In each regard, prophecy is a political “office” because those called to it must address a worldly community about its circumstances and history, professed principles and prevailing practices, choices and fate. Prophetic speech acts are also political in the sense that they conjure into being, or reconstitute, the collective subject they ostensibly address. “Prophecy” thus refers not only to an office whose inhabitant make certain kinds of claims about collective life, but to characteristic speech-acts and registers of voice: the imperative voice that announces truths we deny at great cost, that declares the costs of (in)action, that stipulates the terms of redemption; the voice of judgment that refuses to pluralize or privatize a practice that it insists must be overcome; the voice of action, declaring “the fierce urgency of the now,” as King put it, and insisting on “decision” rather than deferral of responsibility.
Obviously, therefore, prophetic speech acts seem and can be dangerous to a democratic politics organized by the pluralist axiom that all viewpoints are valid. Because critics of white supremacy work not within a democratic frame, however, but address the exclusions and silences that have constituted it, this tension is unavoidable. Indeed, in a liberal society especially, critics of domination turn repeatedly to the genre of prophecy because they need to voice problems and concerns that are occluded by liberal languages of individual rights, formal equality, preference aggregation, or interest group politics. Addressing domination and disavowal, they seek a language whose intensity and cadences perform what Douglass calls “scorching irony,” to provoke self-reflection and to elevate the temperature of the body politic.
Jeremiah Wright thus belongs in this tradition, as much as Martin Luther King or Frederick Douglass. When Wright announces from his pulpit that god damns America, when he bears witness on behalf of those (whether blacks or Palestinians) whose reality remains invisible to the enfranchised, and when he warns of the consequences of a house divided by domination, he is speaking in the prophetic mode and cadences of Amos and King. His loyalty is not to the state as such, to the exigencies of national interest, or to the nation as an imagined community, but to his god and to his people, a divided loyalty fraught with productive tension. When he condemns racism and empire, he speaks as a critic not only of social injustice but of idolatry, the worship of power (and reification of identity) that should be chastened not replenished. Sometimes he addresses the fate of an American whole by bearing witness to the experience and gifts of its excluded part, and seeks the mutual reconstitution of part and whole. But when he addresses his African-American congregation as exiles in Babylon, he also speaks in a prophetic mode, just as his namesake addressed the Hebrews about making a life in exile. Unlike King, Wright may not effectively or consistently mediate between the two sorts of appeal characteristic of prophecy in America: one to a white majority ruled by self-denial and willful innocence, who call themselves a chosen people in a promised land, and the other to subalterns who live as strangers in a strange land. He may be devoted to redeeming, not so much America, as the black nation within it. But given Bercovitch’s argument about the hegemony of civil religion, we need to credit the value and indeed courage of this refusal of American exceptionalism, which allows Wright to question the exclusions entailed by liberalism, and the idolatry entailed by nationalism. He thus continues a powerful strand in the tradition of Black prophecy in America, and he speaks it in the prophetic registers of an imperative and judging voice seeking decision and action.
Saturday 20 June 2009
Civil religion, prophecy and Obama ☀
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