Jeremiah Wright controversy

The Jeremiah Wright sermon controversy occurred in March 2008. Wright is a retired pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ and former pastor to Democratic candidate for President of the United States Barack Obama. The controversy began when segments from some of Wright's sermons were publicized by the media, drawing attention to portions which were criticized as anti-American and racist.

Comments on U.S. foreign policy

In a sermon delivered after the September 11 attacks in 2001, Wright made comments after stating he viewed an interview of former U.S. Ambassador Edward Peck on Fox News. Wright said:

"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, 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."

Wright identified the "chickens" as taking the country from the Indian tribes by terror, bombing Grenada, Panama, Libya, Hiroshima, and Nagasaki, and supporting state terrorism against the Palestinians and South Africa, he concluded that his parishioners' response should be to examine their relationship with God, not go "from the hatred of armed enemies to the hatred of unarmed innocents." Critics interpreted this as saying that America had brought the attacks upon itself. ABC News broadcast clips from the sermon in which he said:

"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... and now we are indignant, because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Later, Wright continued:

"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 is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people that we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that."

Comments on U.S. domestic policy

Clips from a sermon that Wright gave in 2003, entitled “Confusing God and Government”, were also shown on ABC's Good Morning America and Fox News, in which Wright made statements about God and the U.S. Government. In the sermon, Wright first makes the distinction between God and governments, and points out that many governments in the past have failed: "Where governments lie, God does not lie. Where governments change, God does not change." Wright then states:

"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 her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed. She put them in chains, the government put them on slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton field, 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."

Wright then said that the U.S. government provides drugs to African-Americans and "God Damn America" for killing innocent people and pretending to act like God:

"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, as long as she pretends to act like she is God, and she is supreme. The United States government has failed the vast majority of her citizens of African descent."

Comments on HIV

Also in "Confusing God and Government," Wright makes statements on the involvement of the United States government with the Tuskegee experiment and the invention and propagation of HIV. These clips were also widely aired in March 2008 on Fox News and later YouTube. Wright states:

“The government lied about the Tuskegee experiment. They purposely infected African American men with syphilis. Governments lie. The government lied about bombing Cambodia and Richard Nixon stood in front of the camera, ‘Let me make myself perfectly clear…’ Governments lie. The government lied about the drugs for arms Contra scheme orchestrated by Oliver North, and then the government pardoned all the perpetrators so they could get better jobs in the government. Governments lie. The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. Governments lie. The government lied about a connection between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein and a connection between 9.11.01 and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Governments lie.”

Reaction

Obama said to Charles Gibson of ABC News, "It's as if we took the five dumbest things that I've ever said or you've ever said in our lives and compressed them and put them out there - I think that people's reaction would, understandably, be upset." At the same time, Obama stated that "words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialog, whether it's on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue." Obama later added, "Had the reverend not retired, and had he not acknowledged that what he had said had deeply offended people and were inappropriate and mischaracterized what I believe is the greatness of this country, for all its flaws, then I wouldn't have felt comfortable staying at the church."

Lawrence Korb, Director of National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and former assistant Secretary of Defense in the administration of Ronald Reagan (1981—1989) defended Wright's patriotism, noting his service in the Marines and navy and saying, "We've seen on television, in a seemingly endless loop, sound bites of a select few of Rev. Wright's many sermons. Some of the Wright's comments are inexcusable and inappropriate and should be condemned, but in calling him 'unpatriotic,' let us not forget that this is a man who gave up six of the most productive years of his life to serve his country... he has demonstrated his patriotism."

Theological justifications

Martin E. Marty, an emeritus professor of religious history explained Wright's perspective by basing the comments on his church: "For Trinity, being 'unashamedly black' does not mean being 'anti-white.'" Marty also asserted that Trinity's "members and pastor are, in their own term, 'Africentric' [African-centered], and that this should not be more offensive than that synagogues should be 'Judeo-centric' or that Chicago's Irish parishes be 'Celtic-centric'." Marty went on to criticize the "incomprehension and naiveté of some reporters who lack background in the civil rights and African-American movements of several decades ago".

While discussing the same theme of Wright and the jeremiad, James B. Bennett, an assistant professor of religious studies at Santa Clara University, describes how Wright follows in a "rhetorical tradition" that has "a long history in the speeches and writings of African-American leaders who are exalted by black and white Americans alike". To show this, Bennett points first to Frederick Douglass, who he says "spoke in terms similar to those for which Wright is castigated"; Bennett says Martin Luther King, Jr. shared similar feelings with Wright concerning some US activities, calling the US: "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government," and at another point stating: "America was founded on genocide, and a nation that is founded on genocide is destructive." Martin Luther King biographer Michael Eric Dyson similarly connected Wright's harsh criticism of America with King's and the prophetic tradition in the black church. Cultural critic Kelefa Sanneh also traced Wright's theology and rhetoric back to Frederick Douglass, analyzing his 1854 reference to antebellum US Christians as "bad, corrupt, and wicked."

Wright's church criticized the media for coverage of his past sermons, saying in a statement that Wright's "character is being assassinated in the public sphere.... It is an indictment on Dr. Wright’s ministerial legacy to present his global ministry within a 15- or 30-second sound bite."

Effect on Barack Obama

Campaign reaction

When Wright's comments came to light in the national media, Obama denounced them and denied that he was present when they were made. He later revealed, however, "Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes." Obama also said the remarks had come to his attention at the beginning of his presidential campaign but that because Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of Obama's strong links to Trinity, he had not thought it "appropriate" to leave the church. He had begun distancing himself from Wright when he called his pastor the night before the February 2007 announcement of Obama's presidential candidacy to withdraw his request that Wright deliver an invocation at the event. A spokesman later explained "Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church, but... decided to avoid having statements and beliefs being used out of context and forcing the entire church to defend itself." Wright did attend the announcement, prayed with Obama beforehand, and in December, 2007 was named to the Obama campaign's African American Religious Leadership Committee. After the controversy was revealed, Wright was cut off from the Obama campaign.

Unsurprisingly, conservative critics found this response inadequate; Mark Steyn, writing in the National Review, stated, "Reverend Wright['s] appeals to racial bitterness are supposed to be everything President Obama will transcend. Right now, it sounds more like the same-old same-old." On March 18, in the wake of the controversy, Obama delivered a speech entitled "A More Perfect Union" at the Constitution Center in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. During the course of the 37-minute speech, Obama spoke of the divisions formed through generations through slavery, segregation, and Jim Crow laws, and the reasons for the kinds of discussions and rhetoric used among blacks and whites in their own communities. While condemning the remarks by the pastor, he sought to place them in historical context by describing some of the key events that have formed Wright's views on race-related matters in America. Obama did not disown Wright, whom he has labeled as "an old uncle", as akin to disowning the black community or disowning his white grandmother, Madelyn Dunham. The speech was generally well received. Obama said that some of the comments by his pastor reminded him of what he called America's "tragic history when it comes to race."

Presumptive Republican nominee John McCain defended Obama when it came to allegations of guilt by association, saying, "I think that when people support you, it doesn't mean that you support everything they say. Obviously, those words and those statements are statements that none of us would associate ourselves with, and I don't believe that Senator Obama would support any of those, as well.

In an interview with the editorial board of the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review on March 25, 2008, Hillary Clinton commented on Obama's attendance at Trinity United Church of Christ, stating, "You don't choose your family, but you choose what church you want to attend." Later the same day, during a press conference, Clinton spoke on her personal preference in pastor: "I think given all we have heard and seen, [Wright] would not have been my pastor." A spokesperson for the Obama campaign said Clinton's comments were part of a "transparent effort to distract attention away from the story she made up about dodging sniper fire in Bosnia" the prior week. Weeks later during the Pennsylvania debate in Philadelphia, Clinton said, "For Pastor Wright to have given his first sermon after 9/11 and to have blamed the United States for the attack, which happened in my city of New York, would have been just intolerable for me."

Polling

Amidst these events, Clinton re-took the lead in the Gallup national tracking poll, ahead of Obama by 7 points on March 18. By March 20, the race was back to a near dead heat, with Clinton holding a statistically insignificant 2-point lead over Obama. John McCain has recently taken a 3 point lead over both Democrats in hypothetical General Election match ups, with a 2 point margin of error. By March 22, Obama had regained his lead over Clinton and was up by 3 points.

A CBS poll taken from March 15-17 found that sixty-five percent of registered voters said it made no difference in their view of Obama, while thirty percent said it made them have a less favorable view.

At the end of March 2008, as over 40 states had already held their Democratic primary processes, Barack Obama built on his national Gallup daily tracking poll results to become the first candidate to open a double-digit lead since Super Tuesday, when his competitor Hillary Clinton had a similar margin. On March 30 the poll showed Obama at 52% and Clinton at 42%. The Rassmussen Reports poll, taken during the same time frame, also showed an Obama advantage of five points. These polls followed weeks of heavy campaigning and heated rhetoric from both camps, and another late-March poll found Obama maintaining his positive rating and limiting his negative rating, better than his chief rival Clinton, even considering Obama's involvement in controversy during the period. The NBC News and Wall Street Journal poll showed Obama losing two points of positive rating and gaining four points of negative rating, while Clinton lost eight points of positive rating and gained five points of negative rating.