Inaugural prayers: an analysis...and a big Supreme Court case on religious expression

I have blogged before about Liberty Magazine, which arrives in our mail from time to time. This month's issue has two pieces I would like to share.

First, Lincoln Steed (seriously great name!), the magazine's editor, discusses the prayers that were offered at President Obama's inauguration. Here's his analysis of the controversial Rick Warren prayer:

It was almost an anticlimax to hear the actual prayer at the January event. To be sure the possibility of it giving offence was diminished greatly by the chuckles at Chief Justice Roberts fumbling in the administration of the oath. But it was a secularly sacred moment and all turned out well—even the public prayer.

If there was a problem with the prayer it was its very broadness, not any narrow religious viewpoint that some had feared. The good pastor presaged the new President’s inclusiveness by early on throwing a theological bone to Islam by saying of God, “You are the compassionate and merciful One.” True: and expressed in the familiar terminology of the Koran. At the end, before reciting the Lord’s Prayer from the New Testament, Rick Warren identified “the One who changed my life” as “Yeshua, Isa, Jesus, Jesus (hay-SOOS).” Most religions covered there, including the Republicanism of the past eight years!

It was a very formal prayer that invoked the Creator, the uniqueness of the United States (avoiding direct claims of Divine privilege that have intrude into past pronouncements), and looked to God for help in the difficult days ahead. Its only theological gaffe, based on my reading of the Bible, was the assumption that Dr. King and others were watching from heaven. After all the Bible says that “the dead know not anything” (Proverbs 21:4 ) and Paul looked forward to the return of Jesus at the end of days when “the dead will be raised.” (1 Corinthians 15:52 ) However, it is a common enough assumption and we should not hold it against the prayer-giver’s good will. What it does, though, is illustrate the hazards of a public prayer, either endorsed by the state or, as is likely here, given under the smile of the ruler and tending to legitimize a particular religious viewpoint—or, worse, none at all, other than a broadly acceptable syncretistic model of faith.

After a discussion of the other prayers offered at the time of the Inauguration, and a detour back to the time of the founding fathers, Steed concludes:

We had better pray that the prayers paid for and organized on our behalf reflect our views and not the government’s. Come to think of it, that is precisely the problem. No government can possibly accurately represent all the religious views of its citizens without watering all down to meaninglessness or excluding others.

The other article that caught my attention is entitled "Final Summum," and is an overview of a case that was recently argued before the United States Supreme Court:

In November the Supreme Court of the United States heard a case that presents an interesting twist on the persistent constitutional problem of religious displays on government property. Typically, the question is whether a particular display, such as a depiction of the Ten Commandments or a Nativity scene, violates the establishment clause of the First Amendment.

Pleasant Grove City, Utah v. Summum involves a dispute over a religious display that defied the usual order of events. Instead of challenging a religious display on city property as unconstitutional, a small religious group claimed they had a right to display a monument reflecting their beliefs, as well.

Check it out!