Obama's "Faith" in Action

On the way home from the rightie conclave in Austin I had plenty of time to read the Sunday papers. Tucked into the NY Times Magazine was this explosive profile of DNC Chairman Howard Dean's left-hand--his chief of staff and CEO of the Dem convention, Leah Daughtry.

Appointed a year ago spring, right about when Barack Obama shunted the Rev. Jeremiah Wright off the stage for his Springfield campaign kickoff, Daughtry is a ticking time bomb. For she's a Rev. in her spare time, and she espouses the same black liberation theology Obama finally repudiated a few months ago. Daniel Bergner, NY Times, "Can Leah Daughtry bring faith to the party?" A few excerpts, starting with her father's ministry:

A prison convert who served time in his early 20s for armed robbery and passing bad checks, Herbert Daughtry — whose father founded the church and whose grandfather and great-grandfather were also ministers — became the church’s pastor 50 years ago, and today Leah was delivering the sermon as part of an anniversary celebration. Below the sanctuary, in the fellowship hall, a banner for slavery reparations proclaimed, “They Owe Us.” Fliers recounted Herbert Daughtry’s arrest, a few weeks earlier, as he led marchers protesting the not-guilty verdict in the police killing of Sean Bell, an unarmed black man. His ministry has always combined consuming spirituality with black liberation theology — the theology Jeremiah Wright invoked this spring to defend his controversial sermons — and zealous political activism. Leah holds these forces within her.

She usually has her own church in a meeting room in her condo building, but celebrated with her father that day. More:

“THERE WERE THE YORUBAS dressed in all-white,” Daughtry said, thinking back to the 1970s, to the disparate array of black New Yorkers who gathered at her father’s House of the Lord Church to fight injustice. “There were the black nationalists and separatists. The black polygamists who were trying to model their lifestyle on African ways. The Black Hebrews with their long beards, walking with their wooden staffs.” In 1976, when a 15-year-old African-American, Randolph Evans, was fatally shot by a police officer in Brooklyn, Daughtry’s father, despite death threats, led demonstrations and boycotts for a year in the borough’s downtown, until businesses agreed to finance a scholarship program in Evans’s honor. Leah, who was raised according to a strict religious code that forbid females to wear pants, lipstick or makeup, took part in the protests at the age of 13. Her eyes brightened when she recalled those demonstrations and the assorted groups that joined together to give them strength, just as her voice took on extra passion when she discussed black liberation theology and the writing of James Cone.

It was this writing that Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s longtime pastor, cited to support the sermons that led Obama to cut ties with Wright in April. Daughtry didn’t want to comment on the sudden distance Obama put between himself and his pastor, except to say that it pained her to see such a meaningful and private relationship come to such a public and distorted end. But she didn’t put any distance between herself and Cone’s book “A Black Theology of Liberation,” which she suggested I read and which relies on the words of Malcolm X to make its religious arguments. “Some may find it disconcerting,” she replied, when I asked if she feared driving away voters by standing behind ideas that could be deemed radical. “But they are far outnumbered by Americans who are concerned about the disparities.

Just as a reminder, Cone's core philosophy in his own words:

Black theology refuses to accept a God who is not identified totally with the goals of the black community. If God is not for us and against white people, then he is a murderer, and we had better kill him. The task of black theology is to kill Gods who do not belong to the black community. . . . Black theology will accept only the love of God which participates in the destruction of the white enemy. What we need is the divine love as expressed in Black Power, which is the power of black people to destroy their oppressors here and now by any means at their disposal. Unless God is participating in this holy activity, we must reject his love.

Bergner also delves into her track record on setting up the Dem's Faith in Action team (the current advisory council is effectively defunct, and at the very least discredited among those who are more than nominally Catholic anyway) among evangelicals in red-state Alabama in 2006:

F.I.A. has also financed the faith outreach of state parties, sometimes in striking ways. In Alabama, the pro-life party chairman was given F.I.A. money to publish a “Faith and Values Voters Guide” in local newspapers just before Election Day in 2006. The 12-page insert provided the religious narratives of statewide Democratic candidates — “I was richly blessed in my life with parents who raised me in a Christian home. . . .” — and concluded with a Democratic “covenant for the future.” The covenant pledged to “require public schools to offer Bible literacy as part of their curriculum” and made at least two vows that run counter to positions of the national party: to “pass a constitutional amendment confirming that all life is a gift from God and should be protected; and that life begins at conception” and to “defeat any efforts to redefine marriage or provide the benefits of marriage to a same-sex union.”

Daughtry sounded surprised when I read her these vows. Though she is a biblical literalist who sees no problem with teaching creation theory side by side with evolution — “For me, the Bible is history” — she, following the teaching of her father’s church, is also pro-choice. “God allows us to choose in the biggest matter,” she said, “whether to accept Him in our lives. How then can we take away choice on other profound issues? We don’t believe the government should interfere.” Hearing Alabama’s covenant, she said right away that F.I.A. has not vetted everything the state parties have done with its money. Then she leaned heavily on the poles of the big tent: “The wonderful thing about the Democratic Party is that we have room for all kinds of opinions.”

On the basis of all this wonderfulness, I would say no on faith as a plus for the party. Perhaps all this works for the Rev. Daughtry, but many on the secular left will object to her and the Dems turning a blind eye to the Alabama anti-abortion stance and push for Bible-literacy in the schools, while many center-right voters will once again be appalled by the racist black supremacist creed of the Rev. Wright which Daughtry apparently shares.

UPDATE: Displaying some nuance, but not nearly enough, Dawn Turner Trice in today's Trib:

The other part of this disconnect in the poll is that Americans still have so few substantive interactions across racial lines. Though most people, no matter their race, resist being lumped into faceless, soulless categories, it's so easy for all of us to rely on stereotypes. It's also easy to not see people and issues regarding race in a nuanced way.

The Rush Limbaugh types, the Fox News types, the Rev. Jesse Jackson types have made a living drawing an all-too-willing flock into their one-dimensional echo chamber of ideas.

At least she dissed Jesse, who has been around how long? But I listen to Rush and watch Brit's show on FoxNews--are you condemning me as one-dimensional Ms. Trice? By the way, I listened Saturday to a number of disparate speakers at the conservative Americans for Prosperity American Dream Summit, including top blogger Michelle Malkin, rising star and Texas RR Commissioner Michael Williams and GOPAC head Michael Steele.

--crossposted at UNCoRRELATED