Barack Obama’s friendship with Southern Baptist megachurch pastor Rick Warren is deeply offensive to those who see a woman’s right to an abortion and a gay couple’s right to marry as the watershed issues of our day. Now Warren has been tapped to deliver the invocation at Obama’s Inauguration. For a cadre of progressives on the Left, the symbolic choice ends the romance of Obama’s presidency even before it begins.
Why does a presidential inauguration include an invocation and a benediction in the first place? Why this recognition of the place of faith in the life of the President and of the electorate? Do we not live in a secularized world?
No, we do not. As Rick Warren put it:
The Church is everywhere in the world. There are villages that have little else, but they do have a church. You could visit millions of villages around the world that don’t have a school, a clinic, a hospital, a fire department, or a post office. They don’t have any businesses. But they do have a church.
The President of the United States is the world's iconic political figure par excellence. The hopes and fears of all the years meet in that figure for an extraordinary number of people. For that very reason, a President like Barack Obama has to present himself for what he is, a devout Christian whose purpose in life is ultimately defined by his God rather than himself or the electorate.
Obama, who identifies with the most all-encompassing, pervasive movement the world has ever known - Christianity - connects with everyone else in that movement by wearing the fact on his sleeve. Non-Christians and even anti-Christians ought to be able to see the logic.
Paradoxically, if Obama presented himself apart from his confessional identity, he would further exacerbate the messianic expectations people have in his regard. Obama’s faith, the invocation and the benediction at his Inauguration, humanize him.
Obama was received as a prophet during the election campaign. But he is not a prophet, and he knows it.
He will soon be the top executive of the Empire’s government. He will then be judged, not by words or iconic choices including that of having his friend Rick Warren deliver the invocation at his inauguration, but by actions in the rough-and-tumble world of domestic policy and foreign affairs.
This is the problem Barack Obama will face: the bigger they are, the harder they fall.
For a forceful explanation of why the choice of Warren makes sense politically, go here.
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