Religion, Race – and Obama

January 8, 2009

Eddie S.Glaude Jr., author of In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America, discussed religion and race in America at the Pew Forum's biannual Faith Angle Conference on religion, politics and public life in December 2008. He described historical and contemporary appeals for religious pluralism and explored the ways these efforts have been undermined, particularly when they relate to race. Professor Glaude also examined the 2008 presidential campaign controversy surrounding the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and spoke to the challenges President-elect Barack Obama might face when he takes office in January.

Speaker:
Eddie S. Glaude Jr., Professor of Religion and African-American Studies, Princeton University

Moderator:
Michael Cromartie, Vice President, Ethics & Public Policy Center; Senior Advisor, Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life

In the following excerpt, ellipses and hyperlinks have been omitted to facilitate reading. Read the full transcript at pewforum.org.

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EDDIE GLAUDE: Let me give you a little backdrop to my remarks and in some ways, what drives what I'm going to say. That has a lot to do with trying to figure out President-elect Obama's appeal to religious liberty as he talks about religion and religious tolerance against the backdrop of a history of American intolerance to religious difference. How that intolerance played itself out: specifically in relation to race, or more specifically in relation to Jeremiah Wright, and now in relation to this pressing question about which church will President-elect Obama attend.

Let me direct your attention to two important moments during the presidential primaries. One involved President-elect Obama's fascinating talk at the Call to Renewal conference in June of 2006. The other is Mitt Romney's important speech about religion in December of 2007. Both candidates sought to address the incredibly difficult topic of the role of religion in the public square. Obama's remarks served as a call of sorts to Democrats to take seriously religious commitments. He asserted the claim that folks like Alan Keyes,¹ or more generally the religious right, do not hold a monopoly on religion. It was okay, particularly for progressives, to declare one's Christian commitments in the public domain. His Christian commitments were even further specified in terms of the central and prophetic role of historically black churches.

Obama noted, "I still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change, a power made real by some of the leaders here today. Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities." This is 2006; this is pre-Jeremiah Wright. "Because of its past, and in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man," Barack Obama goes on to say, "I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active hope palpable, an active palpable agent in the world as a source of hope."

So Obama recognizes the power of religious belief in the lives of persons and grants that those beliefs animate, and in some cases ought to animate, public deliberation. But he insisted in this talk, which is really interesting, "Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal rather than religion-specific values." So you could hold your commitments as long as those commitments are translatable into something that's more universal, that's not sectarian. In other words, religious adherents cannot retreat behind the inerrancy of their faith -- the inerrancy of their truth claims in public. Those claims, like all reasons according to Obama, must be subjected to public scrutiny. And here Obama appeals to a grand tradition of religious pluralism that requires, in some significant way, a deliberative language that allows us to talk across sectarian differences. So even as President-elect Obama insists on the role of religious beliefs in the public square, he circumscribes how appeals to those beliefs must work in democratic conversation.

Now, interestingly enough, Governor Romney made a similar move. Romney of course struggled mightily during the primary to shake off a standing suspicion, particularly among the base of the Republican Party, about his Mormonism. For many, Romney's candidacy was shrouded in the mystery of his religious commitments. Is Mormonism a cult? Will Romney be beholden to the religious leaders of his church? We've heard these questions before. Many of you have covered them. He sought to allay any concerns about his faith by appealing to the legacy of religious liberty and pluralism in the United States. He insisted on the centrality of his faith to how he understands himself and the world, but that faith was consonant, in his view, with a commonly shared creed of moral convictions that define the nation.

As he noted, "Each religion has its own unique doctrines and history. These are not bases for criticism but rather a test of our tolerance. Religious tolerance would be a shallow principle," Romney goes on to say, "Indeed if it were reserved only for faiths with which we agree. And where the affairs of our nation are concerned, it's usually a sound rule to focus on the great moral principles that urge us all on a common course. Whether it was the cause of abolition or civil rights or the right to life itself, no movement of conscience can succeed in America that cannot speak to the convictions of religious people." But that "speaking" must exemplify a commitment to religious liberty and democratic value. So in similar ways, he makes a similar move to Obama.

Now, I'm not so convinced that either move clarifies much. [Obama's] position sounds a lot like that of Father Richard Neuhaus' in his classic or infamous work, The Naked Public Square, in which Neuhaus argues, among other things, that we Christians have an obligation to translate our commitments into terms accessible as far as possible to our fellows who happen not to hold those commitments. Now, of course, there are different kinds of religious claims: those that reason is fully competent to justify and those that derive their force, at least in part, from revelation. So there's a sense in which Neuhaus and, if I'm right, President-elect Obama insist that religious claims, or more specifically Christian claims that have public implications, must be accessible to public reason.

Now, this may be a bit worrisome because it runs up against the stated commitment to religious tolerance and plurality that supposedly frame the discussion in the first place. Such a view denies an important plurality and the possible conflicts that might emerge from that among religious believers, who are themselves critical of liberalism. That is to say, there are only certain kinds of religious commitments -- those that can be justified by natural law -- that can gain access to the public space. But those folk who justify their political positions in light of certain kinds of religious claims that are not subject to public reason -- the authority of revelation according to Neuhaus and I believe according to Obama -- they have to engage in some kind of translation or otherwise, they can't speak. This doesn't resolve anything. In fact, this is the exact spur in the side of certain religious communities to mobilize in light of liberalism's attack against it.

So it seems to me in the end that, like the political theorist William Galston,² Obama seems to argue that, "If religion is to shape public life, including public law, through the exercise of public reason, then it would seem that the content of public reason is in principle accessible to adherents of all faiths equally and to those who espouse no religious faith at all. If so, then it is hard to see how religion, as opposed to philosophical natural law, is playing a distinctive public role. On the other hand, if the content of specific revelation is to play that role, it can only be by breaching the boundaries of public reason as Father Neuhaus defines it."

Given Obama's commitment to pluralism, he argues that we can only justify coercive public law across the boundary of diverse faith communities through public reason. Claims based on revelation, however, are only relevant and institutionally binding to those who share in the commitment. Propositions based on revelation matter only within the relevant communities.

So, in the end, only those Christians who can offer public arguments for their positions are allowed a public role. Others are relegated to their own communities, to talking with those, at least when they are invoking revelation or making certain kinds of faith claims, who share their commitment.

It becomes very hard, for example, to distinguish what kind of public work religious claims are doing if someone who happens not to hold those commitments still has access to them. So if as a Christian the beatitudes inform how I think about certain policy initiatives, and those commitments result in my support of policies that are compelling to my left-leaning, atheist, secular friend, it is difficult to see how religion is playing a distinctive role here. I'm not quite sure what work religion is doing in this public sense.

Obama's insistence on public accessibility results, again, if I'm right, in religion doing very little work or certain kinds of religious claims doing very little work in the public domain, even as he's opening it up. I worry that these attempts to tidy up the mess of democratic conversation might result in bad faith on the part of many who hold religious beliefs based on revelation and who nevertheless want to impact public life beyond their specific communities. I worry that the Christian, like my evangelical sister who believes that homosexuality is a sin and is prohibited by scripture, will not offer that as the reason for her opposition against same-sex marriage. But instead will appeal to some notion of the sanctity of marriage. I worry that it will lead folk -- decent folk with commitments that we may or may not agree with -- to mislead in order to secure their desired ends. And to my mind, that would be a terribly unchristian result.

So I direct your attention here because both President-elect Obama and Governor Romney appeal to a certain story about America's religious history in order to put forward this value of toleration and pluralism. Like the [Northwestern University] scholar Robert Orsi, I am convinced that American religious history is American political history and American political history is American religious history. Now, as my good friend, the religious historian David Wills writes, "The most common way of telling the story of the United States' religious past is to center it on the theme of pluralism and toleration, the existence of religious variety in America and the degree to which it has or has not been tolerated and even affirmed."

Now, there are several versions of this story. But I must say that at no point in our nation's history, no matter how the story is written, has the mere fact of religious plurality yielded an uncontested normative vision of pluralism. Rather, as Wills writes, "At every point, normative conceptions of religious plurality, which inevitably embrace some forms of religious belief and practice while excluding others, have been a central point of contestation."

To be sure, in our nation's early history, Protestants had come to accept doctrinal differences among themselves as a kind of acceptable diversity, but rarely was this tolerance extended to others, like Catholics or Jews or Mormons on the same basis. When George Washington, for example, assumed the presidency in 1789, many worried about the nation's commitment to genuine religious liberty. Some even wrote President Washington congratulating him on his election and inquiring concerning their status under a new form of government. Washington replied on March 1, 1790, that he hoped to see "America among the foremost nations in examples of justice and liberality." In response to Newport's Hebrew congregation, who wondered if the nation would continue to "offer an asylum to the persecuted and oppressed of every nation and religion," Washington replied, "We no longer speak of toleration but rather of inherent rights." And that "happily, the government of the United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance."

Washington's belief that an old age of intolerance had passed away, however, betrayed a naïve optimism about this fragile democracy. I'm reminded here of a powerful remark by the black abolitionist Sojourner Truth. She said, "I take hold of this Constitution and it looks mighty big. And I feel for my rights, but there ain't any there." So obviously, Washington knew of the many forms of religious bigotry in the new nation. Perhaps, like Jefferson and Madison, he hoped that enlightened persons would eventually shed such prejudices and be satisfied to practice their religion in private.

But we know this isn't or wasn't the case. In many states, some form of establishment continued well into the 19th century. Connecticut and Massachusetts, for example, continued to encourage local governments to make suitable provision "for the institution of the public worship of God and for the support and maintenance of public Protestant teachers of piety, religion and morality." For these Congregationalists, the idea of a religious grounding in our public living was central to how they imagine the relationship between religion and the state. So what I'm suggesting here, however clumsily, is that when we situate the discussion of religious pluralism within the larger context of American religious history, at least two themes emerge: First, we see the difficulties surrounding religious and cultural difference. We have difference erupting, disrupting a certain kind of American imagery. And second, we see religiously-informed efforts -- I suppose this is part of our Puritan inheritance -- to define and achieve some exemplary state of public morality. Now, one can immediately see that efforts to define public morality in terms of a specific religious tradition militate against affirming religious pluralism.

But let me quickly mention a third theme that might emerge. What can be called, as David Wills, the historian at Amherst, says, "the encounter between black and white." Now you can begin to see, I'm beginning to turn back to that body that Obama inhabits. Here we have a group of Christians -- and we're talking about a particular religious tradition, obviously -- who are for the most part within the dominant religious traditions of the nation. Yet because of their color, status as slaves and subsequently second-class citizens, they are often viewed as wholly other. What is interesting is how these peculiar modern folk to whom religious freedom was neither offered nor given seized upon the idea of religious liberty and forged an independent church movement.

The presence of black Christians in American religious history indeed complicates the story of our nation's religious past and present. That history, that religious history on the part of these black folk is crucial to how we tell our political history. All we need to do is think about, for example, that extraordinary moment in November of 1787 in St. George's Church in Philadelphia. Richard Allen and Absalom Jones -- and these guys are literally praying at the altar -- are snatched from their knees in the middle of prayer and told to go to what was called "the n- pews." They walk out, and as a result we see formed by 1794 the first African-American congregation in the city, St. Thomas Episcopal. Later on, we see the African-Methodist Episcopal Church founded in the early part of the 19th century. Then later on we see African-Methodist Episcopal Zion formed in New York.

There's a wonderful phrase by Howard Thurman³ in which he says, "The slaves dared to redeem a religion profaned in their midst." Remember, we have to understand African-American religion or African-American Christian churches in some substantive way as the site of black civil society because they are locked out politically, locked out economically, locked out demographically. African-American religious institutions become the site whereby the infrastructure of black communities begins to take shape, the germ of them.

So education institutions, voluntary associations, burial societies -- black folk who attended predominantly white churches could not bury their dead in the same burial grounds -- part of this tradition of African-American Christian expression involves an institutional space that's reflective of a kind of marginal status. And so there's this intimate relationship that's kind of, shall we say, partitioned by the realities of race.

Within the United States, the African-American tradition [of Christianity] has this prophetic wing. It proceeds on the assumption that white Christianity is idolatry. There is an investment in whiteness that over-determines one's commitment to God. This tradition begins to define in interesting sorts of ways the African-American church that was once an invisible institution and in the post-Reconstruction era becomes a visible institution. It is then transformed with the Great Migration as these folks move from rural countrysides to urban spaces: going from country-rural side of Mississippi to Mobile, Alabama and then moving from Mobile to places like Chicago, New York -- having a different sound, a different timbre. It was becoming in interesting sorts of ways this unique American expression.

[Skipping ahead], what's striking about the 1960s and '70s, of course, is that this religious backdrop -- the prophetic black church of the 19th century -- takes on a much more pronounced role. We see African-American religion informing African-American struggle in interesting sorts of ways. There's a moment in the context of black power in which African-American Christianity is characterized as the religion of white folks, as conservative. And then what do you see? You see people like James Cone in 1969 beginning to translate the prophetic black church tradition into the idiom of black power. So he publishes a text in 1969 entitled Black Theology and Black Power. He publishes it a year before Peruvian theologian Gustavo Gutierrez publishes A Theology of Liberation. Everyone wants to say that black liberation theology is derivative of Latin-American liberation theologies, and that's not true historically.

Cone takes the prophetic dimensions of black Christianity, and he places it in the language of black power where God is on the side of black people. Jesus is on the side of the oppressed; and wherever there is evil, wherever there are oppressed people, that's where we find Jesus. Jesus is not locked into some distant past; he's present in the lives of those who suffer. And so there is this interesting kind of reinterpretation of the Bible -- there's a high Christology in black liberation theology.

This particular iteration of the black church tradition takes on a particular life in light of the kind of register of African-American politics at the moment. Jeremiah Wright comes out of this tradition, and so I want to make a turn to him for a brief moment. Wright's Christianity for some served as a proxy for the claim about Obama's otherness. And so here we have Obama claiming in the beginning the power of the black church, and then here we have Jeremiah Wright coming back on the backside.

Wright's version of African-American Christianity bore the imprimatur not of Martin Luther King's message of love but of the fiery rhetoric of black power -- the effort on the part of black theologians to translate the African-American church tradition into the idiom of black power. And it's precisely Obama's connection to the so-called "rabid sectarian voices of black power" that potentially undermined for some his claims to universality. Remember [conservative political commentator] Patrick Buchanan's blog, "A Brief for Whitey," which said that we've seen this before -- this is simply the shakedown politics of black power. Obama, unlike his marketed image, is really black, and is therefore a candidate only for them, because black candidates can only be niche candidates, only represent black people, right?

How many times did we see that the press represented in interesting sorts of ways Jeremiah Wright as a stand-in for African-American churches. And what is obscured by such broad strokes, it seems to me, is the amazing religious diversity of African-American communities. Part of what we have to do is begin to tell a story about African-American religion that's not reducible to King. There's a story of African-American religion that actually accounts for people like T.D. Jakes,⁴ or Creflo Dollar⁵ -- people you might not know -- for example, Reverend Ike⁶ of the '60s and '70s. Reverend Ike actually lifted particular dimensions of his biography from [white evangelist] Oral Roberts.

There is an interesting cross-fertilization between certain expressions of African-American Christianity, particularly African-American religious fundamentalism, with mainstream white fundamentalism that goes all the way back to the '20s and '30s. A certain vision of what African-American Christianity is always tied to a certain understanding of King, that prophetic tradition. [But] there is much more diversity there. Just yesterday, I was reading an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Caitlin Flanagan and Benjamin Schwarz about Proposition 8 [banning gay marriage in California]. And folk are trying to figure out how could these black folk vote for Proposition 8 given this particular understanding of black Christianity? We saw in the Pew Forum survey data, how mainline black denominations are as conservative as Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses. But there's a tendency to think that mainline black Christians are, by definition, progressive and prophetic.

Now, we see, I think a similar logic given to the question about which church will President Obama and his family attend? Will he join a black church or not, and what might it suggest if he does or does not? Such questions, I believe are freighted with the weight of our current national malaise, not just our economic woes. But there is the fact -- and a dangerous fact it is -- that we can no longer without fear of recrimination talk about race explicitly, at least when it comes to President-elect Obama. So the choice of place of worship, its cultural locus, becomes a critical site for the continued interrogation of his identification. Is he really black after all? And what better way to signal his true identity than his presence in a place, during the "most segregated hour" in American life. But if he decides not to attend a black church, learning the so-called lessons of his Trinity experience, is this an indication that we have truly arrived at a post-racial moment?

The somewhat manic character of this hand wringing bears the burden of a historic neurosis: the fantasy of a black-less America. As Ralph Ellison noted, not with a hint of the vitriol of Jeremiah Wright, "It is a fantasy borne not merely of racism but of petulance, of exasperation, of moral fatigue. It is like a boil bursting forth from impurities in the bloodstream of democracy." This wishful fantasy of absolving our national sins by getting shut of blackness has reached a crescendo with Obama's ascendance, only to be snatched back to the ground by the ever-present realities of race in our daily doings, and, in this case, our worshipping. But as Ellison noted, and as I believe with all my heart in this most critical of moments, that the nation could not survive, "deprived of their presence because, by the irony implicit in the dynamics of American democracy, they, black folk, symbolize both its most stringent testing and the possibility of its greatest human freedom." And it's precisely within this paradox that we find ourselves at this moment; and once again as it has always been, or often been, religion stands as a primary space where the mess gets worked out.

Find the full transcript including discussion and hyperlinks at pewforum.org.

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Notes

¹ Find more about conservative scholar and politician Alan Keyes at pewforum.org.
² Find more about domestic policy expert William A. Galston at pewforum.org.
³ In 1944, author and theologian Howard Thurman left his position as dean at Howard University to co-found the first fully integrated, multi-cultural church in the U.S. in San Francisco, CA.
⁴ Televangelist , author and movie-maker T.D. Jakes is chief pastor of The Potter's House, a non-denominational mega-church in Dallas, Texas.
⁵ Creflo Augustus Dollar, Jr. is a televangelist, Word of Faith teacher, pastor, and the founder of the non-denominational Christian World Changers Ministries based in College Park, Georgia.
⁶ Rev. Frederick Eikerenkoetter, better known as REV. IKE, "The Success and Prosperity Preacher," has been an active evangelist for more than 40 years.