January 2010 Archives

In his State of the Union address, President Obama repeated his pledge to get rid of Don't Ask Don't Tell. On Tuesday, the Pentagon will present Congress with recommendations on how to enable gays and lesbians to serve openly in the military. On Thursday, according to the White House, the president will deliver remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast.

Obama's appearance at the breakfast became a bit controversial earlier this month after it was reported that David Bahati, author of Uganda's notorious anti-homosexuality bill, was going to be on hand at the invitation of The Family, the Jesus fellowship that sponsors the thing. Subsequently, Family spokesman Bob Hunter has been at pains to make clear that Bahati will not be on hand, and gone so far as to inform Box Turtle Bulletin, which has been bird-dogging the situation, that a whole bunch of other Ugandan supporters of the bill won't be either. The Family has become very, very eager to make the issue go away, but is still on the hook.

Obama shouldn't let them off it. Uganda is moving towards criminalizing homosexuality up to and still possibly including the death penalty, while the Obama administration is proposing full inclusion of gays and lesbians in the U.S. military. How about using the podium to ask which approach Jesus would have preferred, Mr. President?

Well, government jobs anyway. According to a new Gallup poll, the South leads all other regions of the country in the proportion of people who would prefer working for the government than for a business. Nationwide, the number is 35 percent; in the South, it's 42 percent. (The East comes in second, at 37 percent.)

This is odd, given that the South is the most Republican region of the country, and that just 26 percent of Republicans, as opposed to 44 percent of Democrats, would prefer a government job. Or maybe not, given that Southerners have a long tradition of denouncing the gummint even as they feast on federal handouts. I used to live there.

Unfortunately, Gallup doesn't include religion in the survey.

If ever anyone planned and carried out the killing of another human being, Scott Roeder's testimony at his trial yesterday made clear that he did. He described taking his pistol to George Tiller's church two times prior to when he actually got to the doctor, pressing the muzzle against his head and pulling the trigger. The killing had been something he'd been meditating, he said, since 1993. The Kansas City Star, has the story and the chilling video.

The real news was not Roeder's admissions, but Judge Warren Wilbert's ruling that he would not permit jurors to consider a verdict of voluntary manslaughter--something he had left open as a possibility. A defense of voluntary manslaughter is only permissible if the accused acted to stop the imminent use of unlawful force.

"There's no imminence of danger on a Sunday morning in the back of a church," Wilbert said, "let alone unlawful conduct. In the state of Kansas, abortions are legal."

Under the circumstances, classic civil disobedience theory would suggest that Roeder go ahead and plead guilty, contending that he had acted in order to protest an unjust law and throwing himself on the mercy of the court. Perhaps he'll do so. But anti-abortion radicals seem to have a difficult time admitting that abortion is actually legal in America. Acknowledging that they are law-breakers seems more than they can manage.

Update: Guilty.

You figure the crackdown on women in (some quarters of) American Catholicism has gone pretty far when the popular music director of a major Fairfax, Virginia church is canned for the following paragraph in a WaPo story on the women's ordination question:

Sylvia Mulherin, 69, a former nun married to a former priest, said that Jesus was progressive in his treatment of women but that, over time, men unjustly pushed women out. "Maybe the women don't have to come in the back door, but we still have to sit in the pews," said Mulherin, who lives in Fairfax County.

Mulherin says she is not among those pushing for women's ordination. Indeed, she is a conservative who describes herself on her Facebook page as a fan of Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin. In December, she gave Newt a round of Facebook applause for denouncing the "deliberate amnesia of the academic Left" in overlooking the "great men" of the American past.

But she did not take kindly to her pastor's denial that she had been pushed out of her job, and emailed dozens of musicians at the church that in her opinion "women have not achieved true equality in the Church and this fact deserves further consideration by the church's leadership. This position is apparently unacceptable in the Diocese of Arlington."

WaPo's Michelle Boorstein is on the case.

According to David Gibson, the Catholic bishops have been shocked and dismayed at the rapidity with which health care reform has gone from near sure thing to near death. So they've written yet another letter to Congress, urging passage of a comprehensive bill despite the changed "political contexts." Color me not so impressed.

Had the bishops not insisted on their whole package of pro-life measures, health care reform would have been enacted by now. Not only does the letter not acknowledge that, but it continues to insist that all they want is to maintain the status quo, which is simply not the case. Under current law, federal funds do help pay for health plans that include abortion services--in those states that supplement federal coverage under Medicaid with their own funds to cover those services. The Senate bill simply lets individuals do what states can do now. But without the absolute prohibition provided in the House version of the bill, the bishops place themselves in the opposition.

None of this is to deny that the USCCB would like their kind of government-sponsored health care reform to pass. That puts them at odds with those conservative Catholics (including a few bishops) who have been happy to press the abortion issue not only for its own sake but pragmatically as a tool for taking down reform altogether. These include Princeton's Robert George and his pals, whom Michael Sean Winters outed yesterday. The question is whether the USCCB is prepared to support any sort of compromise to advance the cause, or whether by sticking to its guns, it effectively sides with Georgites. If the former, there's no public sign of it. 

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams wowed members of the Society of Jesus & friends with his elegant, eloquent, and moving acceptance of America's Campion Award for achievement in letters last evening. Even though there's been a fair amount of honor paid by the Catholic and Anglican churches to each others' martyrs in recent years, it was still a bit of a bold move for the Jesuit magazine to give its highest award to the chief prelate of the church under whose auspices the famous Jesuit recusant was captured, hanged, drawn, and quartered in 1581.

Not surprisingly, some on the right have taken the award as a purposeful poke in the eye to the Vatican in the wake of last year's dust-up over Rome's outreach to Anglicans who would be Anglo-Catholics. That's  the view over at The American Catholic, where the award makes sense because "what the Church of England has morphed into, a left wing pressure group with prayers, is frankly what America has been championing for years in the Catholic Church." (Ah, that lovely Catholic blogosphere.) Actually, the award was decided on well before news of the new personal ordinariates hit the fan.

And yet, lurking in the background are some real questions about the character of Catholic ecumenism these days. Williams himself is a leading figure in longstanding efforts to bring the Catholic and Anglican churches closer ecclesially. His own assessment of the Vatican's Anglican outreach, made November 18 a conference on ecumenism at the Gregorian, was that it "failed to break any fresh ecclesiological ground." But, as NCR's John Allen made clear in a pointed essay last week, Pope Benedict seems happy to let that business languish in favor of forging common religious cause on challenges like climate change.

As America's editor Drew Christiansen noted, the giving of the award marked the 100th anniversary of the modern ecumenical movement, when "the churches of Scotland gathered in Edinburgh to foster unity in their missionary witness." What Williams described as an "act of ecumenical generosity" was about more than just the desirability of working together on important social issues.

OK, so this story is a little long in the tooth, but given the cast of characters it's hard to resist. Last week, discussing Norman Podhoretz's book, Why Are Jews Liberals? in the wake of the Massachusetts election and Obama's pivot against Wall Street, Rush Limbaugh delivered himself of the following speculation:

To some people, banker is a code word for Jewish; and guess who Obama is assaulting? He's assaulting bankers. He's assaulting money people. And a lot of those people on Wall Street are Jewish. So I wonder if there's - if there's starting to be some buyer's remorse there.

Leaping out of his metaphoric seat, the ADL's Abe Foxman issued a statement calling these "borderline anti-Semitic comments"  and explaining:

Limbaugh's references to Jews and money in a discussion of Massachusetts politics were offensive and inappropriate. While the age-old stereotype about Jews and money has a long and sordid history, it also remains one of the main pillars of anti-Semitism and is widely accepted by many Americans. His notion that Jews vote based on their religion, rather than on their interests as Americans, plays into the hands of anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists.

Whereupon, Norman Podhoretz sprang into action, claiming El Rushbo was just speaking about "prejudiced people" and anyway was just making Podhoretz's own point about Jewish voting, and charging Foxman with chutzpah for attacking "so loyal a friend of Israel." And Limbaugh agreed, saying he was only referring to what "the Jew-haters, the bigots" believe.

As MediaMatters pointed out, that last bit is patently untrue--unless Limbaugh wants to include himself among the Jew-haters. He begins with what "some people think" and then associates himself with the view. His speculation is that Jews--three-quarters of whom voted for Obama--may be having buyer's remorse because Obama has started attacking their co-religionists on Wall Street. Only someone a lot more familiar with traditional Gentile attitudes about Jews than with the American Jewish community could entertain the idea that the latter would have second thoughts about supporting a candidate who attacks Wall Street bankers. As usual, Limbaugh was channeling the views of the Cape Girardeau WASP elite from which he springs.

As for Foxman, it's perfectly silly to pretend that American Jews don't constitute an ethno-religious voting bloc--like Mormons, white evangelicals, Hispanic Catholics, and others. The issue at hand was posed years ago by Milton Himmelfarb, when he quipped that Jews "earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans." That reality has caused Jewish conservatives like Podhoretz to gnash their teeth in rage for a generation, and his dreadful book  represents one more effort  to persuade their co-religionists to behave differently.

Foxman's own view of things harks back to the crouch that American Jews used to go into when any Gentile would start a sentence with the words "Jews are" and not conclude it with something like "public-spirited citizens who want their children to get the best education possible."  Why shouldn't Jewish voting be shaped, in some way, by Jewish values and history? In its own way, "on their interests as Americans" expresses as blinkered an account of American Jewry as Limbaugh's "some buyer's remorse there."

In his message for the 44th World Day of Communications yesterday, Pope Benedict urges Catholic priests to join the digital world and start spreading the Word by blog, tweet, and video. To be sure, the message suggests that the pontiff is himself a bit of a stranger to this world, referring as he does to "the many crossroads created by the intersection of all the different 'highways' that form 'cyberspace.'" Perhaps he should give some thought to teaching by example as well as by word, and fire up a blog of his own--say, "See of Peter."

Be that as it may, James Martin, S.J., the learned and culture-savvy managing culture editor of America, extends a warm blogger's welcome to the message over at In All Things. Picking up where the pope leaves off, he runs though a bunch of examples from Jesus to Fulton Sheen to demonstrate that the "history of Christianity is in large part the history of the church using to great effect the latest media, sometimes even inventing media, to evangelize." Of course, there's also the history of the church doing what it can to control the latest media though the burning of books (see Abelard, Peter, et al.); the Index librorum prohibitorum and the Sacred Congregation of the Index (1571-1917); the episcopal use of the nihil obstat and the imprimatur; the censorship of movies via the various diocesan Legions of Decency, etc. Plus the fact that the real media innovators in the Christian world since the invention of printing have been the Protestants.

Of course, Martin knows all this. His purpose is to get his fellow Catholic clergy off their digital duffs. The problem is that the blogosphere is a scary place for any institution that seeks to maintain message discipline. The pope urges priests who venture into it to be sensitive to the "followers of other religions, non-believers and people of every culture" with whom it will bring them into contact. The tougher job will be to negotiate the "on and off ramps" and "wrong-way signs" and "bad drivers" and "traffic cops" and "road rage" that they'll encounter from fellow Catholics--not least, the ones they work for. 

Over on FailedMessiah, the indispensable site for tracking the dark side of Orthodox Judaism, Shmarya Rosenberg has a new post up on one Israeli Chabad rabbi's excommunication of some colleagues for violating certain halachic ordinances as an element of their belief in the messianic status of Chabad-Lubavitch's late rebbe, Menachem Schneerson. This is not the only recent case of antinomian behavior in the Land of Lubavitch, and harks back to the wholesale antinomianism of the notorious failed messiah of the 17th century, Shabtai Tzvi.

Rosenberg, who was profiled by Sam Freedman in the NYT a couple of weeks ago, concludes by likening the situation to the split between those early followers of Jesus who hewed to Jewish law and those who didn't. At the moment, the Chabad antinomians seem pretty marginal--but then the rebbe has only been dead for 16 years--roughly where the Jesus followers were in the year 50. Normally, Chabad is seen by outsiders as comprised of messianists and non-messianists. What Rosenberg suggests is that it's rather a case of openly messianist antinominans and crypto-messianists. If we're on the Christian time clock, it'll take a few decades to get this sorted out.

Now into its second decade, the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA) has from the outset been seen by some as what might be called CEPA--the Christian Evangelization Protection Act. It originated in an effort to embarrass the Clinton administration, and its strongest advocates have always been folks in the conservative Christian world for whom the freedom of Christian missionaries to do their thing has always been a top priority.

To be sure, there's another side to this story. The mandated State Department watch list of countries that violate religious freedom has does some good, notwithstanding criticism that the U.S. shouldn't be interfering in the religious affairs of others. The position of ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom established by the act has had capable occupants in Robert Seiple and John Hanford. The independent U.S. Commission for International Religious Freedom may be something of a loose cannon, but loose cannons have their uses in the world of Foggy Bottom.

With the Obama administration one year in, those who care are agitated about the fact that it has not yet appointed its ambassador-at-large, and the agita has been picked up by WaPo's Michelle Boorstein. There's at least some indication that an appointment is forthcoming--no doubt David Saperstein, the Commission's first head and a key player in all things religious for the administration, has been playing a hand here as well.

At this juncture, it might be a good idea to redefine the position a bit, as the Obamaites have done with the White House faith-based office. As things stand, the ambassador-at-large operates under the assistant secretary of state for democracy, human rights and labor. Why not extend the brief to include situations like Uganda, where religiously motivated politicians and clergy are engaged in an effort to violate the human rights of gays and lesbians? What better way to make it clear that, in the new world of Obama foreign policy, IRFA isn't reducible to CEPA?

I'm happy to report that someone in the New York office of Deutsche Bank has been searching Google for the words "practices of the unscrupulous money-changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men"--and as a result has happened upon this blog. The words are from FDR's first Inaugural Address 77 years ago, and can be found in context here. Now, will Obama see fit to borrow them for his State of the Union? 

The most striking finding from Gallup's new survey of Americans' feelings about different religions and their adherents is...four times as many people admit to "a great deal" of prejudice against Christians than against either Jews or Buddhists. OK, it's four percent greatly prejudiced against Christians versus one percent against the other two. You can hold the headline.

Actually, the survey's "major finding" is  that on the prejudice scale Islam rates a good deal higher than the other three groups tested for: Christianity, Judaism, and Buddhism. This is entirely unsurprising. If Gallup had wanted to do something more useful, it would have gotten responses for other faiths, and differentiated the Christian category. Had the survey included Scientology, Jehovah's Witnesses, Mormonism, Catholicism, Evangelical Protestantism, Hinduism, and atheism, Islam would look nothing like the outlier it does in this one.

New Zealand has announced that it is removing those pesky Bible codes from the Trijocon weapons sights carried into battle by its troops in Afghanistan. They're inappropriate and could stoke religious tensions. OMG. I was kind of hoping for a move in the opposite direction.

Like, remember Roland's sword Durendal? Its golden hilt was equipped with a tooth of Saint Peter's, blood from Saint Basil, some of Saint Denis' hair, and a swatch of the Virgin Mary's dress. Now that's spiritual hardware!

But come to think of it, Roland's little crusading venture over the Pyrenees didn't turn out so well. Ambushed by a bunch of Basque montagnards, he couldn't manage to break the sword to keep it from falling into enemy hands, and had to content himself with hiding it under his body as he died. Maybe the religiously correct spoilsports from down under know something the U.S. Army doesn't.

Update: ...and they're gone. Voluntarily.

Not necessarily in Massachusetts--no one did any exit polls--but now that the Bay State has definitively popped the Obama bubble, it's worth contemplating just how much the electorate has not changed.

To this end, a new book by Corwin Smidt and his poli-sci crowd at Calvin College's Henry Center makes clear that reports of the disappearance of the God gap were indeed greatly exaggerated. The Disappearing God Gap? uses the Henry Center's regular surveys and other data to show that the basic constellation of voting by religious group shifted very little in 2008. This is not big news for those who have been paying attention, but it helps strengthen the argument that the American electorate has settled into pretty stable religious voting blocs--and that efforts to move these one way or another are likely to prove difficult at best.

So what did happen, religion-wise, in 2008? Turnout was more important then shifts of allegiance. Take, for example, Hispanic Catholics. They voted by exactly the same margin for Obama over McCain as they did for Kerry over Bush: 69 percent to 31 percent. But whereas in 2004 they constituted 3.2 percent of the electorate, in 2008 the percentage was 7.5. Contrariwise, non-Hispanic Catholics voted 53 percent to 47 percent for both GOP candidates, but their percentage of the electorate dropped from 19.2 percent to 16.2 percent. Similarly, evangelicals voted almost identically for both Bush (77-23) and McCain (76-24), but their percentage of the vote dropped from 26 percent to 23.7 percent. Add to those number increases in both turnout and percentages among Black Protestants and the religiously unaffiliated and you've got the Obama landslide. But turn the enthusiasm level the other way and...it's the Massachusetts story again and again.

Unfortunately, the full, adjusted numbers from the 2008 exit polls have still not been released, so it's not possible to cross check some of the book's odder data. For example, did Obama really pick up support among traditionalist Catholics while losing it among centrists and modernists? If so, perhaps it was because traditionalists are older, poorer Catholics, some of whom were prepared to return to their New Deal roots in hard times.

And why should it have been centrist mainline Protestants who moved toward the Democratic candidate, rather than traditionalists or modernists? If the book is right, it was a major shift, from favoring Bush by two point to favoring Obama by 12--while constituting the same proportion of the electorate (9 percent and 9.1 percent). Maybe that 14 percent swing was exactly what Obama, the more or less centrist mainline Protestant, managed to achieve, whether through religious outreach or identity politics.

Ed Stetzer, who runs the numbers for the Southern Baptist Convention, has an interesting  essay up on the Christianity Today website, in which he answers the burning question: Why do evangelicals lie about how religion is doing in America? His answer, which includes a useful review of the actual data, is that in order to pump up the troops to go out and exercise the Great Commission, you've got to make things seem worse than they are.

To be sure, Stetzer doesn't have anything to say about his own grim reports on the demographics of the SBC--probably because, in that particular case, the facts are true. (He does point out that the only denominations that are growing are a couple if Pentecostal ones.) For a review of the SBC situation, see Andy Manis' article in the latest issue of Religion in the News.

The National Prayer Breakfast February 4, that is, and it's David Bahati, the mover of the notorious Anti-Homosexuality Bill in the Ugandan parliament. Bahati is connected to the Family, the secretive Jesus organization that sponsors the breakfast, and has himself helped organized a Uganda version of it. As Box Turtle Bulletin's Jim Burroway sums up the latest, Bahati has not only accepted the Family's invitation to attend, but may actually speak.

Now, all U.S. presidents since Dwight Eisenhower have turned out for the annual event, including Barack Obama last year. But thanks to Jeff Sharlet's 2008 exposé--and the unwanted attention its C Street House received last summer in the Mark Sanford affair--the Family is now perhaps the most controversial religious organization in Washington. Nevertheless, so much of an institution has the Prayer Breakfast become that few would have objected if Obama showed up again. Now, as Burroway makes clear, Bahati's presence puts the president's attendance in question.

But a no less important question is: What Will Hillary Do? The Secretary of State has herself been associated with the Family as a regular participant in its prayer groups. In 1993, she had this to say about its current leader:

Doug Coe, the longtime National Prayer Breakfast organizer, is a unique presence in Washington: a genuinely loving spiritual mentor and guide to anyone, regardless of party or faith, who wants to deepen his or her relationship to God.

On December 14, speaking on "the U.S. Human Rights Agenda for the 21st Century" at Georgetown University, Clinton was asked how the U.S. can help protect the rights of LGBT people around the world, and she brought up the Uganda bill:

And then the example that I used of a piece of legislation in Uganda which would not only criminalize homosexuality but attach the death penalty to it. We have expressed our concerns directly, indirectly, and we will continue to do so. The bill has not gone through the Ugandan legislature, but it has a lot of public support by various groups, including religious leaders in Uganda. And we view it as a very serious potential violation of human rights.

The Family seems to be doubling down on hate-mongering in Uganda. Will Clinton vote with her feet and send a message--to her erstwhile Family friends, on behalf of human rights and potential victims of anti-gay persecution? WWJD?

Update: Looks like maybe Bahati won't be coming after all. Was he disinvited? Will he try to crash? Whatever, the Family, er, the National Prayer Breakfast "has never advocated the sentiments expressed in Mr. Bahati's legislation." And the point is? 

David Gibson has a nice piece in the NYT Week in Review today on the Vatican's new determination to make just about every recent pope a saint. As he notes, a bunch of early popes are saints, mostly by virtue of their having been martyred. But the canonization of Pius X (by Pius XII in 1954) was the first in 400 years--and it really hasn't worked out that well. (Cf. the schismatic Society of Saint Pius X.) Now there are processes under way for Pius XII, John XIII, Paul VI, John Paul II--and even a movement to do the same for John Paul I, who occupied the See of Peter for a total of 33 days. Over at Politics Daily, David rehearses the problems in current Jewish-Catholic relations that the first of these has helped create.

This development can be seen as part of a (very drawn-out) process by which the papacy has extended its power over sainthood, which represents a standing threat to the ability of the church to control access to the supernatural. Through the first millennium, saints were declared by popular acclaim, their cults celebrated because ordinary Christians found a holy man or woman to be a worthy intercessor with God. But by the 12th century, the popes had achieved a sufficient grip on spiritual power in the West to put an end to such promiscuous beatifications, and established their own canonical control over the making (and unmaking) of saints.

Now that we're in the third millennium, they have taken the next step, from controlling the process to turning themselves into the modern saints par excellence. Medieval Catholics would have considered this ridiculous. In the 11th century, St. Peter Damian, a monk and cardinal whom Dante places in one of the highest circles of Paradise, famously referred to his friend and rival Hildebrand (who became Gregory VII) as "my holy Satan"--alluding to the sin of pride that was the cause of Satan's fall. An old friend of mine, a medievalist and former monk, once applied the phrase to John Paul II.

Being head of the Roman Catholic Church didn't use to turn you into a saint, but then the pope didn't use to be the most famous Christian in the world and a visible performer on the international stage. Never in history has the Vatican wielded more authority over its far-flung dominions. Celebrity is a powerful thing.  

Including freedom from religion! Or, as the president puts it in his proclamation, "the freedom to practice none at all." Can I have the day off?

For those Christians disinclined to buy into the pact-with-the-Devil explanation, In All Things has a moving post about how to come to terms with Haiti by Msgr. Lorenzo Abacete. His Pauline tack--the "co-suffering" God--isn't so helpful for non-Christians, but then he recognizes that.

In God: A Biography, Jack Miles points out that after the Book of Job, the rest of the Hebrew Bible (as opposed to the Old Testament) records no more direct discourse from the God of Israel. He speaks out of the whirlwind, wrests repentance from Job, and berates the three friends for telling him that he has merited his suffering. The book has kept Judeo-Christians pondering "why" for a long time. Maybe Pat Robertson should re-read it.

Over the past century, give or take, American society has evolved a few rules for talking about religion in public, the foremost of which are:

1. Don't say your religion is better than someone else's.
2. Don't attribute others' suffering to punishment by God.

But since their re-emergence in the cultural mainstream 30 years ago, evangelical Protestants have not been entirely with the program. It's just hard for some of them to suppress the impulse to bear public witness to the superiority of their faith and signs of divine adjudication. So God doesn't hear the prayers of a Jew and Katrina shows what happens to a city dedicated to letting the good times roll. And Tiger Woods should trade in his Buddhism for Christianity and Haiti made a pact with the Devil.

When such assertions are made, a lot of Americans are shocked, and there is widespread condemnation, including from some leading evangelicals. Most of us recognize that civility has its virtues, and we are loathe to give it up, whatever our theological convictions.

Towards the end of Game Change, McCain operations manager Steve Schmidt appeals to Joe Lieberman to help a faltering Sarah Palin prepare for her debate with Joe Biden.

     "You're both very religious," Schmidt said. "Go in there and pray with her."
     As it happened, Palin had already been prayed for that day. A group of Republican congresswomen had offered their blessings via a conference call with her. But Lieberman went back and took a less direct tack, providing Palin with Talmudic wisdom. Invoking the influential Orthodox rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, he spoke about the covenant of faith, which is the relationship between God and man, and the covenant of destiny, which is what men make of themselves.
     "Look," Lieberman said kindly, "you gotta be saying to yourself, 'What am I doing here? How did this happen?' This is your moment to make it really count for something."
     Palin seemed touched. "Joe," she said. "I can't figure any other reason I'm here except that I was meant to be here."

What was this wisdom with which the "Independent Democrat" from Connecticut sought to buck up his pal's running mate? Whichever of the authors got the story from Lieberman (and it could have come from no one else), they've gotten the name of the Sage of Modern Orthodoxy right but garbled his "dual covenant" theory of Jewish identity.

In a 1954 responsum [correction: as Larry Grossman points out below, it was a public lecture], Soloveitchik claimed that Jews have been presented with a Covenant of Fate (not faith) and a Covenant of Destiny. The Covenant of Fate is what binds Jews together as a people, whether they like it or not; it is what they've been handed simply by being born into the tribe, regardless of whether they follow the divine commandments. By contrast, the Covenant of Destiny has to do with a deliberate, conscious, and freely willed choice to embrace the law--to adhere to the practices of Orthodox Judaism.

Within the Orthodox world, Soloveitchik  was a liberal, and his object was to make clear, particularly with respect to the secular Zionists who founded the State of Israel, that Orthodox Jews shared a common fate with the non-Orthodox, and could therefore work together with them. But, as my colleague Ron Kiener points out, Soloveitchik's formulation is "not common"--used by "a very limited circle of Orthodox Jews, primarily in Israel, primarily of the nationalist-Zionist 'modern' camp." See this, for example, from Prof. Shalom Rosenberg of the Hebrew University.

The appeal of the formulation to Lieberman is not hard to fathom. Not only is his own religious identity very much of the Modern Orthodox, nationalist-Zionist persuasion, but as someone who moved personally from low to high-level Jewish observance, it's likely that he sees in it a description of his own spiritual journey--from just the inherited Covenant of Fate to the chosen Covenant of Destiny.

But why lay a Soloveitchikian rap on Palin? Lieberman seems to be trying to tell her to go beyond merely accepting her McCain-given role in the political universe and to embrace it, own it, "make it count"--and so learn enough damn policy details to do better against Biden than she did with Katie Couric. But Palin doesn't seem to get it. She's where she is, she replies, because it was "meant to be"--the Covenant of Fate, as it were.

Farouk Shami is a Palestinian-American businessman, a Houstonian from Ramallah who made a bunch of money in cosmetology after inventing the first ammonia-free hair color. In November, he announced he was running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination and like all American politicians, especially in the South, discovered he needed to say what his religion is. As Corrie MacLaggan of the Austin American-Stateman lays it out, that's not been so easy.

Some of his campaign officials say he's a Quaker, others say no. Family members claim the family's Muslim, but not very observant. "My religion is American," Shami said in December. "I'm a Muslim Quaker." On Monday, he took an Abrahamic tack: "I was born in the land of Abraham, believing in Moses, Jesus and Mohammad, and believing in one God." Texas Democrats, take your pick. Is it real or is it...Shami?

Gallup's latest political release is not exactly stop-the-presses material. Aggregating 2009 surveys, it has determined that Mormons are a lot more conservative and Republican than any other religious grouping in America. Specifically, 59 percent consider themselves conservative and 65 percent Republican. The next most conservative/Republican cohort are the Protestants/Other Christians (i.e. non-Catholic Christians), who weigh in at 46 percent conservative and 44 percent Republican. It would have been useful, however, if Gallup had included a cross-tab by race and type. Back out the blacks and Latinos and the Protestants would look a lot more like Mormons--and white evangelicals even more so. As for the Jews, they're just about the inverse of the Mormons: 43 percent liberal and 69 percent Democrat. The two Zions, as it were.

So what will Roger have her do? She doesn't seem knowledgeable enough or quick enough on her feet or  to do anything other than read prepared scripts.

I've got it! They'll have her give the Invocation every morning. And Brit Hume can give the Benediction every evening. New Fox motto: "We Pray. You Obey."

Anyone who imagines that the Catholic bishops will end up supporting health care reform should go over to On Faith and take a look at this post by their spokeswoman, Sr. Mary Ann Walsh. Insisting that her bosses have supported reform "for decades," Walsh goes on to complain that

the present state of affairs is enough to make you sick. The gamesmanship in Congress relates more to politics than health and has created serious problems.

As things stand, Walsh claims, "health care reform it is not." There follows a litany of what has the the bishops worried: abortion and "conscience rights"; a failure to provide for immigrants, legal and illegal; and too high costs for ordinary citizens. The bottom line:

We need health care reform in America and we're close to attaining it, but if decent health care becomes a matter of politics over the public good, we'll all lose. That's enough to make you sick.

Whatever one's views of the individual pieces, the critique as a whole is disingenuous nonsense. For example, on abortion, according to Walsh, the bishops want reform to include the current Hyde Amendment standard but insist on the Stupak provision of the House bill, which (as pro-lifer Michael Sean Winters points out) goes beyond Hyde in making it "impossible for women, with their own money, to purchase health insurance that covers abortions." At the same time, the Senate bill is criticized as unfair because it "does not allow undocumented persons to buy insurance with their own money."

Beyond such deception and inconsistency, the refusal to acknowledge the signal accomplishments of the reform bills as they stand--the expanded coverage, above all--is striking. Health care reform "it is not"? Give me a break.

But worst of all is the claim that somehow what's happened so far is "politics" undermining "the public good." If anything is clear from this whole process, it's that the bishops have been up to their eyeballs in lobbying for their positions on the life issues. And that their effective politicking has made it more difficult for progressives to advance the other items on the agenda that the bishops say they want--and has led to some unlovely compromises and concessions.

Like anyone else, the bishops are entitled to play the game as hard as they want. But not to acknowledge that they're doing so is simple dishonesty. It's enough to make you sick.

Winnie Sullivan, the enfante terrible of religion and legal theory, is at it again with a review of a new collection of essays on the Muhammad cartoons controversy over at Religion Dispatches. Applauding some of the authors at the expense of others, she takes up familiar cudgels against the Western understanding of its secular order as being somehow religiously neutral. No, she says, it's a product of a specifically Western--especially Protestant--religious ideology that privileges the individual conscience and downgrades communal solidarities that define religion in other traditions.

Over at Immanent Frame, Clemson political scientist Laura Olson seizes on Bill Maher's question why the religiously unaffiliated are not mobilized and comes up with the rather obvious conclusion that it's hard to mobilize a diverse group of people who are, well, unaffiliated. As opposed to mobilizing church folk, with respect to whom (as the religion-and-politics saw has it ), "If they're in the pews, they get the cues."

And yet, what's  odd about the Maher-Olson question is its premise is wrong. Call them unaffiliated or (as I prefer) Nones or simply non-attenders, the least religious Americans are politically mobilized. Twenty years ago, they split their votes pretty evenly between Republicans and Democrats. Now they vote Democratic at a 3-1clip. That makes them as mobilized as white evangelicals. What's mobilized them? More than anything else, the religiosification of the Republican Party. They got the cues by not being in the pews.

Addendum: Daren Sherkat makes the point (in the comment below) that Olson has a point when it comes to the "undermobilization of secular people into social movement organizations and political action committees." I know of no empirical studies that demonstrate that to be the case, though there may well be some. In any event it's a plausible enough claim, given the propensity of people with organizational ties (religious or otherwise) to be more civically engaged generally than those who do not. What is certainly the case is that the religiously affiliated, and those attend worship a lot, have generally tended to vote in greater numbers than those who aren't and don't--and that's where the mobilization rubber hits the road. However, as this 2007 study by Tom Smith of NORC data shows, in this decade Nones have been voting at about the same rate as religious folks.  

The 'Horns may feel a higher power, but  if a 'Bamian don't think every word of the Bible is true, he ain't telling the Mobile Press-Register. Welcome to Belief Bowl 2010. Hook 'em, Tide!

WaPo's editorial today on Uganda's proposed anti-homosexuality bill is (as usual) better written and harder hitting than the Times' of three days ago, but in not recommending government sanctions weaker (as usual) in the remediation department.

Over at FindLaw, Cornell law professor Sherry Colb has a column inspired by a recent call by Israel's two chief rabbis for their colleagues to preach against abortion. Her aim is to make clear how different Jewish law on abortion is from Catholic (and evangelical Protestant) doctrine, even as both differ from secular U.S. and Israeli law. Briefly, the rabbis hold that abortion is a bad thing (except if the mother's life is threatened, when it is mandatory), but that it is permissible under a variety of circumstances, and that it is not murder. Rather, they consider the fetus to be potential life, worth more than mere property but not a living person until most of it has emerged from the womb.

Colb demonstrates that when it comes Judeo-Christian tradition teachings on abortion, current American law is much more closely aligned with the traditional "Judeo" side than the conservative Christian one. In this regard, it would have been interesting if, in response to Rick Warren's question, "[A]t what point does a baby get human rights, in your view?", Barack Obama had answered, "Well, religiously my view is closest to the Orthodox Jewish position, which is that a baby gets human rights at birth." Maybe some pro-choice politicians should try that one out.

Mary Ann Glendon's fulsome appreciation of Cicero in the current issue of First Things is one lawyer/public figure's tribute to her most distinguished predecessor, but given Glendon's own involvement with issues of religion in public life--and the main preoccupation of the magazine she's writing for--it's curious that she didn't manage, in nearly 4,000 words, to say anything about Cicero's view of religion. Well, maybe not so curious.

That view was purely instrumental. Like his friend Marcus T. Varro, Cicero admired Numa Pompilius, the mythic second king of Rome, for having invented religious practices that civilized the thuggish warriors who had founded the city. Famously, he served as an augur even as he wrote a tract demonstrating that augury was nonsense. He did not believe in the gods, or at least denied that they could be shown to exist, and thought private religious practices were not for serious men of affairs. In short, so far as he was concerned, religion was a fiction useful only for fostering social harmony.

This is not an understanding of religion that American conservatives like Glendon like to talk about, much less celebrate, in public.

Twenty-five years ago, I almost interviewed Mary Daly for a profile in the Boston Globe. She agreed to talk to me, then changed her mind. So I wrote a review of her then-latest book, Pure Lust (excerpt after the jump). She was the great feminist theologian, thanks to The Church and the Second Sex, an exercise in post-Vatican II liberalism that appeared in 1968. Of course, over the next 40  years she went way, way beyond that--on a journey that, I would guess, only a very few intellectual devotees could actually follow. An amazing, hermetic performance. And now she's gone, a gnarly giantess no longer roaming the earth.

Because of its comprehensive coverage of the Uganda anti-homosexuality bill, I've become a big fan of Box Turtle Bulletin, the 4-person webzine that tracks homosexuality in public life in a civil and balanced (if not exactly non-partisan) way. But even by BTB's standards, yesterday's commentary on Joel Osteen by Timothy Kincaid is notable. Equipped with the rather odd disclaimer that the other members of the BTB team don't necessarily agree, the commentary makes out a persuasive case that the GLBT community oughtn't to pillory Osteen as just another conservative religious homophobe. Kincaid was prompted by Osteen's giving the opening prayer at the inauguration of Annise Parker, the newly elected lesbian mayor of Houston.

What comes through in the array of Osteenisms Kincaid quotes is that the senior pastor of America's largest congregation is an irenic soul whose aversion to politicized religion may not be such a bad thing. Especially amidst the agita of the "Tea Party Teens" named and claimed by David Brooks today. Perhaps there's a lesson here for the Prosperity Gospel's cultured despisers.

What to say about Brit Hume's advice to Tiger Woods, vouchsafed on Fox News Sunday?

"The extent to which he can recover seems to me depends on his faith," Hume said. "He is said to be a Buddhist. I don't think that faith offers the kind of forgiveness and redemption that is offered by the Christian faith. My message to Tiger would, 'Tiger, turn to the Christian faith and you can make a total recovery and be a great example to the world."

Buddhism seriously practiced would actually seem to be a pretty good way to recover from the need to have sex with whatever strikes your fancy. Central to that faith are the Four Noble Truths, which stress the importance of overcoming trishna--literally "thirst," but also translated as desire, clinging, greed, craving, or lust. Item 4 on Buddhism's Eightfold Path is "right action," defined as abstaining from hurtful behaviors, such as killing, stealing, and careless sex.

But then, Hume might also have suggested that Tiger embrace Judaism, where teschuvah is the prescribed means of returning to God. Or Islam, where repentance (at-tawbah) is an important part of the Hajj. Come to think of it, Christianity makes the whole business of forgiveness and redemption a good deal more complicated than other faiths, what with its endless fussing over the mechanism of grace. Even as we speak, the Southern Baptists are busy contesting resurgent Calvinism in their midst.

But perhaps what Hume had in mind by way of total recovery and exemplariness was the sort of turn to Christianity that helped many a felon get pardoned by Mike Huckabee when he was governor of Arkansas. Make a public acknowledgment of Jesus and you will be redeemed in the eyes of the American public, and maybe even your corporate sponsors. That's the kind of forgiveness that Buddhism doesn't offer.

Update: Darren Sherkat has run the numbers, and it turns out that Buddhist men have the lowest (self-reported) rate of infidelity of all male religious groupings. ("Nones" and "Christians" come in first and second.)

After his star turn at the Inaugural a year ago, the Lord of Saddleback withdrew from the public stage in an act of benignant tzimtzum, permitting lesser lights of the religious firmament to do their shining and the creation of the Age of Obama to begin. But in recent weeks He has returned, setting off new thunderclaps of shock and awe. First there was the Encyclical Video, delivering the Word unto Uganda: Thou shalt not pass the Anti-Homosexuality Act. Which has elicited more gnashing of teeth than all the other spiritual objections, from the Vatican on down, combined. Then came the Urgent Call to the Chosen to come up with $900K for the Church of their Choice; and Lo, $2.4 million appeared, in a Miracle of Radical Generosity. Saddleback in trouble? As if!

Peter Steinfels bids farewell to his NYT Beliefs column today, 20 years and out. He expresses some regret at feeling bound by Times style to maintain an Olympian distance and dispassion even as other Timesfolk began promiscuously inserting first-person-singular pronouns and attitudes into their copy. I'm not sure what it would have been like for him to cut loose in Beliefs, but I suspect the results would not have been all that different from what we got.

The column had something of the Father Mulcahy about it--a diffident voice of faith, self-conscious amidst the secular hurley-burley, but able to rise to the occasion when needed. It was always decent, humane, free of cheap shots, prepared to give the devil his due. And laced with a wit so dry that it took a double-take to register.

While Steinfels' inner contemplative led him to resist the pressure to comment on the important religion news of the moment, sooner or later he'd get around to it--especially when it concerned his fellow Catholics. You always wanted to know what he had to say. As an arbiter of the passing religious scene, Beliefs was without peer. I'll miss it.

As an old newspaperman, I tend to bristle at the conventional charge that this or that sensationalist story was put out there "to sell papers." Since World War II, virtually all American newspapers have been sold by subscription and delivered to homes. No single story can bump circulation, except perhaps in New York City, where there are still enough news stands on corners to make a difference. The same, however, cannot be said for mass market magazines, which do get a significant portion of their sales off the rack. For them, a sexy cover story matters.

Which brings me to "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?", Hanna Rosin's cover story in last month's issue of the Atlantic. Wherein the venerable periodical suggests that the Prosperity Gospel, purveyed from some of the biggest pulpits in the land, led people of modest means to buy homes they couldn't afford--naming it, claiming it, and sending the economy into free fall because of it. Serving up the title as a question is, however, an old journalistic dodge, hinting to those who know how to take a hint that you don't really have the goods. The most famous example of this on the religion beat is Time's notorious Easter 1966 cover, "Is God Dead?" In both cases, the actual answer is: "Some people think maybe."

The verdict on the Rosin article from a panel of varied religion experts over at The Immanent Frame is mostly thumbs down: The Prosperity Gospel is not equivalent to Christianity, it's not as new as Rosin pretends, American Christianity is far more compromised vis-a-vis capitalism than Rosin realizes, etc. Indeed, you hardly needed to be a devotee of the Prosperity Gospel to have contracted irrational exuberance for the pre-Crash cornucopia of American consumerism.

Yet, magazine overreaching aside, the article does offer food for thought. Hostility to the Prosperity Gospel may be the last respectable odium theologicum, but the P.G. is not without its Scriptural basis (at least if you're an Israelite), and it's big out there among the great Christian unwashed. That the doctrine made it easier for devotees to take out unaffordable real estate loans is a plausible hypothesis--made more plausible by Rosin's discovery that at least some banks purveying subprime mortgages targeted churchgoers.

The real problem with "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?" is that Rosin doesn't actually manage to come up with any Prosperity Gospeler who followed the scenario. The closest she comes is a 24-year-old Guatemalan immigrant living in a rented home.

"I want to buy a house," he confessed to me one evening this summer. It turned out his lease was almost up, and he needed to move in the fall. "Not a small one but a really huge one, a nice one. With six bedrooms and a kitchen and living room. I know, it's crazy! But nothing is impossible! God, you saved my life," he said, no longer speaking to me. "You saved my life, and now you will give me a gift. Now I'm crazy!" Last I heard, he and Garay [his pastor] were house-hunting together.

Not exactly the kind of exemplum that drives a thesis home.

So the Prosperity Gospel might have helped make the housing crisis a bit worse. I can live with that bottom line.