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By Ed Stoddard

DALLAS, Jan 17 (Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama hopes to reach across the political divide, but the uproar over the preachers at his inauguration celebrations show just how wide some of those divisions are in America.

Some gay rights activists have expressed outrage at Obama's choice of California pastor Rick Warren to give the invocation prayer at his inauguration on Tuesday because of Warren's opposition to gay marriage. And some conservatives are up in arms over openly gay Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson's role in an earlier part of the celebrations.

But political analysts and activists say many Americans appear weary of the "culture war" battles over issues like gay marriage, and Obama may find some safe ground in the middle.

"There is an opening for a middle ground because people are becoming a bit tired of religious extremists and ideological extremists," said Mathew Schmalz, who teaches religious studies at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts.

Many polls before November's election suggested that culture issues like abortion were becoming less important to American voters, even before the financial crisis hit.

A Pew Research Center survey in August found that abortion was important to the way that 39 percent of the electorate would vote compared to 47 percent in August of 2004.

But such issues remain flashpoints for some.

When he announced that Warren would give the main prayer at the inauguration, Obama angered people in the gay and lesbian community, a key base for his Democratic Party.

Warren, pastor of a "mega-church" and an influential evangelical, was a leading supporter of "Proposition 8," an amendment to California's constitution banning gay marriage that voters passed in November.

Conservative Christians, key Republican Party backers, vented when Obama chose Robinson, a New Hampshire Episcopal bishop, to open the inauguration ceremonies with a prayer at the Lincoln Memorial.

ANGLICAN UPHEAVAL

The 77 million-member Anglican Communion, a global federation of national churches, has been in upheaval since 2003 when the Episcopal Church, it's U.S. branch, consecrated Robinson as its first openly gay bishop.

"... if there was ever a pastor whose actions were divisive it was Gene Robinson, who almost single-handedly devastated one of America's oldest Christian denominations," Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Family Research Council, said in a blog headlined 'Obama levels the praying field.'

Religion and politics are often intertwined in America, which has many believers and high rates of worship attendance.

There is little room for compromise on abortion, which many opponents regard as murder. On the issue of gay marriage, supporters say it is a basic human right; many opponents call it a threat to the "traditional family."

Obama strongly supports abortion rights and has said he generally supports equal rights under the law for same-sex couples and he opposed Proposition 8 in California.

But analysts and activists say extremists don't represent most Americans.

"You are doing something right when both extremes are mad at you," said Michael Lindsay, a political sociologist at Rice University in Houston and a noted expert on U.S. evangelicals.

Some leading evangelicals and left-leaning activists have come together in a coalition to promote their common values, releasing a document this week called "Come Let Us Reason Together: A Governing Agenda to End the Culture Wars."

Its policy proposals for the president-elect include suggestions to reduce the number of abortions by providing more support to pregnant women and funding for adoption -- policies Obama has signaled he would like to embrace.

It also recommends supporting employment protection for gay and lesbian people, renouncing torture as a tool for extracting information from those deemed a risk to U.S. security, and a comprehensive package of immigration reform.

Joel Hunter, the evangelical pastor of a Florida mega-church who has long opposed abortion rights, said he signed up to the initiative because he felt the decades-long focus on making abortion illegal was getting nowhere.

"We must reject this all or nothing approach," he told Reuters in a telephone interview. Evangelicals like Warren have also campaigned against poverty and in support of fighting AIDS in Africa, issues about which Obama has expressed concern. (Editing by Eric Walsh)

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