ReligionDispatches.org

In light of my recent Bloggingheads.tv conversation with Peter Beinart, it’s worth noting that David Brook’s latest atrocity is also a shallow recasting of the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr, except that meh, it’s not.

More

Reading the comments on my last post in re: Glenn Beck, I see quite a bit of reluctance to join my “ignore him and he’ll go away” strategy.

More

The more I think about all the pixels that have been spilt over Glenn Beck's comments on churches that preach "social justice," the more I think we've been had. (And yes, I bit, too, so that makes me equally guilty.)

For one thing, Beck's hardly the first right-winger to attack the tradition of social justice. Personally, I think charging the mainline churches with being in bed with the Sandinistas is much more creative than anything Beck has come up with.

More

This is not going to work. Glenn Beck is a highly polarizing figure, not someone who appeals to a vast audience of persuadable moderates. The kind of Christian who watches Beck for the most part does so precisely because he or she is Christian. In other words, when Beck says "run away from churches that preach social justice," he's preaching to the choir, not persuading anyone new. His viewers don't believe in social justice, never have. It's very odd that a Mormon would have that kind of ideological appeal to the normally very tribal conservative Christian set, but there you have it.

More

Practically the first thing they teach you in a Methodist seminary—between “the bathrooms are over there” and “tell me about your faith journey—is: “Don’t mess with the Martha and Mary Society.” For even in the rarefied atmosphere of the academy, they know who really runs the church. She who holds the keys to the kitchen holds the keys to the kingdom, not whatever goof in a clerical collar they put out front.

More

So Glenn Beck says:

“I beg you, look for the words “social justice” or “economic justice” on your church web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, the idea, hang on, am I advising people to leave their church… yes!… If you have a priest that is pushing social justice, go find another parish.”

More

Reconciliation is quite the buzzword these days, because Congressional Democrats are aiming to pass a health care reform passage through the mechanism of budget reconciliation, allowing them to bypass Republican filibusters in the Senate.

More

Reading a couple of posts by Digby (here and here) reminds me of a friend’s quip after seeing the results of some Congressional season back in the ’90s: “Hooray, the Capitalist Party won 534 seats!” The 535th, of course, was that of Bernie Sanders, the Socialist from Vermont.

If anything, it’s worse today. Sanders is still there, but these days the advocates for the Capitalist Party are more virulent than ever. Besides, we have Independents for Lieberman to contend with.

More

Dear Digby,

Like you, I was struck by Chris Hayes' recent piece at the Nation on the root causes of the illness afflicting American politics. Like you, I highly recommend it to anyone who wants some insight into how — and why — to change the system. And like you (I suspect) I came away from the piece feeling like Hayes had put his finger on some unfocused thoughts I had been having about our baleful estate these days.

I've been reading Peter Block's recent book Community: The Structure of Belonging. Most people will think it's a bunch of New Age leadership babble. It also has some potentially very useful insights. For example, Block reports on the work of the sociologist Robert Putnam:

[Putnam] found that community health, educational achievement, local economic strength and other measures of community well-being were dependent on the level of social capital that exists in a community.

Geography, history, great leadership, fine programs, economic advantage or any other factors that we traditionally use to explain success made a marginal difference in the health of a community. A community's well-being simply had to do with the quality of the relationships, the cohesion that exists among its citizens. He calls this social capital.

Social capital is about acting on and valuing our interdependence and sense of belonging. It is the extent to which we extend hospitality and affection to one another. If Putnam is right, to improve the common measures of community health—economy, education, health, safety, the environment—we need to create a community where each citizen has the experience of being connected to those around them and knows that their safety and success are dependent on the success of all others.

This is an important insight for our cities. If you look beneath the surface of even our finest cities and neighborhoods, there is too much suffering. It took the broken levees of Hurricane Katrina to expose to the world the poverty and fragile lives in New Orleans.

And it took an earthquake for the misery of Haiti to register on most Americans. Lord knows if the lesson will stick.

More

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:

More

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.

More

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.

More

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.

More

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.

More

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

More

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.

More

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.

More

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.

More

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!")

More

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:

More

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.

More

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.

More

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:

More

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.

More

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,

More