Diversity, Division, Growth

Andrew Sullivan is reduced to quoting Jonah Goldberg on the origin and basis of the Obama/Wright flap. I'm somewhat less impressed with Goldberg's reasoning ability than I am with Sullivan's, so you can guess the context of that observation.

However, Sullivan does go on to write a substantial and often moving post about the roots of the issue, which is gratifying to see and goes a long way toward redeeming him in my eyes. He's finally starting to make some connections here. It's the kind of thing he can do, when he's not caught up in Clinton-bashing.

(Goldberg's post, by the way, is a comment on a post by Matt Yglesias that makes a lot more sense than Goldberg's comment -- vide what Goldberg leaves out of this analysis, which are some of the key factors. If you're going to compare Obama to McCain on this, you have to be very careful, which test Goldberg fails. He's just hauling out another straw man, is what it amounts to.

In that vein, here's a post from publius at Obsidian Wings on church membership and what it actually means:

With that in mind, I think tying candidates to church pastors falls into the “silly” category. That's because churches (Protestant ones anyway) are first and foremost communities. Preachers that lead these communities come and go, but it’s the “body politic” so to speak that really matters in most Protestant denominations.

To back up, the strongest potential argument against Obama is that (1) Protestants may freely choose which church to belong to, and (2) Obama chose one led by Wright. The problem with this logic, though, is that it assumes Obama’s choice was driven by the church’s leadership. More generally, it significantly overvalues the importance of the leader in determining people's choices to join a church. When people choose a church, it usually has far more to do with community concerns – i.e., who’s in the congregation, what does the congregation do, what benefits does membership provide, etc.

I suppose it's not much of a surprise that the right is going to see church membership in terms of who the leaders are -- after all, the right is all about authority, not so much about community. Remembering back to my own childhood, we belonged to a couple of different churches -- first, hard-shell Baptist, then Methodist -- and as I recall, it wasn't the preacher who brought us into the Baptist church -- but it was he who caused my parents to leave. He was just too extreme too often. And publius is right -- it was the participation in the community life that was most important -- choir, volunteer efforts, making friends in the congregation, all of that I remember from my early teenage years when we moved to the Methodist church.