Barack Obama may have distanced himself yesterday from “Uncle” Jeremiah Wright—Obama’s spiritual mentor and the (retiring) pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, whose heated, conspiratorialist diatribes (the government “lied about inventing the HIV virus as a means of genocide against people of color”) have been looping 24/7 on cable news and streamed inviolably on YouTube. But what, many are now asking amidst the media’s monomania, do Obama’s own followers think of Wright, especially his black supporters?

The public response to Wright mostly has been that he crosses a line that even Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson toe (e.g., his repeated use of the N-word from the pulpit, calling Condoleezza Rice “Condamnesia” and Justice Clarence Thomas “Clarence Colon”). Liberal pundits have generally taken issue with the “trumping up” of these comments rather than their substance. But—as Obama pointed out during his speech when he explained that black anger, often hidden away publicly, finds its “voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table” and “in the church on Sunday morning”—many blacks do agree with Wright, some nominally, others wholeheartedly. In a Rasmussen poll released Monday, 29 percent of blacks said Wright’s comments “made them more likely to support Obama.”

Interviewing black Obama supporters in Philadelphia after the speech, National Review’s Byron York worried that Wright’s positions weren’t being roundly condemned there because they “are in fact positions with which many of Obama’s supporters agree.” York cited reactions to Wright’s “U.S. of KKK-A” and 9/11 chickens-coming-home-to-roost comments. One man said, “As a member of a traditional Baptist, black church . . . I wasn’t offended by anything the pastor said.” Another: “A lot of things that he said were true, whether people want to accept it, or believe it, or not.”

Slate posted a MediaCurves.com survey where respondents’ reactions were charted in real time as they watched snippets of Wright’s inflammatory sermons. When sorted into different groups, respondents all reacted negatively in varying degrees—except for blacks, whose responses hovered around at least 20 percent positive (sometimes as high as 60 percent), even after the reverend said, “God damn America.”

Conscious of what John McWhorter has called the black church’s need for “therapeutic alienation,” even critics recognize the argument for this mindset, even in Trinity UCC’s black liberation theology, as less victim-based grievance politics and more a coping mechanism. (The 10,000-member Trinity UCC, after all, is one of the country’s largest black megachurches.) The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat writes that “the paranoid style in African-American politics” exists for a reason: Wright “grew up in an era when it was hard for blacks to say ‘God Bless America’ full-throatedly . . . since the government of the United States was effectively engaged in a vast conspiracy against its black citizens.”

The result, some argue, may be that the church is one of the best places for blacks to deal with racism, from the past and of now. When Pew Research released its immense survey at the end of February that reported on how growing numbers of Americans are switching religious denominations, the fact that Protestant blacks were the most static group was largely ignored, which may also underscore how black churches play this McWhorter-like “therapeutic” value.

Last week, Barack Obama released a statement condemning the controversial comments of his retiring pastor, Jeremiah Wright. On Tuesday he gave a speech on race in light of the controversy. My question is: What does Barack Obama have to do with the comments of an independent, fully grown pastor 20 years his senior? Who cares about Rev. Wright? Why is Barack Obama accountable for another man’s words? Obama is not his clone. This is a classic case of political scare tactics intended to frighten white voters.

But this mode of political attack begs the question: What is so scary about Wright in the first place? Why are people shocked by Wright’s comments? I guess most whites (liberal or conservative) have not been in many black mainline churches during Black History Month and heard the preachers of the Jim Crow generation offer reflection. If they did they might notice what should be obvious—given the context—Wright’s comments are not unusual or extreme for the religious left.

Consider the generation from which Wright hails. As one of America’s Jim Crow generation, Wright grew up in a legally segregated, racist America. He has witnessed and was shaped by the turmoil of the civil-rights movement. The fact of the matter is that Rev. Wright sounds exactly like many, many other black pastors of his era. And while I do not support Wright’s comments, I understand why he feels the way he does.

The new pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ, the Rev. Otis Moss III, defended his predecessor in The New York Times: “It is an indictment on Dr. Wright’s ministerial legacy to present his global ministry within a 15- or 30-second sound bite.” We should not consider Wright’s words apart from what they are born of. Nor should we consider it the sum of his ministry. Rev. Moss continued in his statement, highlighting the focus of Wright’s ministry over the past 30 years, which included:

… places for senior citizens, day care for children, pastoral care and counseling, health care, ministries for persons living with H.I.V./AIDS, hospice training, prison ministry, scholarships for thousands of students to attend historically black colleges, youth ministries, tutorial and computer programs, a church library, domestic violence programs, and scholarships and fellowships for women and men attending seminary.

But that is Jeremiah Wright. And Wright is not running for president; Barack Obama is. Should we not be more concerned about $800 billion in new spending Obama has proposed? An exploding welfare state seems to be more of a threat to our republic than the isolated views of a retired pastor.

In a speech this morning in Philadelphia, Democratic presidential hopeful Barack Obama addressed racial division in America and related it to the controversial statements made by his pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright. Obama said he couldn’t “disown” Wright for those statements and added, “But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man.” Blaming anger in black churches on racial injustice throughout American history, Obama said, “The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.”

The New York Times has the complete prepared speech from Obama’s campaign organization.

Whenever Barack Obama’s former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, decides to help Obama, he ends up inflaming the nation with questions of Obama’s patriotism and political beliefs. The latest news: Two controversial sermon quotes, one of Wright saying, “Hillary ain’t never been called a n——er,” and the other saying, “God d—–n America.”

Some say Obama’s associations tell voters what he’s really like. Wright’s rhetoric is miles apart from Obama’s but their personal connection is close. Wright performed Obama’s marriage ceremony, gets credit for the title of Obama’s book, and is Obama’s spiritual mentor.

On The Weekly Standard, Dean Barnett says because voters don’t yet know Obama, “The associations he chooses become relevant.” On National Review’s Corner, John Derbyshire says, “On the campaign trail, Obama has certainly not come across as a white-hating, America-hating black radical. A man can be known, though, by the company he keeps. Obama has been keeping some mighty weird company.” (In Roger Simon’s words, the company of a “racist demagogue.”)

Rod Dreher notes that the link between Obama and Wright is far closer than the link between John McCain and his anti-Catholic endorser, John Hagee. Break down the innuendo and you get this: Obama’s conciliatory rhetoric could be disingenuous. He could be far more radical than he claims.

Another possibility is to believe Obama – that he “deeply disagrees” with some of Wright’s beliefs but that “doesn’t detract” from his admiration for the man whose altar call brought him to Christian belief. If Obama’s conversion experience was the personal, heartfelt experience many evangelicals share, he might be reluctant to publicly repudiate for political purposes the man who facilitated it.

Putting this man in context may be important, too. On God’s Politics, (before Wright’s clips came out), Jim Wallis defended Obama’s faith and called Jeremiah Wright “one of the leading revival preachers in the black church.” Obery M. Hendricks called Wright a “wise, sensitive Christian freedom-fighter” who pastors a church from a mostly white mainstream Christian denomination. Do the views in this particular sermon define Wright, or, in Obama’s words, “the good works he has done”?

See Slate.com for the blog buzz, read Daniel James Devine’s article in the latest WORLD, and join WorldMagBlog’s debate here.