Barack Obama’s critics have spent the past year trying to find a scandal in his life, and they finally came up with one: Obama goes to church.

The television news shows were filled last week with titillating pictures of Obama’s pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, pounding a pulpit, denouncing American racism and making some rather bizarre claims about governmental responsibility for AIDS and other social ills. If you just read the words without context, they certainly make Wright seem un-American.

Obama critics and commentators, including some of the major liberal voices on television, have demanded that Obama denounce his pastor and renounce his ill-fated membership in Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. The fact that he hasn’t proves guilt by association is guilt, indeed, they say.

There has been guilt by association practiced in this issue, but the victim was not Barack Obama. The victim was Jeremiah Wright, whose reputation as a pastor has been trashed across the world because of his association with Obama.

I have never met Wright. He and I are each ordained clergy of the United Church of Christ, a predominantly white denomination that traces its history to the Pilgrims. I’ve never heard him preach, and I’ve never set foot in his Chicago church.

But I do know this: Virtually everything we know about Wright comes from three snippets of three sermons, preached over a period of years, spliced together into one 30-second sound bite and replayed endlessly on cable TV. Those snippets were incendiary, but they were snippets. They weren’t sermons or even completed ideas.

And I do know this: We in the media used those three snippets to represent an entire 36-year ministry. During all those years, Wright helped build Trinity UCC from a congregation of 87 to a congregation of more than 8,000, one that includes gang-bangers, judges, doctors and a potential president of the United States. You don’t do that by preaching hate.

No one can build a congregation by preaching hate. Wright didn’t. Conservative pastors such as Jerry Falwell didn’t. People won’t show up year after year to hear hate. They may listen to it on radio or television, but they won’t do so in church.

I do know that my fellow UCC clergy in Madison have, over the years, taken their youth groups to visit Wright’s congregation. They have told me, time and again, that the kids came back inspired by the church’s ministry to the poor and by its lively worship.

If Wright’s message was one of hate, just why is it that no hate has come from his church? Why is it that all those scouring Obama’s record haven’t found a single incident of racism? Why is it that so many Madison white folk who have attended church there have been welcomed with warmth and with respect?

Wouldn’t we do better to judge a pastor and his church on their record and not on sound bites?

Contact Bill Wineke at bwineke@madison.com.