Why Franklin Graham is Wrong

His father was one of the greatest evangelists of this or any other age, but Franklin Graham ain't your daddy's evangelist. His work with Samaritan's Purse, particularly in Sudan, is legendary, but his $416,000 salary and $117,000 benefits package (according to the organization's 990, available on www.guidestar.org) gives one pause about his commitment to the people of the world living on less than $1 a day. (I guess that could be said about most of us who work to bring justice to the poor; Jesus, after all, told us to sell all our belongings and give the money to the poor. I am as unfaithful as Franklin Graham in that regard, just not as highly compensated.)  But this is not about Franklin Graham's salary, this is about Franklin Graham's theology. 

In a half-hearted acknowledgment of Barack Obama's Christian faith on CNN, Graham commented: "I think the president's problem is that he was born a Muslim, his father was a Muslim. The seed of Islam is passed through the father like the seed of Judaism is passed through the mother. He was born a Muslim, his father gave him an Islamic name." He continued: "Now it's obvious that the president has renounced the prophet Mohammed and he has renounced Islam and he has accepted Jesus Christ. That is what he says he has done, I cannot say that he hasn't. So I just have to believe that the president is what he has said."

The reason that Graham is wrong has nothing to do with Sharia law, which does, indeed, regard the child of a Muslim father as Muslim. When a baby is born, the Islamic call to prayer is whispered in its ears, and parents are expected to make every effort to raise their children as believers. And he is quite correct that Jewish tradition views the mother as the legitimate transmitter of Jewishness. Islam is patrilineal and Judaism matrilineal. In the Hebrew version of the Abraham story it is only the child of Sarah (Isaac) not the child of the Egyptian slave Hagar (Ishamel) who fulfills the promise of God. The Qu'ran reverses this, making Ishmael the legitimate fulfillment of God's promise, while still presenting the birth of Isaac as a miracle. 

So what's the problem? The problem is that Graham is supposed to be a Christian, and Christian theology is that "God shows no partiality and that in every nation anyone who fears God and does what is right is acceptable to God. " (Acts 10:34) That's what St. Peter figured out after meeting the Italian soldier Cornelius and his family. St. Paul continued the push for a universal gospel, and proclaimed that "Abraham 'believed God, and it was reckoned to him as righteousness.' So you see that it is men of faith who are the sons of Abraham. And the scripture, foreseeing that God would justify the Gentiles by faith, preached the gospel beforehand to Abraham, saying, 'In you shall all the nations be blessed.' So then, those who are men of faith are blessed with Abraham who had faith." (Galatians 3:6-9)

What Graham has done with his backhanded compliment of Obama's faith is to undermine the very basis of both Evangelicalism (his father's faith) and Biblical Christianity. If one's faith is predetermined by birth, than Evangelicalism is demonstrably false in its insistence on converting the world to Christianity. But more importantly, if God hates Muslims, than both Peter and Paul were wrong, not to mention the entire sweep of Biblical universalist faith from Abraham on. After all, Yahweh promises Abraham that "all nations would be blessed through" his faith. Amos (9:7) claims that God had covenant relationships with the Cushites (Ethiopians), Phoenicians, and Arameans (Arabs). Micah (chapter 4) looks forward to the time when "all nations" shall live together in peace, the verse that is chiseled into the monument in front of the United Nations building. In spite of both Jewish and Christian attempts to own God, their own book proclaims that God's love is universal. (John 3:17--yeah 17, look it up!) 

There is one last point of Graham's commentary that bears comment: the President's name. While it is true that Barack (the English spelling is the name in both Arabic and Swahili--the language of the President's Kenyan father) is a popular Muslim name that means "blessed," it is also a Hebrew name, spelled in English as "Baruch." Graham hints that by giving him a Muslim name, the President's father made him forever Muslim. That's like saying that, because Graham's father named him "Franklin," he's French. It's just plain silly, as etymological games usually are. 

I am not going to question Graham's faith, taking his word that he accepted Jesus Christ. That is what he says he has done and I cannot say that he hasn't. But I can say, without a doubt, that he doesn't understand Jesus Christ at all. And that he's not French, in spite of his name. 

The Crazy Creepy Peverted God of Pat Robertson

When I got a Facebook nudge about this, I thought my friend was kidding. "Pat Robertson said it was their own fault." Snicker, snicker, you know those crazy fundies. But my friend wasn't kidding. The "Reverend" Pat Robertson, the right-wing commentator, who "Biblically-based news show" is little more than the mad ramblings of a false prophet is at it again.


Here's what Robertson said:

Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III and whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the devil. They said, "We will serve you if you will get us free from the French." True story. And so, the devil said, "OK, it's a deal."

And they kicked the French out. You know, the Haitians revolted and got themselves free. But ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other. Desperately poor. That island of Hispaniola is one island. It's cut down the middle. On the one side is Haiti; on the other side is the Dominican Republic. Dominican Republic is prosperous, healthy, full of resorts, et cetera. Haiti is in desperate poverty. Same island. They need to have and we need to pray for them a great turning to God. And out of this tragedy, I'm optimistic something good may come. But right now, we're helping the suffering people, and the suffering is unimaginable.

The idea that Haiti's suffering, a suffering which has lasted more than two centuries, is due to a fabled pact with the devil is completely devoid of any real historical context. Robertson is referring to the case of Dutty Boukman, a Jamaican-born slave who was a traditional African priest, and who, in 1791, helped spark the Haitian slave rebellion that led to their independence from France (and the end of slavery). According to legend, Boukman offered a sacrifice of a before encouraging his followers to fight the French. The French responded by beheading him, and then going on to lose the war.

So, Pat says, the Haitian revolution was successful because the Devil fought for the Haitian slaves and then kept them in slavery to him ever since then. It's a neat, logical train of thought, as long as you're a polytheistic moron like Pat Robertson with a Manichean cosmology. If, however, you have a brain, you will understand the role that both the French Revolution and the American Revolution played in the Haitian Revolution. You will know as well, that American leaders like Thomas Jefferson and other slaveholders were terrified that if their own slaves understood the logic of the Haitian revolution (and the Declaration of Independence--"all men are created equal") then the wonderful old tradition of slavery would end. So they conspired with the French, Spanish and British (who were generally at war otherwise) to embargo Haiti and keep it from success. The United States did not recognize the only other republic in the Western Hemisphere until after the Civil War had begun.

The past two centuries have been full of pain and suffering for the Haitian people. But not because some long-dead pagan priest killed a pig and prayed to a Vodou god. Instead, it's because of deliberate and harmful actions of the leaders of the nations, their own and others. Just when Haiti has begun to make a little progress, as has happened in the past decade, the ground shifts, and it all comes crashing down.

God does not hate the Haitian people. In fact, the only God worth believing in is a God who suffers when people suffers and who empowers us to act act in His name to serve them. And right now those of who have been given the means to act in His name on behalf of the people of Haiti need to do so.

And don't worry about the God of Pat Robertson. His God is a crazy, creepy, powerless old pervert who likes to watch people suffer when they don't pray the right way. And he's just pretend, thank God.

Officials: Jesus "Okay" After Attack By Woman Seeking Cure

Associated Press

December 25

Galilee— Security procedures for public appearances are under review, according to an official of The Way, a messianic Jewish sect known for the controversial lifestyle of its charismatic leader, Jesus of Nazareth. The review comes after a woman jumped a barrier and rushed at Jesus apparently attempting to rip the hem off his robe before being apprehended by guards, security chief Judas Iscariot said Friday.

The woman, shown at left in a cellphone photo taken shortly before the attack, apparently believed that touching the prophet's clothing could cure her menstrual hemorrhage.She was wrestled to the ground by several plainclothes security personnel before being admitted to a clinic for treatment.

Jesus, 30, wasn't hurt in the Thursday afternoon incident, and immediately afterword his followers claim that he raised a twelve year old girl from the dead. Though a bit unsteady at first, he also delivered a short speech about the political and religious corruption plaguing the Judean region.

The incident just off the shore of Lake Galilee raised fresh questions about security for the prophet, however, after Jesus barely escaped being mugged by an unruly crowd of swineherds the week before. The group was protesting the mass suicide of their large herd of hogs following Jesus' reputed healing of a homeless man who had lived for years in the graveyard outside Geresene village. The area, long occupied by Gentile settlers, is in a disputed area of Judea.

“While we are interested in continuing our drive for rights for the poor, women and minorities,” Isacariot said, “we cannot simply open Jesus' healing up to every mentally unstable person who thinks she has a right to health care.” He added that, while Jesus will be returning to Nazareth next week, The Way is not expecting any great miracles to happen there. Meantime, only those with the new Real Rome I.D. Cards will be allowed in the immediate areas where Jesus is speaking.

Christian and Muslim?

I have no problem holding two opposing theological views at the same time: God created the universe and millions of years of evolution produced every form of life in it. Government is God's servant to us for good (Romans 13:1-7) and government is always ready to eat us alive (Revelation 13:1-7). The Bible is God's word and the Bible is the word of people stuggling to know God.  Jesus of Nazareth was a man, born of a woman, who sweated, pooped, laughed, cried and begged God not to let him get nailed to a cross. A prophet, a rabbi, a miracle worker, but still a man. Yet somehow, Jesus of Nazareth is Light of Light, True God of True God, Begotten, not made, of One Being with the Father (or Mother, if you prefer). 

And it's that last contradiction that makes the curious case of Ann Holmes Redding so wrenching for me. Redding was defrocked as an Episcopal priest on Thursday after she refused to recant her beliefs in Islam. According to CNN:

Redding said her conversion to Islam was sparked by an interfaith gathering she attended three years ago. During the meeting, an imam demonstrated Muslim chants and meditation to the group. Redding said the beauty of the moment and the imam’s humbleness before God stuck with her.

“It was much more this overwhelming conviction that I needed to surrender to God and this was the form that my surrender needed to take,” she recalled. “It wasn’t just an episode but …. was a step that I wasn’t going to step back from.”

Ten days later Redding was saying the shahada — the Muslim declaration of belief in the oneness of God and acceptance of Mohammad as his prophet.

But Redding said she felt her new Muslim faith did not pose a contradiction to her staying a Christian and minister.

Redding maintains that she still believes in the God of Abraham and the God of Jesus, and that God is the One God of Islam. One cannot argue with the logic of that. Jews, Christians and Muslims share the Abrahamic insistence on monotheism. Their holy books all claim that they are worshipping the God worshipped by Abraham. But while one might argue that one can be true to Judaism (at least in its messianic form) and still be a Christian (after all, St. Paul regularly worshipped in synagogues), is it really possible to go a step further and say that one can be both a Christian and a Muslim? 

While I admire Redding's willingness to stand firm in her new-found faith, she is obviously ignoring the absolutism of both Christianity and Islam. The claims of Jesus (especially in the fourth Gospel) don't leave any room for mergers and acquisitions between church and mosque. And the Koran is pretty specific in saying that God has no son, and that Jesus is only the son of Mary (virgin born, no less--Surah 19).

That is not to say that faithfulness to Christ means that God did not work through the Prophet Muhammad (Peace Be Upon Him) any more than it means that God did not work through the prophets of Israel. Though Christianity and Islam each require submission (islam) to God, Christianity insists that submission is mediated by Christ and Islam that it is done directly without a mediator. 

Respecting Muslims as fellow travelers on the road towards God is both faithful and scriptural. (If I actually had any readers, that sentence would engender hate mail, but I can type it knowing that no one will read it anyway.) Christians have much to learn from Muslims about faithfulness in prayer, devotion to God and justice for the poor. And Muslims have much to learn from Christians about forgiveness and grace. But attempting to syncretize the mediator/no mediator conundrum does an injustice towards both Christianity and Islam. I wish I could reconcile those two notions. But I can't and neither can Redding.

Ann Holmes Redding is a faithful Muslim. Thanks be to God. 

But she is no longer a Christian. 

Does Jim Dobson "Make Stuff Up?"

In the mid to late 1980's I was going through a spiritual journey that would take me from the insular world of hyper-fundamentalist Christianity with its certainties, quick and easy answers, and lack of ambiguity to a place where I had to walk by faith and not by the myth of certainty. I traveled the back roads of Florida, where I was a sales rep and kept my radio tuned to AM Christian stations. One of the programs I listened to regularly was Dr. James Dobson's Focus on the Family. Dr. Dobson offered me plenty of advice on rearing my young children, and caring for my family relationships. It was important advice: my wife was an addict and her addiction was destroying our marriage and affecting the ability of our children to succeed in school. Try as I might, the downward spiral was too much for us to bear, and we ended up divorced. My (ex-)wife later died, a tragic victim of the disease that destroys many other families like ours.

Years later, I was serving at a United Way in Florida. I had been ordained in the Episcopal Church and viewed my sojourn through fundamentalism and out the other side as a necessary part of my spiritual formation. I now longer considered myself an "evangelical" but I still had a special place in my heart for Jim Dobson. Those lonely, tear-filled afternoons were part of who I am, and Jim Dobson helped to form me. So I was distressed to learn that Dr. Dobson seemed to have some very wrong information about United Way. And that he was encouraging his listeners to stop supporting their local United Ways, since he said, they were driven by a pro-abortion and pro-gay-rights agenda. One afternoon, a co-worker (an evangelical) buzzed me on the intercom. "Turn on the radio. Dobson's back on us." I did, and he was. I figured that if I called in, identified myself as both a Christian minister and a United Way official, I could surely correct him. After all, he said he was only interested in the truth.

I dialed the toll-free number and heard a friendly voice on the other end. "Focus on the Family. How may I help you?"

I identified myself. "I believe that Dr. Dobson has some incorrect information about United Way, and I'd like to speak with him to set the record straight."

The voice on the other end was suddenly cold. "You are off topic."

And the line went dead.

Jim Dobson went on for the rest of the program lying through his teeth about the organization I worked for. I never again tuned into his program.

So, when Barack Obama said yesterday that Dr. Dobson was "making stuff up," I can testify that Obama is telling the truth. Jim Dobson makes stuff up about people who disagree with him. "I think he's deliberately distorting the traditional understanding of the Bible to fit his own world view, his own confused theology," Dobson said, adding ominously, Obama is "dragging biblical understanding through the gutter."

Why? Because Obama suggested that some Biblical laws were time and culture-bound, and that taking Jesus' Sermon on the Mount seriously would mean an understanding so radical "that it's doubtful that our own Defense Department would survive its application."

That's not "dragging biblical understanding through the gutter," that's having the guts to say that real Christianity is not some American, middle-class, white-bread civil religion, but the claim that Jesus is Lord, and therefore Caesar (or the United States of America) is not. I don't know if Obama really is serious about trying to take Jesus seriously or not.

But I do know that Jim Dobson makes stuff up.

An Apostasy Full of Grace and Truth: Frank Schaeffer's Crazy for God

He was once the fair-haired boy wonder of evangelicalism, there at the creation of the American Religious Right. He helped define the culture war, especially over abortion. He helped create the Presidency of Ronald Reagan, the Republican majority, the conservative Supreme Court and the New Evangelicals. Now, he's an apostate, a unborn-again seeker, a member of an Eastern Orthodox church, and a a self-acknowledged failure. Which means that, strangely, he's a finally a success.

Frank Schaeffer, the son of evangelical theologians Francis and Edith Schaeffer has, in his memoir Crazy for God, provided a beautiful, touching, and painfully honest story of growing up in the evangelical sub-culture in the age before it emerged as the culture. His portrait of his famous (at least in some circles) parents, and their Swiss Christian community, L'Abri, will anger those evangelicals who regard the Schaeffers (especially Francis) as saints. But, if you're looking for a Daddy Dearest, you'll be mightly disappointed. There is no scandal here, other than the scandal of evangelical Christianity in America once it got itself fitted into Constantine's vestments.

Frank paints his father as an art-loving historian, a free-thinker more at home in the Florentine Accademia than on the radio with Dr. Dobson. The elder Schaeffer apparently detested the power-hungry theo-politicians like Dobson, Falwell and Robertson, and was far more concerned with reaching young people in search of life's big questions than in reaching the halls of power. Still he allowed himself to be manipulated by the theo-politicians, to become the most sought after evangelical teacher of the 1980's. Francis Schaeffer is revered in evangelical circles, where his books and film series (produced by Frank) are still best-sellers two decades after his death. He created the intellectual underpinnings of the Religious Right (yes, Virginia, there is such a thing) and did more than any other theologian to gain evangelicalism its entry onto the political stage.

Edith is considerably more God-crazy than her husband, but her son clearly adores her. Beautiful, stylish, and fiercely intelligent, she is the fire in L'Abri's stove, warming everything with her presence, all the while irritating the living hell out of her family with twenty minute sermons masquerading as prayers, and her passion to "save" every living being in earshot.

Frank Schaeffer is honest about the dysfunction of his family, his sister's mental illness, his own sexual coming of age (sometimes uncomfortably so--the man apparently was a world-class wanker as a teen), the family fights over theology (which nearly wrecked L'Abri), and his parents' love affair with art, music and literature. He's also painfully honest about his failed career as a secular film maker, and genuinely regretful at giving up his early and promising career as an artist to chase the big evangelical donors who were underwriting the Schaeffer phenomenon.

Where he's at his best is also where's at his angriest: about the destructive role he played in American political life and the unleashing of the monster that ate the Republican Party. These days, he's a post-evangelical who rejects "what the evangelical community became. It was the merging of the entertainment business with faith, the flippant lightweight kitsch ugliness of American Christianity, the sheer stupidty, the paranoia of the American right-wing enterprise, the platitudes married to pop culture." He also considerably more nuanced about abortion, though calling him "pro-choice" would be a stretch.

In this he taps into that ironic vein that has created most of us evangelical apostates: the very success of evangelicalism, its emergence as the dominant religious influence in America, and its naked lust for power have driven us far from our home. One of Francis Schaeffer's most famous works is a film series about abortion and euthaniasia entitled, Whatever Happened to the Human Race? His son wants to know: whatever happened to the Evangelical Church?

Frank Schaeffer's apostasy is full of grace and truth. But what else would you expect from Francis and Edith Schaeffer's boy?

Harry Dent And the Open Sheep Fold

The seeds of discord were literally there at the beginning. Mark’s version of the Jesus story puts it like this

They came to Capernaum. When he was safe at home, he asked them, "What were you discussing on the road?" The silence was deafening—they had been arguing with
one another over who among them was greatest.

He sat down and summoned the Twelve. "So you want first place? Then take the last place. Be the servant of all." He put a child in the middle of the room. Then, cradling the little one in his arms, he said, "Whoever embraces one of these children as I do embraces me, and far more than me—God who sent me."

John spoke up, "Teacher, we saw a man using your name to expel demons and we stopped him because he wasn't in our group."

Jesus wasn't pleased. "Don't stop him. No one can use my name to do something good and powerful, and in the next breath cut me down. If he's not an enemy, he's an ally. Why, anyone by just giving you a cup of water in my name is on our side. Count on it that God will notice.

Of course, Jesus’ followers rarely followed his advice. And after his death, the divisions only widened: between native Palestinians and Jewish Christians that spoke languages other than Aramaic; between Paul who believed that anyone could be a follower of Jesus and Jesus’ brother James, who believed that circumcision, not baptism, was the ultimate faith marker. By the end of the first generation of Christians, there were a number of distinct “Christianities” (to borrow Bart Ehrman’s term) which made competing claims to being the legitimate descendants of the Jesus movement. Even following the victory of catholic theology at Nicea nearly three hundred years after Christ, there remained stubborn branches of Christianity which never fully accepted the doctrines of the Roman church. By the 11th century, Christianity had split into two distinct halves: the Eastern, mystical branch, and the Western, scholastic branch. (Both of which claimed to be “orthodox,” but that’s another post.)

Then came the Protestant Reformation, and with it, the divide of the Christian religion into thousands of sects, each of whom, more or less, makes a claim to be the true heirs of apostolic Christianity. In the more liberal branches of Protestantism, this claim is accompanied with a wink, because even its claimants know it to be preposterous, but in the more conservative branches, it is still the raison le juré for all the competing, contradictory religious movements that claim to be part or all of the “One, Catholic and Apostolic Church.” (A phrase from the Nicene Creed, to which non-creedal groups like the Baptists and Church of Christ do not adhere, accept when they do.)

The reason I bring up all this church history (something I love, but which both of my readers find boring, I’m sure), is that so many people are making so much over the “splintering” of the Republican Religious Right over which flip-flopping Republican they will endorse in the race for President. The idea that there ever was one, monolithic, right-wing religious movement in this country was a fiction promoted by political analysts who had no more inkling into the how evangelicals and fundamentalists think than they did into post quantum physics.

What evangelicals and fundamentalists wanted was what every other special interest group wanted: access to power. To get there, they formed alliances with the Republican party (not a traditionally friendly place to evangelicals, at least in the pre-Reagan days), because they believed that having power was important. They were tired of being thought of a backwards, ignorant, uneducated cultists. They wanted a little respect. And when the South Carolina’s Republican strategist Harry Dent devised a strategy to bring the South into the Republican column by bringing in evangelicals and fundamentalist, they swallowed the bait.

But Harry’s strategy was never going to last. These are people who have condemned others to hell over whether or not they baptized by full immersion, or used wine at communion (or to wash down pasta) or used Bibles that contained “inclusive language” (or that were authorized by someone other than King James in 1611). If you’re willing to split your closest personal relationships over how much water you use when baptizing somebody, you’re damn sure going to fracture over politics. Evangelicals and fundamentalists, like every other branch of Christianity, never really were of one mind on anything anyway. And gays and abortion were just ways to turn out the vote anyway.

Harry Dent was not such a great shepherd after all, because the sheep kept trying to get out of the fold, and now the gate's busted open and the fuzzy little SOB's are running around everywhere. Before you know it, Rick Warren's going to invite Obama Barak in for a Sunday night service. That's how you'll know it's over.

That, and when and Pat Robertson endorses Rudy Giuliani.

Kansas Sam and the Temple of Doom

• God is an exalted, perfected man.
• Jesus of Nazareth is the biological child of God the Father who had sexual relations with the Virgin Mary.
• After his resurrection, Jesus came to a lost tribe of Israelites called the Nephites, who lived in what is now the U.S. He appointed twelve apostles from the Nephites and they were sent out to spread the Gospel among the people who lived there.
  
• God has a human body and is not "eternal." There was a time when God did not exist.

Those are among the chief doctrines of the Church of Jesus of Christ of Latter Day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church. They are in direct contradiction of the chief doctrines of the "orthodox" Christian churches, Catholic, Protestant and Eastern. Can someone be a Christian and not believe what "orthodox" Christianity teaches? Of course. Even "orthodox" believers (me, for instance) have been known to have their share of doubts, heresies and unbeliefs.

But you cannot logically say that those who accept the beliefs of Mormonism believe in Jesus the same way those who believe in the traditional doctrines of orthodox Christianity do.

Then why is Sam Brownback apologizing for a campaign staffer's e-mail asking for help in fact-checking the doctrines of the LDS church, and asserting that "the LDS Jesus is not the same Jesus of the Christian faith?"

This is something that every orthodox Christian and every Latter Day Saint knows: the two faiths are similar and have much in common, but differ on who God is, who Jesus is, and whether or not the Bible has a missing "Third Testament." They are as similar as Shia and Sunni Islam are. And as different.

The only reason I can think that Kansas Sam has to apologize is that in America, it's not supposed to matter whether or not a President believes that Jesus used to live in Missouri or that the Flying Spaghetti Monster will return to rapture the Chosen Ones. Its' supposed to matter that he or she is competent, has a vision and convinces the American public to support that vision.

Sam got caught slyly trying to slip into the mantle of the evangelical Elijah. It might work among the more moderate religious conservatives. But will the Bob Jones Office of the Inquisition be any more likely to vote for an apostate Methodist who converted to Papism than they would for Mormon Mitt Romney? I rather doubt it. Kansas Sam is headed for the Temple of Doom.

He should apologize for making religion and religious beliefs a central point of his campaign. But he shouldn't have to apologize for saying that religions believe different things. Maybe now, he'll shut up.

The 2.5% Doctrine

My good friend, Not Very Bright, (whose bloghandle is ironically self-deprecating, since he's one the smartest bloggers around) has a great post about the beliefs of some of our South Carolina legislators regarding evolutionary biology. No surprises here: most of those who responded claim that they believe that the Genesis story is to be understood literally and that humans were made in a single, special act of creation in a Middle Eastern garden, on a Friday afternoon 6,000 years ago. Thank the God of Abraham for Bill Cotty and Mick Mulvaney who express their belief that God is indeed quite capable of designing a universe and populating it with billions of life forms in a graduated process that science calls "evolution." (Rep. Mulvaney is a bit confused about the difference between "deism" and "theistic evolution" but at least the man can think. I promise to spend some time in his office giving him a brief on theological schools of thought...)

The more we discover about the grand design of the universe, the more we see the hand of a Creator in it. (At least I do, you're entitled to be an agnostic or an atheist if you like. At least until such beliefs are listed as threats to national security and we ship you off to Gitmo.) But belief in a Creator in no way presupposes that the Genesis stories (there are two creation stories there, one in chapter 1 and another in 2 and 3) are to be taken as a scientific inquiry into the origin of life. In fact, genetic research has established the basic outlines of Darwin's theory as fact.

The April 13, 2007 issue of Science magazine reveals that the tiny spider macaque, chimpanzees and humans share at least 97.5% of their DNA. This means that only very tiny variations in the genetic code produced the vast diversity of primates and humans. It's wonderful, heady, exciting news. It also strengthens the faith of those who refuse to check their brains at the bright red door of their parish church.

Instead of viewing this news as another scientific validation of theistic biological origins, most creationists either ignore it or deny it. Why? Because it does not fit neatly into their "literal" reading of Genesis. If the events of the Genesis stories are to be understood literally, goes the creationist line, then there was no "fall" and no need for redemption, thus no atonement brought by Jesus' death. No resurrection. No Pentecost. No Second Advent.

In this, the creationists make themselves the unwitting accomplices of the Richard Dawkins band of reactionary atheists who belive that knocking over the straw man of a literal Adam and Eve knocks over the whole basis for Christianity. Unfortunately for both of them, Christianity is dependent, not on a literal reading of Genesis, but on Jesus of Nazareth, the radical Jewish rabbi who came to free people from their enslavement to the traditions of human superstition, including those based on a flawed reading of Genesis or other ancient texts.

And it only takes 2.5% of our DNA to help us figure out that the entire 100% got here in an entirely miraculous process of slow motion creation over 15 billion years. It's the little things that count.

Reading From the Back of the Book

The Seventh Sunday of Easter

Acts 16:16-34

Revelation 22:12-14, 16-17, 20

John 17:20-26

Barbara Kingsolver’s remarkable novel, The Poisonwood Bible, is the story of Nathan Price, a Baptist preacher from Georgia, who takes his family on a mission to the Belgian Congo amidst the Congolese war for independence from Belgium. It’s a powerful story of loss, of hope, of salvation. The story is related in turns by his wife, Orleanna, and their four daughters. One of the daughters, a twin named Adah, writes a love sonnet to the very nature of narrative, of poetry and palindromes, in words in so delicious you want to lick them off the page. In a passage describing her long rainy days in the Congolese jungle, Adah says, “When I finish reading a book from front to back, I read it from back to front. It is a different book from back to front and you can learn new things from it.”

I have always tended to read from the back of books and magazines towards the front, especially since the time I found out that the answers to the even-numbered geometry questions were there. That’s where the book reviews are. That’s where those quirky little classified ads promoting the lost secrets of the pyramids and how to get rich selling Tahitian Noni juice are. That’s where the solution to it all lies. Where Poirot reveals the murderer and Jack Ryan saves the Republic. Call it dyslexia, adult ADD or just plain contrariness, I like reading from the back of the book.

Because the back of the book is where all the seeds of hope, longing and desire blossom. It’s why I love the book of Revelation better than the book of Leviticus. It’s not just that that I find its Dali-esque landscape so entrancing, where six-foot scorpions pour out of deep underground caverns, and trumpets blow so loud and long that the mountains crumble and the oceans hide under the sand, but that the end of the Book shines like the bright morning star. Hope blossoms into grace and grace into eternity.

For the human heart needs hope. Earlier this week, I heard Dr. Bob Ross, the Director of the California Endowment, talk about restoring hope to our inner cities, to our poor, our elderly, our youth. He told a story about Willie Ketes, a two-year-old boy whose tragic accident touched Bob Ross’ life forever. In 1982, Bob Ross was the new pediatric intern at the Children’s Hospital in Philadelphia. He was on duty in the pediatric ICU one beautiful summer afternoon when the paramedics brought in the limp, blue body of little Willie Ketes. You know how fast two-year olds can move. You know how they can be out of your sight in a moment. That’s what happened to Willie’s parents. They found him at the bottom of the family swimming pool.

By the time he got to the PICU, there was very little that could be done. They ran what they called the death protocol: a series of neurological evaluations under the guidance of the senior neurologist. The test results were heartbreaking: the EEG had almost flat-lined. The organ donor team was called. The neurologist came out to talk with Willie’s parents. There was nothing else the medical team could do. If Willie could survive, which was nearly impossible, he would be a human vegetable: he could never talk, walk, eat, think. The family would have to make a tough decision, one no parent could make without ripping out their very soul.

Willie’s mom shook her head and said, look, Willie’s my baby. I have to have some hope for awhile. And so she began to sit with Willie, and day and night she talked to him. And when she’d leave for the heart-breaking trip back home, she’d leave a tape player of her voice and the voice of other family members talking and reading stories to Willie. And she’d leave batteries for the staff to put in when the tape recorder ran out of juice. Because she just continued to hope.

About seven or eight years later, Bob Ross had become a pretty famous doctor—the Commissioner of Public Health for Philadelphia with his picture all over the television and the newspaper as the city struggled with the twin public health problems of AIDS and crack cocaine. One morning, Dr. Ross was in the middle of a staff meeting with his senior team when there was a knock at the door: his assistant said that there was a child on the phone who needed to talk to him.

Bob Ross figured it was his son, but his secretary told him she didn’t think so. And when he said hello, he heard a voice that only one person in the whole world ever thought anyone would hear. “Dr. Ross,” the voice said. “This is Willie. I saw you on TV.” Willie? thought Bob Ross. Not that Willie, not that kid. “Willie, Willie Who?”

“Willie Ketes,” came the halting voice. “I-I saw you on TV.” Bob Ross asked to speak with Willie’s mom. When she came on the phone she told him that Willie had indeed survived, and that though he was in a wheelchair, he was alive and in school and growing towards adulthood. Because his momma had never given up hope. She and her family and friends had spent years re-growing his injured brain synapses by talking, reading, singing and praying with him.

Even when you’re in a prison, your wrists chained to the wrists of your best friend and your feet locked down in the stocks, you’ve got to keep talking, reading, singing and praying. It’s what Paul and his pal Silas did when they got themselves into trouble in Macedonia. They’d been out preaching their way from one village to another with their strange message about the Jewish rabbi who’d been killed but rose from the dead. Now usually, whether they came through tiny villages or sprawling cities, they would encounter a mixture of scorn and detached interest, and every once in awhile something approaching genuine faith. That’s when they’d stop and tell the story more fully and sometimes people would believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and get themselves saved.

But one day, on their way to a local temple in Thyatira, they were telling their story not far from one of those roadside fortune-tellers. You know the kind: just outside the city limits, there’s a sign with a big red hand and a moniker like “Madame Athena” or “Sister Joanna.” For some reason, Paul and Silas told their story just outside her hut, and a crowd gathered. They talked about the Rabbi who was dead and now alive. And from inside the hut, a young woman came out. She’d been enslaved by some businessmen who thought that the fortune-telling business was an easier way to empty travelers’ purses than simply hitting them over the head. She wore wrist bangles and large silver earrings. Her clothes were sensuous and colorful, a whirlwind of silk, a hint of cleavage, a suggestion that you might get something extra-special in exchange for your shekel: especially if you looked like you had a pocket full of silver.

That’s when the shrieking started. “These men are slaves of the Most High God, who proclaim to you a way of salvation!” Maybe she thought these new sorcerers would cut into her business and she thought she could drive away their customers. Maybe deep within her desperate soul, something stirred at the story of Jesus of Nazareth. Or maybe, she was possessed by some mental illness that pushed her to extreme and deviant behavior. Whatever it was, the crowd soon dispersed and Paul and Silas loaded up their backpacks and trudged off down the road with their new friend following them.

It went on for days. They’d slip away, when she appeared to looking off into the distance, but then couldn’t seem to get rid of her. They thought sometimes they had lost her, down one village street or in the shadows behind a tavern or an inn, but every time they would start talking to anyone about Jesus, there she was, screaming and whirling and frothing at the mouth. Every potential convert in a hundred miles took cover. It was hard enough to convince people that they weren’t charlatans without this one-woman windstorm screaming at people to follow them.

Finally, Paul turned to her and did something he never knew how to do before: an exorcism. He ordered the demon in her to leave her alone. The girl crumbled to the ground in a heap. One of her owners, anxious that she hadn’t been around lately to fleece unwary travelers, took her home. But the trouble was just beginning. Because when the girl’s owner shoved her down in front of her crystal ball, she just stared at it. Her head was clear for the first time she could remember. She thought about her mother, about the village she was born in. She thought about the strange men and their story of Jesus who was dead and then rose again.

“I-I can’t see anything.” Her owner screamed at her, slapping her face so hard that her eyes got all blurry, demanded that she tell the future. She shook her head quietly. “I can’t. I can’t do it any more.”

Well that was just about the worst thing her owner could imagine. So he did what you’d do if you thought somebody stole your business. He called the cops. That’s when the ruckus began.

He shouted to the police and the crowd forming around his door: “These Jews are coming into our village with their weird Jewish God and their weird Jewish hair and their weird Jewish politics and they are destroying this place. We can’t even make a living with the Jews around. They’ve ruined my business and they will ruin yours too, if somebody doesn’t stop them.”

All those people who’d been just a little ashamed of the unseemly man and his unseemly pals who owned the girl who told the fortunes of unwary sojourners, now turned on Paul and Silas and began to beat the living daylights out of them. The police swung their nightsticks until they felt the satisfying sound of flesh tearing. Then they dragged them before the judges who thought that Jews should be beaten just because they were Jews and so the police beat them some more. After they caught their breath, they grabbed Paul and Silas, and took them to the jail-house, a forlorn stone building at the edge of the village.

“Keep them secure,” said the police to the jailer. “These two are trouble. We’ll be back for them in the morning.” The jailer looked at the bruised and bleeding men. They didn’t look too dangerous, but you could never be sure these days, particularly with Jews. He took them to the inside cell, and clamped their feet in the stocks.

It was all quiet for awhile when Paul said, “Silas, you okay?”

“Yeah, I’m okay,” came the hoarse answer. “My head hurts though.”

“Well your eyelid’s so swollen up, you look like Cyclops.” Paul chuckled.

“You ain’t exactly Adonis, brother,” shot back Silas. They both laughed.

“You think we’ll get out of here alive?” Silas said.

“We’ve got to hope so, friend,” Paul answered. “I’m not letting go of it.”

Paul began to hum. Silas began to hum. Paul started to sing one of the old, old hymns, and Silas joined in harmony. They sang about Moses and they sang about David. They sang about Jerusalem and they sang about the Red Sea drowning old Pharaoh. Just as they got to the song from the end of the Book, the one about the lion and the lamb and the peaceable kingdom, why the earth began to shake, and the walls began to tremble and the ceiling began to fall and all the other prisoners began to scream.

It only lasted a moment, but it felt like eternity. When it stopped, the prisoners realized that their chains were no longer stuck in the walls. Paul and Silas stood up gingerly and spat out dust. The jailer’s head appeared around the corner. He looked at the prisoners through the dark and the dust. He began to unfasten his scabbard.

“Wait a minute!” shouted Paul, “don’t do that! It’s okay, man, everybody’s here, and nobody’s going to escape.”

The jailer knew a miracle when he saw one. He took Paul and Silas into his house, and dressed their wounds. “Look, I know you people didn’t do anything to deserve this. You’ve come to our village to talk about your Jesus who saves people. He must be some kind of Savior if his people even treat their jailers with kindness. What do I have to do for him to save me?”

“All you have to do is believe in him, and you will be saved.” They told him the story of Jesus, of his miracles, of his resurrection, of how people could still do miracles in his name. The jailer believed. He believed so much that he got saved, right then and there. So Paul and Silas, still hurting and bruised from being beaten that afternoon, stood in the kitchen of the house of the man who had jailed them and poured water over him in the name of Jesus. Then they all sat down had the finest meal that any of them could remember.

It happened because Paul and Silas had hope. Because they read back from the end of the Book. When they left his house, the jailer had hope too.

The hope that their dirty and blood-soaked robes would soon be clean and white. That Jesus, gone a long time now, would be coming back soon. That even earthquakes and crazy mobs and poor enslaved little fortune tellers can someday be full of hope and grace and truth.

Jesus himself, on that long dark night before he died, prayed in hope that it wasn’t all just some ghastly and senseless dream. That in his own betrayal, terror and pain God’s own glory would shine through. He prayed that his friends, scattered by fear into the darkness, would regain their hope and believe again. That through their belief, the whole world would believe. Jesus held on to his hope.

You know what? Three days later the earth cracked open and he stood on it again. Then fifty days later, heaven cracked open and wind and fire danced on the heads of people who had learned to hope again.

It’s what we still have to hold on to. The hope that the things we do, the things we believe, the things we long and pray for will come true. That peace will come and justice, will flow like a river. That we can really end the cycle of poverty and hopelessness that engulfs half a planet. That a medical mission in Honduras and a school in Haiti are changing the world in some very real tangible way. That people, divided by religion, tradition, class and race, can come together in a prayer of hope, crying “Amen! Come Lord Jesus.” That grace will come because of that hope. You can read all about it, right at the very end of the Book.

Oh, about Willie Ketes, there’s more. If you go to the end of the Book, you’ll find out that in 2004, he graduated from West Chester State University in Pennsylvania. Because his momma hoped. And never quit hoping.

Amen. Come Lord Jesus.

I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?—Isaiah 43:19.

Whatever you may think of the Episcopal House of Bishops’ “Mind of the House” resolutions passed today at Camp Allen Texas, they have spoken clearly and forcefully.

When the Anglican Primates met last month in Tanzania, they issued an extraordinary communiqué to the American Episcopal Church: comply with our directives by the end of 2007 or face expulsion from the Anglican Communion. The Bishops said, “well, thanks for the advice; here we stand: we can do no other.” They rejected the Dar Es Salaam Communiqué for five reasons:

• “First, it violates our church law in that it would call for a delegation of primatial authority not permissible under our Canons and a compromise of our autonomy as a Church not permissible under our Constitution.
• “Second, it fundamentally changes the character of the Windsor process and the covenant design process in which we thought all the Anglican Churches were participating together.
• “Third, it violates our founding principles as The Episcopal Church following our own liberation from colonialism and the beginning of a life independent of the Church of England.
• “Fourth, it is a very serious departure from our English Reformation heritage. It abandons the generous orthodoxy of our Prayer Book tradition. It sacrifices the emancipation of the laity for the exclusive leadership of high-ranking Bishops. And, for the first time since our separation from the papacy in the 16th century, it replaces the local governance of the Church by its own people with the decisions of a distant and unaccountable group of prelates.
• “Most important of all it is spiritually unsound. The pastoral scheme encourages one of the worst tendencies of our Western culture, which is to break relationships when we find them difficult instead of doing the hard work necessary to repair them and be instruments of reconciliation. The real cultural phenomenon that threatens the spiritual life of our people, including marriage and family life, is the ease with which we choose to break our relationships and the vows that established them rather than seek the transformative power of the Gospel in them. We cannot accept what would be injurious to this Church and could well lead to its permanent division.” Read it all here.

The American branch of Anglicanism is governed by a polity that is similar to that of the United States, with a bi-cameral legislative and governing body that has served well for more than two centuries. Accepting the Communiqué would have meant that only one of those Houses has any real meaning, the House of Bishops. That’s like the U.S. Senate declaring itself the only legitimate law-making body in the U.S. Congress. There’s a Constitution which prevents that. The same is true in the Episcopal Church. Without the laity, the whole people of God, the House of Bishops is just a magesterium comprising “a distant and unaccountable group of prelates.” That may be the way the Roman Church functions, but it’s not the way the Episcopal Church works.

The Bishops are right to take such an extraordinary stand in response to the crisis. The violations of diocesan boundaries, the imposition of a magisterial order, the desire to create an “Anglican Covenant” which supersedes the ecumenical Creeds are all actions that could not be accepted in good conscience of the House of Bishops.

So what happens next? The Bishops asked for a face-to-face meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Dr. Rowan Williams and members of the Primates' Standing Committee to explain their point of view. It may or may not be granted, but it will not change things. The American Church, for better or worse, and to no one’s actual surprise, has decided that to bringing good news to the poor, proclaiming release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, liberation of the oppressed, and proclamation the year of the Lord's favor are more important than trying to pacify those in Anglicanism who consider them heretics.

There’s a new thing coming to be here on the broken foundation of the old, if only we can perceive it.

Fox News Alert: "Barak Obama's Secret Muslim Past"--It's Campaign Time, Kiddies!

I swear the campaign was just over. I've still got my "I voted" sticker stuck to the console of the Jeep.

Alas, it's January, and just in time for George Bush's State of the Union Address, the litter mewing in the cat bed is growing: Bill Richardson, Hillary Clinton and Barak Obama all announced the past couple of days that they want to re-take the White House for the Democrats, and Sam Brownback joined their chorus from the Republican side of the nest.

We can expect the next eighteen months to be full of Swift Boats filled with Bimbos; of Theocrats storming the Bastille; of poorly-worded answers to poorly-worded questions; of inflated resumes, embarrassing gaffes, and leaked memos. And it's already started.

Barak Obama, a Christian from Chicago, got smeared as a jihadist from Indonesia on Fox News. By now, I'm sure you know that Obama's father was a secular Kenyan Muslim. What you may not know is that Obama's middle name is Hussein (as in "Saddam"), and that he attended an Indonesian elementary school that was predominantly Muslim. (He also attended a Catholic school, but we haven't hated Catholics since 1960--so that's not news. Actually in South Carolina, some people still hate Catholics, but most of them go to BJU.)

The story got legs after first appearing on Insightmag.com, the webzine of Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church. Now, one expects that such a paragon of Christian orthodoxy and religious tolerance like Rev. Moon would avoid shameless yellow journalism, but Insightmag.com states this startling revelation came as a result of "an investigation of Mr. Obama by political opponents within the Democratic Party," who are "researchers connected to Senator Clinton." All speaking on deep background of course.

It's not that Hillary Clinton is incapable of political ruthlessness. However, it's just hilarious to think she'd spend money on "research" to discover something that Obama's talked about openly, written about in his books and then leak it, of all places, to the Moonies.

Just think: the primaries are still thirteen months away. This will be long forgotten. But, imagine what we'll learn by then.

There was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo

George Bush's newest "new strategy" on Iraq looks for all the world like the same old strategy that hasn't worked for the last four years. Nothing's changed, not even the soldiers, many of who are being deployed for the third time in a foolish attempt to rescue Bush's failed and reckless war.

Before the beginning of the Iraq war, which was falsely linked to the so-called "War on Terror," we found out that our government had imprisoned hundreds of people at Guantanamo Bay Cuba, and deprived them of the right to counsel, to see the charges against them, and to receive a fair and speedy trial. If this was being done in Iran or Syria, we'd be demanding United Nations sanctions, or threatening war. But, we are the Empire, and no one challenges us.

Our own FBI says that the prisoners have been chained in a fetal position to the floor for at least 18 hours, urinating and defecating on themselves; subjected to extremes of temperature; gagged with duct tape; held in stress positions while shackled; and subjected to loud music and flashing lights. Don't believe it? You can read the FBI's own report, released last week under the Freedom of Information Act. It's gruesome.

And now there's a letter from one of them to me and you. His name is Jumah al-Dossari, he's 33 years old, and from Bahrain. His heart-breaking epistle is reprinted in today's Los Angeles Times. He writes:

During the first few years at Guantanamo, I was interrogated many times. My interrogators told me that they wanted me to admit that I am from Al Qaeda and that I was involved in the terrorist attacks on the United States. I told them that I have no connection to what they described. I am not a member of Al Qaeda. I did not encourage anyone to go fight for Al Qaeda. Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden have done nothing but kill and denigrate a religion. I never fought, and I never carried a weapon. I like the United States, and I am not an enemy. I have lived in the United States, and I wanted to become a citizen. I know that the soldiers who did bad things to me represent themselves, not the United States. And I have to say that not all American soldiers stationed in Cuba tortured us or mistreated us. There were soldiers who treated us very humanely. Some even cried when they witnessed our dire conditions. Once, in Camp Delta, a soldier apologized to me and offered me hot chocolate and cookies. When I thanked him, he said, "I do not need you to thank me." I include this because I do not want readers to think that I fault all Americans.

Jumah al-Dossari is our responsibility, for he resides on land we claim as our own, under the eye of the government we have elected, and he sends us a word that can only be called a Word from the Lord: "I would rather die than stay here forever, and I have tried to commit suicide many times. The purpose of Guantanamo is to destroy people, and I have been destroyed. I am hopeless because our voices are not heard from the depths of the detention center. If I die, please remember that there was a human being named Jumah at Guantanamo whose beliefs, dignity and humanity were abused. Please remember that there are hundreds of detainees at Guantanamo suffering the same misfortune."

If he dies, his blood is on us, for we allowed this to happen.

Magnificat Anima Mea Dominum

It’s finally over. All those people making six dollars and forty-eight cents an hour at Wal-Mart and Target who haven’t seen their families for a month, are home now. The streets are nearly empty, the only traffic out-of-town children slowly driving down once-familiar streets. The tawdry, embarrassing, maddening Christmas season is finally, blessedly over.

Just in time for Christmas.

The one there’s no war on. The one that has nothing to do with strings of lights, giant blow-up Santa lawn bubbles, or the consumer confidence index. The season that celebrates the story of a peasant girl who gave birth to a child of dubious paternity. The season whose celebrants believe that her baby, born in a no account town in a backwater Roman province, changed the world forever.

Christmas is just that: a Christ Mass, a liturgical theatre of the absurd notion that God decided to inhabit the world in the person of a Judean carpenter-cum-rabbi. Looking for the “real meaning of Christmas?” This is it: Luke’s ancient tale of the family from Nazareth, gone down to Bethlehem, to pay taxes to the Empire. The manger, the shepherds, the heavenly host, the cows, and sheep and the child wrapped in swaddling clothes, the entire cast and crew of the turning inside out of the universe. Where shepherds hear angels and a little girl bears a God in a feed trough. Where God has brought down the powerful from their thrones, lifted up the lowly, filled the hungry with good things, sent the rich away empty and on earth brought peace and good will.

This is the night when even our rich, powerful, haughty souls can magnify the Lord.

Merry Christmas.

Mitt Romney, Evangelicals and the End of Religious Tests

Once upon a time, conservative evangelical and fundamentalist Christians had principles. And one of those principles was: theology matters. They would rail against the slightest deviation from the evangelical creed: the inerrant Bible, the Trinity, the Virgin Birth, bodily resurrection and dual nature of Christ, and his imminent second advent.

No faithful conservative evangelical would ever think of casting a vote for a member of a fringe Christian sect like Jehovah's Witnesses, the Unification Church (the "Moonies") or the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons). Of course, that was before they got drunk with Constantine's chalice. Power corrupts even the ostensibly incorruptible.

Because suddenly somebody who believes that God used to be a man on another planet, that the Bible is not only errant, but superceded by "another testament," that salvation is earned through a combination of faith and works, and that the ultimate destiny of faithful humans is to become a God is a contender for the Republican nomination in 2008 among conservative evangelicals.

Today's Spartanburg Herald-Journal notes: "Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who still hasn't officially committed to a presidential run, is shaping up to be a strong contender for the crucial GOP nomination in the Palmetto State." Even among South Carolina's notoriously sectarian Baptists like Jared Young of Romney's Commonwealth Political Action Committee. Young told the Herald-Journal:

"Gov. Romney has always stood on the side of life, he's been a fierce defender of the sanctity of marriage, and will continue to fight for those conservative principles. Gov. Romney is a person of faith, and that's important to most Americans. He leads by example with character and integrity, and has been married to the same woman for more than 30 years."

Young, observes the newspaper, is a Southern Baptist and graduate of Bob Jones University, whose president has called Mormonism a "cult."

If John Kerry or Barak Obama said that Jesus was not born of a virgin, and that God used to be a man, you can bet that the right-wing South Carolina blogs would be all a-twitter. I can imagine that Crunchy and Gross would rail against "wolves in sheep's clothing" trying to fool the voters into thinking that they were orthodox Christians. But of course, what really matters to evangelicals now is power, not theology. So they're lining up behind the Governor of Massachusetts, because he's "electable" and could help bring Congress and the federal courts back into their orbit. (Or do Congress and the courts orbit around evangelicals on their pre-Copernican flat earth?)

Frankly, it matters not a whit whether a president believes God used to be a man or a yellow squash or whether he believes in God at all. What matters is whether or not he believes in the Constitution of the United States, and whether or not he's prepared to preserve, protect and defend it. That Constitution bars any "religious test" for elected office. Which is why we've had Deists, Unitarians and Catholics alongside good Baptists and Methodists and Episcopalians in the White House. (We've undoubtedly had practicing atheists, as well, though none openly. Nixon comes to mind...)

But evangelicals and fundamentalists have made religious testing a precursor to elected office. Now, their power suddenly shaky, they are willing to say that religion is unimportant as long as someone is committed to conservative political positions.

In a strange sort of way, this is actually good news. Maybe our next President won't believe that he (or she) has been anointed by God to save America and the world from infidels. Maybe a Mormon President would actually be a religous liberal, committed to freedom for all beliefs and non-beliefs. Especially if that Mormon President were incoming Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

Whoops. Sorry. He's a Democrat.

Besides, did you know that Harry Reid believes that God used to be a man?

********************
Endnote: As to whether or not Romney is even a "conservative," (as if that term means anything in the reign of George Bush) check out this from the Boston Globe. But he's been married to the same woman for 30 years, so that must count for something.

Beloved Bastards: Ted Haggard and Us

Ted Haggard is probably living up to his surname about now.

The out-spoken opponent of homosexuality has resigned as president of the National Association of Evangelicals after being accused of having a homosexual affair with a gay hooker. He's also stepped aside as leader of the 14,000 member New Life Church in Colorado Springs while a church panel investigates the allegations.

I don't know if Haggard is guilty of the charges, and I won't presume that he is. He denies it, and I'll give him the benefit of the doubt. His accuser has been less than forthcoming with the evidence he claims he has, like voice-mails and an envelope that Haggard supposedly used to send him cash. Could be, but even in religious courts one is presumed innocent. We no longer throw accused witches in the Thames to see if they float.

I'm not a huge fan of Haggard's, though recently he has shown courage in breaking from right-wing orthodoxy around global warming, economic justice, human rights and promoting non-violent solutions to international disputes. That's not to say that he has softened his stance on stem-cell research, gay marriage, or abortion.

The real question is: if Haggard's guilty, so what? It just means he's like me, a poor sinner saved by grace. I've condemned people for doing what I've done too. I'm a far better hypocrite than holy man. You are too, I'll bet. Like my favorite Baptist preacher Will Campbell once said, "We are all bastards and God loves us anyway."

Papal Fallibility: Benedict says he's sorry.

I love irony. Except when people get killed.

When his election as Pope was announced, critics of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger (myself among them), felt that the window of Vatican II had finally been slammed shut. For here was the Grand Inquistor himself, Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, nemesis of such noted scholars and heroes of post-Vatican theology as Hans Küng and Edward Schillebeeckx , now occupying the See of Peter himself.

Of course being an Anglican, I don’t buy that whole business about the shoes of the fisherman, anyway. But, I’m writing post-modern irony here, so stuff it, will ya?

I figured it wouldn’t be long before the new Pope would trot out long-abandoned arguments about orthodoxy and purity and only-celibate-men-in-the pulpit. And I was right. Still, I never figured that Benedict would try, however inadvertently, to reignite the flames of the Crusades. He did just that, this past week, when at Regensburg University, he quoted 14th century Byzantine crusader Manuel II Paleologus: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.”

Predictably, (and ironically) the Islamic world recoiled in protest. “We swear that we will destroy their cross in the heart of Rome ... and that their Vatican will be hit and wept over by the Pope," ranted Jaish al-Mujahideen of the Mujahideen's Army, who called Benedict the “the dog of the crusaders.” The Palestinian and Pakistani Parliaments condemned the Pope while other Muslims burned him in effigy. It went on and on, throughout the Islamic world.

Still more irony: Benedict was not saying that he agreed with the Christian crusader. Still, he never said he didn’t agree, and the full speech reveals Benedict’s view of the inferiority of Muslim theology about epistemology and theodicy. So, his apology sounds a bit strained to my irony-overloaded ears: “At this time I wish also to add that I am deeply sorry for the reactions in some countries to a few passages of my address at the University of Regensburg, which were considered offensive to the sensibility of Muslims. These in fact were a quotation from a medieval text, which do not in any way express my personal thought.”

Benedict, like George Bush, doesn’t even begin to understand Islam, or the regard in which it holds its Prophet, or the value it places on the opinions of the leaders of other world religions. If I, an insignificant Christian cleric, say something stupid or insensitive about Islam, not a single effigy will burn. But when the Pope, viewed as the leader of the world’s Christians (ironically by both himself and Muslims, in spite of the objections of the much of the rest of Christianity), utters the words “evil and inhuman” in connection with the Prophet’s name, Muslims take offense.

And now, somebody has died. Sister Leonella Sgorbati was shot outside a Mogadishu hospital, apparently by somebody who thought that killing her would punish Benedict.

Even the irony that the Pope had to apologize, thus destroying the doctrine of Papal Infallibility, is no longer amusing. Whether Christian or Muslim, it’s time to follow the Qur’an’s advice:

O humankind! We created you from a single pair of a male and female, and made you into nations and tribes, that you may know and deal with each other in kindness (not that you may despise each other). Verily the most honored of you in the sight of God (is he who is) the most righteous of you, and God is Knower, Aware. Qur’an, 49:13.

Entropy and Abdul Rahman

Nearly fifty years ago an Oxford sociologist named Bryan Wilson wrote the groundbreaking article "An Analysis of Sect Development" in American Sociological Review. He observed:

"It is here hypothesized that sects experience different types of tension which vary according to their own constellation of values, as well as the circumstances of their origin. In response to such tensions, in the attempt at their management, we may expect to find the genesis of processes which cause some sects to develop into denominations, others to wither, some to be exterminated, some to fragment, and some to remain, over several generations, as sects." Wilson's work explained why some sects (like the Assemblies of God) become denominations, and some (like Jehovah's Witnesses) never quite get there.

But Wilson didn't think to ask: can denominations regress? In other words, having arrived in the theological mainstream, can religious groups start sliding back down the evolutionary slope towards sect and cult? Or do they just split, with the "denominationalists" going one way and the sectarians another? When you look at the current state of the Episcopal Church, the Southern Baptists and the Roman Catholic Church, you have to wonder: are these groups turning back to their long ago abandoned sectarian ways?

The National Catholic Reporter, for instance, analyzes a Pew Research Center poll showing that Catholics like torture again. (And you thought that went out with the end of the Inquisition.) And Southern Baptists, who began ordaining women to the ministry in the mid-1960's, no longer do, explaining that "the office of pastor is limited to men." And the Archbishop of Canterbury, spritual leader of the Anglican Communion (the "mother church" of the Episcopal Church) has just defended Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola's decidedly un-Christ-like defense of rioting Christians.

Entropy, it seems, infects even religious movements. Of course, that's nothing new: the Revelation of John issued a scathing indictment of the church at Ephesus for "forsaking" its early fervor for the gospel. (Revelation 2:4)

Political movements are entropic of course. Even democratic governments inevitably drift towards authoritarianism, and thus are ever in need of vigilance to curb their decline. But they usually last a bit longer than they did in Afghanistan. This week the world has watched with fascinated horror as a Kabul court put Abdul Rahman on trial for apostasy, in what could have led to a death sentence. Rahman, who became a Christian 17 years ago, was likely freed today not because the Court ruled in favor of religious freedom, but because of the furor over the case from West, the court citing "gaps" in the evidence, as well as the possibility that the defendant was mentally ill. This, in a nation with a "democratically elected" government, whose constitution was mid-wifed by America, and whose "freedom" was purchased with American blood.

The neo-cons seem genuinely puzzled that the regime of thugs they put in place after the regime of thugs they ousted would act like such thugs. Michelle Malkin cried "Who Will Save Abdul Rahman?" Andrew Sullivan sniffed "that a religious faith contains this kind of fanatical intolerance and violence anywhere is disturbing." And the Unification Church (that bastion of religious tolerance and democratic freedom), pontificated in its Washington Times: "If this manipulation of the law can save the life of a man who is only following his conscience, we must be grateful for that much." The Moonie owned Times also noted that its favorite Christian, George W. Bush, was "deeply troubled" that "a country we helped liberate would hold a person to account because they chose a particular religion over another."

Maybe the Afghans don't really believe in democracy after all. Or maybe they did, but then gave up, like John's Ephesian Church. But, is a democracy imposed by an imperial power in any sense a democracy at all? And if it's not, why not choose entropy instead?