Rhetoric Race and Religion
It’s graduation season, and as such a golden opportunity to observe the various ways religion is handled in American public life circa 2013.
A graduation is a momentous occasion for graduates and their families, and such a major rite of passage tends to evoke some kind of effort on the part of high school, college, and graduate school leaders (and commencement speakers) to reach for rhetorical profundity.
But what kind of profundity is acceptable in our pluralistic public space? Can a public high school organize a graduation service that appeals to religious themes? Can a religiously diverse private college invite a commencement speaker representing only one of the many religious traditions represented in the room? Or, given religious diversity, should schools try to maintain an air of resolute non-religiosity?
As a college and seminary professor, and as a dad, I have spent a lot of time at graduations. I have attended private Christian high school and college graduations, public high school graduations, Baptist seminary graduations, post-Baptist university graduations, and more. Hours of having to listen to endless name-reading has given me plenty of opportunity to reflect on the way religion, and ethics, are handled at graduations. And there are clues here related to public religion in our post-Christian age.
I propose that three main patterns emerge from these observations: no faith, single-faith, and multi-faith.
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