Down by the Riverside.

1/30/08, Afternoon.

I am in a huge convention center in Atlanta with 10,000 black Baptists singing “Down by the Riverside. . . I ain’t gonna study war no more; I ain’t gonna study war no more. . .”

We’re killing time waiting for Hillary to show-up. All the presidential candidates were invited. None of the GOP’s white guys in suits agreed to attend – just like their front runners’ failure to show-up for the Congressional Black Caucus debate last year. I guess the GOP thinks they have the Baptists sewn up -- or they have already written-off the hope of getting any black votes.

Barack was here a little while ago, but he came via a videocast -- about five minutes of nothing. He looked incredibly exhausted and stuttered and stumbled a lot. The video connection followed suit and cut in and out. The crowd was disappointed. Getting up and cheering the dispirited video just wasn’t going to happen.

The convention leader is oblique about Hillary coming – whether in person or via another lame video, but I see some stone-faced white guys along the wall with their tell-tale earpieces with the squiggly wires whom anyone who has been to a presidential campaign event knows to be Secret Service. Hillary will be here in person.

The crowd does not seem impatient at all. The music is rollicking, everyone is standing, clapping, dancing around, calling out, and having a great down-home gospel-singing time. Now they’re doing Amazing Grace, led by four incredible young men with voices from heaven.

Everyone around me in this older middle-aged and just plain old crowd is decked out in Sunday-going-to-meeting clothes -- the women in astonishing glittery hats with feathers, fur and brilliant colors made more vivid by the extravagant arrays of sequins and rhinestones; the men wearing suits with long jackets reminiscent of the Zoot Suits in the forties, many in colors, others in sharp pinstripes. I’m seeing quite a number of fur coats, too.

And shoes! The women have matching fancy high heels and purses. The men compete with alligator shoes in colors not found in nature. When the offering is announced, the preacher at the helm encourages the men to put at least as much as their shoes cost in the bucket, and the women at least as much as their hats.

Hillary arrives. Now she is the only other white woman in the room other than me, The Termite. And one of about six white people in all – the others being those Secret Service guys and some lost-looking hippie who has wandered in. She gives a long, powerful and meaty speech, most of which is not the stump routine, but specific to the audience, honoring the historic significance of this convention and talking about her own Methodist faith.

The audience doesn’t quite know what to do with this. They applaud and many rise from their seats but I can tell that many wanted to go nuts over Barack instead. Half jump up for Hillary; half stay seated and clap politely. Pollsters take note.

The Unbearable Whiteness of Being

1/30, evening.

I see white people. . .
White people are coming, coming in droves into the enormous hall where Jimmy Carter will be kicking off the Covenant meeting. I haven’t been seeing white people for awhile and it seems kind of strange. The first thing I notice are their clothes. My god, I see a sweatshirt! And jeans! The contrast between them and the spiffed-up blacks is more than a little startling.

They are mixing pretty well, though. The room is filling with black Baptists, white Baptists; Baptists from the North and Baptists from the South. It took over 150 years for this to happen.

Now I am just plain embarrassed to be white. White warm-up music is playing on the stage. There’s a guy singing who is a cross between Pat Boone and the busted-for-purchased-gay-sex Ted Haggard wearing a red shirt and khakis – so painfully unhip, it hurts. The music, I am learning, is called “praise and worship.” It has all the soul of kindergarten sing-songs. Ding-Dong School.

The white people sing along, many not even needing to refer to the verses on the giant video screens. The blacks look slightly appalled.

Now there’s a guy who looks like Newt Gingrich but even MORE white bread than Newt, if you can believe that’s possible. He is playing the guitar and forcing us to endure more treacly, syrupy kitsch. Ouch, it’s hurting my teeth! Now he is leading the other musicians and singing audience members with strange herky-jerky up and down fists. What the heck kind of conducting is that?

Oh thank God, and praise Jesus, here comes a gospel choir. They are bringing the house down. Their voices rise and shake the building. People are out of their seats, swaying, halleluiahing and calling-out. I am wondering what the Up With People types are thinking about this and if the now much happier-seeming white people in the audience are thinking that their performers might try to be a tad less dead.

The president of one of the black Baptist conventions takes the stage to deliver a sermon. A woman in the audience falls into a rapturous and very loud round of halleluiahs. With the patience of Job, he calmly waits for her to quiet down (or perhaps she was silenced or removed by others) and begins talking about how strange it is for him, as a black Baptist, to be preaching on an assigned topic and for an assigned number of minutes. Blacks in the audience laugh heartily – knowing exactly what he means. He reluctantly agrees to do both and builds into a rousing sermon – within his allotted time.

Jimmy Carter takes the podium and is speaking of the journey that led to this Covenant meeting and his hopes for finding mutual honor and respect across denominational and ideological lines. It’s not getting people out of their seats, but the tone, fairly humble, is good.

As he winds-ups, I’m slipping out now before the white music starts up again and ruins my uplift.

Al Gore and the pale blue dot.

1/31, noon.

It’s Baptist Al Gore time and he has come with his high-tech PowerPoint show about global warming, the film version of which, "An Inconvenient Truth," won an Academy Award. The audience for this luncheon (which cost $35 – the rest of the Covenant events have been free) is almost all white. 2,500 of them.

It’s a bit crowded (and the food is ghastly).

It’s dawning on me how many national office holders are Baptists – Gore, Bill Clinton, Carter, Bush . . . Gore is engaging, self-deprecating and quite funny. People are whispering that they wish he had behaved like this instead of being such a stiff in the 2000 election.

In one of his slides, the animation bounces down a map of Greenland. Gore is bouncing it, bouncing it again, and then a few more times as he quips that he really liked the bouncy thing on Apple’s Key Note software and was dismayed to learn that its most recent release didn’t have it. But, he tells us, there are advantages to being on the Apple board – they reinstalled the bounce for him.

The room is loving the show – all 90 minutes of it – with the exception of two well-scrubbed teenagers at my table who are decidedly not clapping along and two girls sitting on their hands at the table behind us; the annoying nasty, catty chattering of the neighbor girls’ is incessant and I want to throttle them.

As the lights came up and none of these dissenters join the crowd giving Gore an ovation nearly as long as his presentation, I ask why them they weren’t excited about what they’d just seen. Then I notice that the two at my table have press credentials and I take back my question and say, oh, I get it, the press isn’t supposed to clap. But the girl says, no, it’s because it’s Gore. We hate him. These people wouldn’t stand and applaud Bush, she says, so why should we applaud Gore. (So much for Carter’s hope for bridging gulfs and creating harmony.)

I ask, well what about the presentation itself? What did you think of that? The girl says, we don’t care about that stuff. It’s not our issue. She and the young boy with her scurry away. Yes, these kids are reporters, reporters for the Southern Baptist Convention’s newspaper. But their heads are in a lock-box – one Gore never contemplated.

Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!”

1/31, afternoon.
“What a conspiracy this, between Church and State! Sing Tantarara, rogues all, rogues all, Sing Tantarara, rogues all!” ---Thomas Jefferson.

I am happily ensconced in a heady seminar on religious liberty. The Baptists pretty much created and own the concept, despite the Southern Baptists’ sharp move to all but denounce or rewrite its meaning it in recent years. It’s wonderful to see so many people fiercely embracing the First Amendment and taking a stand against government entangling itself in matters of faith and giving money to church groups.

This is making me re-think my work with the White House Office of God. Jefferson would smite me if he knew – and call me a rogue!

Bill Clinton: Seeing through a glass darkly.

2/1, evening.

Now Michael and I are in the airplane hanger of a hall and await the closing speech to be delivered by Bill Clinton. The endurance contest begins with more embarrassingly bad white music playing as people fill the room.

Thankfully, this pain is alleviated by a powerful black preacher’s sermon on “setting the captives free” followed by the awesome Spellman men’s choir. They rouse with song after song. I am thinking they have been given instructions to be prepared to do something between one and thirty songs because Clinton is so notoriously late.

But here he is, after only six songs. I wonder, will it be bad Bill beating up Barack? Inappropriate-for-the-setting Bill giving a stump speech extolling his wife’s credentials for the presidency? Stem-winding Bill? Statesmanlike Bill? Brilliant Bill delivering a wonky fact-filled address?

He is none of those Bills. Subdued. Almost soft. He talks of the history of the break with the Southern Baptists and distinguishes the historical Baptist faith from that which its convention now demands.

Reminiscent of Lincoln in his Second Inaugural when he said, “Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God, and each invokes His aid against the other,” Clinton now says, “we all believe we are fulfilling God's will in our lives. The point that I want to make is, so do they. They read the obligations of the Scripture in a different way.”

He focuses on the meaning of 1 Corinthians 13 – but not verse 13 about love that he reminds us is always read at weddings, but 12, which speaks of seeing through a glass darkly. “For now I see through a glass darkly; but then face to face, now I know in part; but then I shall know even as I am known.” It’s after that passage that we find “And now abideth faith, hope and love but the greatest of these is love."

Clinton says we have to love because we may be wrong about everyone and everything because we see through a glass darkly. And that is his response to how these Baptists should relate to those who have exiled and reviled them for their liberalism and modernism – or traditionalism, if you take a historical view.

Like Dr. King, Clinton exhorts the crowd with the admonition that “we must approach those with which we disagree with an outstretched hand and not a clenched fist. . . no matter what condemnation is leveled at this movement - you must respond with the spirit of love.”

He is none of the Bills I had guessed he would be.

Jimmy Carter gets up again and speaks of his hope that this is a beginning, but we can tell nne knows how to make this stick. The week’s events have come to a close and my new friend.

Michael and I are going to have a drink and talk about this momentous occasion. He doesn’t like the white music any more than I and is eager to leave.

“It’s not as though white people can’t make good music!”

2/2, After midnight, back at the hotel.
“It’s not as though white people can’t make good music!”

I run into some white Baptists at the hotel and we talk about the week’s events. I ask about the white music and I suggest there is most excellent white music out there. Beethoven, Bach, Handel – heck, all those guys wrote astonishing sacred music. Lots more recently, even Elvis did a hack of a job with church music. They explain “praise and worship” is intended to be simple so people can understand it and sing along. (Michael had said he thought it came about when churches became capitalist and sought to sell their music to the masses of believers.) These Baptists seem to think that the classics are too difficult to comprehend and perform (every city’s mass do-it-yourself-Messiah apparently notwithstanding) and folks like Elvis are too . . . I don’t know what. And gospel? I didn’t bring it up.

Closing thought on diverse Baptists coming together and bringing together everyone in this country: It’s the music, stupid.