For those of us who came of age when liberation theology was in the air-in my case, during reporting trips to Latin America, Asia and Africa in the 1980s, followed by time at Union Theological Seminary in the early 1990s-it’s been startling to see all of the coverage of a theological trend that was supposed to be a spent force and a throwback to an earlier era.
I’m referring, of course, to all of the attention paid in the last few weeks to liberation theology, particularly to black liberation theology, in the wake of the Jeremiah Wright controversy.
Kelefa Sanneh had a good piece in last week’s New Yorker magazine that put the brouhaha in much-needed context. I particularly liked Sanneh’s handling of what he called the central “paradox at the heart of black Christianity: the new religion of enslaved Africans was also the old religion of the American enslavers.”
Sanneh pointed out that even so a revered a figure (today) as Frederick Douglass said there was the “widest possible difference” between what Douglass called “the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ.” As Sanneh aptly described it, if Douglass were alive today his comments would be “rendered into cable-news crawl: “CONTROVERSIAL MEMOIRIST ATTACKS RELIGION. DOUGLASS: AMERICAN VALUES ‘WICKED.’ “
A footnote: A conservative evangelical friend who kids me about Union and its liberal ways shrugged his shoulders when I asked him last week what he thought of the Wright matter. He said anyone with a sense of American church history recognizes Wright as part of a tradition.
Maybe so. But I’m not sure we’ve heard the last about Jeremiah Wright in this heated election year.