The Reverend Jeremiah Wright Jr. has been under more or less constant attack ever since his fiery sermons got onto YouTube and forced Barack Obama to distance himself from his pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side. Last week Wright cancelled sermons in Tampa, Houston and Dallas, citing security concerns, and now Fox News has come out with a snarky dissection of the church’s arrangements for Wright’s retirement home in the tony suburb of Tinley Park, Illinois. The only eyebrow-raiser in the deal is the value of the house—$1.6 million for a four-bedroom, 10,340-square-foot spread—which seems to be at odds with Wright’s preaching against materialism. Meanwhile, the fact that one in ten people still believe that Obama is a Muslim indicates that nobody is paying that much attention to begin with. But at the State of the Black Church Summit in Dallas—one of the events where Wright had to cancel—there was lots of paranoid shouting about how the white man doesn’t respect the black church’s criticism, but one of the most powerful moments came when the Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, pastor of Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, addressed himself to the heresy that both blacks and whites can agree on: “Prosperity preachers would seem to suggest that Jesus died so that his disciples could live rich. Poverty is not a personal curse or a failure of faith or a sin, but a sign that the world is broken.” Warnock’s pulpit, by the way, is the pulpit made famous by Martin Luther King Jr. The bigger danger from Wright-gate is that Obama himself will become increasingly prone to theological observations, like his remark last week about everyone being “children of God” during a campaign stop in North Carolina. If you read what he said, it was a “works instead of faith” statement, even though he belongs to the United Church of Christ denomination, which is just about as St. Paul as you can get. I already get too many whack-job press releases every day, and if he keeps doing this, it can only get worse, so Barack, my man, my brother, when you get a religious question, go vague with the answer, okay? Promise me?

For Dallas Catholics, Theft Is the Answer

The “Virgin Mary as a stripper” artwork that was stolen from an exhibition at the University of Dallas was a little more elaborate than first reported. As described by its creator Joanna Gianulis, it was a woodcut print full of images contrasting “saint” with “sinner” and one of those images was the Virgin of Guadalupe as a stripper. University president Frank Lazarus made a lot of anguished hand-wringing statements—we want to respect artistic freedom while respecting the wishes of our Catholic student body blah blah blah—after the work was filched from an exhibit of works by Murray State University art students. (An exhibit of University of Dallas art had been on display at Murray State, too, sans swipage.) Lazarus’ concern should not be “Should we have taken it down or left it up?”—it should be “Who’s the goddamn thief? Bring it back or your ass is expelled.” And the attitude of Joanna Gianulis—who told the press she was upset because she felt she was “misunderstood”—should be, “Give me back my damn artwork.” That would be the Christian thing to do.

Now This Is Some Serious Theocracy Stuff

Every time an American evangelist declares for a political candidate, we have a bunch of tut-tutting commentary to the effect of “This could never happen in secular Europe.” Think again. In the recent Spanish elections the Catholic church waded in up to the hips in support of Mariano Rejoy, less out of affection for Rejoy than absolute detestation of Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, the socialist who pulled the troops out of Iraq and called for more secularism in Spain. I’m not talking about theoretical support here. The bishops of Spain actually published a document telling Catholics who to vote for. I can’t think of any Southern Baptist pastor, no matter how conservative, who’s ever stepped over that line, and in a recent survey of evangelical pastors, only one said he would endorse a candidate. There’s some evidence that the Spaniards resented the meddling, since the satanic socialist triumphed anyway.

Will the Dalai Be a Bad Boy in Beijing?

In many ways the Chinese government is right to criticize the western media. The New York Times has had a rotating tag team of reporters all over this story, even though it’s hard to figure out just exactly why the Dalai Lama is so important. If we were this concerned about every government-in-exile on the planet, we would have 30 stories a day from London and New York alone. And isn’t it a little strange that we seem to be so angry toward China about the Tibetan situation, which is a half century old at this point, while China’s being on the wrong side of the war in Darfur is not even on the radar? Meanwhile, China keeps hammering on two themes—a) that the Dalai Lama is a master manipulator who’s orchestrating civil unrest from abroad, and b) that the press ignores violence of Tibetans against ethnic Chinese and focuses entirely on the excesses of the Chinese police. The first claim is probably untrue, the second one probably true. New York Times reporter Jim Yardley was so extremely favorable toward the Dalai Lama that his coverage probably resulted in the Times being disinvited to the Lhasa press tour where some dissident monks staged a little uprising for the cameras. You have to wonder why the press seems to support independence or autonomy for Tibet—apparently so the Dalai Lama can restore theocracy—when they were so quick to let Muslims take Kosovo away from the Serbian Orthodox Christians who had regarded it as their spiritual homeland since the 14th century. Tibetan Buddhists are somehow politically correct in a way that the black-robed Serbian Orthodox priests are not, even though the most characteristic manifestations of Buddhism in the west are either Richard Gere-sponsored seminars at Radio City Music Hall or LSD-inspired theistic artists like Alex Grey, whose Chapel of Sacred Mirrors is a shrine to visionary art in New York’s ultra-hip Soho neighborhood. Still, China is terrified that the Dalai Lama is going to send some saffron-robed troublemakers to the summer Olympics, even though most of the attention he gets at his Dharmsala fastness is the direct result of Chinese paranoia. Can there be any more pathetic sign of panic than monasteries ringed with tanks and all-out offensives against YouTube? The Politburo was apparently so frantic that they scared India into cooperating with the repression, and there were signs that Nepal would fall obediently into line, despite evidence that the more you crack down, the more the protest spreads. After a week of head-bashing during which the Dalai Lama seemed remarkably restrained, despite Chinese officials calling him an agent provocateur, the grievances of the Tibetans had spread to four large western provinces representing almost a third of the land mass of a very big country, and expatriate Tibetans in other parts of the world were making themselves known. The Dalai Lama, seeing the protests growing increasingly violent, eventually threatened to resign as political head of the exiled Tibetans, apparently in an effort to retain whatever sliver of influence he might have left. Alas, it’s all in vain anyway. It will probably take about one more generation before native Tibetan Buddhists are a minority in the region of Tibet, as China is so afraid of the Dalai Lama “masterminding” a revolution that they’ve started trucking in other ethnic groups to wipe out the influence of Lama Lovers. After that, Tibet will be but a memory, since any attempt to rid Tibet of the other ethnic groups would constitute the crime of “ethnic cleansing” that the United Nations says can never occur again. You can move ‘em in, but you can’t move ‘em out—that was the lesson of Serbia and Kosovo. What’s being created in Tibet is a de jure Kosovo situation. And toward that end, China recently introduced the ultimate weapon—the most luxurious train in the world, a straight shot from Beijing to Lhasa that features enormous bedroom suites, living rooms and bathroom facilities, the kind of Orient Express experience that is so far beyond the means of most Chinese that it can have only one target—American “middle class millionaires” who will make Lhasa a tourist destination and devastate its culture within a single generation. Now that’s some forward thinking. Unfortunately, part of the recent unrest in Lhasa involved torching a tourist bus, and currently all foreigners are banned from Tibet anyway. Maybe the Tibetans are smarter than we think.