(UNDATED) Rick Warren, the California pastor chosen by Barack Obama to pray at his presidential inauguration ceremony Tuesday (Jan. 20), is so influential a Christian leader and author that he has dramatically affected thousands of churches without ever stepping inside them.

The Rev. Jim Miller, pastor of First Baptist Church in Metuchen, N.J., has seen the impact firsthand.

“I normally baptize 12 people a year, give or take,” said Miller, whose church is one of 400 in New Jersey to have participated in one of Warren’s “40 Days of Purpose” workshop. “We have up and down years. Following that `40 Days of Purpose,’ I had about 25.”

The president-elect’s selection last month of Warren-a social conservative seen as less partisan and more mainstream than the likes of James Dobson and the Rev. Pat Robertson-was widely viewed as an effort to reach out to conservatives who opposed Obama in the election.

Yet it outraged a group of Obama’s supporters: gay-rights advocates who complained that Warren’s persistent opposition to same-sex marriage made him an inappropriate choice.

Days later, Obama tempered some of that outrage when he picked Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, to open a star-studded concert at the Lincoln Memorial on Sunday (Jan. 18).

Warren’s slot at the inaugural, however, is more prominent, and so is he.

With the runaway successes of his “Purpose-Driven Life” books and as founder of Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, Calif., Warren is probably the most popular American Christian leader-“certainly the best-known exponent of evangelical Christianity of the megachurch variety,” said William Martin, senior fellow for religious studies and public policy at the James A. Baker Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

Warren shares some traits with the man known as the “pastor to presidents,” the Rev. Billy Graham, who participated in the inaugurations of every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower, although poor health is expected to keep the 90-year-old Graham away this time around.

Like Graham, the most famous American evangelist of the 20th century, Warren has reached across political lines. Last year, he invited both Obama and GOP presidential nominee John McCain to his church for a public forum.

In his introduction, he said both were patriots.

“Warren takes some fairly firm positions that might work against universal cooperation, but he shares with Graham that he’s not mean-spirited,” Martin said, noting Warren’s support for programs to help people with AIDS.

“He is a person of broad spirit and is capable of adjusting. (He has) said, `We’re going to be concerned less with how people got this disease than with ministering to them as Jesus would.”‘

Warren, like Graham, has drawn criticism over the years from conservative Christians for not being conservative enough. Sixteen years ago, a group of evangelical leaders complained about Graham’s decision to accept Clinton’s invitation to pray at his inauguration.

After Obama selected Bishop Robinson for the inaugural kickoff, Warren praised the choice, saying in a prepared statement that Obama “has demonstrated his genuine commitment to bringing all Americans of good will together in search of common ground. I applaud his desire to be the president of every citizen.”

Gay critics of Warren’s selection noted the pastor’s recent comments to Beliefnet.com comparing same-sex relationships to ones involving incest, pedophilia and polygamy.

Harry Knox, director of the Religion and Faith program for the Human Rights Campaign, a leading gay civil rights group, said: “I certainly applaud the Reverend Warren for the difficult work he has done in bringing other evangelicals along on poverty issues and the environment and, to a certain degree, around HIV and AIDS. He is different than some of his colleagues on the Religious Right. But he doesn’t deserve not to have close scrutiny.

“On the one hand he extends a hand of love, and then reaches out to slap with the other, where lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered people are concerned.”

Robinson, who had called Obama’s selection of Warren a “slap in the face,” offered a gentler assessment last week.

“Being a supporter of Barack Obama doesn’t mean that we don’t critique certain decisions that he might make,” the bishop said on MSNBC. “And so many of us in the lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community were just stunned, really, by this choice. But I must say that in the intervening days, it appears that Barack Obama is being the person he told us he was, and that he intended to be, by including all voices in this inauguration, and indeed in his administration.”

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Among those pleased with Obama’s selection of Warren is Geoffrey Garin, a Democratic pollster who says Warren’s words will be viewed as offering some validation to Obama’s views.

“In no uncertain terms, the best-known pastor of our time will be telling his followers and fellow evangelicals that there is nothing ungodly about a president who believes that government shouldn’t interfere with a woman’s right to choose and that gays and lesbians deserve the protection of our laws as much as any other American,” he wrote in the Washington Post last week.

“That’s a moment progressives should celebrate.”

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For all the controversy over Warren and Robinson, the most emotional moment of preaching at the inauguration may involve another man.

Obama picked the Rev. Joseph Lowery to give the benediction after the inauguration. Lowery worked with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. during the civil rights movement, helped lead the bus boycott in Montgomery, Ala., in 1955, and later was president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, the civil rights group.

“People have focused on Warren and Robinson, but Lowery may for quite different reasons pack quite an emotional punch,” said Steven Waldman, co-founder of Beliefnet.com.

“You can look at Lowery and you’ll see an African-American man who is (older than) Martin Luther King would be if he were alive. He’ll be the one person up on the podium who is the connection to Martin Luther King. He’s an elderly man from that generation, and he’s going to be standing there giving the benediction to an African-American president.”

(Jeff Diamant writes for The Star-Ledger in Newark, N.J.)

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