There is something very jarring, and very important, illuminated in the brief prayer Rick Warren offered up at President Obama’s first pass at Presidential Inauguration on Tuesday. And the challenge it presents is this: can the offer of an explicitly and unapologetically Christian prayer by a Christian minister ever be wrong?
In the context of a Presidential Inauguration ceremony, the answer might be, Yes. After all, this is a secular ceremony, secular in the sense of admitting to the nation’s religious diversity. President Obama, be sure to recall, included “non-believers” in his poignant litany of citizens whose recognition he intends to make a priority. Ever since President Madison first invoked the name of God in 1821 at a Presidential Inaugural Address, it has been fairly common to do so—so long as you do not add a qualifier. A President of the people, elected by the people and intended to work for the people, needs to represent all the people without exclusion. “God,” in this way of speaking, means the non-denominational God of us all. Were a President to say more than “God bless you,” or “God bless America,” were he or she to say “may the God we see revealed Incarnate in Christ lay a blessing upon you,” then a blithely ecumenical moment would turn partisan and exclusionary.
The concern now is whether that line was crossed by Rick Warren. His very first words were addressed to “Almighty God, our Father,” and that already suggests a prayer that has zeroed in on the Abrahamic faiths, potentially excluding all others. Four sentences later, he invoked “the Scripture” (note the singular) and the fundamental credo of monotheism, the Shema: “Hear O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one.”
It is that use of the first person plural, *our* God, that nags. Does this “we” really include our Hindu, Buddhist, Zoroastrian, Taoist, and Confucian fellow-citizens? Is the invocation of “God” without any qualifier already a violation of the unwritten prime directive of Inaugural Address?
If so, then Rick Warren came intending to rewrite that unwritten rule, and he came to set the record straight. His prayer concluded in unapologetically and exclusively Christian, terms: “I humbly ask this in the name of the One who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jesus, Jesus (with Spanish inflection)”… and then he recited the so-called Lord’s Prayer (as found in the Gospel According to Matthew 6:9-13, and in slightly different form in the Gospel According to Luke, 11:2-4).
I’m not certain if this prayer crosses an ecumenical line or not; it certainly dances artfully with the boundary. It starts with Israel and ends with Christ. It makes no attempt to include polytheists or non-believers other than in its vague acknowledgment that “we are all Americans.”
So who is this “we”? That is the question that nags at me, still. Warren’s prayer plays amazingly on the full possibilities of the uses of first-person address. In the beginning of the speech, it was all first person plural: “all *we* see,”… “the Scripture tells *us*.” But the prayer ends with a decisive use of the first person singular: “*I* humbly ask this in the name of the One who changed *my* life.” And while the One he quotes spoke in the plural (“give *us* this day”), Rick Warren has run the risk here of inviting a descent into the depths of a dangerous religious narcissism. A prayer that began with “we,” ended with “me.” A prayer that began with all of us, narrowed itself to the Judeo-Christian monotheist, then more narrowly still on the Christian, then more narrowly still on that faith as experienced by Rick Warren himself. It is a stunning rhetorical achievement. This is my prayer, offered to my God, the truth spoken as I see it, regardless of whom it may offend or exclude.
It would be fine thing to initiate a discussion about whether this an appropriate prayer in this setting or not.
