Recently in Public Life Category

A few days ago, Ed Kilgore over at Beliefnet's Progressive Revival lamented that the old-time creedal beliefs no longer define the body of the faithful the way they used to. These days, a "conventionally orthodox Protestant" like himself is likely to considered a bad Christian in many conservative Protestant circles because he supports abortion rights and favors gay marriage. No doubt he's right.

This is not the first time in American history that social issues have become the dividing line among believers. Slavery split many a denomination prior to the Civil War. But in our time, the genital issues really do seem to be substituting for theological ones. As revealed in the latest Pew survey of religious exclusivity, two-thirds of Americans with a religious commitment believe that many religions can get you to heaven. That's down from three-quarters six years ago, but still shows a quite remarkable commitment to what some call universalism.

Not that the odium theologicum has entirely disappeared. Focus on the Family recently removed an interview with Mormon author Glen Beck from its website, evidently because it failed to supply the necessary warning label that Beck's faith might be dangerous to your evangelical health. And of course, prominent conservative Christians of various persuasions periodically cause a certain amount of Jewish heartburn by noting that Jews won't be going to heaven. Why in God's name the Jews should care is a question to which the only sensible answer is that the belief somehow leads to hostility or discrimination. These days, there's not much evidence of that.

The downside of the impetus towards widespread embrace of a "My Father's House Has Many Mansions" ideology," it seems to me, is that it makes it harder to differentiate the sacred from the secular spheres of life. There are real public benefits in having a robust understanding that there are certain doctrines and practices (extending beyond the means of salvation to marriage and divorce and abortion and drinking and dancing) that we have in our religious communities that are not the same as what applies in secular society. In the aftermath of 9/11, there was a ratcheting up of that sacral identity that always lurks in the background of American consciousness. This may help explain that high 2002 number for belief in the accessibility of heaven to many faiths. We can all get to heaven--providing we all obey the sacred American moral norms.

So if religious exclusivity is enjoying a bit of a comeback, that may signal a ratcheting back of Sacred America and a return to a clearer sense of church-state separation. Not a bad thing, even though it probably won't get Ed Kilgore back in the good graces of his old Southern Baptist church.

Anyone interested in the place of religion in American public life owes a thoughtful read to Paul Vitello's fine piece on pastors' web electioneering and the IRS. In the old days, what was said in church more or less stayed in church; it was a semi-private space where pastors could speak to their congregants without concern that the outside world was listening in. Stuff about truth and who gets saved and, yes, who you might could vote for that was too uncivil or impolitic to say out loud in public was OK to utter in the sanctity of your own sanctuary. And if congregants learned about it in a newsletter or other piece of church-produced literature, well, that was pretty private too.

But in an age when everyone puts just about everything on the web, the private space of churches can become mass media in a twinkling. When the sermons of a James David Manning get picked up by a Rush Limbaugh, it's not just a question of how interested the IRS should become--or of what if anything to do about the requirement that non-profits eschew politicking if they want to keep their tax exemptions. The larger question has to do with a redefined public square in which whatever is said in church is readily available to the community at large.

Over at GetReligion, Mark Stricherz has been perusing the obits for Sir John Templeton, the investment genius and philanthropist whose wallet singlehandedly (who singlewalletedly?) revived the Victorian enterprise of reconciling science and religion. Mark is upset that while a number of them note that Sir John's grantmaking drew some sharp criticism, not to say secularist contempt, no effort was made to say what exactly was wrong with it. Wrapping up his post, he writes:

Don’t get me wrong. Maybe Templeton’s awards and prizes were hokum, although I doubt it given the roster of its past winners. But these obituaries needed to explain why it was so.

By way of partial explanation, I offer this two-year-old essay on Harvard cardiologist Herbert Benson's Templeton-funded Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer in Cardiac Bypass Surgery. One can think what one wants of the study, which demonstrated that intercessory prayer has a slight negative effect on patient recovery. The essay makes clear that Sir John was, as much as anything else, a determined publicist of his intellectual passion, and not overscrupulous about the accuracy of what was being publicized. It also suggests that journalists are a good deal more susceptible to the kind of pro-religion propaganda that he underwrote than the GetReligion folks are prepared to acknowledge, dedicated as they are to the proposition that the media have a congenital tendency to shortchange religion. Perhaps it's time to give some attention to the occasions when the media get religion a little too well.

OK, by no stretch is this about religion and the campaign but I couldn't resist.

JULY 8--Lured by $1 beer and the prospect of "hot chicks" and "hardcore fights," thousands of Arkansans were duped last month into appearing as extras in comedian Sacha Baron Cohen's latest staged mayhem. Cohen and his confederates organized cage fighting programs on consecutive days in Texarkana and Fort Smith. Both cards ended with two male grapplers (one was identified as "Straight Dave" and wore camouflage) tearing each other's clothes off and, while in underwear, kissing down their opponent's chest. This man-on-man action triggered Fort Smith fans to throw chairs and beer at the ring, according to one cop present at the city's Convention Center.

You think Bruno maybe's been reading Huck Finn? As in:

Well, that night we had OUR show; but there warn't only about twelve people there -- just enough to pay expenses. And they laughed all the time, and that made the duke mad; and everybody left, anyway, before the show was over, but one boy which was asleep. So the duke said these Arkansaw lunkheads couldn't come up to Shakespeare; what they wanted was low comedy -- and maybe something ruther worse than low comedy, he reckoned. He said he could size their style. So next morning he got some big sheets of wrapping paper and some black paint, and drawed off some handbills, and stuck them up all over the village. The bills said:

AT THE COURT HOUSE!
FOR 3 NIGHTS ONLY!
The World-Renowned Tragedians
DAVID GARRICK THE YOUNGER!
AND
EDMUND KEAN THE ELDER!
Of the London and Continental
Theatres,
In their Thrilling Tragedy of
THE KING'S CAMELEOPARD,
OR
THE ROYAL NONESUCH ! ! !
Admission 50 cents.

Then at the bottom was the biggest line of all, which said:

LADIES AND CHILDREN NOT ADMITTED.

"There," says he, "if that line don't fetch them, I don't know Arkansaw!"

There'll always be an Arkansas.

Google News has asked for a comment from me on the Pew Forum's U.S. Religious Landscape Survey, so for those of you who might be interested, it is here.

Today, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life released the second installment of its Landscape Survey, this one on religious beliefs and practices. I haven't had a chance to pick through it carefully, but here are a couple of items worth noting, derived from today's conference call with the press.

First, as longtime readers of this blog may recall, the first installment of the survey caught my attention for not disclosing the proportion of Muslims turned up in this 35,000-strong interview screen, but rather using the number employed in the 2007 Pew report on Muslims in America. That number was .6 percent of the American population. In the course of the phone call, Pew Forum head Luis Lugo mentioned that the Landscape Survey turned up 116 Muslims, which amounts to only .3 percent of the survey. In response to a query from me, the Pew folks said that the adjusted number turned out to be .4 percent.

Why didn't they report that? They said they decided that their earlier estimate was better because it included questioning in Arabic, Urdu, and Farsee. I don't think this quite computes. It suggests that fully one-third of the American Muslim population can't or won't communicate in English, and given that over one-third of American Muslims are African Americans, that would mean that over half the non-black Muslim population doesn't do English. Given their high levels of education and income, this seems improbable to say the least. Maybe there's another explanation, and perhaps it's the one hinted at by Lugo, who noted in the phone call that they are "still pulling out the arrows" from the barrage they received from national Muslim organizations, which have preferred much higher numbers, after the 2007 report. Whatever the merits of the .6 percent estimate, there's no excuse for Pew not to have included a long footnote or appendix giving the actual number and explaining why they chose to go a different route. So saith I, anyway.

As for campaign-related news, the most important takeaway is that Pew is inclined to see some opening for the Democrats when it comes to evangelicals. On very first blush, the finding that members of evangelical churches only favor Republicans by 50 percent to 34 percent suggests as much. However, there are various caveats. "Evangelicals" are not here identified by how individuals answer the question "do you consider yourself a born-again or evangelical Christian," which is how most surveys identify evangelicals. So members include Latinos and African Americans, who are normally treated separately, and do not include "born-again" members of mainline Protestant denominations, who are often very Republican-leaning. At least we can hope that Pew will soon release the cross-tabs for members of those denominations by race and ethnicity. I trust John Green's nose on this one, but am eager to see the verification.

Otherwise, while the survey broadly tells us lots of things we already know (and it's always good to have what we know confirmed), there seem to be many interesting new tidbits. Intriguingly, if oddly, whole states are looked at for levels of religious intensity--i.e. (as the Hartford Courant will report tomorrow), the distinct lukewarmness of the faithful in Connecticut. Elsewhere, there's the array of views among faith traditions on whether "Religion causes more problems in society than it solves." Leading the list of those who "completely disagree" are Mormons (54 percent), followed by members of evangelical churches (50 percent), Muslims (47 percent), and members of historically black churches (45 percent). The lowest outside of the non-believing, non-belonging types are the Buddhists (12 percent), Hindus (15 percent), and Jews (18 percent). In other words, except for the evangelicals, small and/or persecuted minority groups are clustered at both ends of the spectrum. Social circumstances, historical memory, and theology vary, o ye social scientists eager for explanations based on one or two variables.

In a communication to me, reader B. DelMonico writes, "I appreciate this forum, but could I ask you to please not post comments that use the term "Papal Bull S***", or at least edit the term out. It is flat-out offensive and has no place in civil discourse." Being offensive I do not consider grounds for refusing to post comments--and anyway, one never knows what will offend whom. Ditto with sacrilege. But the comment in question is vulgar, and I'll request that those who wish to have their comments posted avoid vulgarity, which most of us recognize when, to paraphrase Justice Stewart, we see it.

Tim Russert's death has been so big a story because he was one of those fixed stars in American public life--a journalistic personality who you expected to be there, shining away, as presidents came and went. Usually those stars just grow dim, like Chronkite or Brokaw, reappearing as hosts or commentators for this or that special occasion or documentary, in a reassuring sort of way. They're not supposed to blink out permanently at the height of their powers, as Russert did.

A particularly nice tribute comes from Time's Joe Klein, who was a Russert comrade in arms for 30 years. Klein emphasizes his friend's Catholicism, stemming from the kind of postwar urban parochial school upbringing that shaped a lot more baby boomers than standard accounts of our storied generation generally recognize. And it is to the nuns who schooled Russert in Buffalo that Klein attributes what he considers his excessively censorious view of the Clintons:

Tim was boggled by Clinton, impressed and appalled by him. The only real differences we had in 30 years of friendship were over his treatment of both Clintons, which I thought was occasionally too sharp — and had its roots, I believed, in the strict lessons about sex and probity he'd learned from the nuns (which he often joked about). Our last conversation, sadly, was an argument over that.

It's true that the Irish Catholicism of Russert's youth was imbued with a Jansenist Puritanism that put its version of the faith tradition at odds with the more understanding posture towards sins of the flesh taken by the Mediterranean branches of the church. Still, this strikes me as not quite right.

Russert was the quintessential member of Washington's political-journalistic complex, which never had much use for the Clintons and recoiled in special horror and dismay at the Lewinsky and other mini- and pseudo-scandals (remember the Lincoln bedroom overnights?) that came in their train. You would think that the the insiders would have been more worldly wise, but no, they are the acolytes of the American civil religion, and for them, the Clintons were guilty of sacrilege. (If you're interested in my extended take on this, see here.)

Klein, to his credit, spent a lot more time thinking a lot more deeply about the Clintons than his Washington colleagues--see Primary Colors, book and movie--and as a result has managed to achieve a more subtle and dispassionate view. However much Russert owed his moral formation to the nuns, his anti-Clinton attitude seems to me to have been just part of the conventional belief system of his other faith, the cult of Washington.

As Saint Sabina's awaits the return of its pastor Sunday, Chicago Sun Times religion columnist Cathleen Falsani (on a brief leave to finish up a book on religion and the Coen bros.) has written a brief profile of Chicago's most notorious priest. The mot du jour for the likes of Michael Pfleger (and Jeremiah Wright) is "incendiary." What's abundantly clear, however, is that in addition to setting fires they also have built remarkable religious institutions--in Pfleger's case (according to Falsani) "one of the most vibrant parishes in the Chicago archdiocese." What I'd like to see from those who loathe characters like Pfleger and Wright (hey, Donohue!) is some small effort to wrestle with the institution-building side of their ministries. The inner-city prophet-priest is not the rarest of birds. And it's no wonder that a cautious character like the cardinal archbishop of Chicago is sufficiently appreciative of the priestly side to let Fr. Mike return after only a brief forced retreat.

I'll be in Boulder Thursday to deliver a keynote speech, "Think Locally, Act Globally," at a conference on Media, Spiritualities and Social Change" sponsored by Naropa University and the journalistic components of the University of Colorado and the University of Nevada, among others. I'll be speaking at UC's University Memorial Center at 3:30. The campaign will probably rear its head.