Hold firm to your faith and allow it to guide you on your journey. Be unafraid to speak your mind when those values are at stake. In this world of competing claims about what is right and true, have confidence in the values with which you’ve been raised and educated. Here (in italics) are the three key paragraphs of the president’s address, each one followed by my commentary. In a bold and unprecedented challenge to the churches, Obama told believers, not what they believe, but what it means for them to believe it. He would protect the state from the church, not by privatizing faith, but by redefining it. Therein lies the novelty of Obama’s initiative. The faith of which he spoke was not, however, the faith of our fathers. ![]() Throughout his speech, Obama showed how the Christian tradition supplies him with a vocabulary for describing and understanding realities that he previously glimpsed without the eyes of faith. The president spoke winsomely of his own faith journey, and credited “the church folks” with whom he worked in Chicago as a community organizer with showing him the way to religious faith. The commencement address was full of musings about religious faith, and its tone and substance were remarkably faith-friendly. This important underpinning has been scarcely noticed. This new departure explains a great deal about his Administration’s narrow view of religious liberty as manifested, for example, in the HHS contraception, sterilization, and early abortion mandate. His unprecedented contribution was not to give new meaning to secularism, but to redefine the meaning and nature of faith, tout court. For the first time in American history, major political figures (starting with the Supreme Court), began to assert that secularism was the anchor of our political culture, and the presupposition of our government institutions.Īt Notre Dame, President Obama took this project in a novel direction. Some time shortly after World War II, however, the longstanding consensus that religion was essential to America’s identity and prosperity began to totter. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan, America’s Presidents have linked our political identity and fortunes to God’s Providence and to the American people’s faith. From John Winthrop’s first introduction into political idiom of the shining “city upon a hill” trope to its revival by John F. President Obama’s main theme in the address was religion and American democracy. ![]() ![]() Yet, while everyone knows that the president gave the commencement address, it seems that almost nobody has noticed what he said. Despite the understandable excitement of hosting the nation’s dynamic, young chief executive at its graduation ceremony, there was also dissension over the Catholic university’s choice to confer an honorary doctorate on a man who so conspicuously promotes abortion. Amidst great expectations, President Barack Obama delivered the commencement address at the University of Notre Dame on May 17, 2009.
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