Wright says critics twisting sermons

NEW YORK — The former pastor to Democrat Barack Obama said his sermon blaming U.S. policies for the Sept. 11 attacks was a warning against vengeance and the view that all American actions are perfect, according to transcripts of a PBS interview released Friday.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright said he was in Newark when the terrorist strike occurred and, from his hotel window, he said he saw the second plane hit the World Trade Center. Some of his congregants lost loved ones in the Pentagon and at the World Trade Center, he said.

"We want revenge. They wanted revenge," Wright told "Bill Moyers' Journal." "God doesn't want to leave you there, however. God wants redemption. God wants wholeness. And ... that's the context, the biblical context, I used to try to get people sitting again in that sanctuary."

The interview, which was broadcast Friday night, is the first the pastor has given since video of his preaching gained national attention in March, putting Obama's campaign for the presidential nomination on the defensive.

The controversy forced Obama to distance himself from the minister, after a 20-year association through Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. In a March 18 speech in Philadelphia, Obama described the history of injustice that fueled Wright's comments, while also condemning his pastor's statements and acknowledging white resentment of blacks.

Wright, who is stepping down from Trinity's pulpit, said he and his successor, the Rev. Otis Moss III, have received death threats, and that the there have been threats to bomb the church.

In the Sept. 11 sermon, Wright pointed to U.S. military strikes on Panama and Libya, American slavery and its treatment of American Indians and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

"We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans and now we are indignant?" he said in the sermon. "America's chickens are coming home to roost."

Wright told Moyers that "the persons who have heard the entire sermon understand the communication perfectly." The pastor said that the video is being publicized by people who want to make him out to be a fanatic instead of someone expressing problems with U.S. policies.

"To put an element of fear and hatred and to stir up the anxiety of Americans who still don't know the African-American church, know nothing about the prophetic theology of the African-American experience," Wright said, "who don't even know how we got a black church."