Obama's Pastor and the Traditional Religious Left

Such enthusiasm by Thomas is understandable, not only given Wright’s far-left politics, but also his congregation’s generosity towards their denomination. The UCC news service report boasted that Trinity Church, which is the UCC’s largest congregation, has given $3.7 million to the denomination from 2003 to 2007. The shrinking and struggling UCC, which has lost nearly half its membership over the last 50 years, must be grateful towards Wright for his vitality amid the UCC’s overall grim demographic prognosis.

Also praising Rev. Wright’s ministry was the pastor of the UCC’s second largest congregation, the Rev. Kenneth L. Samuel of the predominantly black 5,300-member Victory UCC in Stone Mountain, Georgia. “There have been two major sins in the Black church that many Black churches will not address - homophobia is one and sexism is another," Samuel explained to the UCC news service, "And Jeremiah Wright has been one of the articulate, courageous voices that has not been afraid to address these critical issues. If he can do that and still maintain his close connectivity to the Black community, and stay grounded in the Black ethos, that's what has inspired me."

Likewise coming to Rev. Wright’s defense was “Red Letter Christian” activist Diana Butler Bass on Jim Wallis Sojourners website. “As MSNBC, CNN, and FOX endlessly play the tape of Rev. Wright's ‘radical’ sermons today, I do not hear the words of a ‘dangerous’ preacher (at least any more dangerous than any preacher who takes the Gospel seriously!),” Bass opined. “No, I hear the long tradition that Jeremiah Wright has inherited from his ancestors. I hear prophetic critique. I hear Frederick Douglass. And, mostly, I hear the Gospel slant—I hear it from an angle that is not natural to me. It is good to hear that slant.”

From her enlightened perspective, Bass concluded: “That is not, of course, comfortable for white people. Nor is it easily understood in sound bites. It does not easily fit in a contemporary political campaign. But it is a deep spiritual river in American faith and culture, a river that—as I had to learn—flows from the throne of God.”

Does Wright’s radicalized form of Christianity, dating back to his 1984 visit to Libyan madman dictator Muammar Qaddafi in the company of Nation of Islam honcho Louis Farrakhan, truly flow from the “throne of God,” as Bass discerned? In typical Sojourners fashion, she tried to ascribe Wright’s provocative views to the black church prophetic tradition. But that tradition inveighed against actual injustices, amid authentic human suffering, while remaining rooted in orthodox Christianity.

Wright’s problematic causes are primarily the fads of the mostly white Religious Left, which likes to believe it speaks for oppressed people. But these elites more commonly speak from cushy endowed professorates and tall steeple pulpits, not from a genuine experience of solidarity with the suffering. Typical Religious Left elites actually only dabble in a faux radicalism that, at best, liberates nobody, when not actually apologizing for genuine tyrants. Rev. Wright is no Frederick Douglas, and his UCC defenders resemble even less the sturdy New England Puritans who first founded their movement.

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Mark D. Tooley directs the United Methodist committee at the Institute on Religion and Democracy in Washington, D.C.