Rick Warren’s Inaugural Prayer Was: Too Long, Too Doctrinal, And Too Protestant

Rick Warren’s inaugural prayer, first of all, seemed way too long. About in the middle of his prayer, I started feeling antsy. As Warren started yet another paragraph, I estimated that his prayer was probably twice as long as what good manners should dictate. Then, his final flourish, with an implicit invitation for listeners to join in — The Lord’s Prayer — I thought was simply out of order, over the top, and inappropriate for the occasion.

My uneasy feeling that Warren was trespassing on inaugural time is verified in the word count. Warren’s inaugural prayer counts out to 492 words. Billy Graham’s 1969 prayer at Richard Nixon’s inaugural was 85 words and Franklin Graham’s 2001 prayer for George W. Bush was 92 words. By the standard’s set by the Graham’s, Warren’s prayer was five times longer than it should have been.

And my gut feeling that Warren had gone too far in his Lord’s Prayer conclusion is verified by at least one religious thinker, Randall Balmer, who said, “I don’t think he (Warren) acquitted himself very well. To lead the nation in saying the Lord’s Prayer, which is so particularly Christian, was a mistake.” Balmer is a professor of American religious history at Columbia University and an editor of the conservative magazine, Christianity Today. He has authored a number of books. His last book is, “God in the White House: How Faith Shaped the Presidency from John F. Kennedy to George W. Bush.”

An interesting article in The Wall Street Journal, printed prior to the inauguration, says that the country has gone through, in effect, three phases of inaugural prayers. It identifies this third phase, that we are currently in, as the “Protestant Only Model,” because lately, to give the inaugural prayer, only protestant clergy have been invited.  The Journal says that this Protestant Only Model doesn’t fit the spirit of the Constitution.

It is a common practice in protestant churches that the conclusion to a rousing pastoral prayer is an invitation to the congregation to recite in unison, The Lord’s Prayer — to its peroration:  “For thine is the Kingdom and The Power And The Glory Forever. Amen.” It seems to me, by ending the inaugural prayer with the Lord’s Prayer, Warren put the icing on the cake of this Protestant Only Model.

I realize that Warren had some wise and thoughtful parts to his prayer.  I liked this portion: “As we face these difficult days ahead, may we have a new birth of clarity in our aims, responsibility in our actions, humility in our approaches, and civility in our attitudes, even when we differ.” Its a great thought:  A birth of clarity of aims! Yes.  (I certainly know that such a birth is much needed for public education and I have posted about this need a bunch of times.)

Warren continued, “Help us to share, to serve and to seek the common good of all.  May all people of good will today join together to work for a more just, a more healthy and a more prosperous nation and a peaceful planet.” Yes. Yes. And, Yes. We should all pray, hope, and work for such aims. But the fact that this was a “protestant prayer,” I’m thinking, caused a lot of people to not really hear what Warren was saying.

The Journal says, “Including the two prayers at Barack Obama’s inaugural, 12 prayers will have been delivered at inaugurations since 1989. All of them will have been delivered by Protestants. By contrast, in the previous 48 years, fewer than half of the prayers were offered by Protestants. Every president prior to George H.W. Bush had a Catholic and more than half also had a Jewish or Greek Orthodox clergyman.”

According to the WSJ:

The country has gone through, in effect, three phases. In the first, presidents used a religious-diversity model. From 1937, when the first inaugural prayer was offered, until 1985, the presidents (with one exception in 1981) had clergy of different faiths or denominations up on the podium.

During these years, the Christian prayers were not watered down in any way. They often prayed in the name of Jesus Christ. But because there was a rabbi on the platform, no one could be accused of giving a government imprimatur to one particular religion. At Truman’s inaugural, Rev. Edward Hughes Pruden ended his prayer, “Bestow upon us, our Father, the happiness which is reserved for that nation whose God is the Lord, through Jesus Christ, our Redeemer, we pray, amen.”

It easily fit the spirit of the Constitution because he was followed by Rabbi Samuel Thurman of the United Hebrew Temple of St. Louis. “O Lord, make us worthy of all Thy blessings, to the end that both leader and people may continue to find favor in Thine eyes, and so live and serve that Thy glory,” Rabbi Thurman intoned.

Over time, the president reduced the number of clergy on the podium In 1977, Jimmy Carter enlisted two rather than four clergy, prompting protests from Jewish and Greek Orthodox groups. Ronald Reagan used just his personal pastor in 1981, though he returned to the four-person prayer scrum in 1985.

Then in 1989 and 1993 we tried what might be called the “America’s pastor” model. One man, the Rev. Billy Graham, offered both the invocation and benediction. He pulled it off by using broadly inclusive language. In 1989 he referred just to “God” and in 1993 he declared: “I pray this in the name of the one that’s called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, the Everlasting Father and the Prince of Peace.” Note, too, that he used the word “I” rather than “we,” which would have assumed all in the audience were Christian. …

Next came the Protestant-only model. In 1997, Mr. Graham was the only pastor at Bill Clinton’s second inaugural, but this time he made it a fully Christian prayer, ending it “we pray in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.”

His son, Franklin Graham, then took it a step further in 2001, urging Americans from the balcony of the U.S. Capitol to acknowledge Christ “alone” as their savior. Why did Franklin Graham go this far? To some degree he and Mr. Caldwell probably just prayed the way they normally pray without fully realizing their special roles as the only clergy on the stage that day.

But the politics of evangelicalism had changed, too. By 2001 conservative evangelicals had become a powerful force in American politics, instrumental to electing George W. Bush to the presidency. Part of the evangelical identity, increasingly, was a pugnacious sense that they were being persecuted and should not be cowed into suppressing their faith. “I knew stating that there is no other Name by which an individual can be saved grate on some ears and prick some hearts,” Franklin Graham wrote about his inaugural prayer in his book, “The Name.” “However, as a minister of the gospel, I was not there to stroke the egos of men. My role was to acknowledge the all powerful One and please Him….I want to please my Father in heaven no matter the cost.” The country’s growing religious diversity left evangelical Protestants feeling more defensive and inclined to strut their theological stuff.

When he was criticized by some civil libertarians after the inaugural, Mr. Graham wore their criticism as a badge of honor and used it to warn Christians about their marginalization. “The response to the inaugural prayers is additional evidence of a disturbing trend in American life: Christians who use the name of Jesus and insist that He is ‘the one and only way to God’ are increasingly viewed by many in the liberal media as narrow-minded religious bigots who represent a threat to the rest of society,” he said in his book. Against this tide Franklin Graham had bravely stood, achieving at least one small victory. “The media attention span is short, but at least for a few days in early 2001, the Name Jesus was heard in public discourse as something other than a curse word.”