Obama's church's tenet raises questions

Barack Obama is a member of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ. As I noted last month, Trinity is an offshoot of the 1960s black power movement.

And that's raising some questions.

From the Chicago Tribune, free registration required:

The congregation posits what it terms a Black Value System, including calls to be "soldiers for black freedom" and a "disavowal of the pursuit of middleclassness."

In an interview late Monday, Obama said it was important to understand the document as a whole rather than highlight individual tenets. "Commitment to God, black community, commitment to the black family, the black work ethic, self-discipline and self-respect," he said. "Those are values that the conservative movement in particular has suggested are necessary for black advancement.

"So I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a document that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help."

In his published memoirs, Obama said even he was stopped by Trinity's tenet to disavow "middleclassness" when he first read it two decades ago in a church pamphlet. The brochure implored upwardly mobile church members not to distance themselves from less fortunate Trinity worshipers.

Obama, in the same article, rejects the claim that Trinity's tenet is designed just for blacks.

The title of the senator's best-selling book, The Audacity of Hope, comes from a sermon by Trinity's pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright.

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