When George W. Bush made a campaign stop at Bob Jones University in February 2000, the outcry was immediate and widespread.

One man denouncing Mr. Bush's appearance at the fundamentalist Christian school was his Republican foe John McCain. It's a little-known fact that Mr. McCain's South Carolina campaign chairman, Sen. Lindsey Graham, was trying to arrange a McCain stop at Bob Jones right up till the minute Mr. Bush got there first.

The fallout was erratic. Within four weeks, the school's president, Bob Jones III, was on CNN's "Larry King Live," announcing the end of the interracial dating prohibition that had earned the school its racist label. Mr. Bush won the presidency, and Mr. McCain is 2008's Republican front-runner, but the widely ridiculed university was changed forever -- for the better.

Racism has emerged in this election cycle, too, but this time the Christians who stand accused of it are black. Just as Mr. Bush declared his disagreement with Bob Jones University's segregationist practice and moved on, perhaps Barack Obama can successfully distance himself from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. News about his hate-laced sermons, delivered throughout this decade, have stunned the nation.

But Mr. Obama's affiliation with Rev. Wright is far deeper and lengthier than a mere campaign stop. And if the message of his campaign is that we are ready to heal our country's racial wounds and transcend the old, divisive ways of thinking, how can he have embraced for so long the teaching of a man who, far from denouncing those old ways, fairly wallows in them?

Race, religion and politics have always been inseparable in America. They were inseparable in the Bob Jones case, and they are now. But as we sort through this ugly tangle during, coincidentally, Holy Week, maybe it's time -- for the sake of his own soul and the good of the nation -- for some bold Christians to tell Rev. Wright: "Brother, it's time to lay down your sin."

Comedian Chris Rock declares there's "nothing more racist than an old black man. You know why? Cuz the old black man went through some real racism."

Rev. Wright, 66, has undoubtedly suffered many wounds.

It's also inarguable that American society has changed dramatically in his lifetime. But in the video clips available on the Internet, he rants as if unaware of either America's progress or the Christian teaching of forgiveness. Instead, he forces his experience onto historical fact, current political reality and the scripture he preaches, distorting them all.

Rev. Wright's rhetoric is black and white and wrong all over.

In one clip, he says he finally realized why "so many folk are hatin' on Barack Obama." Lots of people hate Mr. Obama? On the contrary, the young senator's campaign has inspired millions and received news media coverage so fawning that it's been satirized in a "Saturday Night Live" sketch.

Rev. Wright says people hate Mr. Obama because he "doesn't fit the model -- he ain't white, he ain't rich and he ain't privileged." Well, Mr. Obama is biracial, he's a millionaire and he enjoyed a privileged Ivy League education due to his enormous talents and to post-racist America's wide open doors.

Hillary Clinton, says Rev. Wright, "was not a black boy raised in a single parent home; Barack was. Hillary has never had her people defined as non-persons."

The inconvenient truth is that Mr. Obama's white mother was abandoned by her African husband. Blacks defined as non-persons? Dred Scott was 150 years ago, and a half-million Americans died in a war fought to affirm the self-evident truth of human equality.

Dwight Hopkins, a University of Chicago divinity professor and member of Rev. Wright's church, excused his pastor's comments as a "risk-taker's" excesses, asserting: "90 percent of what is said in the church is about Jesus."

But which Jesus is that? Rev. Wright says he "was a poor black man who lived in a country ... controlled by rich white people."

Though no one knows what Jesus looked like, it's historical fact that he was a Jew. Rev. Wright's championing of the "black Jesus" perhaps frees him to embrace the viciously anti-Semitic Louis Farrakhan and to cast white people -- all whites -- as oppressors.

Hating Jews, falsely accusing people of sin, refusing to forgive the contrite so you can leverage their guilt to extract what you want -- the Bible calls these sins. The prominent black ministers who preach such things betray the gospel as surely as yesteryear's Christian segregationists. They also undermine the possibility of a post-racist America.

On Friday Mr. Obama denounced his pastor's more outrageous statements, saying Rev. Wright was only his pastor, not his political adviser. But Rev. Wright doesn't separate politics and religion, and neither, judging from their hallelujahs, do his congregants.

Why should a concerned public be expected to?