"For the past twenty years, he has attended a church led by Pastor Jeremiah Wright, who tends to mix some anti-Americanism in with his sermons."

If I may offer a slight correction...

"For the past twenty years, he has attended a church led by Pastor Jeremiah Wright, who tends to mix some anti-White -Americanism in with his sermons."

The Black churches on the south (and west) sides of Chicago were a thorn in side for years. My Grandparents lived there, and so did many people my father knew, and so every so often, I would find myself in one, wishing that escape were as simple as gnawing through my own leg. Having grown up Catholic, where you're in and out in an hour, the services were interminable. Not being members of the congregation, it was clear that we didn't belong, and that everyone in that room pitied my sister and me for being condemned to Hell, and were angry with our parents for not having all of us "saved." But I digress.

One thing that you notice very quickly, after you've sat through a few of these sermons, is that The White Man is the source of all of the real evil in the world. The sort of Afro-centric social thought that pervades many of these churches is founded upon the idea that Whites are hateful and mean-spirited. They become carricatures - pale-faced boogiemen best suited for scaring naughty children. But it plays into a view of Blacks as victims, and in a lot of ways, that's the main thing the Black church offers - a view of Heaven made brighter and more wonderful by the constant reminders of how Blacks are condemned by Whites to live in a Hell on Earth.

Pastor Wright, when he shouts "God damn America," is refering to a nation that he, and a large number of his parishoners, perceive is controlled by a cabal of White Supremacists, aided and abetted by the average White American citizen, and by Blacks who are too "confused" to wholeheartedly subscribe to their view of an implacably hostile world. "God damn Caucasians," would perhaps be more accurate, but I suspect it loses some punch.

Hopefully, it will be awareness and dialog. The constant drumbeat of "the white man is keeping us down" is remarkably toxic, in large part because it's incredibly demotivating. It also feeds into the resentment of whites, who feel that black racism is somehow considered acceptable while any misstep gets them portrayed as closet Klansmen.

Considering the fact that Obama is not the sort to confront the white community about the history of race relations, he's doing very well within the black community, who aren't asking him to be black first, american second. This brings the potential to help the black community get past the worst of its own self-defeating rhetoric and habits.

To put it another way, Obama seems to share (and to have almost always shared) the notion that the Blame Whitey rhetoric of Reverend Wright and other black churches is toxic and destructive.  Yet, he sat and listened to it be preached to several generations of black congregants, and even brought his own children to hear this same toxic message, knowing that although Obama himself might not be poisoned by this rhetoric, his fellow congregants may be.  And as far as we know, he never did anything to mitigate its imact.

It's hard to understand how someone who believes what Obama says he believes about race relationships could tolerate this.

Again, I don't say this to mean that this disqualifies Obama to be president, but it's something I'm genuinely puzzled by.

The explanation that currently makes the most sense to me is that Michelle Obama doesn't find it all that objectionable, and she wears the metaphorical pants for this particular decision.  But I'm speculating...

Maybe it's just a matter of me trying to put him in a box that he won't fit in, it's just I am trying to get a good picture of who this guy is.  I agree that Obama's public actions in this campaign are much more relevant than whatever goofy things his pastor says, but actions speak louder than words.

I also don't think this can be dismissed as a private matter.  Obama has brought Rev. Wright and the Trinity Church into the spotlight with his book.  We can look at the whole picture, not just what Obama chooses to show us.  And his campaign is deeply personal -- "change you can believe in."  Can we?

I am willing to believe that some of the clips we've seen are likely rare blips, perhaps deserving of an eye roll and nothing more.  But from Obama's speech and NiP's posts, I suspect that whites as evil is a general and consistent theme of Wright's sermons.  This is understandable given the history of black-white relationships in this country, but according Obama himself, it is destructive to make this one's focus. 

So, after tolerating preaching that is destructive to the black community for 20 years, Obama is now going to lead us to something better?  He didn't have the courage to confront his pastor or his wife, but now he's going to do it for all of America?

I hope the answer's yes, but I'm having a hard time getting there.  Not to get into the Obama-as-Jesus comparisons, but Christ Himself led an unremarkable life for His first 30 years.  Maybe it wasn't his time yet...

I feel like I'm grasping at straws.

Hi, John.

Maybe you'd have an easier time if you were old enough to remember the controversy over JFK's Catholicism.  Pure bigotry, of course - but then again, the Pope does say some controversial things, as do his bishops - some of whom had a longstanding personal relationship with the Kennedy family.  Kennedy had to make a statement about how he would never let his religious obedience to his Church interfere with his responsibility to the US Constitution.

As far as I know, no Protestant candidate has ever had to make such a statement - until now.  He just "happens" to be black.

Does anybody even know where McCain goes to church?

have his pastor as an advisor on his campaign team, knowing he's making inflammatory statements? McCain is the guy who tackled the religious right last time around...... 

Well....

1. Obama has been a national figure for four years; McCain for thirty.  We have a long record in trying to figure out who McCain is and what motivates him.  Not as much with Obama.
2. Obama has spoken of his conversion, titled his own book off a Rev. Wright sermon, and ad TWM noted, took him on as a spiritual mentor.  McCain does not make his faith life a theme of his campaign.

I'm sure that if Mitt Romney or Mike Huckabee were the GOP nominee, there would be a lot of poking around about how they spend their Sunday mornings.

It may also be the case that Obama had to stress his Christian faith in order to confront the "Obama is a Muslim" rumors, which were bigoted themselves.

It is also true that many see this as a simple "gotcha" issue, and I think it's more complicated than that.

---

We have a good idea who McCain is, and his faith isn't a big part of that, so I'm not terribly interested in McCain's faith.

We don't have as much of a record on Obama, and he has cited his church life as a big part of his personal story, which is part of his appeal, so it makes sense that we would poke around a bit.

I admit that I don't know about Illinois church politics, but I still think you're universalizing from an anecdote.  I could supply a competing anecdote about the preacher from a black church whose kids I played with growing up, and expand that to signify that they're solid, good people to an individual.  It would be just as (in)correct to do that.  Another part of the country, but according to Time magazine, they're all alike: "Much of white America is unfamiliar with the milieu of the black church. When clips from Wright's sermons began circulating, many whites heard divisive, angry, unpatriotic pronouncements on race, class and country.  Many blacks, on the other hand, heard something more familiar: righteous anger about oppression and deliberate hyperbole in laying blame, which are common in sermons delivered in black churches every Sunday."  I don't want to deny there are style and cultural differences at play--but I don't think there's quite so much as all that to be read into them.

Here's what's bothering me though.  I checked out Bill O'Reilley just now going over Jeremiah Wright's lowlights.  Here's what he said:

1. America is controlled by rich, white people
2. Hillary Clinton doesn't know what it's like to be a victim of racism.
3. America is killing innocent people abroad with our policies, including this war, including the thousands under the atom bomb.  Our rage over 2000 people is disproportionate.
4. Black people are disproportionately imprisoned (here's the goddamn)
5. We have supported state terrorism and oppression.  (So here's Obama's Israel apology then.  For the sake of argument, we can easily choose states that are less ambiguously oppressive, starting with Iraq.)
6. The government lied about connections between Al Qaida and Saddam, and about wmds.  (Okay, the idea that the government invented HIV is silly on its face)

I do find the style obnoxious, and there are questions of emphasis and hyperbole, but more importantly, these things aren't exactly lies.  Do we want a leader who doesn't feel troubled and shamed about these issues, who doesn't want to confront the forbidden topics for fear of maligned patriotism?  What Christian worth his message wouldn't be worried about these things?

And for that matter, no one asks me every five minutes, or makes me otherwise constantly face what my white identity means to me.  If they did, I'd maybe be more inclined to consider a "white church" to help figure it out.

and reveal my uncoolness and failure to understand black churches...

Perhaps I should consider the sermons at black churches less as a rhetorical exhibition and more as a performance art.

For me as a Catholic, the climax of the Sunday service is the Eucharist, wherein we encounter the real presence of Christ.  The homily (or sermon) is vital but of secondary importance.

My understanding is that for Protestants, particuarly those who do not believe in transubstantiation, the preaching is central.  Thus, I was inclined to give Rev. Wright's sermons even more weight than I would otherwise. 

But I guess what matters is whether the resentment is the starting point or the ending point.  Is it the set-up or the punch line?

One way to think about it is that the church builds community by sharing their common story.  And for black Americans, that shared story involves a lot of oppression at the hands of whites. 

Once Wright has the congregation with him through sharing this story, he can the deliver his message.

--

Now for Obama, oppression by American whites isn't part of his story, so he could tune this part out while understanding what Wright was trying to do, and then tuning back in for the real message.

Again, I'm engaging in more speculation here than I have any right to, but it might explain the dynamic in play.

Huh. This is sure taking on a life of its own...

I'm going to take on your Second and Fifth points for a moment. I think the idea is more than throught history, Americans have casually killed non-Americans for their own purposes. Take the atomic bombings, for instance. Their main goal was to end the war so that the Japanes home islands would not have to be invaded. While this surely saved Japanese lives (a point often lost), the goal was to save American lives.

There is a certain school of thought that says that the United States has been too quick to pursue its own interests in ways that are directly damaging to others - such as supporting anti-communist dictators, even when that meant interfering with democratically elected leaders who were judged to be too left leaning. The idea being that a nations right to self-determination was second to America's desire to not have said nation side with its enemy. In this school of thought, the attacks of September 11th were simply a group that had been wronged by United States foreign policy fighting back, using the most effective means at their disposal - which in the grand scheme of things, wasn't all that effective. (Think of how many Afghans and Iraqis have died, and compare that to the number of Americans who have died. Now consider those numbers as percentages of the respective populations. In that light, September 11th, was annoying for us, but an utter disaster for Afghanistan and Iraq.) (Hence the idea that our reaction was disproportionate to the actual harm done.)

It's like poking a wild animal with a stick. You might not "deserve" to get bitten, but most bystanders would ask: "What did you expect to happen?" And people tend to look askance at people who do such things, and then portray themselves as innocent victims of an unreasonably vicious animal.

(In my not very humble opinion, to say that the United States is solely at fault for September 11th deprives the perpetrators and their supporters of not only responsibility, but any autonomy - and in that sense is no better than portraying them as unreasoning savages with no legitimate greivances. They made their choices, but it was only willful blindness on our part that could have prevented us from understanding that they might make such a choice, given past events.)

As for the Fourth - YOU might not think that there is some shadowy cabal controlling things in America, but the whole industry of Conspiracy Theories is made of up of people who do, many of who are quite intelligent and thoughtful people. Why should Blacks be above seeing a hidden hand in what they see as a widespread and intentional campaign to "keep them down," if people are still arguing about the hidden hand that supposedly planted demolition charges in the World Trade Center? (Some of these conspiracy theories are wildly entertaining - not the serious ones like the CIA engineered the crack co