The New Yorker is currently running an interesting articleabout Reverend Wright and Trinity United Church of Christ by Kelefa Sanneh.
For those who've done their own research about the topic or who have been following the issue closely, there is not a whole lot of new information, but it's a good general source of information to point to in case you know others who are still uninformed on these issues.
Sanneh does a fine job (in good New Yorker style) of interweaving several relevant topics: Wright's background; the history of Trinity; Black Liberation Theology within Christianity; Obama's role in the Church; and the reaction of the church and the parishioners to the recent flap.
One interesting part deals with the tension between Black Liberation Christianity and the Nation of Islam (sometimes creative tension, sometimes competitive). Of James Cone, one of the founding voices of BLT, Sanneh writes:
There was, for Cone, another motivating force in the rise of black liberation theology. In black neighborhoods across America, the spiritual marketplace was getting crowded, and churches seemed in danger of being edged out. Politically inclined young people who wanted no part of "the white man’s religion" could turn instead to Marxism, or to various strains of black-nationalist thought, or to Elijah Muhammad’s Nation of Islam, the group that groomed Malcolm X. Cone found himself on the wrong side of a growing divide—as he puts it, "We were Martin Luther King, Jr., people"—and he realized that not just the sales pitch but the product had to be changed; the urgency in his prose reflected his anger but also his fear that the black Church was becoming obsolete.
We already know that the "Obama is a secret Muslim" story is ridiculous, but in a sense, this passage sheds some light on how it might be that Wright's church (and others like it) might have found common ground on some issues with the NoI.
There's some great stuff (although I wished for more) on Wright's history as a political agitator (hanging a "Free South Africa" banner on the Church in '77), and a lucid discussion of what Wright and others mean by black and Africa-centered Christianity.
One of the more interesting paragraphs comes at the beginning of the second page. Sanneh starts the whole piece off by describing this year's Good Friday celebrations, which included seven pastors from different churches (including a white Catholic priest) giving sermons. Some of them lean a little heavily on the crucifixion metaphor when discussing Wright. Then Sanneh writes:
The hints of modern-day crucifixion may have been, in part, Holy Week hyperbole, designed to rouse the indignation of congregants who dislike hearing their church criticized. But there’s no denying the intensity of the media barrage. In a bipartisan display of umbrage, commentators on television and online have largely agreed that Wright is nutty, or insane, or worse. And because the Democratic primary schedule has a big hole in it—six weeks separate Pennsylvania from Mississippi—the tale of the Chicago pastor who said "God damn America" was for an excruciatingly long time the biggest political story in the country. While Good Friday worshippers were making their way out of the marathon service, Bill O’Reilly was preparing his seventh straight television program devoted, at least in part, to the Wright affair.
I find in here the seeds of a potential backlash against this whole affair. At it's heart, Trinity is a good, progressive, hard-working Christian church. A whole congregation of Christians have been made to suffer because of two minutes of looped sound bites. The more people find out the truth, it's possible that Trinity congregants won't be the only ones who "dislike hearing their church criticized," but other Christians in general as well as those among us (myself included) with little to no religious inclination. While the O'Reillys and Hannitys of the world are flapping their gums about this ad nauseum, let's hope that more and more people will wake up to the truth behind this whole issue.