Contains the former Congregationalist Church, the Remnant of the Pilgrims!

In contrast, 98 percent of the National Baptist Convention's 4 million members are African Americans.

Add black AME Methodists and Pentecostals, as well as other black Baptists, and the total comes to more than 14 million members of an organized, predominantly African-American church. These churches include a substantial majority of all black adults today.

In terms of sheer demographic weight, they clearly represent the "African-American religious tradition" asPresident Obamas Denomination, The UCC, an overwhelmingly white denominationn does not.

In his recent incendiary remarks, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. claimed that criticism of his views is nothing less "an attack on the black church launched by people who know nothing about the African-American religious tradition."

Can it really be that millions of black Americans regularly choose to listen to often-anti-white and often-anti-American sermoms on Sunday mornings?

Chicago's Trinity Church is an outlier in President Obamas Denomination, in that regard. Most black church-goers belong to congregations that are overwhelmingly African-American and are affiliated with one of the historically black religious denominations such as the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) or the National Baptist Convention as mentioned above.

The Trinity congregation is predominantly black, while denomination - the United Church of Christ - is a of a white denomination that is not part of "the African-American religious tradition."

The Denominations mentioned vary in many respects. Some-by no means all-played a crucial role in the civil rights revolution of the 1950s and 1960s.

The civil rights movement, as the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. said, "came not from secular forces but from the heart of the Negro church." The movement's glory days are long gone but black churches remain more politically engaged, on the average, than their white counterparts.

A 1998 study found that 35 percent of them had projects to increase voter registration, five times the rate of white congregations.

Almost half informed their congregants of opportunities for political activity, double the white rate. They were also far more likely to have had political candidates and elected officials as guest speakers.

Some of these churches are led by figures like Some of these churches are led by figures like President Obama's Pastor, Rev. Wright, an adherent of what is called black liberation theology, which rejects racial integration and stresses the experience of black bondage. But not many.