Stephen Monsma: Religion Has Played a Crucial Role
As Justice William O. Douglas intoned over 50 years ago, “We are a religious people and our institutions presuppose a Supreme Being.” That truth was on full display at the inauguration of our 44th president, Barack Obama. The ceremonies were opened in prayer by the Rev. Rick Warren and closed in prayer by the Rev. Joseph Lowery. God’s name was invoked at the end of their swearing in by both Vice President Biden and President Obama, and President Obama referred in his inaugural address to Scripture and to God’s grace.
This honoring of religion was appropriate. I am one of those who thought I would never live to see the day when I would have the deeply gratifying experience of seeing an African American sworn in as president. From the religiously motivated abolitionists of the nineteenth century, to the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., to the civil rights freedom fighters who marched from their churches into the streets, religion has played a crucial role in creating the path that Barack Obama has been able to walk.
I am old enough to remember in the 1950s the often unseen, but crushingly real system of segregation in my own home town of Grand Rapids, Michigan. I was involved in an interracial group as an undergraduate and learned from my black peers about the restaurants where they would not be served and bowling alleys where they could not go. When stationed in Texas while in the army, I cringed at the public toilets and drinking fountains labeled “colored” and “white,” and in the 1960s I often despaired as many of my fellow evangelical Protestants opposed the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil right movement.
And now January 20, 2009. As an evangelical, I believe in the reality of sin and evil in a world that is no longer as it is supposed to be. The racist history of our land is strong empirical evidence in support of the Christian doctrine of sin. Yet at the center of the Christian story there is not sin and fallenness, but redemption and salvation. Because of Jesus Christ (“God with us”) there is hope, even the audacious hope that mountains of racism can be moved. By the grace of God that President Obama referenced in his inaugural address, hope sometimes becomes a blazing reality, as it did on January 20.
–Stephen Monsma is a Senior Research Scholar at The Henry Institute at Calvin College.
