Obama's Interfaith Vision and the Restlessness of Our Wretched Refuse

Posted: 01/14/2016 10:58 am EST

Many people are very discouraged by the current climate of anti-Muslim and anti-"other" rhetoric that so fills the airwaves. However, the larger reality is that we are progressing as anation towards a more positive appropriation of our rich religious diversity. It comes with fits and starts, albeit. But don't be fooled to think otherwise. It is the way human social progress works.

Peter Manseau disconcertingly surmised in his January 12 Washington Post Acts of Faith opinion piece that: "the nation as a whole does not agree with Obama's broadminded understanding of faith," calling Obama's effort to unite a religiously divided nation a failure.

Manseau, author of One Nation, Many Gods, is one of the foremost experts on the early and ever-present religious diversity in the United States. He knows better than most the arduous path we have taken in at first rejecting one religious and ethnic group after another in order to only later incorporate them into an ever expanding narrative of our American diversity. Eventually though, I argue that we have honored our highest ideals (and our better selves) to become what Harvard scholar Diana Eck famously dubbed the "world's most religiously diverse nation."

Obama never actually said that he could or would unite a religiously divided nation. Rather he held it up as a value to which we all should aspire. Because we are all responsible. Though he is indebted much to Clinton, Bush, and others before him to set the platform, Obama has done more than any other President to advance a positive view of our religious diversity as a unique American strength. Further, he has done this despite a steady and strong headwind of geopolitical change and pockets of exclusivist resistance uneasy with perceived threats to their eroding hegemony.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-donald-heckman/obamas-interfaith-vision-_b_8972018.html