Oprah, Obama, And Wright

It has been reported that Oprah Winfrey, who endorsed Obama, is the other famous member of Wright's now controversial church.  However, she seems to have moved away from that church quite some time ago - this is from 2002 ["The Church of O" by LaTonya Taylor]:

When Oprah goes to church in Chicago, she has been known to attend Trinity United Church of Christ, located on the city's South Side. Trinity is the largest church in its denomination, with more than 8,000 members, several subsidiary corporations, and an annual budget of about $9 million. It is an Afrocentric church with a membership composed largely of upper middle class blacks. These elements, no doubt, appealed to Oprah's roots in the church, her longtime interest in black history, and her concern for social justice.

According to Trinity's senior pastor Jeremiah Wright, however, Oprah has not attended a service there in the last eight years. When she first came to Trinity in the 1980s, it seemed that she would become an active participant. Says Wright, "She walked the aisle to become a member, publicly claimed us as her church in Ebony magazine, and when I would run into her socially, like at a United Negro College Fund dinner, she would say, 'Here's my pastor!'" But Oprah never completed the membership classes and after awhile her attendance dropped off.

...

"Sundays got to be a hassle for her," Wright says. "Everybody came at her with notes, with portfolios, with ideas and requests. It made her coming to church a problem."

Shortly after her show was syndicated in 1986, Oprah spoke about the challenges of being a celebrity in a public worship service: "Last Sunday I was in church, and a deacon tapped me on the knee and asked me for my autograph," she said. "I told him, 'I don't do autographs in church. Jesus is the star here.' "

Wright understands the pressures Oprah faces in public settings, but he has seen other celebrities maintain a commitment to their churches, despite their fame. He thinks there might be other reasons for Oprah's absence from the pew. "I think it is hard for most very wealthy people to be a part of the church," he says. "Somebody who makes $100 a week has no problem tithing. But start making $35 million a year, and you'll want to renegotiate the contract. You don't want to be a part of 'organized religion' at that point. That's a generalized statement, but that's what I've found across the years. The wealthier somebody gets, the more they pull away from the church."

Today Oprah's relationship with Trinity and Jeremiah Wright seems strained. In a column for a recent issue of Black Collegian magazine, Wright mentioned Oprah as an example of African Americans who forget their roots in the church after finding success. "A lot of us do not even like the word faith anymore," he wrote. "We prefer the more chic-sounding word, spirituality! We are caught up in an Oprah-generated mentality and a 12-step vocabulary that prevents us from using the very words and the very bridge that 'brought us over!' "

Oprah Winfrey did not respond to CT's request for comment about the article, but Wright stands by his statement. He is clearly put off by the direction Oprah's faith seems to have taken.

I wonder what Oprah would say about the direction Wright's ministry took.  Oh, well - she can't really fire back without undermining Barack's "I knew nothing" defense.

Comments

[Christian Prophet]

Oprah may have to distance herself from Barack Obama because he is in trouble if his THEOLOGY is exposed. See:
http://miraclesdaily.blogspot.com/

[yarrr]

What's the source?

[anduril]

Steve Sailer (who is widely ignored with reason) has an interesting take on Rock Obama, in Mama Obama: A "Stuff White People Like" Hall of Famer:

One sign that Obama never succeeded in becoming the fully authentic African-American that he spent all those hours in Honolulu watching "Soul Train" to achieve is that his attitude toward his mom for much of his life was straight out of Stuff White People Like: "#17 Hating Their Parents." He ended up apologizing to his late mother in the 2004 Preface for what he had written in his 1995 autobiography. Real black guys do not diss their mamas. (Also, to digress, as one commenter pointed out, a real black guy named "Barack" would not call himself "Barry" or "Barack," he would call himself "Rock." Rock Obama.)

[miraclesdailyisluciferdaily]

Oprah likes little girls. Little African girls, in Africa. I don't see much difference between her and the preacher and Obama. When everyone gets sane again after the great speaking he does like Kennedy and JFK. It's not rhetoric, insiprational or motivational; but Hitler had it too. Where people just vote for 'em like they are taken over by lucifer or something and they faint cause he's so over powering and right about everything and stuff. The name got bought like their lives, so i don't want it, but all those are the same. when everyone is sane again, we can talk and email.

[clarice]

Whew...for a moment I was afraid we were heading here..and my heart couldn't take another shock.
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03162008/news/regionalnews/the_mcgreeveys_secret_102260.htm>Three

[SteveMG]

Oprah likes little girls. Little African girls, in Africa. I don't see much difference between her and the preacher and Obama.

No, no, no. Nowhere has Oprah preached the type of racial divisiveness that Rev. Wright - and Wright alone, not Obama - has expressed.

Ms. Winfrey is to be commended for her charity work.

If you're from Balloon Juice, take a hike.

If not, I think you're sadly mistaken.

[Jane]

Yikes Clarice.

[clarice]

Yikes, indeed!
What is it with the Northeast?
Spitzer, the McGreevys and the near riot in TM's Episcopalian church..Is there no end to this?

[Jane]

Well don't forget today some Oklahoma congresswoman was quoted in the NY Times that gays are a bigger threat to the country than terrorism.

Sheesh - they giveth and they taketh away. (That's as biblical as I get)

[Jane]

BTW I'm watching "The Fall of Elliott Spitzer" on CNBC.

Apparently the glee is still going on on Wall Street.

Who could blame them?

[Elliott]

By my count, our gracious host has today produced 10 posts, a triple entendre in one of the titles (SWIFT), and a new motto. Bravissimo, Mr. Maguire!

[clarice]

I'm dying to see what happens in the Skilling appeal--the Fifth Circuit seems sympathetic..If his charges are right, I expect the demands for prosecutorial oversight will increase substantially.

[george weiss]

although Tom doesn't say so, the article he quotes from may be from the Chicago Tribune. The initials are right and the style and content fit.

Is that correct?

[clarice]

Why "go balloons!"?

Speaking of sex scandals, Dalrymple explains the difference between sex scandals here and in Europe:
We in Britain are certainly familiar with political scandals of a sexual nature. In 1994, for instance, a Tory member of Parliament, the brother of a clergyman, was found hanged dressed only in women's underwear. This is the kind of thing that we expect of our politicians in Britain.

It used to be that scandals involving the Labor Party mainly concerned financial irregularities and those involving the Conservative Party were predominantly sexual. Labor politicians, being socialists who detested the rich, were avid for money, however ill-gotten. Conservatives, being moralists who lamented the passing of the old order of personal restraint, were deeply attracted to sexual vice. Now that the two parties are virtually indistinguishable, from a policy perspective, they are each financially corrupt and sexually incontinent. I suppose a Hegelian would call this a dialectical synthesis that overcame contradictions.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-op-dalrymple16mar16,0,574100.story>I love this man

[pagar]

"who is widely ignored with reason)" I posted a Steve Sailer link yesterday because I thought it best illustrated the idiocy expressed by Rev Wright in saying that his church promoted a belief used by the Sandinistas in Nicaragua to destroy that country.
Had I just posted the Sean Hannity interview, it did not bring out the Communist connection.

"WRIGHT: The black value system, which was developed by the congregation, by laypersons of the congregation, 26 years ago, very similar to the gospel (INAUDIBLE) developed by laypersons in Nicaragua during the whole liberation theology movement, 26, 28, 30 years ago, yes."
Link

In either case, the fact is that a very large black church in America was developing a belief copied from a purely communist effort and had been actively promoting that Communist doctrine for the past 26 years and had managed to never have that questioned by any mainstream American until
Steve Sailer pointed it out. Even than apparently, not many in America care.

[HitNRun]

"Somebody who makes $100 a week has no problem tithing. But start making $35 million a year, and you'll want to renegotiate the contract."

If you, as a minister, demand or even encourage a full tithe from someone trying to get by on $100 a week, you're a heel.

As for the person making 35 million: Are you shitting me? You think your celebrity parishioner owes you three million dollars a year (or even 1 million after what Oprah probably pays in taxes) just to get you to write her a letter of recommendation to St. Peter? This theory of tithing is tenuous enough with global denominations like Catholicism that have large (and expensive) humanitarian and missionary agencies on every continent.

Giving 7 fingers, excuse me, figures a year to this concession-selling huckster is only spiritually defensible if the donor is stupid. If you're stupid, then it's OK. Sure he probably used half your donation to decorate his house in pastels and create a "money bed" out of twenties, but at least if you're stupid then your donation was in good faith.

[Mike G]

I like to think that Oprah, who's richer than Rockefeller and dominates a large portion of pop culture, simply decided that a preacher who said rich white people dominated everything was uninformed on the actual realities pertaining today.

It'll be interesting if Obama is undone by social climbing within a highly popular black church. He'd have been all right if he'd merely attended, but no, he had to go sucking up to the preacher and become a star among the congregation and name his book after something he said. In his own way, then, he may have sown his fall as surely as Eliot Spitzer.

[rrm]

CT = Christianity Today. CT is their common moniker.

Here's the link:

http://www.ctlibrary.com/ct/2002/april1/1.38.html

[Ann]

HitNRun, Why are you pretending to be our Hit?

Where are these people coming from today?

[Soylent Red]

I love this man

Yes Clarice. Read his books if you haven't.

[Ann]

Big News to me:

In 1988, Michelle was a young Sidley lawyer fresh out of Harvard Law School and she was put in charge of mentoring a summer associate or " INTERN" named Barack. (Is the law firm she worked for Sidney Austin or Sidley Austin?)

and "By the time they got hitched in 1992, Michelle had jettisoned corporate law for the public sector, taking a job with Mayor Richard Daley. “I wanted to have a career where I was thrilled to wake up,” she told a reporter in 2004."

Sidley Austin: When Barack Met Michelle

I am starting to feel sorry for Barack. I think he married Michelle "Omarosa" and didn't know any better.

[Layla Elizabeth]

Hi Tom! Thank you so much for coming by and leaving me the link to the passage. I have put an update and thank you in the article so that readers will follow the link to whence the passage came.

Cheers!

[America's Soapbox]

Of National Lies and Racial Amnesia:
Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama, and the Audacity of Truth

By Tim Wise

March 18, 2008

For most white folks, indignation just doesn't wear well. Once affected or conjured up, it reminds one of a pudgy man, wearing a tie that may well have fit him when he was fifty pounds lighter, but which now cuts off somewhere above his navel and makes him look like an idiot.

Indignation doesn't work for most whites, because having remained sanguine about, silent during, indeed often supportive of so much injustice over the years in this country--the theft of native land and genocide of indigenous persons, and the enslavement of Africans being only two of the best examples--we are just a bit late to get into the game of moral rectitude. And once we enter it, our efforts at righteousness tend to fail the test of sincerity.

But here we are, in 2008, fuming at the words of Pastor Jeremiah Wright, of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago--occasionally Barack Obama's pastor, and the man whom Obama credits with having brought him to Christianity--for merely reminding us of those evils about which we have remained so quiet, so dismissive, so unconcerned. It is not the crime that bothers us, but the remembrance of it, the unwillingness to let it go--these last words being the first ones uttered by most whites it seems whenever anyone, least of all an "angry black man" like Jeremiah Wright, foists upon us the bill of particulars for several centuries of white supremacy.

But our collective indignation, no matter how loudly we announce it, cannot drown out the truth. And as much as white America may not be able to hear it (and as much as politics may require Obama to condemn it) let us be clear, Jeremiah Wright fundamentally told the truth.

Oh I know that for some such a comment will seem shocking. After all, didn't he say that America "got what it deserved" on 9/11? And didn't he say that black people should be singing "God Damn America" because of its treatment of the African American community throughout the years?

Well actually, no he didn't.

Wright said not that the attacks of September 11th were justified, but that they were, in effect, predictable. Deploying the imagery of chickens coming home to roost is not to give thanks for the return of the poultry or to endorse such feathered homecoming as a positive good; rather, it is merely to note two things: first, that what goes around, indeed, comes around--a notion with longstanding theological grounding--and secondly, that the U.S. has indeed engaged in more than enough violence against innocent people to make it just a tad bit hypocritical for us to then evince shock and outrage about an attack on ourselves, as if the latter were unprecedented.

He noted that we killed far more people, far more innocent civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki than were killed on 9/11 and "never batted an eye." That this statement is true is inarguable, at least amongst sane people. He is correct on the math, he is correct on the innocence of the dead (neither city was a military target), and he is most definitely correct on the lack of remorse or even self-doubt about the act: sixty-plus years later most Americans still believe those attacks were justified, that they were needed to end the war and "save American lives."

But not only does such a calculus suggest that American lives are inherently worth more than the lives of Japanese civilians (or, one supposes, Vietnamese, Iraqi or Afghan civilians too), but it also ignores the long-declassified documents, and President Truman's own war diaries, all of which indicate clearly that Japan had already signaled its desire to end the war, and that we knew they were going to surrender, even without the dropping of atomic weapons. The conclusion to which these truths then attest is simple, both in its basic veracity and it monstrousness: namely, that in those places we committed premeditated and deliberate mass murder, with no justification whatsoever; and yet for saying that I will receive more hate mail, more hostility, more dismissive and contemptuous responses than will those who suggest that no body count is too high when we're the ones doing the killing. Jeremiah Wright becomes a pariah, because, you see, we much prefer the logic of George Bush the First, who once said that as President he would "never apologize for the United States of America. I don't care what the facts are."

And Wright didn't say blacks should be singing "God Damn America." He was suggesting that blacks owe little moral allegiance to a nation that has treated so many of them for so long as animals, as persons undeserving of dignity and respect, and which even now locks up hundreds of thousands of non-violent offenders (especially for drug possession), even while whites who do the same crimes (and according to the data, when it comes to drugs, more often in fact), are walking around free. His reference to God in that sermon was more about what God will do to such a nation, than it was about what should or shouldn't happen. It was a comment derived from, and fully in keeping with, the black prophetic tradition, and although one can surely disagree with the theology (I do, actually, and don't believe that any God either blesses or condemns nation states for their actions), the statement itself was no call for blacks to turn on America. If anything, it was a demand that America earn the respect of black people, something the evidence and history suggests it has yet to do.

Click here to read the rest of Tim's column.

[Tenor]

Irreverend Wright is a nutcase and not to be seriously. The fact that Obama stayed in the church speaks for itself.

His wife Michelle is also a problem in view of her statements.
She is obviously holding a grudge against whitey.

[Tenor]

Irreverend Wright is a nutcase and not to be taken seriously. The fact that Obama stayed in the church speaks for itself.

His wife Michelle is also a problem in view of her statements.
She is obviously holding a grudge against whitey.

[Ron Wilson]

As followers of Jesus Christ empowered by the Holy Spirit, true Christians say and pray “God Bless America,” and many are now saying and praying “God Please Help the US.”

However, the Holy Spirit of God would never inspire a true follower of Jesus Christ to say or pray “God Damn American” in any context, much less as part of a taped public sermon in front of children.

Holy Scriptures say to test the spirits (1 John 4:1). Reverend Wright obviously has a fiery spirit that is condemning at times, particuarly when he curses our nation in public sermons. It is certaintly not Christ-like or characteristic of the Holy Spirit.

Sentor Obama apparently does not say or pray “God Damn America,” but the crutial point is that most of his life has trusted and tollerated this particular pastor. Although Reverend Wright is retiring, he will remain as Senior Pastor, and his replacement essentially agrees with him in spirit and truth, and Senator Obama must agree with him in spirit.

There is reason to not trust the spirit in which Reverend Wright said the things he said, and so there is reason to question the spirit leading the youthfull Senator Obama as a professed Christian and prospective president of our nation. May God’s Holy Spirit be our guide.

Hope Page: http://itsallaboutjesusnotme.blogspot.com

[Ann]

Tim,
Your thesis on our treatment of the Japanese completely overlooks that it was the Japanese who built a war machine for many years and at great financial cost and social cost to their culture. They intended to conquer the world and attacked Pearl Harbor as a step they felt would bring us to our knees and we would surrender immediately.
I expect that if we had not stopped them, you wouldn't have the freedom to write that rant that shows an incredible lack of historical knowledge. Man has evolved from a complete Barbarian to a somewhat civilized culture, more in some areas of the world, than others. Killing is where we come from. But for as much as you hate America, we have led the way to try and be less Barbaric than many other cultures we have, do and will deal with.
Try reading a few different views than the self loathing perspective. Try reading a few things written by people outside of this country that aren't American haters and you will find there are people who think we are heros compared to what they have to deal with. And they write good things of their own free will.

[mike]

Anyone with once of brains can figure out why Oprah has disassociated herself from R. Wright, he's a maniac and would kill her ratings, her income and most importantly her power base, viewers. She preys on people who can't think for themselves and there are a lot of them. She's attracting the same base that hollywood attracts, mind numbed angry women who have nothing better to do then watch TV and eat. She's no different then Jimmy Swaggert or Tamme and Jim Baker of PTL who bamboozled their parishioners out of their money. The only differences is Oprah's money comes in the way of ratings versus direct payment. She's a phony, when ever she has a white guest, she speaks white, whenever it's a black guest, she poors on the hood talk... Don't fall for her B.S. or Barrak Obombus either.

[mike]

Anyone with once of brains can figure out why Oprah has disassociated herself from R. Wright, he's a maniac and would kill her ratings, her income and most importantly her power base, viewers. She preys on people who can't think for themselves and there are a lot of them. She's attracting the same base that hollywood attracts, mind numbed angry women who have nothing better to do then watch TV and eat. She's no different then Jimmy Swaggert or Tamme and Jim Baker of PTL who bamboozled their parishioners out of their money. The only differences is Oprah's money comes in the way of ratings versus direct payment. She's a phony, when ever she has a white guest, she speaks white, whenever it's a black guest, she poors on the hood talk... Don't fall for her B.S. or Barrak Obombus either.

[sophy]

Please do not hesitate to have habbo credits . It is funny.