“I humbly ask this in the name of the one who changed my life – Yeshua, Isa, Jesús, [Spanish pronunciation], Jesus – who taught us to pray . . . .”Rick Warren’s invocation of the name of Jesus is all over the internet now, with websites such as The Moral Collapse of America (“Documenting the Increasing Wickedness That Threatens to Destroy America”) congratulating Pastor Warren on his courage in praying in Jesus’s name (http://themoralcollapseofamerica.blogspot.com/2009/01/rick-warren-does-use-name-of-jesus.html). As Moral Collapse notes, “Not only did Rick Warren emphatically use the name of Jesus during his prayer at the inauguration of Barack Obama, but his prayer was definitely one of the most ‘Christian’ inaugural prayers of the post World War II era.”
What’s that all about, then: Yeshua, Isa, Jesús, Jesus? Praying in the name of Jesus in front of a crowd of people from every walk of life, every background, and every sort of religious affiliation—as well as people with no religious adherence at all? Leading an entire nation, a diverse, multicultural, democratic one in prayer in Jesus’s name, in recitation of a prayer Jesus taught his followers?
Some kind commentators are interpreting Pastor Warren’s invocation as surprisingly inclusive, a kinder and gentler version of the saber-rattling invocations one has come to expect from the old war horses who are Rick Warren’s mentors in the religious right movement. These apologists see the Jesus stuff as merely tagged on to a prayer that, in its substance, acknowledges religious and cultural diversity.
I beg to differ. As the Moral Collapse website frankly acknowledges, Pastor Warren’s Jesus prayer has to be read against the backdrop of an ongoing culture war in which triumphalistic Christians with a theocratic agenda continue to use the name of Jesus as a weapon. Against everybody—Jews (Yeshua), Muslims (Isa), anybody who is not Christian according to their definition. The ending of Rick Warren’s inaugural invocation is an in-your-face battle cry to true believers about the intent of Pastor Warren and those he represents to subject an entire nation to a single form of Christianity, their form.
To understand what true believers like the Moral Collapse crowd heard when Rick Warren invoked Jesus’s name, one has to pay attention to the hot rhetoric the religious right was slinging around in the days before the inauguration. In particular, it’s important to focus on the contrast the religious right was seeking to draw between Gene Robinson and Rick Warren in the days leading up to the inauguration.
The FOX news headline about Robinson, which dominated any google search of Bishop Robinson’s name in the day or so before the inauguration, says it all: “A Christian Clergyman Horrified by ‘Aggressively Christian’ Prayers?” (http://foxforum.blogs.foxnews.com/2009/01/18/green_robinson_prayer). That’s the headline that FOX religion correspondent, the former Miss Minnesota and third runner-up for Miss America Lauren Green, chose to give her analysis of Robinson’s objection to “aggressively Christian” prayers in a pluralistic public setting.
Green chooses to hear Gene Robinson saying that he is horrified by belief itself. She reminds us that this is, after all, an overwhelmingly Christian nation, one that is 78% Christian—as if the dominance of a given religion in a pluralistic society affords that religious group ownership of the public forum.
Green ignores what Gene Robinson clearly said: that aggressively Christian prayers in a pluralistic public setting are inappropriate, because they implicitly disinherit large numbers of those present in the public square. They implicitly claim Christian ownership of the public square—and ownership by a specific kind of Christianity at that, a theocratic evangelical Christianity that sees all other Christians as outside the pale of true belief.
The problem, Gene Robinson wants to underscore, is the aggression. In the name of Jesus. Aggression in the name of a religious founder whose entire message was about peace-making, renunciation of power over others, bringing the least to the table and giving them the place of honor.
Sometimes, praying in the name of Jesus betrays everything Jesus stood for. That’s the problem. Rick Warren’s invocation of the name of Jesus in his inaugural invocation is problematic not merely for the many Americans who are not Christian or who are not believers at all. It’s problematic as well for many of us who are Christian, and who want to see Jesus and what he stands for communicated quite differently to the public square. It’s problematic because many of us hear a totally different message as we listen to Jesus than the one Rick Warren and his cohorts hear when they listen to Jesus.
Some interpreters of Pastor Warren’s invocation have noted that the scriptures tell followers of Christ, after all, to pray in Jesus’s name. Rick Warren was only obeying scriptural mandates, when he prayed in Jesus’s name.
That’s fair enough. But it’s not enough. The scriptures, both Jewish and Christian, are filled with conflicting commands and diverse judgments about everything under the sun. The Christian scriptures contain not one but three teachings on divorce, two of them conflicting teachings attributed to Jesus himself.
The challenge is not to isolate a verse here or a verse there and jab one’s finger down and say, “Aha! But Jesus said.” The problem is to understand the meaning of the texts as a whole, to weigh this part of them against that part of them, to respect them in their complex diversity. The challenge is to hear what Jesus says about himself in a way that transcends a single text or a canon within the canon. The challenge is to pay attention to the whole and not only the parts, to the message that runs through all the nooks and crannies of diverse utterances.
To hear that way—to hear beyond literalistic fundamentalist readings of single texts taken out of context—we have not only to read the gospels in their entirety and the scriptures as a whole, in their bewildering multifacetedness. We also have to listen carefully to what over a century of important historical critical and literary analysis of the gospels and the scriptures have shown us about Jesus, about the man whose life story forms the foundation of texts written several decades after his death, texts whose intent is not to remember him biographically but to reinterpret his life in theological terms.
The Jesus who emerges from historical-critical and literary study of the gospels is anything but aggressively Christian. He is a charismatic prophet-healer who announced that the reign of God has broken into history, and that it will be evident in radical reversal of how we carry on our lives, in radical upheaval of ordinary social mores and ordinary social arrangements: the hungry are being satisfied, the poor lifted up, the last made first, the mighty cast down, the rich sent empty away.
The Jesus whose face we see as a result of careful historical-critical and literary analysis of the gospels is a wandering charismatic prophet-healer who decisively repudiated the title son of God, an honorific messianic title some of his followers apparently wanted to apply for him. Instead, he chose to be known as the son of man, an honor-denying, triumphalism-repudiating, anti-theocratic title.
That Jesus, the one who refused to lead a revolt against Roman rule in his nation, the one who would not permit himself to be crowned king, is utterly betrayed by theocratic prayers in Jesus’s name that use Jesus’s memory to bash others, to put them in their place, to subordinate them to true believers and their agenda. That Jesus has everything to do with critique of theocracy, not with its establishment.
It is because many of us read the gospels and hear the voice of this anti-theocratic, aggression-denying Jesus, that we experience profound discontent when some Christians use the name of Jesus to claim dominion over everyone else—over people of other faiths and no faith at all, over Christians of other theological penchants, over an entire nation of many different types of people. Many of us who are Christian have no ambition at all for theocracy. To the contrary, we commit ourselves to work against theocratic agendas not only because they are antithetical to democracy, but because they betray core Christian values. Not to mention the gospels themselves . . . .
Many of us are convinced that Francis of Assisi caught the authentic gospel message—heard the words of the non-aggressive, non-theocratic Jesus—when he famously observed, “Go out and preach the gospel. Use words if you must.” This is why, I submit, so many of those who heard both Rev. Warren and Rev. Lowery at the inauguration ceremonies were moved by the latter more than by the former.
In the last analysis, it’s not so much about the words as about what stands behind the words. It’s about the living witness words embody. In the case of Rev. Lowery, there is a conformity between a life lived and words spoken that is profoundly moving to many of us: a life in which the witness to racial justice and to the end of apartheid led to legal harassment, to years of nonviolent activism, to decades of struggle to bring people at cultural war with each other to the same table.
Many political analysts continue to speak of President Obama’s genius at bringing a representative of the new religious right to the inauguration, in an attempt to weave the message of a powerful movement that has often opposed the ideas for which the new president stands into his policies. I wonder. I think, instead, that President Obama’s genius may have been in matching a minister of the religious right wing of evangelicalism with a minister of the black church.
In this public display of white evangelicalism and black evangelicalism, we were able to see contrasts. We were able to see differing emphases in what the two forms of evangelical religion stand for. Both stand for Jesus. Both are comfortable praying in Jesus’s name, though Rev. Lowery chose wisely (in my view) to refrain from doing so in a pluralistic public setting in which that usage will inevitably (and rightly) be viewed as triumphalistic and exclusive.
But the Jesus these two pastors communicate by their lives and political witness? To me, there’s a radical difference: two ways of being Christian, of communicating the values of the gospel in the public realm. One I can respect, because it’s consonant with the core values I encounter as I read the gospels. The other troubles me profoundly, and will continue to do so. Because I am a believer.
Disclaimer: I did not watch the inauguration, because of Rev. Warren’s inclusion in the program. I have not watched videotapes of his invocation that are now widely available online. I am relying on transcriptions of the prayer in what I say above.
