Is Barack in Church this Morning?

Related post: Obama's Church Blows It

I'm just going to go out on a limb and guess that you won't find Barack Obama in the pews at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago this morning. After the beating he's taken this week regarding his knowledge of the sermons of black nationalist pastor Jeremiah Wright, I'm pretty sure he doesn't want anything to do with that church...at least until this all blows over.

The Corner has been all over this mess, and today there are three posts that take us from how he got to the church in the first place, to what might happen now. First, from Lisa Schriffren some speculation on how a guy with an atheist mother with two Muslim husbands might have found himself in a Christian church:

Call me a cynic, but here's my guess about how Senator Obama came to join Pastor Wright's church — and stay for 20 years. Obama, as we all know, was brought up by his free-spirit, actively atheistic mom, and her two Muslim husbands. He got to Harvard on his intellect and his prescient abilities to navigate the system. He got to head the law review because he managed to convince all sides in the ideological conflict there that he was, if not sympathetic, at least fair. In part he did this by advocating no real views of his own. Nothing in his education would have made a conversion to Christianity a particularly natural evolution.

Then Obama became a community organizer in the black slums of South Chicago. A minister he met through work pointed out that, if he wanted to be an influence for good among the denizens of the neighborhood he should be seen at church every now and then. So he picked the biggest church, with the most famous, most locally influential pastor — and the largest congregation — he could find. That is what anyone contemplating elective office, with no tie to a particular stripe of faith would do. Bright and ambitious as he is, I bet he realized that Wright's church was a good place to learn how to be what his future constituents would want him to be. How to 'talk the talk' — in ways he might not have learned in Hawaii, at Harvard or at Sidley Austin.

For that matter, he must have come to understand that, to succeed in politics, it would help to acquire the trappings of being a good Christian — regardless of what he may or may not have personally believed. It is generally beyond the pale to question a public figure's personal religious commitment (Democrat's, anyway) —and I don't personally care whether he is a genuine Christian (whatever that may be) or not. But, if he was there to absorb the spiritual stuff, he can't have missed the political message, since they were pretty closely intertwined. Only if he didn't care about the substance, but wanted face-time in the community is his ongoing attendance explicable. For that matter, all of the crude anti-American stuff spewed in that church is far-left boilerplate — and therefore would have been pretty comfortable. You could hear something like it any day on Pacifica radio, though not in the same thundering cadences.

Next, from Mark Steyn, we have the "pew" research center:

Kate's right about Obama's who-ya-gonna-believe-me-or-your-lyin'-eyes routine. The Senator has said he missed JeremiahWright's post-9/11 sermon. How many other Sundays did he decide to sleep in? Did he also miss the one where the Reverend Wright referred to "the US of KKKA"? How about the one where the pastor said "the government lied about Pearl Harbor. They knew the Japanese were about to attack"?

Out of town that morning? Well, what about the one where he said "the government lied about inventing HIV as a means of genocide against people of color"? Alarm clock out of batteries that Sunday, too?

It seems hard to believe you could spend 20 minutes in this pastor's company, never mind 20 years (as the Obamas have), without figuring he's a race-baiting loon. So at the very minimum Senator Obama's extremely belated distancing is lame. This is the candidate who wants to negotiate with the Iranians. The US deserves better than a president who, asked his reaction to the moment in the meeting when Ahmadinejad promised to wipe Israel off the face of the earth, says, "Oh, gee, I guess I must have stepped out to the men's room for that bit."

Obama listened to Wright's bilge week in, week out his entire adult life and by the end was giving this huckster over 20 grand a year to keep him in business. It seems reasonable to assume, given some of her observations on the hustings, that Mrs Obama agrees with the broad thrust of Jeremiah Wright's "theology". Does her husband?

Derb wondered the other day whether the Obama campaign was a massive "con job". But it's worse than that. If he were a con artist, he'd be like every other opportunist pol contemplating a run for the presidency: he'd be slick enough to know from the get-go that the Reverend Wright was a guy he needed to keep at way beyond arm's length; instead, he named his big pre-campaign hey-world-here-I-am book after one of his sermons. That suggests Obama didn't even appreciate Wright was a potential problem. Which, in turn, suggests a candidate as disconnected from reality as his pastor is.

As Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council said on CNN the other night, someone who is an active member of a church for as many years as Obama has been knows what's going on at that church even when they're not physically there. People in a church community talk and share, not to mention that most churches have various communications vehicles (newsletters/websites/email/etc.) that often repeat the themes of the pastor's message. The notion that Obama was not aware of the kinds of messages given by Rev. Wright is simply unbelievable.

Mark Steyn has another good column on the issue here.

Finally, Victor Davis Hanson suggests that this whole thing is about to blow over because that's the way Obama and his supporters in the press want it:

End of Story

The Wright scandal has now been clarified as much as it is going to be clarified: Obama senses that most (given the alternative of Hillary or the self-destruction of the nation’s first competitive black presidential candidate) want to believe him—and where there is a will, there is a way.

So Sen. Obama apparently is going to insist that either the racialism and hatred of America (“God damn America”) voiced by Rev. Wright are maliciously cherry-picked and taken out of context (despite the clear evidence of entire sermons delivered in toto on these topics and in this style); or he is going to stonewall by condemning only piecemeal each successive and more astounding venomous sound-bite that surfaces—while contextualizing them by claiming that Wright is retiring, that someone who raves about AIDs being created in the U.S. is a “scholar,” and that Wright was a Marine, etc. And don't dare raise the issue again, since you, not the Rev. Wright, are the problem, or as Obama proclaimed on Saturday, —"The forces of division have begun to raise their ugly head again." Again? Or as they have for 20 years at the Trinity Church?

It doesn’t seem to matter that there is more than enough evidence in Obama’s own memoirs and past interviews and puff pieces—as well as the common-sense deduction that one does not frequent a church for 20 years and remain oblivious to the ratings of its preacher—that Obama knew what went on.

It doesn’t seem to matter that Obama’s assertion he will stay on at the church due to Wright’s departure is problematic, since Wright’s successor Otis Moss III, in a recent CNN interview, simply defended Wright and gave no evidence that he would distance the church from his message.

The senator, I wager, apparently thought the extremism of Wright was a sort of venting and metaphorical catharsis, and what damage it might be doing to the African-American community by demonizing their country and fellow citizens was more than offset by the inculcation of racial pride and solidarity—and the occasional nostrum of having a fiery surrogate articulate the frustrations and bitterness that blacks sometimes fell.

At least, that is the subtext that seems to explain Obama’s inexplicable past—of preaching a new unity and racial healing while being connected to a church that preaches hatred.

If one were to review the recent network appearances of Obama, the reaction to them by pundits, and the campaign’s spin on them, the story we are to swallow is pretty clear:

Given the racist history of the United States, the black church has developed a counter-narrative and history. Others outside the community are apparently not fully aware of the vocabulary, metaphor and style of this sometimes problematic and complicated milieu, but they should give this “alterity” a pass, given our own culpability for shameful episodes in American history. Obama surely and at present does not buy into this “God damn America” rhetoric, so what is the point in pursuing it any longer?

We are most certainly not ever going to get from Sen. Obama anything close to something like “The repugnant rhetoric from the Trinity Church neither reflects my own views nor those of most in America. To assure others of my long-standing objections to such hatred, I am now leaving the church.”

So the question will simply be left to the American voter:

EITHER: 'Obama probably knew what was going on at Trinity, but, given the complex circumstances and Obama’s other strengths, it doesn’t matter enough to affect my vote;'

OR: 'Obama’s attendance and his feeble reaction to the criticism of Wright provide a valuable warning of why someone so inexperienced and yet so familiar with extremists should not be President of the United States next year.'

It's left to the electorate, as it should be.

I'll talk about this subject and more on Monday's BlogTalkRadio program with special guest Dr. Andrew Jackson of SmartChristian.com which you can hear by clicking on the icon. Feel free to call in and join the conversation. The show kicks off at 7pm PT Monday night.

The call-in number will be (347) 347-5547. I hope you'll listen and call in to join the conversation.