B4
Gray, Barry and the new old politics
mayor from B1
that we would see a rapid transforma- tion in education, employment, housing and social services for those on the mar- gins of society. It didn’t happen. The transformative promise of post-civil-rights black politi- cal power in Washington was limited to those of us who were educationally pre- pared to benefit from the transforma- tion. Many of us changed — for instance, I went from Black Nationalist to Panafri- canist to Marxist to whatever I am today, which I choose not to characterize ideo- logically, because reality has a tendency not to conform to ideological presump- tions. But a lot of the black-power per- ceptions didn’t change. Fenty should have been aware of that. His decision to appoint a majority of non-black leaders to the most important cabinet positions in the city stirred up a great deal of ani- mosity among black residents. When I mentioned this to a white friend, she remarked, “But I thought we’d gotten beyond that.” I responded: “What do you think the response of white Americans would have been if Ba- rack Obama had put together a major- ity-black Cabinet immediately after tak- ing office? Probably not ‘Oh, he’s just finding the best people to do the job.’ ” I am nevertheless disturbed by the
level of hostility that was directed at Fenty, the outright hatred that seemed to come so easily to many African Amer- icans I know, a hatred that seemed even more extreme regarding Schools Chan- cellor Rhee. Del. Norton’s offhand remark earlier this year got me thinking: Cities change all the time. The Washington that elect- ed Fenty in 2006 was not the same city that elected Barry in 1978 — or for that matter in 1994. To move forward we shouldn’t pine for an unrealistic notion of what used to be. The city that elected Gray in 2010 is a divided one. He won by large margins in predominantly black areas, and Fenty won by large margins in predominantly white areas. There are some complicated tensions
Gray has to reconcile. Barry is a central figure in the city’s racial divide and as- signed himself a central role in the Gray campaign; his role in the perception of Gray should not be understated. Now, I am not your usual Barry critic: Long ago, I worked closely with former col- leagues of his from the Student Nonvio- lent Coordinating Committee, and when he announced on my television show at Howard University in 1990 that he wasn’t running for a fourth mayoral term after his arrest for smoking crack cocaine, the interview attracted a record audience and, frankly, gave my career a boost.
But I don’t think having Barry as a key voice of the Gray campaign was a good thing. The former mayor reminds me of another former mayor who had some trouble with the law: Newark’s Sharpe James. In a recent article on The-
Root.com, Jeff Mays and Washington Post writer Nikita Stewart compare the declining popularity of current Newark Mayor Cory Booker with the hero’s wel- come James received on his return home from jail. If the template, in 2010, for black may- ors who connect favorably with black voters is James and Barry, even after their jail terms, then maybe Gray needs to hurry up and get himself locked up so he can “keep it real,” too. (I am still fond of Barry, even though he might now stop speaking to me again. That’s all right — we’ll probably start talking again at some point.) If two disgraced black former mayors are somehow more appealing to black voters than any alternative, because they “talk the talk” of race, then Gray’s diplomatic skills will be severely tested as he tries to continue the city’s growth without disturbing its racial sensitiv- ities. It’s a daunting task. I admire anyone who undertakes it. It’s crucial that the city’s white residents understand that assertions of a post-racial District — where a mayor should not be expected to take race into account when crafting policies or making appointments — ig- nore the sensitivities of their black neighbors who have seen generations of dreams crushed by discrimination and racism and don’t appreciate being ad- vised to “get over” their pain. It is, however, time for us all to get over the political obsession that the wards of this city are in constant compe- tition with one another for mayoral lar- gesse, the black wards vs. the white wards, the poor wards vs. the rich wards. It’s an obsession I know from my friend- ships in the city and from my work. WA- MU’s “Kojo in Your Community” has landed in each ward, and in each ward, residents invariably complain that, on one issue or another, residents of other wards have it better. Gray’s official campaign slogan was “One City,” but his candidacy resonated mainly with just one segment of the city’s voters. Now he has to make gov- ernment work for everyone, so we can all focus on the unemployed and the homeless and the schoolchildren who need us to get past this anger and per- manently change the conditions for them, the least among us. Good luck, Vince. You’ll need it.
KB
KLMNO
SUNDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 2010
It took faith to put out a bonfire I
by Jim Wallis
t is easy to believe that hostility toward Muslims is on the rise in America. Media coverage of the bat- tle over the proposed Islamic com- munity center in New York, togeth-
er with the hateful rants of Florida pas- tor Terry Jones, who threatened to burn Korans on the anniversary of the Sept. 11 attacks, paints a picture of tension be- tween faiths. But this narrative of constant conflict
doesn’t tell the whole story. In my work with religious communities across the country, I have seen interfaith relation- ships strengthened in recent years, not in spite of 9/11 but because of it. And these connections helped avert a tragic conclu- sion to the Jones saga last weekend. Although the media focused on the role that political and military officials, including President Obama and Gen. Da- vid Petraeus, played in getting Jones to back down from his plan for a Koran bonfire, the faith community also had a key part. Religious leaders from many traditions condemned Jones’s threats, while behind the scenes, a number of us reached out to stop Jones and support Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the proposed Islamic community center in New York. Even before Jones’s threats, I had been in close dialogue for several weeks with the imam and his wife, Daisy Khan. I have been friends with Rauf since a few months after the 2001 attacks, when we participated in a forum on religious fun- damentalism at the Cathedral Church of Saint John the Divine in New York. From his words that day, I trusted him and knew that we would be able to work to- gether as peacemakers between faiths. The storm around the imam, his wife and their proposed community center was already bad enough when, on Thurs- day, Sept. 9, it threatened to get a lot worse. That afternoon, Jones announced that he would be heading up to the Big Apple to talk with the imam on the 9/11 anniversary. He seemed to think that he could leverage his Koran-burning threat to pressure Rauf to move his center — in the process getting even more attention. The idea was offensive: It suggested a moral equivalence between burning the holy book of a billion people and build- ing an interfaith center, and it presumed that one of the world’s most important and courageous moderate Muslim lead- ers should bargain with the irresponsi-
JOE RAEDLE/GETTY IMAGES
Terry Jones, pastor of the Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Fla., started a media frenzy with his plan to burn the Koran on Sept. 11.
ble, incoherent pastor of a tiny church. How, I wondered the next morning, could evangelicals — members of the faith tradition that Jones and I both claim — run interference? I felt strongly that we were the ones who should deal with Jones, rather than a respected imam whose faith he had demonized. At that moment, I got a call from an- other dear friend, Geoff Tunnicliffe, international director of the World Evan- gelical Alliance. He was in New York and wanted to know what he could do to help Rauf. He explained that he had Jones’s cellphone number and had spoken to him earlier in the week. In an effort to talk Jones out of his original plan, he had asked him: “Will you be willing to be with me when I have to talk to the widow of an evangelical pastor in the Middle East who is killed because of what you are about to do, or to a congregation whose church is burned to the ground as a result of your Koran burning? Will you help me explain to them why you had to do this?” Tunnicliffe seemed like the right per- son in the right place at the right time. We strategized how we could stop Jones from confronting the imam. I called Khan and asked her and the imam to trust Tunnicliffe; meanwhile, he pulled together many of New York’s best young evangelical leaders to meet with Jones. That afternoon, Jones got to town and
checked into a hotel in Queens. He was immediately surrounded by police offi- cers, who, he later told Tunnicliffe,
warned him that his life was in danger and advised him not to go out. With a ter- rified Jones now reluctant to leave his hotel, a conference call replaced the face- to-face meeting that Tunnicliffe had planned.
Without going into the details of a pri-
vate dialogue — one Tunnicliffe hopes will continue — he later told me that the pastor seemed “lost.” Others described the exchange as “powerful,” “productive” and “reflective.” During the conversa- tion, Jones vowed never to burn a Koran and even asked what an apology might look like. He did not seek out a confrontation with Rauf the next day. Instead, he went home. (Unfortunately, he seems to be missing the spotlight now that he is back in Florida, and he has returned to his old anti-Muslim rhetoric.) I saw similarly powerful, productive
and reflective exchanges in churches all over the country after 9/11, when hun- dreds of people routinely turned out to hear a visiting Muslim scholar or imam speak to their congregation. I have seen them in the work of the Interfaith Youth Core, started eight years ago by Eboo Pa- tel, a young Muslim leader committed to helping people from all religious back- grounds find common ground. I saw them last weekend in Jones’s
hometown of Gainesville, where Trinity United Methodist Church, next door to Jones’s little congregation, brought to- gether an estimated 2,000 people for a “Gathering for Peace, Understanding
and Hope” on the night of Sept. 10 — but failed to spark a media sensation. And I see them today at Heartsong
Church in Cordova, Tenn., which — in a rare departure from the cable networks’ steady drumbeat of conflict — was fea- tured on CNN last weekend. A year and a half ago, Heartsong’s pastor, Steve Stone, learned that the Memphis Islamic Center had bought land adjacent to his church. Did he protest the plans for an Islamic center next door? No. He put up a large red sign that said: “Heartsong Church Welcomes Memphis Islamic Center to the Neighborhood.” The Muslim leaders were floored.
They had dared to hope only that their arrival would be ignored. It had not oc- curred to them that they might be wel- comed. The Islamic Center’s new building is still under construction, so its members used Heartsong Church for Ramadan prayer services this year. Heartsong’s community barbecues now serve halal meat. And when I talked to Stone last week, he said the two congregations are planning joint efforts to feed the home- less and tutor local children. Afew days ago, Stone told me, he got a call from a group of Muslims in a small town in Kashmir. They said they had been watching CNN when the segment on Heartsong Church aired. Afterward, one of the community’s leaders said to those who were gathered: “God just spoke to us through this man.” Another said: “How can we kill these people?” A third man went straight to the local Christian church and proceeded to clean it, inside and out. Lately, we have heard much about hos-
tility toward Muslims in America. We have heard an awful lot about Jones’s threats and about arson at the site of an- other Tennessee mosque project,in Mur- freesboro. But we have heard little about people like Tunnicliffe and Stone and Stone’s admirers in Kashmir. And that is everyone’s lostone says he is just trying to love his neighbors, as he says Jesus instructs him to do. For their part, the residents of that small town in Kashmir told him: “We are now trying to be good neighbors, too. Tell your congre- gation we do not hate them, we love them, and for the rest of our lives we are going to take care of that little church.”
Jim Wallis is president of Sojourners, a Christian social jusice network, and the author of “Rediscovering Values: On Wall Street, Main Street and Your Street.”
In politics, religion isn’t personal religion from B1
sonality Glenn Beck decries Obama’s al- leged left-leaning Christianity as “libera- tion theology,” nearly a fifth of the coun- try believes, mistakenly, that the presi- dent is a Muslim. It is tempting to stick with the old Kennedy argument and re- spond that the president’s faith is irrel- evant as well as off limits. But it is nei- ther. The battles over an Islamic communi-
ty center in Lower Manhattan and a Flor- ida pastor’s threat to burn the Koran on Sept. 11 underscore the relevance of po- litical leaders’ views on faith — their own as well as others’. Instead of attempting the impossible task of abolishing faith from the political conversation, we need a new kind of religious test for our lead- ers. Unlike the tests proscribed by the Constitution, this one would not threat- en to formally bar members of specific traditions from public office. But reli- gious convictions do not always harmo- nize with the practice of democratic gov- ernment, and allowing voters to explore the dissonance is legitimate. Every religion is radically particular, with its own distinctive beliefs about God, human history and the world. These are specific, concrete claims — about the status of the religious commu- nity in relation to other groups and to the nation as a whole, about the character of political and divine authority, about the place of prophecy in religious and politi- cal life, about the scope of human knowl-
dates — such as Mike Huckabee, an or- dained Southern Baptist minister— who belong to faith traditions that emphasize transforming the world in the image of their beliefs. The Southern Baptist con- fession of faith asserts, for instance, that “all Christians are under obligation to seek to make the will of Christ supreme . . . in human society.” What would this mean for a Southern Baptist seeking to lead a nation that includes many mil- lions of non-Christians? Muslim candidates, meanwhile, should be asked to discuss their view of the proper place of sharia law in a reli- giously pluralistic society. Jewish candi- dates, too, should be questioned about their faith, as Sen. Joe Lieberman was during his 2000 campaign for the vice presidency, when he was asked to ex- plain how he would negotiate the inevi- table tension between the laws of reli- gious observance (including the Sab- bath) and serving the nation at its highest level.
How would you respond if your church issued an edict that clashed with the duties of your office? This would apply primarily to candi-
dates who belong to churches that make strong claims about the divine authority of their leaders. The Roman Catholic hi- erarchy, for example, has frequently as- serted that the authority of the pope and bishops is binding in matters of faith and morals. As Sen. John F. Kerry learned during his 2004 presidential campaign,
Candidates think they benefit from making a show of their faith, and journalists, aiming to avoid uncomfortable confrontations, usually allow them to get away with platitudes. We need to go further.
edge, about the providential role of God in human history, and about the moral and legal status of sex. Depending on where believers come down on such is- sues, their faith may or may not clash with the requirements of democratic politics. To help us make that determina- tion, all candidates for high office should have to take the religious test, which would include the following questions:
How might the doctrines and practices of your religion conflict with the fulfillment of your official duties? This question would be especially per- tinent for evangelical Protestant candi-
members of the hierarchy have begun to demand that Catholic politicians not only refrain from having abortions and encouraging women to procure them, but also work to outlaw the procedure — even though the Supreme Court has de- clared it a constitutionally protected right, and even if the candidate’s con- stituents are overwhelmingly pro-choice. The dilemma faced by devout Mor- mon candidates is potentially greater. Mormons believe that the head of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a prophet of God, which seems to give his statements far greater weight than those of any earthly authority, in-
cluding the president of the United States. In his campaign for the 2008 Re- publican presidential nomination, Mitt Romney skirted questions related to his Mormonism by playing down its theo- logical distinctiveness. “The values that I have are the same values you will find in faiths across this country,” Romney said in one debate. If he (or another Mormon) runs for the presidency in 2012 or be- yond, he should explain how he would respond to a prophetic pronouncement that conflicted with his presidential du- ties.
What do you believe human beings can know about nature and history? Many evangelical Protestants and
Pentecostals believe in biblical inerran- cy, which leads them to treat the find- ings of natural science (especially those of evolutionary biology) with suspicion. Many of these Christians also believe that God regularly intervenes in history, directing global events, guiding U.S. ac- tions in the world for the sake of divine ends and perhaps even leading human- ity toward an apocalyptic conflagration in the Middle East. Potential candidates who belong to churches associated with such thinking, such as the Pentecostal Sarah Palin, owe it to their fellow citi- zens to elaborate on their views of mod- ern science and the U.S. role in the un- folding of the end times. Given the omi- nous implications of a person with strong eschatological convictions be- coming the leader of the most powerful nation on Earth, it would be profoundly irresponsible not to ask tough questions about the topic.
Do you believe the law should be used to impose and enforce religious views of sexual morality? America’s traditional religious consen- sus on sexual morality — which support- ed laws against abortion and all forms of non-procreative sex, from masturbation to oral and anal sex, whether practiced by members of the same or different gen- ders, inside or outside of marriage — be- gan to break down in the 1960s. The na- tion today is sharply divided between those whose views of sex are still ground- ed in the norms and customs of tradi- tionalist religion and those who no lon- ger feel bound by those norms and cus- toms. Given this lack of consensus, the law has understandably retreated from enforcing religiously grounded views, leaving it up to individuals to decide how to regulate their sexual conduct. The religious right hopes to reverse
this retreat. That opens the troubling prospect of the state seeking to impose the sexual morals of some Americans on the nation as a whole. All candidates — especially those who court the support of
the religious right — need to clarify where they stand on the issue. Above all, they need to indicate whether they be- lieve it is possible or desirable to use the force of law to uphold a sexual morality affirmed by a fraction of the people.
A
sking candidates about their faith should not be taken as a sign of an- ti-religious animus. On the con-
trary, this sort of questioning takes faith seriously — certainly more seriously than most of our politicians and news media currently do. Candidates think they benefit from making a show of their faith, and journalists, aiming to avoid uncomfortable confrontations, usually allow them to leave their pronounce- ments at the level of platitudes. We need to go further. Pastor Rick Warren’s conversation
with John McCain and Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign was a move in the right direction, though Warren was such an anodyne inter- viewer that the candidates were permit- ted to speak mainly in bromides. Better, perhaps, would be a special presidential debate devoted to faith and morality, in which journalists and religious leaders would pose pointed questions about can- didates’ beliefs. It matters quite a lot if, in the end, a politician’s faith is merely an ecumenical expression of American civil religion — or if, when taking the religious test, he forthrightly declares (as Kennedy did) that in the event of a clash between his spiritual and political allegiances, the Constitution would always come first. Those are the easy cases. In others — when a politician denies the need to choose or explain, insisting simply that it’s possible to marry his or her religious beliefs with democratic rule in a plural- istic society — we need to dig deeper, to determine as best we can how the candi- date is likely to think and act when the divergent demands of those two realms collide, as they inevitably will. Obama’s 2008 speech on the Rev. Jer- emiah Wright, his own Christian faith and its complicated intersection with the wrenching story of race in America stands as a particularly eloquent exam- ple of how to take — and pass — the reli- gious test. Obama resisted giving the speech, but many Americans learned something important about the man and his mind as they listened to him talk through some of life’s deepest moral, po- litical and spiritual questions. A political process that compelled candidates to en- gage regularly in such thinking about the tensions and links between faith and governance just might foster increased religious understanding — which, these days, feels in short supply.
damon_linker@yahoo.com
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