All of the caterwauling over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright in recent weeks has been one of the most depressing displays of ignorance, pomposity and bad faith by the establishment media since, well, the run-up to the Iraq war.

God help us if churches, synagogues and other places of worship ever become saccharine temples of conformity.

Rev. Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago's South Side, has been catching hell for repeatedly yelling "fire" in a crowded sanctuary:

"When it came to treating her citizens of African descent fairly, America failed," Rev. Wright said in a 2003 sermon called "Confusing God and Government" now on heavy rotation on YouTube.

"She put them in chains, the government put them in slave quarters, put them on auction blocks, put them in cotton fields ... kept them out of their racist bastions of higher education and locked them into positions of hopelessness and helplessness."

Had Rev. Wright been just another garden-variety Sunday morning rabble-rouser and not the former "spiritual adviser" of the Democratic presidential front-runner, it's doubtful his sermons would have elicited even a yawn from the self-appointed Savonarolas of the press.

"Not God bless America," the daishiki-wearing preacher shouted. "God damn America -- that's in the Bible -- for killing innocent people. ... God damn America, as long as she pretends to act like she is God, and she is supreme."

Obviously, Jeremiah Wright isn't a preacher with the pew-side manner of a Joel Osteen, America's most "successful" (i.e., inoffensive) mega-church pastor. Rev. Wright is more in the tradition of his Old Testament namesake from whom the term "jeremiad" is derived.

Not many of the biblical prophets were patriotic. They were extremists. They married whores to demonstrate Israel and Judah's unfaithfulness to God, cooked food over dung, laid naked on each side for years at a time, called down fire from heaven to kill false prophets, ate locusts and favored itchy camel hair shirts in the middle of summer.

With guys like Elijah, Hosea and Ezekiel setting the standards, it's clear that even Rev. Wright isn't strange enough to qualify as a prophet. Turns out he's just an old-school black-liberation theologian with a lot of trust issues when it comes to white society.

Ironically, the excerpts from Rev. Wright's sermons managed to do what months of truth-squadding by Sen. Obama's campaign couldn't -- it debunked the myth that Mr. Obama was a Muslim fifth columnist operating deep under cover.

The conventional wisdom now as far as the truly ignorant are concerned is that Barack Obama is something worse than a secret jihadist -- he's a black man with a grudge against "whitey" -- and a big one at that if his 20-year-long association with the Rev. Wright means anything.

The assumption that churches should be places where offensive opinions are glossed over for the sake of a mealy-mouthed consensus and a veneer of nonpartisan holiness is uniquely American -- and ridiculous.

Our houses of worship have always been cauldrons of incompatible beliefs, conflicting dogmas, seditious mythologies and weird notions about what it means to be in the world, but not of it.

It's only people in the news media that don't seem to understand this. The fact that Mr. Obama hasn't been substantially hurt by the Wright affair in public opinion polls indicates that the chattering class has been the most scandalized by it.

Worship communities aren't "patriotic." To the extent that they are, they're unfaithful to their higher calling as prophetic communities.

Churches, synagogues and mosques are alternate spaces where loyalty to the transcendent supersedes all earthly allegiances, binding people of different classes, races and dogmas together.

Many black churches are especially indebted to Old Testament imagery in this regard. The Jewish exodus from Egypt and the exile in Babylon, with all of its apocalyptic hyperbole, describe the black experience in America perfectly.

Rev. Wright's sermons -- even the paranoid rants -- draw deeply from this rich tradition. It's a hermeneutics that I find limiting for these times, but I think I understand where he's coming from.

If only media indignation at the war had been as deep and long as what was aimed at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright recently.