Obama Leaves Church
an article
by Peter Menkin

Written for the website Religious Intelligence in London ( http://www.religiousintelligence.co.uk/ ), as assigned by their editor Mr. Colin Blakely, but never published, here is my article "Obama Leaves Church." This is as it was submitted to the editor:


Obama leaves his Church

By Peter Menkin

06/18/08

Considered a man of faith, Barack Obama, the American running for nomination for President of the United States, has left his Church. For reasons of political controversy due to its pastor, The Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama left membership in Trinity United Church of Christ (TUCC), Chicago, Illinois after 20 years. (The church website proclaims: “We are a congregation which is unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian...”)

Trinity United Church of Christ occupies a tan brick building on West 95th Street across railroad tracks from a public housing project, reports The Christian Science Monitor.

The Senator said about leaving, “Too much press harassment, people couldn’t’ worship in peace.” That wasn’t his reason for leaving, but a complaint on the news media attention. The reason were politically controversial remarks by Trinity’s pastor, Reverend Wright.

Wright's comments contradicted one of Obama’s campaign's central messages -- that the candidate can transcend past divisions such as those involving race.

The impediment to the African-American’s campaign is highlighted by Wright’s widely reported sermon remark: “God Damn America” (for its racism}, and blaming the September 11 terrorist attacks on US foreign policy. He has also blamed the U.S. government for the spread of the AIDS virus. Mostly, Wright is seen as anti-white and a racist.

On Bill Moyers Journal, Wright says we are unashamedly Black. His philosophy embodies, “Use the culture of which we are a part.” He preaches there is hope, that life has meaning, and that God is still in control. “We can change. We can do better.” Black Liberation theology is Wright’s UCC message. It is a UCC message he offers, since he is a UCC minister who studied under Martin Marty. Martin E. Marty, distinguished Lutheran Pastor, teacher, and writer who has been on the University of Chicago faculty since 1963.

Grounded in the history of the African-American, Black theology is powerful stuff. He is little sorry about his comments, but in Bill Moyer’s interview, Reverend Wright does appear sorry he made the comment “God damn America” in the Pulpit—if only for a few moments. But it wasn’t one remark, but a string of them that caused the significant distancing between the candidate’s spiritual advisor and candidate.

The press in the United States spends a lot of time and space talking about Senator Obama’s faith, his church, and how he is a Christian—the Senator says he is Christian himself, and that is also news. Religion in the campaign makes news, despite separation of Church and State
. Time magazine says more voters see Senator Obama as a strongly religious person than they do every major presidential hopeful but Mitt Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts. Romney’s Mormonism drew extensive news coverage.

U.S. Senator Obama was married in Trinity church. His children were baptized in the church, and also like the wedding, Reverend Wright performed the solemnizations. The Senator said on leaving the church, “Trinity was where I found Jesus Christ, where we were married, where our children were baptized. We have many friends among the 8,000 members…” It is a church where he was moved many times. When Wright preached one Sunday about the sustaining power of hope in the face of poverty and despair, Obama says he found himself in tears.

He says in one speech:


* “For one thing, I believed and still believe in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social change… Because of its past, the black church understands in an intimate way the Biblical call to feed the hungry and clothe the naked and challenge powers and principalities. And in its historical struggles for freedom and the rights of man, I was able to see faith as more than just a comfort to the weary or a hedge against death, but rather as an active, palpable agent in the world. As a source of hope.”


It is the claim of Reverend Jeremiah Wright that Trinity is a church of Black theology. The Reverend Doctor John Cone, the Harvard Professor and African-American theologian interviewed on American Public Broadcasting System (PBS) by commentator Bill Moyers says on the PBS website:


* “As we examine what contemporary theologians are saying, we find that they are silent about the enslaved condition of black people. Evidently they see no relationship between black slavery and the Christian gospel. Consequently there has been no sharp confrontation of the gospel with white racism. There is, then, a desperate need for a black theology, a theology whose sole purpose is to apply the freeing power of the gospel to black people under white oppression.”

Cone says:


* The Cross is the same as the lynching tree for the Black American in a Harvard Speech. The Christian Reverend Cone wants to start a conversation on this subject. He offers that lynching was terrorism that “worked to a certain degree.” This includes spectacle lynchings where 5,000 would gather to watch.

* Religion is one place where you have an imagination that no one can control.” Black Churches are a place of the spirit… (even though you are living under the shadow of the lynching tree).” … There were 246 years of slavery, and 100 years of segregation and lynching.

* America does not see itself as “not innocent,” according to Cone. “No human being is innocent.”


Reverend Cone is ordained in the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago. which is one of the city's largest black churches and not far from Obama's home in the South Side neighborhood of Hyde Park.

Apparently the Democratic candidate for his party’s nomination is not turning his back on Black theology, per se, since Sunday, June 15, 2008 he spoke from the pulpit at that same mega-church in Chicago, which has 20,000 members and is also considered a Black American church.

It is the history of the African American church in the United States that it is a center of Black community life speaking to the needs of the church and larger community in social and political ways. But not in so partisan a manner as was recently ascribed to the theology and preaching of the Reverend Wright. So the perception became. But he still associates himself with the African American church in general.

Senator Obama spoke of the role of Black fathers and their responsibilities, perhaps more a campaign speech than sermon from a “religious” man whose campaign motto is “Change That Works for You.” After all, he is running for President of the United States—or its Democratic Party nomination more accurately. He gave his talk from the pulpit of the “20,000-member Apostolic Church of God…a short walk from the Obamas’ home. The church’s pastor, Byron Brazier, is an Obama supporter,” reports The New York Times.

It is from the Black Church that Senator Obama learned many things about hope. Can he really take himself out of the African-American church ethos, as he has known it? Perhaps the Reverend Wright thinks not, though he is not saying. His official press release remark on Senator Obama and his family’s leaving was, “…We are saddened by the news …”

END IT

(Appx. 1100 words)