Racism and the ethnic double standard trying to nail the Black church to the cross, attempt to crucify him.

A Black Methodist Minister wasn’t caught off-guard by the national furor triggered by snippets of a few of the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

Like many of the nation’s Black pastors, whether titans in the pulpit or freshly minted theologians of color aspiring to leadership of the Black community’s most enduring and endearing institution, the Rev. Laurel Scott said it was clear that despite the strides made since the days the civil rights movement, whites and blacks remained apart on the issue of race and the role of the Black Church.

“The Black Church,” she said, “is the protector of community and of people’s rights and often serves as the conscience or neighborhoods, large and small. Obviously, the Black Church isn’t simply a place of sermons, baptisms, funeral services, weddings and other forms of Christian worship. It is the voice of those who are oppressed and those who are seeking relief.”

That’s explains why the Church in African-American and Caribbean communities is proliferating at a time when many of the major religious houses of worship are scaling back their presence in many of those same neighborhoods. That’s particularly true of the Roman Catholic Church across the nation. It’s also one of the many reasons why Blacks see nothing wrong with the general tone of the Rev. Wright’s controversial sermon in which he said, among other things, that Obama’s main political rival for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, Senator Hillary Clinton, was a member of America’s “White establishment,” reminding her that she “ain’t never been called a n...ger.” He also referred to the 9/11 attacks that killed thousands of innocent people as “America’s chickens coming home to roost;” and added “God damn America... for killing innocent people.”

The reaction from White America was both swift and harshly judgmental. Senator Obama, a long-standing worshipper at Trinity on the Southside of Chicago, saw his national popularity slide, simply because he didn’t repudiate the Rev. Wright fast enough by leaving the church. In addition, there were strong criticisms of the Pastor, who was called everything from a demon and a devil to a hate-monger and an unpatriotic citizen who should leave the United States if he felt that way about “America the beautiful.”

Although Senator Obama vigorously and repeatedly disassociate himself from Wright’s sentiments, that was far from being enough for political pundits and editorial writers for major newspapers and magazines, not to mention radio and television commentators . They began predicting the presidential candidate’s political death and if times had not changed dramatically from the 1930s and 1940s, when the lynching of Blacks was commonplace, the Rev. Wright, a religious figure, would have had to worry about his safety from a white lynch mob.

What was interesting was that whites and their conservative mouthpieces in the media didn’t stop to look at Wright the preacher and the role of the Black Church.

If they had, they would have seen him as a person who during his extensive ministry fought to end poverty across the nation; battled for elimination of racist laws or practices in schools, government, and the private sector and in various walks of life. They would also have been mindful of his sermons of hope for the uninsured, whether white or Black, who are unable to gain access to high quality health care; his battles for the civil rights and for compassion for HIV victims; and for improved education for the children of the poor.

Instead, the conservatives and their allies in and out of the media focused on less than 30 seconds of thousands of sermons delivered by the Rev. Wright.

Their goal: to play on the deep seated racial fears of the whites who were beginning to feel comfortable with Obama’s message of hope and change. In the process, the detractors deliberately and hypocritically re-opened the gulf between whites and Blacks. Even some Blacks couldn’t help but wonder why Wright had uttered “such incendiary” statements.

But what many people failed to remember was that the Black Church has always inveighed against unfairness in society and historically has sought to ease the pain felt by Blacks, who in President Bill Clinton’s words had been brutalized by “America’s curse,” racism.

The much revered, the Rev. Dr Martin Luther King, in whose name and memory the country has named a national holiday, often used even harsher words to describe the abysmal social and economic conditions under which Blacks had to live in the 1960s. Dr. King and other major religious leaders were joined on the picket lines in the battle against many of the same prejudices of which Wright spoke.

But that’s not all. Hypocrisy laced the call of whites on Obama to leave the church. They didn’t demand that whites leave the Catholic Church when it suffered because of sexual abuse of children by white priests. They didn’t ask for an apology from President George Bush for fraternizing with the leaders of Bob Jones University and other evangelical schools and churches which barred whites and Blacks from marrying. And when Pope Benedict spoke harshly against gays and the use of contraceptives, we didn’t hear any calls for a mass exodus from the pews.

There were few, if any, calls on the 2008 Republican Presidential standard-bear Senator John McCain to ditch the backing of a major Republican evangelical minister who said, with a straight face, sometime ago that the hundreds of people who lost their lives in New Orleans died because God has supposedly victimized them in order to turn them from their ways of life.

It was clear: One law for the Medes and another for the Persians.

It was alright for white Catholics to disagree with the Pope and for an evangelical minister to speak nonsense and voice racist thoughts, but Blacks weren’t allowed to disagree with their pastors and remain in the church.

If Obama made a mistake in all of this, it was certainly his earlier refusal to vociferously condemn Wright. Instead, it was his 2004 address to the National Democratic Convention where he said “there is not a Black America and a White America. There’s the United States of America”

The events of the past few days have probably showed him he has quite a lot of work to do.