Obama and His Church

An AP story sorts out the issues of Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, and Trinity UCC in Chicago. It's a good article that notes that Wright insists there is no rift, that Obama apologized for disinviting him to pray at the campaign kick off, and that we shouldn't believe everything we read and hear.

Here is the closing portion of that article that speaks to Obama's spiritual journey.

Obama's spiritual journey

The son of a white mother from Kansas, who was skeptical of organized religion, and a Kenyan father, Obama was raised in a secular household. He spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, where he attended a Catholic school and a public school where he took Islamic religion classes.


He explained how his spiritual journey culminated that day he walked toward the
altar at Trinity in a 2006 article on the United Church of Christ's Web site, writing that as he knelt beneath that cross, "I submitted myself to (God's) will and dedicated myself to discovering His truth."

He added that he was drawn to activist churches like Trinity because, in them, "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."

Trinity's critics, though, say it emphasizes black causes to a fault.

Fran Eaton, who writes for the conservative blog Illinois Review, singled out Trinity's 12-point value system, which includes a commitment to "pledge allegiance to all black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System."

"I would feel uncomfortable with a church that used the word 'white' instead of 'black' when it talked about these things," she said. "It seems to me we are going backward if we're basing our churches and the help they give on skin color."

Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a politics and African studies professor at Princeton University and an Obama supporter who attended Trinity when she lived in Chicago, dismisses such criticism, saying it only shows "most white Americans, most of the time, can be utterly ignorant of how black people worship on Sunday."

She added that pinning Wright's left-leaning politics on Obama isn't fair.

"The question is what Barack Obama believes, not what Reverend Wright believes," she said, "because Barack Obama and Reverend Wright may be in agreement on some issues and deeply in disagreement on others."