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As Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. is cast as Public Enemy No. 1 by some commentators for his rants against the white establishment, it’s worth remembering that his congregation belongs to a liberal mainline Protestant denomination in America with a long history of offending people.

The United Church of Christ, a blend of four historic Protestant traditions, traces its origins to the first church to take a stand against slavery in 1700, the first to ordain a woman in 1853, the first to publish an inclusive-language hymnal in 1995 and first to support same-sex marriage in 2005, according to a church website. Its 2004 television ads promoting its open door to blacks and gays was rejected by television networks CBS and NBC, which deemed them too controversial. (Story continues below interactive map.)

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But even within that tradition, Wright is considered radical. The rebellious son and grandson of Baptist ministers, he was part of a group of black intellectuals such as James Cone, author of Black Theology and Black Power, who believed that blacks shouldn’t have to choose between Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr. They preached an Afro-centric Christianity that combined Christian principles with a strong social action agenda.

When Wright arrived on the rough-and-tumble south side of Chicago in 1972, Trinity United Church of Christ was clearly losing in the competition for young, black men’s hearts to the Nation of Islam and black liberation groups despite its recently-adopted slogan, “unashamedly black and unapologetically Christian.” Over the next three decades, Wright transformed it into a megachurch with almost 8,000 members with dozens of community services, including day care, a credit union and a drug-and-alcohol program. When he retired last month, the church was the denomination’s largest.

Wright’s screeds against America and white powerbrokers, his post-911 sermon that America had brought the attacks on itself and his praise of Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan are now well known thanks to the constant loop of snippets playing on cable television.
Less well known is how he also informally advised Chicago’s only black mayor Harold Washington, considered a political role model for Obama, and also, the combative relationships he often had with more doctrinally conservative black ministers in Chicago, described in Obama: From Promise to Power, by Chicago Tribune reporter David Mendell.

Mendell said that Obama first noticed the church in 1985 because of the “Free Africa” sign that Wright had posted out front to protest apartheid, and quotes Wright describing their open-ended talks about faith, politics, race and social change.

“Trying to hold a conversation with a guy like Barack, and him trying to hold a conversation with some ministers, it’s like you are dating someone and she wants to talk to you about Rosie and what she saw on Oprah, and that’s it,” Wright said. “… He felt comfortable asking me questions that were postmodern, post-Enlightenment, and that college-educated and graduate school-trained people wrestle with when it comes to the faith … I was not threatened by those questions.”

Obama credits Wright for his embracing Christianity, and says he took the title of his book, Audacity of Hope from a sermon Wright preached.

What he doesn’t say is that he used Wright as a sounding board for questions about politics as well as faith. Mendell describes how, in 2002, a dejected Obama went to see Wright after returning from Washington where he attended the annual Congressional Black Caucus conference trying to garner support for his bid for the U.S. Senate.

“He had gone down there to get support and find out who would support him, and found out it was just a meat market,” the pastor told Mendell. “He had people say, ‘If you want to count on me, come to my room. I don’t care if you’re married. …He was, like, in shock … He comes back shattered. I thought to myself, ‘Does he have a rude awakening coming his way.’”

Mendell notes that Trinity United is considered by some Chicago blacks to be “the church of elites,” attracting celebrities like the rapper Common, TV talk mogul Oprah Winfrey, as well as academics from the nearby University of Chicago. On Sundays, BMWs and Audis create traffic jams on 95th Street.

But the church was undergoing its own generational shift. Wright retired last month, and the top post was assumed by Otis Moss III, a Yale-educated former track star whose style is much more like that of the church’s most famous member, than of its former fire-and-brimstone pastor.

Moss, too, is the son of a Baptist minister – Otis Moss Jr., who preached at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta and who was a friend of Martin Luther King Jr. But while he, too, is said to connect strongly to young people, his cool, intellectual approach is less likely to catapult him to notoriety on cable television. In 2005, the magazine The African American Pulpit named him one of the “Twenty to Watch” ministers under forty.

Here’s a video of Wright:

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