Fallen Into Knowledge

The big news today, of course, was Barack Obama’s speech on race in America.  Let me say this first off:  it is a really good example of political speechifying. We have nearly forgotten how powerful political language can be.  Those who criticize Obama for only being able to talk pretty miss the point - that is the primary responsibility of a politician.  It must be remembered that this speech, which was so well done, is political; while I am sure that Obama really does believe these things, his language is aimed at securing for himself the office of the President of the United States.  I don’t mean by that to demean him, or that by noting this fact we can sweep his comments away.  In fact, I don’t want that at all:  eloquence like his is painfully absent from the American political landscape.

However, I do want to take notice of the way in which theological language is leveraged toward political, nationalist ends.  Obama is right that slavery is for America a kind of original sin; he is right that racism has been institutionalized and that America is still suffering the consequences of this division.  David commented as we talked about this speech this morning that Obama even appropriates language from Black and Liberation Theology in his analysis of race in America.  Obama’s speech functions as a sort of sermon: he embeds his analysis into a narrative of salvation.  He has a Hope and he has a Belief.  But his narrative of salvation from racism is the narrative of American prosperity, not the narrative of the Cross.  His hope is in the decency of americans to pull themselves up by the bootstrap, to manufacture for themselves salvation from the divisions that and scars that mark America’s national identity.  And here, by exchanging the narrative of American prosperity and goodness for the narrative of Christ’s Cross, this becomes idolatry.  The state cannot save us.

Also, by exchanging the narrative of American prosperity for the narrative of the Cross, Obama truly does repudiate Reverend Wright and any narrative of human fallenness which can only be reconciled at the foot of the Cross:

The Christian message on race is quite simply the gospel…”in this new creation we are neither Caucasian, African, Asian, male nor female, bond or free.  We are a third race.” How then did Christians begin to think of race as a third category?  According to Campbell, they did so when the emphasis in Christian theology began to be on humans rather than God.  Nothing is more indicative of such an emphasis than the presumption by modern liberal Christians that the race problem can be solved politically.  Such a presumption serves to legitimate the modern nation-state, which, ironically has been the primary agent for the categorization of people by race. - Hauerwas and Coles, “Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary.

While I certainly welcome any move that truly does resist the oppressive and demonic forces of racism, I think that we must be careful not to get sucked in by the theological language of the state.  This is especially hard for American Christians to do:  American politicians are well practiced at employing such theological language for nationalist ends, and American Christians are equally well practiced at having their interests appropriated by the state.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 6:29 pm and is filed under Political Musing, Theology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.