Controversy-laden Canadian pastor Gretta Vosper’s Christ-less Christian theology—in vogue now after the release of her new book espousing it—has met with endless mockery, but not everyone is convinced it’s a trivial matter serious believers should dismiss like a “freakshow,” as Beliefnet’s Rod Dreher calls it.

“Protestantism evolves with every generation,” laments one concerned blogger, Jesse Cone, an Orthodox. “It has already begun to morph into more subtle forms of this monstrosity. This in turn has left thoughtful Protestants with a choice—and it was this pushed me towards Orthodoxy—do I succumb to ‘popular monotheism’ or find a tradition that is stable? Is it about community or Christ?”

Vosper’s Christianity, after all, only differs from Moralistic Therapeutic Deism in terminology—meaning it’s a sort of next step (the final step?) in a progression to build up a church without “a god,” Jesus, any traditions or catechism or moral absolutes. It’s already common among American youth; 61 percent of respondents to this 2007 LifeWay Research survey said the God of the Bible is “no different from the gods or spiritual beings” of other world religions.

In an interview with Canada’s National Post, David Giuliano, who heads up Vosper’s United Church of Canada, considered Canada’s most liberal mainline denomination, said if he were her, he would’ve left the ministry. Predictably, though, he told the paper “it is not his job to condemn,” adding the church “is structured in such a way that complaints have to come from the congregation.” So far, no congregant has complained. (Giuliano did make sure the Post understood he thought the word “Christian”—one that “carries the baggage of colonialism and other ills”—should “probably be phased out” in favor of “Follower of the Way” or “Follower of Jesus.”)

Defending her pro-church stance, Vosper says sticking with one “is extremely important because it can be a transformative element in individuals’ lives and communities”—a role nonspecific to Christianity, played by every religion, including the Church of Oprah, the satirical term for the religious mishmash Oprah embraced after leaving Trinity United Church of Christ (yes, that Trinity) more than two decades ago.

In Vosper’s With or Without God, which was “officially launched” this week, she dismisses Jesus as a “Middle Eastern peasant with a few charismatic gifts and a great posthumous marketing team.” Vosper likewise puts zero stock in the Virgin Birth, the necessity of sacraments or creeds, the veracity of any of the miracles or—the coup de grace—that Jesus was the Son of God.

Vosper pastors West Hill United Church (Web address: simply coolplace.ca). Its tagline: “A place to find yourself.” Short of “Being the Spirit,” the church refuses to say what it believes in for fear of alienating someone. “Jesus Christ” is excised from hymns and replaced with “glorious hope.” In fact, nothing “Christian” seems to remain at all. “There is no single meaning for the word god,” Vosper writes at her blog. “In other words, what do you mean when you ask me if I believe in god? Without knowing what you mean by that word, I simply can’t answer you.”

New York ran a feature in April on the growing squabble among atheists over whether they need to bond communally in order to have the strength and clout of a “church.” Vosper’s gospel must indeed be good news to them.

Since endorsing John McCain in February, Texas megachurch pastor John Hagee has been backpedaling out of decades’ worth of anti-Catholic statements. From labeling Hurricane Katrina the “judgment of God against the city of New Orleans”—dished out because of the city’s homosexual subculture—to penning a book that explains how “the Roman Church shaped the policy of the Third Reich,” Hagee had the marks of McCain’s own Jeremiah Wright. (The McCain camp even pulled an Obama when the senator explained his relationship with the pastor: “He says that he has never been anti-Catholic, but I repudiate the words that create that impression.”)

An uproar came from Catholic League President Bill Donohue, who linked to a YouTube clip of Hagee where, equipped with an ominous pointer, he calls the Catholic Church the “Whore of Babylon.” The biggest stir, though, has come from guys like New York Times columnist Frank Rich. Running with Hagee’s pro-Israel stance, Rich scoffed that his “rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.”

But Hagee’s interview last week with Deal Hudson, director of InsideCatholic.com, may help explain for Rich and others why McCain-Hagee is not really analogous to Obama-Wright (besides the fact that the mostly areligious John “Agents of Intolerance” McCain didn’t sit in Hagee’s Cornerstone Church for 20 years listening to his sermons). Hagee categorically denied that his “Whore of Babylon” bit refers to the Catholic Church, saying in his eschatology it instead pertains to the post-Rapture Church, but he also told a personal story that Hudson said shows “another side of the man who has now become a symbol of anti-Catholicism.”

In the 1990s, Hagee bought a Catholic girls’ school—San Antonio’s first, founded in 1851—run by Ursuline sisters, who had to sell the property because they’d become too old and too few to maintain it. The sisters couldn’t reach a deal with the archdiocese, so they offered it to Hagee. Hudson says:

Hagee was then told that the delay in selling the property had meant the sisters had to draw on their retirement accounts to live. Hagee then said, “I want to buy this school by the close of business tomorrow.”

Hagee, the sisters, and their attorneys met the next morning. The Ursulines’ attorney said, “Shall we tell Reverend Hagee the real problem?” . . . The attorney for the sisters explained that the archdiocese had expected them to move out of the convent immediately after it was sold and asked what Hagee wanted the sisters to do.

“My plan would be to give them a five year lease to the convent, and I will charge them ten dollars a year. We will pay all utilities and up-keep.” Hagee then took a 50-dollar bill from his pocket and paid the lease himself. One sister looked at the attorney and said, “Let’s get this thing done.”

The following Sunday, Hagee sent his church bus to the Ursuline convent, picked up the sisters, brought them to his church, and seated them in the front row for both services (5,000 attend each service). “I thanked them publicly for their lives of sacrifice and devotion to Jesus Christ. The congregation gave them standing ovations because the campus we bought was the fruit of their labor, a testimonial of their commitment to Christ.”

Hagee let the Ursuline sisters stay in the convent for twelve years, free of any cost. “Our children hugged them,” he said. “They would reach out and grab them by the hands. They were very precious to us for what they had done with their whole lives which had been invested in building this wonderful school. We were glad to honor them as long as they walked on this earth.”

After media coverage of “pregnant man” Thomas Beatie, transsexualism seems to have suddenly emerged, deus ex machina-style, to point out a variety of flaws in conservatives’ arguments against same-sex marriage, even to offer transgender same-sex couples a potential egress into marriage like a wormhole in space.

Beatie, whose story first appeared in The Advocate, the gay national magazine, got media and bloggers talking about marriage and sex changes in early April, culminating with an ultrasound prerecorded for “Oprah.” It served as kindling for endlessly rehashing how transsexuals fit into the legal picture—specifically how the conservative argument against same-sex rights can advocate normalcy by opposing rights for societal outliers like transsexuals, but not by showing support for gay men who’ve been with the same partner for decades.

The latest addition to the growing dossier came in Sunday’s New York Times, which reported on another legal quandary wherein a New Jersey same-sex couple—a man-to-woman transsexual married (now) to another woman—is more or less de facto legal, even in a state that doesn’t recognize homosexual marriages. Denise Brunner, formerly Donald, had surgery and began taking female hormones. Denise says her legal wife, Fran, “helped me literally buy my first bra and first wig.” They say they’re more concerned now with tax returns, which they still file jointly in violation of federal law, than whether New Jersey thinks they’re married.

But the Brunners’ situation falls into a sort of a wrinkle. As the Times story noted, marriages like theirs “are rarely challenged by government agencies because more conservative states do not recognize sex changes, and more liberal ones (like New Jersey) are loath to seem hostile to transsexuals.”

For liberals, it’s the exception that proves the rule. That is, the “world hasn’t fallen apart because New Jersey has a same-sex marriage,” as Denise Brunner told the Times. Or, to quote the impartial Times itself: The Brunners “offer themselves as Exhibit A on how the nation’s dizzying patchwork of marriage laws, which include the domestic partnerships of California and other states, may be out of step with people’s lives.”

Advocates of the rights of the growing number of couples like the Brunners (many of whom disputed the claim that the Brunners are even New Jersey’s first same-sex married couple, assuming others have likely also circumvented the law via this transgender loophole), argue that transsexuals are just a few snips and cuts south (to simplify and euphemize) from others on the plastic surgery spectrum, like biannual Botox injectees.

Also, transsexualism is a final frontier of sorts for same-sex rights. It’s uncharted territory. Even legal pros have a hard time teasing sense out of the convoluted web of states’ transgender law intersections. In its story on the Brunners, the Times mentions a 2000 wrongful death case appealed to the Supreme Court by lawyers for a Texas male-to-female transsexual named Christie Lee Littleton (the wrongful death was her husband’s, though the state annulled their marriage).

Attorneys painted this picture if she were to travel from Texas to New Jersey: “Mrs. Littleton, while in San Antonio, Texas, is a male and has a void marriage; as she travels to Houston, Texas, and enters federal property, she is female and a widow; upon traveling to Kentucky she is female and a widow; but, upon entering Ohio, she is once again male and prohibited from marriage; entering Connecticut, she is again female and may marry; if her travel takes her north to Vermont, she is male and may marry a female; if instead she travels south to New Jersey, she may marry a male”—in all, what both sides of the debate probably consider a lose-lose situation.

The Supreme Court refused to take her case, as it has all other cases involving transgender appellants, but the court of Oprah has not. In addition to Beatie’s appearance, the Brunners were also on her show in October.

Beware, President Bush: Cindy Sheehan, your most famous citizen caviler—the matriarch of “Camp Casey,” that onetime pup-tented protesters’ Hooverville at the gate to your Crawford ranch—has filed papers to run against House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi in November. And if she wins, she says she’s coming for you. She’s promising: “I guarantee he’ll know I’m there.”

Having long talked up her intent to challenge the Democrats’ highest-ranking member of Congress, Sheehan was at San Francisco City Hall on Friday to make it official. She got forms she’ll need to fill with 10,198 signatories to run as an Independent challenger in November. She needs all 10,198 by Aug. 8 to make it onto the ballot.

Sheehan began her antiwar crusade in 2004 after the death of her son, an Army specialist, in Iraq, but it soon metastasized into a crusade against everything Bush, including of late stints overseas in Egypt protesting the trials of Muslim Brotherhood members charged with terrorism—an act even fellow liberals criticized as out of her element and over the top.

For her part, Sheehan is straightforward about why she’s running against Pelosi: The speaker unequivocally tabled the articles of impeachment against Bush that Sheehan wants introduced, mostly on account of the war. Because of this, Sheehan says she’s got a chance; granted, she still recognizes it’s an uphill battle. The San Francisco Chronicle reported that she’s raised $100,000 so far, most of it from donors outside her district. (Not much, admittedly, since she’s been talking of challenging Pelosi since last summer.) “If she becomes a recognized candidate,” the Chronicle story said, “she’ll be challenging one of the best-known and most powerful Democrats in the country in Pelosi, a 10-term incumbent who routinely collects around 80 percent of the vote” in her district.

Sheehan had been on a yearlong “break” from politics, but says she came back in after Bush’s commutation of White House aide Scooter Libby’s prison sentence in July—a final straw of sorts, convincing her “that seeing George Bush impeached would be a victory for humanity.” (An odd campaign platform, since, in the unlikely event that she unseats Pelosi, she will be in office barely two weeks at most before Bush leaves.)

Others doubt the sincerity of other parts of her campaign. She told the Chronicle that she’ll “represent everyone in San Francisco, not just the corporate elite”—which struck critics as a promise to represent everyone but the corporate elite—then added: “I’m working class, my family was working class, and we have struggled the same way our neighbors here in San Francisco have struggled.”

Of course, there’s some truth to her claim that voters might be disillusioned with Pelosi. Pelosi leads a Congress that has abysmal approval ratings of slightly better than 20 percent. Her district is overwhelmingly left-leaning and sympathetic to ideas like impeachment (even if that would be impossible by January 2009). Plus Pelosi, neutral in the Clinton-Obama race, has found herself in the hot seat lately because of her have-it-both-ways stance on the role of superdelegates, as well as a more ignominious incident where she appears to have “quoted” a passage from Isaiah (one she’s in fact used verbatim for years) that doesn’t exist to encourage the celebration of Earth Day.

The Bush administration has floated an inter-agency memo putting the kibosh on words like “jihadist,” “mujahedeen” and “Islamofascist” to officially describe Muslim terrorists, fearing, The Associated Press reports, those words “may actually boost support for radicals among Arab and Muslim audiences by giving them a veneer of religious credibility or by causing offense to moderates.”

“Never use the terms ‘jihadist’ or ‘mujahedeen’ in conversation to describe the terrorists,” the memo reads. Using them to describe terrorists “unintentionally legitimizes their actions.” Instead, “Use the terms ‘violent extremist’ or ‘terrorist.’ Both are widely understood terms that define our enemies appropriately and simultaneously deny them any level of legitimacy.”

The AP got a copy of the memo, which was rumored to be circulating through the Bush administration, and explained that the administration prepared it in March under the auspices of the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department approved it for diplomatic use earlier this week. The plan is to distribute it to all U.S. embassies.

The memo aims to control officials, loose-lipped or otherwise, who address terrorism publicly, like those in embassies. A bit patronizingly (and debatably), the memo says that while Americans may understand “jihad” to mean “holy war,” it is, in fact, a broader Islamic concept of the struggle to do what’s good. So it urges officials, “don’t take the bait” when addressing, say, statements by Osama bin Laden. Officials should “offer only minimal, if any, response to their messages,” it adds, because “[w]hen we respond loudly, we raise their prestige in the Muslim world.”

Conservative critics, not surprisingly, are calling this a retreat in the war on the War on Terror’s phraseology—an inane back-and-forth that has erupted anew almost every time terrorists or their activities have been publicly described. President George Bush took repeated heat for his persistent use of descriptors like “Islamofascist” for groups like al Qaeda. His administration has since tweaked the wording for the War on Terror (which theretofore may or may not have included the modifier “Global”). Officials recast it as the Global Struggle Against Violent Extremism in 2005, then even more euphemistically essayed the “long war” (in Bush’s 2006 State of the Union).

Concerning America’s partners in the “war,” Britain long ago rejected referring to a “War on Terror” and now even employs the strange contradiction in terms “anti-Muslim activity” to refer to terrorist activities carried out by . . . Muslims terrorists. “Security officials believe that directly linking terrorism to Islam is inflammatory, and risks alienating mainstream Muslim opinion,” England’s Daily Mail explained in January when this new strategy was announced. (Though Gordon Brown’s move, coming under heightened scrutiny ironically in light of news that England has foiled 15 terror plots since 2000, to hold terrorist suspects for more than the allowed 28 days without charge has been angrily denounced as Bush-esque.)

John McCain, meanwhile, received an angry missive last week from the Islamic Society of North America (previously an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation trial) that demanded the senator stop describing terrorists as “Islamic” and opt instead for a “word that is more acceptable to the Muslim community.” The suggested alternative: “criminal.” McCain’s staff says he’ll just stick with “Islamic.”

Using the empathetic backdrop of Earth Day, the Department of Transportation yesterday rolled out new car and truck fuel efficiency standards that it says will draw down America’s foreign oil dependence and carbon footprint. But they could also draw blood from already-wounded American auto manufacturers.

The proposed standard—which “improves” upon the one already passed by Congress in December’s Energy Independence and Security Act, of you-must-fade-out-incandescent-light-bulbs fame—would bump up the corporate average fuel economy, or CAFE, from 27.5 mpg to 35.7 mpg by 2015 for cars and from 23.5 mpg to 28.6 mpg by 2015 for trucks. (Congress nonetheless has to approve these changes, which incidentally still allow, as the current system does, manufacturers to pay a penalty for vehicles that don’t confirm to CAFE standards or to accumulate and apply credits to offset them.)

“All told, the proposal will save nearly 55 billion gallons of fuel and a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions estimated at 521 million metric tons,” Transportation Secretary Mary Peters said in a statement. “The plan will save America’s drivers over $100 billion in fuel costs over the lifetime of the vehicles covered by the rule.”

Wall Street Journal business columnist Holman Jenkins isn’t convinced and calls it an “Earth Day hoax” that only suckers would think “amounts to a hill of biofuel soybeans.” Given the complexity of anything that must snake its way past Congress, as any new CAFE standards must by 2009, and given the recurrent fight this has reawakened over who actually has authority to set fuel efficiency standards, it isn’t likely to amount to anything before the current administration leaves, at least.

Critics argue its effects would be disastrous on the manufacturers. “On average, engine efficiencies have advanced by 1.5 percent per year for the last 20 years, with most of that gain going to size and horsepower—as demanded by consumers,” writes Henry Payne at National Review’s Planet Gore blog. “As a result, fuel mileage averages have been flat.” He argues that the industry, by executive-department fiat, would be forced to prize fuel efficiency over the customer. And in order to meet federal standards by 2015, Payne adds, “automakers will have to increase engine efficiencies by 4.6 percent per year”—effectively tripling manufacturers’ current gains at an additional cost of $2,500 to $8,000 per vehicle. (The government’s unsurprisingly more conservative guess is about $1,000, though, as Payne point out, Toyota’s TV ads trumpeting the fuel efficiency of its smallest non-hybrid—the Corolla, which gets only 30.5 mpg—pretty well encapsulates the challenge the mandate presents.)

The refrain is becoming familiar: As more Americans take up the banner of environmental sustainability, the more problematic and double-edged proposed solutions turn out to be, especially in the arena of fuels. Yesterday, ironically, the average price of gas broke $3.50 per gallon, and oil pushed past $120 per barrel. Consequently, 2008 could be the first year since 1991 to record a drop in gas consumption—in some respects, good news—but also leading presidential candidates to contradict themselves by “prattl[ing] on about the need to fight global warming while also complaining about the high price of gasoline,” ex-Reason editor Virginia Postrel writes. The candidates, she says, treat CO2 emissions “as a social issue like gay marriage, with no economic ramifications. In the real world . . . reducing carbon dioxide emissions means consuming less energy and that means raising prices a lot, either directly with a tax or indirectly with a cap-and-trade permitting system.”

The New York Times is again deflecting charges of gunning for the Bush administration after it dedicated some 7,800 words yesterday to how the Pentagon runs a “media Trojan horse.” Inside the would-be horse, the story lays out, are retired military officers who have been fed and stand ready to parrot deceitful or too-optimistic analyses of the wars in Iraq and on terror.

“To the public,” the story reads ominously, “these men are members of a familiar fraternity, presented tens of thousands of times on television and radio as ‘military analysts.’” Yet “[h]idden behind that appearance of objectivity” is “a Pentagon information apparatus” used “to generate favorable news coverage of the administration’s wartime performance.”

The Times’s critics have dismissed it as trumped-up non-news, analogizing the reportage to what happens when, having embarked on a bear hunt, you return with a squirrel. “The Times thought it was on to something very big, ended up with something very small, and then took what little they had and tried to make a silk purse from the sow’s ear,” writes John Podhoretz. He says the honest thing to do would have been to kill the piece, but investigative journalism is too cost-prohibitive, as well as labor- and time-intensive, to admit, “You know what? This just didn’t pan out.”

Assembled from 8,000 pages of Defense Department e-mails and internal documents that the Times sued to obtain, the story is nonetheless more bad news for an administration many Americans already distrust (and that brought them Armstrong Williams and Maggie Gallagher). Liberals have reacted to the “apparatus” like it is an unheard-of Orwellian fiasco. Editor & Publisher’s Greg Mitchell laments how pro-war talking points were foisted onto “unsuspecting viewers.” Conservatives like Max Boot, meanwhile, have said it’s “part and parcel of the daily grind of Washington journalism in which the Times is, of course, a leading participant.”

The Times story waxes conspiratorial, explaining that analysts, whose titles author David Barstow wraps in quotes, are “in sync with the administration’s neoconservative brain trust.” (Though it’s true former Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t emerge from the piece unscathed.) But the murkiest ties are probably those between the on-air analysts and the private defense contractors they work for—contractors that neither news organizations as varied as CNN and even the Times, assuming they knew of them to begin with, nor the analysts themselves disclosed.

Among critics’ other points is that it’s probably silly, given the pro-Pentagon inclinations, typically right-of-center ideologies and Establishment loyalties upper-echelon generals hold, to expect any analyst with that background not to shill for these policies, even be chummy with the Pentagon. (Chances are, he helped shape what he’s asked to analyze.) Does the Times expect “neutrality,” they ask, when it talks to former Bush administration officials about the Bush administration? Would it shock reporters to discover other media commentators and pundits regularly consult with or are even advised by government or industry insiders?

Michael Goldfarb, editor of the magazine infamously at the epicenter of neoconservatism, The Weekly Standard, argues it probably wouldn’t shock many Americas: “The charge is a lack of transparency, and it rests on the assumption that Americans are too stupid to surmise the likely ideological and institutional biases of a former general. . . . Of course, Americans are not so stupid, and I suspect most will appreciate the irony of the New York Times judging retired military officers as insufficiently objective in their analysis of the war in Iraq.”

A Yale art major got slathered with bucketfuls of scorn yesterday after The Yale Daily News reported that the subject of her senior project was “miscarriages”—self-induced and videotaped, as they occurred. In her bathtub. Then exhibited in an installation piece, scheduled to debut next Tuesday, where a cube would be wrapped in plastic sheets lined with blood from the miscarriages, which she induced by “legal and herbal” abortifacients after artificially inseminating herself. Onto the cube, footage of the miscarriages would be looped.

Aliza Shvarts coyly summed up her project’s purpose for the News as “a private and personal endeavor, but also a transparent one for the most part.” Smelling a publicity stunt, no one really bought that line, though, including pro-choicers, one of whom even called Shvarts a “self-aggrandizing fool” bent on “throw[ing] the pro-choice movement under the bus.” Shvarts assured the paper she wasn’t going for “shock value.”

As it turns out, that’s all she was going for: Outraged callers, playing their part, hounded the university all day about Shvarts’s project. Many dubious reporters, meanwhile, questioned its veracity, and the News’s reporting of it—namely, the ability to induce as many miscarriages as possible over a nine-month period (chosen for its symbolism) and know they were, for a fact, miscarriages while not suffering other medical maladies or feeling the need to consult a doctor. Yale’s Office of Public Affairs eventually released a statement by day’s end explaining that Shvarts worked in the medium of “performance art,” acknowledging that “[h]ad these acts been real, they would have violated basic ethical standards and raised serious mental and physical health concerns.”

Before this gotcha, debate ensued everywhere on the Right about whether pro-lifers should deny her “the satisfaction of the publicity she craves,” in the words of The Atlantic’s Ross Douthat. His reckoning was no, defending it, and its prominent treatment on blogs and even The Drudge Report, as “too helpful to the pro-life cause to be ignored.” Others argued it didn’t matter: Real or hoax, either belied serious problems of its own. Many argued the faculty members responsible for approving the project should be sent packing. Some used the issue to probe pro-choicers who said they were disturbed at what they characterized as a wanton plea for publicity to explain why, if they do believe fetuses aren’t humans, there should be any outrage at all. Criticism was heaped on the campus pro-life group for not taking an official position.

Yale, for its part, called the projective “a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.”

UPDATE: The Yale Daily News has reported that Shvarts is still standing by her original story. She called the university’s statement “ultimately inaccurate” and went on to tell the paper she did “repeatedly use a needleless syringe to insert semen into herself. At the end of her menstrual cycle, she took abortifacient herbs to induce bleeding.” She screened portions of the miscarriage videos for News reporters and concluded by saying: “No one can say with 100 percent certainty that anything in the piece did or did not happen because the nature of the piece is that it did not consist of certainties.”

Except one thing is certain: At this point, her words, which seem most at ease, whatever their claim, so long as they’re stirring publicity, aren’t likely to carry much credibility.

Working to prove they aren’t out of their element when it comes to soul-searching God-talk, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton spoke at a forum Sunday night about how faith informs their politics—an area often seen as the GOP’s home turf.

John McCain, meanwhile, was nowhere to be seen. Although the left-of-center Faith in Public Life sponsored the event, critics argued that McCain’s presence would have given the Republican and Baptist megachurch member an opportunity to polish his religion bona fides with voters. He has rarely spoken about his faith on the campaign trail, and Sunday’s Democrats-only exchange underscores conservative fears that McCain’s tepid handling of religion could be part of his undoing in November. (His staffers cited a scheduling conflict.)

Obama and Clinton, who have been rigorously courting the religious vote, fielded questions from a mixed group—pastors, rabbis, imams and other religious leaders—in Pennsylvania, where voters go to the polls in the state’s critical primary on April 22 — one way, for sure, to ensure their attendance.

Most of their responses were re-jiggered stump-speech boilerplate (CNN’s transcript is available here). Both defended their support for abortion rights as ardently as their commitment to justice and ending poverty. But other parts were instructive for voters interested in hearing the senators talk specifics of their Christian faith. Clinton, for example, was asked by Newsweek’s Jon Meacham to explain theodicy, or why a good God allows suffering in the world—a topic that occupied C.S. Lewis for an entire book. Her semi-rambling response—to a question, in fairness, that can leave clergymen fumbling—was that “the Lord is just waiting for us to respond to his call, because this despair, this impoverishment of body and soul is what we are expected to be spending our time responding to.”

Clinton’s oddball connections to The Fellowship (Douglas Coe’s Tolkien-sounding Christian group that organizes the annual National Prayer Breakfast) have been the subject of recent acerbic Nation and Mother Jones pieces and a forthcoming book. She told the crowd she couldn’t “have made my life’s journey without being anchored in God’s grace and without having that, you know, sense of forgiveness and unconditional love.”

Asked when life begins, Clinton said, “I believe that the potential for life begins at conception,” adding it’s not just “about a potential life” but also “the other lives involved” and noting that the Methodist church (to which she belongs) “has struggled with this issue.”

Asked the same, Obama said, “This is something that I have not, I think, come to a firm resolution on. I think it’s very hard to know what that means—when life begins. Is it when a cell separates? Is it when the soul stirs? So I don’t presume to know the answer to that question.”

Obama was still trying to weather last week’s media firestorm from “bitter”-gate, where, at a closed-door fund-raiser in San Francisco, he lumped together gun ownership, xenophobia and religion as things “bitter” Americans “cling to” in order to “explain their frustrations.” At Sunday’s forum, Clinton cut him little slack. His description of middle- and working-class voters, she said, was “elitist, out of touch and frankly patronizing.” Admitting his earlier words were “clumsy,” Obama during his turn rushed to explain that, “in my own life . . . religion is a bulwark, a foundation when other things aren’t going well.”

A leaked copy of the script for Oliver Stone’s biopic of President Bush suggests the film, now called W, may be a lot less of the “fair, true portrait” he has promised.

The copy, first obtained by ABC News before Slate and Hollywood Reporter turned it into a blogosphere staple earlier this week, has been derided for its inaccurate, childish attacks on a sitting president. New York magazine jokingly asked if Stone was making a comedy, and the blog Defamer, wondering if it was an April Fool’s joke, said the script read like Animal House.

According to reports, W is an amalgam of unflattering scenes, some true—but often cherry-picked or exaggerated—and others flat-out false, with little evenhandedness or balance otherwise. The emphasis, though this is hardly shocking, appears to be on Bush as a buffoon: The (true) incident where he nearly choked to death on a pretzel; the (likely exaggerated) tale of how he cursed his dad as “Mr. F——g God Almighty” as the two nearly came to fisticuffs; the (probably invented) account of how he practiced parachuting in the White House pool and couldn’t get his chute to deploy; the potential tagline “How did an alcoholic bum become the most powerful man in the world?”

“We’ve done our homework,” producer Moritz Borman told The Hollywood Reporter in response to criticism. “W will . . . be a compelling account of the actions and motivations of this president, fully guided by facts that have been established and documented.” With insider movies like JFK and Nixon—two blockbusters—Stone, moreover, has no excuse.

Slate reports on screenwriter Stanley Weiser’s profanity-laced scenes like this one in the buildup to the Iraq invasion: “When press secretary Ari Fleischer reports that [White House veteran reporter] Helen Thomas is asking around ‘about secret plans for military actions in Iraq’ and wondering ‘what makes Saddam any different from other dictators,’ W. flips out …” (Read Slate for the rest.)

In another scene, reacting to French Prime Minister Jacques Chirac’s move to give U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq 30 more days, Bush explodes: “Thirty days! I’d like to stuff a plate of freedom fries down that slick piece of s—-’s throat!”

To test the script’s veracity, The Hollywood Reporter distributed its copy to several Bush biographers. “This notion that his schedule is driven by what’s on ESPN is ludicrous,” said Robert Draper, author of Dead Certain: The Presidency of George Bush. “It leaves you with the impression that the White House is run as a fraternity house with no reverence for hierarchy, the office itself or for the implications of policy.” Another, Peter Schweizer, author of The Bushes: Portrait of a Dynasty, told the Reporter, “If Stone wants to portray this as an accurate accounting, he has some serious work to do.”

The downside for Stone is that too many tall tales are like crying wolf: No one will believe the smattering of true stuff tossed in. At The Defamer, the authors tried to separate what’s “authentic” from what “appear[s] to be inexplicably hacky,” and already they guessed wrong on two events—one where Bush locked Colin Powell out of the Oval Office (which is true), another where he tells Billy Graham that “there’s this darkness that follows me” (which all the biographers agreed couldn’t be.) Blurring the line between these two is perhaps Stone’s ultimate aim.