Lexington

Wright's wrongs

Will no one rid the airwaves of this turbulent priest?

AFTER he became notorious as the man who urged God to damn America, Jeremiah Wright claims he wrestled with two impulses. The first was to heed the proverb: “It is better to be quiet and be thought a fool than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” The second was to “come across the room” and fight back. Mr Wright's decision to come across the room with his mouth wide open is proving a disaster for all concerned.

Mr Wright, who was Barack Obama's pastor for 20 years, has reason to be angry about the way he has been caricatured. The video clips that made him famous represent mere seconds of the thousands of hours he has spent preaching (207,792 minutes on Sunday mornings alone, according to his church, the Trinity United Church of Christ). Mr Wright volunteered to serve in Vietnam and spent six years in the armed forces. That, as he pointed out, is six years longer than Dick Cheney.

Mr Wright's appearance at the National Press Club on April 28th before a massed throng of reporters provided him with the perfect opportunity to set those seconds in context. But he chose to do exactly the opposite. He surrounded himself with some of the most divisive figures in black America: Marion Barry, Washington's disgraced former mayor, Malik Zulu Shabazz of the New Black Panther Party, Cornel West of Princeton University and a posse of security guards supplied by the Nation of Islam. And he hurled a succession of rhetorical bombs.

He defended his remark about “chickens coming home to roost”. He called Louis Farrakhan “one of the most important voices in the 20th and 21st century”. He talked about whites worshipping in church in the morning and putting on white Klan sheets at night. He defended his assertion that the American government invented the HIV virus to decimate blacks (“Our government is capable of doing anything.”). He even argued that blacks and whites have different learning styles, further proof that he endorses the racist theory that blacks and white have differently wired brains.

This is both a personal and a political tragedy for Mr Obama. Mr Wright was clearly a father-figure to a fatherless man who was confused about his identity. He introduced him to Christianity, and later conducted his wedding and baptised his children. In his speech on race relations in Philadelphia Mr Obama resisted incredible pressure to throw Mr Wright under a bus.

Mr Wright responded by throwing Mr Obama under the bus instead. He dismissed Mr Obama's attempt to distance himself from his former pastor as a politician doing what he had to do. He announced that, if Mr Obama becomes president, he will be “coming after him” because he will represent a government “whose policies grind under people”. Mr Obama was said to be “deeply, visibly angry” when he was shown transcripts of these remarks. He responded with a press conference, in which his tone was alternately hard-hitting and elegiac, to make it clear that “whatever relationship I had with Rev Wright has changed”. Whether that will reassure nervous white voters, time will tell.

This was also a tragedy for Mr Wright. He is far more than the blustering buffoon who was on the stage on Monday. He has presided over an increase in the size of his congregation from 87 when he arrived in 1972 to 8,000 today. Trinity is a welfare state in its own right, providing more than 70 welfare programmes for the poor, the unemployed, prisoners and HIV patients.

He is one of the most liberal members of the black church, happy to question Scripture when he thinks that it forsakes common sense and unusually tolerant of gay couples, who can be seen holding hands in his pews. No less a figure than Martin Marty, who is probably America's most distinguished historian of religion and who happens to be white, has defended Mr Wright and said how welcome he and his family feel in his congregation. But Mr Wright could well be remembered as a race-baiter who helped to prevent one of his parishioners from becoming the first black president of the United States.

And finally this is a tragedy for race relations in general. Mr Wright had a chance to explain how blacks can feel ambivalent about America—how they can volunteer to fight in a war, as he did, but also feel furious about slavery and segregation. But he furnished the anger without the explanation.

No quiet exit

He also had a chance to explain how blacks are über-Americans when it comes to religion. They are the most religious people in the country, and black churches are among America's greatest self-help organisations: they provided slaves with a social framework when they were denied even the right to form families, and they continue to provide support and welfare services. There were hopes that Mr Wright might have done this; he was in Washington for a conference on the black church. But he ended up doing the opposite, arguing that any criticism of him was a criticism of the black church in general.

What inspired this calamitous performance? Egomania was clearly part of it. Mr Wright responded to the applause of the amen corner in his audience with ever more outrageous assertions. There was probably a touch of jealousy too. Mr Wright has seen his former protégé rise to heights he himself could never have dreamed of, and he has been caught up in the tailwinds.

But there is also something deeper here: a generational struggle for control of black politics. Mr Wright belongs to a generation of activists—Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are other prominent members—who thrived in part by playing to the resentments of their black supporters. Mr Obama belongs to a much more pragmatic generation, people who want to get beyond racial polarisation and enter the political mainstream. Mr Wright's generation is not about to leave the stage quietly. So much the worse for America.