On a morning of countless firsts in U.S. history, add this: Barack Obama's inaugural speech is the first time a president has ever explicitly acknowledged not only "Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus" but non-believers as well.
"This inclusiveness is a signature moment in American inaugural history," says David Domke, professor of communications at the University of Washington in Seattle, who has analyzed religious language in seven decades of inaugural and State of the Union addresses.
Even so, "You could hear beneath it all references to God-given promise, God's calls on us, God's grace on us, and the frequent use of 'shall' in that King James-ian English of the Bible and early translations of Jewish prayer books," adds Marvin Kranz, an American history expert at the Library of Congress before his retirement....
