Obama and the Pastor: A Question of Faith, or Race?

By Diane Winston

Back in the day, when I was a reporter at The News & Observer in Raleigh, N.C., my editors sent me to church every Sunday to see if I could find any news. I'd spend all day Friday working the phones, looking for a Sunday sermon that might have some bite. Then I'd head to church and pray that I didn't have to write a story that had nothing newsier than First Baptist's annual offering for foreign missions.

I swore that once I'd established my creds, I'd never ever cover Sunday sermons again. The real religion stories took place Monday through Friday in classrooms, courtrooms, boardrooms and smoke-filled back rooms.

Looks like I was wrong. The controversy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor, suggests that my editors in Raleigh were onto something.

What they were onto was the gotcha story - the perfect storm of religion, politics and hypocrisy. They were hoping to catch a clergyman (they were mostly men in Raleigh during the mid-1980s) saying something that might have been heard one way within the church family ("There's Pastor Joe on his soapbox again...") and very differently when quoted in the newspaper ("That minister is a left-wing loony!").

Accordingly, the avalanche of stories about Rev. Wright's remarks raises three very thorny questions for the public (I'll get to the actual people in the pews later). The first: What are we to make of black anger spoken from the pulpit? The second: What is the appropriate response of congregants - political candidates or not - to that anger? The third: Are congregants responsible for their ministers' remarks?

News stories and blogs have focused on the third question, and many criticize Obama for remaining in Wright's church. Are the stories justified? According to surveys, many Americans believe that religious commitment is essential for political candidates, so it follows that his or her spiritual formation is fair game for reporters.

But apply the principle equitably and consider the context (is this a political connection, or an ongoing relationship?). When Mike Huckabee was still in the race, he deep-sixed sermons from his ministerial days, and few reporters tried to discover why. Likewise, John McCain has been backed by the Revs. Rod` Parsley and John Hagee, but their inflammatory comments on Islam, Catholicism and liberal groups like Planned Parenthood haven't stirred much comment. Hillary Clinton is a longtime member of two conservative prayer groups, but few reporters have pursued her ties to The Fellowship.

Bottom line: Is it worse for Obama to remain in his church home than for McCain to accept Parsley's support, or for Clinton to pray with a secretive, politically conservative group? Most stories assume Obama is more culpable. Why? The conclusion ignores a central fact of church membership: Few believers agree with everything their pastor says. As M.J. Rosenberg of Talking Points Memo writes, "He is my spiritual adviser, not my political adviser." Insofar as Wright was an adviser to Obama's campaign, what was the substance of his advice for the political arena?

Question two asks, "What should Obama have done about Wright's remarks?" Obama distanced himself first from Wright's remarks and then from Wright himself. Typically, candidates say they don't agree with everything a religious leader says, and that's that. But it hasn't been enough for Obama. That's because the key issue here isn't religion as much as race, which brings us to the third question.

Ezra Klein of The America Prospect nails this with his observation about "normalized extremism": "The Biblical extremism of a rabbi or a pastor is an acceptable extremism (e.g., Hagee and Parsley), while the racial anger of Jeremiah Wright is disallowed."

White America is still not ready to face the legacy of racism, much less the ongoing anger of some/many African Americans. As Michele Norris noted on Meet the Press, what was spoken in Wright's church was "not altogether different from what many people are hearing at this moment in churches all across America."

The irony is that Obama may well be a product of Wright's church - a political leader who has taken the legacy of anger in a different direction. But before accepting someone who wants to overcome the suspicion and resentment on both sides, we need to know more about blacks and whites are thinking, feeling and experiencing. Tracking that story would mean more than sifting through a few Sunday sermons, but it would be key to understanding race, religion and politics in the 21st century.

Diane Winston is Knight Chair in Media and Religion and professor of journalism in the USC Annenberg School for Communication. For other columns by Winston, visit The Scoop, her blog on the Knight Chair site.

judythpiazza@newsblaze.com