SocraticGadfly: Required reading for Amy Sullivan about ‘the black church’

April 30, 2008

Required reading for Amy Sullivan about ‘the black church’

Washington Post column Eugene Robinson, often underappreciated, makes clear there is no such thing as “the monolithic black church.”
(Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s) basic point — that any attack on him is an attack on the African American church and its traditions — is just wrong. In making that argument, he buys into the fraudulent idea of a monolithic, monocultural black America — one with his philosophy and theology at its center. …

The reality of the African American church, of course, is as diverse as the African American community. I grew up in the Methodist church with pastors -- often active on the front lines of the civil rights movement -- whose sermons were rarely exciting enough to elicit more than a muttered "Amen." They were excitement itself, however, compared with the dry lectures delivered by the priest at the Catholic church around the corner. And what I heard every Sunday was nothing at all like the Bible-thumping, hellfire-and-damnation perorations that filled my Baptist friends with the Holy Ghost -- and even less like the spellbinding, singsong, jump-and-shout sermonizing that raised the roofs of Pentecostal sanctuaries across town.

That said, Robinson also gets to the “throwing under the bus” line, which some white liberals, under the guise of calling it “overused,” seem to think is taboo.

Robinson says, clearly, that Wright threw Obama under the bus and it was time for Obama to return the favor.

Can white liberals who aren’t so skeptical be a little less PC at times?

Meanwhile, MoJo seeks new levels of inanity by comparing The Really Angry Black Man and Sort Of Angry Black Man. I don’t know if she saw all of Obama’s “denounce Wright” speech, or read the transcript; it’s clear that, like much of the MSM, she didn’t do that with Wright.

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