In recent months, the candidate has tried to distance himself from Wright and his often radical views, even as he felt compelled to understand and explain his former pastor to a larger, predominantly white political world.

As for Wright, he saw a cascade of perceived slights coming from the campaign of a bright young follower whose political ambitions were tugging him away from Trinity United Church of Christ. He saw the church he had founded coming under pressure from reporters and critics, forced to hire security guards. And he made no secret of whom he blamed: Obama’s political adviser, David Axelrod, a white Chicago political operative.

Only a few years ago, the tightness of the bond between Obama and Wright was difficult to overstate. Obama titled his second book, The Audacity of Hope, after one of Wright’s sermons, and his pastor was the first one he thanked when he gained election as a United States senator in 2004. “Let me thank my pastor, Jeremiah A Wright Jr of Trinity United Church of Christ,” Obama said that night, before going on to mention his family and friends.

In this learned and radical pastor, Obama had found a guide who could explain Jesus and faith in terms intellectual no less than emotional, and who helped a man of mixed racial parentage come to understand himself as an African-American. “Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black,” Obama wrote in his autobiography Dreams From My Father.