Wednesday 3 September 2008

The Black Line Protecting Christendom

Shaun Bailey, London black community leader and Tory PPC for Hammersmith, was very interesting on Radio Four this morning. He couldn't quite bring himself to admit that he was economically of the Left, but such were in fact the views that he expressed, call them what he will. And he was fulsome in his self-proclaimed social conservatism, sounding for all the world like the old white working class round here. Or, no doubt, in Hammersmith.

Such is the voice of the black churches, the heart and soul of the black community in United Kingdom, and the reason why London is a slightly more churchgoing place than the country at large. (Immigration? The more of Her Majesty's churchgoing West Indian and Pacific Islander subjects, the better. As Her Majesty's subjects, they are not really immigrants, anyway).

And such is the voice of the black churches, the heart and soul of the black community in United States. This year, it is perfectly possible that Obama could just scrape in on the votes of those whites in South Carolina, where he will of course clean up among the large number of black voters, who vote the ticket that has on it Bob Conley, traditional Catholic (with all that that entails on life and family issues), Ron Paul activist (with all that that entails on trade, immigration and foreign policy), and Democratic candidate for United States Senator. For that matter, the black votes for that same ticket, because it has Obama on it, also make it Conley's ticket to Capitol Hill.

Conley's moral views are in any case closer than Obama's to those of most African-Americans. Obama's moral liberalism is one of those little reminders that he is not in fact an African-American in the original or ordinary sense of the term. And the black churches are key to getting out Obama's vote nationwide.

Who are the American black churches? Baptists, Pentecostals, like-minded tendencies within other denominations, Catholics who don't like the Modern Rite because it sounds too much like how their white bosses and landlords speak whereas the Latin Mass didn't, and pockets of extremely traditional Anglo-Catholicism, which has always had a radical political edge. Much like the British black churches, in fact.

The grandaddy of Civil Rights in Obama's own Chicago is Squire Lance, a very active member of Opus Dei.

All is far, far, far from lost.

2 comments:

  1. Is that "active member of Opus Dei" in the same way as Ruth Kelly is supposedly a member of Opus Dei?

    Lindsay, these attempts to prove that the election of America's most socially liberal Senator will somehow be good for social conservatives are beginning to look desperate. (Every single evangelical Obama supporter who has taken a conservative stance on moral issues has been firmly slapped down by the great man. Clinton campaigned as a moderate then governed like a Soviet for his first two years. I dread to think what the first two years of an Obama Presidency would be like.)

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  2. Not a bit of it. It's the people who try and deny this who are increasingly, and very obviously, desperate.

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