The Question: Jeremiah Wright's sermons continue to be an issue in the presidential campaign. Why? What do you think of his preaching style? What do you wish you understood better about it?

I can't help but wonder if the surfacing of Jeremiah Wright -- and his
recent resurfacing on PBS and other venues -- didn't send a shiver of fear
through campaign central in the Obama camp. In himself Sen. Obama
exemplifies the success of racial integration, having lived in both worlds
and understanding each with unaffected sympathy. Rev. Wright is not such a
person. His manner was gentler when talking to Bill Moyers -- you wouldn't
recognize the firebrand from those YouTube video clips -- and he attempted
to sound reasonable without backing down, however, from anything he has said
in the past.

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Half-truths are the bread and butter of politics. This must be so where compromise is the only way to move ahead and warring constituencies have to be placated. But after Watergate personal dishonesty became a central issue, and the simmering contempt that Americans have casually felt toward "lying politicians" was ignited into something far more contentious. Bill Clinton was impeached for a lie that most husbands would at least attempt if caught cheating. This wasn't an indication that America sets a high standard of personal integrity but exactly the opposite: politics has become an arena for vitriol and personal attack. Everybody's untrustworthy if your opponent is cynical enough to keep hurling false accusations (hence the 20% of the public who believe that Barack Obama is a Muslim.)

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The strikingly new note in the Evangelical Manifesto is that it intends to be conciliatory. In affirming that they totally identify with their faith, the writers quickly declare that their purpose is "not to attack or exclude." This seems to reverse the very impulse that brought the religious right to power politically. By erasing the line between faith and the voting booth, evangelicals absolutely excluded anyone who believes in a secular Constitution and its separation of church and state. They also vehemently attacked candidates who didn't share their viewpoint.

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It's strange to think that America's view of love might be four hundred years behind the times. In Sonnet 116 ("Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments") Shakespeare devotes the whole poem to extolling love as immortal. "Love's not Time's fool," he declares, praising its constancy in all ages. We, on the other hand, seem quite eager to throw impediments in the way of marriage. I was struck by a news piece on TV a few weeks ago in which a hidden camera was set up in downtown Atlanta to watch people's reactions to a romantic couple necking in public.

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Greed is a moral bad but a functional good. Greedy entrepreneurs have benefited the world with more than a few things without which we wouldn't want to live. It was greed, for example, that led investors in the 1980s to buy so-called junk bonds. Junk bonds combined high yield with high risk. They were roundly condemned at the time by gatekeepers of public morality (at least one national politician, Rudy Giuliani, used this as a springboard, loudly prosecuting Michael Milken, the one-man brain trust of junk bonds). Yet junk bonds allowed FedEx and MCI to get off the ground, two budding ventures scorned by established financial lenders. There's even an argument that junk bonds, had they not been vilified, could have financed enormous changes in the developing world, providing desperately needed funds that otherwise weren't available.

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