Motivation, expectations matter in church dilemma

As part of the Newsweek/Washington Post online conversation “On Faith,” J. Brent Walker posted this response to the question, “Should Barack Obama have resigned from his church?”

Only Sen. Obama and his family can make that decision. If he believes he no longer can worship at Trinity United Church of Christ in good conscience and needs to find a new church home, that’s his call. But I hope he does not feel impelled to resign his church membership for political reasons alone.

In the spirit of the no religious test clause in Article VI of the Constitution, we should give our candidates for president (and other offices) a lot of leeway in determining where they worship and who their spiritual leaders will be. It is wrong, through guilt-by-association tactics, to strap a candidate with isolated, out-of-context statements of preachers. All the more in the case of a former pastor (Rev. Wright) and a visiting preacher (Fr. Pfleger) at a time when Sen. Obama was not even present.

I have been a member of seven Baptist churches led by 12 pastors. Every one of them has said in sermons and written in articles thing I disagree with — sometimes vociferously. If a preacher is doing his or her job — preaching prophetically much of the time — their words can be controversial and sometimes outrageous. That does not mean that I embrace everything I heard or vitiate their spiritual tutelage in my life. It also does not mean I leave the church every time something controversial is spoken from the pulpit.

The same is true of Sen. Obama. He emphatically has repudiated the inflammatory remarks made from the pulpit of his home church. However, to make him suffer a political penalty unless he denounces the person and changes his church membership is to expect too much. By the way, the same would go for Sens. Clinton and McCain.