God bless America

Yesterday's Slate features a nice little survey of the religious festivities surrounding President-Elect Barack Obama's inauguration on the 20^th titled "God Bless, and Bless, and Bless, and Bless America--How many preachers does one inauguration need? Not too surprisingly, they blow the answer to the question raised beneath the title, but they do at least provide the information that four more have been scheduled than is Constitutionally necessary and who they are and what they've been up to.

Regular readers shouldn't be surprised that I think the answer to "How many preachers does it take to screw in a lightbulb swear in a President?" ought to be zero. But it's also something I've sort of tried not to think about too much: after all, I recognize that the overwhelming majority of Americans are some kind of religious, however poorly informed or defined in many cases, and that atheists and agnostics have less of a chance of being elected Governor, much less President, than, say, a pedophile terrorist whose chief hobbies are crack cocaine and fighting pit bulls. Okay, that's an exaggeration. But not by much. But the reality, anyway, is that notwithstanding the efforts of a bunch of grandstanding A/As,¹ the inauguration will include lots and lots of prayer and blessing and invoking of a deity (and do you have to ask which one?). So I try not to think about it.²

What is sort of interesting, if utterly unsurprising, is that the Slate piece doesn't seem to notice that what's really missing from the lineup isn't atheists,³ but any kind of real ecumenical breadth and depth whatsoever. Okay, so we have four different Christian denominations represented by four different kinds of Christians, and only one of them has implied he'll give a specifically Christian prayer (oh come on, you didn't really have to click that link to guess which one I'm referring to, did you?), while two others (much to their credit) have said they'll try to be non-denominational. Nonetheless, one doesn't see a Rabbi, or an Imam or a Lama or brahmin Priest on the list, much less a representative of Wicca or Vodun or something really outré on the list. One has to wonder what the reaction would be if the Invocation were to be given by a witch. (I'm thinking the reaction on the Christian right would probably look a lot like this. How do we get one for 2012?)

How does anybody say the whole project isn't exclusionary?

Of course, most of the controversy about the invocation has surrounded Rick Warren, who might not be a homophobe even if he frequently waddles and quacks like one when he's not paddling around in the pond or flying south for the winter or getting into disputes with rabbits over what's in season.⁴

The Slate piece has a nice link, to this blog entry at American Prospect, which is particularly relevant because it turns out that Rev. Warren (who's giving the invocation) has previously gone against Bishop Gene Robinson, who's giving the opening prayer. Bishop Robinson, who seems like a pretty cool dude for a cleric,⁵ is the openly-gay Episcopalian Bishop who triggered a schism in the American Episcopalian church when he came out and said God told him to. When that occurred, a number of Episcopalian churches attempted to splinter away from the main church, which naturally caused a problem insofar as their church buildings were owned by the national Episcopalian church and these schismatics were no longer members of that larger church, so their continued use of the facilities would have been, what's the word? Oh, yes: theft.⁶

Anyway, Rev. Warren was very helpful in the anti-gay-bishop-Episcopalians'⁷ time of crisis, offering up Saddleback Church's facilities to the bigots. This meta-quote from American Prospect probably sums it up better than I could:

Warren, says Jim Naughton, the canon for communications and advancement of the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, "is owning up to the fact that he has a relationship with people who are, by anybody's calculus, bigoted toward homosexuals." The breakaway congregations represent a small minority of Episcopalians in the United States, but they work with a global network of anti-gay churches to "keep an atmosphere of crisis boiling." Using "the guise of orthodoxy, people are laying claim to material resources," Naughton added.

Well, indeedy.

I'd like to agree with Rev. Randall Balmer, who told The New York Times that he thought it would be a mistake to lump Warren in with James Dobson or Chuck Colson; Warren clearly isn't the worst of the worst, indeed when compared to Fred Phelps, Warren comes off as the totally awesomest guy in the universe--if you were stuck on a desert island with these two guys, a gun, and only one bullet, the choice would be obvious.⁸ On the other hand, Warren himself has characterized his differences with James Dobson as being a matter of "tone," and not substance.

I would like to be fair. Warren's position on the environment (that Christians should actively defend it, including work to halt or reverse anthropogenic global warming) is in the best tradition of organized faith. His positions on gay rights have, admittedly, swung off the usual magnetic north of religious conservatism: he's floated support of some kind of same-sex civil union while nonetheless comparing homosexuality to incest and supporting California's Proposition 8. His views of the role of the church in combating poverty are both noble and terrifying: while he believes in combating poverty issues, particularly in the Third World, and addressing hunger and disease, his tool for doing so sounds an awful like the missionary philosophy of earlier centuries: bring them to the church and teach them to improve their lots as good Christians.

But I just cannot like what I see of the man. There's still his uneasy relationship with capital-R Reason. His disbelief in evolution and (mostly) literal take on the Bible, while typical of his faith, aren't views I have much respect for. I don't completely trust the man--I can't really tell if his views on issues that directly harm my friends and members of my family are evolving or if he just attempts to express them in a fashion more palatable to the mainstream press while giving the usual spiel to religious homophobes and offering the use of his church to bigots.

Not that it matters one whit. He's giving the invocation. It's a done deal. I'd rather there was no invocation, or that the invocation was done by somebody truly ecumenical, perhaps even an ecumenical blessing by somebody who wasn't even the usual Christian, but any angst over the matter profits me nothing, unless you count becoming even angstier as something of a profit.

I don't.

And that (I think) is everything I have to say about the Inaugural Parade O' (Christian) Faith.

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¹Note to Michael Newdow: you're not actually helping.

²Which is maybe sort of chickenshit on my part, I admit, but there's only so much you can grieve over.

³What would we do if we were invited, anyway? Put up some kind of crappy, half-assed sign? No wonder we never get invited to the really good parties.

⁴Except that Sam Harris bears less resemblance to Bugs Bunny than he does to a douchebag. In fact, I thought about linking to the "debate" between Harris and Warren and calling it "Battle Of The Douchebags" or "When Douchebags Attack," but then the Bugs riff came into my head. Consider Harris v. Warren to be a little like Bugs' and Daffy's classic "Duck Season/Rabbit Season!" debate on a loop that never actually resolves with Elmer Fudd shooting anybody. (And don't you wish Elmer would just shoot 'em both and pay the fine to Fish And Wildlife for whichever one was wrong?)

Harris sometimes says reasonable things, but believe it or not Warren sometimes sounds reasonable, too. Newsweek's HvW-SMACKDOWN! isn't a totally terrible read insofar as you can see that Harris and Warren sometimes sound surprisingly like thoughtful, intelligent, informed individuals, but then they also occasionally spice things up by sounding like Sam Harris and Rick Warren instead, so it's kind of like a roundtable discussion featuring four people, two of whom are possibly retarded drug addicts.

Harris, in case you're unfamiliar, has defended torture and parapsychology while making attacks on religion that are sometimes completely justified and other times off-the-hook and at least as bad as the attacks on atheism and agnosticism he's supposedly repudiating. (Let's face it: if you're going to say something as inflammatory as claiming religion is the source of all evil in the world while attempting to marginalize religion's positive contributions to civilization, you're no better than the idiot who tries to blame Nazism or Stalinism on rampant atheism. Is it really any surprise that the Harris-Warren cage match features both men engaging in that ahistorical and dishonorable tactic?)

⁵He's one of the two religious guests at the ceremonies who has said he will try to be non-denominational. His comments, which are quoted in the American Prospect piece linked to, are worth repeating here:

"While that is a holy and sacred text to me, it is not for many Americans," Robinson said. "I will be careful not to be especially Christian in my prayer. This is a prayer for the whole nation."

⁶Okay, so that's not really the word. The real word is "trespassing," with a lengthy and unnoticed trespass eventually leading to "adverse possession." But "theft" just rolls off the tongue and page so much more smoothly, no?

⁷They really need a new name, don't they? Might I suggest "assholarians"? What? Just trying to be helpful. Sheesh.

⁸Suicide.