Barack's Pastor

Hillary got what she must have been dreaming of this week when scrutiny fell on Barack Obama as it relates to his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Rev. Wright's controversial remarks in some of his sermons are causing Obama to get some of the tough media scrutiny Hillary claimed Obama wasn't getting. And of course it led to Barack's incredible speech on race, which may go down historically much the same as JFK's 1960 speech to the ministers in Houston who were concerned about Kennedy being a Catholic.

Rev. Wright's comments about race have been fueling a lot of fodder in the media and it makes me really wonder why it was such a big deal. After all, don't we all have associations with people who have differing points of view than our own? My parents and I have different points of view about policy. God knows I disagreed with how some of the principals I worked under ran schools I worked for. So why is there so much guilt by association in the case involving Rev. Wright and Barack Obama?

I think it comes down to the role pastors play in the lives of the average church-goer. I really believe that the average church-goer pretty much falls in line with whatever their pastor says and never questions it. I think America is loaded with people who are intellectually lazy and the church is no different. In other words, people show up on Sunday and expect to have their pastor tell them what to think. The look to their pastor as their spiritual guide (which they should) but they never question what he has to say (which they should not).

Necessity taught me to question my pastor when I was in high school. When you grow up in a small midwestern town you don't always get the sophistication of the big city. The pastor of the Southern Baptist church my family attended had not attended a seminary. I am not sure if he even was a college graduate at all. But I remember very specifically him saying he did not think attending seminary was very important. This is a lot like saying a doctor doesn't need to got to medical school. But hey, this is America and we certainly don't value intellectualism very much at all.

While I was in high school there were two things our pastor said that really blew my mind. The first one involved the creation story found in Genesis. He told his congregation that when the Bible says God created something in a day's time it meant a 24 hour calendar day , which makes God a lot like Jack Bauer. At the time I thought it was ridiculous and I still do. Just look at the loonies running around today that claim the earth is only 3,000 years old because the Bible only accounts for that much history. I love the way Lewis Black describes these people who are "watch the Flintsones as if it were a documentary."

The second thing (and even crazier still) was his assertion that a woman using artificial insemination to get pregnant was an abomination. To this day I am convinced he didn't really understand how artificial insemination worked. I think he thought that a woman would simply get pregnant by getting nailed by a man who wasn't her husband. And to this day I still have no idea what his Biblical argument was to explain how this procedure that had helped so many couples who couldn't have kids get pregnant was somehow Godless. He also spoke once about Darwin having a deathbed change of heart about his writings on Evolution. I am pretty sure he made that one up.

It's dangerous when people take any information at face value without investigating it for themselves. It's really scary when it's information that will impact the moral choices you make in your lifetime. The sad thing is the average Christian is completely illiterate when it comes to the Bible. Most Christians (like most Americans) are simply intellectually lazy. I am not completely sure why this is. It may be they are scared to uncover things about their beliefs that may challenge what they have always held to be true. There are many Christian denominations who only use the King James translation of the Bible as their guide. It doesn't matter to these people that 400 years of scholarship and research has been done and that modern translations are simply more accurate in terms of what the Bible says. The point is the King James Bible says what they want it to say.

I think that is the fear people have about Barack and Rev. Wright; that Barack attended that church because its pastor said thing Barack wanted him to say.