In his several explanations and denunciations of his longtime pastor,
Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama asks us to believe that he
never heard any of the sermons in which Rev. Jeremiah Wright denounced and
asked God to damn America. Neither was he present, he says, for Rev.
Wright's message in which he said America got what it deserved on 9/11
because we bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to end World War II and have bombed
other countries. He apparently also missed the one about how America created
AIDS. The implication appears to have been that it was a plot to wipe out
blacks, since the disease disproportionately affects African Americans.
Other church members must have told Obama what Rev. Wright said, or he could
have viewed the sermon on the church's Website. It appears many others
besides just Rev. Wright share this point of view. If one looks at the
video, church members are standing, shouting approval and applauding. This
is not one man speaking for himself. From the reaction, one can fairly
conclude he is speaking for most, if not all, of the congregation. But not
for Barack Obama, he says.
A statement issued by the church last Sunday accused critics of attacking
"the legacy of the African-American Church." That is like excusing racism in
some Southern white churches 50 years ago because of a "legacy" of bigotry.
Hate from a preacher - black or white - can never be justified.
I have attended enough churches over the years that if I missed a Sunday
service at which the pastor had said something as incendiary as Rev. Wright,
I would have heard about it and done more than denounce it. I would have
left that church. Obama says Rev. Wright is a "Bible Scholar" and has spoken
at seminaries around the country. He specifically mentioned Union
Theological Seminary, which is theologically and politically liberal.
Liberal seminaries teach a "social gospel" that is more social than gospel
and more the earthly agenda of the Democratic Party than the Kingdom of God.
As the left attempts to peel off religious voters from their ties with the
Republican Party, which has used and abused them, they are encountering some
of the same pitfalls experienced by conservatives. These include outrageous
statements from their own preachers. In the '60s, some conservative
preachers denounced Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., calling him a fellow
traveler with communists. They opposed integration as "unbiblical." In the
late '70s, they began a too-close association with Republican politicians
who were all too happy to have their votes, but advanced little of their
agenda, either because they could not, or because they would not.