There has been quite a bit of space used in the print media, the internet, and on television about Barack Obama and his now former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. It has also come up that Obama has apparently repudiated the remarks made by Wright concerning the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
There is an angle that I wish to pursue that really has less to do with Obama, per se, and more to do with religion in America. Allow me two examples here:
1) A Catholic candidate has as the priest/pastor of his parish a man who is a quasi-RadTrad type who believes in assigning ‘collective guilt’ for Jewish people as ‘Christ-killers’ and holds to a believe that one must be part of the entity known as the Catholic Church in order to be saved.
2) A candidate who belongs to a non-demoninational Christian church that has a pastor similar to Jeremiah Wright - he holds to some racialist ideas and believes that the USA deliberately goes out of its way to kill off and destroy a particular group of people, and manages to weave some of these things into his weekly sermon on Sunday.
The question is – which candidate has the easier task of repudiating what his spiritual leader said?
March 16, 2008 at 12:23 pm
The Catholic does, because he can point to the universal teachings of the Church which contradict his pastor. Really all the second one has is recourse to the Bible, and there about 90 billion different ways to interpret that.
March 16, 2008 at 9:29 pm
You pretty much nailed it on the head. which is what I was getting at. On the surface, it seems as if Candidate #2 would have an easier job, but ultimately, as you pointed out, because we have a higher authority than just that priest that can say that the priest is a kook and needs to watch what he says.
The second candidate’s pastor is the defacto Pope of his church and who is going to tell him he is wrong?
March 17, 2008 at 4:23 pm
I guess at the same time though, the individual congregant is just as free to pick and choose as the pastor is. So maybe it is less of an issue.
March 17, 2008 at 8:42 pm
Although, you run into a problem with picking the pastor/congregation, and this is what I think I was trying to get at with the Obama/Wright issue: that Obama has been a member of this particular church in Chicago for over 20 years and yet claims he is ’shocked’ to learn through the media this past weekend that his pastor has said inflammatory things!
Because being a Protestant, especially a non-denom type involves the voluntarism that it does, the member has a harder time trying to distance himself when he still won’t leave that particular congregation.