Linoleum cut by Stephen Alcorn
(RNS) The American presidency encompasses three roles: head of state, chief executive, and party leader.
History, I predict, will judge Barack Obama to have been a mediocre party leader, a good chief executive, and among the finest heads of state in U.S. history.
As party leader, Obama enjoyed indifferent relations with Democrats on Capitol Hill, and presided over devastating congressional losses in the 2010 and 2014 midterm elections. His failure to recognize Hillary Clinton’s weakness as a presidential candidate, and to contrive an alternative, will haunt him till the end of his days.
As chief executive, Obama’s rescue of the economy from impending disaster was marred by his refusal to prosecute criminal behavior by bankers; his health care reform, by an inability to build public support for it. Even as the Iran deal will stand the test of time, his non-intervention in the Syrian civil war will forever be held against him.
But as head of state, Obama not only brought unsurpassed grace, class, and humor to the job, but no president since Franklin Roosevelt, and very few before — notably Lincoln — have managed to articulate the ideals and aspirations of the country so eloquently. (John F. Kennedy deserves a mention with an asterisk here, because so many of his best lines were written by his speechwriters.)
This latter function has to do with the articulation of what has come to be called the American Civil Religion. Since sociologist Robert Bellah identified it in a seminal article 50 years ago, this amalgam of national texts, places, and liturgies has had, to this day, its bitter critics as well as its celebrants.
A new book by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Walter A. McDougall of the University of Pennsylvania is titled, The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest.
On the celebratory side is Yale sociologist Philip Gorski’s forthcoming American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion from the Puritans to the Present.
Disagreements over the nature of the thing help explain the differences of opinion. Is the American Civil Religion about justice and equality or the need to remake the world in our image?
From his speech at the 2004 Democratic Nation Convention, which turned him into a national figure, to his farewell address this week, Obama has advanced the case that what it’s really about is inclusion and common cause — a case embodied in his own modest origins and mixed-race identity.
Republicans acknowledged that by continually branding him “the most divisive president in history,” cleverly enabling themselves to assail even the mildest of his criticisms of his adversaries.
The election of 2016 reduced the American Civil Religion to one word: Winning.
Now we’re about to discover what divisiveness in a head of state really is.
