Barack Obama needed to speak out years ago, not resign now. Leaving now is just a sad example of politics as usual from a candidate who promises change, and that is truly disappointing. The issue is not leaving the church now, which if he believes in its teachings, he ought not to do. Nor is it accepting the tired canard that membership within any community implies agreement with all of its teachings. That is simply a path to creating homogenous communities of spiritual/intellectual automatons.
But it is fair to ask Obama, especially in the context of a spiritual community so proud of a prophetic voice which speaks truth to power, how come he never took the initiative to speak out against those words and deeds with which he disagreed, when he was a member of Trinity Church? Had he done so, he might have modeled the kind of loving critique which is so absent from contemporary discourse, especially when it comes to religion.
Instead of perpetuating the “with us or against us” model that is so part of our society, whether in politics, religion or personal relationships, he needed to speak out long ago, but do so as a loyal member of his community. Instead, by allowing years of silence to be followed by divorce, he modeled all that is wrong in a culture in which we find it almost impossible to sustain conversation, membership or connectedness in the face of genuine disagreement.
To be sure, not all relationships can be sustained forever. That is why Scripture, as understood by Jewish tradition at least, teaches that divorce can be as sacred as marriage. But before that divorce occurs, we try and work things out in a way that helps us see that the relationship can go on, even when there are real differences between us. Obama’s failure to try this model was a genuine failure of leadership. And his remarks in making public the decision to resign from his church are perhaps the most troubling of all.
What are we to make of his claim that he never anticipated the storm of controversy that grew out of his membership in Trinity Church? There are three options here, and none of them are good. First, is that he is so out of step with how most American feel that he really didn’t appreciate how controversial his church was and is. That kind of tone- deafness is pretty scary from a man who needs to be President for all Americans, regardless of which candidate they choose in November.
The second possible reason for his professed surprise is that he truly doesn’t appreciate the connection between personal spirituality and public policy. But that’s hard to believe in light of both his writing on the topic and the tradition linkage between those two, especially in African American Churches.
Option three is that he is simply lying to us, i.e. he knew full well that he was a member of a controversial church, and that his membership was likely to become a campaign issue. But, that because that church did many things of which he approved, he thought that he could simply side step those views with which he did not agree, and dodge the controversy by doing so.
None of this suggests that Barack Obama supports the often America bashing, Israel hating, rage-filled positions of his church’s clergy. In fact, there is not a shred of evidence to suggest that he does, and when people criticize his ongoing membership in the church by suggesting that he does, they are simply wrong. But it does suggest that candidate Obama did here what all old-fashioned politicians do: measure the reaction in the polls instead of the one within their own hearts, and when it becomes expedient to do so, conform the latter to the former -- hardly the idealistic politics of change for which he stands in the minds of so many, and for which he has spoken out in so many areas of public policy.
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