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...defended Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and claimed the U.S. government introduced AIDS into the black community. Obama had to distance himself again from Wright. But the scrutiny of Trinity only deepened. After the May 25 speech by Father Michael Pfleger at Trinity, in which the controversial white Chicago priest derided Sen. Hillary Clinton as a white elitist who felt entitled the Democratic nomination for the presidency, it seemed only a matter of time before Obama had to make a clean break...
...association with the church was doing to his presidential aspirations. After all, Obama's stunning rise to the brink of being the Democratic presidential nominee has cast an unusually harsh light on his place of worship. Trinity's roughly 8,500 members makes it among the largest congregations in Chicago - and the largest in the United Church of Christ, a predominately white protestant denomination. When Wright assumed leadership of Trinity in 1972, it barely had 90 members. He steered it toward Black Liberation Theology, which had emerged in the late-1960s largely in response to the Black Power Movement...
...charismatic leadership, and unapologetic (sometimes angry) rhetoric, Wright struck a chord with many of this city's growing black middle class. One of them, a young, relatively unknown community organizer named Barack Obama, joined Trinity in the mid-1980s, finding both a spiritual home and a useful entree into Chicago's black political elite. Obama soon came to view Wright as something of a father figure. Wright ended up consecrating Obama's wedding to Michelle Robinson, baptizing the couple's children, and even provided the title to his best-selling memoir, The Audacity of Hope...
...whole episode has stunned many Trinity members, but its ultimate conclusion was not that much of a surprise to some. Dwight N. Hopkins, an authority on Black Liberation Theology at the University of Chicago's Divinity School, as well as a longtime Trinity member, recalls watching a clip of Pfleger's comments. "I thought, given that this is a presidential season, and that Sen. Obama is a member of the church, there was going to be some type of fallout. I didn't know the exact nature of it," Hopkins says. In the wake of the Obamas' departure, he adds...
...Sunday seemed to suggest the church was trying hard to focus hard on its business and away from the controversy of the past several months. Several members seemed to agree. "The congregation isn't caught up in that larger debate - it's a distraction," says Hopkins, the University of Chicago professor. "We've still got to teach Bible class. None of this is going to impact the work of our ministries, or the scholarships we give to black colleges...