IS TRINITY A RACIST AFRICAN AMERICAN CHURCH OR A "WARM AND ACCEPTING" CHURCH COMMUNITY WHERE ALL RACES ARE "ENTHUSIASTICALLY WELCOMED"

Congregants Said Trinity Was "A Warm and Accepting Community." The New York Times reported, "On blogs and cable news shows, conservative critics have called it separatist and antiwhite. Congregants respond by saying critics are misreading the church's tenets, that it is a warm and accepting community and is not hostile to whites." [New York Times, 4/30/07]

Religion Historian: At Trinity, "My Wife And I On Occasion Attend, And, Like All Other Non-Blacks, Are Enthusiastically Welcomed." University of Chicago's Martin Marty, a historian of modern Christianity. wrote, "Trinity is the largest congregation in the whole United Church of Christ, the ex-Congregational (think Jonathan Edwards) and Reformed (think Reinhold Niebuhr) mainline church body. Trinity's rubric is "Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian." So far as I can tell Trinity shapes a kind of ellipse around these two "centers," neither of which makes sense without the other. This you would never know from the slanders of its enemies or the incomprehension and naiveté of some reporters who lack background in the civil rights and African-American movements of several decades ago — a background out of which Trinity's stirrings first rose and on which it transformatively trades...More important, for Trinity, being 'unashamedly black' does not mean being 'anti-white. My wife and I on occasion attend, and, like all other non-blacks, are enthusiastically welcomed." [Martin Marty, 4/2/07]

Keywords: Barack Obama, Racist, Black, African American, Trinity United Church of Christ, Chicago, Religion, Christian, Faith, Race, Africa

TRINITY TENETS ARE "TAKEN DIRECTLY FROM SCRIPTURE" AND EMPHASIZE "COMMITMENT" TO GOD, COMMUNITY, FAMILY, WORK, SELF-DISCIPLINE AND SELF-RESPECT

Obama Says Black Values System Must Be Understood as a Whole. "Obama said it was important to understand the document as a whole rather ...