Name That Preacher: Take the Quiz!

Jeremiah Wright made two of the statements that appear below.

 The others were made by Martin Luther King Jr. and Billy Graham, pastoral advisor to George W. Bush and Hillary Clinton.

Which statements did Wright make?

Answers and sources follow.

1. "The world now demands a maturity of America that we may not be able to achieve. It demands that we admit that we have been wrong."

 

2. "Perhaps a more difficult but no less necessary task is to speak for those who have been designated as our enemies. . . . Surely we must understand their feelings, even if we do not condone their actions. Surely we must see that the men we supported pressed them to their violence. Surely we must see that our own computerized plans of destruction simply dwarf their greatest acts."

 

3. "Is AIDS a judgment of God? I could not say for sure, but I think so."

 

4. "I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today-my own government."

 

5. "I've told you for over three decades now: God will forgive you for sowing wild oats. But God's forgiveness don't stop the crop. Them oats you sowed will bring a crop. You will reap what you sow. But stop calling your crops your cross. 'Well . . . that child is just my cross.' No, that child is your crop. A cross is a sacrificial vehicle of redemption that you voluntarily pick up; a crop is the result of something you sowed. Our choices have consequences, our behaviors have consequences."

 

6. "I was increasingly compelled to see the war as an enemy of the poor and to attack it as such."

 

7. "A lot of Jews are great friends of mine. They swarm around me and are friendly to me, because they know that I am friendly to Israel and so forth, but they don't know how I really feel about what they're doing to this country, and I have no power and no way to handle them."

 

8. "This stranglehold [of the Jews] has got to be broken or the country's going down the drain."

 

9. ". . . the long line of military dictators seemed to offer no real change, especially in terms of their need for land and peace. The only change came from America, as we increased our troop commitments in support of governments which were singularly corrupt, inept, and without popular support. All the while the people read our leaflets and received the regular promises of peace and democracy and land reform. Now they languish under our bombs and consider us . . . the real enemy."

 

10. "A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, 'This is not just.' It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of South America and say, 'This is not just.' The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just."

 

11. "If you're here without a church home and you know that the lord has set you free, you want a church home, come on! Red, white, black, yellow, Asian, Hispanic, come on!"

 

 

 

 

 

 

ANSWERS: Jeremiah Wright said 5 & 11; Billy Graham said 3, 7, & 8; MLK said the rest. SOURCES: On Hillary's relationship with Graham, see Time Magazine, Aug. 8, 2007(http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1650798,00.html); quotes 5 & 11 come from a sermon Wright delivered on January 27, 2008 (http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=4808fe74-023d-417b-8537-33763c33e399); quote 3 comes from a speech Graham delivered in Columbus, Ohio, in 1993, though he later retracted the statement (http://www.aegis.com/news/ads/1993/AD931840.html); quotes 7 & 8 come from a conversation between Graham and Nixon recorded for posterity on the Nixon tapes (http://www.slate.com/id/2063030); MLK's quotes come from his speech "Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break Silence," delivered April 4, 1967 (http://www.americanrhetoric.com/speeches/mlkatimetobreaksilence.htm).