Background & an Embrace of Black Liberation Theology

Born in 1971, Otis Moss III was raised in the affluent Cleveland suburb of Shaker Heights, Ohio. His father, Otis Moss Jr. (born 1935), was a longtime Baptist minister known for his involvement in the 1960s civil-rights movement; he was a friend of both Martin Luther King Jr. and Martin Luther King Sr.  A key mentor to Moss Jr. was Samuel DeWitt Proctor, who contributed substantially to the development of black liberation theology. Otis Moss III likewise embraces the tenets of black liberation theology.

Otis Moss III holds a BA degree in religion and philosophy from Morehouse College (1992), a Master of Divinity degree from Yale University (1995), and a Doctor of Ministry degree from Chicago Theological Seminary. After becoming ordained as a Baptist minister in 1995, Moss pastored the Tabernacle Baptist Church (TBC) in Augusta, Georgia. Following his stint at TBC, he became assistant pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC) from 2006-08. When TUCC’s longtime pastor Jeremiah Wright retired in February 2008 amid controversy over his many anti-white, anti-Semitic statements, Moss was named as his successor.

Likening Jeremiah Wright to Jesus

In a 2008 Easter Sunday sermon, Moss declared that Rev. Jeremiah Wright had been “lynched” by those in the media who were determined to use his (Wright’s) past incendiary rhetoric to discredit him (Wright) and his most famous congregant, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama: “No one should start a ministry with lynching,” said Moss, “no one should end their ministry with lynching.” Moreover, Moss compared Rev. Wright to Jesus Christ: “The people [critics] gathered around Jesus, they knew better. But they kept repeating sound bytes from his ministry. They kept saying, you know, things like the last shall be first and didn’t say the first shall be last. They just kept quoting things. Did not talk about his parables. Did not talk about his work. Just, there he is on the cross, being lynched. No rabbis came to the aid of Jesus during his lynching.”

In a March 2008 interview with CNN contributor Roland Martin, Moss described Wright as “an incredibly powerful, creative, prophetic voice of this age … who has been passionate in the pulpit.”

Portraying America as a Racist Nation

Moss has long viewed the United States as a nation rife with white racism and injustice. For example, in the introduction to a 2007 TUCC newsletter article alleging that the entertainment industry mistreated African Americans, he wrote: “Currently, there are about eight companies controlling 90% of everything we hear, read, watch on television or view in the movie theater. These companies operate with contempt and disdain for the Black community.”

In a March 2008 sermon, Moss likened the condition of contemporary black Americans to that of the lepers referenced in biblical stories: “Based on their skin condition, they [the lepers] were considered to be second-class citizens. They had a skin issue. They had a skin disease. And the lepers lived in a leper project. The lepers had bad health care. The lepers were disrespected. They had funny names for lepers. The lepers were considered inferior. They had an inferior school system. The lepers lived in a ghetto leper colony. The lepers were segregated from everybody else.” Moss further implied that whites — who, in his estimation, continued to segregate blacks both socially and economically — were the “enemy” of African Americans.

“Hip Hop Pastor” Lauds the “Prophetic Brilliance” of Black Rap-Music Artists

Also in 2008, a National Public Radio interviewer asked Moss whether or not he accepted Jeremiah Wright’s claim “that the [U.S.] government was involved in the distribution of drugs or in the spread of HIV and AIDS” in the black community. Moss dodged the question by replying: “Well, I think in terms of that particular narrative, I think we need to be very, very honest in terms of that our government has the ability to place a Hubble Telescope in the sky but yet we haven’t had the political will to shut down drugs coming into our community.”

Nicknamed the “hip-hop pastor” by his congregants, Moss has criticized middle-class America for not accepting the “prophetic brilliance” of black so-called “thugs.” “There are times,” Moss said in one 2008 sermon, “when our prejudice keeps us from hearing ghetto prophets, who preach a brand of thug theology which keeps us from hearing the truth from their lips because of their coarse language and ragged subject-verb agreement.”

In the same sermon, Moss cited as a prophetic figure the late Tupac Shakur — a “gangsta” rap star with a long arrest record for such offenses as assault-and-battery, sexual abuse, and weapons violations. In Moss’ view, those who failed to recognize Shakur as a prophet were limited by “bourgeois paradigms” that shaped their thinking. “Our society creates thugs,” Moss elaborated. “Children are not born thugs. Thugs are made and not born.”

In yet another 2008 sermon, Moss quoted a song — titled Wrong Nigga to Fuck With, by the rap artist Ice Cube — which contains the following lyrics:

“Down wit the niggaz that I bail out.
I’m platinum b-tch and I didn’t have to sell out.
F— you Ice Cube, that’s what the people say.
F— AmeriKKKa, still with the triple K.
Cause you know when my nine goes buck,
it’ll bust your head like a watermelon dropped from 12 stories up.
Now let’s see who’ll drop.”

In a 2012 opinion piece which he wrote for the Huffington Post, Moss lamented that the “invisible racism” pervading American society: (a) “leads to Voter Photo ID laws that suppress the democratic rights of the elderly, people of color and the poor”; (b) had “made targets of thousands of African American, Latino and working class households, as unscrupulous lenders caused them to lose their homes to foreclosure”; (c) “drives a torrent of anti-immigration laws instead of legislation that provides paths to citizenship”; and (d) “has resulted in more African American men [being] currently in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, before the Civil War began.”

Admirer of Father Michael Pfleger

Moss is a great admirer of Rev. Michael Pfleger, pastor of Saint Sabina Catholic Church in Chicago. At one TUCC event in 2008, Moss described Pfleger as “a friend of Trinity”; “a brother beloved”; “a preacher par excellence”; “a prophetic, powerful pulpiteer”; and “our friend [and] brother.”

White House Advisory Council on Faith-based & Neighborhood Partnerships

During Barack Obama‘s first term as U.S. President (2009-2013), Moss served on the White House Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

A Highly Influential Young Minister

Shortly prior to 2010, the African American Pulpit Journal named Moss as one of the “20 to Watch” ministers who were likely to shape the future of black religious life. The website Belief.net similarly identified Moss as a leader destined to impact the faith experience of black Americans.

Lamenting the Growing Racial “Wealth Gap”

In April 2013, Moss published an opinion piece in Sojourners Magazine titled “The Growing Wealth Gap,” which lamented the economic hardships faced by black Americans. Wrote Moss:

“There is a growing wealth gap between African-American households and white households. A Pew research study, for example, shows the dramatic change between 2005 and 2009. In 2005, the typical white household had a net worth of $134,992 (in 2009 dollars), while the typical black household had a net worth of $12,124—9 cents for each dollar the white household owned. By 2009, that fell to 5 cents, as the typical black household saw its net worth drop more than 53 percent, as compared to a drop of 16 percent for the average white household. And, alarmingly, 35 percent of black households in 2009 had a zero or negative net worth.

“A few seek to blame this damaging downward trend on the current [Barack Obama] administration’s policies. This is unfair and incorrect. Black families have traditionally built wealth through homeownership, but since the mid-1990s we have witnessed a dramatic increase in bank mergers—and predatory lending. Local banks, now owned by large corporate institutions with little interest in community investment, increasingly close branches in poor communities, then check-cashing establishments fill the void in financial services….”

Supporting Black Lives Matter; Condemning Trump, Capitalism, & White Racism

In June 2020, Moss was one of many leftwing religious figures who signed their names to a document titled “On Black Lives Matter: A Theological Statement from the Black Churches,” a denunciation of President Donald Trump, capitalism, and “the evil beast of white racism, white supremacy, white superiority and its concomitant and abiding anti-Black violence.” It read, in part, as follows:

At an October 2020 gathering of self-identified “Red Letter Christians” in Goldsboro, North Carolina, Moss was among 100+ Christian leaders who signed a letter supporting the impeachment inquiry into President Donald Trump. The letter said, in part: “As Christians in the United States of America, we join together as people of faith to express our conviction that an impeachment inquiry is necessary to reveal the truth, hold President Donald J. Trump and other public officials accountable, and bolster democracy in the United States…. [W]e who follow Jesus must make visible that any President’s violation of his oath of office would harm the most vulnerable among us. The current impeachment inquiry is focused specifically on whether President Trump solicited help from a foreign government in his 2020 re-election campaign, buried evidence of that solicitation, and then attacked the whistleblowers and Congressional representatives who brought evidence to light…. [W]e have already seen enough to know that the accusations are both serious and credible.”

Film About Past Restrictions on Black Voting Rights

In October 2020 as well, Moss created Otis’ Dream, a short film about his grandfather’s unsuccessful attempt to vote in 1946.

Additional Information About Moss & His Career

Over the years, Moss has been:

• chaplain of the Children’s Defense Fund’s Samuel DeWitt Proctor Child Advocacy Conference
• a board member of the Christian Century magazine
• a board member of the United Way of the Central Savannah River Area of Georgia and South Carolina
• a life member of the Progressive National Baptist Convention
• a member of the Georgia branch of Jesse Jackson‘s Rainbow/PUSH Coalition
• a member of the Metro Denver Black Church Interfaith Progressive National Baptist Convention
• a member of the NAACP
• a member of the New Era Baptist Churches of the South & the New Era Baptist Convention
• an advisor to the Spiritual Project
• vice president of the Augusta Baptist Ministers Conference
• an adjunct professor at Voorhees College
• a guest lecturer at Dillard University, Emory University, Harvard University, Howard University, Morehouse College, Paine College, Presbyterian College, and Yale University.

Moss’ sermons, articles, and poetry have appeared in such publications as Sojourners Magazine, the HuffingtonPost, the Urban Cusp, and The Root.