ReligionDispatches.org

I take a lot of heat for not liking the things Jim Wallis says, but I have to say in all honesty that his piece yesterday in the Huffington Post was about the most egregious thing he's published in a long, long while. It's like a primer in all the ways Wallis' approach to religion and politics is flawed. It's so textbook, in fact, that I think I'll dispense with a conventional review and just list all the howlers for you, in no particular order:

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I think I agree with RD’s own Sarah Posner that denominations should disclose their in-house lobbying activities. If they’re not doing anything wrong, they have nothing to fear from disclosure. At the very least, it lets their members know what the church is doing in their name, which strikes me as a very democratic and very Christian standard.

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Reading Candace Chellew-Hodge’s excellent piece on a newly-released study of the religious left makes me want to add a few thoughts on the subject.

It wasn’t until I read about this study that this made sense, but it’s precisely the communal faith of mainline Protestant denominations that makes me caution political observers about writing them off as irrelevant. It’s true that mainliners are a relatively small chunk of the population—about 12-15%, compared to roughly 25% each for Catholics and Evangelicals—but as the study points out, the communal ideal cuts across denominational lines to some extent. So even though a denomination like the United Church of Christ may only represent a tiny fraction of the overall population, it can still exert a disproportionate influence, because it can provide leadership to many Catholics and even a few Evangelicals.

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So the other day, I scoffed at Bart Stupak's chances for getting 40 Democratic votes to hold up health care reform over the issue of federal money for abortion. I theorized in that post that Stupak and other conservative Dems weren't so much interested in sticking to a pro-life hard line as scotching reform.

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Now that we’re getting closer to a final health-care reform bill, it’s worth asking if pro-life Democrats will carry out their monumentally irresponsible threat to bring down reform if abortion funding is included in the package.

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Who would have thought that holding a self-contradictory and incoherent position might wind up confusing people or leading them not to trust you?

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Instead of simply popping a cork over Dan Gilgoff’s latest, I’d like to offer an alternative narrative, one suggested by Adele Stan, among others.

To wit: while the new Pew poll on abortion might signal some real drift toward pro-life positions, the evidence is ambiguous. It’s just as likely that the changes Pew is picking up on stem from a simultaneous hardening of Republican opposition and slackening of concern on the Democratic side, while abortion is becoming less of an issue overall.

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I know that I previously mocked the Conservative Bible Project, which probably makes me a not-very-nice person. It’s a hard target to resist, an alluring blend of hubris, dubious principles, and non-sequiturs (since when is gambling a liberal cause?).

But though the project does indeed deserve to be mocked - it is very stupid - it also deserves a serious response.

The project, as it turns out, indulges in an error common not just to conservatives, but to liberal believers and atheists as well. Namely, these conservative ideologues seem to think that the Bible should tell them what they already know, rather than challenge their beliefs.

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Piggybacking on what Rev. Laarman had to say this morning, it’s commonly acknowledged among serious students of the modern conservative movement that one of the reasons it has been such a success is that it has managed to establish a feedback loop of sorts.

Every iteration of the movement has moved itself to the right: if Republicans do well at the polls, it’s because American voters want conservative ideas. If Republicans don’t do well—or if there’s some other failure in the movement—it’s because conservative principles weren’t truly applied. So every contingency militates a righter-than-thou stand, which results in people taking Orly Taitz seriously.

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Melissa McEwen wrote a post last week that's fairly labeled "provocative," and which I am in typical fashion just getting around to reading.

McEwen's post is long and worth reading in its entirety, so I won't excerpt from it here. The gist is that when the non-crazy Christians ask her not to lump them in with the crazy, hateful ones, it only furthers Christian privilege in our society. (The rough equivalent of distinguishing between "real" Christians and otherwise, she points out, is something like a white man saying "but the Klan aren't 'real' white people!")

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One of the unexpected pleasures of preaching from a lectionary cycle is discovering how often the texts have something to say about the events of the day. Whether through coincidence, divine guidance, or the simple ability of humans to draw connections, scripture proves amazingly relevant from week to week.

Case in point: the readings for the eighteenth Sunday after Pentecost and Roman Polanski, of all people.

Ordinarily, there wouldn’t be much to say about the arrest of the veteran filmmaker on 31-year-old charges. Though Polanski’s victim wants the original charges dismissed, the fact remains, Polanski skipped out on his bail, and has yet to face the court for that. So unless we’re going to encourage hiding in France for decades as a remedy to being sentenced to jail time, there doesn’t seem much room for comment from the pulpit here. But consider what this week’s Old Testament lesson has to tell us:

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To reiterate just for a moment the points about narrative I made the other day, when confronted with an opposing worldview, it's all well and good to make fun of it — humor can be a very useful polemical tool — but to be really effective, you have to offer more than just mockery. You have to give a meaningful alternative.

That's much easier and much more effective if you can tell a story. A classic liberal dilemma is the instinct to respond with facts and figures when conservatives offer up narratives. The progressive position is often correct on the merits but not anywhere near as persuasive as the conservative view because it fails to tap into the emotional core of the message. Anyone who's read George Lakoff understands this much.

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It had to happen sooner or later. The Religious Right has devolved into pure goofiness:

At the Values Voters Summit, the annual conference for the religious right sponsored by the Family Research Council last weekend, conservative youth activist Jason Mattera evoked the battle of David against Goliath as a metaphor for conservative college students who are “persecuted” by the big bad liberals who control academia. “David has the righteous answer,” Mattera said, “because he is taking pride in his Christian beliefs.” No matter that Mattera didn’t accurately grasp David’s biography or the biblical timeline. In conserva-land, David, a character from the Old Testament, was a Christian even before Christ was born. “Anyone who came against his God,” Mattera said, “David would take it personally.”

Umm, no. As a rule, humans aren’t usually the main characters in biblical narratives. The stories are about God and God’s power. Modern readers tend to talk about David as a plucky young lad, an Old Testament Tintin, but the actual story is pretty clear that his success stems not from his bravery, but from God’s favor bestowed upon him.

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Dan Gilgoff has a frank and rather revealing post up at his God & Country blog, responding to a piece I wrote on talk about abortion and health-care reform the other day. In answer to my question about why he didn’t bother to include the views of any religious pro-choice advocates, Dan says:

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Posts like this raise many questions. Namely: how many times will the Religious-Industrial Complex go to the same well? And: how many times will US News & World Report blogger Dan Gilgoff dutifully write up the latest iteration of this same threadbare press release for them without bothering to evaluate its premises?

Most of all, it raises the question of how monumentally irresponsible progressive activists would have to be to risk jeopardizing health-care reform by playing into right-wing talking points.

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Start with the idea of hope. S.M. Smith, summarizing the work of Jurgen Moltmann, writes:

The church is to be seen as the people of hope, experiencing hope in the God who is present in his promises. The coming kingdom gives the church a much broader vision of reality than a “merely” private vision of personal salvation. The church is to contest all the barriers that have been constructed by man for security; it challenges all structures that absolutize themselves, and all barriers erected between peoples in the name of the reality that is to come in Jesus Christ. The coming kingdom creates confronting and transforming vision for the mission of the people of God.

And Walter Brueggemann says,

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Digby wonders what it is with putatively religious folks like Gary Bauer trying to justify torture.

There’s no explaining why Bauer is such a creep. Some people are just like that. And by “that,” I mean: bloody-minded authoritarians who seem to derive an inordinate amount of pleasure in devising theoretical justifications for the suffering of others.

But while there’s no good answer for that question there is one for how it is that Bauer’s moral reasoning goes off the rails. It’s actually pretty straightforward, and Digby will no doubt be relieved that it doesn’t require theology, just some commonsense ethical reasoning.

Bauer bases his defense of torture on Just War Theory, the tradition of critical reflection on why nations go to war and how they ought to behave once they are at war. Here’s Bauer:

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Amanda Marcotte flagged this piece on "recession brides" on Twitter the other day. It does a nice job of explaining the compromises some couples have to make when they can't afford to chump out $29,000 — the average price of a wedding these days.

As a pastor, I can tell you that it's very true that prices get jacked up for weddings. Some of that is because nuptials are a damned nuisance, and trust me, Bridezilla does exist. But yes, some is due to garden variety greed.

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[Genesis 3]: Adam, Snake conclude intensive closed-door negotiations over disputed status of apple. Snake demands that the apple not be used to interfere with market ability to set wages of sin. Adam concludes that not enough votes are present to pass Guilt Free Fruit Consumption Act with proviso exempting apple tree. Adam and Snake hold joint press conference deriding the radical left tactics of Eve.

[Genesis 4]: Cain murders Abel, blames "rancorous atmosphere," "class-based politics" of Abel.

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User Ramona at TPMCafe reacts to Wednesday's health care reform conference call between Pres. Obama and religious leaders:

What struck me about this entire event — these thousands of religious leaders conferring with the president about how best to use their community to do good works — is how little we've heard from these people, as opposed to those leaders on the Religious Right who use their names and their clout to fight any attempt to rein in insurance company profits and use taxpayer funds to give aid to the many millions of Americans who suffer because of non-existent or inadequate health, or worse — because the Insurers have had the freedom to play God with their lives.

How is it that we've rewarded those hateful charlatans with fame and fortune while effectively shunning those who actually minister to real people with real problems? Maybe now that change is in the air, now that unprecedented numbers of our citizens need an unprecedented amount of help, we'll look to the real churches for real help.

Which is all very nice.

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Look, this is a good and productive thing. There is not a durned thing wrong with religious progressives working together to kick a little behind on health insurance. Kudos to the coalition for a job well done!

It's just that when Jim Wallis reassures us, "This is not a partisan political move," I have to wonder, why not?

I get where Wallis is coming from: he's not behind this plan to help Democrats, he's behind it to get uninsured people covered. Fine.

But it's not like there's this great spirit of bipartisanship at risk of being flushed down the drain here. So far, the across-the-aisle action amounts to a sum total of: Democrats propose, Republicans give a raspberry. Coming out in favor of health care reform is a partisan move in the sense that there's only one party lining up behind it.

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Two posts by wildly disparate bloggers get at more or less the same question: what is it that holds "us" together, anyway?

Stephanie Zvan asks the question in one form: how polite do atheists need to be as they advocate their positions?

The mostly-sensible answer she comes up with is that however annoying "less than polite" atheists like PZ Myers are, they serve useful functions in the social discourse on religion. For one thing, they highlight the disproportionate nature of religious perspectives on non-belief (really, is stealing a communion wafer as bad as making death threats?). For another, the not-polite allow the polite to play "good cop" in the discourse.

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I thought I perhaps was cherry-picking in my last post on Chuck Colson's idea that health-care reform would lead to government-sponsored eugenics. A couple of days later, it looks like a trend: there's Tony Perkins laying out "The bottom line is that health care rationing isn't coming — it's here. And until euthanasia is specifically prohibited in the legislation, the only thing that should be humanely killed is the plan to encourage it."

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Chuck Colson must have used his time in the federal pen for something other than working on his shanking skills and putting down riots with prayer. By now, he has almost magical writing powers, cramming a world of misleading, stupid, and just plain insulting into a mere 534 words penned for the Christian Post.

For anyone who reads the Christian Post regularly, this is about as surprising as noting the wet-making powers of water, or the disturbing character of Michael Jackson's biography.

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Let us begin this post with a word of apology to my mother, who hates it when my language gets too salty. Sorry, Ma.

And let us continue with the stipulation that there is nothing particularly wrong with this column by Newsweek's religion editor Lisa Miller.

Yes, yes, the sub-head ("The radical left versus the president") is a crock, but Miller probably didn't write that. The column itself — a consideration of the flack Pres. Obama is catching from the likes of Cornel West and Michael Lerner — is even-handed and thoughtful. Miller even manages a mild challenge of Obama in the conclusion, prodding him to take more risks in the service of his agenda.

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