Media Matters has a good write up on Tucker Carlson on February 9, stating that Obama’s church “contradicts the basic tenets of Christianity,” and “sounds speratist.”
Trinity United Church of Christ follows a tenant called The Black Value System, which, in essence, tasks members to be hard working, self-reliant, believe in God, and give back to the community. Carlson and others in the Right Wing Media fuss that because the message is aimed at and tailored for the Black community, it is racist. However, Trinity is well within the mainstream of black churches, as The Christian Century explains:
When the first criticisms of Obama’s church came to the senator’s attention, he seemed genuinely perplexed. He converted to Christianity at Trinity, responding to one of Wright’s altar calls, weeping beneath an old wooden cross as he promised to follow Jesus. He told the Chicago Tribune: “I would be puzzled that they would object or quibble with the bulk of a document [the Black Value System] that basically espouses profoundly conservative values of self-reliance and self-help.”
Dwight Hopkins, a member of Trinity and a professor at the University of Chicago Divinity School, argues that the church is within the mainstream of black churches and as such is socially conservative. Its emphasis on education harkens back to the days when black parents worked two and three jobs to educate their children, since schooling was one thing “they can’t take from you.” Moss, noting the church’s tutoring, SAT preparation and scholarship programs, said, “We place more African-American students in college than any other organization in Chicago.” Hopkins pointed to the church’s annual marriage retreat, in which “500 black couples study the Bible’s views on marriage together,” as more evidence of the church’s focus on traditional concerns: the Bible and the family. Obama himself believes that he could explain the Black Value System to people in Iowa and “get a few Amens.”
