Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
Rick Warren and the President
Rick Warren and the President
Apr 20, 2025 3:02 PM

The blogosphere is atwitter over the news that Rick Warren, pastor of Saddleback Church, will give the invocation at President-elect Barack Obama’s inauguration. The decision on Warren’s part to accept is getting criticism from the right, while Obama’s offer of the opportunity is getting criticized from the left.

At Redstate Erick Erickson views Warren’s participation as evidence of his desire to be the next “Protestant Pope” after the decline of Billy Graham. Erickson writes that Warren “wants to be the moral voice of the moral majority the way Graham used to be and he has a bigger ego to boot. So he’s happy to lay his hands on the new President and have the media give him the legitimacy the media once gave Billy Graham.”

And from the other side of the spectrum, Peter Daou’s entry at the Huffington Post does a good job summarizing the massive criticism Obama has gotten from the more radical strands of his party. In Daou’s words “the munity is outraged.”

Of course, they were also outraged when Obama participated in Warren’s Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency. And so too were many religious conservatives doubtful about mitment to the two rails of the Religious Right, marriage and abortion. Many conservatives were pleasantly surprised when Warren (politely) pressed Obama on his views about abortion, which spawned the now-infamous “above my paygrade” response from the now President-elect. Quite frankly, Warren doesn’t need the media to “give” him legitimacy…his popularity, his pulpit, and his ability to bring together politicians in a public forum do that well enough.

I wouldn’t be surprised if Warren again surprises his conservative critics, even though an inauguration invocation is hardly the place for political grandstanding or pontificating. My opinion about Warren remains unchanged. At the time he organized the Saddleback forum, I thought it was a mark in his favor that he could act as a fair dealing arbiter and get the two major presidential candidates to appear. Only someone who had garnered a level of trust from both sides could achieve that kind of thing, and that’s where parisons to Billy Graham are most accurate plimentary to Warren: “Perhaps Warren has had to upset the margins on both sides of the political aisle to get himself into a position that mand the kind of respect from both candidates that would get them to this platform.” He seems to be doing the same thing here.

Gina Dalfonzo over at the Point says that “a Christian leader given the opportunity to stand up and pray for the nation in public on an important occasion should generally take it, I think, no matter who’s doing the asking.” I do think pastors should avoid partisanship, as best they can, and I think Warren has done so rather admirably.

On this point there’s an parison to be made between Warren’s appearance at a presidential inauguration and the offer to Joel Hunter and Cameron Strang to pray at the Democratic National Convention. Strang, who is the founder and CEO of Relevant magazine, initially accepted the invitation, and then declined under criticism that his appearance would lend partisan credibility to Obama. Strang explained his choice to withdraw, saying, “If my praying at the DNC was perceived as showing favoritism and incorrectly labeling me as endorsing one candidate over the other, then I needed to have pause.”

So here’s the question: is praying at an inauguration more or less partisan than praying at a party’s convention? Or are the two equally partisan? I’m inclined to think that praying at the inauguration isn’t nearly so easily identifiable with “endorsing one candidate over the other” or “showing favoritism.” Once the election is over, the President is everybody’s President. Before the election, that’s a different story.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
CAFTA/Culture of Life: enemies?
John Paul II gave us all a tremendous gift by endorsing the terms Culture of Life and Culture of Death. But as with all great gifts, we must guard these terms carefully so as not to wear them out with misuse, robbing them of their relevance. Unfortunately, this is precisely what is happening in the current debate over CAFTA. A group called Catholics for Faithful Citizenship (PDF) claims the following: “Clearly, supporting CAFTA is inconsistent with upholding a culture of...
You catch more bees with honey
Following months of Zimbabwe’s brutal “Drive Out Trash” campaign, pleasantries exchanged between Mugabe and a UN delegation may have made some headway. The UN report on the situation, according to Claudia Rosett, began “with a delicacy over-zealously inappropriate in itself to dealings with the tyrant whose regime has been responsible for wreck of Zimbabwe” by describing Mugabe’s reception of the UN officials with a “warm e.” Despite the ings of the UN report with respect to policy solutions (more aid!),...
Labor unions and free association
The Service Employees International Union and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters have broken away from the plaining that the federation has focused too much on political activism in the face of declining union membership and influence. Dr. Charles Baird was a featured guest on yesterday’s edition of Kresta in the Afternoon on Ave Maria Radio, discussing Catholic perspectives on unionism and whether the modern American labor union movement patible with church teachings. Dr. Baird is Chair of the Department of...
Seeing the trees, missing the forest
The United Nations has released a report on the ongoing upheavals in Zimbabwe, where tyrant Robert Mugabe has been punishing his political opponents under the guise of “cleaning up” the country’s cities. The effect of Operation Murambatsvina (meaning either “Operation Restore Order” or “Operation Drive Out Trash,” depending on who’s translation you believe) has been to leave some 700,000 people homeless, jobless, or both. A downloadable copy of the UN report is available here. While the report does illuminate the...
Close call on CAFTA
Close at Home The House of Representatives voted early this morning (12:03 am) to approve the Central American Free Trade Agreement (CAFTA) after weeks of intense lobbying on both sides. The final vote was a close 217-215. My predictions: somehow, any dip in employment (if there is one) in the next six months will somehow be linked to CAFTA by its detractors. Detractors will attempt to take the moral high ground in American politics in ’06 and ’08, and even...
ExTORTion
S. T. Karnick over at The Reform ments on a recent suit filed against DuPont over Teflon, claiming that “DuPont lied in a massive attempt to continue selling their product.” Karnick observes that abuse of the tort system is rampant, in part because “it has been perverted into a proxy for the criminal justice system: a means of punishing supposed wrongdoers through the use of a weaker standard of proof—preponderance of the evidence instead of proof beyond a reasonable doubt.”...
SCOTU$
Slate features an article by Henry Blodget, a former securities analyst, which examines the investments of Supreme Court nominee John G. Roberts. In an analysis that has more than you would ever need to know about a person’s finances (and perhaps reads a bit too much into the investments), Blodget writes of Roberts, “His fortune is self-made, which suggests a bias toward self-reliance rather than entitlements and subsidies.” That sounds promising. HT: Fast Company Now ...
Great debate
Foreign Policy hosts this exchange on environmental issues and economics. Carl Pope, executive director of the Sierra Club, gets the first word and Bjørn Lomborg, adjunct professor at the Copenhagen Business School, gets the last word. ...
Cuba and China
Here’s a great interview from the Marketplace Morning Report with Chris Farrell, in which he argues for the lifting of trade sanctions against dictatorial and oppressive regimes. pares the cases of Cuba and China, in which two different strategies have been used, with vastly different results. We need to “stop the policy of broad based sanctions against nations that we don’t like,” says Farrell. This is directly opposite of the view, for example, which primarily blames economic engagement and the...
Roadside Religion
Alan Warren / Associated Press ...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved