I don't know which white commentators have been stupider about Wright. On the right, many are gleeful about Wright's emergence and try to tie Obama to his every utterance. On the left, a number of liberal members of the punditocracy, oozing patronizing superiority, have tried to portray Wright as a misunderstood member of a black church rooted in a historic tradition of resistance to slavery and discrimination. Tell it to Martin Luther King, whose steps and philosophy Wright isn't fit to walk in or claim.

Any white person who ever sat in pews in black churches in the South during the civil rights movement, or anyone who has, more recently, taken the trouble to hear the weekly sermons at the Reverend Calvin Butts's Abyssinian Baptist Church or at Mother Zion in Harlem, has heard the voices of black pastors who speak to common dreams rather than grievances. There are many black ministers across the nation, for example, who have attacked the notion that the U.S government in particular, and white people in general, are responsible for spreading AIDS in the black community. They have spoken about drug use, and about black men who are ashamed of their homosexuality and have unprotected sex on the "down low," as vectors of AIDS. We're not hearing about those black ministers, because Wright, and his connection with Obama, are the whole story. We're also not hearing about black churches, in the plural, because the white press doesn't have a long list of black ministers in its collective Rolodex.

But the story is no longer about Wright's old comments in sermons. Wright's publicity offensive over the weekend ensures that Obama will no longer be able to tread a careful path of disagreeing with his former pastor while refusing to renounce his past personal attachment. For Obama, now, it's a no-win situation. He cannot deny his old attachment to a man who, whatever his gifts and liabilities, is overwhelmed by anger and egotism, nor can he continue to act as if the Wright issue is, or ever will be, relegated to a distant past.

On Wright's part, what is clearly playing out is an Oedipal drama in reverse. In his National Press Club address, Wright said he told Obama that if he were to be elected president, "On November 5, I'm coming after you." Well, if Wright had planned to torpedo Obama's chances, he couldn't have been more effective than he was this weekend. Obama's message, so potent early on, was that the nation is ready to transcend race. Wright's message is, "Not yet, sonny. And maybe not ever, if I have anything to say about it." He is Moses saying to Joshua, "I'm not going to see the Promised Land, and you aren't either."

As an atheist, I would also like to point out that all of the pontificating from white pundits about the role of religion in the black community ignores the fact that religion was also, at one time, used by blacks to keep other blacks subservient and to placate white supremacists. (See W.E.B. DuBois, whose views about the Reverend Wright I would give up my fixed mortgage rate to hear.) Wright is being taken seriously, by blacks and whites, precisely because he is a representative of religion. And that's a tragedy. If he were a black political scientist, he would never have made the front page in the first place. He would never have been invited to address the National Press Club. I can't offer a better example of the unfitness of religion to serve as a guide to public policy. In concluding her On Faith comments week, Lisa Miller observes that Wright is "not what Obama now most needs him to be--and that is a politician." I would argue that the need for a pastor to be a politician is precisely what is wrong with involving faith in our political campaigns.