Amy Sullivan is an Idiot: Politics and Religion Edition

Amy Sullivan is a columnist who for years has suggested that the only problem that Democrats have is that they are just not welcoming enough to the religious. She is an idiot, and Barack Obama has bought into this view, and is probably its most articulate advocate:

The single biggest gap in party affiliation among white Americans is ... between those who attend church regularly and those who don't. Democrats, meanwhile, are scrambling to 'get religion,' even as a core segment of our constituency remains stubbornly secular." -- Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope"

So now, Ms. Sullivan, who must have been ecstatic about the fact that the leading Democratic candidate is espousing her position, is now bent out of shape that it's all blowing up in his face because of L'Affaire Wright. In Salon, Walter Shapiro has her number when he says, "This is a week when the Illinois senator probably wishes that he could say, 'I'm from the stubbornly secular wing of the Democratic Party.'" More generally, there is no stubbornly secular wing of the Democratic Party. Seriously. How many atheists are in Congress? None. There is one admitted Agnostic, Pete Stark. And she gets owned again in yet another episode of What Digby Said, "Apparently, she never considered the possible downsides of hewing so closely to religion that people think it's definitional. She and he friends didn't seem to realize that all the blather about secular Democrats was never about religion, but about social conservatism. You get no points for going to the 'wrong kind' of church. You'd think they would have figured that out a long time ago." The success that the Republican party has had with Religion comes from two things:

• Because church is still the most segregated place in America, it gives cover for hatred and bigotry.
• Because the press is accused of being anti-religion, they will bend over backwards to make any unreasoning spew coming from behind a clerical collar seem reasonable, as is shown by their studied indifference to pastors Hagee and Parsley.
• Except, of course, if they are black, as we can see with Rev. Wright. Or as was the case of a black Preccher protesting police brutality, who was called a "cleric" by the New York Times.

So Amy is wondering what went wrong. Her answer, which shows how unwilling to adjust her theory to accomodate reality is that, "... while Wright is a theologian, a teacher and a pastor, he is ultimately a performer". So her answer is not that the wearing religion on one's sleeve might be problematic, but rather that Reverend Wright is not really religious, which ignores the tradition of activism in the black church and in progressive congregations in general. What's more, I think that her article reflects a profound discomfort on the part of Ms. Sullivan with regard to Black America too. Why else would she make a point of noting, "A cheering crowd of supporters that included a whistling Cornel West", and that, "[the] resulting confusion and fear contributes to a racial divide." It sounds to me like this is a genteel way of calling Wright an "Uppity N*****", particularly when she references Martin Luther King, and suggests that when he spoke out against the war in Viet Nam, Dr. King diminished himself. Why else would she write:

The poster boy of the reimagined black church is Martin Luther King, Jr. "King said America suffered from a 'congenital disease' and that disease is racism," notes Eddie Glaude, Princeton professor of religion. He says that King's speech against the Vietnam War, delivered at Riverside Church in April 1967, was not a feel-good speech. "It was a passionate cry to speak to these enormous problems that were linked to America's imperialism and militarism, and what he saw as the evils of capitalism." By that point int his career, King had been banned from Lyndon Johnson's White House. The New York Times condemned his speech, running an editorial calling it "Dr. King's Error." And Barry Goldwater said King "bordered a little bit on treason." But that King, the one who sounded a little bit like Jeremiah Wright, is not the one we remember every January. It's because the prophetic black church tradition has been filtered into an unthreatening form suitable for public consumption, so that it has been rendered, in Wright's word, "invisible." And it is because of that invisibility that Wright's sermons seemed so shocking and out of the mainstream. In reality, the two strands fit together — the unbearable optimism of "I Have a Dream" and the righteous anger of "I cannot be silent."

Unless, I read this wrong, she is saying that King was uppity at times, and that we as a society should ignore that he was a man who was profoundly outraged by what he saw around him in the whole world, not just what happened to the African American community. I see Reverend Wright as being solidly placed in the tradition of American Black theological rhetorical tradition, though my frame of reference is narrow, as I'm neither Evangelical nor mainline Christian, so I've been to perhaps 3 Churches outside of life events (funerals and weddings) in my life.