Barack's nutty spiritual mentor

I've been working on a piece about conservative Christians and other Republicans who are attracted to Barack Obama's candidacy. I hadn't realized before I started digging how radical and anti-white his spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is. Obama's response, when questioned about Wright's racialist worldview, is to say that he doesn't agree with it. I can accept that, but what I find impossible to understand is why Obama was drawn to Wright's church anyway, given that Wright explicitly preaches a race-based "black liberation theology" (Wright's words), and holds white evil responsible for so many evils. From the NYTimes:

Congregants respond by saying critics are misreading the church’s tenets, that it is a warm and accepting community and is not hostile to whites. But Mr. Wright’s political statements may be more controversial than his theological ones. He has said that Zionism has an element of “white racism.” (For its part, the Anti-Defamation League says it has no evidence of any anti-Semitism by Mr. Wright.)

On the Sunday after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, Mr. Wright said the attacks were a consequence of violent American policies. Four years later he wrote that the attacks had proved that “people of color had not gone away, faded into the woodwork or just ‘disappeared’ as the Great White West went on its merry way of ignoring Black concerns.”

Such statements involve “a certain deeply embedded anti-Americanism,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative group that studies religious issues and public policy. “A lot of people are going to say to Mr. Obama, are these your views?”

Mr. Obama says they are not.

“The violence of 9/11 was inexcusable and without justification,” he said in a recent interview. He was not at Trinity the day Mr. Wright delivered his remarks shortly after the attacks, Mr. Obama said, but “it sounds like he was trying to be provocative.”

As a conservative who likes Obama and wishes him well, not least because I think he can genuinely move the national race conversation to a new and more productive place, I am really troubled by this stuff. I really don't think Obama buys into this racialist garbage, but I can't understand why he chose to make Wright his mentor. Ron Paul, whom few people think is a racist, got taken to the cleaners -- and rightfully so -- for not taking racism seriously enough to distance himself from supporters who espoused poisonous views. Why is Obama drawing a free pass?

He won't for long. Here's a passage I found in a Rolling Stone profile of Obama:

The Trinity United Church of Christ, the church that Barack Obama attends in Chicago, is at once vast and unprepossessing, a big structure a couple of blocks from the projects, in the long open sore of a ghetto on the city's far South Side. The church is a leftover vision from the Sixties of what a black nationalist future might look like. There's the testifying fervor of the black church, the Afrocentric Bible readings, even the odd dashiki. And there is the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a sprawling, profane bear of a preacher, a kind of black ministerial institution, with his own radio shows and guest preaching gigs across the country. Wright takes the pulpit here one Sunday and solemnly, sonorously declares that he will recite ten essential facts about the United States. "Fact number one: We've got more black men in prison than there are in college," he intones. "Fact number two: Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run!" There is thumping applause; Wright has a cadence and power that make Obama sound like John Kerry. Now the reverend begins to preach. "We are deeply involved in the importing of drugs, the exporting of guns and the training of professional KILLERS. . . . We believe in white supremacy and black inferiority and believe it more than we believe in God. . . . We conducted radiation experiments on our own people. . . . We care nothing about human life if the ends justify the means!" The crowd whoops and amens as Wright builds to his climax: "And. And. And! GAWD! Has GOT! To be SICK! OF THIS SHIT!"

This is as openly radical a background as any significant American political figure has ever emerged from, as much Malcolm X as Martin Luther King Jr. Wright is not an incidental figure in Obama's life, or his politics. The senator "affirmed" his Christian faith in this church; he uses Wright as a "sounding board" to "make sure I'm not losing myself in the hype and hoopla." Both the title of Obama's second book, The Audacity of Hope, and the theme for his keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in 2004 come from Wright's sermons. "If you want to understand where Barack gets his feeling and rhetoric from," says the Rev. Jim Wallis, a leader of the religious left, "just look at Jeremiah Wright."

We're going to be hearing a lot more about Jeremiah Wright this fall, if Obama is the nominee. If the media don't bring him up, you can be sure the Republicans will, and rightly so. Again, I don't worry that Obama shares Wright's racist views. I'm worried that he doesn't find them intolerable, and what that might say about Obama's ability to truly transcend the Jackson-Sharpton politics of racial grievance.

UPDATE: A reader e-mails to say that the Obama church's so-called "Black Values System" is actually a pretty conservative manifesto, in terms of demanding its adherents to follow a code of behavior that involves personal and communal responsibility. (I tried to link to the church's website, but the server is down). In a Chicago Tribune interview (which I can't link to either), Obama had this to say:

In an interview late Monday, Obama said it was important to understand the document as a whole rather than highlight individual tenets. "Commitment to God, black community, commitment to the black family, the black work ethic, self-discipline and self-respect," he said. "Those are values that the conservative movement in particular has suggested are necessary for black advancement.

"So I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a document that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help."

I hear that, and I admire the basic moral code here. But look, why does the uplift of the black community have to be tied to trashing white people? The Nation of Islam also preaches black self-help, self-discipline, and devotion to family and community. If that was all it preached, who could possibly object? Same with the Rev. Wright's ideology.