his events (and if crowds were votes, he’d win the
nomination in a landslide). Rather, it’s the promise of the “narrative
arc” that Obama credited churches with bringing to the lives of
American blacks. People want The Sermon, not Obama’s well-turned
thoughts on foreign or economic policy. What the crowds crave from this
scrupulous agnostic is his proven capacity to deliver the ecstatic
consolation of old-time religion—a vision of America that
transcends differences of race, class, and party, and restores harmony
to a land riven under the oppressive rule of a government alien to its
founding principles.

Watching the tail ends of these events on C-SPAN, one often sees
people drifting away with boredom and disappointment on their faces:
They came for the evangelist, and got the competent politician. It’s a
problem for his campaign that there are several Obamas now running.
There’s the charismatic preacher, loved by all (or nearly all). There’s
Obama the adroit and well-briefed policy wonk. There’s the lean,
black-suited, somewhat aloof figure, so engrossed in his reflections
that he seems to be talking as much to himself as to his audience, a
moody Hamlet brooding on the state of Denmark. There’s also the man who
can look far younger than his age (he’s 46), like a boy with
sticking-out ears, the Obama whom Maureen Dowd, the New York
Times columnist, labeled “the child prodigy.” For this last Obama,
one suffers—especially in debates—as one suffers for one’s
own offspring on the night of the school play, desperately crossing
one’s fingers that she won’t screw up in her star part. Sometimes Obama
bombs.

You never know which of these personae will be on show at any one
event, which is probably why Michelle Obama, now barnstorming the
country for her husband, has rather over-egged the pudding in her
attempt to ground him in everyday domestic reality. From Michelle,
we’ve learned that Obama snores, has “stinky” morning breath, is
incapable of returning the butter to the fridge, and is “just a
man”—an assurance hardly required of any other candidate, but
necessary in Obama’s case because the line between demigods and
demagogues in American politics is dangerously fine, and Obama, on a
religiose roll, can seem, like snake oil, more than a little too good
to be true.

What seems entirely genuine in his candidacy came out unexpectedly
in a recent televised debate, when the moderator asked Obama why, since
he claimed to represent “change,” so many of his advisers were drawn
from Bill Clinton’s two administrations. Good question. Hillary Clinton
immediately interjected, “Oh, I want to hear that!” and gave
vent to her forced jackal laugh, which was echoing in the rafters of
the hall when Obama replied, “Well, Hillary, I’m looking forward to you
advising me as well.” The audience laughter that met this return of
service nearly drowned Obama’s next remark, which went unreported, but
was, “I want to gather up talent from everywhere.”

The point where Obama’s lofty secular theology and his skills as a
practical politician meet and merge is in the likely face of an Obama
administration. If Hillary Clinton were to win both the nomination and
the general election, it’s depressingly probable that her cabinet would
look a lot like Margaret Thatcher’s team of sworn loyalists, purged of
dissenting “wets.” Were Obama to become president, one could fairly
look forward to the third branch of government becoming more ecumenical
than it’s been in living memory, an administration of all the talents,
drawn from the ranks of political opponents as well as party allies.
Jeremiah Wright says that Jesus comes for the folk you love, yes, and
the folk you can’t stand. Obama, in 2004, put the same thought another
way:

The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and
blue states: red states for Republicans, blue states for Democrats. But
I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue
states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in
the red states. We coach little league in the blue states and, yes,
we’ve got some gay friends in the red states.

In Obama’s sacralized version of the “United States of America,”
folk sit down with folk they thought they couldn’t stand, whether
Republicans with Democrats or Americans with Iranians and Syrians. He’s
managed to articulate this so persuasively that poll after poll shows
his support mounting among registered Republicans (the few Republicans
I know personally have rejected their own candidates in favor of
Obama), despite the fact that all his declared policies—like
those he championed, to impressive effect, in the Illinois State
Senate—are far to the left of those of the present Republican
party. In a speech in Iowa on December 27, he announced that he was out
to “heal a nation and repair the world.” It says a lot about the
grievously damaged state of America now that even lifelong Republicans
hunger to take Obama—on his good days—seriously.