Posted: 3/28/08

ANALYSIS:
Living in the gray with the Man in Black

By Cathleen Falsani

Religion News Service

CHICAGO (RNS)—It has been suggested, on more than one occasion, that if another face were to be added to the quartet of Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore, it should be Johnny Cash.

The Man in Black would have my vote.

You’d be hard-pressed to name someone more quintessentially American, more representative of the spirit and soul of our nation, than J.R. Cash.

In his new book, Johnny Cash and the Great American Contradiction: Christianity and the Battle for the Soul of a Nation, author Rodney Clapp makes a persuasive argument that Cash—in his life and his music—is emblematic of America’s spirituality.

Clapp’s book, a scholarly if slim volume at only 159 pages, is one of the best examinations of American spirituality and culture I’ve read in a very long time. Clapp also is the author of Border Crossings: Christian Trespasses on Popular Culture and Tortured Wonders: Christian Spirituality for People Not Angels.

Using Cash as a lens through which to view contemporary religiosity, culture and politics, Clapp paints a resonant picture of a society built upon, and entirely mystified by, paradox.

He defines America’s contradiction as the “simultaneous embrace of holiness and hedonism, its pining love of tradition as it carries on a headlong romantic affair with progress, its extreme individualism coursing beside a gigantic, gaping yearning for community, and its insistence on innocence at the same time it revels in violence.”

“All of those are characteristics of the American personality,” Clapp said in an interview. “And it just so happens that Johnny Cash profoundly struggled with all of those things and embodied all of them.”

In life and in song, Cash took on defining moral issues of our time—racism, war, abandonment of the disenfranchised. Each time, he picked the right side. Each time, he chose love over hate, reaching out over turning away, faith over certainty. His was a prophetic voice, and even now, nearly five years after his death, Cash’s words ring as true as ever.

“I do think that in the U.S. right now, we have forgotten and largely ignored a big part of our heritage, which is a big concern for the underdog, the person who is down and out. It’s described on the Statue of Liberty. Give me your poor, your needy, etc. We’re so far from that right now. And Cash was somebody who wouldn’t let us forget,” Clapp said.

“Pay attention to his life and who he was and his music. … He was honest. He was non-sentimental. And too often, I think, especially for churched people, for Christians, there is a tendency to if not cover over, ignore our brokenness, our faults, our sin, to act as if we’re beyond that at least when we’re acting like church people.”

Call it moral ambiguity, spiritual ambivalence or simply hypocrisy, we as a people— Americans and Christian Americans in particular—are so very uncomfortable with what we see as inconsistencies between word and deed. It makes us nervous when someone publicly proclaims their faith and then makes a very public mistake. Or two. Or a dozen.

We respond with anger, skepticism, all-or-nothing judgmentalism and fear. I know when those are my responses, and the first place I should be examining is my own soul. Usually, what I’m horrified by most in others is what I’m struggling against desperately in my own life.

Cash was a straight shooter; that is part of his enduring and broad appeal. As far as I can tell, he never doubted—at least not in any deep or enduring way—the Christian faith he had from childhood. But at the same time, he never pretended for a second he didn’t battle violence, drug and alcohol addiction, infidelity and despair.

“He didn’t brag about these things, but his persona and his music was very honest and nonsentimental,” Clapp said. “That goes against the grain of religious America but does so in a constructive way: We need to be more honest.”

None of us does the right thing all the time. We’re not all good or all bad. We’re something in between.

Even The Man in Black dwelt in the gray.

Cathleen Falsani is a columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and author of The God Factor: Inside the Spiritual Lives of Public People.

Posted: 3/28/08

Judge dismisses Klouda
lawsuit against seminary

By Robert Marus

Associated Baptist Press

FORT WORTH (ABP)—A federal judge has ruled Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary’s decision to fire a female Hebrew professor was akin to a church’s decision to fire its pastor and therefore outside the purview of the civil courts.

U.S. District Judge John McBryde dismissed all of the complaints in Sheri Klouda’s lawsuit against her alma mater and former employer.

Citing a string of precedents by the U.S. Supreme Court and the Fifth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, McBryde wrote, “The courts are prohibited by the First Amendment from involving themselves in ecclesiastical matters, such as disputes concerning theological controversy, church discipline, ecclesiastical government or the conformity of the members of the church to the standard of morals required.”

Klouda’s suit against Southwestern and its president, Paige Patterson, involved such an ecclesiastical matter, the judge determined. It should, therefore, be treated the same way the law would treat an employment dispute between a church and a minister—by avoiding involvement.

“The record establishes as a matter of law that the employment decision made by defendants (Southwestern) concerning plaintiff (Klouda) was ecclesiastical in nature,” McBryde wrote.

“If the court were to allow plaintiff’s claims to go through the normal judicial processes, the procedural entanglements would be far-reaching in their impact upon (the) seminary as a religious organization.”

Klouda filed suit against Southwest-ern a year ago, citing gender discrimination and breach of contract, after leaving the school to take a teaching position at Taylor University in Upland, Ind. Her case was publicized by critics of Patterson, including Southern Baptist bloggers Wade Burleson and Benjamin Cole.

Klouda was hired to teach Hebrew in 2002, under a previous president’s administration.

Patterson became Southwestern’s president in 2003.

According to court documents, he decided women should not teach theology to male ministers-in-training because the Southern Baptist Convention’s confession of faith says the office of pastor is reserved for men.

Nonetheless, according to Klouda, Patterson assured her she was safe in her tenure-track position.

However, in 2004, she was told that she would not be granted tenure.

In 2006, according to Klouda, seminary officials told her she would be terminated at the end of that year.

Among her complaints were that the seminary had violated its promises to her, and there was no clear justification in the Bible or the SBC confession for Patterson’s decision to bar women from Southwestern’s theology faculty.

But McBryde said that was not a decision for the court to second-guess, writing, “Mere inquiry into those areas would be an unconstitutional intrusion into the affairs of the seminary as a religious organization.”

Patterson, in a statement to the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, said McBryde’s decision “has implications for all of our institutions and churches. Americans everywhere may still rejoice in freedom of faith and the ordering of their institutions accordingly.”

In a blog post analyzing the ruling, Burleson said the implications of the ruling, if carried out to their legal conclusion, would bar women from serving as professors at any SBC seminary.

“In the long run, I believe people of the Southern Baptist Convention will realize that there are two ideologies causing tension within our convention,” he wrote.

“One ideology would wish to relegate all women to a position of subordination to men, while the other seeks to acknowledge the biblical view of equality between men and women—with the only official denominational exception to that equality being the prohibition in the (2000 revision of the SBC Baptist Faith & Message statement) for women to serve as ‘senior pastors.’”

Klouda did not return telephone messages requesting comment for this story by press time.

But she reportedly had not decided whether or not she would appeal the decision.

Posted: 3/28/08

Lamar students minister in South Texas

Lamar University students sing in the Escobares town square.
		Lamar University student workers paint faces of children during Vacation Bible School in the South Texas town of Escobares.
	Young children enjoy a Vacation Bible School at Primera Bautista Iglesia de Escobares led by Lamar University student missionaries.
• See Complete Spring Break Ministry Coverage Here

Posted: 3/28/08

Texas Baptist Forum

Reason to swap

Regarding your editorial on “U.S. faith swapping,” (March 17) illicit affairs are not the only reason to leave a marriage. Sometimes the spouse is overbearing, neglectful and abusive.

• Jump to online-only letters below

Letters are welcomed. Send them to marvknox@baptiststandard.com; 250 words maximum.

“Honestly, if we could harness some of the emotion from this and turn it to evangelism and missions, we could see a massive change in our missionary and evangelistic endeavors.” Frank Page Southern Baptist Convention president, commenting on the furor after some Southern Baptists—including Page —signed a statement calling for environmental protection (Baptist Press/RNS) “One day, I have to give an account to God and not to nobody else of what I’ve done in my life. And that’s why I’ve said and shared the stuff with y’all that … I wouldn’t like to share with y’all.” Andy Pettitte Yankees pitcher and Baptist Sunday school teacher, telling Congress he used human growth hormone but did not consider it cheating (New York Daily News/RNS) “Women have two places—in front of the sink and behind the vacuum.” Micah Armstrong Evangelist, preaching to University of Alabama students, also saying they will go to hell for drinking, cursing, having pre-marital sex, watching movies or reading Harry Potter books (Associated Press/RNS)

Having come of age spiritually in the midst of the Baptist infighting of the 1980s and 1990s, I, like many of my generation, left an unhealthy Baptist marriage and sought less contentious places of worship.

At Baylor University in the late 1980s, I watched as my professors were abused in photocopied publications passed around campus and at Baptist General Convention of Texas meetings. I attended those meetings, which were as partisan and divisive as mainstream politics.

I graduated from South-western Seminary a few weeks after watching the trustees treat Russell Dilday in a way that should bring shame to even the most corrupt corporate board. I talked to professors at Southwestern who were driven out of their positions by trustees who sent their student interns into class with orders to report on any questionable teaching they heard.

Since graduating from seminary, I have been happy to attend nondenominational churches that are not weighed down by the institutional sicknesses that have plagued the Southern Baptist Convention and the BGCT. Are these churches perfect? No. But I certainly do not feel like I am missing out on anything by not being a part of the denomination in which I was raised.

I know there are some lovely, healthy ponies in the Baptist barn. I just got tired of the piles and piles of manure.

Paul Mastin

Fort Worth

Sign of covenant?

You quite properly report that a large minority of American parents have decided to avoid nontherapeutic circumcision of their newborn sons (March 17). Your article asks, “Are parents cutting out the sign of the covenant?” The answer is, “No, they are following the New Covenant.”

You apparently overlooked the teaching of Scripture, including the council at Jerusalem (Acts 15), at which Paul, Banabas, Peter, James and others decided new Christians should not be required to submit to circumcision.

Circumcision was not included in the requirements set forth in the letter to Gentile believers (Acts 15:22-29). Christians from that day forward have been exempt from the Old Testament Abrahamic covenant of circumcision (Genesis 17:9-14).

Paul said we should not have confidence in the flesh (Philippians 3:3), meaning that cutting off a body part is not the way to salvation. Christians are not supposed to circumcise.

Paul twice warned of the falseness of the claims made for circumcision (Galatians 2;4; Titus 1:10-11). His warning is equally valid today, because many false medical claims are put forward for circumcision. Parents should be skeptical of doctors who advocate circumcision.

The Bible is supposed to be our authority for faith and practice.

Why do American Christians not follow the guidance of the Bible with regard to circumcision?

George Hill

Vice president for bioethics and medical science

Doctors Opposing Circumcision

Seattle, Wash.

Thank you so much for the article on circumcision (March 17). I am a Texan, a Christian, an intactivist—anti-circumcision activist—and the mother of an intact son.

Mandy Ballard

Tyler

Stick to business

I am saddened, embarrassed and confused by the contents of Statement 2, “It is Prudent to Address Global Climate Change” portion of the recently issued A Southern Baptist Declaration on the Environment and Climate Change (March 17).

First, I am saddened because my beloved brethren have been caught up in this economic scam that has been falsely portrayed as science. I suppose that when the tide seems to be flowing one way, some feel that is the only way to swim. History is rife with tragic examples of “consensus opinion” being tragically wrong. 

Secondly, I am embarrassed that, despite disclaimers to the contrary, the ill-advised statement will be assumed to be shared by all of us who claim the name Baptist Christian.

Finally, I am confused about what possible good can ever come from nonscientists taking bold stands on unsettled social issues that are still in the very early stages of research. Many esteemed climate scientists have stated that even they don’t yet know enough to recommend what, if any, action is warranted. 

I humbly ask that we all stick to the business to which we have been called—going and telling about the eternal hope that will survive far beyond the inanities of this wisp of time we call life. To do otherwise takes us from being salt and light to being just more voices howling at the moon, hoping to scare it away.

Jerry Barker

Falfurrias

Silly significance search

I can’t stop laughing over “Indiana Jones would be proud: Prof claims he has found lost Ark of the Covenant” (March 17).

I am trying to imagine why this is a “story,” why you would publish it and could anyone take it seriously? Surely you published this as a “take a look at how silly some have become in their search for significance” article.

The other article on that page, “Oxford researchers get $4 million to study origins of belief in God” makes me want to see if I can get a grant to study what makes people say stuff like, “On the flip side, just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s true.” Say what? Is that psycho-babble or gobbledygook?

Thanks for the humor; God knows there is little of it in Baptist circles these days.

Besides, everyone knows the Ark of the Covenant is in a warehouse somewhere deep in the bowels of Washington, D.C.

Bill Weaver

North Richland Hills

Out-of-step scientists

Deborah and Loren Haarsma (March 17) apparently believe evolution is God’s way of creating life and evolving it into its present state. If so, they are out of step with the basics of evolutionary theory, which insists evolution happens without purpose and without direction from any outside planner or designer (read God).

As William Provine says in Evolution and the Foundation of Ethics, “Persons who manage to retain religious beliefs while accepting evolutionary biology have to check their brains at the church-house door.”

When I left the University of Texas as a petroleum engineer, I was a confirmed believer in evolution. In nearly 60 years since, my studies have convinced me Darwinism is shown to be wrong by science itself. The fossil record, for instance, shows life has not evolved as Darwin predicted. Instead, new life forms consistently appear in the rocks fully developed, with no transitional stages leading up to them.

I could easily become a theistic evolutionist if I could convince myself evolution is true. I could just rationalize away any troubling Scriptures by remembering the Bible is not a book about science. Unfortunately, evolution is not such good science, either, when challenged with the facts of true science, like paleontology.

Ken Boren

Rowlett

Full of goodness

The Apostle Paul’s writings indicate Paul was a genuine individual who was committed to the Lord Jesus Christ, yet his commitment did not end there. Paul was committed to friends, colleagues and fellow brothers and sisters in Christ.

One statement, found in Romans 15:14, has had a profound impact on me. Paul writes, “I myself am convinced, my brothers, that you yourselves are full of goodness, complete in knowledge and competent to instruct one another.” This statement indicates Paul’s absolute confidence in his fellow believers’ goodness.

I don’t think Paul was describing a goodness that was intrinsic, but rather that which was as a result of a relationship with God through Christ. Pastors should believe in those we lead!

Next, Paul believed their knowledge to be complete, and this drives home a thought of a foundational Baptist belief in each believer having the ability to discern/understand God’s word.

Paul also believed his friends to have the ability to instruct one another. Pastors may get the idea the church “can’t do it without us.” Paul’s confidence indicated a level of belief in his fellow brothers and sisters, and to me this is an amazing statement of leadership.

Leaders must convey trust and confidence in those we lead. 

Bill Adams

Belton

What do you think? Because we affirm the priesthood of all believers, we value the dialogue offered by our readers’ forum. Send letters to Editor Marv Knox by mail: P.O. Box 660267, Dallas 75266-0267; or by e-mail: marvknox@baptiststandard.com. Due to space considerations, maximum length is 250 words, and only one letter per writer per quarter will be published .

Posted: 3/28/08

Sam Houston State teams at Mission Arlington
Erika Rangel from Sam Houston State University spends quality time with a little girl at Mission Arlington.	Brock Wardlaw from Sam Houston State University gives a boy at Mission Arlington a ride on his shoulders.	Zach Massey from Sam Houston State University gives a piggyback ride to an Arlington child.
		Michael Bosquez from Sam Houston State University enjoys time with children in Arlington.
Sam Stokes from Sam Houston State University hangs out with a group of children in Arlington.
The Baptist Student Ministries at Sam Houston State University sent 25 volunteers to Mission Arlington. The student missionaries conducted service projects including free garage sales, passing out flyers at apartment complexes, organizing and cleaning, and filling Easter eggs.  Students worked with about 60 children in the afternoon at an apartment complex— singing, praying, playing games and teaching Bible stories.
• See Complete Spring Break Ministry Coverage Here

Posted: 3/28/08

Report: Without changes,
selling lottery doesn’t add up

By John Hall

Texas Baptist Communications

AUSTIN—Unless gambling is expanded, selling the lottery will not produce the $14 billion Gov. Rick Perry has estimated, according to a report released by a watchdog group March 26.

Texans for Public Justice reports that documents given to the governor’s office suggest gambling in Texas would need to be expanded in order to generate the kind of income Perry has suggested. The extension of gambling would allow the lottery to show increasing sales, making it more attractive to bidders.

In nonbinding opinions, Texas Attorney Gen. Greg Abbott already has stated some of the proposed gambling expansions are unconstitutional. Among the suggested expansion options are keno, video lottery terminals and Internet gaming.

But Aces Wired, a Dallas company that operates games some say blur legal lines, is pushing the governor to privatize the lottery, the report said.

“Projections that the gambling industry privately submitted to the governor’s office make clear that the state cannot raise a purse of this size unless it resigns itself to the proliferation of more gambling in potentially more-addictive forms,” the report reads. “If Texans oppose such a gambling expansion, then these documents suggest that what they should play with the Texas lottery games is Texas Hold ‘Em.”

Suzii Paynter, director of the Baptist General Convention of Texas Christian Life Commission, said the report is further confirmation additional privatization of the lottery would be a blunder.

“Many of the functions that can be effectively and efficiently privatized have been privatized in Texas,” she said. “To consider an expansion of gambling, adding more games that would bring a lot of negative consequences just to drive up the price, would be a bad idea.”

Posted: 3/28/08

Texas Tidbits

Baylor Garland medical team serves in Honduras. Health care professionals from Baylor Medical Center in Garland recently served on a medical mission to Honduras, working with Mission Predisan. Physicians, nurses, pharmacists, translators, anesthesiologists, sterile processing technicians and others who made the trek donated their medical services. At a clinic in Catacamas, the operating room team performed 27 surgeries in three and a half days. Part of the mission team traveled to remote mountain clinics, where they treated 300 patients in three days, working by candlelight in facilities that lacked electricity and plumbing.

Gracewood benefits from matching grants. Children at Heart Ministries has received two matching grants to expand its Gracewood program for single mothers and their children. The Christ Is Our Salvation Foundation will match up to $220,000 for operating expenses related to Gracewood’s expansion, which includes the first residence on a new northwest Houston campus and the conversion of existing offices to a residence at its original campus in southwest Houston. The Leroy and Merle Weir Charitable Trust has made a $275,000 challenge grant toward construction of an additional residence on the northwest campus in Houston.

Baugh Foundation awards $250,000 to Howard Payne. The Eula Mae and John Baugh Foundation of Houston will grant $250,000 to Howard Payne University to support its Paul and Jane Meyer Faith and Life Leadership Center. The center will utilize renovated space in the Phelps Bible Building, the chapel and Mims Auditorium. At the Baugh Foundation’s request, the facility’s multipurpose conference room will be named in honor of Richard and Wanda Jackson. Jackson is founder of the Jackson Center for Evangelism and Encouragement in Brownwood. The conference room will be a central component of the Paul and Jane Meyer Faith and Life Leadership Center, seating about 300 for lectures and 230 for banquets.

HPU Lady Jackets win national championship. Howard Payne University completed an undefeated season and captured its first NCAA Division III women’s basketball national championship by defeating Messiah (Pa.) College, 68-54. The Lady Jackets (33-0) became the first Division III national championship to go undefeated since Washington (Mo.) University in 2000. Howard Payne, which was appearing in the NCAA tournament for the fourth consecutive year, is the first team from the American Southwest Conference to win the national championship.

Lindsay wins book award. Michael Lindsay, assistant professor of sociology at Rice University and a member of West University Baptist Church in Houston, received one of the top honors from Christianity Today magazine in its annual CT Book Awards. Lindsay, who also is assistant director of the Center on Race, Religion and Urban Life, won the Christianity and culture category for Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite. In addition, three Baylor University professors received award of merit honors in the competition. Roger Olson, professor of theology at Truett Theological Seminary, was recognized in the in the apologetics/evangelism category for Questions to All of Your Answers: A Journey from Folk Religion to Examined Faith. Thomas Kidd, associate professor of history, wrote The Great Awakening: The Roots of Evangelical Christianity in Colonial America, which took the second-place honor in history/biography. Rodney Stark, university professor of the social sciences, was honored in theology/ethics for Discovering God: The Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief.

Families endow Wayland scholarships. Three families recently have donated funds to create endowed student scholarships at Wayland Baptist University in memory or in honor of loved ones. The family and friends of Donna Sarchet, a former associate professor of business at Wayland who died in July 2005, created a scholarship in her memory. Sarchet served 22 years at the university. The family of Mauriene Smithson Matthews, a former Flying Queen who was a member of the WBU Athletic Hall of Honor, also established an endowed scholarship in her memory. Matthews, who died at age 74 in June 2007, taught school in Plainview 33 years before retiring in 1995. The family of Gerald Thompson created an endowed scholarship in his honor to mark his pending retirement in May. Thompson has been a science professor at Wayland since 1967.

WMU annual meeting slated. The Woman’s Missionary Union of Texas annual meeting is set for April 18-19 at Columbus Avenue Baptist Church in Waco. It will feature Jennifer Kennedy Dean, executive director of The Praying Life Foundation. For more information, visit www.wmutx.org.

Posted: 3/28/08

When the preacher loses his cool,
should church members take a hike?

By Jim White

Virginia Religious Herald

The now-familiar images of Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, calling down God’s wrath on America raise questions for Christians: What place does rage have in the pulpit? And when should worshippers show their displeasure with the pastor’s preaching by leaving the church?

Professors Beth Newman of Baptist Theological Seminary at Richmond and Roger Olson of Baylor University’s Truett Theological Seminary in Waco agree Wright’s anger must be understood within the context of the African-American experiences and worship.

Anger is an appropriate response to injustices experienced and prejudices endured, Newman noted.

“Even God gets angry,” she said. “The Bible says to be angry and sin not.”

Newman suggests that although the language Wright used is offensive, she interprets it as Wright’s calling down judgment on the nation that has allowed many of its people to suffer racial injustices and indignities.

White American Christians must struggle to comprehend the depth of humiliation racism creates as well as the rage black liberation theology expresses, Olson noted.

“Black theology is full of righteous indignation or simply black rage. It may be debatable how justified it is, but I can understand it even if I think that at times it crosses the line,” he said.

“The way he (Wright) is saying it is unfamiliar to a lot of people who don’t attend black churches. When you are in the pulpit in a black church, you are expected to be passionate. That’s what he was doing.”

Furthermore, Newman believes different worship expectations constitute one substantive difference between African-American and white churches.

She cites a conversation between Methodist bishop William Willimon and an African-American pastor. Willimon asked the pastor to explain the lengthy worship services.

The pastor responded, “Our people are repeatedly told during the week that they are less than what God created human beings to be. So when they come into worship, we have to set things right and give them the vision they should have of themselves and who they are in God’s story. It takes a long time to do that.”

Should Sen. Barack Obama—or any other worshippers—have left the church after Wright’s sermon? Neither professor thinks so.

“That smacks of a kind of consumer approach,” reasoned New-man. “‘If it doesn’t meet my needs, or if I don’t agree with what is said, why don’t I go somewhere else?’ I think that a part of what it means to be the church together is to be there with each other even during those times we think the other is mistaken. I think one of the things the church in the United States needs to aspire to is the willingness to stay put.”

Each professor emphasized, however, that at times leaving a church is appropriate. How does a person know when to leave? Olson offered this advice: “When you find that you are not able to contribute constructively to the congregation and by your presence to edify others, it is probably time to look elsewhere. I would not leave just because I disagreed with what the pastor said unless it was terribly heretical or blatantly racist or something like that. That raises the question: Was Rev. Wright being racist? I have trouble judging that.”

Perhaps it is precisely that issue that is most theologically troublesome. Does a 30-second video clip qualify one to pronounce judgment upon the ministry of another? Regardless of his momentary offenses, should Wright’s comments, so offensive to many, negate a lifetime of ministry?

While Martin Marty taught at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he and Wright became close friends. He takes strong exception to some of the things Wright has done, but cautions against writing him off. “I’ve been too impressed by the way Wright preaches the Christian gospel to break with him,” Marty asserted.

Posted: 3/28/08

Pastor’s role in Obama campaign
spotlights race, pulpit freedom

By Robert Marus

Associated Baptist Press

ASHINGTON (ABP)—While the political consequences of Sen. Barack Obama’s recent speech on race created chatter for cable-news channels, the episode is noteworthy for another reason, according to experts in religion and politics.

For the first time in modern American history, a presidential candidate’s pastor and congregation are the cause of a major campaign controversy.

Also, according to experts on the African-American tradition of prophetic preaching, the division over the Illinois Democrat’s former minister casts light on the difficulties black and white Americans still have in understanding each other’s religious culture.

“I just can’t come up with a good example—a good analogy—of one church, one pastor, even one sermon having this kind of effect on a candidate,” said Laura Olson, a Clemson University professor and expert in religion and politics.

Asked to think of a parallel situation in American presidential politics, Ouachita Baptist University political scientist Hal Bass had to reach nearly a century.

“Back in the late 19th and early part of the 20th century, when anti-Catholicism was hot and heavy in the United States … there were frequently allegations that the Catholic candidates for president—like Al Smith in ’28—were in the pocket of the pope,” he said. But comparing that to the present situation was like comparing “apples and oranges.”

Obama’s campaign has been assailed for weeks because of comments made by Jeremiah Wright, who recently retired after 36 years as senior pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. Snippets of the messages—containing comments that many have interpreted as anti-American and anti-white—have been posted on YouTube and publicized by innumerable media outlets.

Obama has been an active member of the predominantly African-American congregation more than 20 years and has credited Wright with helping bring him to Christ and being a spiritual mentor.

In response to the uproar over Wright’s comments, Obama delivered a speech in Philadelphia in which he denounced his pastor’s most controversial statements. But he also asked those offended by Wright to understand the context in which a black preacher raised under the oppression of segregation might feel compelled to make controversial statements about race and a United States whose founding ideals were, as Obama put it, “stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery.”

Nonetheless, the candidate added, Wright’s words “expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country—a view that sees white racism as endemic, that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America.”

In that sense, Obama continued, Wright’s comments “weren’t only wrong, but divisive—divisive at a time at which we need unity.”

But to African-American ears, those divisive words can ring pretty true, according to Bill Leonard, dean of Wake Forest University Divinity School.

“In many ways, Jeremiah Wright exists in a community that both expects and needs him to wear the prophet’s mantle in ways that sound very painful in the public square—to the principalities and powers that occupy the public square,” said Leonard, who is white but has been an active member of historically African-American Baptist congregations for 16 years.

Olson, the Clemson political scientist, said one has to note the ministry context in which Wright preached. Trinity is a large congregation—the biggest in its denomination, which is overwhelmingly white. It has a tradition of social activism and operates multiple ministries for the disadvantaged. It is located in one of the poorest and most crime-ridden parts of Chicago’s South Side.

“So, you have to think a little bit about what the target audience is,” Olson said. “In a sense, if you’re Jeremiah Wright … you’re trying to inspire and you’re trying to give people hope and you’re trying to rile people up and get them to see things in a way that they maybe wouldn’t have seen things, and that you’re maybe trying to shake people out of a cycle of hopelessness. I mean, you’re not trying to tear down white America; your comments aren’t meant for that purpose.”

Many commentators have denounced Wright’s comments as “racist” or “anti-white.” But many African-American preachers—and a handful of their white colleagues—have defended Wright vigorously.

Alfred Smith, pastor of Allen Temple Baptist Church in Oakland, Calif., and an early leader in the civil-rights movement, has been one of the most outspoken.

Wright’s white critics, Smith said, are “living in privilege in suburbia where a suburban gospel is preached. And we’re living in the inner city, where the cry of the cross is perennial. And we have to give hope to people where the hope, unborn, has died.”

Leonard noted the historical emphasis in black churches on the value of a free pulpit.

“Jeremiah Wright won the right to talk straight with this people because he married them and buried them and was there when they were sick and hurting,” he said. “And so, a great many people … because their preacher has been a pastor to them, are willing to let their pastor, in a free pulpit, let he, she say whatever … they feel led to.”

Bass and Leonard both said the Wright episode also shows that many in the mainstream news media still have a difficult time understanding Christianity in all its forms.

“In spite of all the religious conversation that has gone on, often growing out of the evangelical participation in the public square … the public media still, in general, does not know what to do with Christianity, left or right, with the rhetoric and the commitments and the contexts of Protestant preaching and culture,” Leonard said.

Bass said that, while he was not trying to “establish an equivalence” between Wright’s comments and those of many conservative evangelicals, when taken out of context, evangelical preachers often are misunderstood by those outside their own context in the same fashion that Wright may have been interpreted.

“I think we all are, shall we say, victims of selective perception. We hear what we want to hear, we disregard what we don’t want to hear,” Bass said. “I think, after natural disasters (and) in anticipation of natural disasters, you’ve seen prominent conservative-oriented religious leaders speak of God’s judgment on parts of America or America as a whole.”

Leonard said churches also need to be aware of how comments could be perceived in the wider public in the YouTube age.

“Pulpit rhetoric in Protestant churches, left and right of center, in the context of most churches … sounds like prophetic conviction,” he said. However, “in light of American pluralism, when it gets on CNN, it sounds like bigotry. And religious communities have to understand that.”

Posted: 3/28/08

Black liberation theology provides
the doctrine behind fiery rhetoric

By Rosemary Parrillo

Religion News Service

NEWARK, N.J. (RNS)—Jeremiah Wright’s condemnation of the United States—particularly pronouncing damnation on America—looped hundreds of thousands of times on YouTube and news broadcasts. In the process, the pastor preached himself and his most famous church member, presidential contender Barack Obama, into a political maelstrom.

Quickly the question of race developed into a speed bump for the streaking Obama campaign, leading the candidate to try to set the record straight about his relationship with Wright, the fiery pastor who recently retired from Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

What has not re-ceived much coverage, however, is black liberation theology, the doctrine behind Wright’s rhetoric. The theology, which grew out of the civil rights struggles of the 1960s, embraces a black-centered Christianity aggressively focused on eradicating racism.

Liberation theology had its roots among the poor in Latin America. In the United States, the originator of black liberation theology is James Cone, an African-American Protes-tant minister who grew up in the segregated South and now teaches at Union Theological Seminary in New York.

Cone took the idea that the God of the poor is much different from the God of the rich and privileged and created a doctrine that sought to make the gospel speak to African-Americans suffering oppression in white society.

Black liberation theology accepts traditional Christian beliefs, such as Jesus as Savior. But it teaches that Christ’s message today would be one of fighting for racial, political and economic equality.

Cone described an early “crisis of faith” that led him to try to create a theology reconciling the nonviolent Christianity of Martin Luther King Jr., and the “by any means necessary” philosophy of Malcolm X—in effect, a religious answer to the secular Black Power movement of the day.

This led to his seminal works on the subject, Black Theology & Black Power (1969) and A Black Theology of Liberation (1970).

Cone, 69, is now a professor of systematic theology at Union Theological Seminary and continues to lecture on black theology. Appearing at Harvard Theological Seminary in 2006, Cone said his goal was to “make sense of the Christian gospel in the face of the horrific suffering of black people in the U.S.”

In a somewhat prophetic interview with the New York Times in 1989, Cone noted that serious theological scholarship is needed to inform the messages delivered in black churches.

“Without strong theology, preaching becomes entertainment, and there is a tendency to make church life center around the preacher.”

Posted: 3/28/08

Obama pastor’s tough sermons just
part of long, prophetic tradition

By Adelle M. Banks

Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)—The longtime pastor of Sen. Barack Obama’s black megachurch in Chicago has come under fire for sermons that many have called racist, offensive—and even dangerous.

Jeremiah Wright has called the federal government the “U.S. of K.K.K. A.” Just after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Wright said “America’s chickens are coming home to roost.”

Observers of the black church say Wright’s sermons may seem incendiary, but they reflect a proud history of what Walter Earl Fluker of Morehouse College in Atlanta calls “prophetic preaching, which is the trademark of the black church tradition, of which Jeremiah Wright is perhaps one of the most illustrious exemplars.”

Peter Paris, professor emeritus of Christian social ethics at Princeton Theological Seminary, attended seminary with Wright in the 1960s and said Wright fits in the prophetic tradition of both the black church and the Bible.

“Prophets are basically reformers and not revolutionaries,” said Paris. “There’s a line beyond which one is no longer prophetic but one is revolutionary. He’s not there, but the language may appear from time to time to be there.”

Even those who disagree with Wright’s comments—politically or otherwise—maintain his right to preach the truth as he sees it in the pulpit.

“For many African-Americans, everything that Jeremiah Wright said would be considered true,” said Harry Jackson, the conservative black leader of the High Impact Leadership Coalition and a pastor in Lanham, Md. “It is the spirit in which he said it, the attitude even of bitterness, that comes through in that particular piece, that’s the thing that taints the whole thing.”

And some, including white evangelical activist Jim Wallis, say Wright’s comments, however incendiary, reflect reality in black America.

“That the country is mostly run by rich white people, that’s a pretty broadly based opinion among most people in the black community, including black churches,” said Wallis, the founder of Washington-based Sojourners/Call to Renewal.

Those who know Wright, and who have observed the black church, say he fits squarely in the truth-telling tradition of prophetic preachers who speak truth to power and say things others might not.

Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, professor of African-American studies at Colby College in Maine, wasn’t surprised to hear Wright combat racism.

“If you’re really a Bible-believing Christian, you’ve got to take seriously the issues of poverty, the issues of racism, the issues of oppression,” said Gilkes, assistant pastor of a Baptist church in Cambridge, Mass.

Marvin McMickle, professor of homiletics at Ashland University in Ohio, said it is inappropriate to assume Wright’s words also would be Obama’s simply because the senator worships in his church.

“I think the notion that because your pastor says something, it must necessarily either be shared by each member, or it reflects the unspoken views of the members, or he is in some sense a surrogate for Obama, is completely false,” said McMickle, author of Where Have all the Prophets Gone?

Storylist for week of 3/31/08

• Tarleton students see encounter with accident-victim as no accident

• Aggie BSM students minister at ‘Mardis Gras of the North'

• Baylor students serve in Louisiana & New York, collect gift cards for Union

• Beach Reach volunteers make positive impact on South Padre

• DBU students have fun in the sun, building homes in Louisiana and Georgia

• Harlingen church trains champs during spring break

• HBU students drill well for Nicaraguan villagers

• Rice students serve in San Antonio over spring break

• UNT student missionaries show God's love to Mexican orphans

• Houston students minister to needy in Bay area

• UMHB students fan out to serve over spring break

• UT Southwestern medical team brings healing to Juarez

• Wayland students on mission in Plainview over spring break

• Howard Payne students assist community center in Austin

• Lamar students minister in South Texas

• Sam Houston State teams at Mission Arlington

Previously posted Spring Break stories
• For UT students, spring break missions was Grand

• TCU students focus on giving during spring break

• Texas State students minister in Mexico



• New Baptist Covenant: Another meeting approved, but no permanent structure

• Baptist Briefs


• ANALYSIS: Living in the gray with the Man in Black

• Supreme Court to revisit decency standards

• Faith Digest


• Books reviewed in this issue:The Great Awakening by Jim Wallis, The Betrayed by Lisa T. Bergren and May I Walk You Home? Sharing Christ’s Love with the Dying by Melody Rossi.


• Texas Baptist Forum

• Classified Ads

• Cartoon

• Around the State


• EDITORIAL: Race relations, pastors & grace

• DOWN HOME: From ‘Please, Jesus!' to a new morning

• IN BETWEEN: Welcome, all Texas Baptists

• RIGHT or WRONG? Political correctness

• Texas Baptist Forum



• Bible Studies for Life Series for March 30: Living with passion for Jesus

• Explore the Bible Series for March 30: Renewing your commitment

• Bible Studies for Life Series for April 6: Moving out of your comfort zone

• Explore the Bible Series for April 6: When others hate you



Previously Posted:
• DBU president's leukemia in remission

• For UT students, spring break missions was Grand

• TCU students focus on giving during spring break

• Texas State students minister in Mexico

• Obama campaign spotlights
race, pulpit freedom

• BRIEFS: Hymnal contents released

• Theologian urges greater sensitivity to suicide

• Is Religious Right dead or part of new center?

• IRS scrutiny of Obama's denomination may signal political-speech crackdown

• Program offers stress relief for South Texas families

• BCFS gets first-time parents off to a Great Start

• Does the ‘evangelical center' include moderate Baptists?

• Will evangelical center emerge to rival waning Christian Right?


• See articles from the previous 3/17/08 issue here.