By Jeff Sharlet

Dan Gilgoff, politics editor of Beliefnet and author of a definitive and brilliantly titled account of James Dobson’s empire, The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture War, has invited me to be a guest blogger for a week in Beliefnet’s “Casting Stones” forum. Here’s the beginning of my second entry:

It looks like it’s the end of the line for Clinton and the beginning of a new battle for Obama, and that means it’s time for the press to do what it does best — tidy up the tale, craft a chronicle of inevitability, obscure its own role in the political process, and restore the conversation to the reductionist right/left divide it finds easiest to file on. Exhibit A: “Obama Effectively Clinches Nomination,” on Time.com. It’s a sum-up piece, putting Time’s stamp on a sanitized version of how we got from A to B(arack). What I found most fascinating about this story was the scant space it afforded religion in its account of a race that was to no small extent a piety contest between two faith-based Democrats. Here’s what we get, right at the end:

Yet race, religion, region and gender became political fault lines as the two campaigned from coast to coast.Along the way, Obama showed an ability to weather the inevitable controversies, most notably one caused by the incendiary rhetoric of his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

At first, Obama said he could not break with his longtime spiritual adviser. Then, when Wright spoke out anew, Obama reversed course and denounced him strongly.

Wasn’t there an editor around to challenge the passivity of “one caused by,” an update on Nixon’s famous lesson in evasive grammar, “mistakes were made.” The attribution seems off, as well — the Jeremiah Wright controversy was nothing if not a media intervention in the political process. And an oddly chosen one, too, since each of the three candidates had ties to controversial pastors, and Wright was by far the most mainstream, and also the least powerful. Here’s something I wrote awhile back for The New Republic as part of an adaptation from my new book, The Family:

Lost in the hysteria over Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s remarks is the fact that the current race offers a rare snapshot of the three great strands of American political religion. It’s ironic that Wright occupies center stage, since, in the twenty-first century, his is by far the weakest of these–a progressive Christianity which stretches from the Social Gospel to black liberation theology, a big tent of liberal and left religion that’s not very crowded anymore. John McCain’s problem pastor, a Texas pulpit-pounder named John Hagee, stands in for a more familiar faith: populist fundamentalism, a crowd-pleasing mix of hellfire and the kind of prosperity preaching that encourages followers to ante up to the Lord in both spirit and dollars. And then there’s Hillary Clinton’s religion: the third strand of political faith, the least understood and arguably the most powerful.

I went on to write about Hillary’s connection to Doug Coe, the aging head of “The Family,” or “The Fellowship,” a low-profile but influential group of establishmentarian, theological conservatives in Washington. How controversial is Coe? This NBC report on Hillary’s Family ties includes video of Coe preaching on the leadership lessons to be found in the friendship of Hitler, Himmler, and Goebbels. Coe’s not some kind of crypto-Nazi; he’s an admirer of strength, Christ’s greatest virtue in his teaching, and sees it best exemplified in strongmen. (Beliefnetregular David Kuo, for whom I have a lot of respect, says Coe’s Hitler talk is just a metaphor. To which the only response is: He couldn’t find a better metaphor for Jesus than Hitler?)

But despite NBC’s amplification and articles in Mother Jones and The New Republic, that story never got traction. Nor did the Hagee story in any serious way, until blogger Bruce Wilson put the kibosh on Hagee with his audio of a Hagee sermon praising… Hitler. (What is it with Hitler? The Christian Right needs a course in metaphors, not miracles.) Even then, it was a minor story, and McCain and Hagee were allowed to part ways with no real damage done.

But Wright — the press could not let that pass. Hagee’s sphere of influence includes a couple million fans who are as hungry for war with Iran as John McCain. Doug Coe, whom Hillary calls a “genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide,” has long played the role of matchmaker between foreign dictators and American power, from Asia’s worst strongman of the late 20th century, Suharto, to Somalia’s lunatic nation-killer Siad Barre, to the death squad leaders of Central America (as first noted by the LA Times’ Lisa Getter).

Jeremiah Wright? He has a working and middle class church in Chicago. Love him or hate him, there’s no denying that he’s not a major player in the power politics of religion.

And yet, the press made him one, only to smack him down. He filled a role they recognized: “angry black man.” Their obsession with him a few months ago — and the way they’ll ignore him and the role they cast him in now that Obama has all but secured the nomination — is evidence of the media’s religious illiteracy. There’s a sense in which the whole narrative was driven by the boneheaded sentiment expressed by Tucker Carlson: “many black churches are basically political organizations.” You could see Carlson’s confusion after he got hammered for that remark – he knows that passes as conventional wisdom among members of the political press corp.
Wright, for much of the press, represented a bogeyman that might be called — if they were honest with themselves — “black politics.” By bringing Wright to the fore only to maul him, they were, in effect, performing an exorcism — calling out “black politics” from Obama’s past and then destroying them. The new media narrative, in which the Wright controversy will go down as a speed bump on the path to power, is evidence that they believe they have rid the candidate of his demons. But all they really did was banish any serious conversation about relationship between religion and politics – the good, the bad, and the ugly — from the public square…
Continue reading at Casting Stones.