Quick: name the people who gave the invocations at the last five presidential inaugurations. Four…? Three…? Anyone…? Bueller…? Bueller…?

This is something that everyone will forget about on January 21st.

Just because a lot of pundits and bloggers are talking about it doesn’t make it hugely important.

That said, I don’t think it’ll come as any great surprise to readers of this blog that I’m not a huge fan of Rick Warren, and especially not of his stance on gay people or his apparent views on political assassination. And I can certainly understand why LGBT folks in particular would see this as a slap in the face.

Beyond that, I’m not at all a fan of the whole idea of draping the presidency with the appearance of religious sanction. I’m a church-state separation guy primarily for religious reasons. Religion tends to become corrupted when it identifies too closely with political power. Ceremonies like this, however innocuous or benign they might appear, do little more than breed coziness between the religious and political establishments as far as I can tell.

The one silver lining I can detect is that, if you’re going to have religious leaders involved in the ceremony, there is something to be said for including people who strongly disagree with the president. This not only reinforces the idea that the office holder is the president of all Americans, but emphasizes that the clergy aren’t the kept priests of the state. After all, there are societies where dissenting clergy are not only not invited to speak at presidential inaugurations, but are silenced and executed. (Which is not to say that there’s never been suppression of political dissent here.)

But even here there are limits, obviously. As we saw with the Jeremiah Wright brouhaha, someone who genuinely opposes American exceptionalism very quickly becomes political persona non grata. And I doubt Daniel Berrigan was on the short list either.