January 2009 Archives

It's over. No doubt there will be plenty of effort expended trying to make the social conservatives happy. But Steele's agenda is going to be big-tent, which will mean an official welcome mat for pro-choice Republicans. And that will not make the Dobson wing happy. At all.

Steele up. Social conservatism down.

I spent last evening at the Connecticut Forum, where Christopher Hitchens, Peter Gomes, and Harold Kushner spent a couple of hours amusing the crowd with quips and barbs about God, religion, faith, and reason. On the anti-God side, Hitchens believes he has a new ally in the White House; to wit, that Obama is a secret nonbeliever who signaled as much in his inaugural speech not only by including nonbelievers in his array of Americans-by-religion but also by (anonymously) quoting the words of Thomas Paine that George Washington read to the troops at Valley Forge:

"Let it be told to the future world ... that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive... that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it]."

THESE are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

The scoop, according to NYT's Laurie Goodstein, is that President Obama will name Joshua DuBois to head COFANP, the Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships that inherits President Bush's faith-based initiative. The 26-year-old DuBois headed religious outreach for the Obama campaign, and while he wasn't in the inner circle of chieftains, he is by all reports close to Obama himself.

Goodstein elicited words of praise for DuBois from John DiIulio, the bigfoot professor who first ran Bush's effort, but there's no hiding the fact that he's not a social service pro, from either the academic or the practitioner side. He's about the care and feeding of the community of the faith-based, as is underscored by the fact that Goodstein got her information from "religious leaders" whom the White House had informed about the appointment.

No question, the hiring issue--whether Obama will, as promised, forbid those who receive government grants to discriminate on the basis of religion--is a biggie. But no less important is whether COFANP will absorb and act on what researchers have learned over the past decade about the nature and effectiveness of faith-based social service provision. If not, it will, like Bush's faith-based initiative, be mostly about jollying up elements of the religious community for P.R. and political purposes.

Dan Gilgoff calls attention to the absence of faith or any reference to social conservatism on the website of Sarah Palin's new political action committee, and indeed it's striking. Even Mike Huckabee's HUCK PAC lists "the family" among the things it cares about. But movement evangelicals like Huckabee and Palin don't need to advertise who they are to the movement. They do feel the need to veil it from everybody else. That's why no one could manage to lay hands on the sermons Huck gave when he was a Baptist minister. And why Palin was so exceptionally vague about her religious views and attachments during the campaign. Is anyone fooled? Nope.

Gallup has surveyed Americans for religion's importance and broken the results up by state. Here's the map:

So what's the explanation? Says Gallup: The question of why residents of some states (e.g., Mississippi and other Southern states) are highly likely to report that religion is an important part of their lives, while residents of other states (e.g., Vermont and other New England states) are much less likely to report the same is fascinating, but difficult to answer simply. Well, the simplest explanation is membership in religious institutions. New England and the Pacific Northwest (OR, WA, AK) have the lowest membership rates, with the rest of the West (except Utah and New Mexico) not far behind. By contrast, what we call the Southern Crossroads (TX, OK, LA, AR, MO) and some but not all states in the South have the highest membership rates. Of course, that to some extent begs the question, which Gallup does not presume to answer. In case you're interested, I can recommend Silk and Walsh, One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics.

And while we're on the subject, in the past election, Obama carried all the least religious states except Alaska, while McCain carried all the most religious except North Carolina and all the "more religious" except Virginia and Indiana. Other than McCain's Arizona, the three northernmost Mountain states (ID, MT, and WY), and two-thirds of Nebraska, Obama carried all the "less religious" and "average" states. In other words, the 2008 election makes clear how much of a dividing line religiosity is in American politics.

Pastordan sez no more kumbaya.

Howard Friedman over at Religion Clause has noticed that the fiscal stimulus bill includes $100 million for what's been known as the faith-based initiative, and also that Rep. Susan Davis (D-CA) has proposed an amendment to increase that to $500 million. The money's slated for Health and Human Services' Compassion Capital Fund, whose purpose is "to expand and strengthen the role of faith-based and community organizations in their ability to provide social services to low-income communities." The grants are supposed to go for technical assistance and capacity-building for programs targeted at at-risk youth.

Now, recall that under a renamed Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships (COFANP), Obama promised a $500 million program to provide summer opportunities to 1 million children. Is that what Rep. Davis' amendment is all about? And if not, where's the program? And where's COFANP?

The man once known as God's Rottweiler justifies giving something for nothing:

"I undertook this act of paternal mercy because these prelates had repeatedly manifested to me their deep pain at the situation in which they had come to find themselves," the pope said.

"I hope my gesture is followed by the hoped-for commitment on their part to take the further steps necessary to realize full communion with the church, thus witnessing true fidelity, and true recognition of the magisterium and the authority of the pope and of the Second Vatican Council," he said.

The barons of the GOP are longing for a new Haley Barbour to head the RNC, writes Alexander Burns on Politico, and on his account what that means is someone consummately competent at the care and feeding of the apparat. Oh to be able to party like it was 1993-97! But it's worth bearing in mind that, in addition to his political skills, the governor of Mississippi is a classic Bourbon conservative in more ways than one. When the state was forced into a round of major belt-tightening a few years ago, the joke was that the only thing that wasn't cut was the governor's Maker's Mark account. So much not a part of the religious right is Barbour that the Democrat who tried to unseat him in 2007 based his campaign on a religious challenge to throw the money changer out of the Temple. (See Charles Wilson's article on the campaign here.)

Meanwhile, James C. McKinley, Jr. reports in today's NYT on the coup in the Texas legislature wherein the autocratic social conservative speaker of the house, Thomas Craddick, has been supplanted by Joe Straus, a pro-choice Jew from San Antonio who voted against legislation to ban gay men and lesbians from serving as foster parents. That's Texas Republicanism?

To be sure, when it comes to party leadership posts, ideology generally takes a back seat to more practical considerations. But it's hard to avoid the suspicion that a lot of Republican insiders are trying to find a way to lower the party's social conservative profile. What they understand is this: It's the geography, stupid. For the GOP, "social conservatives" means "white evangelicals," and white evangelicals are distributed highly unevenly around the country. In 2008, they were insufficient to hold those linchpins of GOP national success, Florida, Virginia, and Ohio. Any effort to rebuild the party has to look to capturing states outside the evangelical heartland, and that means being able to appeal to "social moderates"--pro-choice suburbanites who have no particular problem with gay marriage. And that means having party leaders who are not hamstrung by "moral values."

There's plenty of commentary in the offing on Obama's interview with Al-Arabiya--here's Klein's early guide to it--but I want to call attention to just this exchange on President Bush's War on Terror.

Q President Bush framed the war on terror conceptually in a way that was very broad, "war on terror," and used sometimes certain terminology that the many people -- Islamic fascism. You've always framed it in a different way, specifically against one group called al Qaeda and their collaborators. And is this one way of --

THE PRESIDENT: I think that you're making a very important point. And that is that the language we use matters. And what we need to understand is, is that there are extremist organizations -- whether Muslim or any other faith in the past -- that will use faith as a justification for violence. We cannot paint with a broad brush a faith as a consequence of the violence that is done in that faith's name.

And so you will I think see our administration be very clear in distinguishing between organizations like al Qaeda -- that espouse violence, espouse terror and act on it -- and people who may disagree with my administration and certain actions, or may have a particular viewpoint in terms of how their countries should develop. We can have legitimate disagreements but still be respectful. I cannot respect terrorist organizations that would kill innocent civilians and we will hunt them down.

But to the broader Muslim world what we are going to be offering is a hand of friendship.

A close reading of this exchange shows Obama taking the Bush line. What the questioner is angling for is an answer that differentiates Al Qaeda and those who collaborate with it from militant Muslim organizations with other agendas, such as Lashkar-e Tayyiba, the Kashmir-liberationist group believed responsible for last year's attacks in Mumbai, whose top leaders have been designated as terrorists by the U.N. Obama won't go there. Even as he emphasizes extending the hand of friendship to the Muslim world, he promises to "hunt down" organizations "like al Qaeda -- that espouse violence, espouse terror and act on it." Where this leaves Hamas and Hezbollah remains to be seen.

David Gibson's post on Benedict's welcoming the Lefebvrists back into the fold is a must-read. Tiniest of quibbles: David ends with the famous tag, "Roma locuta, causa finita." To which I'd respond with the famous Yogi's, "It ain't over till it's over."

So what does the "Come Let Us Reason Together" agenda consist of? Four items. The most important in the realm of religious politics is what has come to be called "abortion reduction." The idea is that pro-choice and pro-life folks can jointly support various measures to reduce abortions short of making them harder to obtain. There does seem to be enhanced willingness on the part of pro-choicers to think beyond easier access to birth control as an abortion-reduction strategy. And while such an approach will do little to satisfy the organized pro-life community, it could have an impact on social conservatives generally. The Obama folks seem to want to seize the opportunity.

Next in importance is comprehensive immigration reform--though here, it's not clear to me that there was much common ground that needed to be reached. In 2006, the Southern Baptist Convention itself passed a resolution backing comprehensive immigration reform--'nuff said. So what exactly has Third Way achieved? The same might be said for opposition to torture, which the National Association of Evangelicals condemned in a 2007 statement. So again, what exactly his Third Way achieved?

This brings us to the most problematic item: "Protecting the Rights of Gay and Lesbian People to
Earn a Living." As a society, we are way past guaranteeing gays and lesbian the right not to be discriminated against in hiring. But protecting the right of "faith-based organizations" not to hire gays and lesbians, as the document does, opens a major can of worms--including the question of employment paid for by public funds. Meanwhile, there's not a word about housing discrimination or the rights of life partners. Evidently, the parties could achieve no further agreement on these matters--but as a way forward it looks to me like a complete non-starter.

Then there's what does not appear in the document. Much of the discussion of the "new evangelical agenda" has centered on climate change, but there's nary a mention of that here. Nor a word about poverty or health care or Darfur or AIDS. And likewise nothing on the issue that has most engaged religion in domestic politics over the past decade--faith-based social service provision. All these are matters of concern to many in different religious communities, and deserve mention in any "governing agenda" from a common ground religious group. Perhaps such additional items will be forthcoming as Third Way proceeds along its way. Until then, it a pretty limited exercise.

Robby Jones, who runs Public Religion Research, is up on Religion Dispatches this morning with a staunch defense of Third Way's "Come Let Us Reason Together" memo, in which he played a leading role. Robby directs his guns at the criticism the document has gotten from the religious lefties at Religion Dispatches and elsewhere, whom he accuses of being as ideologically dug in on their side as Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council is on his. I'm not sure they'd disagree, but the comparison isn't pleasant, and is to some extent earned. When you decide to be a prophet, moral compromise is not an option.

Robby also takes a shot at the snarkiness of the commentary on "Come Let Us," and as an interested observer, I'm willing to plead guilty to some of that. Mea culpa, but when you subtitle your effort "A Governing Agenda to End the Culture Wars," I'm afraid you're asking for snark. And not just on rhetorical grounds. At this point, there's less to Third Way's bid to constitute a new Vital Religious Center than such language warrants. More on that a little later.

An old ditty goes:

Three things the pope does not know:
What the Dominicans are thinking,
What the Jesuits are doing,
And how many orders of nuns there are.

Take, for instance, the pope's decision to reinstate four excommunicated bishops of the Lefevbrist Society of St. Pius X, including one notorious Holocaust denier. Not only has that drawn the predictable ire of Andrew Sullivan, but also the troubled distress of George Weigel, who told the NYT:

It is not easy to see how the unity of the Church will be enhanced unless the Lefebvrists accept Vatican II’s teaching on the nature of the Church, on religious freedom, and on the evil of anti-Semitism, explicitly and without qualification; otherwise, you get cafeteria Catholicism on the far right, as we already have on the left.

Which brings us to question of how the Church will be relating to the new administration in Washington. The bishops' initial reaction to the election was equal parts hysterical, irrelevant, and insulting--focusing almost exclusively on the Free of Choice Act, a piece of pro-choice legislation that's got an iceberg's chance in Hell of getting through Congress. By contrast, the Vatican has taken a far more balanced approach, as outlined most recently here by Rocco.

There are substantial areas of policy where, from Rome's standpoint, Obama is much to be preferred to Bush. And there are indications that the Americans are getting the memo. Hardly a peep of protest could be heard against Washington archbishop Donald Wuerl and his auxiliary bishop taking prominent parts in the National Prayer Service last week, and an official statement is up on the USCCB website welcoming Obama's executive order banning torture. Like the Supreme Court, the Church follows the election returns, as much as some within its copious skirts might wish otherwise.

Anbar today.

And so, in the dead news zone of early Friday evening, the "Mexico City policy" has been, as promised, reversed. International groups that provide abortions or information on obtaining them will now get federal money. Even if that were to result in a net decline in the number of abortions (via better information on birth control), pro-life groups would not be happy. For them, the issue has to do with moral norms, ethical principles, and public policies, not abortion rates. Of course, they'd deny that, and argue that any claims of abortion-reduction are bogus. But that's why I'm dubious that third-way hopes for common-ground abortion reduction will gain much mainstream pro-life support. Politically, to be sure, it may have its benefits.

It's worth bearing in mind that opposition to relocating the Guantanamo prisoners to the mainland may have less to do concerns about security than with fear of a kind of infection. Take this statement from Diane Gramley, president of the American Family Association of Pennsylvania:

I don't think the average murderer or rapist hates all Americans or hates what America stands for like the terrorist prisoners from Guantanamo. You intermix them with the prison population, and there's the very real possibility they would influence those individuals in prison."

The line on Obama's Roe v. Wade Day statement is that, in line with various "third way" approaches, it reveals a noteworthy commitment to abortion reduction. See Paulson here, for example. I confess I don't see it. Here's the relevant part of the statement:

On the 36th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, we are reminded that this decision not only protects women’s health and reproductive freedom, but stands for a broader principle: that government should not intrude on our most private family matters. I remain committed to protecting a woman’s right to choose. While this is a sensitive and often divisive issue, no matter what our views, we are united in our determination to prevent unintended pregnancies, reduce the need for abortion, and support women and families in the choices they make. To accomplish these goals, we must work to find common ground to expand access to affordable contraception, accurate health information, and preventative services.

Yes, Obama refrained from announcing an end to the "Mexico City policy" requiring any non-governmental organization to agree before receiving U.S. funds that it will "neither perform nor actively promote abortion as a method of family planning in other nations." That would have been a stick in the eye to all those pro-life demonstrators wending their way through the post-inaugural detritus yesterday. But there was nothing designed to appeal to them--say, about enhancing childcare or adoption services so as to encourage the reluctant to carry their pregnancies to term. Like it or not, the president is pretty much an unreconstructed pro-choicer. Like the majority of his people.

"As I sat there at my ease, cross-legged on the deck; after the bitter exertion at the windlass; under a blue tranquil sky; the ship under indolent sail, and gliding so serenely along; as I bathed my hands among those soft, gentle globules of infiltrated tissues, wove almost within the hour; as they richly broke to my fingers, and discharged all their opulence, like fully ripe grapes their wine; as. I snuffed up that uncontaminated aroma,-literally and truly, like the smell of spring violets; I declare to you, that for the time I lived as in a musky meadow; I forgot all about our horrible oath; in that inexpressible sperm, I washed my hands and my heart of it; I almost began to credit the old Paracelsan superstition that sperm is of rare virtue in allaying the heat of anger; while bathing in that bath, I felt divinely free from all ill-will, or petulance, or malice, of any sort whatsoever.

"Squeeze! squeeze! squeeze! all the morning long; I squeezed that sperm till I myself almost melted into it; I squeezed that sperm till a strange sort of insanity came over me; and I found myself unwittingly squeezing my co-laborers' hands in it, mistaking their hands for the gentle globules. Such an abounding, affectionate, friendly, loving feeling did this avocation beget; that at last I was continually squeezing their hands, and looking up into their eyes sentimentally; as much as to say,-Oh! my dear fellow beings, why should we longer cherish any social acerbities, or know the slightest ill-humor or envy! Come; let us squeeze hands all round; nay, let us all squeeze ourselves into each other; let us squeeze ourselves universally into the very milk and sperm of kindness. Would that I could keep squeezing that sperm for ever! For now, since by many prolonged, repeated experiences, I have perceived that in all cases man must eventually lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side; the country; now that I have perceived all this, I am ready to squeeze case eternally. In thoughts of the visions of the night, I saw long rows of angels in paradise, each with his hands in a jar of spermaceti."

Moby-Dick, chapter 94

Barack Obama's passage to the presidency has been marked by unprecedented graphics virtuosity, but that was not what was on display in the Carnival of Obama that took place in Washington over the last few days. In front of Union Station and along many other downtown thoroughfares, a vast array of peddlers hawked their wares--buttons and caps, bookmarks and calendars, T-shirts and hoodies, and portraits of the president and the new First Family, most done up in a style more reminiscent of Elvis memorabilia than the elegant Obama "O."

Okay, I saw nothing on black velvet nor anything like my favorite bit of Evisiana: a vial of liquid purporting to be some of the King's sweat, with the legend, "Let His Perspiration Be an Inspiration." Nevertheless, not only is the iconography of Obama well underway, but from the numbers of people buying, there was every indication that Americans--black Americans especially--were making their collections of Obamiana and constructing their shrines. Students of popular culture take note.

The two most important previous American presidential cults are Lincoln's and Kennedy's. As Christianity has taught us, nothing drives a cult more powerfully than martyrdom, but Kennedy's status as the first Catholic president would doubtless have earned him a measure of veneration had he served out his time in office. In Obama's case, the symbolic significance of being the first African-American chief executive more than suffices. It was not long ago that the McCain campaign made fun of Obama as the "world's biggest celebrity." They weren't even close.

It looks like Dan Gilgoff has more or less come around to my position on Warren's inauguration invocation. I think he's quite right to suggest that Warren wanted to have it both ways--gesturing at inclusivity while sacrificing nothing to exclusivity. I do not presume to see into Warren's true intentions--his heart, so to say--but it does seem to me that 1) Warren has demonstrated a pattern of wanting to appeal to larger audiences without doing anything to give his evangelical homeboys any theological basis for criticizing him; and 2) in this case, the evangelical folks who concern themselves with missions to Jews and Muslims would have gotten the message exactly. From what I can tell, there have been no objections from the right to Warren's prayer, and that should tell you something.

You've got to give the Episcopalians credit. When they want to put on a major display of establishmentarian power and glory, they sure can do it. With all the stops out for an anthem like Holy Holy Holy, you really felt that the National Prayer Service was, well, a national prayer service--conducted by a self-appointed First Among Equals but done up with all due respect for all those other equals. "Welcome to your Cathedral," said the Dean of the place, the Very Reverend Samuel T. Lloyd III. Well, kinda.

So it's a big old Protestant service in which no one except a white evangelical feels compelled to pray in Jesus' name. Not the Mainliners, not the Jews, not the Muslim nor the Hindu, not the Greek Orthodox Archbishop and not the Catholic Archbishop of Washington, who merely asked things of God "in your holy Name." I'm all for recognizing the specific needs of particular religious traditions, but exactly where is it written that white evangelicals cannot pray generically to God when amongst a mixed religious congregation? So far as I know, it's not one of the Fundamentals, nor is it required by any of the creeds or quasi-creeds that evangelicals swear to abide by. But there was the Reverend Andy Stanley, pastor of North Point Community Church in Alpharetta, Ga., introducing Jesus into the equation.

Isaiah's famous call for the right kind of fasting (58:6-12) got double billing, first in a reading by the Rev. Dr. Cynithia Hale of Ray of Hope Christian Church (Disciples) of Decatur, Ga., and then in the sermon by the head of her denomination, the Rev. Dr. Sharon Watkins. This emphasized the main theme of the day, which was the importance of service to others; though oddly, Watkins, whose sermon will not go down in the annals of great American preaching, kept emphasizing that the wrong kind of fast was "the self-interested fast." What Isaiah is criticizing, though, is not self-interested fasting but fasting for show, empty ritual without good works--in a word, the hypocritical fast. Watkins' sermon would have been a good deal more interesting had she dilated on the dangers of hypocrisy in the new Age of Obama.

Towards the end of the service, the Cathedral Choir offered a rendition of America the Beautiful, including these words of Victorian caution from the second verse:

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
confirm thy soul in self-control, thy liberty in law.

I liked John Williams' version of "Simple Gifts" that Yo-Yo Ma and company performed at the Inauguration--lighter and subtler than Aaron Copeland's famous Appalachian Spring version, where the old Shaker hymn reaches a level of fortissimo bombast that has always seemed to me at odds with that religious tradition. Even so, you wonder what the Shakers themselves would have thought about having the musical expression of their modest if ecstatic dancing ways incorporated into the inaugural extravaganza.

I'd like to believe that Jeremiah Wright learned something from Joseph Lowery today. But I don't.

When Rick Warren was introduced to give the invocation today, I heard a couple of discernible uh-ohs. Pretty soon, though, the African-Americans around me were responding as in church, and when he got around to saying the Lord's Prayer, there was no shortage of people saying it with him. So, cool with them.

For me, not so much. Praying in Jesus' name is pretty much what you're going to get when you invite a white evangelical these days--it would have been considered a great scandal to his folks if Warren hadn't. He could, however, have foregone the Lord's Prayer, and the fact that no inaugural invocation has ever done that is eloquent enough on the point. But that in itself is not what got to me. What got to me was that the invocation was faux-inclusive. It makes a move towards inclusion with:

The Scripture tells us Hear, oh Israel, the Lord is our God; the Lord is one. And you are the compassionate and merciful one.

But Warren concludes by saying that he is praying "in the name of the one who changed my life, Yeshua, Isa, Jesus, Jesus (hay-SOOS)"--which is to say, not just Jesus as named in English and Spanish but also in Hebrew and Arabic. For Jews, Yeshua is the name by which Jews for Jesus proselytizes among Jews, as in the pamphlet I was handed this very day by a member of the Rockville, MD Jews for Jesus chapter. Praying the Lord's Prayer in the names of Yeshua and Isa (as far as Muslims as opposed to Arabic-speaking Christians are concerned), is an evangelistic strategy. It is not inclusive, as Gilgoff and ABC News' Susan Donaldson James believe, but hegemonic.

The folks who showed up without tickets just to be there were, as you might expect, a pretty Democrat crowd--about half black and half white where I was. They happily cheered all Democrats, with the exception of Joe Lieberman, who got a good round of boos. Ted Kennedy got a good round of applause; Jimmy Carter's was rather tepid; Bill Clinton got the heartiest cheers short of Obama himself. On the Republican side, it was pretty much boos all around, including for Clarence Thomas and the hobbling George H.W. Bush. And although most of this was good humored enough, there was some real hostility reserved for 43. As in the chant:

Na-na-na-na
Na-na-na-na
Hey hey hey
Good Bye.

Making my way to the mall this morning I happened to come across a small clutch of protesters, cordoned off on the north side of Constitution. They proved to be 14 members of Fred Phelps' Westboro Baptist Church, the congregation that has managed to irritate just about everybody they come in contact with, most of all by seeking to picket the funerals of military personnel who die in action. They display the flag upside-down and believe God hates America because of the country permits abortions and homosexual behavior.

They've picketed the last couple of inaugurations, but Barack Obama has sent them onto a new level of apocalyptic denunciation. There were signs proclaiming Obama as the Antichrist--or more precisely, as one of their signs put it, "Anti-Christ-in-Chief." According to Katherine Huskenbarger, a young woman who said she'd been in the church all her life, he meets all the biblical criteria. "This is a huge opportunity for us to preach to the world," she said.

Once upon a time, New England ministers turned their attention to public affairs with election day sermons. Michael Paulson has compiled an archive of Massachusetts sermons given to mark the inauguration of the nation's first black president. Story here. And here's an excerpt from one given by Rev. Vicki Kemper of Amherst UCC:

Do you feel it? Can you sense a shifting in the tides of time, a long-overdue opening of hearts to what is possible? Did you catch a whiff of hope in the air when you went out into the bracing cold this morning? Do things suddenly look brighter, sharper, more beautiful—the contrast of a white birch tree against deep blue sky above blindingly white snow highlighted by brilliant sunshine? Does it seem as if the spirits are attuned, the stars are aligned, and we have entered an unexpected state of grace where even a jet plane can float—landing in a river and becoming a boat, delivering all of its passengers safe on that shore again? Do you find yourself uttering that overused, under-appreciated word 'miracle'—and feeling the wonder of it? Are you tempted to dream again?

Kudos to Christianity Today's Sarah Pulliam for recording and uploading to the CT website the video of Bishop Robinson's prayer below--viewed upwards of 60,000 times with many appreciative comments from liberals. Some snarky types have been known to refer to the venerable evangelical magazine as Christianity Yesterday, but at this rate it may soon become known as Christianity Tomorrow.

I arrived in Washington but unfortunately not in time for the "Animating the Spirit of Democracy With a Ritual of Unity and Blessing" by the D.C. community of magical and spiritual progressives. They were on hand at 2 pm at the Jefferson Memorial Plaza "to sweep the town clean" with a Witches' Broom Dance "intended to cleanse Washington of the malfeasance, deceit and partisanship of the last eight years." A quartz crystal resembling the Washington Monument was charged with blessing and "sacrificed into the Tidal Basin"--thereby "broadcasting energies of ritual into the Potomac."

Not since Fanne Fox (aka the Argentine Firecracker) jumped into the Tidal Basin to avoid being picked up with House Ways and Means Committee Chairman Wilbur Mills in 1974 has as much energy been so discharged. And in truth, wandering around Dupont Circle in the evening, with hundreds of cheery young people, some wearing Obama ski hats, happily milling about, the place did seem kind of cleansed.

I'm heading down to Washington today, credentialed as a journalist, brave new blogging world that this is. Which, of course, is going to mean less blogging on the fly, but some first-hand reporting in due course.

New Hampshire's Episcopal bishop Gene Robinson kicked off the inaugural festivities, religion-wise, with a nice liberal prayer to the "God of our many understandings," and why not? "In God We Trust," the national motto, allows all theists to repose their trust just that way--and if you include all other Gods, including the God of Science and the God of Self, well, just about everybody else too. Anyway Robinson is an Episcopal bishop, which is to say he represents the most establishmentarian--we preside, we include--of all American denominations.

My favorite line was: "Bless us with freedom from mere tolerance, replacing it with a genuine respect and warm embrace of our differences." This harks back to George Washington's letter to the Jews of Newport:

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights, for, happily, the Government of the United States, which gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance, requires only that they who live under its protection should demean themselves as good citizens in giving it on all occasions their effectual support.

On the other hand, was it quite appropriate for a white man, and a Southerner (Kentucky-born) to boot, to pray:

Make him color-blind, reminding him of his own words that under his leadership, there will be neither red nor blue states, but the United States.
Help him remember his own oppression as a minority, drawing on that experience of discrimination, that he might seek to change the lives of those who are still its victims.

It seemed pretty smart to have Robinson--who made his support for Obama public before the New Hampshire primary--do his stuff at this opening convocation of, one might say, Obama's base. He would be prominent, but in such a way that conservative religious folks--from the dais to the screen--wouldn't feel that a gay bishop was being inflicted on them at the National Prayer Service. Yet in line with Obama's apparent gift for religious controversy, Robinson's appearance did not go smoothly: It neither was entirely heard by those on the mall nor was it included in the HBO broadcast of the Barackstock concert that followed. Coincidence? Some people don't think so. Most won't care.

Best piece of reporting I've seen, from Eli Saslow in today's WaPo. I like this, from his days as an organizer, based at Chicago's Holy Rosary Catholic Church:

In his free moments, he sat in his office and wrote short stories about worship and church life. Other times, he smoked cigarettes with Bill Stenzel, the priest at Holy Rosary, and talked to him about faith.

Steve Waldman has a good overview of the declining inclusivity of inaugural prayers over the past half-century. I find his overall argument persuasive and would only take slight exception to his claim that the country's founders would have disagreed on the desirability of having prayers at the inauguration at all. Steve bases his claim on the differing views of Washington, Adams, and Madison on presidential prayer proclamations. But it's worth noting that none of the above, nor any other president for nearly a century (until Chester Arthur, who took office in 1881) so much as used the phrase "so help me God" when taking the oath of office. This was to be a secular ritual, not a sacred rite complete with invocation and benediction. Yes, most pre-invocation presidents employed a Bible, but that ought to be seen in the usual common law sense of oath-taking in a courtroom. So while I have no particular enthusiasm for Newdow et al.'s efforts to get the prayers out of the Inauguration, I do think there would have been a consensus among that first generation of national leaders to keep religion out of it--lest, as Madison said of the proclamations, it imply and nourish "the erroneous idea of a national religion."

Yep, Archbish Wuerl will be on hand at the National Prayer Service, delivering a prayer for the nation as antepenultimate batter up. Jim Wallis will get to help "symbolize America's traditions of religious tolerance and freedom." As will Uma Mysorekar of the Hindu Temple Society of North America. Uh-oh, not a Buddhist in the house. Full roster provided in the press release after the jump.

It was Franklin Delano Roosevelt who, at his second inaugural on January 20, 1937, began the practice of having prayers at the inauguration ceremony. Prior to that, the only manifestation of religion in the ceremony was the habitual use of a Bible for the swearing in—accompanied by the traditional (but not constitutionally mandated) phrase, “so help me God.” Often the new president would kiss the Bible. In 1929, Herbert Hoover did. In 1937, Roosevelt didn’t.

Otherwise, the only prayer associated with the inauguration was one given in the Senate chamber by the Senate chaplain after the outgoing vice president administered the oath of office to his successor. In 1937, Roosevelt decided to have the vice presidential oath take place as part of the main event, and presumably not to deprive the Senate chaplain of his prerogative, decided to let the current holder of that position, the Episcopal priest ZeBarney T. Phillips, give an invocation.
More interestingly, from a political as well as a civil religious standpoint, Roosevelt decided to have Msgr. John A. Ryan give the benediction. (If you have an invocation, you've got to have a benediction.)

It's hard not to see Flight 1459 as a metaphysical bookend to 9/11, signaling the setting of the Age of Bush and the dawning of an Age of Obama. There, airliners were crashed into Manhattan buildings by Forces of Evil, while the massively ill-prepared and disastrous response of rescuers was occluded by bravado and pseudo-heroism from on high. Here, on the very day Bush paid his farewell to the nation, trouble threatened Manhattan by accident of nature, and disaster was averted by the skill of the pilot and the competence of the rescuers. So a Manichaean world of faith-based ideology and incompetence gives way to a unitary one of secular understanding and expertise. We can hope.

Still waiting to see who will be named to head the new President's Council for Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Has this dropped off the table?

It's been so hard to get past the culture wars because 1) they involve real differences of belief and principle; and 2) a lot of our politics has come to be structured around them. It is a bit churlish--OK, I'm a bit of a churl--to diss those who, with the best of intentions, are trying to mark out a middle ground for at least some moderate types on either side to occupy. But to imagine that middle-ground positions can, or indeed should, neutralize profound disagreements over the norms that govern abortion and the rights of non-heterosexuals in our society is a mistake.

So the culture wars will continue, in one form or another. And with that in mind, let me recommend A Field Guide to the Culture Wars by Mike McGough, sometime editorial page editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and now a Washington-based editorial writer for the Lost Angeles Times. Hot off the press, the book not only tells you who's who and what's what but provides essential context for understanding why. Mike's one of those old-breed intellectual journalists who combines deep knowledge of religion and law with a love of the daily cut-and-thrust of politics. On a subject that stirs ungodly passions, his is a dispassionate voice of reasoned understanding. So order your copy today.

Not.

But according to the big story of the day in our little neck of the woods, that's the goal of Third Way's exercise in brokering a "Come Let Us Reason Together" agreement on a few issues between some of the usual middle-of-the-road evangelicals and some of the usual bien-pensant progressive evangelicals. With the imprimatur and nihil obstat of that sponsor of all goodly coalitions, Rabbi David Saperstein. Brody puffs and Gilgoff's got the story and Pastordan snorts.

To me, this smacks too much of creating that elusive centrist evangelicalism we've all been reading so much about, and not enough about, well, policy coalitions. If you want to go for comprehensive immigration reform, go for it; and bring all those Catholics along. See how much of the pro-choice crowd will sign on to abortion reduction. Get behind a no-torture resolution in Congress. The way to end the Culture Wars is not to create a third way (pace Third Way), but to do the work itself. Sez I.

Unaware of the awesome magnitude (to say nothing of the wonder-working power) of religion in inaugural festivities these days, some of us chatterers have misunderestimated the extent of Barack Obama's commitment to religious pluralism in organizing the members of the praying class for his ascension to the presidency. Yeah, there are the two Protestants at the swearing in, and the Protestant at the special Lincoln Memorial event, and the Protestant giving the sermon at the National Prayer Service (NPR) at that big Protestant pile up there on Mount Saint Alban. But what we overlooked was the fact that, since being invented by Ronald Reagan in 1985, the NPR has become The Quadrennial Occasion for the celebration of American religious diversity. Here, for example, is the clerical array that turned out the last time a newly elected president took office:

The Right Reverend Jane Holmes Dixon, Bishop of Washington, pro tem
The Very Reverend Nathan D. Baxter, Dean of Washington National Cathedral
The Reverend Canon Peter Grandell, Precentor, Washington National Cathedral
The Reverend Franklin Graham, Samaritan Ministries, Boone, North Carolina
The Reverend Beulah "Bubba" Dailey, Austin Street Center, Dallas, Texas
Rabbi Samuel Karff, Beth Israel Synagogue, Houston, Texas
The Most Reverend Theodore E. McCarrick, Archdiocese of Washington, Washington, DC
Pastor Kirbyjon Caldwell, Windsor Village United Methodist Church, Houston, Texas
His Eminence Archbishop Demetrios, Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America
The Reverend Suzanne Love Harris, St. Johns Episcopal Church, Jackson Hole, WY
Dr. Jack Hayford, The Church on the Way, Van Nuys, California
Father Luis León, St. John's Church, Lafayette Square, Washington, DC

It has become customary for the Archbishop of Washington to represent the Roman Catholics, but as of this morning there's been no word on whether the current occupant of that office, the Most Reverend Donald Wuerl, will be on hand. Some Catholics--had he lived a few days longer, John Richard Neuhaus would no doubt be among them--will consider it a scandal if Wuerl turns up to sanctify the presidency of someone they consider irredeemably pro-choice. Many others will consider it a scandal if he doesn't. I say he does.

Ambinder notes a possible moderating trend taking place among Republicans in the hinterland. You might add to that the selection of social moderate Rep. Greg Walden (R-OR) as second-in-command at the Republican Congressional Campaign Committee. The key indicator will be who wins the race for chairman of the Republican National Committee, but it looks like the wind is blowing against the Blackwell-Benkiser social conservative ticket.

In today's column, Tom Friedman offers his thoughts on how Israel should proceed in its latest asymmetrical war against a foe with less military might but an ability to inflict harm at once physical, psychological, and in the court of world opinion. On the same op-ed page, Jeffrey Goldberg writes about a different type of asymmetrical combat, between a more or less normal state (Israel) interested in the security and prosperity of its citizens and a non-state actor (Hamas) driven by a religious commitment to destroy that state. Not surprisingly, the two come to different conclusions.

Friedman urges Israel to be about the business of educating Hamas to behave itself, the way it educated Hezbollah in Lebanon two years ago. He believes that such education works, and points to Hezbollah's current quietude as evidence that it does. The only hope Goldberg sees is for Fatah to be helped to create a normal, moderate regime on the West Bank, such that the people of Gaza are led to reject what they have in favor of something like that.

Approaching such an asymmetrical struggle as a normal contest of arms runs the risk of underestimating the resistance of the other side. But seeing the enemy as an implacable religious foe risks not only underestimating its capacity for moderate behavior but also turning oneself into a religiously motivated combatant. One of the few real accomplishments of the Bush administration--for which it has not received credit during the current summing up period--has been its determination from the outset to promote the American response to 9/11 as a War on Terror rather than a War on Islam.

Most of the time, the normal human desire to live peacefully under one's vine and fig tree prevails over the impulse to engage in religiously inspired violence. The challenge is to keep the occasions for the latter down to a minimum.

Here are some of the "words that burned and scourged" (as the NYT's Arthur Krock put it) that Franklin Delano Roosevelt employed in his first inaugural address 76 years ago:

And yet our distress comes from no failure of substance. We are stricken by no plague of locusts. Compared with the perils which our forefathers conquered, because they believed and were not afraid, we have still much to be thankful for. Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.

Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind's goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

True, they have tried. But their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence. They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.

Yes, the money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of that restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

"You cannot negotiate with Hamas until it renounces violence, recognizes Israel and agrees to abide by past agreements"--or as Yediot headlines it:

Clinton says 'no' to Hamas talks
Hillary Clinton says US won't talk to Hamas before it recognizes Israel's right to exist

So on the one hand, you've got the Rob Schencks and Patrick Mahoneys of the world doing all they can to sacralize the government, and then you've got Michael Newdow, the Appignani Humanist Legal Center, et al. doing all they can to desacralize it. I'm inclined to say a pox on both your houses and let it go at that, but the more grown-up professorial thing to do is try to distinguish between what's de minimis and what actually matters.

If someone wishes to anoint a Capitol doorpost with holy oil, it's no skin off my nose. On the other hand, emplacing crosses or menorahs or rocks engraved with the Ten Commandments on public property or in government buildings actually does mean something like state endorsement of a particular religious tradition, and we're entitled to be concerned about it. Going the other way, I can't work up any principled concern about the chief justice incorporating the words "so help me God" into the presidential oath of office; it's a phrase from common law used every day in every courtroom in the land. But, as the Supreme Court more or less acknowledged by punting on the Newdow case a few years ago, leading public schoolchildren in a Pledge of Allegiance with the phrase "One Nation Under God" in it does pose something of a problem, Establishment Clause-wise.

As a forthcoming book by UPenn's Sarah Barringer Gordon makes clear, much of current U.S. religious jurisprudence has come about because of cranky people engaging in acts and filing lawsuits to rectify situations that most of the rest of us consider unproblematic. But there's a price to be paid for having our civil religious space pushed and pulled by secularist and religionist zealots.

Let's suppose that Obama's decisions to have Sharon Watkins give the National Prayer Service sermon and Gene Robinson pray at the Lincoln Memorial pre-inaugural event were fully planned and the timing of their announcements premeditated. It would suggest a strategy of leading with your right and then coming in with the left--kind of what you'd expect from a left-handed fighter and a very shrewd Democratic politician. Now let's see if that happens with the economic stimulus package, Guantanamo, investigation of Bushian war crimes, health care, the Mideast, the environment, etc. etc.

One white evangelical male pastor. One black male prophet. One white mainline female priest. Completing the Inaugural Clergy Trifecta of Invocator, Benedictor, and Homilist, the Rev. Sharon E. Watkins, General Minister and President of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), has been chosen by President-elect Obama to deliver the sermon at the National Prayer Service on Wednesday, January 21st at the National Cathedral. She's the first woman to head her denomination. Hear her preach.

Update: And to kick things off, one white mainline gay bishop. Hey, nobody here but us Protestants.

Brody is puffing this little public religion stunt by a couple of B-list Beltway evangelicals. He sees it as an admirable expression of conservative evangelical readiness to pray for the new Democratic president. I don't quite see it that way.

It seems that Rob Schenck of Faith and Action and Patrick J. Mahoney of the Christian Defense Coalition took it upon themselves last week to bless the Capitol passageway through which Barack Obama will make his way to be inaugurated as the 44th president of the United States. Turned back by Capitol police, they happened upon Rep. Paul Broun (R-Ga.), who shepherded them to the place. There, as you can see, amidst the praying for the president-to-be and his family, Schenck anoints the door posts with holy oil from the Holy Land, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.

What's up with this? In the video, Schenck declares that he is consecrating the passageway "as they did the furnishings of the Tabernacle and the Temple to the use of God and to His will and to His Word." That would be a reference to what God tells Moses to do in Exodus 30; to wit:

22 Then the LORD said to Moses, 23 "Take the following fine spices: 500 shekels [k] of liquid myrrh, half as much (that is, 250 shekels) of fragrant cinnamon, 250 shekels of fragrant cane, 24 500 shekels of cassia—all according to the sanctuary shekel—and a hin [l] of olive oil. 25 Make these into a sacred anointing oil, a fragrant blend, the work of a perfumer. It will be the sacred anointing oil. 26 Then use it to anoint the Tent of Meeting, the ark of the Testimony, 27 the table and all its articles, the lampstand and its accessories, the altar of incense, 28 the altar of burnt offering and all its utensils, and the basin with its stand. 29 You shall consecrate them so they will be most holy, and whatever touches them will be holy.

Schenck belongs to what might be called the establishmentarian wing of American evangelicalism. That is to say, he belongs to the world of the National Prayer Breakfast and other exercises in sacred-nation-building, as detailed in Jeff Sharlet's recent book, The Family. He himself brings a somewhat Judaizing tendency to the enterprise--not perhaps surprising in someone who started life as a Jew. Faith and Action, for example, proposes that Hanukkah (n.b. the feast of the re-dedication of the Temple) be adopted as a Christian holiday. For his part, Mahoney comes out of the anti-abortion activist wing of evangelicalism, but he's also an establishmentarian sort, having put his shoulder to the wheel for Roy Moore's crusade to enshrine the Ten Commandments in the Alabama Supreme Court. Last summer, he turned up at Obama's office building with a sign showing the then presumptive Democratic nominee dressed as Uncle Sam over a legend that read, ""I WANT YOU TO PAY FOR ABORTIONS!"

Their hope, presumably, is that the president-to-be will be led into the path of pro-life righteousness by passing through the anointed portal. Michael Newdow take note.

In the NYT obit of Richard John Neuhaus, Laurie Goodstein wrote:

With Charles Colson, the former Watergate felon who became a born-again leader of American evangelicals, Father Neuhaus convened a group that in 1994 produced “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” It was a widely distributed manifesto that initially came under fire by critics, who accused the two men of diluting theological differences for political expediency. But the document was ultimately credited with helping to cement the alliance, which has reshaped American politics.

Yes, the Catholic-evangelical alliance that Neuhaus helped broker has created a mighty political force. It has been one of the seminal political developments of the past 30 years. Let's just not forget that that marriage has some tensions that are also worth watching. After all, the split between evangelicals, who voted for John McCain by 3 to 1, and Catholics, who broke for Barack Obama after supporting Bush in 2004, is one reason Obama is the president-elect.

Before this meme solidifies into an article of faith, let's try to be clear about what the putative alliance really amounted to. Yes, Neuhaus and Colson had their project; and yes, some Catholic ways of thinking about social issues trickled down into evangelical brains. That's to say, evangelical biblicism has, for some evangelical activists, been enhanced with some Catholic natural law argumentation and a more intellectually coherent vision of the moral universe. One thinks particularly of George W. Bush's use of the expression "culture of life" in the 2000 election, and the prominence of that expression in the effort to prevent the removal of Terri Schiavo's feeding tube in 2005. (For an article on the subject, see here.) But alliance?

On the ground, the most than can be said is that the religious détente between Catholics and evangelicals has continued to strengthen--thanks mostly to the fact that conservative leaders in both camps take the same positions on abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage, etc. But you don't see bishops and leading evangelical clerics issuing joint statements or otherwise palling around together. As I've argued previously, the self-promoting claim that Deal Hudson and Karl Rove engineered an effective evangelical-style political mobilization for Bush among conservative Catholics in 2004 is bogus. At the end of the day, Neuhaus helped further some intellectual interchange among Catholic and evangelical elites, and thereby maybe contributed to lowering the already low level of antagonism between their two communities by a degree or two. The rest is hype.

A newly released report by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force Policy Institute, based on post-election polling, has reanimated the debate over whether or not African Americans were responsible for the passage of Proposition 8, the ballot initiative reestablishing California's ban on gay marriage. The principal news is that 58 percent of African-American voters, not 70 percent as the exit polling reported, supported the initiative. Inasmuch as Latinos supported it at 59 percent, and twice the number of Latinos voted as African Americans, it seems that if anyone was responsible, it's them.

Of course, in a narrow election, more than one group can be deemed responsible--the narrower the election, the more groups. (If Norm Coleman had just done a better job of appealing to Minnesota's left-handed paperhangers, he might have won his senate race.) Pace Ta-Nehisi Coates, what drove the African-American angle of the story was not just the 70 percent number, but the apparent irony of one minority group turning out in force to support one of its own and in the process sticking the shiv in another minority group. Journalists cannot resist such ironies. (For a skeptical view of the new survey plus links, see here.)

Be all this as it may, the report provides some interesting analysis of the role of religion in the vote. If multivariate factor analysis is your bag, your take-away is that religiosity, measured by reported worship attendance, had less of an impact on the vote than party identification or ideology (liberal, moderate, conservative), but more than twice the impact of race or ethnicity. Me, I prefer simple cross-tabulations, and here's what these show.

While 70 percent of weekly attenders voted for Prop 8, only 37 percent of those who attend less than weekly did, for a God gap of 33 points. That's not much of a surprise. What's more striking are the differences in the gap from group to group. For Asian-Americans, it was 35 points (68-33); for whites, 34 (70-36); for Latinos, 28 (74-46); and African Americans 18 (66-48). In a word, the God gap for whites and Asians on Prop 8 was nearly twice as big as it was for African-Americans, with Latinos falling somewhere in the middle. Among frequent attenders, African Americans were the least likely to support Prop 8; among less frequent attenders, the most likely.

The point here is that religion divides African-Americans less than it does other racial/ethnic groups. In California, the culture war is above all a white and Asian thing, and that presumably goes for the rest of the country as well.

I first met Richard John Neuhaus in the mid-1980s, when I was working on a book about religion in America since World War II. I wanted to interview him about his role in the antiwar movement, and specifically about Clergy Concerned [later, Clergy and Laity Concerned] About Vietnam, the antiwar organization that he created with the Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel. Neuhaus was the Protestant in that quintessential postwar Protestant-Catholic-Jew mix--a Lutheran pastor to a small, poor African-American parish in Brooklyn. In due course he went over to Rome, but when we met he was still under the Wittenberg umbrella, albeit fully fed up with Mainline Protestantism and its ways. Though he had long since given up the leftist politics of his antiwar days, he was more than happy to talk about them.

Neuhaus' claim to literary fame rests on his book The Naked Public Square, which appeared in 1984. It had a great title--one that succinctly captured the distress of the post-Vietnam religious conservatives who were in the process of building the religious right. Brevity was never Neuhaus' strong suit, and the book went on far too long for the point it had to make. But in its grim Germanic way, it pounded the point home with such repetitive force that you could not but come away impressed. In a 1986 essay for the New York Times Book Review, I anointed it one of seven religious books that had made a difference in American culture since World War II, and I think I'd still keep it on the list. Neuhaus was pleased as punch with the essay, and over the years I think his gratitude led him to pull his punches when something I wrote stirred his animus.

Once ensconced in the Catholic priesthood, he became a fiercesome controversialist, using his journal First Things to pummel the liberal opposition for no end of sins, real and imagined. There was no shortage of those on the Catholic left who came to regard him as the Prince of Darkness--in part because of the influence he seemed to wield in John Paul II's Vatican. No doubt their antipathy was enhanced by the fact that he was not to the faith born--a priest of a certain age who knew not Vatican II. For all that, he never gave up his commitment to interfaith action, though his new co-conspirators were now evangelical Protestants and neoconservative Jews. If he believed, as I suppose he did, in nulla salus extra ecclesiam (no salvation outside The Church), he didn't let that get in the way of the common agenda.

In the past year, the word on the street was that the Vatican had become displeased with him--something to do with his having taken a potshot or two at Benedict XVI's American visitation. If so, it would not have been out of keeping with a certain irrepressible bomb-throwing side to his character that generally kept him this side of insufferability. The old antiwar activist was on display in the 1990s when he roiled the neocon waters by calling for civil disobedience against the American judicial system because of Roe v. Wade and its progeny. He never was afraid to question the legitimacy of the system.

In his last piece in First Things, copyrighted this month, Neuhaus goes on and on in praise of The Democratic Virtues of the Christian Right, a new book by Jon Shields of Claremont-McKenna College. Shields' argument is that the Christian Right represents the realization of the anti-establishment vision of the radicals of the Sixties, and it's easy to see why Neuhaus loved it (transposing "Christian right" into "pro-life movement"). By the lights of the culture, it represents an irony of American history. By his own, it proved he kept the faith.

Hat tip to Number One Son for earning a NYT Caucus shout-out for his highly entertaining Huffpost "Open Letter to the Obama People" on their everlasting gobsmacking email solicitations. To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven. Enough already.

Announced appointments send signals, and as the top positions in the incoming administration fill up, I'm waiting to see who the president-elect chooses to head his new Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships (COFANP). Like the head of Bush's Office of Faith-based and Community Initiatives, COFANP's director will be charged with coordinating activities among satellite offices in federal departments and comparable state operations. But how will the enterprise proceed?

Much of the public discussion of the old regime has been tied up in debates over church and state. The Bush approach was predicated on claims that 1) faith-based organizations are more effective than government bureaucracies or secular non-profits; and 2) the former were the object of anti-religious discrimination on the part of public funding agencies. Research has shown that neither claim had a significant basis in fact. Meanwhile, as partisans have debated the issue of permitting faith-based hiring discrimination, Bush's efforts have done nothing to increase the involvement of religious congregations in social service provision.

For its part, the Obama critique of the Bush effort (leading off the campaign's position paper on the subject) is that it has been 1) underfunded; and 2) overly politicized. What the critique shows little awareness of is the varied character of social service provision from place to place around the country. In some locales, faith-based agencies have always been central to the mix; in others, not so much. A couple of days ago, Bob Wineburg of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, one of the leading experts in the field, took to the pages of the Providence Journal Bulletin to make his case for an approach that recognizes the importance of letting the folks on the ground determine what best suits their needs in strengthening local safety nets.

The Obama approach, which emphasizes partnerships among government agencies, large non-profits both secular and faith-based, and congregations, may be more capable of resisting the one-size-, one-ideology-fits-all of the Bush administration. Bush's first director, John DiIulio, was a highly respected academic and a Democrat, but ideologically committed to a narrow vision of the task and politically inept. He crashed and burned in record time, and was replaced by a series of lesser functionaries. What the new regime requires is a director who knows the social-service landscape from both the governmental and non-profit sides, of sufficient stature to resist the inevitable desire of administrations for a uniform set of deliverables to brag about, and sure-footed enough to navigate the minefield of religion in American public life. After Wright and Warren, Obama does not need another faith-based drama.

Update: Pastordan pops G&C Dan for buying into Jim Wallis as Pappy of "the burgeoning religious left." Make of that what you will. In his capacity as rapporteur on current COFANP kibbitzing, Wallis seems to be saying that the emphasis is on making the partnerships work and connecting the little folk to "policy." I don't know what policy means in this context exactly, but presumably the idea is that everyone get with the program, whatever the program is.

Gilgoff's got a post up about Rick Warren and Billy Graham that concludes:

But I wonder if it's fair to compare Warren with Graham on responding to the Christian right, given that so much of Graham's time in politics—though by no means all of it—happened before the rise of the Christian right in the 1980s. The Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was founded in 1950.

Well, maybe not quite a U-Turn, but let's just say that the fledgling lobby has walked back its pick-no-side position on Gaza . This it did in an unsigned response to Eric Yoffie and a message from executive director Jeremy Ben-Ami. In the former, it portrays itself as part of a large company of worried Israel supporters; the latter includes these lines:

J Street unequivocally condemns Hamas’ indiscriminate firing of rockets into Israel and its use of terror against civilians over the years.

We reiterate that J Street is deeply committed to Israel, its security and the safety of its citizens.

And they're not feeling too good themselves.

“Billy Graham’s America,” Grant Wacker’s presidential address at the just concluded annual meeting of the American Society of Church History, not only provided a brilliant summation of Graham’s significance in 20th-century American culture but also suggested a way to understand the current debate over the future of evangelicalism. That's because evangelical leaders like Rick Warren are, after a generation dominated by the religious right, simply finding their way down a path long since trod by the preeminent "cooperative evangelical" of our age. The oddity is that Graham has come to be seen as so sui generis that observers are hardly aware of it.

Here, for example, is a little paean to Warren over on Religion in American History by Phillip Luke Sinitiere, who with Shayne Lee has written a forthcoming book about contemporary evangelical leaders entitled Holy Mavericks:

Consider these snapshots from his recent activities: not many other preachers are friends with the president of Rwanda, write a monthly column for Ladies Home Journal, and receive a standing ovation after speaking at Harvard University. Not many other conservative pastors possess the flexibility to be pro-life and pro-poor, the ingenuity to lead a preaching seminar for rabbis at the University of Judaism, or the versatility to work and dine with homosexual activists while maintaining a firm stance against same-sex marriage. Not many spiritual leaders mentor prominent businesspersons like Rupert Murdock and Jack Welch, or can claim that after three decades of ministry, they have never been alone in a room with a woman other than their wife. Few evangelical pastors are friends with both President George W. Bush and Democratic president-elect Barack Obama, a notable participant at Warren’s 2006 Global Summit on AIDS and the recent Presidential Forum, both at Saddleback Church. And Warren’s latest book, The Purpose of Christmas, adds further insight into the complexity of this holy maverick’s cosmopolitan outlook. It continues to articulate the readable simplicity of the purpose-driven message and hit the major points of conservative evangelical theology (e.g., centrality of Jesus, authority of Bible, etc.). Yet with a closing chapter on Warren’s P.E.A.C.E. plan, it registers as decidedly cosmopolitan in outlook and activist in tone.

Graham got to where he got because, over his six decades in American public life, he became more adept at slipping punches than Muhammad Ali in his prime. Many were thrown, from left, right, and center, but Billy danced away from most to become the best known Protestant evangelist and the most iconic American religious leader of all time. How did he do it? In part by force of personality, in part by having perfect pitch for what appealed to his vast middle-class, moderately conservative white Protestant followers, in part by sticking to his message of getting people to decide for Christ, in part by a shrewd determination never to let himself get boxed into an ideological corner.

By comparison with Graham, Warren is a softie—too eager to be loved, too willing to let his opponents spook him. And he’s paying a price for it. On Proposition 8, he was so much a non-presence among the pro-initiative forces that AP reporters planned a “Where’s Rick?” story. But then, at the 11th hour (on a Friday, to his flock), he allowed himself to publicly support the thing. For his pains, he’s been pilloried on the left as just another Dobson. Graham, it’s safe to say, would never have succumbed. Just as he never presumed to speculate on the final fate of the earnest non-Christian. Always, he kept his eye on the main chance. By contrast, Warren wants to have his cake and eat it too.

This week will feature various events for the six candidates for Republican National Committee chair to strut their stuff. According to Politico's Alexander Burns, there are not a lot of happy campers in RNC-land. In preparation, Ken Blackwell rolled out a list of supporters that, if not exactly a Who's Who of theocons and ecocons, certainly puts on display a number of the heavies from those two ideological legs of the party (James Dobson and Pat Toomey, for example). As for the neocon leg, it is conspicuous by its absence. Blackwell, the former Ohio Secretary of State who got his clock cleaned in the 2006 gubernatorial election, is rated on the rise by the Plain Dealer this morning. His letter to RNC members, appended to the Plain Dealer's story, is all nuts and bolts--but what his candidacy promises is trench warfare according to the Old-Time Republican Religion of family values and small government. Read my lips: no new ideas.

J-Street, the fledgling peacenik alternative to AIPAC, has gotten itself in a crack for, in the eyes of some, seeing a moral equivalence between Hamas firing missiles into Israel and Israel's bombing campaign against Hamas in Gaza. That's not quite true, but close enough. Here are relevant passages from its most recent statement:

As friends of Israel, we felt immediate pressure from friends and family to pick a side. Did we think that Israel's actions were fully justified or disproportionate? Did Hamas bring this on itself by firing rockets and provoking Israel or are the strikes an act of aggression against a people trapped in misery and poverty? Couldn't we see who's right and who's wrong?...

Israel has a special place in each of our hearts. But we recognize that neither Israelis nor Palestinians have a monopoly on right or wrong. While there is nothing "right" in raining rockets on Israeli families or dispatching suicide bombers, there is nothing "right" in punishing a million and a half already-suffering Gazans for the actions of the extremists among them.

And there is nothing to be gained from debating which injustice is greater or came first. What's needed now is immediate action to stop the violence before it spirals out of control.

For this, J-Street has been taken to task by no less a peacenik than Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Union for Reform Judaism. Unsurprisingly, on the Commentary wing of the Jewish world, Noah Pollak has happily pronounced J-Street "an anti-Israel organization"--for which he's been properly called out by Matt Yglesias.

But there is a problem here, and it has to do with J-Street's actual identity. Its self-description admits of some ambiguity on that score. Calling itself "the political arm of the pro-Israel, pro-peace movement" (as opposed to what, the military arm?), it says, in part:

J-Street represents Americans, primarily but not exclusively Jewish, who support Israel and its desire for security as the Jewish homeland, as well as the right of the Palestinians to a sovereign state of their own - two states living side-by-side in peace and security. We believe ending the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in the best interests of Israel, the United States, the Palestinians, and the region as a whole.

If J-Street is indeed, as it proclaims, a pro-Israel organization, then its arguments need to be based on the premise that its first concern is what's good for Israel. And there are no shortage of pro-peace arguments to be made on that premise. But if it is equally committed to the creation of a sovereign Palestinian state, then it is operating on premises that may or may not be in Israel's best interests. J-Street's refusal to "pick a side" in the Gaza situation suggests not that it is anti-Israel, but that it is not prepared to take its stand with Israel, whatever that means. It's entitled to adopt such a position, which is hardly a dishonorable one. But many of those whom it would like to represent may decline to go along.

What's in a name? What George Bush established as "The White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives" (OFCI) Barack Obama is rechristening "The President's Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships" (COFANP). According to the Obama campaign's position paper on the subject, "The new name will reflect a new commitment to strengthening the partnership between government and neighborhood community programs."

What's the signal here? The Bush name implies that initiative comes from the non-profits, be they religious or otherwise; OFCI was supposed to ensure that faith-based entities were not shut out from government funding for what they wanted to do. COFANP makes the government an active participant in whatever happens--including in assessing the results. The Obama plan calls for keeping in place the faith-based offices established by Bush in 11 federal agencies and emphasizes the importance of evaluating programs for effectiveness and "best practices." Programs will not be saved by faith alone; it will take works.

What about the pesky issue of faith-based hiring? The position paper is about as explicit as it's possible to be on that score:

Must comply with federal anti-discrimination laws, including Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Religious organizations that receive federal dollars cannot discriminate with respect to hiring for government-funded social service programs.

First, the legal angle. Both constitutionally and statutorily, there are serious questions about the legality of the Bush initiative's approach to faith-based funding. Thanks in part to the 2007 Hein decision, which prohibits ordinary citizens from challenging government funding on Establishment Clause grounds, obtaining some resolution of these questions from the Supreme Court has become more difficult, but sooner or later resolution there will be. It will be easy for the Obama Justice Department to issue an advisory ruling that, going forward, faith-based entities "out of an abundance of caution" must obey federal non-discrimination rules in hiring staff for programs receiving government funds. But those already working for existing government-funded programs will not be disturbed, and there will be soft-soap language promising reassessment depending on future court decisions.

Second, the legislative angle. The one new program specified in the Obama position paper is a summer learning program for one million children priced at $500 million annually. That will require an appropriation from Congress, and it will become clear that House and Senate Dems require such appropriation to include a provision specifying non-discrimination in hiring. The Bush initiative ran aground in Congress because of a failure to come to terms on the hiring issue, and it's possible that GOP senators, out of an abundance of ill-will, will attempt a filibuster. But if a Specter or a Collins or a Snow can't be sprung on this one, I'd be astonished.

Finally, the effectiveness angle. By pushing program effectiveness to the fore, COFANP will put a premium on secular competence over spiritual identity. This should encourage the faith-based to recognize that the public funds are meant to further the goals of society at large, as opposed to their own mission, and to hire accordingly or quietly abandon the exercise.