Journalist David Gibson discusses Obama’s recovery of “the lost gospel of America’s civil religion”:
Obama, on the other hand, can “re-present” such a transcendent civil theology, in part, because he literally embodies it, with DNA from a white mainline mother and an African father raised as a Muslim (and a name reflective of all that), as well as a childhood spent partly in exotic (to us) lands, and a family life today grounded in the experience of black America. Moreover, the black church Obama joined as an adult preaches, as R. Stephen Warner, the distinguished University of Chicago sociologist wrote, a congruence between private and public religion that is rarely found in other denominations. “Out of necessity, the black church rarely had the luxury of separating individual salvation from collective salvation,” as Obama put it in “The Audacity of Hope.” (One could argue that Latino spirituality shares a similar dynamic.) Obama also embraces doubt as a theological virtue with the kind of honesty that can disarm even the most ardent neo-atheists.
[…]A central tenet of Obama’s civil religion is the religion of civility, the fair-minded witness of competing claims, however strongly held. Daily discourse on the web and talk radio, as well as events around the world last week—audiotaped threats from Osama bin Laden and the assassination, inside a Kansas church, of abortion doctor George Tiller by a right-wing zealot—would seem to bode ill for Obama’s gospel. But extremism is also symptomatic of the desperation of a losing cause (witness John Wilkes Booth), and perhaps a paradox of hope for the future.
Read the full article at Politics Daily. And be sure to read contributions to “These things are old,” a new discussion series on this topic at the The Immanent Frame.