WHEN HISTORIANS provide us with a narrative of President Obama’s inauguration, the flap over the invocations of Pastor Rick Warren and Episcopal Bishop Eugene Robinson will be relegated to an anecdotal footnote.

As we plunge into what may come to be known as the Great Depression of ’09, and with our foreign policy in tatters, the dust-up over what religious leaders ought (or ought not) to have been invited, and what they ought (or ought not) to have prayed will surely appear to our grandchildren hardly worth a sidebar.

Nevertheless, as insignificant as this wrangle was, it has convinced me that the time has come to retire invocations at public inaugural events once and for all. But my reasons are not quite those of the Atheist Alliance International.

Pastor of a California megachurch and putative heir to Billy Graham, Warren was also a vocal supporter of California’s Proposition 8, which amended the state constitution to deny same-sex couples the legality to marry. Bishop Robinson, of New Hampshire, is not only the first openly gay bishop in the Anglican Communion, having lived in a same-sex relationship for 20 years, he has been a voice in the redefinition of the Episcopal Church.

Both men approach any podium with considerable baggage.

I have no doubt that President Obama invited the two clerics to deliver their invocations out of a genuine attempt at inclusion and tolerance. I know that these are early days, but this president seems to possess a moral seriousness we haven’t seen in a while. And I cannot deny that both Warren and Robinson did what they said they were going to. Neither gave vent to an unexpected egregious gaffe. Warren made no allusion to Sodom and Gomorrah, and Robinson did not appear in rainbow vestments.

As a Christian evangelical, Warren said a prayer that was story-determined. He invoked a God who showed himself through history. Consequently, Warren’s words moved from a gratitude for the world this God has created to an acknowledgment that each of us will someday be held accountable for his or her role within this story. It was a prayer of which that crusty old Christian realist, Reinhold Niebuhr, would have been proud. As for invoking Jesus, Warren exhibited a certain theological deftness. He made his petitions in Jesus’s name, but did so in terms of the singular pronoun “I.” He refrained from the imperious congregational “we.”

And as for concluding with the Lord’s Prayer, Warren chose a prayer that is quintessentially Jewish, and, unless you’re a devout animist, is one that resonates with a majority of faith traditions.

There was only one problem with Warren’s invocation. We have come to inhabit a world that no longer understands religious beliefs in terms of story. One result of the culture wars, for which conservatives are as much to blame as liberals, is that religious beliefs have become ideologies to be lobbed into the opposing trench. And however carefully Warren tried to be to avoid preaching or making a political statement, we simply cannot hear a prayer anymore in terms of its story. Even the columnists and bloggers who applauded Warren’s prayer did so not because of the story that determined his words, but because of the points that he had “scored.”

And Bishop Robinson? For once a religious leader had the candor to inform us in advance that he intended to pray neither as a bishop, nor as a Christian, nor even as a particularly competent theologian. He intended rather to invoke the God “of our many understandings.” Consequently, his invocation was not story-determined, but ideas-driven. His God was not a “person” rendered within our history, but the insubstantial Dispenser of Regulative Ideas, whom Robinson beseeched to bless us with tears and anger, discomfort and patience. To use a phrase coined by the literary critic John Crowe Ransom, Bishop Robinson’s God was decidedly a “God without thunder.”

But there was a problem with Robinson’s invocation. For when a cleric invokes God as the Dispenser of Ideas, he or she cannot avoid assuming that the assembled are agreed on the precise nature of those ideas to be dispensed. Robinson’s words were addressed “upward” to God, but it was hard not to sense in them a certain “horizontal” mummery, as if Robinson was acknowledging with a verbal wink his fellow cognoscenti scattered amongst the common people. Given our ideological times, Bishop Robinson’s invocation could easily have been misheard as an altar-call to those benighted souls who are not (yet) liberal Democrats.

The inauguration itself has always been preceded by a private prayer service in a local church, and for seven decades has been followed a day or so later by a national prayer service at the National Cathedral. I have no difficulty with either. The first has always seemed reminiscent of the early republican virtues when Washington or Adams walked to a neighboring church. The officiating clergy are to be seen only in welcoming and then bidding adieu to the president, his family and friends. The prayers said and the sermon preached are left unrecorded and unreported.

And for the service in the National Cathedral, it has always seemed to me illustrative of the inevitable civil religion and sacred panoply that accrue with the emergence of any empire — much like the ancient Roman flamines or priests who presided over the state-supported cults. Here clergy of all faith traditions are allowed to vest themselves, however briefly, in a charisma neither merited nor even real. And here the prayers are contained, at least, within the magnificent space of a sterile Gothic building, which may appeal to our sense of the numinous but never bothers us with the interdictions of the holy.

These two services have a certain value. But it’s time to withdraw the designated invocators, however well intentioned, from the inauguration. Not because they infringe on the separation of church and state. Rather, because in an age of the ideologically driven and theologically purblind, their prayers cannot but sound in the public ear as faux as the Capitol dais on which they stand.

For those of us for whom all true prayer is rooted in fear and trembling, enough is enough.

The Rev. David Lewis Stokes Jr. , an occasional contributor, is a Catholic priest and associate professor of theology at Providence College.