Washington, D.C. ? Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama on Friday denounced inflammatory remarks from his pastor, who has railed against the United States and accused the country of bringing on the Sept. 11 attacks by spreading terrorism.

Obama called the statements appearing on television and the Internet “completely unacceptable and inexcusable” in a Fox News interview and said they didn’t reflect the kinds of sermons he had heard from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright while attending services at Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ.

Obama, a member of the church since the early 1990s, said he would have quit Trinity had such statements been “the repeated tenor of the church. … I wouldn’t feel comfortable there.”