The Black Divide

THIS WEEK PRESIDENT Bush finally spoke at the NAACP convention and received, according to reports, a polite reception. The delegates especially liked it when he announced his support for extension of the Federal Voting Rights Act.

Did the president go out of politeness or out of political calculation? According to Harry Jackson there is an emerging split in black America, one that puts African Americans in play politically for the first time in forty years.

The split was made public on June 27 before the national media. As a result, writes Jackson, the pastor of New Hope Christian Church in Lanham, Maryland, the occasion

marked a watershed moment for the black religious community in America. The Revs. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Joseph Lowery and about 100 others decided to attack the motives and moral integrity of the nation's most successful black mega-churches.

They made the usual criticism from the left that the mega-churches have abandoned �Jesus' emphasis on social justice to preach a gospel of wealth and self-help.�

No doubt �poverty reduction, education reform, improved health care, judicial fairness and prison after care� are important, Harry Jackson says, but there are plenty of blacks who are also concerned about �black genocide� in abortion and �family disintegration.� And they need a voice for their concerns.

Harry Jackson is concerned about black unity, but he is backing the wrong horse. It is not disastrous but good that blacks are splitting and beginning to emerge from the safety of racial unity.

It�s happened before in America, and it will happen again. When an immigrant group starts to get its feet on the ground it moves away from ethnic solidarity towards the great American way of purpose and self-help. And the great vehicle of this social transformation has been, for two hundred years, the enthusiastic Christian church.

People cannot live on bread alone. As Harry Jackson quoted Senator Barack Obama: People �want a sense of purpose, a narrative arc to their lives.�

Welcome to America.

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Christopher Chantrill blogs at www.roadtothemiddleclass.com. His Road to the Middle Class is forthcoming.

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Faith & Purpose

“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990

Mutual Aid

In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society

Education

“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State

Living Under Law

Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures

German Philosophy

The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since 1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West

Knowledge

Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then, once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities

Chappies

“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.” —Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison

Democratic Capitalism

I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all. In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism

Action

The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness... But to make a man act [he must have] the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action

Churches

[In the] higher Christian churches� they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm

Conversion

“When we received Christ,” Phil added, “all of a sudden we now had a rule book to go by, and when we had problems the preacher was right there to give us the answers.”
James M. Ault, Jr., Spirit and Flesh

Living Law

The recognition and integration of extralegal property rights [in the Homestead Act] was a key element in the United States becoming the most important market economy and producer of capital in the world.
Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital

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