Obama's Church Pushes Controversial Doctrines

When did not following the Republican agenda become meaning someone was anti-American? It seems that as long as you support a Republican or are labeled a right-wing person, you can make racist statements or comments connecting the country's morality and 9/11, etc. That seems to be just fine. What in the hell is patriotism? It's not defined as military service, since Bush, Cheney, and their ilk made sure they stayed out of Vietnam. Seems that patriotism goes pretty cheap if all it means is that you put a $ 2.00 flag pin on your lapel. We have to take back our own definitions of patriotism. This idea that Trinity is anti-American because it questioned U.S. policies abroad and its policies at home is ridiculous. Christianity means nothing if people do not question the way they live their lives. I certainly hope Trinity opposed apartheid (along with every other church in the U.S.), and who thinks that Jesus was blonde and blue-eyed living in the Middle East? I may not agree with everything that the church says, but so what? I'm not voting for Wright for president. Obama started going to this church in his 20s, when he was a community organizer for the Southside. It serves his constituency, and it is also where he became a Christian. This church is not some cult. It is in a mainstream denomination, is well-known in Chicago, and many people go to it, from all walks of life. If every church's bulletins, websites, and sermons went under a national microscope, then none would survive scrutiny. If any did, then I doubt there would be enough substance there to encourage anyone to attend. Can we please go on to another topic and leave this fine church alone?

What is so nagging is that his young children are exposed to this and how do you go home and undo what they learn in church? You are not supposed to go home and sort out what you believe and don't believe that the preacher said today....and what about that slip Michelle made about being the First time she has ever been proud of her country? Was it really, after all, exactly, what she meant?

I find this to be a misleading headline and article. Why? Because it spuriously uses the word "doctrines" where there is no statement of such by this particular church. Produce a written statement of the doctrine of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, and then comment on its "doctrines", otherwise you are conflating inspirational writings by an author as the church's official doctrine.

Obama spent nearly all of his adult life with Wright and his church !
How could he not have the same beliefs as this vile man ????
If Obama does hold these same thoughts , then it's Obvious he has a VERY flawed Judgement about Race and America,not to mention the World !!
I have never held with racism, but this situation,as well as the comments about Hillary are definitely trying to change my mind !!!

Obama joined that church to win the South Side of Chicago senate race. He would have been a toast if he didn't join. We wouldn't even know about Obama if he didn't win state house senate. He was a community organizer and this church was doing the best work. Obama even mentioned the fact that he did work with churches in some of the debates he had with Clinton in South Carolina.

I am an Obama supporter and I honestly think this Church was a political convenience for Obama. If he quit the church, then he would have faced an onslaught from the black community in Chicago.

He refused to cave in on this Wright issue and this shows courage, principle and a hard stand that a presidential candidate needs to take.

Courage, Leadership, Touch

Obama 08

Only in America could the idea that poor and oppressed people must stand together against their oppressors be considered controversial.

guilt by association is a slippery slope!!!

He does need more experience apparently.

The church was probably necessary for him in local politics. He should have dropped the church when it came time to go to Washington.

Now that the more extensive excerpts from the two sermons with which the racist bigots find fault is available, we have to do something about Hanity, Limbaugh and Mathews....they have played snippets over and over and over without bothering to listen to the whole sermon, or even the section from which those snippets were lifted.

Turns out, Wright was quoting a white man, a Reagan Ambassador, who first made those statements on FOX news, and building up a not comparison to events and the Bible....

So any time you hear a pundit like Chris Mathews, or Sean Hanity, or a blowhard like Limbaugh
whine that Barack Obama listened to 20 years of hate, you will know they are uninformed, or
deliberately lying, and in either event, they are racist bigots.

What poll is that, Huffington/Oblahma poll?

HuffPost's Pick

This country may not be perfect, but it's still the best state of corporatist fascism in the world! I wouldn't trade our materialist consumer class for any other state of ignorance in the West even if it claims to shop were Jesus did and watch the same TV channels that Jesus did. And when it comes to the state of the public discourse, we have the blandest level of mediocrity of all the first world countries and the best propaganda to distract us. Fox News deserves a unitary presidential medal for promoting our unitary president's point of view....whenever he knows what it actually is. Our sex scandals are the best too. Even a war that has resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and the displacement of nearly 3 million refugees -- all based on lies, crony corporatism, manipulation of the oil markets and exacerbated by war crimes such as torture -- can't compete with our righteous focus on the issues of true Christian morality -- who is having sex with whom.

Let's hear it for Amerika! Any member of whatever oppressed minority who we have screwed along the way, whether through school segregation, denial of employment, health care, housing or participation in the political process, should just keep their unpatriotic mouths shut and "love it or leave it"! They should be grateful they are not living in Canada or Norway where they wouldn't have the opportunity to work and shop at Walmart!

Why do people in media keep pushing the no-research idea that Wright preaches nothing but hate on any given sunday. He was in the White House with Bill Clinton. At that time people must have known who he was and the breadth of his work -- whether negative or positive. Obama even said that these statement in media are atypical of what Write actually taught.

Many of the those of the church, including white members, provide positive information; but the media ignores it. Wright preached many times a week for thirty years, and all anyone can find are less than a few minutes of controversy. Do the math, and think of the children that go to this church. Don't bash it before looking further. Because the children of that church will suffer.

Why do people in media keep pushing the no-research idea that Wright preaches nothing but hate on any given sunday. He was in the White House with Bill Clinton. At that time people must have known who he was and the breadth of his work -- whether negative or positive. Obama even said that these statement in media are atypical of what Write actually taught.

Many of the those of the church, including white members, provide positive information; but the media ignores it. Wright preached many times a week for thirty years, and all anyone can find are less than a few minutes of controversy. Do the math, and think of the children that go to this church. Don't bash it before look further. Because the children of that church will suffer.

I think Barack's a decent guy, and I think there's social problems in our country, but I also believe that there needs to be an 'air gap' between the Kingdom of heaven, and Obama's Candidacy. 'Believe whatever you want', that's what I say, comma, when you go to the polling booth or to the podium, do so with a clear head and pertinent facts in mind. It's noble to want to help people, but sometimes the best possible help you can give someone is the incentive to stand up, and help themselves.

I guess Opra had better judgement than Obama after she left the very same church.

This article is at the height of racism. You don't believe me? What the hell does the article mean when it says " the 8,000-member congregation ...historically supported left-wing social and foreign policies, from South Africa to Latin America to the Middle East."
Excuse the hell outta me, but why is this article trying to shine a negative light on TUCC's protest against South African Apartheid? That was a great thing, and the only controversial thing about Apartheid's connections to the United States is that racist crooks like Cheney did not want to support a resolution to release Nelson Mandela.
Is it me or is our media doing a great job of channeling Faux News lately? That is to say its acting real fascist!

I don't see why Jesus couldn't be black. Marx took some Christianity beliefs into his doctrine. The church that supported slavery was racist. I don't see the big controversy. Are you trying to make one?

The trouble with the McClatchy article is that is going to the source of some of the teachings of the church without going to the trouble of analyzing what the church is actually teaching now. For example I don't think that stating that the ANC in South Africa was considered a terrorist group in the 1980's really has anything to do with how we feel about the ANC now. And while Cone's view may have remained consistent from the early 70's it doesn't mean that the church itself has not evolved since then. And Revolutionary theology in the 70's broke the Catholic Church in half in the 70's. The other half of the Catholic church supported or did not oppose the right wing death squads from Chile to Guatemala.

Who is Margaret Talev, and why is she doing the EXACT same things she complains about? Oversimplifying. Exaggerating. Distorting in order to sensationalize. You have to go and read the whole flinkin' article to see that her lead-in is the rankest BS yet.

"Jesus is black"? Well, the one thing he CANNOT have been is the lily-skinned blue-eyed Nordic blond so beloved of White "Christian" America. And for the last several hundred years Northwest Europeans, and even more so White Americans, have decreed that anyone who isn't as lily-white as they are is "nonwhite". (It took them a LONG while to accept that olive-skinned Europeans, like Italians, Spaniards and southern Frenchmen, were fellow whites. Some people still aren't sure of that.)

There not only is no incompatibility between Marx' economic theories and the Acts of the Apostles, they actually mesh together pretty well. (The early Apostles ran their groups on a communalistic basis, sharing whatever they had, and advocated that society in general should do likewise.) On the other hand, there is an EXTREME incompatibility between modern Capitalism-run-amok and the Gospels, between the "Greed is good", "I got mine, f. you" school of thought and "What you have done to the least of these, you have done to Me also". But very few people are willing to take an honest look at *that*.

Most white denominations in America DID support slavery, or at least turned a blind eye to it as a "necessary evil". There were exceptions, like the Quakers, who were in the forefront of the Abolitionist movement - but modern white Americans would rather sweep the whole thing under the rug and forget about it, rather than analyze the complexity of the sociohistorical situation.

There's a pretty huge pile under that rug by now, and some day - maybe soon - we are going to have to peel the rug back and take a good hard look.

I don't get it. What are you talking about? Are these factual statements? Where is the evidence to support this assertion. It would be beneficial to everyone if you could provide some context to these assertions or point readers in a direction where they can either confirm or repudiate the accuracy of these statements. Without such factual evidence this comes off as mere innuendo.

Obama proclaim"He has never been a muslim" yet on Rev Wright's wikipedia site ..this is what is said>>>s Barack Obama, a candidate for the Democratic nomination for president, first met Wright and joined his church in the 1980s, while he was working as a community organizer in Chicago before attending Harvard Law School. Obama and his wife, Michelle, were later married by Wright, and both their children were baptized by him.[citation needed] Obama's book The Audacity of Hope was inspired by one of Wright's sermons and he credits his own conversion to Christianity to Wright.

Thats very good that the majority of voters do not believe Obama shares Wright's views- it was by a wide margin too - which is good news for Obama. The voters who think Obama actually shares Wright's views are more then likely GOP voters anyway who wouldn't vote for Obama anyway. On another note: "Jesus is black" isn't as controversial as "the white church is the antichrist" - LOL! I just have to point out that Jesus' skin color isn't all that controversial of a topic. Jesus would have come from an area where he looked northern african/persian- he may have been light skinned but he probably didn't look like the way jesus has been portrayed in the west.

In the Christian religion it seems that every denomination has its own way of teaching the Bible, and in the black churches, as with many of the evangelical churches, the doctrine may not be agreeable, but is taught as a hard and fast law. Believe what I say and go to Heaven; don't believe what I say, and burn in Hell. It's pretty cut and dried.

I don't care what Obama hears on the pulpit on Sundays, whether it's occasional or every Sunday. What I care about is the character and content of the man who would be president of this nation. He actually seems to be the only one who gets it -- "united we stand, divided we fall."

He is not pushing a religious agenda, which is what the GOP are doing. He is not pushing for war, which is what the GOP are doing. He is not pushing protecting the rich or those who believe only in a vengeful God, which is what the GOP are doing.

The Religious Right has been trying for the past few years to control a woman's reproductive rights, poison society against gays and lesbians, stop scientific research which could save a generation, and make rights a gender/race-specific subject.

Obama is for unifying us, and represents all that is good in this country. Fox, get back to the issues. The issue is not right or wrong, black or white, Rev. Right or Rev. Falwell (who was just as incendiary). The issue is America and its survival.

Black Liberation Theology is based on telling the historical truth in addition to loving Jesus, God, and thy neighbor - regardless of color. For those interested enough to learn the facts about Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Obama's church then follow the link below and watch the sermons posted there. The one that contains the 30 second snip taken totally out of context by FOX and then broadcasted all over the world to advance their own political agenda. People ought to be very angry at FOX for lying and trying to manipulate and influence the outcome of our election. If media companies lie to us, as FOX constantly does, then they should risk losing their licenses to use the PUBLIC airways and bandwidth.

http://www.youtube.com/user/TRINITYCHGO

This was the best thing to come out of this article:

"White America today embraces Nelson Mandela, and he won the Nobel peace prize. But in the early 1980s, when the U.S. government considered Mandela's anti-Apartheid African National Congress a terrorist organization because of its support from communists and use of violence, Trinity became one of the first U.S. churches to support the group."

My point, of course, is that white America is still populated by a large number of ignorant xenophobic closet white supremacists (As a white person who grew up in Pennsylvania, I think I am in a position to state this unequivocally) who only ever change their minds about something, whether it be Reverend Wright's Trinity United Church or Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, when they look at the good work they do fighting against real injustices. Trinity United Church is a prestigious philanthropic organization. Whatever their theology, they actively work to make real people's lives better.