Bishop who loathes Trump and wrote that sermon (meant to be just six minutes long) on his iPad
THE TV cameras caught Harry’s reaction. ‘Wow!’ After 13 minutes 43 seconds, Bishop Michael Curry had just wrapped up a sermon that was meant to have lasted just six minutes.
The prince wasn’t the only one looking slightly shellshocked. Other members of the Royal Family shared bemused glances and surreptitious grins.
However, nobody who knows Bishop Curry would have been surprised that, when offered the opportunity to address the British Royal Family and a watching worldwide TV audience of around two billion, he would veer off his script (written on his iPad) and embark on a passionate speech about love, peace and racial equality.
For in America, the 65-year-old is well-known for his fire-breathing Southern Baptist-style preaching, full of rhetoric and hyperbole.
Indeed, Sundays aren’t the same in North Carolina, where he normally preaches, without his long-winded, meandering homilies accompanied by his gesticulating hands.
For a British audience, quotations from a cleric in St George’s Chapel from the black civil rights leader Martin Luther King would have come as a surprise.
However, Curry is not a Baptist minister like Martin Luther King. He is the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion and America’s snootiest and richest Christian denomination.
Few clergy at a British summer wedding, though, will have ever peppered their address to a bride and groom with references to slavery and calls for an end to war, hunger and poverty.
But then this was not a usual summer wedding. This featured a mixed race bride whose great-great-great grandfather chose a surname after slavery was abolished in 1865.
Thus Curry intoned: ‘Love can help and heal when nothing else can.’ He seemed to revel in the consternation he was causing in some congregants. But as the first black leader of a very white church, he is used to challenging rigid orthodoxy.
HIS grandparents were all the grandchildren of slaves in Alabama and North Carolina. The African-American spirituals, such as the one he quoted on Saturday, were passed down through the generations of his family.
He and his sister, Sharon, learnt them from their grandmother, Nellie Strayhorn, as they sat in the kitchen while she cooked.
Nellie’s daughter — the bishop’s mother — grew up as a Baptist but switched to the Episcopal Church after she read Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, also author of the Narnia children’s stories.
Her husband and Curry’s father, a Baptist pastor and civil rights activist, followed her into the Episcopal Church and was ordained.
He converted after joining her at a Sunday service and being impressed to see her, a black woman, being offered communion wine from the same chalice used by white congregation members.
The young Michael Curry spent most of his childhood in Buffalo, near the Canadian border in New York. Back then, in the Fifties and Sixties, racial segregation was a fact of life — even at church.
Tragically, his mother died after suffering a cerebral haemorrhage when he was in his early teens. His gran, Nellie, then looked after the family. Amid the racism they faced, she instilled in the young Michael the belief that all races were equal in God’s eyes.
As a family, they prayed every night. The young Curry would secretly hope that his father’s prayers would not go on too long, saying: ‘If it was the Baptist prayer, it would go on forever.’ An ironic comment in view of his own protracted sermon on Saturday!
Meanwhile, his father campaigned to end Buffalo’s policy of racially segregated schools. Curry himself says he can never forget the day, in 1963, that he crossed from the black east of the city to the white western half and was able to attend an integrated school.
Today, he firmly believes in combining Christian faith with social action. Indeed, he’s long been a champion of racial equality and LGBT rights, a move matched elsewhere across the Church.
This has led many more conservative Christians to desert the Episcopal Church.
As Bishop of North Carolina, Curry was one of the first bishops to allow same-sex weddings to be performed in his diocese. He also took part in ‘Moral Mondays’ — demonstrations to fight Republican policies which were said to hurt the poor and marginalised.
Inevitably, he has been criticised for highlighting so-called ‘white privilege’. Certainly, two books he’s written, Songs My Grandma Sang and Crazy Christians: A Call To Follow Jesus, focus heavily on racial justice.
He has recalled how his daughter once mistook TV footage of hooded Ku Klux Klansmen standing around a burning cross as Episcopal bishops in their mitres. Thirty years earlier, no black child would have been able to see a burning cross without being struck by terror, he said.
Curry did not know either Meghan or Harry until he was invited to contribute to the royal wedding, reportedly on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury.
The Archbishop felt he would spice up the service and has praised his sermon as ‘Raw God’, saying Curry ‘blew the place open’.
Ed Miliband, getting the bishop’s title wrong, tweeted that ‘Rev Michael Curry could almost make me a believer’. Perhaps the former Labour leader is aware that Curry is the most senior churchman in
America to have spoken out against Donald Trump and his authoritarian, dishonest and un-Christian policies. This week, he is due to join a protest march on the White House.
Curry has also opposed Trump’s attempts to limit the influx of refugees and immigrants from less stable Muslim countries, quoting lines from the Bible about welcoming in strangers.
The bishop and his allies have also spoken out about the millions of Bible Belt, conservative evangelicals who voted for Trump, saying they cannot credibly call themselves Christians if they support policies such as tax cuts for the wealthy.
In a joint declaration by the bishop and other u.S. religious figures, he says: ‘We are living through perilous and polarising times as a nation, with a dangerous crisis of moral and political leadership at the highest levels of our government and in our churches.’
Now a grandfather, Curry is still restless. Sometimes, swept up by his words, he leaves his pulpit and strides up and down the aisle, his robes billowing around him as his arms fly in all directions.
With just seven extra minutes of his fire, love and brimstone, St George’s Chapel in Windsor got off lightly.