No Prior Convictions
By
Erin Aubry Kaplan
It’s always depressing, at least momentarily, to be reminded that hope has its limits. Or that it can be qualified and moderated, sculpted like limestone, to a point where it no longer resembles hope but something just slightly above the status quo.
President-elect Obama has chosen Pastor Rick Warren to preside over next month’s inauguration, an event as eagerly anticipated as anything in modern American history.That’s partly because there’s been so little to celebrate on a national scale for so long, folks are already putting on their dancing shoes and ready to see the whole event as a template for a better, more enlightened nation.
It’s a coming-out party for a country that wandered away from its better nature for too many years and suffered in a desert of its own making, a country that’s been wounded badly by culture wars, but not killed by them. Not yet.
This inauguration is not just a message to the world that America is back, it’s a reintroduction to ourselves.
So the invocation and who does it is critical. Invocations are not just for the religious, by the way, but for all of us whose stake in this still-evolving democracy feels spiritual and always has. Of course, I don’t expect that whoever’s delivering the blessing will wear a cloth that covers everybody’s religious beliefs, to say nothing of the secular beliefs. It’s not possible in this case that one can or even should represent the many.
But that one who holds the brief power of the pulpit on Jan. 20 will nonetheless reflect something about all of us, spiritually, politically and otherwise.
Obama knows this very well. Which is why his choice of Warren, the supposedly moderate evangelical pastor from Orange County, is such a letdown. It’s not just that Warren vigorously supported Proposition 8, the anti-gay marriage initiative that just passed in California and opened up new rifts among gays, straights, blacks and other groups, rifts that are still deepening. It’s also the fact that during the campaign, Warren felt entitled to call the presidential candidates into account at his own place of worship.
The debate that he hosted at Saddleback church was really an Oprah interview, during which Warren was perfectly comfortable grilling Obama and McCain about their views on abortion and other “moral” issues that were far more about the mostly white church base than about an American base—a narrow reflection indeed.
Certainly Warren is only one symbol of the kind of faith-based power that’s ruled America for the last decade, but that’s the point—he’s a look backward, not forward. It’s not that he doesn’t have a constituency, but it’s very clear that that constituency as a guiding force should be retired, or at least minimized.
Obama’s already shown that he’s a master of compromise and soother of ruffled feathers when it comes to appointments, but he’s also shown that he can tip that compromise into capitulation. Or at least it looks that way.
I can’t help but think now about Obama’s former pastor and spiritual advisor, Jeremiah Wright. He was chased off the scene by his alleged racial divisiveness, a chase that Obama himself sanctioned in the end. Clearly that was more a political move than a move based on a real conviction that Wright’s scripture-based social critiques of America were wrong.But now that the politics have paid off and Obama’s got the office he was running for, he can put forward who he wants to; he can articulate his own values without fear of retribution. That he chooses to put forward a very divisive Warren instead of someone one else—not Wright necessarily, but someone—says something about his values I’m not sure I like.
ERIN AUBRY KAPLAN is the first African American in history to be a weekly op-ed columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Her musings continue to appear in the Times, Essence magazine, and a host of other publications. Among her many projects, Kaplan is currently working on her much anticipated book.