Barack Obama quit his church.
The Illinois U.S. senator was set Saturday evening to explain his resignation from Trinity United church on Chicago’s South Side, a spokesman said.
His run for the Democratic presidential nomination has been dogged for months by controversies associated with the church, most recently when a visiting priest used the Trinity pulpit to mock Obama’s rival in the party primaries, U.S. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).
More substantively, the church’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was revealed in past sermons to have said that U.S. foreign policy helped bring about terrorist attacks on the United States.
Wright was also in the past sharply critical of Israel, comparing its settlement policies to white colonialism, and had praised Louis Farrakhan, who headed the anti-Semitic Nation of Islam. The church’s bulletin last year ran an op-ed by officials of Hamas, the terrorist group that rejects Israel’s existence.
At other times, the church’s ties with the local Jewish community were reported to be friendly.
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