Say Anything Blog

Wounded by what?  The fact that most Americans found the former head of their church’s sermons where he damned America and blamed conspiracies by “whitey” and the federal government for AIDS objectionable?

CHICAGO — They paraded through the summer-like heat last weekend in long dresses and suit coats, hundreds of families following the same paths that lead them to church every Sunday morning. They passed single-story houses and dilapidated parks before entering Trinity United Church of Christ on this city’s South Side.

Across town, Sen. Barack Obama dressed in sneakers, jeans and a golf shirt. He was going biking with his wife and two daughters on a rare day off from the campaign. He strapped on a helmet, and his family pedaled north from their Hyde Park neighborhood, toward the big houses on the lake.

A vast distance separates Obama from the church he quit last month, as hurt feelings continue to fester on both sides. Obama, his patience exhausted by the most recent controversial remark from a pastor, said in late May, “Our relations with Trinity have been strained.” And some of the church’s 8,000 members — as well as some other black pastors — feel abandoned, betrayed and misunderstood after their contentious turn in the national spotlight.

This was not how it was supposed to be. Obama, the biracial presidential candidate who has pledged to unite Democrats and Republicans, rich and poor, blacks and whites, was going to provide an opening for Trinity and other black churches to shatter their stereotypes and bolster their national presence. Instead, a landslide of negative video of Trinity’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., and right-wing political attacks left Obama’s former church and others like it even more marginalized and vilified.

As the controversy over Trinity crescendoed earlier this month, the church’s new pastor, Otis Moss III, released a statement to his congregation: “We, the community of Trinity, are concerned, hurt, shocked, dismayed, frustrated, fearful and heartbroken. . . . We are a wounded people and our wounds, the bruises from our encounter with history, have scarred our very souls.”

This is so typical.  “Victimhood” is what organizations like Trinity Church thrive on.  These organizations need their constituents to be victims because if they’re not victims then the organizations themselves have no reason to exist.

The same is true of organizations like the NAACP.  They don’t want to end racism, because if they ended racism they’d be out of business.

So it’s not surprising at all that the leadership at Trinity Church would try to make it seem like the Church and its congregation have been victimized by the scandals surrounding Jeremiah Wright.  It’s their business, and I suspect that Trinity Church will be filling collection plates with sermons about how “whitey” attacked them and their political candidate long after Obama loses this election.