Monday, May 05, 2008

Obama's National Conversation on Religion   [Mark Hemingway]

Asked about the Rev. Wright on Meet the Press Sunday, Obama again tried to distance himself:

I think that the American people understand that when I joined Trinity United Church of Christ, I was committing not to Pastor Wright, I was committing to a church and I was committing to Christ. And it is a wonderful church. It's a member of the United Church of Christ, a denomination that dates back to the battles around abolition.

The problem here is that trying to separate Wright from the UCC — a church body with a long history of radical politics — is near impossible. As I wrote last week:

While American conservatives have focused resources and talent on highlighting the alleged takeover of academic and political institutions by liberal activists since the 1960s, comparably little attention has been paid to the same development in churches.

[snip]

Jim Naughton, the director of communications for the Washington D.C., Episcopal diocese, claims “[politically liberal church bodies are] dealing with an attack funded by the same donors who have funded the establishment of the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, who fund The American Spectator magazine — the whole sort of intellectual infrastructure of the far right wing in this country has decided to target our mainline churches because it doesn’t like where they stand on social issues, on economic issues and to some extent on theological issues.”

Apparently, Naughton doesn’t pay much attention to the Episcopal Church’s own membership rolls: It’s not just the vast right wing conspiracy that has a problem with the politicization of these churches. It’s the laity that objects, and they’ve been voting with their feet. Nearly every one of these church bodies has been hemorrhaging members for decades now.

Case in point: the United Church of Christ, which has been grabbing headlines as the denomination of Barack Obama and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has lost some 40 percent of its membership over the last 40 years. When the Wright scandal broke, the church leadership vigorously defended Wright and his comments on the church's website and elsewhere. Is it any wonder that a church body that would embrace him is unpopular? The scandal with Wright isn't just that his views may represent a particular politician; it’s also that his identity politics and arrogance may reflect those of many denominational leaders.

Indeed, if Obama's trying to pledge his allegiance to the UCC over Wright, from a political standpoint that's not really preferable. Over at the UCC website you can find out why God wants you to protest the FCC over media consolidation, campaign against legislation that mandates employers verify the legal citizenship of employees, prevent social security privatization, participate in an “Economic Justice Young Adult Team Immersion Experience,” decry Wal-Mart's lack of “corporate social responsibility”, and understand that "safe and legal abortion is consistent with a woman’s right to follow the dictates of her own faith" and so on. Oh and let's not forget the time Rabbi Abraham Cooper, associate dean for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, called the UCC “functionally anti-Semitic.”

Now that he's disowned his pastor, I'm looking forward to Obama initiating a national conversation on religion to explain his church.

05/05 10:50 PMShare