Yo Chuck! We Got Some Non-Believers Out There

Posted by on . 9 comments.

Barack Obama, Inaugural Speech, 1/20/09:

For we know that our patchwork heritage is a strength, not a weakness. We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus – and non-believers.

I’d be very surprised if this wasn’t the first shout-out to atheists in a major Presidential speech.

Comments

  1. Fdo. Montenegro says:
    January 20, 2009 at 1:09 pm

    Yes, to a point, but hardly a “shout-out”. Lumping atheists and agnostics together as “nonbelievers” is not unlike subsuming some of the Founding Fathers’ Deist beliefs under the “Christian” label.
    Then again, for a politician, in such a moment and with such an audience… Hurray, Mr Obama, and so help you God, if there be one.

  2. TucsonPaul says:
    January 20, 2009 at 1:15 pm

    Is Obama the first black that Powell has saluted in an inferior capacity?

  3. matt says:
    January 20, 2009 at 1:19 pm

    Lumping atheists and agnostics together as “nonbelievers” is not unlike subsuming some of the Founding Fathers’ Deist beliefs under the “Christian” label.

    clearly the point of the post was not that obama had rolled back the creeping religionism or even that he got it all right. but that line is striking in how far it does go relative to past presidents’ words.

  4. matt says:
    January 20, 2009 at 1:21 pm

    Is Obama the first black that Powell has saluted in an inferior capacity?

    powell isn’t in the military anymore so he can’t be “inferior.”

    that said, powell was in the military for a very long time, and i’d be very surprised if he had no black superior officers.

  5. TucsonPaul says:
    January 20, 2009 at 2:54 pm

    It seems to me that by naming the world’s 4 largest theist religions, primarily monotheistic, and by referring to “nonbelievers”, he is simply acknowledging as inclusive in our society, those without similar monotheistic beliefs whether atheist, agnostic, secular humanist, Native American, pagan or whatever, giving emphasis to the 1st Amendment non-establishment/free exercise of religion … to his and our credit.

  6. kiel says:
    January 20, 2009 at 5:03 pm

    Agreed, but it sure would have been nice to get props for us believers in the Norse gods. Now let’s put Thor back in Thursday!

  7. Shan says:
    January 20, 2009 at 5:17 pm

    It’s not fair to say that his list was all inclusive, or was even attempting to be so.

  8. Joan says:
    January 21, 2009 at 6:34 am

    I agree that the list was not all-inclusive. It wouldn’t have taken much to put in a phrase like ‘all the other religions of the world’, or ‘members of any of the other religions in the world’.

    In general, I thought it was an excellent speech. However, I did not like the phrase ‘we will defeat you’. I thought something like ‘we will prevail’ would have been more in tune with the rest of the speech and less warlike, and less like the fighting words we have heard from Bush and McCain.

  9. matt says:
    January 21, 2009 at 6:44 am

    He wasn’t speaking about the world, he was speaking of the US. The context was our religious heritage.

    Religious composition of the United States 2007:
    Protestant 51.3%
    Roman Catholic 23.9%
    Mormon 1.7%
    other Christian 1.6%
    Jewish 1.7%
    Buddhist 0.7%
    Muslim 0.6%
    other or unspecified 2.5%
    unaffiliated 12.1%
    none 4%

    Buddhists definitely got the shaft, but he covered every other base to the tune of 99+%.

    stop nitpicking this line.