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("Louis Farrakhan is not my enemy. He did not put me in chains. He did not put me in slavery. And he did not make me this color.")

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Obviously there was a cultural difference / gap that elevated Wrights initial soundbites to the controversy they were. People thought "oh he's loud - scary" well - some black pastors are loud when they preach.

Right. Everyone has seen "Coming to America" - loud is fun & comfortable. I'm sure it had nothing to do with what he actually said, Barry.

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"He was just my pastor. My words were mis-represented."

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Originally posted by Legacy Fan:
Although I still find it suspicious that now, overnight, Obama has had a revelation that he wasn't able to for the past 20 years.

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Why'd Obama Join Trinity in the First Place?

The question is worth revisiting now that his ex-pastor is threatening his entire campaign.

I've heard two basic theories since the Wright tapes first surfaced in March. The first is cynical: Obama was a black politician in Chicago with an exotic background and intimidating credentials. He needed a home in a black church to gain credibility with his less educated, less affluent, more parochial-minded constituents. Trinity offered him the requisite cred.

The second, not entirely unrelated, theory is psychoanalytical: Obama, as the product of a racially-mixed marriage, in which the black father was almost entirely absent, had spent his whole life groping for an authentic identity. Wright offered Obama both the father and the identity he never had.

The problem with both theories is that they don't answer the question of why this particular church, this particular pastor. Yes, Wright was a prominent figure with a large congregation. But surely there were other pastors and churches that fit that profile. And, in retrospect, probably distinctly less controversial ones.

Which is where this fascinating passage from David Mendell's Obama biography comes in:

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Wright earned bachelor's and master's degrees in sacred music from Howard University and initially pursued a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago Divinity School before interrupting his studies to minister full-time. His intellectualism and black militancy put him at odds with some Baptist ministers around Chicago, with whom he often sparred publicly, and he finally accepted a position at Trinity. ...

Wright remains a maverick among Chicago's vast assortment of black preachers. He will question Scripture when he feels it forsakes common sense; he is an ardent foe of mandatory school prayer; and he is a staunch advocate for homosexual rights, which is almost unheard-of among African-American ministers. Gay and lesbian couples, with hands clasped, can be spotted in Trinity's pews each Sunday. Even if some blacks consider Wright's church serving only the bourgeois set, his ministry attracts a broad cross section of Chicago's black community. Obama first noticed the church because Wright had placed a "Free Africa" sign out front to protest continuing apartheid. The liberal, Columbia-educated Obama was attracted to Wright's cerebral and inclusive nature, as opposed to the more socially conservative and less educated ministers around Chicago. Wright developed into a counselor and mentor to Obama as Obama sought to understand the power of Christianity in the lives of black Americans, and as he grappled with the complex vagaries of Chicago's black political scene. "Trying to hold a conversation with a guy like Barack, and him trying to hold a conversation with some ministers, it's like you are dating someone and she wants to talk to you about Rosie and what she saw on Oprah, and that's it," Wright explained. "But here I was, able to stay with him lockstep as we moved from topic to topic. . . . He felt comfortable asking me questions that were postmodern, post-Enlightenment and that college-educated and graduate school-trained people wrestle with when it comes to the faith. We talked about race and politics. I was not threatened by those questions." ...

But more than that, Trinity's less doctrinal approach to the Bible intrigued and attracted Obama. "Faith to him is how he sees the human condition," Wright said. "Faith to him is not . . . litmus test, mouth-spouting, quoting Scripture. It's what you do with your life, how you live your life. That's far more important than beating someone over the head with Scripture that says women shouldn't wear pants or if you drink, you're going to hell. That's just not who Barack is."

So, if you buy Wright's account--and it rings pretty true to me--it was his intellectualism and social progressivism that won Obama over. Certainly it's hard to imagine that someone like Obama, who came from a progressive, secular background, would have felt genuinely comfortable in a socially conservative, anti-intellectual church. The problem for Obama is that the flip-side of these virtues was a minister with a radical worldview and a penchant for advertising it loudly.

Which, put another way, means that Obama's decision to join Trinity was probably the opposite of cynical. Trinity was the place where, despite the potential pitfalls--and he must have noticed them early on--Obama felt most true to himself.

Update: Just to clarify, by "felt most true to himself" I mean "most true to himself as a worshipper." The point is that the pastor who made him feel most welcome as a worshipper probably also made him pretty uncomfortable politically.

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W sounds like a genius compared to listening to Hillary Obama & McCain

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Originally posted by Westside Steve:
"Just last week a woman man youngperson whatever came up to me and told me....blah blah blah."

WSS

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Originally posted by Aloysius:
I think that's a fair question. I'm also curious as to why Obama chose Wright as his pastor.

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Originally posted by Aloysius:
I think that's a fair question. I'm also curious as to why Obama chose Wright as his pastor.

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Originally posted by Legacy Fan:
Nit-picking scripture aside, political views aside, the hate booming from Wright's pulpit is at serious odds with major themes of the Bible, & Christianity (and many religions, except one that I can think of).

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Originally posted by We need Tom Tupa:
Does that mean polygamy fits your idea of "consistent with a Biblical way of thinking"? After all, there are OT verses about it, and it has a tradition in America.

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Originally posted by Aloysius:

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Originally posted by Legacy Fan:
Nit-picking scripture aside, political views aside, the hate booming from Wright's pulpit is at serious odds with major themes of the Bible, & Christianity (and many religions, except one that I can think of).

I don't agree with Wright at all, but I think some of his more controversial comments are part of a distinctly biblical (& American) tradition of seeing our national success as a function of our moral righteousness.

From Leviticus 18:26 ("And if you defile the land, it will vomit you out as it vomited out the nations that were before you") to Jefferson Notes on Virginia (says US will be punished for slavery) to the Westboro Baptist Church, this tradition has alway been controversial - but I think it's perfectly consistent with a biblical way of thinking.

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Originally posted by DieHardBrownsFan:
Since the African Slaves were sold by BLACK tribal leaders to the English/Spanish/whatever, what does this have to do with white Americans today, most of whom ancestors have NOTHING TO DO with slavery?

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The Past

by hilzoy

I was thinking, as I read some of the commentary about Rev. Wright, that at least some of the people I read didn't seem to realize just how recently African-Americans were literally terrorized on a regular basis; and in that context it occurred to me that I didn't know exactly how old Rev. Wright was. So I looked him up in Wikipedia, and found that he was born in 1941. And it struck me: that would make him the same age as Emmett Till:

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"In August of 1955, one year and three months after Brown v. Board of Education, a fourteen-year-old black boy unschooled in the racial customs of the South traveled to Mississippi to visit relatives. With adolescent bravado, he whistled at Carolyn Bryant, a white woman. This inadvertent violation of a sacred code of the South cost him his life. Two white men dragged Till from his bed in the dead of night, beat him, and shot him through the head. Three days later his mangled body was pulled from the Tallahatchie River. It was Emmett Till's first visit to the South. Eight days after arriving in Money, Mississippi, where the town line was marked with a sign reading, "Money -- a good place to raise a boy," Emmett Till was dead.

If not for one extraordinary decision of Mamie Till, Emmett's mother, the story may have ended there. At the urging of civil rights leaders, Mamie Till decided to leave the casket open at her son's funeral. She told the mortician not to "fix" her son's face. The world would see what had been done to him. Tens of thousands of people viewed Emmett Till's body, which was on display in a Chicago church for four long days. Gruesome photos of his maimed and distorted face flooded the national and international press. America was shocked out of comfortable complacency, and the Till case became international news. (...)

Till's uncle identified the assailants in court -- the first time a black person had testified against a white in Mississippi, and perhaps in the South. He was forced to leave town. After a five-day trial that made an open mockery of the possibility of justice, the defendants were acquitted. The Bryants celebrated, on camera, with a smile and an embrace."

That's a photo of Emmett Till while he was still alive. To see a photo of what remained of his face -- and photos like this were printed in Jet and circulated around the world -- click here. It's not pleasant to look at, but if you haven't seen it before, you should steel yourself and try.

American Experience did a show on Till's murder, and their website has reminiscences from people like Wright, who were about Till's own age, and black:

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"I was a senior at Los Angeles High School in California. It had a profound affect on me because I understood that it could have happened to any of us. It shook my confidence. It was as though terrorists had struck -- but it was terrorists from our own country. It made me want to do everything I could to make sure this event would not happen ever again.

Johnnie L. Cochran, Jr., high-profile trial lawyer

My memories are exact -- and parallel those of many others my age -- I felt vulnerable for the first time in my life -- Till was a year younger -- and recall believing that this could easily happen to me -- for no reason at all. I lived in Pennsylvania at the time.

Julian Bond, civil rights leader and chairman, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

Emmett Till and I were about the same age. A week after he was murdered... I stood on the corner with a gang of boys, looking at pictures of him in the black newspapers and magazines. In one, he was laughing and happy. In the other, his head was swollen and bashed in, his eyes bulging out of their sockets and his mouth twisted and broken. His mother had done a bold thing. She refused to let him be buried until hundreds of thousands marched past his open casket in Chicago and looked down at his mutilated body. [I] felt a deep kinship to him when I learned he was born the same year and day I was. My father talked about it at night and dramatized the crime. I couldn't get Emmett out of my mind...

Muhammed Ali, boxer"

The murder of Emmett Till was not particularly unusual. Neither was the fact that the killers, though known to their community, were not brought to justice. (The jury deliberated for 67 minutes; one juror said that "they wouldn't have taken so long if they hadn't stopped to drink pop.") What made it unusual was the actions of Till's family: his mother's decision to have an open casket funeral, and his uncle's decision to testify against his killers in court.

Jeremiah Wright was fourteen when Till was killed. Though he did not live in the South, Jim Crow was in full force there until his early twenties. He was twenty one when George Wallace called for "segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever." He was a few days shy of twenty two when a bomb went off in a Birmingham church, killing four young girls who were at Sunday School, about a month shy of twenty three when Lyndon Johnson finally signed the Civil Rights Act, and almost twenty four when Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act.

By the time our country got around to guaranteeing voting rights for blacks, Jeremiah Wright had served his country in the Marine Corps for three years, and in the Navy for two more.

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Originally posted by rich4eagle:
Now that was pure as Ivory Snow.....the village idiot has spoken

And Aloyisus keep saying what you think..........because FREEDOM is now the subject..........