This weekend, Obama supporters cheered quietly as their presidential candidate officially broke up with his church. As Steven Gray reports from Chicago on Time.com, the senator and his family resigned from Trinity United Church there after months of roiling conflict surrounding its controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright (read this recent analysis by Joe Klein). The last straw, apparently, was a storm over comments by a visiting Roman Catholic priest, Michael Pfleger, accusing Hillary Clinton of feeling entitled to the party nomination because of her race.
I thought this quote by Obama from Gray’s article best stated his reasons:
“It was going to be very difficult to continue our membership there as long as I was running for president. The recent episode with Father Pfleger,” he continued, “just reinforced the view that we don’t want to have to answer for everything that’s stated in a church. On the other hand, we also don’t want a church subjected to the scrutiny that a presidential campaign legitimately undergoes.
The pundits are nodding sagely on this morning’s talk shows, lauding the decision as a wise one. Many question why he didn’t cut the cord ages ago, and wonder if the damage can be undone (his association with Wright didn’t exactly win over those white, blue-collar primary voters). They flick blithely at the dissembling of an important relationship, meaning the one between the Obamas and their pastor—the marriage rite and baptisms performed, the title of the memoir taken right from a sermon.
What I think a lot of secular people can’t begin to comprehend is the heartbreak behind the decision to leave a church.
As an adult Catholic, I never enjoyed the kind of deep community with a local church that Senator Barack Obama did. I grew up in the faith, which means I never sought or questioned. That diluted my experience of faith; unlike the senator, I didn’t find my church upon intense soul-searching. Still, my religion is as much a part of my identity as my race or my birthplace. And I too can blame politics for coming between me and my church; although I am not running for anything, my distaste for my church’s political beliefs and actions have grown so great that I can no longer conscientiously call myself a member.
A member of Trinity tells Time.com that “I’d be disappointed if he stopped believing in God.” It doesn’t sound as though Obama is losing his religion—just his church. But as anyone who belongs to one knows, that means losing friends, a place to worship, family activities, people who show up with home-baked bread when you’ve just had a baby, a pastor who knows your name. It means giving up what was perhaps your most vital, important community—just when you need it the most. It’s a horribly lonely place to be.