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by Paul R. Hollrah, Lincoln Heritage Institute Trustee
In his March 18 speech from Philadelphia, in which he tried to justify a twenty-year relationship with Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pastor of the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Barack Obama said, “Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in the church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.”
So the question arises, if Obama heard Pastor Wright make repeated remarks that were “controversial” (others might call them, more appropriately, radical and anti-American), why did he continue his membership in that church and why did he maintain his personal relationship with the pastor?
Everyone who has ever heard controversial remarks from the mouth of their pastor, priest, or rabbi must decide for themselves how to react. I can only judge Barack Obama by my own standards and by my own experience with unacceptable remarks from my church pastors.
For example, in 1963, after being transferred from New York to Tulsa, Oklahoma, my wife and I took inventory of the Missouri Synod Lutheran churches in the city, selected the church closest to where we lived, and became regular churchgoers.
Then, after a period of weeks or months, we had a telephone call from the pastor of the congregation (out of respect for his privacy I will withhold his name). The pastor informed us that it had been his standard practice to always pay a personal call on all new members so that he could get to know them better and to give them a better understanding of the congregation. He said he’d like to drop by some evening, at our convenience, so we set a date and time.
At the appointed hour the pastor arrived at our front door. We invited him in, and after we had introduced ourselves we offered him a cup of coffee.
He began by explaining the demographics of his congregation. He said, “We have some members from south Tulsa, people who are quite wealthy. We have a substantial number of members from north Tulsa, most of whom are quite poor. But most of our members are from mid-town Tulsa, people such as you, who are middle-class or upper middle-class.”
But then came the shocker. He said, “We have no black people in our congregation.” He went on to explain that, just weeks earlier, a young black student from the University of Tulsa, located just blocks from the church, had called on him for the purpose of joining the congregation. The pastor then described how he had advised the young man that, since there were none of “his kind” in our congregation, he might be happier “looking elsewhere for a church home.”
If nothing else, the pastor was an honest man. He explained that he had grown up in the south, and although he had become a Lutheran minister, he could not shake the prejudices he had learned as a child.
I quickly brought our conversation to an end, thanked him for his time, and showed him to the door. It took us two or three weeks to find another congregation and, after two face-to-face confrontations in which I lectured him on the meaning of “brotherly love” and the true mission of God’s church on Earth, we never again set foot in his church.
Our new congregation, some five miles more distant from our home, had just moved into a newly constructed church building in south Tulsa. The pastor was a kind and gentle man and displayed none of the un-Christian characteristics of our previous pastor. However, on more than one occasion after joining that congregation, we found ourselves engaged in small-group conversations outside the church after services.
On more than one occasion, we heard someone say, “Oh, what a beautiful church we have. Aren’t we glad that we scrimped and saved so that we could worship in such a beautiful building?”
But when the responses came back, “Yeah, but what are we gonna do if the n----ers try to get in here?” we decided that we’d always met a much finer class of people in the political world than in any of the churches we’d attended and we never went back.
After being baptized and confirmed in the Lutheran Church, after attending Lutheran parochial schools for eight years, and after attending church and Sunday school regularly for the first thirty-two years of my life, I had never before heard such words from my pastor or anywhere in the vicinity of my church. Our decision to leave the church was based on our belief that all men are created equal and that God instructs each of us to love our fellow man…no matter what his race or the color of his skin.
I believe that Barack Obama was under the same obligation, yet he maintained a twenty-year relationship with a pastor and with a church congregation where racial hatred and hatred for our country was preached from the pulpit. He may claim a much greater tolerance for racist and anti-American speech than the rest of us, but if so, do we really want him as President of the United States…and should the good people of Illinois want him to continue to represent them in the United States Senate? I would think not.
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