The Church of Contradictions

When you walk into Trinity United Church of Christ on the South Side of Chicago, the first thing you see on a Sunday morning are the people crowding the lobby, hugging and kissing, asking after each other's children. The congregation is older and formally dressed. Many of the women wear fur coats, stockings and heels; almost no one is dressed in jeans. As an usher leads a reporter upstairs to the pastor's office, he rebukes a young boy: "Take off your hat in church, son."

The service warms up with a few numbers by a 300-member gospel choir. Then there's a performance by a drill team: rows of women dressed in matching white shirts and red suspenders walk through military moves while chanting verses from scripture. There's the sermon, a time for quiet reflection, and an altar call. When asked about the controversial statements of their former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, statements that have been pasted all over the Internet and cable news for the past few days, congregants are almost universally dismayed. These messages are being taken out of context, they say; their church is the most benign place in the world. "Come on, media, it's just a gospel choir," says Dwight Hopkins, a member of Trinity and a theology professor at the University of Chicago. "It's about the least scary place on the planet," says Melissa Harris-Lacewell, a professor at Princeton University who attended Trinity for a time.

How is it that Trinity Church—along with its message and its messenger of 36 years—can look so different to different people? More to the point, how is it that presidential hopeful Barack Obama, a member of that church for two decades, could fail to anticipate how terrifying Wright would look to the rest of the world? Trinity Church, like so many places of worship, is a place of contradictions. From the inside it's a place of comfort and solace, a place where the most heated conversations are about what kind of music the choir should sing on Sundays: hip-hop or gospel. From the outside it looks like a hotbed of radical, anti-establishment talk.

America may be the most religious nation in the Western world, but as so many scholars have pointed out recently, Americans are also among the least well educated on the subject of religion. They know little about the history and theology of their own religious traditions and even less about those of their neighbors. As we learned after September 11, Americans pay scant attention to the religious practices of the minorities among us. When the spotlight does shine on adherents of an unfamiliar religion or religious movement, we do a bad job trying to understand them, and they, in turn, do a bad job trying to explain themselves.

Rev. Wright represents a vein of thought in the African-American church tradition called "black liberation theology," a commitment, born out of the racial strife of the late 1960s and early 1970s, to use Christianity as a weapon in the fight against what was seen as systemic, overreaching and unchanging racism. Obama condemned this view as narrow in his speech on Tuesday. Rev. Wright's views "expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country," he said, "a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America." At the same time Obama refused to pretend that the problem of racism, which so inflamed his pastor, no longer exists. The anger that finds its voice in the sermons of Rev. Wright, Obama said, "is real. It is powerful. And to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races."

Last Friday, in an effort to gauge just how "out there" Wright's sermons are in the context of the African-American church tradition, NEWSWEEK phoned at least two dozen of the country's most prominent and thoughtful African-American scholars and pastors, representing a wide range of denominations and points of view. Not one person would say that Wright had crossed any kind of significant line.