The Audacity of Faith and Obama's discussion of religion.

And this doubt should not push us away from our faith. But it should humble us. It should temper our passions, cause us to be wary of too much self-righteousness. It should compel us to remain open and curious…

These sentences, together with the earlier excerpts, draw out the implications that seem to have been the president’s key lessons for the graduates assembled before him. The message of this complex of ideas (passion, self-righteousness, and humility in the context of a “world of competing claims about [the] right and [the] true”) is unmistakable. It is the familiar rationalistic argument that, only if believers internalize the relativism (“doubt”) of which the President spoke at Notre Dame, can we avoid the intolerance, oppression, and even slaughter that history teaches are the perennial tendency of religion...

This doubt should remind us even as we cling to our faith to persuade through reason, through an appeal whenever we can to universal rather than parochial principles, and most of all through an abiding example of good works and charity and kindness and service that moves hearts and minds.

The contrast here between a doubt-addled “faith” to which we “cling” and which involves “parochial” principles on the one hand, and “universal” “reason” on the other, further suggests that, in its native form—sans infused “doubt”—religion is beyond the sphere of the rational...

The possibility that AIDS activists and Planned Parenthood might be dogmatic, and need to be more “humble” of mind and heart, never crossed President Obama’s lips at Notre Dame. The deeply partisan effect of his own remarks passed largely unnoticed.