At Religion Dispatches, legal scholar Bruce Ledewitz predicts that, despite its repeated religious invocations, the pageantry of Obama’s inauguration might actually point the way to a more secular and inclusive civil religion, one where the beliefs of nonbelievers, too, need to be respected:
America may finally be on the way to resolving the culture war over the acceptable nature of public religious expression. It would not surprise me if President Obama is the last President whose inauguration is accompanied by expressly Christian prayer. Assuming that President Obama is reelected in 2012, a new President will be inaugurated in eight years, in 2017. By that time, America will look quite different religiously from the way it looks today and our public expression of religion may have come to reflect that change.
Continue reading at Religion Dispatches.
