The New Year is almost upon us, but there is yet time for a post or two in 2008. My wife and I have had a busy but happy Christmas season so far. We’re starting to make progress on our movie-going; basing our decisions on major award nominations, we see three-quarters of the films we will see all year in the period between Christmas day and the Super Bowl. I’ve already praised “Milk” here on the blog, and offer now enthusiastic endorsements for “Slumdog Millionaire” and the breathtaking, heartbreaking “The Wrestler.”

Almost everyone else has weighed in on Barack Obama’s decision to invite Rick Warren to give the invocation at the January 20 inauguration. I have little to add to the many voices that have spoken on the subject, save to say that I remain both frustrated and bemused by the mutual incomprehension that emerges at moments like this between secular progressives and more conservative elements in the country. It’s a gulf that Obama himself has promised, over and over again, to bridge. Bridge-builders will invariably arouse animosity from those who derive satisfaction from staying on their side of the fixed chasm that exists between the two sides in the culture wars. The wisdom of the Warren selection, from Obama’s perspective, may be that it serves to demonstrate his Solomonic remove from partisanship. The left is infuriated by Warren’s vocal opposition to same-sex marriage; many on the right are infuriated by the imprimatur that his invocation will give to Obama’s presidential agenda.

It is axiomatic that religious conservatives often have trouble grasping the various distinctions that divide the left. The right-winger who rails against “feminists” doesn’t know a “Marxist feminist” from a “liberal feminist” from a “radical feminist”, and probably isn’t clear on which “wave” women of Hillary Clinton’s generation belong to. It is also axiomatic that most progressives tend to see the religious right as monolithic. Theological divides (such as the famous one between Pentecostals and Southern Baptists which exploded in the PTL scandal two decades ago) often seem arcane and insignificant to those who don’t come from Christian backgrounds. As a result, both sides — if we can speak of there being only two — in the culture war caricature and misunderstand each other. (And my goodness, we don’t help ourselves with the shop talk. With feet in both camps, I may be reasonably comfortable talking about both “perfomative heteronormativity” and “supralapsarianism”, but really, it all gets a bit overwhelming for the uninitiated!)

Many folks on the left may not fully understand the degree to which Rick Warren is viewed with suspicion by the religious right. Indeed, as many commenters have pointed out, it’s not accurate to call Warren “right-wing” at all. He has, time and again, explicitly rejected the adversarial politics of an older generation of Christian conservatives (represented by the late Jerry Falwell and Jim Dobson). While remaining in the right-wing camp on issues such as abortion and marriage, Warren has consciously de-centered the purely sexual issues from his message. He has been willing to talk about AIDS, poverty and environmental degradation, making clear that his vision of Christian involvement in public life involves more than an obsession with pelvic morality. Many of the older generation of conservative American evangelicals, the sort who see the fight against abortion and gay marriage as “first among equals” in the struggle to remake America, are exasperated, even enraged by what they see as Warren’s willingness to grant moral equivalence to other issues.

It is also axiomatic that partisans are invariably disappointed by the presidents whom they successfully elect. Read old issues of National Review and Human Events from the 1980s; far from being a constant conservative darling, Ronald Reagan regularly aroused ire from the hard right during his administration. Similarly, the left will be frustrated by Obama time and again, chiefly because the gap between the promise and the possible always widens after inauguration day. But one particular way in which the left will be frustrated is by Obama’s dead serious commitment to healing rather than exacerbating the cultural divide that has so occupied this country. Choosing the immensely popular and affable Rick Warren, who is as close to a genuine centrist* as the evangelical movement has these days, is a signal of this eagerness to build consensus rather than increase division.

The GLBTQ movement is right to be frustrated by the passage of Proposition 8 in California, and to have a progressive president select a supporter of that initiative to give an inaugural invocation stings. Like it or not, we can assume that Obama meant it when he said he believed marriage should be reserved for heterosexual couples; it was wishful thinking that led some in the movement to assume that his words to that effect were only political posturing. As a result, the movement needs to push forward on the marriage issue at the state and judicial levels, and look to the Obama Administration for leadership on other issues. And there are other issues, ranging from protection against discrimination to greater funding for AIDS treatment to revisiting the unworkable and outdated “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. Marriage equality will happen, but the nation’s 44th president has made clear that on this issue, he will be a follower rather than a leader.

*If the (white) evangelical right includes the like of Dobson, Richard Land, and John Macarthur, and the (white) evangelical left includes the like of Jim Wallis, Ron Sider, and Tony Campolo, then it’s safe to say that Rick Warren represents a middle ground on a wide variety of theological and political issues.