April 2009 Archives

Yesterday Rome spoke on The 100 Days and found that they were...not as bad as feared. According to the front-page story in L'Osservatore Romano, President Obama has operated with laudable caution, including on matters of ethics and morals. Notably, the pope's paper found reason to praise the administration's proposed guidelines for funding stem cell research and applauded the re-introduction in Congress of the Pregnant Women Support Act. The latter, as Tom Reese points out, is a "common ground" undertaking that has received the active lobbying support of Philadelphia's archbishop, Cardinal Justin Rigali, chairman of the USCCB's Committee on Pro-Life Activities and certified Big Dog In The Church.

In the face of the anti-Notre Dame campaign of conservative Catholic activists, this looks very much like push-back. Archbishop Raymond Burke, removed from St. Louis to Vatican City last year, has blotted his copybook by calling down the wrath of pro-lifers on those of his fellow bishops who decline to deny Communion to pro-choice politicians. The idea of layfolk like Randall Terry ginning up campaigns to oust church hierarchs who fail to live up to their pro-life standards sitteth not well with Rome.

The conservatives who would like to cast Obama into outer darkness now find themselves confronted with de-demonization from on high and a president happy to play ball. At last evening's press conference, Obama was asked about his support of the Freedom of Choice Act, a bill that, while showing nary a sign of life, has agitated the bishops no end since the election. Pro-choice I may be, he replied, but:

The other thing that I said consistently during the campaign is I would like to reduce the number of unwanted presidencies that result in women feeling compelled to get an abortion, or at least considering getting an abortion, particularly if we can reduce the number of teen pregnancies, which has started to spike up again.

And so I've got a task force within the Domestic Policy Council in the West Wing of the White House that is working with groups both in the pro-choice camp and in the pro-life camp, to see if we can arrive at some consensus on that.

Now, the Freedom of Choice Act is not [my] highest legislative priority. I believe that women should have the right to choose. But I think that the most important thing we can do to tamp down some of the anger surrounding this issue is to focus on those areas that we can agree on. And that's--that's where I'm going to focus.

Hear that, angry people?

It's worth noting that the biggest Irish Catholic in New York is no longer Bill Donohue but the freshly minted archbishop, Timothy Dolan. Dolan carried water for Rigali in St. Louis and is close to him. Albeit vigorously pro-life, neither has taken the "deny Communion" approach of Burke and company. They are Roman through and through and, as such, they believe in engagement with the secular powers-that-be. Indeed, Dolan supports inviting pro-choice politicians to Catholic campuses, just not giving them honors.

In his inaugural address, Obama said, "To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist." In Rome, it is Dolan's glad hand that now seems to be the order of the day.

Today's Gallup poll on The First Hundred Days suggests that Obama has shrunk his religion gap. Whereas 41 percent of weekly worship attenders and 61 percent of seldom or never attenders supported him just before the election, now the numbers are 69  57 percent and 57 69 percent respectively. Thus the gap between the two groups has narrowed from 20 points to 12 points. Since Obama has improved his numbers markedly with both groups, the best way to understand this is to say that of those who didn't support him six months ago, he has gained 27 percent of the weekly attenders as compared to 21 percent of the seldoms and nevers. What explains the differential?

In my view, it's that Obama has succeeded in calming the fears of religious folks sufficiently to enable a disproportionate number of them to support him for other reasons--mainly economic. (According to yesterday's NYT poll, Americans support his handling of the economy by 55 percent to 24 percent.) He's done this by reaching out to religious conservatives, rolling out pro-choice policies quietly, taking a couple of middle-ground positions (stem cell funding limits, abortion reduction), and putting off some hot button issues such as reversing the military's "don't ask, don't tell" policy. In a word, he's so far managed to keep his social liberal base happy without scaring the conservatives.

Which brings us to Sen. Olympia Snowe's lament for the Republican moderates of yesteryear, in the course of which she puts the blame for the GOP's current woes on social conservatism:

There is no plausible scenario under which Republicans can grow into a majority while shrinking our ideological confines and continuing to retract into a regional party. Ideological purity is not the ticket back to the promised land of governing majorities -- indeed, it was when we began to emphasize social issues to the detriment of some of our basic tenets as a party that we encountered an electoral backlash.

It is for this reason that we should heed the words of President Ronald Reagan, who urged, "We should emphasize the things that unite us and make these the only 'litmus test' of what constitutes a Republican: our belief in restraining government spending, pro-growth policies, tax reduction, sound national defense, and maximum individual liberty." He continued, "As to the other issues that draw on the deep springs of morality and emotion, let us decide that we can disagree among ourselves as Republicans and tolerate the disagreement."

This analysis works pretty well for New England, where Republicans have not fared well as social conservatives. But it's a pretty poor account of how the GOP prospered in the last decades of the 20th century as well as of what happened to Arlen Specter. It was through enlisting social conservatives in the Republican Party in the South and West that the party achieved its recent ascendency. And it wasn't Specter's pro-choice stance that cost him his party; it was his vote on the stimulus package. The opponent who was kicking his butt in the polls was Pat Toomey, president of the Club for Growth.

For all the huffing and puffing over abortion, gay marriage, and the like, the party's real problem is its doctrinaire economic world view. Consider the sad case of Mike Huckabee. His initial appeal as a national candidate beyond his social conservative world lay in daring to challenge Republican orthodoxy on immigration and economic policy. He even made so bold as to refer to the Club for Growth as the Club for Greed. And he had his head handed to him by the GOP powers-that-be. Today, he's a chastened, shrunken, party hack version of  his former self. Meanwhile, Obama is sitting pretty, eating the GOP's lunch.

Defending the Obama approach to torture, Tom Friedman claims that 1) prosecuting the malefactors (up to and including George W. Bush) would "rip our country apart"; and 2) torturing was justified because only torture was capable of deterring al Qaeda, an enemy like no other we have ever had. The first claim is guesswork, but no doubt prosecuting the former president, if it came to that, would be a divisive undertaking. As to the second, however, it rests on an assumption for which Friedman makes not the slightest attempt to give evidence; namely, that the torturing actually did deter al Qaeda. The best evidence so far available is that not only did it fail to generate significant new, or otherwise unobtainable intelligence but also that it strengthened al Qaeda by helping recruit of new members. In short, Friedman's deterrence argument is at best unproven, at worst nonsensical.

Arlen Specter's party switch leaves just one Jewish Republican serving in Congress--House GOP whip Eric Cantor (R-Va).

A decade ago, conservative syndicated columnist Cal Thomas won some liberal props for criticizing the religious right in Blinded by Might, a book he wrote with Grand Rapids megachurch pastor Ed Dobson. Thomas and Dobson were old comrades-in-arms of Jerry Falwell--Thomas VP of the Moral Majority and Dobson associate pastor of Falwell's Thomas Road Baptist Church. The book charged MM and the religious right generally of succumbing to the blandishments of power, and without backing off conservative social values, opened the door to a wider vision. Here's a Wallis-esque passage from an essay of theirs based on the book (available here) that gives the flavor:

Both the religious left and religious right go wrong when their theologies and their practices are selective. They take from God those things that seem to bless their political agendas and reject or ignore those things that won't raise money or that make them feel uncomfortable.

Dobson has gone on to live out this vision. Retired and suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, he determined last year to live as Jesus lived, growing a beard, keeping kosher and observing the Jewish sabbath and holidays, taking the occasional alcoholic beverage, and preaching the word of God from place to place. And towards the end of the year, he decided to vote for Obama, despite the latter's support for abortion rights. As he told Charles Honey of the Grand Rapids News:

I felt, as an individual, he was closer to the spirit of Jesus' teachings than anyone else. (Obama) was a community organizer, so he was into the poor, the marginalized, the oppressed, which Jesus is very much into.

Not surprisingly, this earned him some national attention and caused some consternation in the evangelical world.

For his part, Thomas has stuck to the religious right's straight and narrow. Last week, for example, he took out after Meghan McCain and Steve Schmidt for presuming to suggest that the GOP should rethink its conservative orthodoxies, particularly on gay marriage.

Republicans are in electoral trouble for many reasons, but one of them surely is not that they are insufficiently liberal on social issues. What's the point of having a two-party system if one party mimics the other? Many erstwhile Republican voters turned on the GOP not because they were insufficiently liberal, but because they were insufficiently conservative. 

And true to form, Thomas' GOP orthodoxy extends to economic policy--as witness this early attack on Obama's stimulus package.

No doubt, as Thomas and Dobson argued in their book, those phone calls and invitations from the White House suckered some true believers into reposing too much hope in the Republican Party. But the real seduction was the Faustian intellectual bargain that bound religious conservatives to a reactionary economic agenda. Thomas remains in thrall to it. Dobson asks, "What would Jesus do?"

In today's release of the follow-up to its 2007 Landscape Survey, Pew offers an answer to the intriguing question: Which major Christian tradition is most likely to have its members drop out of religion. (Pew calls these folks "unaffiliated," we at ARIS call them Nones--I won't argue the point here.) The answer, in the immortal words of the Rev. Lovejoy, is that they are all, in this regard, pretty much the same.

Pew asked a sample of its unaffiliateds what their childhood religion was and the answers were 27 percent Catholic, 22 percent Evangelical, and 17 percent Mainline Protestant. Pew's numbers for the strength of those groups were, respectively, 24 percent, 26 percent, and 18 percent--which is to say, each contributed roughly its share of the U.S. population to the dropout pool.

As usual with Pew, there's a tendency to give the Catholics the needle. In the Executive Summary, the first table has a "Raised Catholic, now Protestant" line but no "Raised Protestant, now Catholic." Bury down, and you do discover that yes, Virginia, some American Protestants do travel to Rome. But we don't like to talk about them in polite company.

Over at CT Politics, Douglas Koopman is unhappy with the Obama administration's faith-based initiative so far. A political science prof at Calvin College, Koopman is one of those center-right evangelical types who was disappointed at the politicizing of the Bush effort but nevertheless remains an enthusiast of the approach. His is not the clearest exposition ever committed to writing, but the bottom line is that he thinks DuBois and company have been distracted by extraneous responsibilities like whomping up the OFANP advisory council and finding the Obamas a new church (how's that going?). And then there's that annoying hiring issue.

Koopman thinks the Obamaites underestimated Democratic opposition to following the Bush rules on permitting religious groups to limit government-funded hiring to their own kind--and expects that the new lawyer-run approach will chip away at what he calls their "rights to use religious criteria in hiring decisions." I'm inclined to agree. What's missing from his discussion--and from most of its ilk--is the acknowledgement that while no one objects to religious bodies hiring their own kind for their own purposes with their own money, many have a real problem with letting them do so for public purposes with public money.

You've got to admire the Audacity of Jim. As Ted Olsen over at Christianity Today Politics details in chapter and verse, Wallis of Sojourners has made a career of keeping his distance from the Religious Left--portraying himself, like God, as someone  who stands at the radical center. So now to have a minion send around an email (reproduced after the jump) proclaiming him Presider at "the first big mobilization of the Religious Left in the Obama era...filling the hole created by the decline of the Religious Right but now we have the political power and ear of the White House"--wow!

While Pastordan is left sputtering, what strikes me is how very like the Religious Right's this approach to the powers-that-be is. One of my all-time favorite quotes is from an email sent by the then chair of the Christian Christian Coalition, Sadie Fields, to her members after the GOP captured the Georgia state house in 2002.

I received a call from the Governor's transition team last week requesting a meeting with me to discuss and plan how to best implement a pro-family agenda over the course of his administration. The Governor-elect is very in tune with our values, and wants to work with us on accomplishing our goals. I will be meeting with them either this week or the week after to discuss how we can work together on issues that are important to the pro-family movement in Georgia. While standing on principle, we must govern wisely and incrementally, and to that end I will work with the Governor's office to ensure that our agenda is reasonable and attainable. It is due to your hard work and dedication that we have a seat at the table and I am honored to have been asked by the transition team to be your voice and representative during this critical time.

It's a nice question whether the Religious Right, at the state or national level, would have accomplished more had it sallied forth as a grass roots movement rather than as an inside player, but at least it had the choice. Be they lefties or centrists, religious progressives have no movement on the ground that I can see. Maybe they will some day. As of now, the only reasonable facsimile of one is Obama's.

Yesterday, the Connecticut legislature set its good housekeeping seal of approval on the state Supreme Court's decision allowing same-sex marriage, adjusting state law to bring it into line with the ruling. A probably unnecessary provision, borrowed from Vermont, was written in to give religious organizations--but not individuals--the right to refuse gay couples facilities and services. There were plenty of Republican votes, and the Republican governor says she'll sign the bill. So it goes in the Land of Steady Habits.

I'm writing this from Tacoma, WA, where yesterday I participated in a little conference at Pacific Lutheran University on Cascadia: The Elusive Utopia, a collection of essays on spirituality in the Pacific Northwest (including British Columbia) edited by Doug Todd of the Vancouver Sun. Out here, there's been a bit of good humored distress at the revelation of the new ARIS survey that New England is now vying with the Pacific Northwest for the highest proportion of "Nones"--those who, when you ask them, "What is your religion, if any?" say "none."

The question I posed was why, in public policy, the mark of "none-ness" in New England should be same-sex marriage (now approved in half the region), while in the Pacific Northwest, it's physician-assisted suicide (where in the last election Washington joined Oregon as the only two states where that's allowed). My surmise is that New England is a culture of egalitarianism, shaped by annual town meetings where all citizens have a voice in making decisions for the community at large; there, the cause of "marriage equality" has real force. By contrast, the Pacific Northwest is a libertarian land shaped by an ethos of the individual and nature; if Cascadian individuals want to kill themselves, well, that's their privilege.

So while both same-sex marriage and assisted suicide may violate traditional Judeo-Christian norms, those who embrace them may differ. Not all Nones are created the same.

Pastordan is a bit befuddled by Michelle Boorstein's God in Government post reporting that the Advisory Council of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships (OFANP) is not, after all, going to take up the thorny faith-based hiring issue. Since I reported a month ago that the Council was going to take it up, let me attempt some clarification. Back when OFANP was created, its director, Joshua DuBois, was widely quoted as saying that the hiring issue would be handled on "a case-by-case" basis. Indeed, DuBois said that to me on the record. (Unfortunately, he's now not speaking on the record to reporters except after being cleared to do so by the White House office for clearing officials to speak with reporters.)

It made no sense to me at the time, and makes no sense to me now, how a case-by-case approach can be conducted without an actual articulation of what the new administration's policy on the subject was. On what basis will cases be decided? During the campaign, Obama declared, simply, that there should be no discriminatory hiring by faith-based providers for government funded positions. Clearly, the White House has decided to walk that back--and quite apart from the politics, this is a more complicated question than some like to think. Anyway, a month ago I had it from a high White House source that the Council's task force on "reform of the faith-based office" would be taking up the hiring issue. Now, as Boorstein reported, that won't happen.

Why? My guess it has to do with a recognition of the legal complexities involved, the distance between Council members on the issue, and, one hopes, a recognition that this is for the administration itself to decide. One question worth pursuing with Jim Wallis and other center-right types who want to preserve the Bush permission for faith-based hiring discrimination is this: What kind of compromise would you be open to? Thus far, all I have seen is a willingness to refrain from proselytizing with government funds and an interest in proceeding via vouchers, such that the client gets to decide whether she wants a faith-based or secular program. But on the hiring issue per se, nada.

The NIH's draft guidelines on stem cell research funding have gladdened the hearts of common ground conservatives, as rounded up by Faith in Public Life. Scientists and hard-line conservatives, not so much, though both camps seem more shocked into silence than anything else. No one seems to have expected that the administration would propose a ban on funding somatic cell nuclear transfer, aka therapeutic cloning. 

As usual, an Obama move on a hot button social issue was disclosed on a Friday afternoon, and in this case was all but effaced by the Bybee memo commotion. Moreover, the guidelines were unaccompanied by any ethical or scientific justification, with the cloning ban tucked down at the very end. Speaking to the Washington Post, Susan L. Solomon, chief executive of the private New York Stem Cell Foundation, said, "I am really, really startled...This seems to be a political calculus when what we want in this country is a scientific research calculus."

Everyone gets to weigh in during a period of comment, and in due course the president can be expected to provide a rationale for what is ultimately decided. So far, however, the politics seems to have been calculated perfectly.

I've been meaning to tip my hat to a new playmate in the religion-and-politics sandbox--WaPo's God in Government, featuring the newspaper's two religion reporters, Michelle Boorstein and Jacqui Salmon. This a.m. they've got a couple of must-read posts, an interview with Rich Cizik by the latter and a scoop by the former on the faith-based hiring issue.

In his post-National Association of Evangelicals incarnation, Cizik is starting up a new organization for "new-agenda evangelicals." If it achieves traction, Cizik will become a force to be reckoned with on the faith-based political scene. The hiring issue, meanwhile, has been judged too hot for the OFANP Advisory Council to handle, and so is being kicked over to the lawyers. That, in my view, is where it should have been in the first place. The Obama Administration has to decide what its policy is, rather than expect some compromise to emerge from the widely divergent folks on the Council. 

There was a touch of the Lincolnesque in President Obama's statement on the release of the four Bybee memos last week. It smacked of the promise at the end of the Second Inaugural Address to "bind up the nation's wounds."

This is a time for reflection, not retribution. I respect the strong views and emotions that these issues evoke. We have been through a dark and painful chapter in our history. But at a time of great challenges and disturbing disunity, nothing will be gained by spending our time and energy laying blame for the past. Our national greatness is embedded in America's ability to right its course in concert with our core values, and to move forward with confidence. That is why we must resist the forces that divide us, and instead come together on behalf of our common future.

But this is not just about a civil conflict between political opponents. Actual people--foreign nationals, for the most part--were tortured, under color of the Bybee memos. The last words of the Second Inaugural are a call "to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace, among ourselves, and with all nations." Such a peace, today, requires more than reflection and a commitment not to repeat past misdeeds.

"If I had my way, I'd destroy all the mosques and spread the whores around a little more. At least they're not sectarian."
                                                                     --Baghdad police detective, New York Times

If I were a religious progressive eager to change America for the better by forging a broad national consensus on an issue of profound moral concern, then I'd focus my efforts on putting pressure on the Obama administration and the Congress to pursue truth and justice in the matter of Bush torture policy. Last week's release of the four Bybee torture memos provides the occasion.

The makings of such a consensus already exist. The National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) is a membership organization that has been in existence since 2006. The membership includes denominations, congregations, and faith-based organizations from all quarters--Catholic, mainline Protestant, evangelical (well, at least one), Jewish, Muslim, Baha'i, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, you name it. Groups on both sides of the current progressive food fight are on board: Catholics in Alliance, Sojourners, and Faith in Public Life (via Faithful America) along with Street Prophets and Progressive Christians Uniting. And that's to say nothing about the secular side, including the ACLU (which brought the FOIA request that sprung the memos) and conservative libertarian types like Bruce Fein.

The question is whether all this anti-torture sentiment can be turned into something efficacious. One place to start on the White House front would be the Advisory Council of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships--which has the brief to engage moral and religious concerns of all sorts. Council members have not been shy about speaking out and even signing letters urging the administration to take action--for example, a couple of weeks ago on the "conscience" protections for healthcare workers. The NRCAT is calling for a commission of inquiry. Others have called for the appointment of a special prosecutor. The table is set. 

The Catholic League does not ordinarily discern threats to civil and religious rights coming from anti-abortion Catholics, but then Randall Catholic Terry isn't your ordinary anti-abortion Catholic. A few weeks ago, the founder of Operation Rescue managed to embarrass Vatican bigwig Raymond Burke by publicly playing a taped interview in which Burke called on faithful Catholics to protest against those bishops willing to give communion to pro-choice Catholic notables. That was part of Terry's campaign to get Washington D.C. Archbishop Donald Wuerl and Arlington Bishop Paul Loverde removed from office for being soft on pro-choice communicants.

Now Terry is tilting at Fort Wayne-South Bend Bishop John D'Arcy for turning thumbs down on "unseemly and unhelpful demonstrations" against President Obama when he gives his commencement address at Notre Dame next month. To be sure, D'Arcy has condemned the invitation to the president. But for his call for civility, Terry, in a column in the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette, identifies him with the Peter who thrice denied Christ.

"I wish," Terry pronounced, "the bishop had followed biblical teaching and contacted me before making his public statement against our efforts." Which biblical teaching was that?  He also declared that he knew "for certain" that D'Arcy had "stepped far beyond his canonical authority by urging the faithful to abandon the babies." D'Arcy does have a doctorate in spiritual theology rather than canon law, but that, coming from a recent convert to Rome, pushed League Eminence Bill Donohue over the edge. "This is arrogance on stilts," he sputtered.

The problem with pro-life zealots is that they expect everyone to line up single file and do exactly what they want. Thus do they play to the worst stereotype floated by the pro-abortion camp. Terry needs to take a deep breath and get off his high horse.

Ipse dixit.

Maybe I'm missing something, but it looks as though L'Affaire Notre Dame has created a more open speakers policy on Catholic campuses. In recent years, politicians who support abortion rights have routinely been denied the opportunity to give talks; what Notre Dame has done is introduce the distinction between giving a talk and receiving an honorary degree.

Which brings us to  New York's baby archbishop Timothy Dolan, whom no one would accuse of being a liberal, but who outlined this policy of "engagement" in an interview with Rachel Zoll of the AP a couple of days ago.

Regarding the fight against abortion, Dolan said that the University of Notre Dame had made a mistake by inviting President Barack Obama to give this year's commencement address, in light of Obama's support for abortion rights.

Dolan said that the invitation and the honorary degree the president will receive sent the wrong signal to students that "we hold him up as a model to you."

But the archbishop said it would also be wrong to freeze out abortion rights supporters and that Catholics should instead engage them. He said Obama could have been invited to Notre Dame to speak without honoring him.

"The word we have to keep using is engagement," said Dolan. He does not deny Holy Communion to Catholic politicians who break with church teaching. Obama called Dolan on the day of his appointment and the archbishop says he prays for the president daily.

Yesterday, no one (except the likes of Randall Terry) protested Obama's appearance at Georgetown to give his economic speech. Call it the Dolan Doctrine.

According to Gilgoff.

So the AP has discovered (thanks to Operation Rescue) that Kansas abortion doctor George Tiller contributed more money to HHS nominee Kathleen Sebelius than the latter has heretofore acknowledged. Why no outcry from GOP elders and the religious right establishment? Brody and Christianity Today's Sarah Pulliam seem perplexed. Answer: If she doesn't become HHS secretary, Sebelius is the frontrunner to succeed staunch pro-life Republican Sam Brownback when he retires from the Senate next year--which could give the Dems that pesky 60th seat. No wonder Brownback is supporting Sebelius' nomination. Getting awkwarder though.

Fred Clarkson responds to my priests v. prophets piece over at Religion Dispatches, and as Clarkson broadsides go, this one is pretty tolerable. Boiled down, he accuses me of 1) impiety (making light of the struggle); 2) orthodoxy (buying into the conventional narrative); and ignorance (failing to recognize that the vote-getting strategy of the commongroundniks, aka the Religious Industrial Complex, is predicated on the false belief that there are votes out there to get). I plead 1) guilty; 2) a little guilty; and 3) not guilty.

1. Mea culpa, but it's not just that I have a congenital inability to take spiritual politics as seriously as the combatants do. What we're talking about here is a tempest in a pretty tiny teapot.

2. Well yes, it's not news that the Religious Industrial Complex (RIC) is about politics--electoral and legislative. My point, however, was that its critics to the left aren't about political strategy, but about holding its feet to the progressive fire. If that weren't the case, Clarkson would be offering some rejoinder to my point that the religious left is lacking in troops. Prophets are not measured by the size of their following but the truth of their witness. I expect that even if they were persuaded that the RIC strategy was well founded, they would stick to their ideological guns. And deserve credit for doing so.

3. That said, Clarkson's substantive claim that the commongroundniks are hunting for a quarry that can't be caught needs answering. For starters, there is solid evidence--check it out here--that Obama made solid inroads among younger evangelicals, inroads that were disguised in the aggregate figures by the fact that he lost ground among the oldest evangelical cohort. Going forward, it's not an unreasonable bet that the RIC strategy of friending evangelicals can reap electoral dividends. Whether there are Catholic votes to pick up via a common ground approach is less clear, since (as I've argued as recently as yesterday), a presidential candidate's position on abortion makes no difference in how Catholics vote these days. But what the prophets need to recognize is that the politics here are not just presidential. Faith in Public Life was heavily involved, for example, in creating We Believe Ohio, the progressive clergy coalition that helped spike the guns of a very active religious right in Ohio in 2006--resulting in the election of a Democratic governor and senator. And remember pretty pro-life Bob Casey, Jr.'s victory over Rick Santorum that same year? Like it or not, the RIC approach is very much of a piece with Howard Dean's 50-state strategy so beloved of progressive Democrats these days.

None of this, so far as I am concerned, is meant to suggest that Clarkson et al. shut the hell up. Prophets are supposed to be without honor in their own country, among their own relatives, and in their own homes. Who needs honor?   

Since the outbreak of the Great Notre Dame Invitation War, there has been a certain journalistic impulse to discern political consequences in President Obama's pro-choice words and deeds, with the focus on Catholics. GOP partisan Michael Gerson was out of the blocks two weeks ago with a column contending that Obama's Catholic support was faltering. At the end of last week, Time's Amy Sullivan delivered herself of a piece titled, "Catholic Democrats: Is Their Support Fraying?" The answer, actually, is no.

Here's the problem, journalistically speaking. There is no evidence that the Catholic vote for president is affected by a candidate's position on abortion. Yet you can't just tell your editor that it makes no difference to rank-and-file Catholics that a bunch of bishops are het up over the president's abortion moves, or she'll want to know why the hell you're writing the story in the first place.

This morning, Politico's Carrie Budoff Brown took the inside-the-Beltway track, reporting on an increase in activity among the anti-abortion organizations in DC--not exactly stop-the-presses news. To her credit, Brown notes:

In a poll released last week, Obama's disapproval ratings among Catholic and Protestant voters rose between February and April, but it was consistent with an increase in dissatisfaction among all voters. The fluctuation among white evangelicals was more severe, according to the survey by the Pew Center for the People and the Press. A 31 percent disapproval rating in February jumped to 47 percent in April, making it one of the steeper spikes among demographic groups.

Even this bespeaks the kind of slight massaging that journalists do when the statistics don't really support the storyline. The truly honest way to put it would have been:
 

Obama's approval rating among Catholic and Protestant voters rebounded in April after a drop from February to March, suggesting that the president's abortion positions have thus far had little if any effect on voters' opinions. The only faith group that might be paying attention are the evangelicals, whose approval of Mr. Obama has experienced a steady decline since January.

I'm inclined to doubt that last surmise as well, however. Look at it this way. Obama won 47 percent of white Catholic voters; as of this month, 56 percent of them approve his performance, for a net of +9 percentage points. Among white evangelicals, the numbers are 24, 37, +13. White Mainline Protestants are 44, 54, +10. And for all whites, the numbers are 43, 55, +12.

In sum, Obama's approval rating for each major white religious grouping is currently about 10 points higher than that group's vote for him in November--exactly what the margin is for white people as a whole. In conclusion, Obama's moves on abortion have not had any discernible effect on his support among voters presumed to care most about that issue.

J-Spot recommends turning the White House seder into a big annual event. Bad idea. Let the president have an annual seder for a few close Jewish friends and staffers if he likes. Don't turn it into one more routine mega-religious event with, in this case, every Jewish mover and shaker seeking a place at the table. 

Writing for the first time to Jesus' followers in Corinth, Paul explained his evangelistic technique:

 ¹⁹Though I am free and belong to no man, I make myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. ²⁰To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. ²¹To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God's law but am under Christ's law), so as to win those not having the law. ²²To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all men so that by all possible means I might save some. ²³I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

Fortunately for Paul, there were no video clips around for the Gentiles to see him acting like a Jew and vice versa. Unfortunately for Rick Warren, there are clips showing him becoming different things to different people in the matter of Proposition 8. Today, he canceled his appearance on ABC's "This Week," this past week having been notable for two more states legalizing gay marriage. Catch you later, Rick.

My 16-year-old son Isaac believes that if Bill Clinton was the first black president, then Barack Obama is the first Jewish president. Is there anything more to this than Obama's being the first president to host a seder in the White House? Clinton seemed to merit his distinction by a certain elective affinity with blacks. Certainly he was wildly popular among them. Obama did just fine among Jews last November, but hardly on the same scale. At the same time, his somewhat deracinated upbringing, meritocratic progress through plumiest groves of academe, and close association with Axelrod, Emanuel & Co. does suggest something...

President Obama's approach to faith-based programming has, up til now, seemed at times more about religious outreach and public relations  than programmatic substance. But not this afternoon. The Department of Education has just announced the appointment of Peter Groff as Director for the Faith-Based and Community Initiatives Center in the Office of the Secretary. That's no mean appointment.

Groff is a lawyer who is currently president of the Colorado State Senate. He also directs the Center for African American Policy at the University of Denver. According to this admittedly puffly U.of D. bio, he has, in less than six years in the state senate,

passed landmark legislation prohibiting racial profiling, requiring booster seats for young children, creating visionary education reform measures, securing tens of millions of dollars to combat health disparities and crafting Referendum C, which generated billions of dollars for critical state needs and infrastructure.  

On March 30, Groff advocated a major educational reform initiative in Colorado tracking the Obama approach. This is not someone to be shunted off to the side as a sop to the White House's religious PR.   

Yesterday, Wall Street Journal pontificator Daniel Henninger took it upon himself to give President Obama the old tut-tut for speaking in Turkey about seeking "mutual respect" with Islam but overlooking the lack of respect shown by Muslim countries for religious minorities in their midst. But, as pointed out in this space, the president did precisely that in his speech to the Turkish parliament. Calling on the Turks to reopen the Halki Greek Orthodox theological seminary, he said, "Robust minority rights let societies benefit from the full measure of contributions from all citizens."

This comment did not go unnoticed by the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America, which, in an April 7 report on the president's meeting with Patriarch Bartholomew, noted:

The substance of the discussions included President Obama's mention of the issue of the Theological School of Halki in his speech before the Turkish Parliament, and his further discussion of the same with the President of the Turkish Republic, Abdullah Gul. The President said that he would follow up on the issue with a view to a favorable solution for the Ecumenical Patriarchate. Evidently, Henninger hadn't actually bothered to read what the president actually said in Turkey.

I guess those GOP talking points Henninger had in front of him didn't mention what the president actually said in Turkey.

Meanwhile, a week ago, former Bush speechwriter and current WaPo columnist Michael Gerson tried to make make the case ("Why Obama is Losing a Faith") that the president's moves on stem cells and abortion was alienating his Catholic supporters--based on a Pew poll showing not that overall Catholic support for the president had slipped more than the public's at large (it wasn't), but that white non-Hispanic Catholic support was down from 61-20 percent to 47-41 percent. Well, the latest Pew poll shows that number bouncing back to 56-31 percent--higher than, for example, white mainline Protestants (54-28 percent). So why is Obama regaining a faith, Michael? 

With a new magazine to hawk, Rick Warren has broken media silence and given interviews to Larry King and Christianity Today's Sarah Pulliam.Students of the great one's purpose-driven public life have taken note, and noted certain inconsistencies between past and present pronouncements. Both Gilgoff and BaptistPlanet make clear that Warren is now representing himself as softer on gay marriage than he appeared heretofore. To be fair, he was something of a reluctant warrior during the run-up to the Proposition Vote. What's interesting is that he seems to be letting the zeitgeist blow him along as it listeth--toward the recognition that gay marriage is where America is headed.

Let me just call attention to a couple of Warrenisms. First, when Pulliam asked for his views on the Obama interation of the faith-based initiative, he said:

Those are great goals. My fear is that if all of a sudden you have to compromise your convictions to be part of the faith base, that will kill it. People will simply ignore it. Saddleback has never accepted government money for any PEACE Plan project because we don't want the strings attached to it. While the faith-based initiatives have great promise, if it becomes an issue where you can't just hire Christians in a Christian school, that will effectively kill them.

On the one hand, he is exactly right to make the point that those who see their service missions as religious should steer clear of government funding. On the other, no one has proposed to do away with longstanding rules exempting bona-fide Christian schools from anti-discrimination laws against hiring based on faith. The question is whether you should get the hiring exemption when you're using government funds to advance a public purpose.

Then there's this, in response to Larry King's question about John Meacham's ARIS-based Newsweek cover story, "The Decline of Christian America."

KING: OK. Do you think Christianity is slipping in America? That's the front cover of "Newsweek," out today. Quite a loss occurring in the Christian community. There you see the headline.

WARREN: Well, I would say it's the best of times and the worst of times. First place, I don't think that all of the questions that are asked in surveys are always as objective as they could be. For instance, if you ask people, are you a Protestant -- and the number of Protestants has gone down dramatically in the last 30 years. I don't even call myself a Protestant.

So terminologies are changing. I don't think faith is changing that much.

On the one hand, the ARIS surveys don't ask people if they're Protestant. They ask, "What is your religion, if any?" And the fact that the number of "just Protestants" has declined from 17 million to 5 million in two decades is simply a report on what people say. On the other hand, terminologies are changing. And what the ARIS shows is a huge increase in those who call themselves non-denominational Christians and "just Christians"--the Rick Warren people. Not enough, however, to prevent a 10 percentage-point decline in the proportion of Christians in America, with 90 percent of that coming in the non-Catholic portion of the Christian population.

My take, over on Religion Dispatches.

The Vermont House's vote to override Gov. Jim Douglas' veto of same-sex marriage was 100-49, with Rep. Sonny Audette, D-South Burlington, not voting. The pressure in either direction, internal and external, evidently turned him into Buridan's ass.

As a student of the history of the use of "the Judeo-Christian tradition" in American public discourse, I can't resist posting this Blitzer-mediated exchange between Carville and Donatelli on the president's remarks concerning the kind of nation the United States is: not Christian or Jewish or Muslim but "a nation of citizens." That is, of course, exactly what the founders had in mind, and Obama is obliquely referring here to Washington's famous 1790 letter to the Jews of Newport that makes that point:

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.

Donatelli thinks such statements should not be made, as if in doing so the religious heritage of the country is dismissed or demeaned. Not that the founders would have identified that heritage as "Judeo-Christian." That shibboleth dates to World War II (Wikipedia doesn't have it quite right), and really only came into its own during the Cold War. Dwight Eisenhower used it in his notorious (misquoted) statement implying that America needed religion but that it didn't matter what kind of religion. (For a complete discussion, see my 1984 American Quarterly article, "Notes on the Judeo-Christian Tradition in America.")

What the Washington-Obama position is based on, however, is not a belief in the necessity of some kind religious underpinning for the American approach to religion, unless by that is meant a belief that the Judeo-Christian tradition is particularly given to recognizing humankind's "inherent natural rights," and in particular a right of conscience. That's a debatable proposition. 

So the 25-member OFANP Advisory Council has finally been put together--see the White House press release after the jump. In the identity politics department, there are two bona fide Mainline Protestant leaders: the Rev. Peg Chemberlin, a Moravian clergywoman who is incoming president of the National Council of Churches; and the Rev. Dr. Sharon Watkins, head of the Disciples. Plus Harry Knox, a former United Methodist pastor who heads the Religion and Faith Program of the big mainstream gay rights organization, the Human Rights Campaign. Also on board are a couple more Jews and Catholics, another Muslim, a Hindu, and the presiding bishop of the largest black Pentecostal domination, the Church of God in Christ. They're all meeting at the White House for a couple of days. Have fun, guys!

The headline on President Obama's speech to the Turkish parliament is his statement that the U.S. is not at war with Islam, but for connoisseurs of religious politics, the real interest lies in this remark:

Freedom of religion and expression lead to a strong and vibrant civil society that only strengthens the state, which is why steps like reopening the Halki Seminary will send such an important signal inside Turkey and beyond. An enduring commitment to the rule of law is the only way to achieve the security that comes from justice for all people. Robust minority rights let societies benefit from the full measure of contributions from all citizens.

Since its opening on the site of an ancient monastery on an island in the Sea of Marmara in 1844, the Halki Seminary was the main school of theology for the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople. Then, in 1971, the Turks closed the place, on the grounds that they didn't want religious institutions of higher learning to exist independent of the Turkish state. Oh, and the idea that this should become a center for education of world Orthodoxy didn't sit well with them either.

For years, the position of the American government has been that Halki Seminary should be reopened. Both houses of Congress passed resolutions to that effect in 1998, and the following year President Clinton actually visited the island and urged the same. It's now on the table in Turkey's negotiations to become part of the EU. So in one sense, Obama wasn't doing anything out of the ordinary. But just yesterday, he made waves in Europe by urging Turkey's admission to the EU--a position he reiterated in Ankara. ("Let me be clear: the United States strongly supports Turkey's bid to become a member of the European Union.") The Turks have real reason now to make a move.

Meanwhile, by speaking up strongly for Halki to the Turkish parliamentarians, Obama earned some cred with the Greeks in America--whose religious suzerain is the patriarch of Constantinople, Bartholomew. They had been annoyed that Obama met with him at his hotel rather than making a visit to the Phanar, where Bartholomew hangs his mitre. Win-win for the president as things stand, big win-win if Halki is permitted to reopen.

One of the Catholic prelates who got out of Dodge...er, Boston...ahead of the posse was Alfred Hughes, who served as Cardinal Bernard Law's Vicar General prior to becoming, first, Bishop of Baton Rouge and now Archbishop of New Orleans. For example, back in 1992, Hughes  "rallied to the defense of Fr. John Hanlon, indicted for sex abuse charges, even though [he] knew of more recent allegations that he did not reveal," as the National Catholic Reporter's John Allen put it a few years ago.

In New Orleans, Hughes (now pushing 80) was not exactly a no-show  after Katrina, which devasted his archdiocese; but he has managed to alienate parishioners by inept handling of parish closings, not least by having parishioners arrested for occupying their to-be-shuttered churches. Earlier this year, hundreds signed petitions to the Vatican asking that he be replaced.

Otherwise, Hughes has bestirred himself publicly on the pro-life front, declining to attend commencement exercises at Loyola honoring the city's prominent Landrieu family because a couple of members are pro-choice, warning of the dangers of the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), and, most recently, chastising Notre Dame for its commencement invitation to President Obama. But not a peep about Gov. Bobby Jindal's announcements that he would refuse to let Louisiana accept federal stimulus funds to help the poor, the sick, and the unemployed. Pope Leo XIII, he of the social encyclicals, is likely turning over in his grave. WWJD? I won't presume to say.

Today's unanimous ruling in favor of same-sex marriage by the Iowa Supreme Court not only takes a two-by-four to the actual secular arguments advanced by appellant Polk County on behalf  of the state statute limiting civil marriage to a union between a man and a woman. It also acknowledges the religious basis of opposition to gay and lesbian unions, and proceeds to address "the religious undercurrent propelling the same-sex marriage debate as a means to fully explain our rationale for rejecting the dual-gender requirement of the marriage statute."

What follows is as clear an articulation as could be desired of the difference between civil marriage as constituted by a government forbidden to legislate "respecting an establishment of religion," and marriage as it may be conceived religiously. I've included the relevant section after the jump because from now on it's the text to be reckoned with for religious opponents of same-sex marriage, be they Catholic bishops, Southern Baptist pastors, Orthodox rabbis, or members of the Vermont House of Representatives. It's a great text for classroom use as well.

And one other thing. By noting that there are various religious groups that recognize same-sex marriage, the Court makes it clear that this is not an issue pitting secular norms against  "religion." There are "people of faith" on both sides. Those disposed to construct the culture wars purely as secular v. religious take note.

Last night, the Vermont House of Representatives passed its version of a bill permitting same-sex marriage by a vote of 95-52--a hefty margin but not hefty enough to withstand Gov. Jim Douglas' promised veto. According to the Burlington Free Press, however, "some" of the 11 Democrats who voted against the bill have said they would switch sides for the override. One hundred votes are needed in what promises to be a nail-biter.

I tuned in to the live stream of the debate on the Free Press website, and while the impassioned and sometimes tearful statements of gay and lesbian members were very moving, what touched me most was the evident distress of Albert "Sonny" Audette, a 77-year-old representative from South Burlington. Audette, who spent 30 years as South Burlington's director of public works before getting elected to the House, seems to be Vermont's version of a conservative Democrat--NRA member, supporter of organized labor, pretty strongly pro-environment, opponent of symbolic impeachment resolutions directed at Bush and Cheney.

He was clearly moved by the pleas for equal marriage rights, but in his speech before the vote, said that he just couldn't vote for the bill because of his devout Catholicism. After the vote, he rose again--the Vermont House permits members to explain their votes after the fact--to extend what seemed like an apology to his gay colleagues: "I respect all of these people not for the sexual orientation but because of who they are." I don't expect to find him among the switchers. Call it faith over public works.

Update: Final passage in House, 94-52; now on to Senate. 

Over at Religion Dispatches, Bill Berkowitz has an interview with Talk To Action's Bruce Wilson, whose sleuthing into Sarah Palin's religious associations helped make Pastor Muthee, well, if not a household name at least familiar to some of us. Actually, much of the interview is taken up with Wilson's explanations for why the MSM didn't make more of those associations. Among them: The nondenominational neo-charismatic movement he fingered is pretty unfamiliar; it's pretty strange; and the story was pretty complex. But as someone who followed the Palin religion story pretty closely, I'd say the most important explanation is Palin's own effort to obscure her religious identity. She refused to answer even the most straightforward questions, such as what church she belonged to. She wouldn't say what her beliefs were. And this occultation dated back several years, to when she first ran for statewide office. In the heat of the general election campaign, it was a tough story to nail down--a lot tougher than Wright-Obama or McCain-Hagee.

Dan Gilgoff has canonized the battle over commongroundism in a useful piece in U.S. News. On his account, it's religious progressives v. religious lefties, with the latter (Schultz, Laarman & Co.) portrayed as ideological hardheads. I'm not sure I'd cast it quite the same way, however.

Substantively, the commotion is mostly about abortion, with some skirmishing over gay marriage and the hiring question in the Obama version of George Bush's faith-based initiative. The "progressives" are for the most part pro-life, anti-gay marriage, and in favor of the Bush rule letting faith-based service providers restrict their government-funded hiring to their own religious kind. The lefties are pro-choice, pro-gay marriage, and opposed to faith-based hiring. But on issues like poverty and healthcare reform, there's been no conflict to speak of, although Laarman did let loose a broadside on the economic agenda of the "faux progressives" a couple of weeks ago.

Behind the substantive disputes, what's going on (I'm tempted to say, what's really going on) is a struggle for turf within the Obama administration. Despite his Mainline Protestant affiliation, faith, and moral values, the president has, since the beginning of his campaign, devoted the bulk of his faith-based energies to wooing such evangelicals as have been willing to overlook his liberal social views.

The 15 announced members of the advisory council of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood include a bunch of evangelicals but nary a white mainliner, and of the remaining 10 yet to be named, the two that have leaked are both socially conservative evangelical types--author Donald Miller and former Indianapolis Colts coach Tony Dungy. "Who's next, Chuck Colson?" snorted Pastordan when Dungy's name surfaced. "My Lord, they should just come out and admit the obvious: the Council is a colony for socially-conservative Evangelicals established as a reward for their help in 2008. What bullshit."

The balance of the council is supposed to be announced any time now, so we'll see soon enough what the entire colony looks like. Meanwhile, efforts are underway to connect the president directly with more liberal Protestant personages. This game ain't over yet.

Correction: I'm persuaded that it's not accurate to describe the commongroundniks as mostly pro-life. Some are, and some aren't. And whether some who say they are, like Jim Wallis, favor overturning Roe v. Wade and criminalizing the practice, is unclear. What they are as a group is determined to avoid taking a position, at least institutionally, beyond supporting social policies and legislative remedies that, they think, should earn the support of both sides.

Maybe Gerson should have looked at that Gallup survey. It's time to stop mistaking Catholic voters for Catholic prelates and assuming they are to be won or lost by a candidate's position on abortion. According to the  Pew survey Gerson cites, in mid-March the entire public approved of Obama's job performance by a margin of 59-26; Catholics, by 59-28. Let's be clear about this: Catholics have the same view of abortion as other Americans, and politically, there's no religious group that more closely mirrors Americans as a whole. There's just no reason to think that a president's actions related to abortion will affect Catholics any differently than they affect the rest of the voting population.