Miller: Trying Times for Trinity

Tired of hearing (and reading) pundits rant about Barack Obama's controversial pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr.? I know I am. It's not that the story isn't important--it is. But one can only take so much pontificating. Luckily, my NEWSWEEK colleague Lisa Miller spent several weeks reporting on Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago before the Wright story broke wide. Actual facts, scenes and stories matter more, at this point, than what Bill O'Reilly and Maureen Dowd have to say--at least in my humble opinion. Take a look:

Always a volatile combination, race and politics is particularly vexing for Obama, who, with his message of unity, hopes to transcend it all. The Wright and Farrakhan controversies force voters to look at Obama through the lens of their racial or cultural identity, and in a tightly contested race, Obama can't afford to alienate anybody. The question for him now is whether his connection to Wright will hurt his ability to appeal to the best in people.

Wright declined to be interviewed, but on a recent Sunday morning between services, Moss spoke to NEWSWEEK. Trinity has been mischaracterized by the press, he says: the church is "very much in the traditional vein of the African-American church. Caring for seniors, loving our young people, and the focus on Christ and the cross is central to this church."

Trinity was founded in 1961, the first black church in the United Church of Christ. (UCC members are Congregationalists, mainline Protestants who trace their history to John Cotton and the Puritans of New England.) The earliest members of Trinity were "teachers, people with middle-class jobs, resistant to doing anything radical in terms of justice," says church historian Julia Speller, a professor at Chicago Theological Seminary and a member of Trinity. But as the 1970s dawned, values within the church began to change. According to Speller's book "Walkin' the Talk," the congregation was beginning to believe that it couldn't continue to do Christ's work and not speak out against racism and injustice. What Wright gave the congregation, Speller says, was a "sense of beauty about who they were." In 1978, Wright broke ground on a new sanctuary big enough to hold 900 people. In 1994, he built the existing one, which seats 2,500.

As a leader, Wright defied convention at every turn. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune last year, he recalled a time during the 1970s when the UCC decided to ordain gay and lesbian clergy. At its annual meeting, sensitive to the historic discomfort some blacks have with homosexuality, gay leaders reached out to black pastors. At that session, Wright heard the testimony of a gay Christian and, he said, he had a conversion experience on gay rights. He started one of the first AIDS ministries on the South Side and a singles group for Trinity gays and lesbians—a subject that still rankles some of the more conservative Trinity members, says Dwight Hopkins, a theology professor at the University of Chicago and a church member.

Barack Obama walked into Trinity when he was 27. He was a secular person, raised by a mother who would now be called "spiritual, not religious." According to "The Audacity of Hope," he realized that his secular upbringing was hurting his work as a community organizer. It was keeping him at a distance from the religious people he was trying to help. In "Dreams From My Father," Obama describes the feeling he had when he heard Wright preach: "I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion's den, Ezekiel's field of dry bones. Those stories—of survival, and freedom, and hope—became our story, my story."

In the African-American church tradition, pastors rely frequently on the stories of the Old Testament—stories of liberation and struggle—to reach their people. "The Audacity to Hope," the Wright sermon that so inspired Obama, is a discussion of the Biblical character Hannah, who, though she was barren, prayed for a child. Wright uses Hannah as a metaphor for the black people who pray for deliverance even though it seems unattainable.

Friends of the church like to speculate about what, exactly, drew Obama in. Hopkins thinks it's the erudition of the preachers. "Historically, African-American churches have had a strong anti-intellectual bent. There's a saying, 'Too much learning blocks the burning.' Trinity has the learning and the burning." But Melissa Harris-Lacewell thinks it's something else, a connection to the black experience that Obama lacked as a child. "I really see Trinity for Barack as being part of his continuing adult choice to be a black man," says Harris-Lacewell, who attended Trinity for a time and is now a professor at Princeton.

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