The emergence of tapes of Barack Obama's minister, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, delivering sermons which harshly condemn the United States, and suggest that 9/11 reflected "the chickens coming home to roost," have created the biggest crisis of Obama's political career. Had the tapes comes to light earlier in the campaign, they might have derailed Obama's candidacy. Even at this late date in the campaign season they have put his campaign squarely on the defensive, and play into deepseated fears in the white community that a black president cannot adequately represent all the American people. They also feed the urban myth, spewed over the internet, that somehow Obama lacks patriotism, and that if in office, he would pursue a black, retributive agenda rather than one that seeks the common good. Such questions have been part of a whispering campaign against Obama since the beginning of the primary season, and are now being asked loudly by his critics.

An interview done on "60 Minutes" by Steve Kroft with citizens from southern Ohio, illustrates perfectly the unease that a segment of white America has had with the Obama candidacy long before they ever heard of Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Here is Kroft, prior to the Ohio primary, asking one blue-collar worker who he planned to vote for:

Man: I'm leaning toward Obama. [but] there's a couple issues with him I'm not too clear on.

Kroft: Which issues?

Man: Well I'm hearing that he doesn't even know the National Anthem. He wouldn't use the Holy Bible. He's got his own beliefs, the Muslim beliefs. A couple issues that bothers me at heart...

When Kroft informed him that none of those things were true, the man seemed genuinely startled. While I would doubt that the interviewee actually voted for Obama anyway, the release of the Wright tapes will have almost certainly fueled his fears, as well as causing many serious individuals to ask how Obama could have associated himself with Pastor Wright for so long. A cottage industry has developed to explain this issue. Didn't Obama know that Pastor Wright's views were a ticking time bomb? Doesn't their relationship cast doubt upon Obama's judgment after all?

The worst analysis I've heard of the Obama/Wright relationship was the one put forth by William Kristol and Juan Williams on Fox News Sunday. Here is Kristol:

....he just joined the largest church in the area for political reasons, for opportunistic reasons....

Here is Juan Williams:

.... he joined the church to solidify his credentials as authentically black, because it is the largest church in South Chicago....he exploited it up to a point....it speaks to his character and his judgment.

These bits of analysis are well off the mark, for several reasons. First, Obama began going to Trinity United Church of Christ in 1987, before he had even gone to law school. At that time, Obama was hardly--as Kristol and Williams suggest--a politician on the make, but rather a young man searching to find himself and his place in the world. At the time, he was working as a community organizer, was dealing with many pastors in the Chicago area, and was preparing to leave Chicago for Harvard Law School. For Obama, Trinity was not a source of racial polarization as many now see it; rather it was a unifying presence in the community, a place where the black middle class sat next to laborers, where those who ran the school system sat next to those who struggled within it, where black intellectuals worshiped along with those who were still mastering their reading skills.

It was during one of Obama's first visits to the church when he heard Wright sermonize about a painting by British Victorian artist George Frederic Watts, called "Hope." The painting shows a bruised and battered woman sitting atop the globe with a harp that has lost all but one string. The world below her is in disrepair, and she has fared no better. After describing the many hardships that beset the many members of his congregation, Wright intoned:

And yet consider again the painting before us....a few faint notes floating upward to the heavens...She dares to hope.... She has the audacity....to make music...and praise God...on the one string... she has left.

Obama writes in his book "Dreams from My Father" about this moment:

As the choir lifted back up into song, as the congregation began to applaud those who were walking up to the altar to accept Reverend Wright's call, I felt a light touch on the top of my hand. I looked down to see the older of two boys sitting beside me, his face slightly apprehensive as he handed me a pocket tissue. Beside him his mother glanced at me with a faint smile before turning back to the altar. It was only as I thanked the boy that I felt the tears running down my cheeks.

This, not the crass political calculation proffered by Kristol and Williams, is the essence of Obama's bond with the Trinity United Church of Christ. For Obama, it is the fact that Trinity backs up its rhetoric with action. It provides care for the elderly, offers hospice care, money for college bound students, charity for historically black colleges (many of which have fallen on hard times), is an important source of anti-drug work in the community, and serves as a support and resource center for ex-prisoners trying to make their way back into society. That is what drew the then skeptical Obama to this place of worship. And it was this church that helped Obama find his identity as a black man in society. Wright became a mentor and a father figure for Obama, who had never really known his own father. And I suspect that if we knew the Wright that Obama knew, removed from the pulpit, rather than the caricature drawn from YouTube videos, he would emerge as a far more compelling individual than the ranting figure in the tapes.

My point is a simple one, that understanding the work of a church and a minister through a handful of YouTube excerpts hardly does justice to the entirety of the work of that church. Just as a Catholic can attend services and derive great spiritual uplift, while still leaving behind the messages of homophobia, sexism, and archaic views on sexuality, so I believe that Obama got the same kind of uplift from Wright, while forgoing the over the top rhetoric and appeals to race. It may be that Obama, like his Republican counterpart Mitt Romney, will feel obligated to give a broad address, explaining his almost familial closeness to Reverend Wright, explaining the overwhelmingly positive work of his church, while also explaining the ways in which Obama's and Wright's political views differ. If he does, he might want to start with one of the eloquent passages from his book "Dreams of My Father":

And if a part if me continued to feel that this Sunday communion sometimes simplified our condition, that it could sometimes disguise or suppress the very real conflicts among us and would fulfill its promise only through action, I also felt for the first time how that spirit carried within it, nascent, incomplete, the possibility of moving beyond our narrow dreams.

"The audacity of hope!" I still remember my grandmother, singing in the house, "There's a bright side somewhere...don't rest till you find it."