On the Inauguration and Religion

I watched the Inauguration here in London with the other students in my program, a group of mostly non-Americans happy about Obama’s election and ready to join in the celebration. The experience was not particularly different from what it would have been like to watch with a group of friends in the US, with one notable exception: the surprise and distaste for the religious overtones throughout the ceremony.

“Distaste” is perhaps too strong a word - it was almost more like amusement. At first there was a smattering of boos for Rick Warren, from Americans and non-Americans alike, which wasn’t particularly surprising given the controversy surrounding his selection. But then came this sentence in Obama’s speech:

We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus - and non-believers.

And, to my surprise, several students burst out laughing. It seemed the sort of sentiment this crowd would endorse, and of course it is. The laughter, I later learned, was provoked by how absurd they felt the statement was in the context of the rest of the Inauguration. For the day had begun with a Christian prayer from an Evangelical preacher, and only a few minutes earlier Obama himself had invoked “the words of Scripture.” And of course later the event was closed out with more prayer. And in the middle comes this ecumenical statement from Obama about our “patchwork heritage” in which the final words “and non-believers” are spoken in a tone mixing defensiveness with condescension. To the non-Americans in the audience, the prayers were unseemly and even shocking, and Obama’s words rang hollow.

It’s no secret on this blog that I don’t take the friendliest view of religious belief and that I’m a strong advocate of separation of church and state. But even I was taken aback by this reaction. Watching at home, I would have barely noted the Biblical quotations in Obama’s speech, and I would have marked the recognition of “non-believers” as progress - which, in the American context, it is.

It made me realize how ingrained religion - and Christianity in particular - is in American public life. It also made me realize a previously unnoticed cost of that intermingling: we look like fools.

I should note that I don’t wholeheartedly endorse their reaction. I think Obama’s invocation of scripture, for example, is at least partly a way for him to nod in the direction of the black civil rights heroes who came before him by emulating their rhetoric, which often carried religious overtones. But watching the invocation and benediction among a group of people who found it so utterly bizarre for them to be taking place at a political event made me realize that it is utterly bizarre. And it does undermine Obama’s statements of inclusiveness when they take place in the midst of such open displays of Christian piety.

There’s a sense in which this isn’t that big of a deal, and I recognize that. But it becomes at least a little bit bigger of a deal when it’s noted that it taints the message we try to send to the world - and based on the reaction of the people I’m hanging out with, it does so to a degree more significant than I would have thought.

Cross-posted at Urbanagora.