The sermon text in the
So Strong collection was apparently drawn from tape recordings and slightly modified for purposes of writing by the collection’s editor, Jini M. Kilgore. In a sermon titled, “When God is Silent,” Wright tells a revealing story from one of his three trips to Cuba. Talking about his Cuban translator’s nervous desire to see his sermon text ahead of time, Wright says: “...sometimes there are things too hot for paper, and you’re going to be looking around trying to figure out where I am in that manuscript, and I am not going to be on that manuscript.” So it’s obvious that all of these printed sermon texts are imperfect (and probably toned down) versions of what Wright actually says in his sermons.
The Audacity to HopeHere, then are some of the political passages from the fuller version of “The Audacity to Hope” text reprinted in
What Makes You So Strong?:
In order for a people to have taken a negative and turned it into a positive, surely somebody had to have had the audacity to hope. In order for a race held in bondage to slavery to have taken a proclamation not worth the paper it was written on and to have turned it into a proposition that produced a race full of giants, somebody had to have had the audacity to hope. Abraham Lincoln is remembered as the “Great Emancipator” of the slaves, but in reality, he did not see black Africans as equal with whites. (The issue of slavery was paramount for him because it threatened the unity of the country. The primary reason that the Civil War was fought was not to free the slaves, but to save the United States.... [p. 104])
A bit further on, Wright says that when Martin Luther King Jr. went beyond working for integration alone and, “had the courage to call the sin of Vietnam exactly what it was — an abomination before God — he had to have the audacity to hope.” Wright goes on to list prominent black leaders (Senator Brooke, Jackie Robinson, Carl Rowan, Roy Wilkins, and the Urban League) who turned against King over Vietnam:
It was all right for this preacher to protest against North American apartheid and segregated lunch counters, but when he dared speak the message God gave him against our racist, militaristic posture in South Vietnam and our racist involvement in South Africa, he was iced and isolated by all the establishment blacks. And in order for him to hang in and hold on, in order for him to have the audacity to hope, he had to have a vertical hookup that assimilated Negroes had forgotten all about. It was a hookup that said “before I’d be a slave [a slave to conservative theology that enslaves and preaches love], before I’d be a slave [a slave to right-wing ignorance that wears black robes on Sunday morning and white robes on Sunday night], before I’d be a slave [a slave to white America’s corporate dollars that hold and pull the purse strings of so many national black organizations], before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, and go home to my God and be free.”....Martin was a man who integrated the buses of Montgomery and the streets of Selma, yes, but Martin also took on the unjust economic system of our country. He took on the iron-fisted military system.... [N.B.: The brackets in this passage were inserted by Wright himself, as a way of updating the meaning of an old anti-slavery spiritual. Also, “vertical hookup” here means “connection to God.” (p. 105)]
These political comments in Wright’s 1991 “Audacity to Hope” text may well have reworked and/or substituted for the remarks in the 1988 sermon chastising what Obama calls “the callousness of policy makers in the White House and in the State House.” But they are clearly echoed throughout the many sermons reprinted in What Makes You So Strong? Wright here is sounding attacks on American foreign policy, corporations, “assimilationist” blacks, and America’s founding icons and presidents that permeate both the body of his sermons, and black liberation theology more generally.
Zionism as Racism
For example, in the sermon “When God is Silent,” Wright launches a systematic attack on America’s military interventions:
We have no money to educate our inner-city children who happen to be black and brown, but we do have money to wage war in the Persian Gulf. We do have money to send those same black and brown children to an early and unnecessary grave, wearing the uniforms of a country that will not make funds available for making geniuses, only for making war. This country will exterminate them, but not educate them. And God is silent.
Martin gave his life for the cause of a more humane and just society and a reordering of an economic priority in a society gone insane with self-interest and sick military solutions for every problem. Twenty-two years later, none of those issues have gotten better by one iota; if anything, they have gotten worse. African Americans are still at the bottom of the economic ladder. There is a resurgence of racism. We have traded Vietnam for Grenada in the Reagan years and for Panama in the Bush years. Martin’s dream has turned into a nightmare, and God is silent.... [What Makes You So Strong, pp. 117-118.]
Perhaps most striking here is the apparent equation of military service with “extermination.”
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