If It Isn't Obama's Race Being Attacked, Then It's His Religion

Posted by Steve Benen, The Carpetbagger Report at 11:58 AM on March 13, 2008.

In the new Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll (.pdf), respondents were asked, “Do you know what Barack Obama’s religion is?” About 37% got it right, and said Obama’s a Protestant. The more discouraging news was that 13% said they know Obama’s faith, and identified him as a Muslim. (It was the second most common response to the poll question.) Even more discouraging still, the number of people who believe Obama’s a Muslim is going up — in a WSJ/NBC poll from December, only 8% of Americans made the same mistake.

I still hear this all the time from people, who presumably have received the lying chain email, who are convinced that Obama’s a Muslim — and they couldn’t possibly bring themselves to vote for someone who is. It’s a routine reminder that the Obama campaign has some educating to do.

The frustrating part, of course, is that while conservatives (and even a few liberals) are confused about Obama’s faith tradition, he’s actually getting hit on matters of religion from two directions. When he’s not falsely being accused of being a secret Muslim, Obama is also being accused of cozying up to an extremist Christian pastor.

Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor says blacks should not sing “God Bless America” but “God damn America.”

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side, has a long history of what even Obama’s campaign aides concede is “inflammatory rhetoric,” including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own “terrorism.”

In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.” He said Rev. Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with,” telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family.

There are plenty of disconcerting remarks included in Wright’s record, but I guess there’s a political upside for Obama: he can’t be a Muslim and a Christian with a radical pastor at the same time.
Not surprisingly, far-right blogs (and a couple of the more intense Democratic Obama detractors) are pretty worked up about Rev. Wright’s rhetoric, which, by any reasonable measure, is mostly on the fringe.

An ABC News review of dozens of Rev. Wright’s sermons, offered for sale by the church, found repeated denunciations of the U.S. based on what he described as his reading of the Gospels and the treatment of black Americans.

“The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God Bless America.’ No, no, no, God damn America, that’s in the Bible for killing innocent people,” he said in a 2003 sermon. “God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme.”

I suppose the reflexive response would be to argue that if John McCain’s embrace of John Hagee and Rod Parsley are offensive, then Obama’s connection to Wright is just as bad.

Perhaps, but there is a key difference — Obama has denounced Wright’s more extreme statements and made clear he “deeply disagrees” with the offensive remarks. McCain prefers to pretend that Hagee’s and Parsley’s extremism is innocuous and barely worth commenting on.

Nevertheless, expect to hear quite a bit more about Jeremiah Wright. It might cause the number of people who believe Obama’s a Muslim to go down, but it may simultaneously drive the number of people who believe Obama’s a Christian black nationalist to go up.

When it’s not race, it’s religion. Ferraro’s out, Wright’s in.

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Tagged as: religion, race, racism, obama, christianity, muslims, wright

Steve Benen is a freelance writer/researcher and creator of The Carpetbagger Report. In addition, he is the lead editor of Salon.com's Blog Report, and has been a contributor to Talking Points Memo, Washington Monthly, Crooks & Liars, The American Prospect, and the Guardian.