Obama quits Trinity Church

We just knew this was going to happen sooner or later. No, we didn't want him to quit his church, per se, but a repudiation would have been better before departing. As Mike Allen and Ben Smith of Politico show us that is not the case:

On the brink of the Democratic presidential nomination, Barack Obama announced Saturday evening that he had resigned from his controversial Chicago congregation, Trinity United Church of Christ, “with some sadness.”

Obama told reporters he didn't want his "church experience to be a political circus — I think most American people will understand that, and wouldn't want to subject their church to that, either." He said it has been "months" since he has attended Trinity.

At a news conference in Aberdeen, S.D., after the news emerged on the blog of a black journalist in Chicago, Obama said he and his wife, Michelle, had notified the church in a letter Friday that they “were withdrawing as members of Trinity,” in part because of “a cultural and a stylistic gap.”

Obama said he also regrets “all the attention that my campaign has visited on” the church.“We had reporters grabbing church bulletins and calling up the sick and the shut-in,” he said. “That’s just not how people should have to operate in their church.

Notice that he didn't want it to be the focus of politics, despite the fact that Jeremiah Wright, Otis Moss, and Michael Pfleger made it a circus in the first place. It was their fiery, racist demagoguery that made Trinity the focus of so much scrutiny. And Obama offers no repudiation of it. Later in the piece, he reminds people that Trinity is where he "found Jesus Christ."

The problem with that observation is that Christ's church they He founded NEVER engaged in such rhetoric. Jesus never preached conspiracy theories about the Romans. He never condemned Israel for how it treated the poor, or the indigent. Jesus never said "G*d damn Israel." He never praised those who called for violence, as Otis Moss did in his first sermon as the new pastor, citing the rap lyrics of Ice Cube.

Trinity is not indicative of Christian churches, but it is unique in the "gospel" that is preached there. It is radical, and it doesn't follow the sort of gospel that others would hear preached at their churches. They preach black liberation theology which is based on division, discontent, and discrimination. It is not the sort of theology that most people hear in their churches every Sunday.

The church itself, along with Wright, Moss, and Pfleger, is the radical side of Obama's heart and mind. Throw in Bill Ayers, and we have the portrait of a radical that is so inexperienced he's become a one-man gaff machine. Without the sort of critical thinking necessary for politicians, Obama has shown that he simply can't be trusted to be president. His outlook on America is far outside the mainstream; it borders on the radical in the way he looks at this nation, and his general opinions of it.

We can go through his positions on issues, which just underline his radicalism. We can go through those he's connected to, and see where that radicalism was fomented. Add it all together, and Obama's problem isn't the church he refuses to repudiate. It lies in those he's held counsel with -- be they of the secular world or the faithful world.

The ties that bind, Senator Obama. Thy name is "radical."

Publius II