Paul

Ibrahim

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March 9, 2009

My Troubling Visit to Obama’s Trinity United Church of Christ

I’m a Christian who recently happened to be in Chicago on a Sunday. Obviously, my choice to visit Trinity United Church of Christ was not random. The church had gained special significance since one of its congregants, Barack Obama, became president of the freest, most powerful nation in the world. Knowing that Pastor Emeritus Jeremiah Wright had retired, I decided to try the church for my Sunday worship, and at the same time get an unblemished picture of the 20-year spiritual home of my country’s president. I did. And I was deeply troubled.

At first, the church was very welcoming. Cute children asked the guests to stand up, then said: “If you don’t like to get hugged on, you came to the wrong church.” At that point the congregants around me extended handshakes and hugs, warmly welcoming us to the service. If the people I briefly met are a reflection of the entire congregation, then I can confidently say that the church is full of devout Christians who are personally very kind. Their sincerity helped me find myself in deep and heartfelt prayer at several points during the service.

Yet this was another reason the remaining aspects of the service and institution so shocked and troubled me. It began with the program itself. Under the headline of “African American History Month,” the congregation was instructed to shout out, in response to the minister’s praise of the works of God, that “beautiful also are the SKINS of my people,” (emphasis in original), “my people built the pyramids and the world’s first civilizations,” and “my people were the first to sail (the Seven Seas)!”

One opinion column championed Obama’s “stimulus” plan, and another announced that Republican congressmen “took a break” from “bashing” the stimulus to journey to a mountain spa. The program also included a letter by a black woman from a Catholic family, who wrote: “How ironic! One of the most African [of] Africans, practicing one of the most culturally European religions!” Oh, the humanity! She went on to express her love of the Trinity service and her support for its “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian” message.

The service saw references praising Barack Obama, and was heavy in emphasis on race in a manner that, if embraced by a white church, would lead to condemnation from every politician, media personality, and self-proclaimed civil rights leader in the country. A Christian need not be a theologian to recognize that Christ came no more to save blacks than to save whites, and did not instruct Peter to start black churches and white churches. We can say with reasonable certainty that Christ was color-blind.

Yet that was not the message proclaimed by guest preacher Dr. Aaron Parker, who by far represented the lowest point of the Trinity experience. Parker warned the congregation not to be fooled by Obama’s election, for it did not free them from racist “slavery” in America. He seized on the declaration of Attorney General Eric Holder that America is “a nation of cowards” on race issues (a statement about which Obama merely said he would have used “different language” to make the point).

Parker asserted that the Three Rs – reading, writing, and arithmetic – have been joined by another – racism. He offered his evidence that society conspires to keep black people down in three parts: Trent Lott praising Strom Thurmond (seven years ago); Don Imus’s reference to a women’s basketball team as “nappy-headed hoes;” and the recent New York Post cartoon portraying a dead chimpanzee. Based on these incidents, Parker, and through the invitation Trinity’s Pastor Otis Moss III, see justification in continually pushing American blacks into resentment and self-victimization. The message was consistent with the Black Value System embraced by Trinity, a system that urges blacks to avoid the white-dominated competitive pursuit of “middle-classness” and promotes racial separatism.

Parker’s words were fiery, à la Jeremiah Wright. And the congregation absorbed them enthusiastically. I, a Lebanese-born Arab who grew up in a war-time bunker and under the grip of a totalitarian Syrian regime, was being attacked by Parker as an institutional racist for the reason that I am a conservative, a capitalist and an opponent of political correctness who passionately believes that America is, on the whole, very fair to blacks.

The same people who had hugged me minutes earlier were now wildly cheering words that sharply divided black and non-black, capitalist and black-socialist. They were writing down the lessons they learned in the blank pages provided for that purpose in the program. As a Christian, I was stunned that a Christian pastor was partitioning me from those sitting immediately next to me based on nothing but our skin colors. I suddenly felt unwelcome. And at the conclusion of Parker’s speech, I had no choice but to quietly leave.

I soon realized that the controversy about Obama’s church was never truly about Jeremiah Wright. Trinity embraces racial-separatist principles and actively pursues them through the pieces it publishes, the speakers it invites and the message it spreads. Wright never even had to be there for Americans to worry that the president of the United States enthusiastically espoused a philosophy that passionately discourages color-blindness, capitalist pursuits and any effort to move blacks out of the restrictive past and into the opportunity-filled world in which we all live.

We know that Obama has been thoroughly influenced by this philosophy. He adopted Trinity and took on Wright as his spiritual guide for 20 years. He was married by Wright and had his children baptized by him. He believes “in the power of the African-American religious tradition to spur social Change,” and says that his faith makes him question “the idolatry of the free market.” Indeed, as is now becoming quite clear, it very much does.

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