Religion versus religiosity
By Barack Obama has always claimed his religious faith is one of the most important things in his life, and essential to his identity. It’s therefore all the more disappointing that his choice of Rick Warren reflects a particularly American brand of incoherence and hypocrisy when it comes to public displays of supposed religious belief.
The incoherence is reflected by behavior — such as choosing Warren to give the invocation — that seems to affirm two propositions:
(1) Religious beliefs are enormously important.
(2) The actual content of those beliefs is irrelevant.
The first proposition is something that almost all religious believers have to affirm, given the putative content of their beliefs. The second is affirmed by absurd formulations such the supposed importance of being “a person of faith” , without any regard to the actual content of that faith (assuming of course it stays within the boundaries of the “acceptable” religions with which American politicians may be affiliated).
Does Obama have to be as phony on this kind of thing Mitt Romney? That’s a pretty low bar to leap.
If Obama’s religious beliefs are important to him as he claims, and he wanted to do something genuine in regard to the invocation, he would either have someone from his own religious community deliver the invocation, or not have an invocation at all. Both choices would no doubt be considered too politically problematic, so they had to do something phony. But if they were going to do that, they should have picked some utterly generic person to give an utterly generic invocation, devoid of any real religious or political content, like the rote invocation of God’s blessing at the end of a presidential speech.
Choosing somebody like Warren is an insult not only to political progressives, but to religious believers (and especially politically progressive religious believers). It trivializes religious belief — which I would bet even most of Warren’s biggest fans will recognize as well, thus eliminating any supposed political advantage to be gained from this nauseating little exercise in pseudo-ecumenical posturing.