Jerome E. Copulsky compares references to God in the inaugural addresses of three American presidents:
While Bush celebrated the American ideal of freedom and the nation’s mission to expand it throughout the world, Obama spoke soberly of a nation in crisis. Though he didn’t use the word, one may hear in Obama’s words an indictment of America’s recent sins and a call for national revival.
Obama began with an admission of the current crisis. Unlike FDR, who in his first inaugural address stated that difficulties of the time “concern…only material things,” the difficulties Obama described were broader and deeper: the nation at war, its economy in shambles, the grave threat to the environment, failure of American education and the high cost of health care. But Obama stressed that America also faces a crisis of values and of confidence, brought about by a pettiness in our politics, feckless greed on the part of a few, but also “a collective failure to make hard choices.”
Yet this speech was no jeremiad, but rather a clarion call to a “new era of responsibility.” From his description of the crisis of the moment, Obama pointed out that America has weathered crises in the past “because we, the people, have remained faithful to the ideals of our forebears and true to our founding documents.”
Read the full piece at Religion Dispatches.