Any thoughts/feelings on this?

Let the man speak for himself.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barack-ob ... 91623.html


On My Faith and My Church

Posted March 14, 2008 | 04:28 PM (EST)

The pastor of my church, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, who recently preached his last sermon and is in the process of retiring, has touched off a firestorm over the last few days. He's drawn attention as the result of some inflammatory and appalling remarks he made about our country, our politics, and my political opponents.

Let me say at the outset that I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it's on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.

Because these particular statements by Rev. Wright are so contrary to my own life and beliefs, a number of people have legitimately raised questions about the nature of my relationship with Rev. Wright and my membership in the church. Let me therefore provide some context.

As I have written about in my books, I first joined Trinity United Church of Christ nearly twenty years ago. I knew Rev. Wright as someone who served this nation with honor as a United States Marine, as a respected biblical scholar, and as someone who taught or lectured at seminaries across the country, from Union Theological Seminary to the University of Chicago. He also led a diverse congregation that was and still is a pillar of the South Side and the entire city of Chicago. It's a congregation that does not merely preach social justice but acts it out each day, through ministries ranging from housing the homeless to reaching out to those with HIV/AIDS.

Most importantly, Rev. Wright preached the gospel of Jesus, a gospel on which I base my life. In other words, he has never been my political advisor; he's been my pastor. And the sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn.

The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation. When these statements first came to my attention, it was at the beginning of my presidential campaign. I made it clear at the time that I strongly condemned his comments. But because Rev. Wright was on the verge of retirement, and because of my strong links to the Trinity faith community, where I married my wife and where my daughters were baptized, I did not think it appropriate to leave the church.

Let me repeat what I've said earlier. All of the statements that have been the subject of controversy are ones that I vehemently condemn. They in no way reflect my attitudes and directly contradict my profound love for this country.

With Rev. Wright's retirement and the ascension of my new pastor, Rev. Otis Moss, III, Michelle and I look forward to continuing a relationship with a church that has done so much good. And while Rev. Wright's statements have pained and angered me, I believe that Americans will judge me not on the basis of what someone else said, but on the basis of who I am and what I believe in; on my values, judgment and experience to be President of the United States.

Nothing that guy is saying is all that controversial, the "KKK controls the USA" comment aside (and ABC showed a three second clip so who knows what the true context was). It comes across as overbearing and ridiculous because he's giving a sermon. A lot of intellectually credible people say the same things but have the capacity to defend themselves in public without sounding like demagouges. So I'm agreeing with what he says (or what ABC is telling us that he says), I just don't agree with the approach. What's more ridiculous, this guy talking about state terrorism or Hagee talking about the apocalpse and homosexuality? Hasn't Obama already distanced himself from this one? There are people like this on both sides.

The only reason the media can make people like this look bad or good is because Americans are too lazy to stop watching their credit-bought Blu-Rays and actually start thinking for themselves.

first, it's a pretty weak argument to criticise obama for what someone else says, albeit someone he is linked to. further, of the little i've read of the pastor's comments, i didn't have a problem with the vast majority of them.

I'd say comments like these are partially fair game, god forbid you can judge Republicans on the merits of their support from Evangelicals. The difference is that I don't have a huge problem with what Obama's guy is saying. It's good for the average war-supporting idiot who can't locate Iraq on a map to have Obama condemn the comments, but I'm relatively comfortable standing by them as they are.

"The government lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color. The government lied."

Whatever you say about the guy (Wright), it's hard to argue that he's not anti-American. It's a curious association for a prospective US president.

what'd he say about hiv/aids?

edit: thanks.

OH FUCK, ANTI-AMERICANISM!

Personally, I don't give a shit. Obviously you don't either.
There's a lot of people that do. Do you understand that?

How about this gem:

"Racism is how [America] was founded and how this country is still run. No black man will ever be considered for president, no matter how hard you run Jesse [Jackson] and no black woman can ever be considered for anything outside what she can give with her body. . . ."

And who's problem is it? People talk about personal responsibility, they need to TAKE SOME and educate themselves.

I don't want everyone to become a reactionary, but I do want people to learn cause and effect.

i'm familiar with those comments, man in black. i do have to wonder when the one referencing jesse was said. i'm guessing me meant jesse jackson it probably was in the 80s- a time when it was pretty hard to imagine a black man winning the presidency.

further, criticising america isn't anti-american in my book.

I'd love for Barack Obama to be a lot faster in responding to stuff like this. That is, this was brought up sometime last year and he was rather dismissive about the whole idea that his pastor would be seen by many as a controversial figure who, according to Obama, had played a big part of his life.

What I'm getting at in regards to letting Obama speak to his own beliefs is that he has done a rather poor job at not nipping things like this in the bud. Take the Tony Rezko deal. I don't think he did anything wrong (unless it comes out that he traded political favors for donations), but he has been trickling out details in regards to his involvement with the guy, and in the end it makes him look like he's hiding something (even if he's not). About 10 debates ago, he got into a squabble with Clinton and she brought up Rezko's name. The moderator asked him to clarify the Rezko issue, and at that time he said that Tony Rezko was a guy he spent a few hours working on a case for during his stint at a law firm and that was that. Then it was revealed that Rezko gave him donations that he was donating to charity....then the story about Obama's house came out.

If this is all there is to Obama and his Pastor, then I'll take his word for it. However, Obama was making the rounds on the cable news networks tonight and said that he had never heard Rev. Wright say anything like the comments that are being played right now. I find that hard to believe....and I think a parishoner of that church is going to emerge who will say she saw Obama in attendance when Wright went off on one of his rants.

Exactly.

There are millions upon millions of run-of-the-mill white Christians who will see these clips and will be done with the idea of President Obama.

indeed, which is why it's politically damaging and he needed to make the statement he did- and i agree with you that he hasn't done a good enough of job of nipping these things in the bud soon enough. perhaps he's trying to be seen as above it all, but that strategy has it's risks.

were those people really going to vote for him anyway is the question. perhaps this is just the excuse they were looking for and would have found regardless.

People who really feel THAT personally insulted by what this guy said weren't going to vote for Obama anyway

I don't think that's a fair argument. Obama HAS been reacting to most things pretty fully and quickly. Whether his responses find their way into teh MSM quickly is a differnt story.

He renounced Wright like 10 months ago in the New York Times, I think it was, but I understand why he didn't want to address the issue anymore until there were videos on youtube. As for Rezko, there's nothing there. What more are you supposed to say when there's nothing to deny, nothing to hide. The fact that Rezko raised money for Obama and gave to his campaigns isn't news. That information has been out there for a year. People keep trying to find something to stick to him, but it's not there yet.

How is he expected to "be upfront" when there's nothing that he even thinks he needs to hide?

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080331/berman

posted March 13, 2008 (March 31, 2008 issue)
Smearing Obama

Ari Berman

He's a Muslim. He was sworn into office on the Koran. He doesn't say the Pledge of Allegiance. His pastor is an anti-Semite. He's a tool of Louis Farrakhan. He's anti-Israel. His advisers are anti-Israel. He's friends with terrorists. The terrorists want him to win. He's the Antichrist.

By now you've probably seen at least some of these e-mails and articles about Barack Obama bouncing around the Internet. They distort Obama's religious faith, question his support for Israel, warp the identity and positions of his campaign advisers and defame his friends and allies from Chicago. The purpose of the smear is to paint him as an Arab-loving, Israel-hating, terrorist-coddling, radical black nationalist. That picture couldn't be further from the truth, but you'd be surprised how many people have fallen for it. The American Jewish community, one of the most important pillars of the Democratic Party and US politics, has been specifically targeted [see Eric Alterman's column in the March 24 issue, "(Some) Jews Against Obama"]. What started as a largely overlooked fringe attack has been thrust into the mainstream--used as GOP talking points, pushed by the Clinton campaign, echoed by the likes of Meet the Press host Tim Russert. Falsehoods are repeated as fact, and bits of evidence become "elaborate constructions of malicious fantasy," as the Jewish Week, America's largest Jewish newspaper, editorialized.

What floods into one's inbox these days bears little or no relation to Obama's record. "Some of my earliest and most ardent supporters came from the Jewish community in Chicago," he has said. Obama ran for the Senate promising to help reconstitute the black-Jewish civil rights coalition. His first foreign policy speech of the campaign was before the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), where he pledged "clear and strong commitment to the security of Israel." He has occasionally angered pro-Israel hawks by urging direct negotiations with Iran and Syria, but Obama's foreign policy record is well within the Democratic Party mainstream. He's committed to a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians, supported Israel's incursion into Lebanon in 2006 and has criticized Hamas. During his campaign for the presidency, Obama has been defended by AIPAC, the neoconservative New York Sun and The New Republic's Marty Peretz, a noted Israel hawk. And yet no defense of Israel by Obama--or of Obama by the pro-Israel establishment--seems to be enough. "When one charge is disproved, another is leveled," says Rabbi Jack Moline, who leads a synagogue in Alexandria, Virginia.

CONTINUED BELOW
It's nearly impossible to decipher where the smears originated [for a comprehensive account of how such campaigns are generated and spread in the age of the Internet and e-mail, see Christopher Hayes, "The New Right-Wing Smear Machine," November 12, 2007]. The Jewish Telegraphic Agency traced one e-mail back 200 people before it stopped with a filmmaker in Tel Aviv who didn't receive a return address. "No one knows if it's the Clintons, a rogue agent or a Rove agent," says Congressman Steve Cohen, a Jewish Obama backer who represents a largely black district in Memphis. Likely it's a combination of the three.

We may not know who started the smears, but we do know who's amplifying them. The "Obama is a Muslim" rumor began in the fringe conservative blogosphere. "Barack Hussein Obama: Once a Muslim, Always a Muslim," blogger Debbie Schlussel wrote on December 18, 2006. Schlussel had a history of inflammatory rhetoric and baseless accusations. She said journalist Jill Carroll, who was kidnapped by Iraqi insurgents in 2006, "hates America" and "hates Israel"; labeled George Soros a "fake Holocaust survivor"; and speculated that Pakistani terrorists were somehow to blame for last year's shootings at Virginia Tech. Yet her post on Obama gained traction; one month later, the Washington Times's Insight magazine alleged that Obama had attended "a so-called Madrassa" and was a secret Muslim.

The Christian right is also preoccupied with Obama's religious beliefs. "Is Obama a Muslim?" the Rev. Rob Schenck, a reform Jew who converted to Christianity and now calls himself a "missionary to Capitol Hill," asked in a recent videoblog. "He may be an apostate, he may be an infidel, he may be a bad Muslim, a very, very bad Muslim, he may be an unfaithful Muslim." Schenck's videoblog was circulated by the Christian Newswire and Cross Action News, a self-described "Drudge Report for Christians." Schenck later concluded that, although not a Muslim, Obama was also "not a 'Bible Christian'" and did not practice a "confident faith." A separate report posted on the Christian Newswire recently asked if Obama was "Wearing a What-Would-Satan-Do Bracelet." And a top figure in the group Christians United for Israel, Pastor Rod Parsley, a "spiritual guide" to John McCain, repeatedly referred to Obama as "Barack Hussein Obama" before campaigning with McCain in Ohio. (Thirteen percent of registered American voters now incorrectly believe that Obama is a Muslim, according to a recent Wall Street Journal poll, up from 8 percent in December. Forty-four percent of respondents are unsure of his religion or decline to answer; only 37 percent know that he is a Christian.)

The Muslim rumor was followed by fictions about Obama's actual faith, Christianity. In February 2007, Erik Rush, a columnist for WorldNetDaily, a hub of right-wing yellow journalism, called Obama's Chicago church a "black supremacist" and "separatist" institution. Rush found a sympathetic audience at Fox News, where he was interviewed by Sean Hannity. Soon after, another blast of e-mails went out, calling Obama a racist: "Notice too, what color you will need to be if you should want to join Obama's church...B-L-A-C-K!!!" Like the Muslim claim, it was a lie. But screeds about Obama's faith soon gave way to wide-ranging attacks against his campaign advisers, his positions on the Middle East and his associations in Chicago.

At the fulcrum of this effort is a little-known blogger from Northbrook, Illinois, named Ed Lasky, whose articles on AmericanThinker.com have done more than anything to give the smear campaign an air of respectability. Lasky co-founded AmericanThinker.com in 2003, modeling it after Powerline, a popular conservative blog. Before that, he had frequently written letters to newspapers defending Israel and criticizing the Palestinians. Though his background remains a mystery, Lasky didn't hide his neoconservative leanings. He wrote a blog post in 2004 titled "Why American Jews Must Vote for Bush," made three separate donations to the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth, contributed $1,000 to Tom DeLay and has given more than $50,000 to GOP candidates and causes since 2000. Lasky sits on the board of the International Fellowship of Christians and Jews, headed by Rabbi Yechiel Eckstein, whose close affiliations with Christian-right operatives like Ralph Reed has made Eckstein a controversial figure in the Jewish community.

A lengthy article from January 16, "Barack Obama and Israel," put Lasky on the map. "One seemingly consistent theme running throughout Barack Obama's career is his comfort with aligning himself with people who are anti-Israel advocates," Lasky wrote. To reach that conclusion, Lasky laughably warped what it meant to be "pro-Israel," criticizing Obama for, among other things, opposing John Bolton as UN ambassador and hiring veteran foreign policy hands from the Clinton and Carter administrations. By Lasky's criteria, every Democrat in the Senate, and more than a few Republicans, would be considered "anti-Israel." "Lasky's piece is filled with half-truths, omission of 'inconvenient facts,' innuendo, deeply flawed logic, undocumented charges, hearsay, and guilt by distant association," wrote Ira Forman of the National Jewish Democratic Council in the Philadelphia Jewish Voice.

Despite--or perhaps because of--its propagandistic nature, Lasky's column and subsequent follow-ups circulated far and wide. Caroline Glick of the Jerusalem Post quoted Lasky at length in a January column, printing his false claims as fact, as did a separate column in the same paper by Marc Zell, a former law partner of Douglas Feith (a onetime top official in the Bush Defense Department) and a top ally of neocon darling and Iraq War proponent Ahmad Chalabi and co-chairman of Republicans Abroad in Israel. More surprising, Lasky became a household name in the mainstream Jewish press, the talk of the town at synagogues--even liberal ones--and a useful ally for members of the Clinton campaign, who circulated his articles. Recently he's been interviewed by mainstream outlets like NPR and the New York Times, which have labeled Lasky a "critic" of Obama without explaining his neoconservative sympathies. "I wonder how a tendentiously argued anti-Obama piece is mass-emailed by so many Jews who should know better," blogged Andrew Silow-Carroll, editor of the New Jersey Jewish News.

Another key purveyor of the smear campaign is Aaron Klein, an Orthodox Jew who is Jerusalem correspondent for WorldNetDaily. WND is notoriously disreputable, a sort of National Enquirer for the right (typical headline: "Sleaze Charge: 'I Took Drugs, Had Homo Sex With Obama'"). Klein made a name for himself by getting terrorists to say nice things about Democrats and allying himself with extremist elements of the Israeli right, whom he frequently quotes as sources in his articles--when he bothers to quote anyone at all. Klein originally called Hillary Clinton the "jihadist choice for president," but when Clinton stumbled, he turned his fire to Obama, attempting to expose his so-called "terrorist connections."

Klein penned two stories in late February wildly distorting Obama's links, from his days in Chicago, to pro-Palestinian activists like Rashid Khalidi, a respected professor of Middle East studies at Columbia University who previously taught at the University of Chicago (hardly a bastion of left-wing activism). Klein's story goes something like this: Obama sat on the board of a foundation in Chicago that gave a grant to the Arab American Action Network (AAAN), run by Khalidi's wife, which supposedly rejects Israel's existence; and Khalidi directed the PLO's Beirut press office and is a supporter "for Palestinian terror." (In fact, the AAAN focuses solely on social service work in Chicago and takes no position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Khalidi says he was never employed by the PLO; he has been a harsh critic of Palestinian suicide bombings and a longtime supporter of a two-state solution, and he has never been an adviser to Obama. As for Obama's past statements, at least in Chicago, being pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian is not a contradiction in terms.)

Once again, the facts mattered little, and Klein's stories gained an audience beyond the narrow confines of WND. Christian publicist Maria Sliwa sent Klein's articles to prominent reporters, the Tennessee GOP included his claims in a press release titled "Anti-Semites for Obama" and the Jewish Press, an Orthodox Brooklyn paper, reprinted his story about Khalidi. His latest article alleges that "terrorists worldwide would indeed be emboldened by an Obama election." As evidence, Klein quotes Ramadan Adassi, a leader of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in the West Bank's Askar refugee camp, who says an Obama victory would be an "important success. He won popularity in spite of the Zionists and the conservatives." In previous stories, Klein has quoted Adassi praising Cindy Sheehan, Rosie O'Donnell and Sean Penn. For a suspected terrorist, Adassi follows pop culture and US politics remarkably closely.

Despite Klein's questionable sourcing and scandalous accusations, mainstream reporters now call the Obama campaign to ask about Klein's articles. He also reports for John Batchelor, a right-wing talk-radio host for KFI-AM in Los Angeles who has written a series of outlandish columns about Obama for the conservative magazine Human Events and repeatedly pushed the Obama smears on his radio show. According to an e-mail of Batchelor's obtained by The Nation, Batchelor says that information about Obama and Khalidi came via "oppo research."

Even if the false claims about Obama originally emanated from the neoconservative right, the Clinton campaign has eagerly pushed them. Clinton operative Sidney Blumenthal has e-mailed damaging stories about Obama to reporters, including a recent article by Batchelor. Clinton fundraiser Annie Totah circulated a column by Ed Lasky before Super Tuesday, with the inscription "Please vote wisely in the Primaries." Clinton adviser Ann Lewis falsely referred to Zbigniew Brzezinski, a critic of AIPAC, as a chief adviser to Obama on a conference call with Jewish reporters. "I can tell you for a fact people from the Clinton campaign are calling reporters and asking them to pay attention to things involving Obama and Israel," says Shmuel Rosner, Washington correspondent for the Israeli daily Ha'aretz. The volume of e-mails about Obama in a given state tends to track the election calendar--hardly a coincidence.

Large American Jewish organizations, like AIPAC and the Orthodox Union, have repeatedly defended Obama. Yet they've had little sway over reactionary elements in both the United States and Israel--including Jewish hate groups--who are eager to keep the smear campaign alive. The website Jews Against Obama, for instance, is run by the Jewish Task Force, which funnels money to the radical settler movement in Israel. (Curiously, John McCain's alliance with Pastor John Hagee of Christians United for Israel, a leading proponent of "end times" theology, and his recent endorsement by former Secretary of State James Baker have received far less scrutiny from pro-Israel pundits. It was Baker, after all, who reportedly told George H.W. Bush, "Fuck the Jews. They didn't vote for us anyway.")

Respected news outlets have stoked these smears, even as they attempt to debunk them. "Is Barack Obama a Muslim?" asked an editorial in the Forward. "Almost certainly not. Was he ever a Muslim? Almost certainly yes." After Obama criticized "a strain within the pro-Israel community that says unless you adopt an unwavering pro-Likud approach to Israel that you're anti-Israel," Rosner of Ha'aretz accused Obama of "meddling in Israel's internal politics." The Washington Post noted Obama's "denials" of his Muslim faith, without ever stating that the rumor was untrue. Post columnist Richard Cohen crassly connected Obama, his pastor, Jeremiah Wright, and Louis Farrakhan, a line of guilt-by-association questioning that Tim Russert aggressively repeated in the last Obama-Clinton debate.

Among conservatives, Fox News has endlessly amplified such rumors. Karl Rove, a new hire by the network, recently speculated that Obama would withdraw funding for Israel. Sean Hannity has asked if Obama has a "race problem." Fox News radio host Tom Sullivan compared Obama to Hitler. "Fox News are on to him and all the arguments our 'smear' camping [sic] is making and for the most part it is running with them," right-wing blogger Ted Belman, of Israpundit, wrote in a recent e-mail.

The attacks on Obama reek of racism and Islamophobia but, as John Kerry learned in 2004, any Democrat should expect such treatment. "If Moses was the Democratic nominee, he'd still be the victim of this hate mail," says Doug Bloomfield, a former legislative director for AIPAC. The right-wing smear machine grinds on, with the mainstream media and rival campaigns lending a helping hand.

You are correct, sir.

I stand by my assertion that there will be a lot of hay made out of this and it won't go away because the GOP 527s will run wild with creating the narrative that Barack Obama is a radical who was mentored by Rev. Wright.
I know that Obama has been very quick to fire back at the charges that have come from the Clinton camp (such has his lightning response to her "3 A.M phone call" ad). That said, he had a press conference with Chicago papers today to disclose that he has taken more campaign money from Rezko than had been previously disclosed by his campaign. I'm not saying he's hiding stuff - he just seems either slow or a bit reluctant to provide the transparency that he espouses on certain issues and it makes him look bad (rightly or otherwise).

Anyway, you are correct that this (you tube stuff aside) was discussed at length a year ago in the New York Times. For those interested, here is the article, dated April 30, 2007.....

A Candidate, His Minister and the Search for Faith

CHICAGO — Members of Trinity United Church of Christ squeezed into a downtown hotel ballroom in early March to celebrate the long service of their pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. One congregant stood out amid the flowers and finery: Senator Barack Obama, there to honor the man who led him from skeptic to self-described Christian.

Twenty years ago at Trinity, Mr. Obama, then a community organizer in poor Chicago neighborhoods, found the African-American community he had sought all his life, along with professional credibility as a community organizer and an education in how to inspire followers. He had sampled various faiths but adopted none until he met Mr. Wright, a dynamic pastor who preached Afrocentric theology, dabbled in radical politics and delivered music-and-profanity-spiked sermons.

Few of those at Mr. Wright’s tribute in March knew of the pressures that Mr. Obama’s presidential run was placing on the relationship between the pastor and his star congregant. Mr. Wright’s assertions of widespread white racism and his scorching remarks about American government have drawn criticism, and prompted the senator to cancel his delivery of the invocation when he formally announced his candidacy in February.

Mr. Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate who says he was only shielding his pastor from the spotlight, said he respected Mr. Wright’s work for the poor and his fight against injustice. But “we don’t agree on everything,” Mr. Obama said. “I’ve never had a thorough conversation with him about all aspects of politics.”

It is hard to imagine, though, how Mr. Obama can truly distance himself from Mr. Wright. The Christianity that Mr. Obama adopted at Trinity has infused not only his life, but also his campaign. He began his presidential announcement with the phrase “Giving all praise and honor to God,” a salutation common in the black church. He titled his second book, “The Audacity of Hope,” after one of Mr. Wright’s sermons, and often talks about biblical underdogs, the mutual interests of religious and secular America, and the centrality of faith in public life.

The day after the party for Mr. Wright, Mr. Obama stood in an A.M.E. church pulpit in Selma, Ala., and cast his candidacy in nothing short of biblical terms, implicitly comparing himself to Joshua, known for his relative inexperience, steadfast faith and completion of Moses’ mission of delivering his people to the Promised Land.

“Be strong and have courage, for I am with you wherever you go,” Mr. Obama said in paraphrasing God’s message to Joshua.

It is difficult to tell whether Mr. Obama’s religious and political beliefs are fused or simply run parallel. The junior senator from Illinois often talks of faith as a moral force essential for solving America’s vexing problems. Like Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and John Edwards, his fellow Democratic candidates, he expresses both a political and a religious obligation to help the downtrodden. Like conservative Christians, he speaks of AIDS as a moral crisis. And like his pastor, Mr. Obama opposes the Iraq war.

His embrace of faith was a sharp change for a man whose family offered him something of a crash course in comparative religion but no belief to call his own. “He comes from a very secular, skeptical family,” said Jim Wallis, a Christian antipoverty activist and longtime friend of Mr. Obama. “His faith is really a personal and an adult choice. His is a conversion story.”

The grandparents who helped raise Mr. Obama were nonpracticing Baptists and Methodists. His mother was an anthropologist who collected religious texts the way others picked up tribal masks, teaching her children the inspirational power of the common narratives and heroes.

His mother’s tutelage took place mostly in Indonesia, in the household of Mr. Obama’s stepfather, Lolo Soetoro, a nominal Muslim who hung prayer beads over his bed but enjoyed bacon, which Islam forbids.

“My whole family was Muslim, and most of the people I knew were Muslim,” said Maya Soetoro-Ng, Mr. Obama’s younger half sister. But Mr. Obama attended a Catholic school and then a Muslim public school where the religious education was cursory. When he was 10, he returned to his birthplace of Hawaii to live with his grandparents and attended a preparatory school with a Christian affiliation but little religious instruction.

Years later, Mr. Obama met his father’s family, a mix of Muslim and Christian Kenyans. Sarah Hussein Obama, who is his stepgrandmother but whom Mr. Obama calls his grandmother, still rises at 5 a.m. to pray before tending to her crops and the three orphans she has taken in.

“I am a strong believer of the Islamic faith,” Ms. Obama, 85, said in a recent interview in Kenya.

From Skepticism to Belief

This polyglot background made Mr. Obama tolerant of others’ faiths yet reluctant to join one, said Mr. Wright, the pastor. In an interview in March in his office, filled with mementos from his 35 years at Trinity, Mr. Wright recalled his first encounters with Mr. Obama in the late 1980s, when the future senator was organizing Chicago neighborhoods. Though minister after minister told Mr. Obama he would be more credible if he joined a church, he was not a believer.

“I remained a reluctant skeptic, doubtful of my own motives, wary of expedient conversion, having too many quarrels with God to accept a salvation too easily won,” he wrote in his first book, “Dreams From My Father.”

Still, Mr. Obama was entranced by Mr. Wright, whose sermons fused analysis of the Bible with outrage at what he saw as the racism of everything from daily life in Chicago to American foreign policy. Mr. Obama had never met a minister who made pilgrimages to Africa, welcomed women leaders and gay members and crooned Teddy Pendergrass rhythm and blues from the pulpit. Mr. Wright was making Trinity a social force, initiating day care, drug counseling, legal aid and tutoring. He was also interested in the world beyond his own; in 1984, he traveled to Cuba to teach Christians about the value of nonviolent protest and to Libya to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, along with the Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan. Mr. Wright said his visits implied no endorsement of their views.

Followers were also drawn simply by Mr. Wright’s appeal. Trinity has 8,500 members today, making it the largest American congregation in the United Church of Christ, a mostly white denomination known for the independence of its congregations and its willingness to experiment with traditional Protestant theology.

Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, who by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less. That message can sound different to white audiences, said Dwight Hopkins, a professor at University of Chicago Divinity School and a Trinity member. “Some white people hear it as racism in reverse,” Dr. Hopkins said, while blacks hear, “Yes, we are somebody, we’re also made in God’s image.”

Audacity and Hope

It was a 1988 sermon called “The Audacity to Hope” that turned Mr. Obama, in his late 20s, from spiritual outsider to enthusiastic churchgoer. Mr. Wright in the sermon jumped from 19th-century art to his own youthful brushes with crime and Islam to illustrate faith’s power to inspire underdogs. Mr. Obama was seeing the same thing in public housing projects where poor residents sustained themselves through sheer belief.

In “Dreams From My Father,” Mr. Obama described his teary-eyed reaction to the minister’s words. “Inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones,” Mr. Obama wrote. “Those stories — of survival, and freedom, and hope — became our story, my story.”

Mr. Obama was baptized that year, and joining Trinity helped him “embrace the African-American community in a way that was whole and profound,” said Ms. Soetoro, his half sister.

It also helped give him spiritual bona fides and a new assurance. Services at Trinity were a weekly master class in how to move an audience. When Mr. Obama arrived at Harvard Law School later that year, where he fortified himself with recordings of Mr. Wright’s sermons, he was delivering stirring speeches as a student leader in the classic oratorical style of the black church.

But he developed a tone very different from his pastor’s. In contrast with Mr. Wright — the kind of speaker who could make a grocery list sound like a jeremiad — Mr. Obama speaks with cool intellect and on-the-one-hand reasoning. He tends to emphasize the reasonableness of all people; Mr. Wright rallies his parishioners against oppressors.

While Mr. Obama stated his opposition to the Iraq war in conventional terms, Mr. Wright issued a “War on Iraq I.Q. Test,” with questions like, “Which country do you think poses the greatest threat to global peace: Iraq or the U.S.?”

In the 16 years since Mr. Obama returned to Chicago from Harvard, Mr. Wright has presided over his wedding ceremony, baptized his two daughters and dedicated his house, while Mr. Obama has often spoken at Trinity’s panels and debates. Though the Obamas drop in on other congregations, they treat Trinity as their spiritual home, attending services frequently. The church’s Afrocentric focus makes Mr. Obama a figure of particular authenticity there, because he has the African connections so many members have searched for.

To the many members who, like the Obamas, are the first generation in their families to achieve financial success, the church warns against “middleclassness,” its term for selfish individualism, and urges them to channel their gains back into the community.

Mr. Obama has written that when he became a Christian, he “felt God’s spirit beckoning” and “submitted myself to His will and dedicated myself to discovering His truth.” While he has said he shares core Christian beliefs in God and in Jesus as his resurrected son, he sometimes mentions doubts. In his second book, he admitted uncertainty about the afterlife, and “what existed before the Big Bang.” Generally, Mr. Obama emphasizes the communal aspects of religion over the supernatural ones.

Bridging Religious Divides

He has said that he relies on Mr. Wright to ensure “that I am speaking as truthfully about what I believe as possible.” He tends to turn to his minister at moments of frustration, Mr. Wright said, such as when Mr. Obama felt a Congressional Black Caucus meeting was heavier on entertainment than substance.

As a presidential candidate, Mr. Obama is reaching out to both liberal skeptics and committed Christians. In many speeches or discussions, he never mentions religion. When Mr. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, does speak of faith, he tends to add a footnote about keeping church and state separate.

But he also talks of building a consensus among secular liberal and conservative Christian voters. Mr. Wallis, the antipoverty advocate who calls himself a “progressive evangelical,” first met Mr. Obama 10 years ago when both participated in traveling seminars on American civic life. On bus rides, Mr. Wallis and Mr. Obama would huddle, away from company like George Stephanopoulos and Ralph Reed, to plot building a coalition of progressive and religious voters.

“The problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply technical problems in search of the perfect 10 point plan,” Mr. Obama says in one of his standard campaign lines. “They are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness — in the imperfections of man.”

He often makes reference to the civil rights movement, when liberals used Christian rhetoric to win change.

Mr. Obama reassures liberal audiences about the role of religion in public life, and he tells conservative Christians that he understands why abortion horrifies them and why they may prefer to curb H.I.V. through abstinence instead of condoms. AIDS has spread in part because “the relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down, and needs to be repaired,” he said to thunderous applause in December at the megachurch in California led by the Rev. Rick Warren, a best-selling author.

At the same time, Mr. Obama’s ties to Trinity have become more complicated than those simply of proud congregation and favorite son. Since Mr. Obama announced his candidacy, the church has received threatening phone calls. On blogs and cable news shows, conservative critics have called it separatist and antiwhite.

Congregants respond by saying critics are misreading the church’s tenets, that it is a warm and accepting community and is not hostile to whites. But Mr. Wright’s political statements may be more controversial than his theological ones. He has said that Zionism has an element of “white racism.” (For its part, the Anti-Defamation League says it has no evidence of any anti-Semitism by Mr. Wright.)

On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”

Provocative Assertions

Such statements involve “a certain deeply embedded anti-Americanism,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative group that studies religious issues and public policy. “A lot of people are going to say to Mr. Obama, are these your views?”

Mr. Obama says they are not.

“The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification,” he said in a recent interview. He was not at Trinity the day Mr. Wright delivered his remarks shortly after the attacks, Mr. Obama said, but “it sounds like he was trying to be provocative.”

“Reverend Wright is a child of the 60s, and he often expresses himself in that language of concern with institutional racism and the struggles the African-American community has gone through,” Mr. Obama said. “He analyzes public events in the context of race. I tend to look at them through the context of social justice and inequality.”

Despite the canceled invocation, Mr. Wright prayed with the Obama family just before his presidential announcement. Asked later about the incident, the Obama campaign said in a statement, “Senator Obama is proud of his pastor and his church.”

In March, Mr. Wright said in an interview that his family and some close associates were angry about the canceled address, for which they blamed Obama campaign advisers but that the situation was “not irreparable,” adding, “Several things need to happen to fix it.”

Asked if he and Mr. Wright had patched up their differences, Mr. Obama said: “Those are conversations between me and my pastor.”

Mr. Wright, who has long prided himself on criticizing the establishment, said he knew that he may not play well in Mr. Obama’s audition for the ultimate establishment job.

“If Barack gets past the primary, he might have to publicly distance himself from me,” Mr. Wright said with a shrug. “I said it to Barack personally, and he said yeah, that might have to happen.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/30/us/po ... =nyt&scp=9

Amen.

Sour Grapes.