c. 1998 Religion News Service
WASHINGTON _ President Clinton’s race initiative _ minus the president _ travels to New Orleans Thursday for an all-day discussion on the role of religion in racial reconciliation.
On the agenda are a series of discussions on such topics as “the impact of changing racial demographics on the religious community,” key elements of promising religious activities that are bridging the racial divide and ways to “mobilize and re-energize our communities of faith.”
It is one in a series of meetings organized by The President’s Initiative on Race, a year-long Clinton administration effort to create a more unified America.
Judith Winston, the initiative’s executive director, said religious leaders can have an even greater influence than they do now on helping to bring America’s diverse group of races and religions together.
“It is an interesting paradox because I think it is still true that Sunday morning may be the most segregated hour of our week, but at the same time our religious leaders have been at the forefront of racial reconciliation _ both during the civil rights movement of the 1980s and in response to the burning of churches”in the recent past, Winston said.
Winston said the race initiative’s meeting in New Orleans will include a diverse group of religious leaders, both from around the country and the New Orleans metropolitan area.
The Rev. Robert M. Franklin, president of the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta, the nation’s largest black seminary, said he hopes the New Orleans meeting can inspire religious leaders to do more to ease racial tensions.
“We have what I would call an uneven commitment to making racial justice and reconciliation a priority among religious America,” Franklin said.
Despite the mostly optimistic rhetoric coming from the presidential panel, Franklin said he believes America is “losing ground” in terms of racial harmony.
“What we need today is the kind of vision for our cooperative moral possibility of the sort that Martin King was sketching in his speeches between `1963 and 1968,” Franklin said. “We’re lacking that vision today.”
The Rev. Jim Wallis, the leader of Sojourners, a progressive evangelical movement, has long been pushing for more discussion by religious leaders of race.
“I welcome any initiative on the issue of race from the White House, but it has been so little so far _ just a couple of meetings,” Wallis said. “A year’s program with some meetings is not going to to deal with issues in depth, I’m afraid.”
But Wallis faults the news media for failing to report adequately on either the race initiative or the growing commitment of evangelical churches toward developing better relationships between blacks and whites.
“I would just ask what you think would happen if the national conversation on race and the moral drama of millions of families trying to move from welfare to work had been in the news as much as Monica Lewinsky over the last several moths,” Wallis said. “Imagine how much further along we would be on these issues.”
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The morning agenda for Thursday’s meeting includes remarks by New Orleans Mayor Marc Morial, and an overview on the changing face of faith in America” by Diane Winston, of Princeton University’s Center for the Study of American Religions.
The Rev. James Forbes, senior minister at the Riverside Church in New York, will talk about “racial reconciliation from a spiritual perspective, and an afternoon panel discussion will be moderated by Rabbi Edward Cohn of Temple Sinai, New Orleans.
“Our interest in coming to New Orleans is providing an opportunity for religious leaders of many faiths to come together to talk about some of the activities that they are involved in and bridge the religious and racial divide in our country,” Judith Winston said.
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