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Analysts said Sunday that Sen. Barack Obama's choice of a new church signaled his desire to build bridges to the white community and religious fundamentalists as he joined a congregation with historic ties to Pilgrims who came to America on the Mayflower to found a Christian nation.
"He's really trying to put all this black separatist baggage down deep in the hold of this historic ship, so to speak, where no one can find it," said Bibby Skollar, a divinity professor at Great Holy Toad Seminary in Atlantis, Ohio. "It'll be interesting to see whether this works."
Just hours after resigning his membership at the notorious, pulpit-pounding, anti-American, Black Liberationist Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, Obama and his wife announced that his family had transferred their membership to Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, part of a mostly white denomination that traces its beginnings to Mayflower Pilgrims.
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"As long as we spin this as Obama rejecting his black roots, we're pretty sure that the religious illiterates who report on politics are too stupid to notice that this is the same church from which he resigned," said an Obama spokesman who spoke on condition of anonymity because that's just the way things are done in politics these days.
"The right wing and our media are so fond of calling America a Christian nation because some of our earliest white settlements were founded by Pilgrims seeking to practice Christianity freely," the spokesman said. "Let's see them try to call Barack unAmerican now that he has joined a Pilgrim church!"
Skollar said the gambit would be risky.
"It's never bad to bet against the intelligence of our news media, but this won't get past all those liberal bloggers who wrung their hands with concern over Obama after they saw a couple of raspy sermons from Jeremiah Wright on the TV or the Youtube," Skollar said. "And it sure won't get past Hillary."
Americans believe that videos and TV news programs are never misleading or deceptive, and many were deeply scarred by videos from Trinity that showed black people whooping it up during loud sermons, Skollar said. These Americans would probably be too skittish to be fooled by Obama's return to the same church, even it's packaged truthfully as belonging to the blue-blooded, lily-white United Church of Christ denomination, she added.
But the Obama spokesman said the plan should work out fine because the United Church of Christ has very few black congregations, unlike the African-Methodist Episcopal denomination, the Church of God in Christ denomination and numerous historically black Baptist denominations.
The United Church of Christ and Unitarians are generally recognized as the two main remnant denominations of the Pilgrims.