Obama’a call to renew that covenant has been drenched in civil religious language and myth, and he has renounced the exclusionary and extolling language of what Gorski calls “crusader nationalism.” Obama has successfully reintroduced the themes of the covenant, the prophetic, and the kingdom of God into the national conversation about inclusion and into the international conversation about a global community. Dialogue has already replaced diatribe. Multilateralism has replaced unilateralism. As Gorski points out, principle has replaced power. Obama’s patriotism stems from a conception of the nation that is rooted in shared memories, but more importantly in shared visions for the future. Though America’s past is mired in ambiguity and abrogation, the future depends—and Obama realizes this all too well—on a collective effort to imagine beyond “our narrow dreams.” Nation has at times been the site of great contention, and nationalism has all but too often produced violence. Whereas the nation for a long time seemed only a figment of the imagination of a powerful few, it now seems to be in a position to once again become the realized dream of an empowered multitude. It is this message of optimism and this vision of hope that President Obama has successfully conveyed in his speeches and his first acts as president.

The war in Iraq, the economic crisis at home and in the world, the impending ecological disaster have presented President Obama with an opportunity to bring the language of class (and all of America seems to find itself in the middle class), nation, and—I would add—globalized community back into the limelight. His acceptance speech bristled with fervor and civil religiosity, and echoed the renewal of the American promise—a promise that cannot be separated from the covenant. “At this moment, in this election,” Obama concludes his speech, “we must pledge once more to march into the future. Let us keep that promise, that American promise, and in the words of scripture hold firmly, without wavering, to the hope that we confess.” If civil religion is understood as a faithful devotion to higher ideals, both secular and religious, then it can very well become an unstoppable force for change and renewal—as Obama seems to have understood. The success and failure of civil religion depends wholly and unconditionally on the power of the covenant, both as a religious contract to those higher ideals and a social contract between human beings, who increasingly recognize that the perils of society and, indeed, this world require a joint effort. The prospects for a global civil religion in this volatile world gain a sense of clarity and urgency, but not necessarily feasibility—unfortunately perhaps.

It is here, in this context of interdependence and globalization, that I return to the issue of the nation and covenant, and perhaps in a way also class. The survival of the nation, ironically, depends on the acceptance of its vulnerability. Judith Butler in The Precarious Life makes that very point in relation to the subjectivity. “To foreclose … vulnerability, to banish it, to make ourselves secure at the expense of every other human consideration is to eradicate the most important resource from which we must take our bearings and find our way.” The events of 9/11 were not, as self-proclaimed hellfire prophets Jerry Falwell and Pat Roberston spewed, punishment for modernity and secularization, but they were an atrocious and sobering reminder of America’s vulnerability. Butler argues that if we, as individuals, as Americans, as human beings find it within ourselves to embrace that vulnerability, we will have made a covenant that cannot be broken. It is a moment in which the “chosenness” of one people is distributed to all by the mere fact of the human condition. The categories of race, class, and nation remain unfortunately necessary evils we have not yet been able to dispel. And neither has American politics. Obama, in speaking the language of inclusion rather than exclusion, is attempting to transcend these categories, perhaps hoping that the rest of the world will do so as well. Is this then the transcendent character of civil religion—our unwavering quest, aspiration or hope perhaps, to be something beyond what we have been? Is that perhaps what he intends for America? I believe it is.

In doing so, in my view, Gorski robs prophetic religion of its blood, tears and anger, and Obama’s speech of its subtlety.
Obama is doing something more complex and more ambiguous. He is attempting a sleight of hand in which the oppositional religion of the black church is acknowledged without being espoused. Indeed perhaps he does not feel justified in claiming it for his own—given his own biography. But he honors its power, a power that cannot be reduced to ethics. A power of which Langston Hughes spoke when he describes Jesus in his poetry as “the loveliest lynchee.” Obama honors prophetic religious language while insisting that it cannot be the basis of national action. For national action, he does not offer religion, but politics.

The speech ended with a beginning, not an ending–with a call to renewed effort, not a lullaby to put the nation to sleep. America is a messianic nation, a nation with profound eschatological pretensions, at least from time to time. But Obama was not indulging in self-congratulation. Rather, he urged the nation to take with ever greater seriousness the moral and, indeed, religious obligations that those pretensions put upon all citizens.

And the theological language was not simply frosting on a wholly secular cake. Rather, theology was put to work, naming our condition and illuminating a way forward. Most interesting on this point was Obama’s diagnosis of the nation’s “racial stalemate” as a matter of escapism or avoidance–a problem, he suggested, rooted in our collective failure to engage one another, a failure both political and theological, a failure to be a people and to have hope. His criticism of Jeremiah Wright, among others, was a criticism of Wright’s partial and despairing vision, his insistence that America is “static,” that the proper response to our situation is to reinforce the patterns and expectations we have, rather than step out of them and do a new thing. Furthermore, by framing the choice as one between two stark options, Obama echoed deep biblical patterns. Most obviously, he echoed Deuteronomy: “I have set before you life and death…choose life.” But more than that, he drew from the language of the Hebrew prophets the idea that God is doing a “new thing,” that God is not just a marble edifice but a living God who demands something of the people now and in the future. The theological language was not being used to compliment America, but to obligate it.

This use of “new thing,” it seems to me, is a genuine innovation in the rhetoric of “America as religious mission.” Or if it is not entirely an innovation–after all, the reverse side of the Great Seal of the United States does say Novus Ordo Seclorum, “A New Order of the Ages”–it was nonetheless never used in this way (at least not by anyone else from outside Illinois). This enabled Obama to express a faith in God and a faith “in the American people” in such a way that it wasn’t idolatrous, but simply an expression of hope. And, most importantly, he called upon America to begin–to start to do something. This is a use of civil religion not rooted in apocalyptic endings, or titanic final battles between good and evil, but a struggle inside the nation, and inside each soul, between hope and fear.

In all these ways it was easily the most significant public statement on race by a major politician and, at the same time, the most significant addition to the canon on civil religion in America in forty years.

[Note: For those who are interested, a longer version of some of these ideas also appeared at the Religion and Ethics Newsweekly blog.]