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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Barak, Church and State |
| 2008-03-16 |
| Lisa Schiffren, National Review Call me a cynic, but here's my guess about how Senator Obama came to join Pastor Wright's church — and stay for 20 years. Obama, as we all know, was brought up by his free-spirit, actively atheistic mom, and her two Muslim husbands. He got to Harvard on his intellect and his prescient abilities to navigate the system. He got to head the law review because he managed to convince all sides in the ideological conflict there that he was, if not sympathetic, at least fair. In part he did this by advocating no real views of his own. Nothing in his education would have made a conversion to Christianity a particularly natural evolution. Then Obama became a community organizer in the black slums of South Chicago. A minister he met through work pointed out that, if he wanted to be an influence for good among the denizens of the neighborhood he should be seen at church every now and then. So he picked the biggest church, with the most famous, most locally influential pastor — and the largest congregation — he could find. That is what anyone contemplating elective office, with no tie to a particular stripe of faith would do. Bright and ambitious as he is, I bet he realized that Wright's church was a good place to learn how to be what his future constituents would want him to be. How to 'talk the talk' — in ways he might not have learned in Hawaii, at Harvard or at Sidley Austin. For that matter, he must have come to understand that, to succeed in politics, it would help to acquire the trappings of being a good Christian — regardless of what he may or may not have personally believed. It is generally beyond the pale to question a public figure's personal religious commitment (Democrat's, anyway) —and I don't personally care whether he is a genuine Christian (whatever that may be) or not. But, if he was there to absorb the spiritual stuff, he can't have missed the political message, since they were pretty closely intertwined. Only if he didn't care about the substance, but wanted face-time in the community is his ongoing attendance explicable. For that matter, all of the crude anti-American stuff spewed in that church is far-left boilerplate — and therefore would have been pretty comfortable. You could hear something like it any day on Pacifica radio, though not in the same thundering cadences. As for his relationship with the hate-mongering Reverend Wright? That a fatherless young man would feel both close and grateful to a charismatic minister who behaved sympathetically to him, and encouraged his ambitions, seems natural. For a politician, having a constituency that regards itself as particularly victimized — as Wright tells his congregants they have been — in a way he is uniquely able to fix, is a boon. The great irony here is that, if Obama believed any of Wright's anti-American, anti-white venom, his tremendous success among white voters as the "post racial" candidate must have knocked him for a loop. And only the fact that those white voters so badly want him to be this mythological creature makes his membership in the racist, victim-mongering church a problem. |
| Posted by:Mike |
| #2 Lets put it in proper perspective. A caucasian polititian joins a church in which they preach that the "children of Ham" are lazy, shiftless, and a bunch of natural born criminals. When this becomes public, the candidate explains that, in 20 years, he never noticed. |
| Posted by: g(r)omgoru 2008-03-16 14:39 |
| #1 For years it was a given in many parts of America, especially the South: If you have something to sell to the community - cars, hardware, insurance, whatever - you'd damn well better be seen going to church... |
| Posted by: M. Murcek 2008-03-16 08:54 |