Religion and the Candidate

Is America ready for a president who is not a mainline Protestant or Catholic?

The New York Times describes the candidate's church: they do not follow Christian orthodoxy on many points, but describe themselves as 'Christian' nonetheless. The candidate openly quotes scripture, and identifies with Christian voters. Most disturbingly for orthodox believers, perhaps, is that the church interprets scripture racially, with a unique place given to one race (and it's not the Jews).

The candidate, of course, is Senator Barack Obama, who is a member of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago.

Like many mainline denominations, Trinity supports ordination of women and membership of practicing homosexuals. Its gospel is heavily social and its pastor has been a guest of Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi, and the Times reports on his particular brand of liberation theology:

Mr. Wright preached black liberation theology, which interprets the Bible as the story of the struggles of black people, whom [sic] by virtue of their oppression are better able to understand Scripture than those who have suffered less.

The Times then quotes a professor at U. of Chicago who helpfully says that this isn't really racist because white people just don't understand.

Perhaps not. And if Mr. Obama accepts this narrative of history and the premise that whites simply cannot understand black people, perhaps he should abandon his campaign to seek an office representing a nation that is home to more than 200 million white people.

Also, the Times should be somewhat less surprised than it is that the far-left Obama found religion at Trinity after years of resisting evangelism by the many other black pastors with whom he worked. The pluralist Obama had found a church that told him that earth is more important than heaven, that blacks are better than whites, and that his personal behavior is not admissible evidence in the final judgment. Finding God is surprising, because God is utterly different than man and demands much of him. Making a God in one's own image is much less surprising - Nietzche's phrase aptly captures the foolish religions that proliferate in a postmodern world, as varied as the images of those they reflect.