Obama and Ross Douthat's "Christian center"

Skimming the NYT over the weekend, I read the following in Ross Douthat's summary of his new book:

Our president embodies [America's] uncentered spiritual landscape in three ways. First, like a growing share of Americans (44 percent), President Obama changed his religion as an adult, joining Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ in his 20s after a conversion experience brought him out of agnosticism into faith. Second, he was converted by a pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose highly politicized theology was self-consciously at odds with much of historic Christian practice and belief. Finally, since breaking with that pastor, Obama has become a believer without a denomination or a church, which makes him part of one of the country’s fastest-growing religious groups — what the Barna Group calls the “unchurched Christian” bloc, consisting of Americans who accept some tenets of Christian faith without participating in any specific religious community.

The third point annoyed me. The 2008 election-season controversy over Jeremiah Wright was a whole heap of manufactured garbage, dirty politics that played on much of the electorate's reliable fear of black men who sound angry and use bad words. I was disappointed with Obama for distancing himself from Wright and eventually leaving his congregation, but right or wrong it was clearly about politics, not some sort of religious change on Obama's part. Now he's in the White House, and if he so much as visits a church it's a major news-light story and a huge undertaking for his security apparatus and fellow worshipers. So he doesn't go very often.