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.]