As the hubbub over Barack Obama’s association with Rev. Jeremiah Wright dies down, the time has come to reflect on our bizarre and contradictory understanding of the role of religion in public life. 

When Obama’s name first floated into the homes of wealthy, educated American Jews, there was quite a to-do over the fact that this guy who was pretty much a Muslim might soon be our President.  What would he do about Israel?  Was he to be trusted?  Didn’t we just want a good ol’ reliable Christian in the White House?  Obama was forced to publicly declare that of course he was not a Muslim, god forbid.  (It was pretty embarrassing for the Jewish community.)

Then, as the Wright scandal progressed, it became clear that the church of Jeremiah Wright was not at all “safe.”  We were dubious of Obama’s connection to a man who spewed such anti-American vitriol.  But we were comforted when Obama explained that Wright was of another generation, a generation that had been beaten down and had found in the church a place to express its feelings of abandonment and mistreatment.  It was just civil rights stuff and nothing to worry about, Obama said. 

But then Wright kept saying the stuff he had been saying before, and everyone got up in arms about it because…well…it was one thing if he’d said stuff like that before, but honestly, could he just say whatever he wanted whenever he wanted?  However, evidently, we were satisfied by Obama’s public breakup with Wright (or else someone else might be the forerunner now). 

Did we learn anything at all from this?  Can we perhaps glean that just as the Christian church is not homogenous, neither is the Muslim one?  Can we say firmly that Obama’s religious affiliation as Christian or Muslim or whatever is such a wide-ranging descriptive that it’s effectively meaningless?  Or do we still think that it matters?  Do we need to find out that Obama is actually affiliated with some unsavory Jewish sect before we will get it? 

And as for Obama’s apologetic defense of Wright’s past statements—well, we found that compelling, right?  No one (except maybe Bill Cosby) can deny that black American men have had it pretty bad.  Wright said (and says) things that are a product of the circumstances of his upbringing.  We might not want Wright to be President, and yet we are willing to accept that Obama could sit in his church and walk out and say what he says about hope and uniting across racial lines for a better country and, y’know, mean it.  I’m willing to wager we would not make the same concessions for a Muslim President who sat for a couple decades in a mosque with a heady imam speaking about the way America has poisoned the Middle East.      

I guess Jesus does matter, after all.