Invoke nothing
Everyone’s been talking about Obama’s choice of Rick Warren to give the invocation at his inauguration. My initial response was something like, “Ugh — fine. I’ve got to pick my battles.” It’s troubling, but there are bigger problems out there, even if we just limit ourselves to church-state separation issues, and I can’t get that riled up about this one. To be honest, it sounds to me like a little bit of gloating (remember how the Saddleback debate looked like a giveaway to McCain?) as well as a visible yet ultimately meaningless concession to the Christian Right. It doesn’t set any policy, just allows them to feel a little special. Not so bad.
My real issue is with the idea of an inaugural invocation in the first place. I agree that there’s plenty to be upset about regarding Rick Warren himself, but as has also been pointed out before, this “tradition” didn’t start until 1937 and isn’t an essential part of the inauguration. It’s pretty clearly an inclusion of specific religious statements and viewpoints into state functions, which is supposed to be forbidden. It seems like the only reason we still use it is that, once FDR did it (three times in a row), Truman didn’t look like he was some kind of a godless heathen, and naturally Eisenhower had to show he loved God too, and so on and so forth.
It’s just like the phrase “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. People act like there’s something magical about that set of words, but don’t seem to realize they weren’t even written until the 1890s (by a Socialist! gasp!) and that God wasn’t mentioned in it until the 1950s. Some tradition!
The appeal to tradition is a blatantly fallacious argument. If “we’ve always done it” was a good enough reason to do something and never change, we would still be living in caves and gnawing on hunks of raw meat. Worse, proponents of religion in public ceremony aren’t even applying this fallacy well! The older tradition is not to have an invocation, not to mention God in the pledge. (The even older tradition is not to have a pledge at all… or not to have an inauguration at all. Why not go back to the Articles of Confederation, or even to being a British colony? Perhaps we should all pack up and leave the country to whatever Native Americans are left, since the older tradition is for this continent to be undiscovered by Europeans! Or maybe you’d rather the tribes go really old-school and find their way back across the Bering Strait?)
What we ought to do is not to look at what is superficially older (stopping at whatever arbitrary point in time we don’t care to look beyond), but to look at what course of action is best. An inaugural invocation is certainly against the spirit of the First Amendment, and though I’m no lawyer, I think there’s a good argument to be made that it’s against the letter of the text as well. “Invoking” any particular God or gods as part of an official swearing of oaths “[respects] an establishment of religion” unless they have a representative from every existent belief system including atheism, which strikes me as rather difficult as well as time-consuming. It’s better to invoke nothing and no one but the people of this country and the Constitution. Unfortunately, the groupthink of the democratic process is not extremely logical or detail-oriented. As long as people care whether candidates share their religious beliefs, the electoral process is not going to change this practice, and unless Michael Newdow et al. are sucessful in their suit, the judicial branch won’t be much help either.