Weighing Warren

An Obama spokesperson recently defended the Obama's pick of Rick Warren to invoke God's name during the upcoming Presidential Inauguration. She said, "This is going to be the most inclusive, open, accessible inauguration in American history."

Obama's willingness to include everyone at the table had gone smoothly until this choice. Some have defended Obama by noting he also chose someone favorable to gay-rights to close the inauguration. What's the big deal? Everyone gets to be there and sit "at the table" together - he can bring them all together, right?

I disagree. Religion is the content of our absolutes. It is can never be an object alongside other objects, even if it is the preeminent one. The uncomfortable public has rightly (for once) perceived the impossibility of forcing Warren into the table alongside others. This is because the content of Warren's religious claims don't just seek supremacy, they demand transcendence of all other values.

Obama has brilliantly brought together varying political viewpoints and may be remembered as a uniter. But this can never work with religion, and it has nothing to do with effort. The second this "occurs" we will know one thing - we weren't really talking about religion.

I'm not talking about Warren's specific stance when I say I think Obama attempting to blend opposing ideologies suggests hubris against the nature of reality itself. And I don't have to see the future to know he will utterly fail every time he tries to do something like this - the nature of religion does not allow it. To paraphrase the wizard Gandalf in the Tolkien trilogy: "There can be only one Lord of the Ring, and he does not share power."

"Religion cannot stand in some way alongside other things, for it is the meaning of the unconditioned." -Paul Tillich, Theology of Culture

-S.P. Lunger