« Previous — Next »

Where Loyalties Lie

18 March 2008

This morning Barack Obama gave his race speech where he dealt with the issue of race and his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright. While it was certainly a rousing speech, expertly delivered, it reveals some serious and profound misunderstandings and misconceptions held by Senator Obama.

The largest and most glaring of those misconceptions is his understanding of the church and loyalty. Clearly Obama puts his loyalty to Jeremiah Wright over his loyalty to scripture or the church. He equated rejecting his pastor with rejecting his grandmother. Nice words but very far off the mark.

For Christians who understand the church, placing a man, any man, above the church and its mission is unthinkable. That doesn’t mean that you totally reject someone with whom you disagree. But you certainly do not remain under his leadership and authority when he is so clearly in conflict with scripture and the church. I’m not talking here about a single local church. I’m talking about what the Bible refers to as the bride of Christ. To hold any man above that is hold that man above Jesus himself.

Certainly Senator Obama is free to do just that. But he goes on about his Christianity when he appears to have little understanding of the meaning of that term. Christianity is NOT about membership in an organization. But that’s precisely how Barack Obama has presented it. It’s as if Obama’s church was the local Kiwanis club and, while you didn’t always agree with the president, you liked him none the less.

The church, both universal and local, isn’t a civic organization. It isn’t a club. It is the one institution on earth tasked with spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ. And while I agree wholeheartedly that the church should be caring for the poor and the downtrodden, that is not its primary goal.

Barack Obama spent more than 20 years under the authority for Jeremiah Wright and, apparently, never found anything he said to be so far off the mark that he would consider removing himself from that authority. I dearly love my pastor but if he were to ever advocate, for example, returning to slavery or the notion that blacks were genuinely inferior to whites, I would have leave that church. I would not stop loving that pastor but I could not remain in a church, under a pastor, that was in such conflict with scripture and the biblical mission of the church. That Barack Obama could remain in such a church reveals one of two things. Either he actually agreed with wrights’ positions or he did not see any problem with being under the authority of a man who holds such strong views in conflict with the Bible. Either is unacceptable in my view.

In the end it is even worse. Obama didn’t only sit under the authority of Jeremiah Wright as a member of the church. Wright was a mentor to Obama. That means that for years Obama has been inculcated with the hate that spews from Wright’s mouth. It is very difficult for me to accept what Obama wants us to believe, that through all that mentoring he absorbed none of Wright’s hate for whites and this country.

Barack Obama is, perhaps, the most dangerous presidential candidate we’ve ever seen in this country. I sincerely hope the American people aren’t fool by the slick presentation of his excuse because it just doesn’t hold water.