By Dan Gilgoff, CNN
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Addressing his large, mostly black congregation on Sunday morning, the Rev. Wallace Charles Smith did not mince words about where he stood on President Barack Obama’s newly announced support for same-sex marriage: The church is against it, he said, prompting shouts of “Amen!” from the pews.
And yet Smith hardly issued a full condemnation of the president.
“We may disagree with our president on this one issue,” Smith said from the pulpit of the Shiloh Baptist Church here. “But we will keep him lifted up in prayer. … Pray for President Barack Obama.”
And Smith said there were much bigger challenges facing the black community — “larger challenges that we have to struggle with” — bringing his full congregation to its feet, with many more “amen”s.
Days after Obama announced his personal support for same-sex marriage, pastors across the country offered their Sunday-morning opinions on the development, with the words of black pastors — a key base of support for Obama in 2008, that is also largely opposed to gay marriage — carrying special weight in a presidential election year.
But black pastors were hardly monolithic in addressing Obama’s remarks.
In Baltimore, Emmett Burns, a politically well-connected black minister who said he supported Obama in 2008, held an event at Rising Sun Baptist Church to publicly withdraw support from the president over Obama’s same-sex marriage support.
The Rev. Calvin Butts, an influential black pastor in New York City, did not endorse Obama’s views but said that some opponents of legalized gay unions “claim hatred in the name of God, but our God is love.”
And like Smith in Washington, plenty of black ministers talked about distinguishing between opposition to same-sex marriage and views about Obama.
“I don’t see how you cannot talk about it,” the Rev. Tim McDonald, based in Atlanta, said earlier this week. “I have to. You can say I’m opposed to it (same-sex marriage), but that doesn’t mean I’m against the president.”
Though African-Americans provided Obama with record support in 2008, they are also significantly more likely to oppose same-sex marriage than are whites. That may be because black Americans are more likely to frequently attend church than white Americans.
A Pew Research Center poll conducted in April found that 49% of African-Americans oppose legalized same-sex marriage, compared with 39% who support it. Among whites, by contrast, Pew found that 47% supported gay marriage, while 43% opposed it.
African-American pastors have been prominent in the movement to ban same-sex marriage. In North Carolina, black leaders helped lead the successful campaign for a constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage and domestic partnerships.
In California, 70% of African-Americans supported Prop 8, the 2008 state gay marriage ban, even though 94% of black voters in California backed Obama.
McDonald, who founded a group called the African-American Ministers Leadership Council, says he opposes same-sex marriage, but that he is more concerned about issues like health care, education and jobs.
But he says more black pastors are talking about same-sex marriage than ever before. “Three years ago, there was not even a conversation about this issue,” McDoland says. “There wasn’t even an entertainment of a conversation about this.”
At the same time, black opposition to same-sex marriage has dropped dramatically in recent years. In 2008, Pew found that 63% of African-Americans opposed gay marriage, 14 points higher than the proportion who expressed opposition this year.
On Friday, a handful of black leaders, including the Rev. Al Sharpton and former NAACP leader Julian Bond, released a letter supporting Obama’s position on same-sex marriage but expressing respect for those who disagree.
“The President made clear that his support is for civil marriage for same-sex couples, and he is fully committed to protecting the ability of religious institutions to make their own decisions about their own sacraments,” the letter said.
“There will be those who seek to use this issue to divide our community,” it continued. “As a people, we cannot afford such division.”
But the letter itself was an implicit acknowledgement of discord within the African-American church community on gay marriage.
Black pastors who preach in favor of same-sex marriage know they may pay a price if they take Obama’s position, says Bishop Carlton Pearson.
The Chicago-based black minister says he lost his church building and about 6,000 members when he began preaching that gays and lesbians were accepted by God.
“That’s the risk that people take,” he told CNN. “A lot of preachers actually don’t have a theological issue. It’s a business decision. They can’t afford to lose their parishioners and their parsonages and salaries.”
Pearson navigates the tension between the Bible’s calls for holiness and justice this way: “I take the Bible seriously, just not literally,” he says. “It’s more important what Jesus said about God than what the church says about Jesus.”
In Obama’s interview with ABC this week, in which he announced his personal support for same-sex marriage, the president talked about squaring his decision with his personal religious faith.
“We are both practicing Christians, and obviously this position may be considered to put us at odds with the views of others,” Obama said, referring to his wife, Michelle.
“But, you know, when we think about our faith, the thing at root that we think about is, not only Christ sacrificing himself on our behalf, but it’s also the Golden Rule,” he said. “Treat others the way you would want to be treated.”
CNN’s John Blake, Chris Boyette, Meridith Edwards, Dan Merica and Stephanie Siek contributed to this report.
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