The Rev Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama's former pastor, did far more this week than just damage the presidential campaign of the Illinois senator. The central figure in a drama focused on the most emotive issues in American society — race, religion, politics and patriotism — has divided black churches and confronted white America with a part of US society it still barely understands: the African-American pulpit and pew, where many view Jesus and God as black.

In a fateful appearance in Washington on Monday Mr Wright repeated his assertions that US foreign policy had brought about the September 11 attacks and his claim that the Government introduced the Aids virus to kill African-Americans. It was a performance that forced Mr Obama to sever ties with his pastor of 20 years, the man who married him and baptised his children.

Mr Wright also declared that the controversy was not about him or his statements but was “an attack on the black Church launched by people who know nothing about the African- American religious tradition”.

This week, in African-American churches across North Carolina - part of the Old South where the Confederacy fought the Union army to keep its slaves —Mr Wright was supported by many preachers, condemned by others and opposed by many in the pews. The debate showed the diversity of the “Black Church” but also said much about the rich history of the black religious experience, which was forged in the crucible of slavery and shaped by white oppression.

And it made one other consequence of this historic Democratic race clear: that black people feel deeply betrayed by Bill Clinton, who they believe has stoked racial fears among white voters to scare them away from Mr Obama.

“Sure, this has divided us,” said the Rev George Brooks, the pastor at Mount Zion Baptist Church in Greensboro, North Carolina. “Any time you have a pastor of the stature of Jeremiah Wright, and a candidate running for president of the United States who is of colour, then this is going to be divisive.”

Yet like many pastors he did not fundamentally disagree with many of the views of Mr Wright - just with the way he expressed them. He cited the sermon that Mr Wright gave a week after the attacks on September 11, when he declared that America's “chickens are coming home to roost” and that the US was being punished by God for a criminal foreign policy.

“I would not have said 'God damn America',” Mr Brooks said. “I would have said God has a right to exercise his wrath on America.”

He added that Mr Wright was not speaking for the Black Church and that it was unfair for white people to assume that he was. “That's one of the fallacies we have to deal with - that when someone black says something, he's speaking for all black folk, that it's a ‘black statement',” he said.

Ironically, Mr Wright was a pastor in the United Church of Christ, a liberal, predominately white denomination. His Chicago church had a mainly black congregation. He comes from the black liberation theology wing of the Black Church, which focuses on injustice and oppression in a white-dominated society and came of age in the 1960s. Its founder, James Cone, once wrote: “What we need is the destruction of whiteness, which is the source of human misery in the world.”

Mr Wright, in his appearance before the National Press Club on Monday, said that how one sees one's God is how one sees humans. “The God to whom the slaveholders pray, as they ride on the decks of the slave ship, is not the God to whom the enslaved are praying, as they ride beneath the decks on that same slave ship,” he said. He cited the Tuskegee Experiment, when hundreds of illiterate black sharecroppers in Alabama infected with syphilis were denied penicillin deliberately as part of a study to see how the disease affected black people — proof, he said, that the US Government was capable of anything.

Eugene Rivers, a Pentecostal minister at the Azusa Christian Community, said that most African-Americans saw Jesus and God as black. “If you go to a black barber shop and speak to working-class folks they will say Adam came out of Africa, God made Adam, so God is black. But what they are saying has nothing to do with black liberation theology.

“And let me make this clear: Jeremiah Wright does not speak for the Black Church. All he has done is to promote the erroneous illusion that this is what black America is like. He uses a lot of incendiary one-liners, which is old school, black nationalist tough talk. He's an upper middle-class liberal who does stuff out of the mainstream. Preachers don't cuss from the pulpit - they just don't do that.”

There are 65,000 black churches across America and about 23 million congregants. There are seven main denominations, including the Colored Methodists and the African Methodist Episcopal Church. There are black Roman Catholics, evangelicals, charismatic churches, high church and low church, a pentecostal wing that focuses on self-improvement, more conservative, traditional Baptists and the black liberation wing. Like any religion it is extraordinarily diverse.

Yet every Black Church is rooted in the history of slavery and discrimination. Slave revolts in the 1800s led to Southern states passing laws barring exclusively black churches. Slaves organised underground religious meetings, where these hidden churches provided psychological refuge from the white world. After the Civil War they established separate churches to escape white control and to worship in their distinct way - a Christianity of empowerment that drew heavily on African spiritual traditions.

They have long been the centre of black communities and often the centre of political power within those community. As Mr Obama correctly stated recently, Sunday morning is still the most segregated hour in America.

“I know Jeremiah Wright,” said the Rev Reginald Van Stevens, of White Rock Baptist Church, the most politically powerful African-American institution in Durham, one of North Carolina's blackest cities. “He felt personally attacked by the corporate media. They have used him as a scapegoat to hurt Barack Obama. The only way to do that was to tie him to something black and militant.

“Nobody has even brought up if Hillary Clinton goes to church or, if she has a pastor, what he has said in the past. Mr Wright has been vilified for saying what a lot of people have been thinking. Why should he be quiet until after the election?”

Her husband, too, had lost a lot of respect. “I don't think he is racist. But he believes at the American core there is still a very high racist element and the Clintons are capitalising on that. African-Americans now look at him with different eyes,” he added.

At another Baptist church the view from the congregation was more focused on Mr Obama's fortunes.

“I'm angry at Reverend Wright,” Latoya Wilcox, a worshipper, said. “What's he think he's doing? He's hurting Obama. How could he do this to the guy trying to become our first black president?”

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