God Damn Amerika.....part 2

Barack Obama and Reverend Jeremiah Wright are in hot water. Newspapers and news stations across the world have been reporting on Wright’s “inflammatory rhetoric” (as Obama’s campaign is calling it) in 2003 when he called upon his Chicago congregation to reject the hymn “God Bless America” and instead shout “God Damn America.” Wright denounced the United States for historically advocating terrorism for its own purposes, for refusing to offer help to the hopeless, and for oppressing minorities. “God damn American for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.” The re-surfacing of these comments has led Obama and his camp to scramble. They are now distancing themselves from Wright and, in reaction, some African Americans feel betrayed by Obama.

What is striking, historically, is that there is nothing new in Wright’s sermon and how often African American perspectives on so-called American Christian nationalism are ignored. It seems that each year, at least a handful of books come out trying to discern whether the United States was founded as a “Christian nation.” Most recently, this can be seen in Steven Waldman’s Liberating the Founders. But so often historians have approached the topic from the perspective of elite whites, and not the people who were building the nation from its foundation, hoeing the fields and raising the cotton, washing the clothes and preparing the meals. (One exception to this is David Howard-Pitney’s wonderful The African-American Jeremiad.) If we look closely at African American perspectives of Christian nationalism, we find Reverend Wright firmly in a long oppositional and rhetorical tradition.

Good stuff eh? read the whole thing.....here