by Bill Moyers
Oh, yes, they were. They all knew this new kid with the big natural hairdo was going to be there. They made sure to show up.
What did you see in that church and what did you think you had to do?
Well, actually, a good friend of yours, and one of my professors at the University of Chicago, Dr. Martin Marty—
Longtime friend, one of our distinguished historians of religion in America.
Marty put a challenge to us back then. This is the late ’60s, early ’70s. I’ll never forget. He said, “You know, you come into the average church on a Sunday morning and you think you’ve stepped from the real world into a fantasy world. Pick up a church bulletin and you will see what I mean. You leave a world with Vietnam in it, with all that’s going on.” Today, he’d say, “You leave a world with Iraq in it, and four thousand American boys and girls dead, and one hundred to two hundred thousand Iraqi dead, you leave the world of the hungry, suffering, and life as it is in the Lower Ninth Ward in New Orleans, and you come in your church and pick up the bulletin and it says there is a ladies’ tea on the second Sunday, the children’s choir will be doing this and that, and so on, and you will wonder, how come the church bulletin doesn’t relate to the world to which those very church members are going back after the benediction?” Well, it hit me. And it hit me several different ways.
Number one, what about the prophetic voice of the church that’s not heard? What are we to do with the ministry? Take our church. We were started by a white denomination and we were meant to be an integrated church. Ten years later that hadn’t happened. What do we do in ministry that speaks to the reality around us? Martin Marty made me think about such things. He put the challenge to me.
Marty told me you launched a strenuous effort to help the members of that church overcome the shame, and I’m quoting him, “they had so long been conditioned to experience.” What was the source of that shame?
What Carter G. Woodson calls the “Mis-Education of the Negro.” That whole idea that Africa was ignorant, Africans were ignorant; there was no African history, no African music, no African culture; anything related to Africa was negative. Therefore, you were ashamed to be African, even African American. Chinese come to the country, they’re Chinese American. Koreans come, they’re Korean American. With us, the shame of being a descendant of Africa was a shame that had been pumped into the minds and hearts of Africans from the 1600s on, even aided and abetted by the benefit of those schools started by the missionaries, who simply carried their culture with them into the South so that European culture and Christianity became synonymous. So that to become a Christian, you had to let go of all vestiges of Africa and become European, become New Englanders and worship like New Englanders. People were made to feel shame for being black.
My predecessor at the church, Dr. Reuben Sheares, started using the phrase “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian,” so coming out of the 1960s, we didn’t have to apologize for being black or for being Christian. Remember, many persons in the African American community teased us black Christians for following a white man’s religion. We learned in this church that no, we don’t have to be ashamed of being African American, and we don’t have to apologize for being Christians.
When Trinity Church says it is unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian, is it embracing a race-based theology?
No, it is not. It is embracing Christianity without giving up our African past. A lot of missionaries to other countries assumed their own culture was superior, that Africans had no culture of their own. And they said, “To be a Christian, you must be like us.” Right now, you can go to Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, and see Christians in 140-degree weather who have on a tie—because wearing a tie was what it meant to be a Christian, as on Sundays in New England. And the missionaries said, in effect, “We have the only sacred music. You must sing our music. You must use a pipe organ. You cannot use your instruments.”
They were taught to sing the great Anglican hymns and sing them the way the English and Americans sang them, right?
Correct, correct. And make sure you use correct diction. Well, African Americans in the late ’60s started saying, “No, no, no, no, no, no, no.” I was a soloist in the concert choir at Virginia Union in the early ’60s. We were not allowed to sing anything but anthems and spirituals. The same thing with the Howard University concert choir. The same thing with all the historically black choirs until ’68. Can you believe that for a long time there was no gospel music at Howard University—an all-black school? There was no jazz major. The white universities were giving Count Basie and Duke Ellington degrees. We didn’t even have a blues course. It goes back to when the missionaries had not allowed us to teach our own music. And in the’60s, as you’ll remember, all across the country and all across denominational lines, college-age kids started saying: “No more. No más. Nada más. We’re going to do our culture, our history. And we’re not going to say one is superior to the other. We are different, but different does not mean deficient. We’re different like snowflakes are different. We’re proud of who we are”—that’s the statement my congregation was making. It’s not about a race-based theology.
So, contrary to some of the rumors that have been circulated about Trinity, God is not exclusively identified with only the black community?
Of course not. What we have in our church is what people call “multicultural” these days. We have Hispanic members, members from Cuba, from Puerto Rico, from Belize—all of the Caribbean islands, in fact. We have members from South Africa, from West Africa, and we have some white members.
What does the Sunday morning worship service mean to them?
It means hope, for one thing. Like David says in the Book of Psalms, I would have fainted unless I lived to see the goodness of the right in this life. Don’t tell me about heaven. Tell me there’s a better way in this life. We’re not about Edward Albee or Camus’s theater of the absurd. We’re not about Shakespeare—full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. We’re about God and people of goodwill working hard together to do something about conditions in this life. We tell ourselves we can change, we can do better. We remind ourselves that before Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement, we did not have a Civil Rights Act. We did not have a Voting Rights Act. See? Change is possible. That’s what our church says. So our people come looking for hope. They’ve been getting their heads whipped all week. And we try to move them from hurt to healing.
You’re talking about members of Trinity who are experiencing unemployment, a daily struggle, discrimination. They come from the real world to worship.
They come for encouragement, to not just talk about heaven “by and by,” but to learn that we are not alone in this struggle, and that the struggle can make a difference. Not to leave that world and come to church pretending that we are now in some sort of fantasy land, but that we serve a God who enters history on the side of the oppressed, that we serve a God who cares about the poor, that we serve a God who says “inasmuch as you’ve done unto the least of these, my little ones, you’ve done unto me.” This God says, “I’m with you in the ongoing struggle.”
As I understand it, black liberation theology reads the Bible through the long experience of people who have suffered, who then are able to say to themselves that we read the Bible differently because we have struggled. Is that a fair bumper sticker of liberation theology?
I think that’s a fair bumper sticker. I think that the terms “liberation theology” and “black liberation theology” cause more problems and red flags for people who don’t understand it.
When I hear about “black liberation theology” as the interpretation of scripture from the vantage point of the oppressed, well, that’s the Jewish story.
Exactly, exactly. From Genesis forward. These are people who stayed on message through Egyptian oppression, Assyrian oppression, Babylonian oppression, Persian oppression, Greek oppression, Roman oppression. See, because of that, their understanding of what God
is saying is very different from the Greeks, the Romans, the Egyptians. And that’s why the prophetic theology of the African American church is different.
Here’s where the trouble comes, though. The Hebrew prophets loved Israel. But they hated the waywardness of Israel. And they were calling Israel out of love back to justice, not damning—
Exactly.
Not damning Israel, right?
Right. In fact, if you look at the damning and the condemning—well, look at the book of Deuteronomy, it talks about blessings and curses, how God doesn’t bless everything. God does not bless gangbangers. God does not bless dope dealers. God does not bless young thugs who hit old women upside the head and snatch their purse. God does not bless that. God does not bless the killing of babies. And when you look at blessings and curses out of that Hebrew tradition, that’s what the prophets were saying, that God is not blessing this. God calls them through the prophets to repentance. “If my people, who are called by my name,” God says to Solomon, “will humble themselves and pray, seek my faith and turn from their wicked ways, then will I hear from heaven.” That’s God talking, not Jeremiah Wright.
Well, you know that one of your most controversial sermons is the one that ended up with the sound bite “God damn America.” Here’s a portion:
REVEREND JEREMIAH WRIGHT, APRIL 13, 2003: Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change. And I’m through now. But let me leave you with one more thing. Governments fail. The government in this text comprised of Caesar, Cornelius, Pontius Pilate—the Roman government failed. The British government used to rule from East to West. The British government had a Union Jack. She colonized Kenya, Ghana, Nigeria, Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, and Hong Kong. Her navies ruled the seven seas all the way down to the tip of Argentina in the Falklands, but the British government failed. The Russian government failed. The Japanese government failed. The German government failed. And the United States of America government, when it came to treating her citizens of Indian descent fairly, she failed. She put them on reservations. When it came to treating her citizens of Japanese descent fairly, she failed. She put them in internment prison camps. When it came to treating citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains. The government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields, put them in inferior schools, put them in substandard housing, put them in scientific experiments, put them in the lowest paying jobs, put them outside the equal protection of the law, kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education, and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness. The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law, and then wants us to sing “God Bless America?” No, no, no. Not God bless America; God damn America! That’s in the Bible, for killing innocent people. God damn America for treating her citizens as less than human. God damn America as long as she keeps trying to act like she is God and she is supreme!
What did you mean?
When you start confusing God and government, your particular government with God, then you’re in serious trouble, because governments fail people. And governments change. And governments lie. And that is the context in which I was illustrating how governments since biblical times, up to our time, how they failed and how they lie. And when we start talking about “my government right or wrong,” I just don’t think that goes. Governments that want to kill innocents are not consistent with the will of God. You are made in the image of God, not in the image of any particular government. We have the freedom in this country to talk about this publicly, whereas some other places, you’re dead if you say the wrong thing about your government.
You can almost be crucified for saying certain things in this country.
That’s true. That’s true. You can be crucified by corporate-owned media. But as I just said, you can be killed in other countries by the government for saying that. Dr. King, of course, was vilified. And most of us forget that on April 4, 1967, a year before he was assassinated, he came here to New York City’s Riverside Church and talked about racism, militarism, and capitalism. He became vilified. He was ostracized not only by the majority of Americans and by the press, he was vilified by his own community. They thought he had overstepped his bounds. He was no longer talking about civil rights, sitting down at lunch counters and all that—he was talking about the war in Vietnam.
President Johnson was furious at him for that. That’s where they broke.
And that’s where a lot of the African American community broke with him, too. He was vilified by Roy Wilkins and by Jackie Robinson. He was vilified by many of the Negro leaders who felt he had overstepped his bounds talking about an unjust war. And that part of King is not lifted up every year in all the memorial services. “I have a dream” is lifted up, and passages like that—sound bites, if you will—from that March on Washington speech. The King who preached, “I’ve been to the mountaintop, I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land. I might not get there with you,” that part of the speech is talked about, but not the fact that he was in Memphis siding with garbage collectors who wanted a raise. Nothing about Resurrection City, nothing about the poor—
Resurrection City was the march in Washington for the poor.
For the poor. That part of King is not talked about. It’s been off-limits for forty years now.
Why do you think so many Americans don’t seem to want to acknowledge that a nation capable of greatness is also capable of cruelty?
I come at that as an historian of religion. We are miseducated as a people. And because we’re miseducated, you end up with the majority of the people not wanting to hear the truth. They stick with what they were taught. James Washington, a church historian now deceased, says that after every revolution, the winners of that revolution write down what the revolution was about so that their children can learn it, whether it’s true or not. They don’t learn anything at all about the Arawak. They don’t learn anything at all about the Seminole, or the Cherokee Trail of Tears. No, they don’t learn that. What they learn is that in 1776 there was one black guy in the fight against the British. They weren’t taught that the words “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” were written by men holding slaves. No, keep that part out. Don’t learn that. So people cling to what they were taught. And when you start trying to show them they have a piece of the story, here’s the rest of the story, you run into vitriolic hatred because you’re desecrating our myth, you’re desecrating what we hold sacred. And when you’re holding sacred a system of miseducation that has not taught you the truth, then you don’t understand the meaning of condemn, d-e-m-n, d-a-m-n. They don’t understand the root, the etymology of the word in terms of God condemning the practices that are against God’s will and God’s people. What is happening today is that I am talking about truth. Reading the scripture or the hermeneutics of a people.
Hermeneutics is an interpretation. It’s the window through which you’re looking. See, the story is framed through this window, and if you only see it through this window, you don’t take into account the world seen through another window. Your story is informed by and limited by your hermeneutics. The theologian James Cone put it this way: the God of the people who are riding on the decks of the slave ship is not the God of the people who are riding underneath the decks as slaves in chains. If the God you’re asking to bless slavery is not the God to whom other people are praying, “Get us out of slavery,” it’s not like Notre Dame playing Michigan. You’re not flipping a coin and hoping God blesses the winning team, no. The God who is perceived as allowing slavery, allowing rape, allowing misogyny, allowing sodomy, allowing the murder, the lynching of people—that’s not the God of the people being lynched and sodomized and raped and carried away into a foreign country. Same thing you find in the Hebrew Bible. Those people who are carried away into slavery have a very different concept of what it means to be the people of God than
the ones who carried them away.
And they ask: “How can we sing the song of the Lord of a foreign land?” You used them in one of your sermons.
Yes, I did. I was trying to show how we felt anger. I felt anger. I felt hurt. I felt pain. In fact, September 11, I was in Newark, New Jersey, across the river from the World Trade Center. I was trapped in Newark because when they shut down the airlines, I couldn’t get back to Chicago. I saw the second plane hit from my hotel window. And I had members who lost loved ones both at the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center.
So I know the pain. And I had to preach to my people that Sunday. I had to preach. They came to church wanting to know, where is God in this? Using Psalm 137, I tried to show them how the people who were carried away into slavery were very angry, very bitter, moved, and in their anger wanting revenge against the armies that had carried them away to slavery. That text ends up saying, “Let’s kill, let’s bash their babies’ heads against the stones.” So you move from revolt and revulsion to wanting revenge. You move from anger with the army against you to taking it out on the innocents. You even want to kill babies. That’s what’s going on in Psalm 137. The Hebrew people wanted revenge. And that’s exactly where we are. We want revenge. But God doesn’t want to leave you there. God wants redemption. God wants wholeness. And that’s the context, the biblical context, that I used to try to get people sitting in that sanctuary on that Sunday after 9/11, who wanted to know, “Where is God in this? What is God saying? Because I want revenge.”
Here is part of that sermon:
REVEREND WRIGHT, SEPTEMBER 16, 2001: The people of faith have moved from the hatred of armed enemies, these soldiers who captured the king, those soldiers who slaughtered his son and put his eyes out, the soldiers who sacked the city, burned the towns, burned the temples, burned the towers, and moved from the hatred for armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents, the babies, the babies. “Blessed are they who dash your baby’s brains against a rock.” And that, my beloved, is a dangerous place to be. Yet that is where the people of faith are in 551 BC, and that is where far too many people of faith are in 2001 AD. We have moved from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents. We want revenge. We want paybacks, and we don’t care who gets hurt in the process. I heard Ambassador Peck on an interview yesterday. Did anybody else see him or hear him? He was on Fox News. This is a white man, and he was upsetting the Fox News commentators to no end. He pointed out. Did you see him, John? A white man. He pointed out—an ambassador!—that what Malcolm X said when he got silenced by Elijah Muhammad was in fact true. America’s chickens are coming home to roost! We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, the Arawak, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism! We took Africans from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism! We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, nonmilitary personnel. We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenagers and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hardworking fathers. We bombed Gaddafi’s home and killed his child. “Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against a rock!” We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy. Killed hundreds of hardworking people, mothers and fathers who left home to go to work that day, not knowing that they would never get back home. We bombed Hiroshima! We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye! Kids playing in the playground, mothers picking up children after school, civilians—not soldiers—people just trying to make it day by day. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant? Because the stuff we have done overseas is now being brought back into our own front yards! America’s chickens are coming home to roost! Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred and terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that, y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open, and who’s trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised.