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When the Rev. Jeremiah Wright says attacks on his preaching are aimed not at him, but at the “black church,” he’s half-right.

Many observers, particularly those of us in mainly white, largely Lutheran Wisconsin, are uncomfortable with much black preaching and were appalled at televised clips of Wright, clad in a dashiki, waving his arms and calling on God to “damn America.” You really don’t hear that kind of thing at Bethel Lutheran Church.

Wright later explained he was only quoting Iraq but that didn’t do much to help the image.

On the other hand, there is really no such thing as “the black church” as a single entity.

Back in the 1980s, my own congregation, the Wisconsin Rescue Mission, provided space to two distinctive black congregations.

The first was a Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, a friendly, but sedate group that organized services differing little from the mainly white United Methodist Church down the street.

The second, founded by the Rev. Eugene Johnson, grew into what became the Madison Pentecostal Assembly and remains, nearly a quarter-century later, a thriving and important Madison church, providing a host of religious and social services to the poor among us.

Johnson does not preach the kind of social commentary that characterizes Wright’s message. But no one would ever call either Johnson or his church “sedate.”

Their services at the Rescue Mission went on for hours and featured foot stomping, hand-clapping and praise shouting. These folks knew how to make a “joyful noise unto the Lord.” They were even gracious about our resident manager at the Rescue Mission, a fellow who rarely remained as sober as we wanted him to remain, and who had a habit of wandering into the service and shouting racial epithets. The manager told me he didn’t understand why they couldn’t be “nice” like the “other church people.”

My only point in all this is that the black church, like the white church and the Hispanic church and all other Christian churches, has many faces.

No one really cared about what Jeremiah Wright preached until one of his parishioners, Barack Obama, became a leading candidate for president. Then, all hell broke loose.

Lost in this spectacle was a truly ugly feature of this year’s presidential campaign: We have now made it acceptable to attack a candidate on the basis of his religion. Ever since John F. Kennedy defended his Catholicism in 1960, the news media and the political establishment have pretty much agreed to leave religion out of the debate. Commentators questioned whether Mitt Romney’s Mormon faith would be a problem. But no serious politician and no serious reporter overtly attacked Romney’s faith.

With Obama, it was a different story. Hillary Clinton announced piously that she would not attend Obama’s church. Television commentators demanded that Obama distance himself from his church and its pastor. Republicans in North Carolina are running “Willie Horton” ads featuring Wright and Obama.

The common thrust was the idea that, since Obama attended the church, he believed the same things Wright preached. That there is nothing in Obama’s past to suggest any such thing was deemed irrelevant.

The attacks on Obama were justified by claims that Wright is unusually controversial. Next time, the attacks will be aimed at churches that are merely unpopular.

There’s a reason why we have kept religion out of politics in the past. When we mix the two, things get ugly and the people who do the mixing get uglier still.

Contact Wineke at bwineke@madison.com or at (608) 252-6146. Read Wineke’s blog at www.madison.com/wsj/blogs.