I mean, Jeremiah Wright was a Muslim and a black nationalist before he was a Biblical scholar who found that Jesus was actually a black African who was "sick of this sh*t!" This kind of trip is Jules Verne meets Jack Kerouac where Miss Daisy is told to shut up and drive. Or else.
Barack Obama's unlikely political education.
But Wright was a former Muslim and black nationalist who had studied at Howard and Chicago, and Trinity's guiding principles--what the church calls the "Black Value System"--included a "Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.'"
The crosscurrents appealed to Obama. He came to believe that the church could not only compensate for the limitations of Alinsky-style organizing but could help answer the nagging identity problem he had come to Chicago to solve. "It was a powerful program, this cultural community," he wrote, "one more pliant than simple nationalism, more sustaining than my own brand of organizing."
As a result, over the years, Wright became not only Obama's pastor, but his mentor. The title of Obama's recent book, The Audacity of Hope, is based on a sermon by Wright. (It's worth noting, however, that, while Obama's book is a coolheaded appeal for common ground in an age of political polarization, Wright's sermon, "The Audacity to Hope," is a fiery jeremiad about persevering in a world of nuclear arms and racial inequality.) Wright is one of the first people Obama thanked after his Senate victory in 2004, and he recently name-checked Wright in his speech to civil rights leaders in Selma, Alabama.
The church also helped Obama develop politically.
But Obama was a Christian after he was not a Muslim. Was Wright a Christian before he was a Black Nationalist Muslim before he was a Biblical scholar who welcomed Hawaiian Harvard Obama into his new church to become an authentic African-American from the southside of Chicago, ie become part of a family he never had.
I don't know about Wright and Obama, but I got whiplash just trying to keep up with this sell.
HT to Ace
