Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of the Diocese of Washington was among the panelists discussing President Obama’s second term on Religion and Ethics Newsweekly.
Here is some of what she said:
[M]y sense was that the president really saw himself, and we saw him, as the one who would bring us together as a country. There wouldn’t be red America, there wouldn’t be blue America. We would be one country together, and what we learned in the first administration is that we were not yet ready to be that country, that we are far more isolated and polarized as a country than we knew ourselves to be, and what we wanted ourselves to be at that time. So my sense is that the task now isn’t so much to speak to the middle but to, in fact, help create a middle where there it’s so much easier for us to stay in our isolated areas with people who think like us, and the president’s task and the tasks of communities of faith is, in fact, to create that common ground where we can find the compromises that we need to make to go forward.
Watch Inauguration Perspectives of People of Faith on PBS. See more from Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly.