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What does political theology describe that at the same time eludes political theory? Political theology begins with the existential, and thus pre-legal, moment of revolution and sacrifice to make sense of modern political experience; for revolution, as a form of war, entails sacrifice. That is to say, in war, sovereignty, or preserving the life of the people at all costs, is affirmed. But at the origins of political experience, life, or society, is not merely defended. In the beginning, or, in theological language, at the “Creation” of sovereignty, the community of the living is constituted, as are the structures put in place so that it can be maintained. This constituting moment is called revolution. It is the exceptional moment, the moment of the (declared) exception, the moment of (popular) sovereignty.

But is this just an example of an incomplete break from “premodern forms of religious influence on political order”? No, says Kahn: political theology argues instead for “the discovery of the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies upon God. [It] argues that secularization, as the displacement of the sacred from the world of experience, never won, even though the church may have lost. The politics of the modern nation-state indeed rejected the church but simultaneously offered a new site of sacred experience.”

Here we are at the heart of Kahn’s argument. Indeed, it is the key point that Kahn insists must be taken away from Carl Schmitt’s classic Political Theology: Four Chapters on Sovereignty, around which his own book is structured. First published in 1922, at the dawn of the Weimar era in Germany and on the heels of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which effectively subordinated Germany to England and France (its two main rival European powers) and stripped it of its colonial holdings—forcibly rendering it, as one theorist has said, “a postcolonial state in a still colonial world”—Schmitt’s Political Theology offered an account of contemporary political experience given the crisis of (German) sovereignty, or the collapse of German peoplehood. Schmitt saw this moment of political crisis as an existential crisis tantamount to death, and as a threat to which liberal political theory as such could not respond. Surrounded by perceived enemies without (its revival European and imperial competitors) and within (the Jew as abject), Germany faced an existential crisis that could be summed up in the Shakespearean phrase: “to be or not to be . . . .” Thus, Schmitt took the question of the political to be at best only secondarily a question of law or constitutionalism. It was principally a question, rather, of authenticity, of being. Hence, “the political,” as Kahn explains, “begins with the distinction of friends from enemies. This is a world in which subjecthood—who you are—makes all the difference.” Schmitt understood that the future of Europe would develop in accordance with such a concept of the political.

Kahn’s objective is to seize upon Schmitt’s deepest insights precisely at this juncture. Now, while I wish he would have done more reflection on the issue of identity (i.e., identity as subject and object, and even more, as abject, as Jews came to be figured within the political field, of which he says nothing at all; I will return to this below), Kahn is surely right to attend to this part of the Schmittian description of politics, sovereignty, and the exception in his effort “to develop a political theology for our [post-Cold War, post-September 11] time.”

When political theology takes the Western political imagination as its object of inquiry—in Schmitt’s case, post-World War I Germany; in Kahn’s and our case, the United States in the age of the war on terror—what is discovered? Kahn argues that one finds an imagination of the exception, or of exceptionalism, as a practice of “ultimate meaning.” Exceptionalism functions within a political and social imaginary fueled by a quest to secure national life by holding at bay an imagined death (think of the ticking time bomb scenario, which the television series 24 put on cinematic display) at the hands of a perpetual if undefined enemy.

This imaginary thus includes as a basic possibility the suspension of law and the use of violence. Exceptionalism, in other words, functions within an imaginary that rests, beyond the rule of law, on the sovereignty of the people, which, before being legal, is first and always existential, a sovereignty that decides who lives and who must die for the sake of life itself, or the preservation of the people. Within this framework for understanding modern political experience, sovereignty is what enables law (not the other way round) and law is shaped by sovereignty, which, as a logic of sacrifice, is invested in securing life over death—by means of death.

The experience of political sovereignty for the sake of life over death, or for the sake of the life that at all costs must stave off death, exceeds theory and discourse. It is a matter of authenticity and freedom, through which the sacred—our own sacredness—appears in history. This is what political theology describes as it looks back to the originary moment of sovereignty, and it is what liberal or political theory cannot describe, and cannot describe because of what might be thought of as its own melancholic disavowal and reinscription of its origins.

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From my perspective as a theologian and critical theorist of religion, one of the great gifts of Kahn’s book, as a constructive interaction with Schmitt on the notion of the exception, are the possibilities that it opens up for understanding what’s at stake in the discourse of theology as a mode of humanistic inquiry into the current political machinations of our world, and of America as a state of exception/alism. With Kahn we begin to understand why theology ought not to be reduced to being the parochial or fideistic pursuit of like-minded, if at times fractious, believers and increasingly inconsequential theologians, though far too often, certainly, it is this too. As Carl Schmitt once said, in a letter to Jacob Taubes, “everything is theological, except what the theologians are talking about.” Zeroing in on the heart of Schmitt’s thinking about the political (despite that he put his insights to fascist ends), Kahn calls attention to the form of political life that is coordinated with Christian theological and doctrinal ideas. And it’s worth saying again that I speak of the Christianity that has been collapsed into the project of West. Kahn has put his finger on how the political in which we have come to “live and move and have our being,” as St. Paul put it (Acts 17:28), is a theological field, a field, as I would put it, whose deepest operations remain “Christian”  (again, as it came to be bound up with Western hegemony), though it functions between the denial and the forgetfulness of its ongoing theological being.

Political theology refuses to dwell in such forgetfulness and denial. It attends to sovereignty as the alpha and omega of modern political experience.  It calls attention to the moment of destruction and construction, the moment of apocalyptic eschatology and sovereign creation, that lies at the heart of lived political experience, an experience that also lays claim to the sacred. The political is a sacred field. Inasmuch as it is a correlate of Christian theology, it sovereignly posits itself as “a joint community of gods and men” (Cicero), the community of the God-Man. This is the moment of sovereignty, the constitutive moment of We the People.

Moreover, political theology understands that mediating between eschatology (the telos of such a community) and creation (its origin), between death (as a threat to the community) and life (as its preservation at all costs), is atoning sacrifice. Therefore, atonement is at the heart of the political. Kahn notes, “Our tradition of the theological—in both its religious and political forms has always modeled that double moment of destruction and creation as sacrifice. Sacrifice has been our tradition in the democratic revolutions of the past, on the battlefields of the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and perhaps now in the sites of confrontation with the terrorist.”

Kahn’s final chapter brings the argument home by turning to the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac. This story of sacrifice is the singular narrative of the preservation of the father(-land) in the person of Abraham and the appearance of the divine or the sacred in history to authorize or legitimate self-preservation. History, Kahn notes, unfolds as sovereign sacrifice for sake of the life of the people. This biblical story is at the root of modern politics. It portrays our politics as a politics of sacrifice, which is to say, as a politics that carries out a logic of atoning death to preserve the nation. It is a story in which the human is conceived of as fundamentally a sacrificial animal, a being caught within a kind of “death contract” (Abdul JanMohamed), or within a politics that is always and fundamentally a “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe).

Theologically, this way of understanding the story of the sacrifice of Isaac eventually became a hermeneutical key for interpreting the death of Jesus Christ, who in classical Christian thought is the God-Man, the head of the ecclesial community. In this way, modern political experience, as the experience of sovereignty, acquired footing in the life of Jesus Christ (i.e., Christology) and in his death (i.e., soteriology, or atonement theory). All of this is to say that death is a most strange political gift, as we have learned from Jacques Derrida, a gift in dialectical relationship with life.

To grasp the deep architecture of the political today, therefore, is to venture into the theological domains of Christology and especially atonement, that area of theology (particularly, Christian theology) that deals with the logic of (redemptive) death. But the journey cannot be simply phenomenological in the way Kahn carries it out. Or, put differently, it may need to be phenomenological, but in a way that Kahn himself has not considered. Atonement thinking, and the “death contract” that binds politics, must, from within a different phenomenology (and therefore from within a different approach to political theology), be redirected. There must be a new future of death and the political.

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I have only scratched the surface of Kahn’s richly provocative and, indeed, on so many levels, clarifying text, mainly in celebration of what he has accomplished in it. But I have also just suggested that we must not rest with his phenomenology of the political. I want to conclude with a few thoughts meant to gesture toward what I mean.

Earlier I mentioned that I wish Kahn would have reflected more on the issue of identity formation (i.e., the making of subjects, objects, and abjects) in the constitution and in the telos of the politico-theological field of political experience. This is an important matter, for it provokes the question of what an account of modern political experience, generally, and U.S. exceptionalism, particularly, might look like if it were tied to actual bodies in the world. It is precisely here that Kahn’s account of political theology does not go far enough.

For the most part, Kahn carries out his fine analysis of political theology from a vantage point that privileges those constituted as subjects in the political field of the sovereign We the People. What might a politico-theological examination of the political look like if it were carried out from the vantage of those constructed as “enemy,” or, moreover, (and this is what I’m most interested in) from the vantage of those deemed “abject”?

My colleague Rey Chow (see The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism), drawing on Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, and others, notes that abject is that which is neither wholly a part of the body nor wholly apart from it. Examples of abject substances are tears, saliva, feces, and urine. In terms of political theology as a description of the field of the political, the abject is neither friend (subject) nor enemy (object). The abject exists in the zone between life (full citizenship) and death (the enemy as one who must be killed). As with tears and similar substances that are never fully expelled from the body but that it rather produces as waste matter to maintain itself as a “clean and proper body,” so too is the abject within the field of political theology. Thus, even more than the enemy, it is the abject, as that which is produced in order to maintain the cleanliness and propriety of the body politic, that might prove to be key in understanding the field of the political as a sacred field of sacrificial sovereignty.

Thus, the abject is a figure neither of life nor of death but of living death, or, as Orlando Patterson has put it, of “social death.” This space in-between is both a precarious space of brutality and a flexible space that can be the harbinger of new possibilities. Kathleen McKittrick, in her work on black women in modern social space, has called this “the space between the legs” (see Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle). It is a space that crushes, but also a space that functions as a “loophole of retreat” (Harriet Jacobs), where the project of the human is carried out in a different key. In its flexibility, it is the space of the death of death itself and the space of new human life. The quintessential figure of this political space is the figure of the slave, modernity’s abject par excellence. Could it be that this is the sacrificial figure, along with this figure’s unassimilable progeny, who actually funds sovereignty or peoplehood in the making or constitution of normalized social and political space? And could it be that this is the figure who offers an alternative site, a space “to be” politically otherwise?

Most accounts of political theology today do not approach the political from the vantage of abjection. A qualified exception—no pun intended—can be found in the work of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben, however, theorizes the homo sacer (the abject) as passive, without agency, and therefore does not consider the possibility of an agency particular to the homo sacer—an agency through death itself. Put somewhat differently, death, according to Agamben, is that which acts upon the homo sacer, and not that through which it acts to risk transforming the political structure and experience of death itself. It is perhaps this mode of “abject agency” that Frederick Douglass, to cite but one example, gave voice to in his 1845 Narrative, in which, after his fight with Covey, he declared a “resurrection” of the abject self in the transformed subjectivity of the slave with the words, “I rose.”

My point in positing this other possibility is to suggest that the political experience of abjection, as a mode of being politically otherwise, can supplement, if not reorient, Agamben’s as well as Kahn’s (and others’) work on political theology. But for Kahn to have pulled off a phenomenology of this sort, one that begins with the lived experience of abjection and incorporates the friend-enemy-abject distinction as it has been pressed into the flesh, he would have needed a different set of interlocutors. Among these could have been transnational black intellectuals (or similarly positioned figures), a number of them contemporaries of Schmitt, who in thinking in terms of their own position of abjection, and the position of black folks more broadly in the socio-political and cultural world of modernity, were themselves engaged in reflections on political theology, though many of them did not use the term “political theology” to describe what they were doing. They had to think and act from within what W. E. B. Du Bois often referred to, in an allusion to the psalmist of the Hebrew Bible, as “the Valley of the Shadow Death.”

Besides Du Bois and Douglass, in this group we find thinkers like Olaudah Equiano and Phyllis Wheatley, David Walker and Maria Stewart, and others like Richard Wright and Caribbean intellectuals Amié Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Édouard Glissant, and, contemporarily, Sylvia Wynter, Paul Gilroy, and Toni Morrison. This tradition of wide-ranging thinkers has approached the concerns of political theology, concerns over sovereignty in the creation and telos of the field of the political in colonial modernity (which of course is not apart from the field of the social and the cultural), from the sites of abjection and “social death.” Such abject sites are those of the slave ship, the transatlantic slave routes, the slave plantation, the black body itself, or what Fanon called “the lived experience of the black.” These were the sites where sacrificial sovereignty, or normalized peoplehood, was constituted—and contested—in modernity. These were sites of the death-world—the excremental sites, wastelands, archipelagoes (Wynter), and uninhabitable zones of under- and uneven development that helped maintain and regulate Western political life-worlds, worlds like the United States and the European metropoles.

In providing phenomenological descriptions of political sovereignty from the vantage point of abjection, black intellectuals of the sort just named have been involved in a project similar to the one Kahn embarks upon in Political Theology. They have been about the task of both describing and renarrating death, of trying to think toward a new future of atonement and therefore toward a new future of the political itself.

Perhaps the next horizon of political theology as a mode of inquiry is to learn from these and similar kinds of intellectuals. Perhaps it is to begin the work of political theology (understood as a phenomenology of the political) neither from the subject (the citizen) nor the object (the enemy), but from the abject (the one who is “both-and” and “neither-nor”). Until then, we have been given much to think about with Paul W. Kahn’s fine and timely book.

While Palin eschews the Pentecostal label, she spent her youth in a congregation affiliated with the Assemblies of God. Though Palin joined a non-Pentecostal church in 2002, she has maintained close ties to the movement, attending the AG-affiliated Juneau Christian Center when in Alaska’s capital city. In June of 2008, Governor Palin spoke at a graduation ceremony at her childhood church, the Wasilla Assembly of God. Captured in a pair of videos available on You Tube, the overtly supernatural language used by Palin and Pastor Ed Kalnins has evoked fear and incomprehension in progressive journalists and bloggers. Zeroing in on the parts of the video that connect divine intervention with the state of Alaska, they have scrutinized Palin’s prayer for a $30 billion natural gas pipeline, as well as Kalnins’ claim that Alaska will be a “refuge state” during the coming apocalypse. Also raising eyebrows is the governor’s relationship with an African cleric linked to an anti-witchcraft crusade. This past June, Palin recalled how Bishop Thomas Muthee prayed over her, calling his words “bold” and “awesome.” A 2005 video shows Muthee laying hands on Palin, praying that “every form of witchcraft . . . will be rebuked in the name of Jesus.”

While Sarah Palin’s connection to Bishop Muthee is indisputable, other claims about her religious background are far more speculative. Playing a Pentecostal version of the Kevin Bacon game, some have linked Palin to such controversial movements as the Latter Rain of the 1940s and the so-called Third Wave. Because the Pentecostal-Charismatic movement remains a loose network of congregations, parachurch groups, and denominations, this connect-the-dots approach reveals some interesting associations. What it does not show is how much Governor Palin has internalized the beliefs and ideologies of these movements and leaders. This past June, Palin said, “There’s been so many words, Ed, over the state of Alaska,” implying that she shared Pastor Kalnins’ belief in Alaska’s prophetic destiny. Yet Palin left the Wasilla Assembly of God in 2002, three years into Kalnins’ pastorate.  It is unclear whether she was comfortable with the new direction he was taking the church.

Research by the sociologist Margaret Poloma suggests that the sorts of religious phenomena that have worried progressive bloggers are relatively uncommon in the Assemblies of God. According to a 1999 survey only a minority of AG pastors have “regularly experienced prophecy, healing, deliverance” or other dramatic manifestations of the Holy Spirit. Over eighty percent have never or rarely experienced holy laughter. While these findings say nothing about Palin or the churches she has attended, they suggest that anxiety over Pentecostalism in American culture is somewhat misplaced.

Lost in the discussion of Sarah Palin’s religion is an appreciation for the diversity of American Pentecostalism, past and present. After hearing Palin talk about the Iraq war and her soldier son, it is jarring to read a 1917 resolution from the Assemblies of God defending conscientious objectors. Noting the incompatibility of military service with Pentecostal faith, it states: “Scriptures such as ‘follow peace with all men,’ ‘resist not evil,’ ‘thou shalt not kill,’ or ‘love your enemies’ had ‘always been accepted and interpreted by our churches as prohibiting Christians from shedding blood or taking life.’” During World War I Pentecostal pacifists were investigated by the federal government and harassed by their fellow citizens. Though such radicalism faded in the face of nationalist pressures, it lives on in the witness of the Pentecostal Charismatic Peace Fellowship.

More enduring is the relationship between African-American Pentecostalism and movements for equality and social justice. Few Americans know that Martin Luther King’s last speech took place on the platform of a Pentecostal church. When King went up to the mountaintop he was speaking from the pulpit of Mason Temple Church of God in Christ, the final resting place of Bishop C.H. Mason, the founder of black America’s largest Pentecostal body. Fewer still know that the 2008 Democratic National Convention was organized by Pentecostal minister Leah Daughtry. Together with Barack Obama’s faith outreach coordinator Joshua DuBois she has combined progressive politics with black Pentecostalism (including a dash of liberation theology). Though some African-American Pentecostals have gravitated to the prosperity gospel and the new Christian right, most remain committed to the values of racial equality and economic justice. Some even work as community organizers.

Few Americans know about the interracial origins of the Pentecostal movement. At a time when white and black churches had little contact with each other, the Azusa Street revivals of 1906 brought together both races under one roof. So unprecedented was this mixing that one observer wrote that “the color line has been washed away in the blood.” Scholarly treatments of early Pentecostalism have warned against romanticizing the racial harmony of this era. Though the early years of the movement “saw a remarkable degree of interracial fraternity,” Pentecostalism never achieved complete integration. In the late 1920s, white Pentecostal pioneer Charles Fox Parham became a public advocate of the Ku Klux Klan. By that time, the movement had divided into two racially homogeneous camps. While whites flocked to the Assemblies of God (formed in 1914), the once biracial Church of God in Christ became a black denomination.

Although whites and blacks seldom worshipped together, a pattern of interracial influence continued to shape Pentecostalism, and by extension, American popular culture. As Paul Harvey notes in Freedom’s Coming, “the Azusa Street revivals spun off a corps of black and white evangelists who spread the new gospel and encouraged cultural interchange in religious settings.” Such mutual borrowing was especially apparent in gospel music, where “two streams of musical religious culture traveled beside each other, never merging, but often intersecting.” In the world of black popular music innumerable musical innovators came from Pentecostal backgrounds, including Marvin Gaye, James Brown, Little Richard, and Sister Rosetta Tharpe. Together with white Pentecostals Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis (who borrowed liberally from African-American sources) they helped reinvent American popular song.

Though such racial interchange had a profound impact on worship and music, Pentecostal voters have remained racially split. In the 2008 U.S. Religious Landscape survey 45 percent of Pentecostals in predominantly white denominations identified with the Republican Party, compared to just 23 percent of those in black Pentecostal bodies. Though Pentecostals in white denominations are somewhat less Republican than other white evangelicals, they are far more conservative than their black co-religionists.

In the decades ahead an influx of Latino, Asian-American, and African Pentecostals promises to reshape Sarah Palin’s childhood denomination. In 1999 ethnic churches made up 26.8 percent of all Assemblies of God congregations, up from 21.8 percent in 1993. By 2030, only 50 percent of AG churches will have a white majority. While the number of white congregations has steadily decreased, the number of ethnic churches continues to grow. Without an infusion of Latino, Asian, and black congregations, the AG would be facing a decline in membership.

In the final analysis, the diversification of formerly white denominations may end up pushing Pentecostalism in a more moderate direction. Though somewhat more Republican than Latino Catholics, Latino Pentecostals are not as conservative as their Anglo brothers and sisters. In 2006 a majority of Hispanic evangelicals gave their votes to the Democrats. Currently, Latino Protestants are leaning toward Obama, suggesting that the demographic changes in the Assemblies of God may bode well for the Democratic Party. Bishop Muthee’s support for Sarah Palin notwithstanding, the influence of global Pentecostalism may move the American electorate to the left.

Senator Obama attended Trinity United Church of Christ not simply because of Reverend Wright, but in order to belong to a religious community that offered both the promise of personal community and a transcendent vision—a vision of how people who profess a belief in God through Jesus Christ should live together in service to one another and to those around them. That vision of community came through the organizational, oratorical, and musical talents of the church’s senior pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

It was Wright’s vision to pull the black middle-class back into the orb of the church. Wright recognized in the mid-1970s a growing disaffection among the black middle-class toward the style of black Protestant churches, which were still heavily rooted in rural folkways and led by clergymen without much formal education. He correctly analyzed the problem, and when he took over the small congregation on the far Southside of Chicago, around 1975, he sought to address the growing black middle-class, who needed a sense of community in the midst of the many contradictory forces plaguing urban America. He understood that spiritual formation was the tonic necessary for the unique daily struggles that black Americans faced.

As more blacks achieved middle-class status, Wright set out to provide for his parishioners a spiritual house that would lead them to engage the poor, specifically the black poor, as well as to provide a place to be accepted outside the gaze of a hostile and racialized society—which the city of Chicago was when he was called as Trinity’s pastor, and indeed still is today. Obama joined the church, and stayed at Trinity for twenty years, for the same reason that thousands of other Chicagoans were drawn to it. Here was a community that offered acceptance and faith. Rather than seeing them as the exception, as well-educated black Christian believers, Trinity gave its members both acceptance and the comfort that being Christian was intellectually plausible as well as consistent with having black or brown skin. Trinity’s motto was: “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian.” This was an affirmation—being a black American and a Christian belonged together.

Senator Obama not only gained a place of worship by belonging to Trinity, he also found an ethnic community. Black Protestant church communities continue to be cultural spaces where what it means to be black in America is defined. It should come as little surprise to anyone who pays close attention to religious communities that ethnic and religious identities are often developed and defined in tandem. A careful survey of Irish or Mexican-American communities, for instance, will find a close link to Roman Catholic parishes. In other instances, Protestant communions such as German Mennonites or the Dutch-based Christian Reformed Church in North America play a vital role in shaping ethnic identities. Ethnic forms of Christianity have a way of informing communal self-identification—and ethnicity has a way of strongly shaping a church’s Christian theology.

Trinity in Chicago is yet another instance of this linkage between ethnicity and religious community. It is clear from Senator Obama’s autobiographical description of his life’s journey that he was looking for a spiritual home. Being mixed race in the United States is one of the most intensely racializing experiences. Yet as a matter of historical record, it is not all that unique in the history of black America—having mixed racial heritage is a part and parcel of what it has meant to be black in the United States. Both Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington were of mixed “racial parentage,” and they tried to provide a reconciliatory bridge to white America, yet to little avail—the United States Supreme Court voted to uphold racial segregation and the South ran roughshod over the civil liberties of black voters throughout the region at the turn of the 20th Century.

Needless to say, times have changed. Nevertheless, Senator Obama needed to find a spiritual home outside the racializing gaze that permeated his life and the lives of so many mixed race children of black and white parents. He found that home in Trinity, both as a space of worship and as an ethnic space. It was a place where he was allowed openly to come to terms with his own unique voice as a man, a husband, a father, and a public official. This helps to explain why Trinity was so important in Obama’s life.

Even though Obama was a member of Trinity, it would be wrong to assume that he and Reverend Wright never had genuine differences. Religious communities, just like political ones, are filled with tensions and debates-about styles of worship, direction, social justice concerns and theology. As Obama mentioned in his important speech on race in America—given this March in Philadelphia—he and Wright were not of the same generation. Obama, socially, is a cosmopolitan, urbane and learned. As a matter of political tact, he recognized the need to draw black, brown, yellow, and white together across the racial divide.

Wright is more deeply rooted than Obama in the black bourgeois culture, black church history, and black freedom struggles, and he sees his first allegiance as a religious leader being to black Americans. As a result, these two black men have two different strategies for achieving rather similar goals—social justice, racial equity and human rights in America and abroad. At the National Press Club a couple of weeks ago, Wright charged that Obama was merely a politician, as though that was a negative. However, Wright—as a pastor in the black church tradition—is a politician too. Yet the kind of politics each must exercise is distinct. Obama, on the one hand, as a matter of practicality, must build a consensus of lawmakers and all Americans to advance more just social policies. He must appeal to a broad spectrum of people and interest groups in order to achieve his legislative goals. In running for the presidency, Obama looked to the nation-state at large, not simply to his ethnic religious community. In fact, with his coalition building among different groups across the country, Obama has reached back and drawn on the older model politics of the New Deal. Obama has done a better job of what Jesse Jackson tried to do in his “Rainbow Coalition” in 1984 and 1988. He has held together a coalition of blacks, whites, and some browns, to keep a lead in delegates-and perhaps to achieve the Democratic Party’s nomination.

Wright, on the other hand—as a major religious leader within the black community—exercises what the historian James Melvin Washington called the “symbolic political aspirations of black Christendom.” Wright’s politics are rooted in evangelical theology and the political revivalism that catalyzed the civil rights generation. “Revivals,” Washington wrote, “function as planned events that intentionally try to reclaim some idyllic moment of group cohesion for communities whose identities are under siege.” They use “liturgies forged in the crucible of the slave regime, segregation, depressed urban ghettoes, and rural shanties to fight assaults upon the psychic well-being of black people.”

Wright’s political revivalism is derived from a much larger Protestant principle. As Washington writes, quoting the theologian Paul Tillich, “the most important contribution of Protestantism to the world in the past, present, and future is the principle of prophetic protest against every power which claims divine character for itself—whether it be the church or state, party or leader.” This style of politics, especially when it comes from a progressive and fiery black clergyman, finds little resonance among the average white voter in America. Wright’s style reminds average white voters of black anger, and for many of them this is a sign of entitlement, rather than an assertion of legitimate criticism. As Washington noted in assessing Jesse Jackson’s first bid for the Democratic nomination in 1984, if the politics that drive black ministers do not “translate into a larger following beyond their own racial boundaries, they usually did not succeed.”

Unlike Obama’s campaign, Jesse Jackson’s campaign in 1984 and 1988—to which the former President Bill Clinton compared the Obama campaign in the South Carolina primary earlier this year—was never really intended to defeat his chief opponent, Walter Mondale. What Jackson successfully did was galvanize black voters to be a counterforce to President Ronald Reagan’s domestic policies, which in point of fact made all working-class people, no matter what color they were, poorer and in the long run more vulnerable to unregulated and avaricious economic policies. What Jackson recognized at the time, using old-fashioned black political revivalism as a tool, was that it was in black people’s interest to politically galvanize to have a voice in shaping the future policies of the Democratic Party, which by 1984 was quickly aligning itself with neo-liberal economics to simply win back the presidency and governorships. Jackson’s progressivism, however, was quickly dismissed, due to his political relationship to Louis Farrakhan and Farrakhan’s intemperate anti-Jewish rhetoric. In addition, Jackson did himself a great disservice in his infamous “Hymie town” remark about New York City.

Obama’s narrative, unlike Jackson’s, is tied neither to the history of the American South nor to the long and bitter antagonism between blacks and white working-class ethnics in the North. And Obama’s own personal trajectory initially freed him from being branded in the same manner as Jackson. When Bill Clinton compared Obama to Jackson in South Carolina, however, he arguably sought to dredge up white fear, just as it was dredged up in 1984 against Jackson. Clinton called Obama a “kid,” which for some was tantamount to referring to him as a “boy.” As former Clinton advisor Donna Brazile later said of Clinton’s remarks, “As an African-American, I find his words and his tone to be very depressing.” Yet it was Obama’s relationship to Trinity and to Wright that tied him most clearly and forcefully to the history of racial antagonism in the United States, and to the political tradition with which Jackson is associated.

Wright’s politics could be easily linked to Jackson’s—with the net effect being that Obama’s presidential bid was to be dismissed, the candidate sullied by his association with what some would consider negative black politics. But this politics is not negative—indeed, it represents the most progressive politics that America has had to offer. Each of these men—Jackson, Wright, and Obama—has called for fair play, and programs that help workers, children and the elderly. All of them want to renew our inner cities and rural areas. They have come out of a black tradition of progressive politics, which is informed by black Social Gospel theology. Many leading black clergy and political leaders informed by Christianity have followed in this grand tradition, a tradition that has emphasized that God cares for the whole of society. Proponents of the black tradition of the Social Gospel have been numerous, they have been a progressive force for good, and they existed long before Martin Luther King, Jr. became enshrined as a static hero of the left and the right in American memory. As an elected official, Obama stands in this tradition, too.

The real story about Barack Obama and Jeremiah Wright is not Obama’s long membership at Trinity United Church of Christ. The real story is how two Christian men—who hold strong theological convictions, but who have different styles, political realities, and constituencies—have been forced to butt heads in the course of this contested primary, in their attempt to make America a more spiritually whole, just, and safe place to live for all.