Supporting the Gospel of Nuttiness (UPDATED)

When all the stuff from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright started hitting the fan a couple of days ago, I decided I would only comment if the United Church of Christ stepped in. I don’t deal with partisan politics here, but the ecclesiastical angle is another story. Well, I didn’t have to wait long:

In the wake of misleading attacks on its mission and ministry, Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ is being lauded by United Church of Christ leaders across the nation for the integrity of its worship, the breadth of its community involvement and the depth of its commitment to social justice.

That may well be true of Trinity Church, but the church isn’t the issue, except to the extent that it agreed with and appreciated the bizarre, racist, conspiracy-mongering and trash-talking of its senior pastor.

“Trinity United Church of Christ is a great gift to our wider church family and to its own community in Chicago,” says UCC General Minister and President John H. Thomas. “At a time when it is being subjected to caricature and attack in the media, it is critical that all of us express our gratitude and support to this remarkable congregation, to Jeremiah A. Wright for his leadership over 36 years, and to Pastor Otis Moss III, as he assumes leadership at Trinity.

“Caricature”? I’m not sure that’s the right word for someone who thinks that the U.S. invented AIDS and sells drugs to destroy black people, thinks that New York and Washington got what they deserved on 9/11, who echoes Fred Phelps in calling on God to damn America, who honors Louis Farrakhan as a man who “truly epitomized greatness, etc. Having seen the video and read the transcripts, I think a lot of folks have Jeremiah Wright pegged just right.

“These attacks, many of them motivated by their own partisan agenda, cannot go unchallenged,” Thomas emphasizes. “It’s time for all of us to say ‘No’ to these attacks and to declare that we will not allow anyone to undermine or destroy the ministries of any of our congregations in order to serve their own narrow political or ideological ends.”

Thankfully, there is no ideological agenda at work, either in Wright’s anti-American, anti-white, conspiracy-mongering screeds or in Thomas’ defense of him. Just pure gospel honesty. Fortunately, the latter’s defense is based on personal experience, Thomas having worshiped at Trinity on several occasions:

“While the worship is always inspiring, the welcome extravagant, and the preaching biblically based and prophetically challenging, I have been especially moved by the way Trinity ministers to its young people, nurturing them to claim their Christian faith, to celebrate their African-American heritage, and to pursue higher education to prepare themselves for leadership in church and society,” Thomas says.

“Biblically based and prophetically challenging” preaching–yeah, that’s the ticket. Check out an example of it here. Or here. Please notice that at no point does Thomas deal with the substance of what Wright is on videotape saying. Wright’s conference minister, the Rev. Steve Gray, is also an enthusiastic supporter:

The Rev. Steve Gray, the UCC’s Indiana-Kentucky Conference Minister, describes Trinity UCC as a “jewel.”

“It’s everything a Christian community is supposed to be,” says Gray, who has been working with Trinity UCC for the past three years to develop a new UCC congregation in Gary, Ind. “Trinity has given well over $100,000 in support of its partnership with us, and in 15 months of regular meetings with Jeremiah Wright, we always found him to be a man of gracious hospitality, humor, generosity, who paid attention to detail but also a man who does not call attention to himself.”

Gray also said this with regard to the Trinity congregation, just to give you an idea of how lots of leaders in the UCC think:

“When you’re Euro-American, the people [at Trinity UCC] are so exceedingly gracious, warm and welcoming. They hug you and say, ‘Welcome to our church!’”

Isn’t that extra special? But given what we’ve been hearing about their senior pastor’s preaching, maybe it’s kind of surprising, after all.

UPDATE: I wonder if Rev. Gray would feel quite so welcome–as a Euro-American, I mean–if he wanted to take the new members class at Trinity. From the March 9 bulletin:

BLACK AND CHRISTIAN NEW MEMBER CLASS
Have you given your heart to Christ, walked the aisle and given your hand to the preacher? So that you may become a full-fledged member of Trinity United Church of Christ, you MUST complete your new member class!

I know Trinity has some non-black members, but I can’t imagine this is the best way to bring them in.

(Hat tip: anonymous commenter at UCC Truths.)

Kinnamon Channels Edgar

The Rev. Michael Kinnamon, General Secretary of the Communist Party National Council of Churches, has taken up where his predecessor left off. For all his talk about how Christian unity was going to be his central focus, Kinnamon, like Bob Edgar, can’t resist the lure of far-left politics, judging by the statement he has put out on the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq:

Five years ago this week, the US invaded Iraq in the name of national security. Over the past 60 months, the war has repeatedly been declared a disastrous mistake by the leaders of the National Council of Churches’ 35 member communions, which represent a wide range of American Christianity from Orthodox to Historic African American churches. These leaders have called for the war to be brought to an end. They have also insisted that the war has made this country less secure. We are convinced, said the delegates to the Council’s 2006 General Assembly, that “genuine security is based in God and is served by the recognition of humanity’s interdependence, and by working with partners to bring about community, development, and reconciliation for all.”

Was the war a mistake? Maybe it was. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone into Iraq. I disagree with that, but I’m open to it as a proposition for debate. But five years later, we are dealing with a completely different set of realities in Iraq: a democratically elected government, a rapidly weakening insurgency, a state making significant progress in dealing with its own security, etc. Yet all Kinnamon can do is repeat the assertions of the past. For some people, it is always 1968. For Kinnamon, it will apparently always be 2003.

On this tragic anniversary, and in the midst of an election campaign where security is a dominant topic, I want to underscore this last point. Anyone can observe that US aggression is spawning new generations of terrorists; but the Christian critique runs deeper. Because human life is interdependent, because we are all children of one Creator, security can never be won through unilateral defense. The Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, puts it succinctly: “There is no security apart from common security.” Israeli security depends, finally, on Palestinians having a stake in the development of the Middle East. US security depends, among other things, on addressing the economic and social disparities that help fuel hatred of this nation.

It is true that “anyone can observe that US aggression is spawning new generations of terrorists,” just as it is true that anyone can observe that Gregory Peck was the star of Animal House. “Observing” doesn’t make it so. As with all the folks on the far left who think this self-evident, Kinnamon doesn’t both to demonstrate it, and so ignores obvious responses: The Islamic world had plenty of terrorists before 2003; Islamic radicals have been proclaiming “death to America” since at least 1979; our support of Israel’s existence is supposedly the reason why the Islamic world hates us, not our aggression; much of America’s military activity in the last 18 years has been in defense of Muslims, whether in Iraq, Kuwait, Afghanistan, Kosovo, or Bosnia. Kinnamon’s position, and that of his far left friends, is based on the idea of American “imperialism,” which is supposed to lie at the heart of all the world’s ills. Tell that to the Russians, dealing with Chechen terrorism. Tell it to Sri Lankans dealing with the Tamil Tigers. Tell it to Columbia, fighting an interminable war war FARC, or Thailand fighting a brutal Islamic terrorist movement. The fact that these countries and others (what exactly has Spain done lately to deserve the terrorists’ wrath?) are having to fight such homegrown murderers demonstrates that common security is indeed a necessity, but not in the way Kinnamon envisions. It isn’t a matter of “addressing the economic and social disparities” (whatever that latter is), given that most of the people we’ve been fighting have been from middle or even upper class backgrounds (an unusual number of terrorist leaders and planners have been doctors, for instance). It’s a matter of the world recognizing its common enemy in those who hate life, hate freedom, and hate difference, and closing ranks to destroy it.

Christians are realistic about evil in the world and, therefore, about the threat of terrorism. We reject any ideology, however, which demonizes others while claiming all righteousness for ourselves; and we refuse to define life as a zero-sum game in which our security is gained at the expense of others.

It is certainly true that demonization and self-righeousness should have no part to play in this issue, but neither does a rosy-eyed moral equivalence that sees the United States and Islamic fascists as simply two heads of the same coin. Kinnamon says that American security “is gained at the expense of others.” What does that mean? That al Qaeda is less secure that they were? I hope so. That Iraq is less secure than it was? In some respects that’s true, but it is also a fledgling democracy instead of one of the world’s most brutal dictatorships, one in which a megalomaniac gladly let hundreds of thousands of his people starve and go without necessary medical treatment, even clean water, while he built enormous monuments to his own vanity.

All of this has enormous implications for the budgeting process now underway in Congress. The President’s proposed defense budget for FY2008 is over a half trillion dollars–not counting extra appropriations for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. A fraction of that amount could substantially reduce hunger, the shortage of adequate housing, the spread of HIV/AIDS, the shortage of classrooms, and environmental destruction around the world. Christians must ask with ever louder voice: Which expenditure will contribute most to our security? Pressing this question is not being soft on terrorism; it is being faithful to the message of the prophets (e.g., Isaiah 32 and Micah 4) that only justice will lead to lasting security.

This seems to be the latest argument getting aired by opponents of the war, and it strikes me as base and immoral, essentially appealing to Americans’ greed and/or self-interest. “Look at how much money we’re wasting protecting those people over there! Think of all the good it could do for us here!” (Even that is a big assumption, since it is based on Great Society notions that have proven positively harmful to countless poor and otherwise needy people.) That isn’t justice, it’s rank nationalism, and says to me that Kinnamon values the lives of Iraqis a good deal less than he does that of Americans. Somehow I don’t think the prophets would buy that message at all.