The receptionist at Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ makes a joking pretence of punching the latest visitor. “We are not supposed to entertain media inquiries,” she declares. This Sunday, as on the preceding six, the media will lay siege to Barack Obama’s local church on Chicago’s south side for fear of missing what might be the latest twist in the affair surrounding its pastor reports the Financial Times.

Surrounded by housing projects and boarded-up shops, Mr. Wright’s church is 20 minutes drive from downtown Chicago but a world apart. Known for its work among the homeless, single-parent families and HIV-Aids sufferers, Mr. Wright has irrevocably associated his church with a series of notorious comments that could badly damage Mr. Obama’s prospects of reaching the White House.

Rather than scolding their pastor for the damage he might have wrought, Trinity’s 8,500-strong congregation has closed ranks behind him. On Wednesday, Mr. Obama, in effect, disowned Mr. Wright after the pastor reiterated that the US had brought the 11 September terrorist attacks upon itself and vigorously defended the militant Nation of Islam, whose bodyguards were flanking him.

Mr. Obama’s move came in spite of the assertion in a speech in March that he could no more disown Mr. Wright than his own white grandmother. Mr. Obama this week said that Mr. Wright’s remarks were offensive to all Americans, including blacks. “That is one thing Senator Obama got wrong,” says Michael Dawson, an African-American political scientist at the University of Chicago. “Most black churchgoers in Chicago agree with what Jeremiah Wright had to say.”

This has created an unwelcome dilemma for Mr. Obama. Having mostly bypassed race as an issue in his campaign, the democratic contender now faces the prospect that he might become the nominee of a racially inflamed party. According to a survey by the University of Chicago, 79 per cent of the US’s blacks believe either that they will not achieve racial equality in their lifetime, or that it will never be attained. In contrast, almost two-thirds of whites believe it has already been achieved.

Read it here: Religion drags race to the fore in US election