Whose Religion?

In a new article at The New Republic, E.J. Dionne asks if Rev. Jeremiah Wright is "as far outside the African-American mainstream as many of us would like to think?"

Not surprisingly, his answer is no. Dionne notes that another "black leader who was capable of getting very angry indeed is the one now being invoked against Wright. His name is Martin Luther King Jr."

Dionne quotes King's February 4, 1968 speech at Ebenezer Baptist Church:

God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war.... And we are criminals in that war. We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world, and I'm going to continue to say it. And we won't stop it because of our pride and our arrogance as a nation. But God has a way of even putting nations in their place.

King concluded with a prediction of the divine response: "And if you don't stop your reckless course, I'll rise up and break the backbone of your power."

Dionne is quick to add that he's not citing King to excuse Wright's comments, but to show that they are within a tradition of prophetic rhetoric within African-American churches. Obama, Dionne suggests, has opted for the part of King's legacy that "converted rage into the search for a beloved community."

Meanwhile, an article from the September 2007 issue of Mother Jones has gained new interest. Titled Hillary's Prayer the article examines Hillary's bizarre association with a secretive evangelical Christian group in Washington called the Fellowship (or the Family). When she first began to participate in 1993, her "cell" (apparently segragated by gender) included:

• Susan Baker, wife of Bush consigliere James Baker
• Joanne Kemp, wife of conservative icon Jack Kemp
• Eileen Bakke, wife of Dennis Bakke a leader in the anti-union Christian management movement
• Grace Nelson, the wife of Senator Bill Nelson, the conservative Florida Democrat

Authors Kathryn Joyce and Jeff Sharlet characterize the group's theology as a:

... blend of Calvinism and Norman Vincent Peale, the 1960s preacher of positive thinking. It's a cheery faith in the "elect" chosen by a single voter—God—and a devotion to Romans 13:1: "Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers....The powers that be are ordained of God."

The group's long term goal, Joyce and Sharlet report, is ""a leadership led by God—leaders of all levels of society who direct projects as they are led by the spirit." Fellowship leader Doug Coe counts among his friends former Attorney General and "oil anointed" Christian John Ashcroft, former Reagan Attorney General Ed Meese, and Rep. Joe Pitts of Florida, who heads the "House Values Action Team, an off-the-record network of religious right groups and members of Congress created by Tom DeLay." The corresponding Senate Values Action Team is led by Sen. Sam Brownback.

The Fellowship's God-led men have also included General Suharto of Indonesia; Honduran general and death squad organizer Gustavo Alvarez Martinez; a Deutsche Bank official disgraced by financial ties to Hitler; and dictator Siad Barre of Somalia, plus a list of other generals and dictators.

Joyce and Sharlet suggest that Clinton's association with the Fellowship has likely influenced her support of initiatives with conservative Republicans, such as:

• A ban on flag burning with Senator Bob Bennett (R-Utah)
• Funding for research on the dangers of video games with Brownback and Santorum
• An anti-human-trafficking law that withheld funding from groups working on the sex trade if they didn't condemn prostitution in the proper terms
• The Workplace Religious Freedom Act, with Santorum, which protects e.g pharmacists who won't fill birth control prescriptions, or police officers who won't guard abortion clinics
• Federal funding of faith-based social services years before George W. Bush
• Defense of Marriage Act

The libertarian Cato Institute recently observed that Clinton is "adding the paternalistic agenda of the religious right to her old-fashioned liberal paternalism."... [W]hen Clinton seeks guidance among prayer partners such as Coe and Brownback, she is not so much triangulating—much as that may have become second nature—as honoring her convictions. In her own way, she is a true believer.