The Archbishop of Kenya has welcomed the election of America’s first president of African-descent, calling Senator Barack Obama’s win a “fulfillment of democracy.”Archbishop Benjamin Nzimbi also applauded president-elect Obama’s decision to break during the campaign with religious leaders who sought to polarize the country on racial grounds, saying America’s next president should be a leader for all people.
“The election is a historical event which provides the fulfillment of democracy by electing an African American,” the Kenyan archbishop told ReligiousIntelligence.com.
Obama “comes from humble origins with another outlook and has worked hard to come this far.”
“He is an example to many that if you work hard you can climb the ladder. So we should work hard to expect results,” Archbishop Nzimbi said. Obama’s election brings “hope for the developing world,” for as the son of a Kenyan, he brings a new perspective to the social, political and economic issues facing the world. The new American president’s disavowal of racial politics was also an encouraging sign, Archbishop Nzimbi said.
“Obama needs our prayers so he may walk without listening much to people who may talk out of discrimination,” he said during a trip to Boston this week, adding “we are happy that he has steered from that kind of talk. He is a good example of bringing all races together.”
During the presidential election campaign Senator Obama’s long time “mentor” the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago --- where Obama worshipped for almost 20 years and whom he called his “moral compass” --- sparked controversy with his views on race and politics. During the Democratic primary, Wright denounced Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton from the pulpit of his church as a child of privilege. In a March sermon lauding Obama’s candidacy, Wright said that America was a “country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people.”
He argued that “Jesus was a poor black man who lived in a country and who lived in a culture that was controlled by rich white people. The Romans were rich. The Romans were Italians which means they were European which means they were white. And the Romans ran everything which was in Jesus's country. It just came to me within the past few weeks y'all why so many folks are hating Barack Obama. He doesn't fit the model. He ain't white. He ain't rich and he ain't privileged. Hillary fits the mold,” he said.
While Barack Obama knew “what it means to be a black man living in a country and a culture that is controlled by rich white people, Hillary can never know that. Hillary ain't never been called a nigger,” Wright said.
In past sermons to his 10,000-member congregation, Wright had denounced American social and foreign policies. “The government gives [blacks] the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America; that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in 2003 sermon.
“God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme,” he said. Following the 9/11 attacks, Wright argued America “bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye.”
“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff we have done overseas is now brought right back to our own front yards,” he told his congregation on Sept 16, 2001.
“America’s chickens are coming home to roost,” he added, drawing upon the racially charged phrase used by Nation of Islam leader Malcolm X in 1963 following the assignation of John F. Kennedy as just retribution for the evils of American society.
However, during his presidential campaign, Senator Obama called for America to move forward from its racially divided past, giving a major policy speech on race and America to a Philadelphia audience on March 18.
In interviews given after the Philadelphia speech, Wright said the presidential candidate was pandering to the electorate.
Senator Obama’s views on a post-racial society were driven by expediency, Wright said in an interview with PBS. The senator’s Philadelphia speech on racial equality was “what he has to say as a politician.”
“Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls,” Wright later told the National Press Club on April 28. “Preachers say what they say because they’re pastors. ... I do what pastors do. [Obama] does what politicians do.”
Speaking to reporters in North Carolina, Obama said Wright’s remarks were “a bunch of rants that aren’t grounded in truth.”
“When he states and then amplifies such ridiculous propositions as the US government somehow being involved in AIDS; when he suggests that Minister Farrakhan somehow represents one of the greatest voices of the 20th and 21st century; when he equates the United States’ wartime efforts with terrorism, then there are no excuses. They offend me, they rightly offend all Americans, and they should be denounced. And that’s what I’m doing very clearly and unequivocally here today,” Obama said.
While applauding Obama’s run for the White House, other African Anglican leaders have been less sanguine with his political views, objecting to comments that posited a moral equivalency between the civil rights movement and gay marriage.
“We are Africans and know the difference between moral behavior and responsibility as opposed to civil rights being compared to homosexuality,” Archbishop Henry Orombi of Uganda told us, adding that it was “distressing that Barack Obama, a fellow African, would promote racial civil rights as morally equivalent to immoral civil behavior.”
While proud of his candidacy, Africa’s 50 million Anglicans did not share Obama’s views on this issue, holding that the “unchangeable standard of Christian marriage” was between one man and one woman and that homosexual practices were immoral, he said on June 29.
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(Source: RI)