"So the Reverend Jeremiah Wright infamously declared in a sermon on April 13, 2003. He made the pronouncement, of course, in direct counterpoint to the beloved civil benediction, "God bless America." "No, no, no!" Wright insisted, "not 'God bless America,' 'God damn America'-that's in the Bible." A video clip of this moment from Wright's preaching would surface nearly five years later during the American presidential campaign of 2008. It generated a media firestorm. White Americans were shocked. They called Wright anti-white and anti-American and reviled then-candidate Barack Obama for his connections to Wright and Wright's congregation. But they also responded to an additional, theological dimension of Wright's sermon.

Wright had, as it were, lodged a fundamentally disorienting claim about God, which commentators then sought to re-stabilize. Literally thousands of think-pieces appeared in the aftermath of the video clip's circulation"--.