Trying Times for Trinity

(Editor's note:Barack Obama resigned his membership from Trinity United Church of Christ on May 31, 2008. This story, published in March, profiles the church and some of the problems it presented for presidential candidate Obama.)

The year was 1971, race riots flared across the country, and on the South Side of Chicago a tiny church was dying. Many blacks, disillusioned by their ministers' failure to bring home the promises of the civil-rights movement, were abandoning Christianity. They converted to Islam or Judaism or fringe sects—or refused to go to church at all. This particular congregation was looking for a pastor to lead them through these troubling times, and before they launched their search, they wrote a blue-sky description of the community they wanted to be: we want to "serve as instruments of God and church," the statement said, and we want to "elimin[ate] those things in our culture that lead to the dehumanization of persons." They wanted to be Christian, in other words. And they wanted to keep fighting.

On New Year's Eve, the search committee interviewed its final candidate. Jeremiah Wright Jr. was a young pastor enrolled at the University of Chicago Divinity School. Wright belonged to a group of black intellectuals who embraced "black liberation theology," the idea that blacks shouldn't have to choose between "Malcolm and Martin," as the theologians put it. They could be Christian and black; they could be black and proud. When Barack Obama responded to the altar call at Trinity United Church of Christ in 1988, he was responding, in part, to that message.

Wright built Trinity into a huge church, with 8,500 people coming to worship on Sundays. Earlier this month, after a yearlong transition, Wright handed his pulpit over to the young and charismatic pastor Otis Moss III. In his heyday, Wright was a forceful presence, calling for divestment from South Africa as early as 1983. By keeping the problem of racism alive with provocative sermons, Wright encouraged his flock to "speak truth to power" and to always identify, like Jesus, with the marginalized of society. In the context of Trinity's South Side neighborhood, where about 20 percent of residents are on welfare and the same number are unemployed, the church and its messenger were rarely controversial.

But now, in the larger context of Obama's run for the Democratic nomination, they are. Last Thursday, snippets of a few of Wright's more incendiary sermons circulated online, including one in which the pastor calls out Hillary Clinton for being part of the white establishment—"Hillary ain't never been called a n–––––"—and another in which the pastor says, "God damn America … for killing innocent people." He also calls the 9/11 attacks "America's chickens coming home to roost." The next day Obama released a statement about Wright on the Huffington Post. "I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy," he wrote. He said further that he hadn't been in the room when the offending comments were made and that he and his family looked forward to continuing their relationship to the church through its new pastor. Later, a spokesman announced that Wright would no longer serve the campaign in any advisory capacity.

Still, the clips triggered unease among whites, reopened divisions within the black community and provoked politically loaded questions about the nature of Obama's relationship with Wright. Obama has said he found his Christianity at Trinity, and he credits the title of his book "The Audacity of Hope" to a sermon he heard Wright preach. Wright married the Obamas and baptized both their children. But the senator has tried throughout his campaign to distance himself from some of Wright's more controversial statements, notably Wright's praise of Nation of Islam Minister Louis Farrakhan. (Wright is like "an old uncle who sometimes will say things I don't agree with," Obama has said.) When pressed, Obama said at the last Democratic debate that he would reject and denounce Farrakhan's inflammatory rhetoric.