A belated introduction to an article on Obam's faith-based initiative:

[unusualmusic_lj_archive]

Maybe Obama actually means it: Faith Based

The case against the supposed political motivation of Obama's "tack to the right" in his speech outlining his plan to expand government funding to faith-based charities (PDF) is an even easier slam dunk. It annoys me what it says about how little the almost entirely white journalism establishment understands about black Americans that they think that the first credible black Presidential candidate would only shovel money to churches for political reasons. This is one area where black history and white history are diametrically opposed. First, the relevant white history: even the most religious white colonists who first came to America, the Puritans who made up over 80% of all the non-natives in America by 1640, came here fleeing from a church. From two of them, actually: the Catholic Church, and the Church of England. They had fought a war in England against the imposition of state-sponsored Catholicism. They took one look at what state-sponsorship was doing to their own Protestant faith and its ministers, and came here opposed, at least initially, to that, too. Stamped in the DNA of white America is a deep and abiding suspicion of organized religion. Even the most pious fundamentalist assures himself (delusionally, in many cases) that he, not some clergyman, let alone some government-supported clergyman, is his own highest moral authority after God and the Bible. For crying out loud, white American Catholics believe that, and that's 100% opposed to stated Catholic doctrine.


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But Senator Obama's proposal is neither proof that he's a right-wing Democrat in disguise, nor a dishonest attempt to portray himself as more moderate than he is, nor a liberal plot to advance the homosexual agenda. How do I know this? Occam's Razor. It is far, far simpler to believe that he is just that much of a believer in the black church, like nearly every educated black man in America. Remember that different black-versus-white historical experience I mentioned earlier? Let me finish that thought. Because, you see, black Americans' ancestors didn't come here fleeing any kind of church; they were captured by enemy tribes back in Africa and sold to white plantation owners as slaves. Those plantation owners lived in constant fear of organized revolt by their slaves; the term "monomania" was originally coined by southern plantation owners, for whom this "obsession" that black slaves had with getting free, their unwillingness to accept their fate, was seen as a mental sickness. But the one organization that black slaves were allowed, the one time they were allowed to gather under their own authority without white overseers, was in church on Sunday morning. At the time of emancipation, all black leaders in America were ministers, except for a tiny handful up north. And under the Jim Crow laws that were enacted to keep "freed" slaves enslaved in practice, and in the face of substantial barriers of institutionalized racism in education and hiring, it stayed true for another hundred years. Virtually the only black college graduates were seminary graduates in the American Methodist Episcopal and American Baptist churches; until the 1964 Civil Rights Act, practically the only good-paying job for black Americans was pastor of an AME or a Baptist church. As a result, up through 1964, the pastorate was a highly coveted job, one that without almost any exceptions attracted the best of the best, the brightest of the brightest. There have even been some black intellectuals who've complained about one of the unwanted side effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act being that the black church lost its monopoly on intellectual and moral authority, and a few of them blame that at least as much as they blame racist economics for the high rates of single parenthood in black America.


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EDIT: In which Fengi does some masterful filleting of this article here

So this commentary will be struck:
This kind of thing is the reason why facile and easy condemnations of religion when applied to minorities somply do not work. Because, for the most part, these condemnation are rooted in the white experience and history, and the fact is that MINORITIES HAVE HAD DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES WITH RELIGION. And this fact is something that so many people have SO MUCH TROUBLE understanding, for some strange reason. Now, I hate the faith-based initiative. I am from the school where I simply do not want churches in charge of gov't money. Yes, some of them do some exceptional work, but some of them have been right pains in the asses. But at the same time I would love for criticsm of this idea to be nuanced, taking into account the different circumstances and histories of the new players on the block. Cause no matter what many white liberals think, THERE ARE DIFFERENT EXPERIENCES AND HISTORIES OF AMERICA. Therefore, people's worldviews are gonna be different.

Comments

[cobecat.livejournal.com]

Hm. Also, I'd submit that the history of white relations to religion isn't nearly as clear-cut as this makes it seem. Sure, the Puritans were escaping from religious persecution, but no sooner did they set down in Plymouth than they were legislating their own religion as the One True one. Mary Dyer, hanged in 1660 for preaching Quaker beliefs in Boston, is a good example.