After Rev. Michael Pfleger’s sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ, a sermon that mocked Hillary Clinton’s response to competition from a black candidate with unanticipated popular appeal (and campaigning skills), Obama formally severed ties to the Chicago congregation. Most of the public discussion about that move has been framed as a debate about whether he took too long to leave his controversial church behind.
Given all the problems Obama and McCain have had with religious leaders this campaign season, they could both write a similarly pitched (and slightly newfangled) argument for the necessary separation of Church and State. But one thing that hasn’t gotten nearly as much attention, it seems, is the extent to which Obama’s decision to leave his church of 20 years (for its sake and his own) demonstrates a larger divide between general assumptions about the function of religious traditions and the actual role that organized religious practices and beliefs play in people’s everyday and political lives. Religion is often an easy thing to invoke (as an abstract “good”) but much harder for some to swallow in all its sharpest specificity. Everyone invokes a loving God, but few can accept a God of war and vengefulness (at least not in public circles).
Moreover, Jeremiah Wright’s recent controversies have opened up a series of debates about the state of black Christianity today. For instance, Stanely Kurtz flays the Marxism-inflected liberation theology of one of Wright’s mentors, James Cone, in a recent National Review article, arguing that Wright deployed Cone’s theories to transform Trinity from a liberal to a radical congregation during his tenure. Kurtz’s demonization of Cone underplays the degree to which religiously driven radical commitments to social/material equality, commitments underpinning what historian Edward J. Blum calls the “second wave” of liberation theology, precede even the well-known Latin American cases from the 1970s.
Serious political activism tends to demand the kind of existential footing that religious faith provides. Writing about Nicaragua, anthropologist Roger Lancaster argues that the history of revolutionary social movements there (or anywhere else, for that matter) is just about incomprehensible without making links to the moral authority and galvanizing power that Christianity helped establish.
Marxism and religion are usually assumed to operate at cross purposes, especially since social theorist Karl Marx famously dismissed religious beliefs as delusions, ideological tricks that purposefully keep people focused on heavenly gates instead of their earth-bound troubles. But Christian socialisms clearly predated (and even informed) Marx’s very own theory of revolutionary change, Christians socialisms that had long grounded demands for equality in a language of spiritual brotherhood and righteous anger.
Kurtz might be putting the cart a bit before the horse when he starts the discussion with Cone appropriating Marx. Ironically (given his stated hostility to religious beliefs/doctines as political opium), Marx was actually — to a certain extent — simply re-appropriating the Christian doctrines that came before him.
