The Covenant Network of Presbyterians, at its annual meeting in Cleveland Nov. 5-7, asked questions about the future of the church.
And Eddie Glaude Jr., a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton University, asked them: What does the election of President Barack Obama, the United States’ first African-American president, mean for the country’s self-perception?
In posing this question Nov. 6, Glaude did a complicated thing. He engaged the crowd with an intellectual question. But he tied it very clearly to the real world, to lessons of history that resonate still and to intensifying problems the country faces today – and he sidestepped providing facile answers.
For example, some see Obama’s election as something over which to triumph – a way of shoving the pain of the country’s racial inequalities into the past, and of portraying the U.S. as a country of opportunity in which anything is possible.
But in other ways, “what we are witnessing is a deepening of our national racial pathology,” Glaude said. To keep his support, Obama is limited in what he can say – on what issues he can take stands, Glaude said.
“When he talks to black folk, he has to lecture us about personal responsibility, so you can feel better … ” he said to this mostly-white audience.
But there are issues on which he’d like to hear Obama say much more. African-American unemployment is high, “can’t talk about it.” Nearly half of those without health insurance are black or brown, “can’t talk about it.” A starkly disproportionate number of those imprisoned are black, and “Obama can’t talk about it.” And, in a time of economic collapse, “poverty is a bad word in Obama’s mouth.”
In his address, both Glaude’s Ivy League academic side and his Christian roots came shining through. Although he apologized repeatedly for not being a theologian, he fluently spoke theological language. He’s a well-known name on both radio and television public-affairs shows; a colleague of the author and scholar Cornell West; and a speaker who honored both his Mississippi roots, tipping his hat both to his mother and his grandmother, and his forbears in thought, by quoting repeatedly from the writer James Baldwin.
Glaude started off by quoting the philosopher and pragmatist George Herbert Mead, who made the argument that “we understand where we are, the things we care about and the current lives we lead” in the light of the sufferings and the contributions of those who came before us. But sometimes, there are moments of novelty that do not seem to emerge from the past — perhaps like Obama’s election — that are “unlike anything we’ve ever experienced before.”
When we consider those moments, which “fundamentally rework how we understand ourselves and the world we inhabit,” often we return to the past, to the historic archives, to make sense of it, Glaude said.
What he made clear is that this is complicated territory. For example, “race matters have haunted our national status,” being at the core of our national malaise, and including a sense of estrangement for people of color, a sense of what the writer Baldwin described of “being unhoused in one’s own home.”
Some see Obama’s election as a wiping clear of those sins, “a final ritual of expiation, of the purging of the wages of our national sins.”
Glaude sees much more complexity.
“Americans have a nasty habit of rushing past wounds,” he said. “You can’t rush past that to some utopia.”
He spoke, for example, about slavery — including what the slaves understood about Christianity that was different from what white people taught them. And he drew that conversation about Christian hypocrisy into the world today.
“Today, we have too many Christians who would put the Pharisees to shame,” Glaude said. “They want to protect fetuses but they say little about the suffering” of children who are born. As they socialize their children, “they are teaching them to hate in the name of the Lord.”
Too many “become deaf to the prophetic message of God,” he said. “Where is the church in this prophetic moment?” The mainline church is so worried about losing members to megachurches, but “when are we going to step up for Christ?”
In this time, “Obama is not the occasion for us to run from our past. He is the occasion for us to stare it squarely in the face, so we can imagine a brighter future.”
During a question-and-answer session, one man asked whether Obama really does represent African-American reality as he was raised mostly by a white mother and white grandparents in Hawaii, educated at Harvard and Columbia.
Glaude pushed back.
For many, despite the nuances, Obama would be seen and judged because of his appearance as black, he said.
“He also is indicative of a particular slice of black America” — a symbol, in part, of the emerging class differences in the black experience. Glaude’s mother gave birth to her first child in eighth grade. His father was a postman. “The life I lead, they can’t imagine. The life my son leads, I can barely imagine.”
It can be hard to bridge the gap, he said, between “cufflink, bow-tie wearing” professionals — (referring to his own attire) and blacks living in poverty in the ghettoes of American’s cities.
The Covenant Network is an interest group working within the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) to push for full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the life of the church — including advocating ordination for gays and lesbians.
“Those who sit in the pews have to push,” Glaude said. “The church is nothing without us.”
So when progressive Christians hear people say something that sounds wrong, “speak up,” he encouraged. Say, “We think this is wrong, and this is why” — just as conservative Christians so often do.
For gays and lesbians pushing the church to change, say: “‘I am Christian, and I will not let you or anyone tell me I’m not. You are wrong.’ Christians can be bullies, especially when they think they know what God is saying.”
