Crunchy raises an excellent question in response to my earlier post.

If that’s true — and it sounds plausible to me — that does not make me feel any better about Obama’s moral reasoning. How does one get around the idea that he calculated that fear of and hostility to the white community was the glue that held Trinity’s community together, and that he thought the greater good of that community was worth the racism and paranoia that was its social glue? Why is that okay?

First, I want to clarify something. I don’t think Obama believed the glue that held Trinity together was hostility to whites. Rather, racial hositility was one strand within Trinity. There were other strands, too, including old-fashioned integrationists, like Obama. What Obama appreciated about Trinity, and Wright, was its capacity to unify these communities. The glue that held those constituencies together was not hostility to whites; it was commitment to Jesus, and to the poor. That’s what got Buppies and gangbangers, separatists and integrationists, racists and non-racists serving and praying together.
I think there is an ends-justifies-the-means aspect to this but not quite the one you mentioned. Trinity wasn’t based on hostility to whites but it did indeed tolerate it and, at least sometimes, encouraged it. So the question is whether the greater good — serving Christ by serving the poor — made up for this acceptance of a very real anti-white strain. It’s a tough question, and not one that necessarily accrues to Obama’s benefit.
By the way, this is all my own armchair-psychologizing. I strongly doubt Obama would agree with my interpretation. He would say the reason he stayed is that this is the church that brought him to Christ. I’m embarrassed to say that I didn’t take that explanation seriously enough. I should have. It’s the old cynical journalist in me that just assumes that such a rationale coming from the mouth of a politician is inherently suspect. But we should at least be open to the possibility that that really was a key factor.
If it was, then you have an even more interesting ends-justifies-the-means conundrum. What if Obama tolerated Rev. Wright’s racist views because the pastor and the church strengthened Obama’s connection to Christ? Rod, if you believed that to be true, would that change your view of whether he should have stayed at the church?