Eighty evangelical leaders are signing an “Evangelical Manifesto” that rebukes both liberal and conservative evangelicals for diminishing the Gospel to fight the culture wars, becoming “‘useful idiots’ for one political party or another.” It encourages political engagement, but it says evangelicals have sometimes spoken “truth without love” and it calls on evangelicals to “reform our own behavior.”

The document is embargoed until Wednesday, so most of the discussion centers on who is involved in writing and signing the manifesto.

Warner Todd Huston calls the manifesto “another attempt by the political left to undermine the devotion of Christians to the political right,” and asks why the project “studiously excluded so many prominent conservative Christians.”

Warren Cole Smith says the document has both virtues and flaws, but he also questions the list of people who either haven’t signed or say they weren’t included in the process: Gary Bauer, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins, Focus on the Family’s James Dobson, Southern Baptist Convention’s Richard Land, Michael Farris, and Concerned Women for America’s Wendy Wright.

But FundamentaList’s Sarah Posner points out that it’s unlikely that some of the most dedicated culture warriors would want to sign a document clearly criticizing some of their tactics: “The list of names Smith claims were excluded represents the generals who issue the orders to the foot soldiers in the religious right’s politicized culture war.”

The list of participants isn’t easily boxed, either. Rick Warren is a Southern Baptist pastor who is hard to categorize politically. For instance, some religious right leaders criticized him for inviting Barack Obama to speak at his church’s annual AIDS conference, but Democrats criticized him for inviting four Republicans and only one Democrat to speak at the same conference.

Several others – at least the few whose names are public — aren’t primarily political figures. Os Guinness is an academic and author. So are Richard Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, and Timothy George, founding dean of Beeson Divinity School.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 101 Comments »

“Then the other disciple, who had reached the tomb first, also went in, and he saw and believed” (John 20:6-9).

If you skimmed that verse quickly you missed the great philosophical debate of the next two thousand years of Western civilization: what constitutes “evidence”?

Let’s have an instant replay of the scene: It’s dawn and two men are racing. John outruns Peter (perhaps he is younger) and reaches the crypt first; he does not enter. Peter arrives second and, being Peter, barges in. He takes in the following brute data at a glance: linen cloths lying; Jesus’ head-covering apart from the linens, folded up. No body. (A reporter would have scribbled notes, perhaps looked for signs of struggle, foul play, forced entry.)

John crossed the threshold second. We are told he “also went in, and saw and believed.”

You might think, “Wait! Wait! John is skipping too many steps! What about this possibility, and that possibility?” And you proffer a dozen theories to explain the missing corpse, and each generation after you generates a dozen more.

When I was on the threshold of becoming a Christian, in the early 70s, pestering Christians with objection after objection, a patient man named John finally said calmly: “You know, Andrée, there comes a point where you have to stop accumulating evidence and decide.”

Of making many books there is no end. In the final analysis, there is this: the linen cloth neatly folded, the empty tomb, and your choice.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The World | 91 Comments »

In his now infamous remarks at the National Press Club, Rev. Jeremiah Wright said to applause from black leaders, “This most recent attack on the black church is not an attack on Jeremiah Wright; it is an attack on the black church.”

He went on to say, “It is our hope that this just might mean that the reality of the African-American church will no longer be invisible. …. Maybe that religious tradition will be understood, celebrated, and even embraced by a nation that seems not to have noticed why 11 o’clock on Sunday morning has been called the most segregated hour in America.”

He was right about a few things: American churches are still segregated and until now, many white Christians were ignorant of black liberation theology. But just how mainstream are Wright’s views?

In the Globe and Mail, Michael Valpy says Americans are finally realizing the scope of black liberation theology, calling Wright “not a radical kook but a mainstream voice” and adding, “There are a lot of Jeremiah Wrights across their land.”

Other accounts paint a more complicated picture. God-o-Meter and The New Republic note that Wright’s church is more liberal and socially progressive than many black churches. NPR quotes another Church of Christ pastor in agreement with Wright: “”It is an attack on the black church — to muzzle us to silence the preaching and the power of that form of teaching and preaching and action in the world.”

But a Pentecostal pastor disagrees: “Jeremiah Wright is not mainstream. … He doesn’t represent the majority. … My guess is maybe 25 percent of black pastors may hold that view.” Another pastor told Bloomberg.com that Wright’s comments “were just totally ridiculous and do not reflect mainstream thought in the African-American community.” A Chicago pastor said Wright has done good in the Chicago community, but he’s a “very militant minister” who “took advantage of the big stage.”

The Associated Press finds pastors divided between their admiration of Obama and Wright and their disapproval of the way they handled the disagreement. The New York Times says parishioners are less likely to defend Wright than their pastors. Bloomberg.com quotes one of Wright’s ex-parishioners saying he partly agrees with Wright, but that Wright doesn’t represent the black church: “I feel like he’s trying to be a spokesperson for the black Christians, but we don’t want different races to look at us through Jeremiah Wright.”

Posted in Campaign 2008, Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 28 Comments »

Brandon O’Brien’s Christianity Today column, “A Jesus for Real Men,” is an unfortunate example of opinion offered from cursory knowledge. A little bit of religious history is a dangerous thing. In fact, the overall consensus of O’Brien’s disserts is that he misses the point and innacurately caricatures and revises John Eldredge, Mark Driscoll, David Murrow.

I completely agree. O’Brien’s named “masculinity movement” has been the subject of much conversation over the past 25 years or so because a dying church in America is witnessing the fruit of radical feminism and the warehousing of generations of passive or abusive men.

Here’s recent data from David Murrow:

The typical U.S. Congregation draws an adult crowd that’s 61% female, 39% male. As many as 90 percent of the boys raised in the church will abandon it by their 20th birthday. On any given Sunday there are 13 million more adult women than men in America’s churches. This Sunday almost 25 percent of married, churchgoing women will worship without their husbands. Midweek activities often draw 70 to 80 percent female participants. The majority of church employees are women (except for ordained clergy, who are overwhelmingly male). [Many only return when their girlfriends or wives bring them back.] More than 90 percent of American men believe in God, and 5 out of 6 call themselves Christians. But only 2 out of 6 attend church on a given Sunday. The average man accepts the reality of Jesus Christ, but fails to see any value in going to church.

We must wrestle with the fact that men have checked out of church-life in America.

Leon Podles provides a historical narrative of the masculinity crisis in The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity. Historian Anne Braude’s essay “Women’s History Is Religious History,” in the book Retelling U.S. Religious History readily admits that for quite some time Christianity has been, and continues to be, primarily oriented around meeting the needs of women and their children. Men are not around because American church does not connect.

However, O’Brien, doesn’t get it. The men he critiques are not trying to “re-masculate Jesus,” introduce “greater testosterone” into the church, or use natural instincts to define masculinity. Those are ridiculous assertions. They are addressing the fact that the average man in America simply does not connect with narrow image of Jesus presented in most churches today. The average man doesn’t feel like he fits into the overall ethos of church life since it has been, for far too long, almost exclusively oriented away from bringing men into a broader view of kingdom mission in ways that are unique to callings God has placed on men as they bear the image of God. Moreover, many of the men that do fit into churches organized primarily to meet the needs of women and their children are not the types of men that others look to follow.

O’Brien’s biblical theology is so bad that I’ll have to deal with it elsewhere but his claim that the only time Jesus appears as warrior are his “pre-incarnate” and “post-resurrection” debuts has no biblical warrant and largely misses the reality of spiritual warfare during Jesus life and ministry. Casting out demons is not spiritual warfare? The Kingdom needs warriors who are allied with God to fight against “principalities and powers.” Was Jesus not fighting the devil during his ministry?

Overall, O’Brien wrongly prejudices men against being challenged in good ways because of his own misunderstanding of church history, the reality of the church in America, and a biblical theology that may suffer from a lack of exegetical depth. If O’Brien “got it” a more accurate title to his unuanced opinion would be “The Bible’s Jesus for the Regular Guy.”

If O’Brien knows very little about the writings and teachings of the men he critiques, argues against a straw man, and mishandles biblical theology why should we take him seriously? This would be equivalent an accountant critiquing the Navy’s assessment of what makes a man a good Navy seal.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, Odds & Ends | 53 Comments »

The pleasures of the less than rich are visible only to those in that number. This is not because these pleasures are illusory but because there is a certain capacity that the poor develop that the wealthy had no need to.

Instead of the health spa, I can walk. Instead of restaurants, I cook well. I don’t buy expensive processed food, and the unexpected by-product has been the extinction of a taste for it, and the evolution of a love of fresh fruit. I remember hitchhiking through Ireland 35 years ago with nothing but an apple for the day. How I nursed it, fondled it, anticipated it, and, when the time came, savored it.

When my son was in prison, he wrote me a letter relating this incident: They were all playing volley ball in the exercise yard. Suddenly a hawk was spotted gliding overhead. Everyone stopped in his tracks and just looked at that hawk. Finally someone broke the silence and said what everyone was thinking: “I wish I was that hawk.”

Beauty is free. And it is visible in the smallest nooks and crannies. Here is the secret I learned: The less you have, the more tuned in you become to everything beautiful around you — that hawk overhead, the peculiar slant of sun during your morning and evening walk, a lovely song wafting in from somebody’s radio.

I find I don’t have to hold the mortgage on a sumptuous estate to pass by and enjoy it. These all belong to my Father anyway, and to his children who are seen “as having nothing, yet possessing everything” (2 Corinthians 6:10).

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, Odds & Ends | 48 Comments »

Despite the fact that Obama says he wants his campaign to transcend race, exit polls and election anecdotes seem to reveal another shameful truth: Some people aren’t going to vote for a black candidate, and others are going to put up vocal, overt and racist opposition.

Andrew Sullivan says, “I think all of us who once dismissed the fashionable view around the world that a black man would have a real problem becoming an American president have had a learning experience these past few weeks. … You have to be blind not to see the impact of race.”

In Pennsylvania, the Obama campaign dealt with vandalism and volunteers faced racial slurs. The North Carolina GOP party ran an ad John McCain denounced and the New York Times condemned as “a clear bid to stir bigotry in a Southern state.” Pennsylvania exit polls showed the usual racial rift: Clinton won white voters – the older the voter group, the greater the margin – while Obama won 85 percent of the black vote.

An April AP-Yahoo poll found that 8 percent of white voters would be uncomfortable voting for a black candidate, but given people’s reluctance to admit racism the number is probably higher. A prominent Republican told Politico’s Roger Simon that if Obama faces John McCain, the racist vote is worth 15 percent to McCain.

If McCain is getting the racist vote in November, is Hillary Clinton getting it now? Obama campaign manager David Plouffe told Talking Points Memo that race-based voters are “probably firmly in John McCain’s camp anyway.” But in Pennsylvania, about one in five said the candidate’s race was among the top deciding factors, and white voters who cited race supported Clinton over Obama three to one.

The racial tension is spilling over into party politics. The Washington Post leads today with a story about Democrats fearing a racial divide within the party. After Bill Clinton accused the Obama camp of playing the race card on him, House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn called Clinton’s behavior “bizarre” and accused the Clinton campaign of marginalizing black voters and creating racial divides within the Democratic party.

On The Corner, Victor Davis Hanson says, “Much of the tragedy of the Obama campaign is how ever so steadily, incrementally its theme has devolved into a racialist message.” The question is whether or not this racialism was always present in Obama’s campaign, as Hanson suggests, or due to a still racially charged political climate.

Posted in Campaign 2008, Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 71 Comments »

A friend from church hosts a women’s Bible study in her home every week, and makes an effort to invite women from outside her immediate circle of friends. One of these women, after attending a few meetings, came to her, troubled. “Are you saying,” she asked, “that Jesus is the only way to get into Heaven?” The poor woman felt that in this stricture the Lord was being a bit exclusionary. What about well-meaning Buddhists and kind-hearted Muslims?

This woman is a member of a large and well-known Christian denomination, which in recent years has taken to marketing itself as the church with open doors and minds. Thinking it still adhered to the Nicene Creed, however, my friend urged the woman to ask her pastor if she wanted confirmation of this basic tenet.

The woman met with her pastor, and came away with the impression that yes, Heaven’s doors are wide and accommodating. This Jesus thing is all well and good, but what really matters is the love in your heart/how much you give back/[insert inoffensive pop psychological aphorism here].

So the woman stopped attending the Bible study. Apparently her open mind can handle anything but closed mindedness. There’s no telling what her pastor actually said to her. At the very least, we can surmise that his teaching ability is less than adequate. I’m sure it has a pleasant tickle, though.

I find, when I think about some muddle-headedness like this long enough, that I am frequently just as guilty of it. So I began to sum up all the ways I put conditions on God, just as this woman did. Don’t ask me to do that, Lord. Please don’t expect me to believe this. Let’s be reasonable.

But the shaper of the earth, the whisperer amidst the storm, the redeemer of fools and bull-headed sinners is anything but reasonable, it seems, at least by my standards. If it were all just a hoax, it would seem that the fashioners of this religion would have done a bit to smooth down its rough edges. But it seems the early church fathers did precisely the opposite, with all this talk of bodily resurrection and a divine trinity and other such unreasonable notions.

I suppose we’ve left it to their weak-willed and marketing-minded inheritors to make it all more palatable, lest we run anyone off, as if their belief were up to us in the first place.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, Odds & Ends | 90 Comments »

Religiously-minded voters turned out to vote in Pennsylvania yesterday. According to exit polls, 36 percent of voters said they attend church weekly, 45 percent said they attend occasionally, and 17 percent said they never attended at all. Of all these groups, only the last went for Obama over Clinton, prompting God-o-Meter to observe that Barack Obama has a secular base.

Despite campaigning with Catholic Sen. Bob Casey, forming a Catholic National Advisory Council and hiring a full-time Catholic outreach director, Obama got stomped in the Catholic vote – 37 percent of Pennsylvania voters and a key swing group that helped George W. Bush win the White House.

Clinton took 69 percent of the Catholic vote to Obama’s 31 percent. Among the more devout (the 18 percent who attended Mass weekly), she took almost three-fourths of the vote. Among those who attend less often, she still got 65 percent to Obama’s 35 percent.

Exit polls also showed Clinton doing better than Obama among white Catholics if matched against McCain. Eighty-two percent of white Catholics said they’d pick Clinton over McCain, and only 59 percent said the same of Obama. Twenty-one percent said they’d go for McCain over Obama, and 17 percent said they wouldn’t vote at all.

The news may not be quite as bad as it looks for Obama, however. Obama didn’t fare as badly among Protestants, neatly splitting the votes of Protestant weekly church attenders. Daily Kos also notes that Obama has made slight improvements since Ohio, raising his percentage of Protestant votes from 36 percent in Ohio to 53 percent in Pennsylvania. Clinton also won 40 percent of the white Catholic vote in Ohio and less (33 percent) in Pennsylvania. Overall, Obama and Clinton are virtually tied for the Catholic vote in a general election.

And religion isn’t a voter’s sole motivating factor. On the Wall Street Journal’s Political Perceptions blog, Steve Waldman said it’s possible that Obama’s problem with white Catholics is really “just a problem with white, working-class seniors, who in Pennsylvania happened to be Catholic.” George Marlin touched on this when he told Human Event’s John Gizzi that aging, blue-collar, white Catholics mistrust Obama as a “Yuppie liberal.”

Christopher Hitchens adds his biting analysis to theirs:

The apparent front-runner has a lot of work to do before he can count on the support of the old-fashioned households who care about guns, values, churches and other keywords and code words that Mrs Clinton can exploit with more conviction than he can.

Posted in Campaign 2008, Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 11 Comments »

Last time I wrote about how my pastor referenced in a sermon the subtitle to Gary Thomas’s book, Sacred Marriage: What if God Designed Marriage to Make Us Holy More Than to Make Us Happy? My pastor saw a connection to Christianity in general, and I think he’s on to something.

It does seem that many people view religions as ice cream flavors, and we the grubby children clutching our dollars and trying to decide which best suits our tastes. Many of us have an expectation that religion exists, like antibiotics and air conditioning, to make our lives more comfortable. This is certainly how social scientists write about it, with their analytical and precisely wrong-headed treatises on man’s religious impulses. Even neuroscientists get in on the act, trying to identify the part of the brain that is pleasantly stimulated when a person “practices spirituality.”

In that worldview, it is only the logic-wedded atheist who refuses the tonic, choosing to see the universe for what it is, an indifferent mass of elements in which by chance we have been situated. That’s a self-serving explanation of non-belief, of course, because if the atheist really does have only the here and now, the rational thing to do would be to take the tonic, and allow himself to be persuaded of a pleasant afterlife. Eating, drinking, and being merry, in other words, would logically include a self-delusion about the coming paradise.

The reason the atheist doesn’t allow this notion, however, is because even the most watered-down stories of God dethrone the Self. We are prone to fancy ourselves princes and princesses, after all. So the atheist does not bow down to God because his knees won’t bend — yet. For some this leads to a great sadness and searching, but for others it leads to self-adulation for their clarity of thought, as if the razor-sharp scientists, philosophers, and theologians of centuries past, who shaped the ideas on which even the atheist depends, were all muddle-headed fools.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to consider God as John F. Kennedy admonished us to consider our country. That’s a scary thought, to ask what we can do for God, rather than what he can do for us, because it suggests perilous paths. All this business about tending to the sheep and spreading the word tends to get one crucified, in one way or another. Isn’t there a sweeter flavor of ice cream in the freezer?

And there certainly is, there always is, because man specializes in sweet nothings. But what if Christianity really isn’t about making us happy? What if it really is about holiness? Not the self-righteous holiness practiced by those who think their Sunday suits disguise their stench, but the holiness that is separateness in spirit, combined with closeness in flesh, the famous in but not of the world that we Christians so often get completely backwards?

It’s a frightening notion, and an exhilarating one at the same time.

Posted in Editor's Choice, Front Page, The World | 35 Comments »

Although a conservative blogger once dubbed him “the most pro-abortion candidate ever,” Obama has received support from two pro-life Democratic members of Congress. Sen. Robert P. Casey Jr. and former congressman Timothy Roemer are promoting Obama to their constituents as uniquely able to “lower the temperature and foster a sense of common ground” on the issue.

As the Washington Post notes, “Obama has never supported a single measure that would curtail access to abortion — even under controversial circumstances.” According to a National Right to Life Committee voter’s guide, he has voted against parental notification laws and objected to the Supreme Court ruling against partial birth abortion.

But speaking at the Compassion Forum Sunday night, Obama said he “absolutely” thinks pro-life and pro-choice groups can find common ground. Calling abortion a “wrenching choice,” Obama seemed measured in his response, tailoring his message to resonate with pro-life voters.

Cal Thomas called Obama audacious and characterized any pro-life outreach as a “crafty political move.” But according to Jim Wallis in Christianity Today this week, the abortion debate in American as gotten “stale,” amounting to little more than a political litmus test both parties trot out in election years. Calling the push for a constitutional amendment to ban abortion “endless, and meaningless,” Wallis said he wants real solutions to reduce the abortion rate. If the Democrats will acknowledge it’s a moral tragedy, as Obama himself said at the forum, Wallis is optimistic they could deliver the much-needed change.

Frank Schaeffer suggests that despite his pro-choice position, Obama’s worldview is fundamentally pro-life because it celebrates the “intrinsic worth of each individual” and focuses on saving the planet and providing a good life for everyone. According to the argument that abortion deprives the unborn of their intrinsic worth, Schaeffer’s logic has some flaws, but it indicates a leap that some pro-lifers are willing to make.

Obama’s list of pro-life supporters isn’t necessarily an indication that people have changed their attitudes about abortion so much as their attitudes about the best way to approach the debate. Supporting an unapologetically pro-choice candidate may be taking a huge risk, but it’s a risk some pro-lifers seem willing to take – perhaps because, as Dan McCarthy notes, they think that three decades of supporting Republicans hasn’t panned out.

Posted in Campaign 2008, Editor's Choice, Front Page, The Nation | 37 Comments »