Black church and politics in the Obama era

KEY WEST _ This afternoon's session at the Pew Forum's semi-annual Faith Angle conference focused on the interplay between religion and race during this year's presidential campaign, which, as everyone knows, saw the first African-American elected president of the United States. The speaker was Eddie S. Glaude Jr. (right), a professor of religion and African-American studies at Princeton.

Glaude, like many, sees the election of Barack Obama as a signal moment in the history of race in America; he called it "an extraordinary ritual of racial expiation.''

"It's all about race,'' he said. "We couldn't say that during the election. But it's historic. How do we deal with the ghastly ghosts of our past?...These ghosts are constantly reminding us of how earthly and human this fragile experiment in democracy has been. And his election, for African American communities in particular, and for the nation in general, is a signal that the true work begins January 20.''

Glaude was dismissive of the discussion in the media about where the Obama family will worship in Washington, a storyline that Glaude called "rather crazed." "Will he join a black church or not? Such questions are freighted with the weight of our current national malaise -- the continued interrogation of his identification. Is he really black, after all?" Glaude suggested that the fixation with Obama's former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, falls into a similar pattern, in that Wright, "served as a proxy for the claim about Obama's otherness...he really is black, and therefore is a candidate only for 'them'.'' He also said that the discussion of whether Obama should worship in a predominantly black church is related to the discussion of whether America has entered some kind of post-racial moment, a concept that Glaude called "a lazy American way of marking something that's shifted" and compared to a Ralph Ellison envisioned- "fantasy of the blackless America.''

Glaude said that it will be interesting to watch how the black church is affected by the Obama election. "There is an extraordinary transformation taking place within African American churches,'' he said, pointing to the emergence of megachurches, the "Pentecostalization of much of religious life,'' and, in both church and politics, the emergence "for the first time of a cadre of leadership in the African-American community that has no biographical experience of slavery or Jim Crow.''

"How will black suffering speak publicly?'' Glaude asked. "Wherever power is operating, there is a role for a prophetic voice, but it's going to be complicated because a black man is running the empire.''