Progressive Christians Uniting’s

In Toyota We Trust

Thu, 25 Feb 2010 15:24:17 -0800

Posted by: Frances M. Leap in Sightings

The nearly-blanket news coverage that Toyota and its unraveling have received from all media, but especially NPR, is an indicator of much more than a slow news time, which it is not. The massive recalls seem to be a faith crisis for an entire segment of our population.
Who made up Toyota’s most loyal following? The baby boom. Why did the baby boom generation choose Toyota? That story sounds very much like a faith conversion. Our parents were solidly committed to The Major Brands. There was a lot of rivalry, but also great respect among those who pledged competing allegiances. I can remember an uncle goading my father every time something would break or even squeak on our Oldsmobile, because his Dodge was a paragon of beauty and reliability in his eyes. But I also remember the respect with which he uttered the “he was an Olds man all his life,” at my father’s early funeral. It was a sort of ecumenical cordiality.
There was absolutely no such respect or even tolerance to be given to next generation, though, when many made the choice for foreign-made vehicles. They were not merely heretics – they were infidels who had turned to the East for their faith commitment. Much of the baby boom generation seems to have driven “rice-burners” and driven the greatest generation nuts in the process.
This is probably one reason why we did it. How does a generation grow up to distinguish itself from the one that liberated Europe in their young adulthood? We longed for a moral high ground of our own and many found it in their automotive choices. We may have rejected all things conservative and traditional, but we had our own righteous moral conversions to saving gas and conserving the environment. We may not have believed very well in God, but we came to place deep trust in the skill of foreign car manufacturers.
This hyper news coverage is not about Toyota as a business; it’s about Toyota as a locus of belief and the deep shaking of a generation’s faith. Life may have been unreliable, relationships may come and go, but Toyota was forever. One friend went through three “long-term” relationships in a single car. She had parties when the long-termers moved on, but had a funeral when “Fidelio” (from the Latin for faithful) died. She went out and married another right away. Safe, sturdy, compact, we could enfold ourselves and those we loved best (at the time) into a trustworthy web of non-American engineering that identified us as committed to something, something even greater than our parents. We looked beyond xenophobia to the future of the planet.
Why this obsession with massive Toyota recalls? For Toyota to admit that they are not perfect, but will redouble their efforts for customer safety and value, is like finding out that there is no Santa, but your mother will carry on in buying your presents. You may continue to practice Christmas, but something is lost that will never return. For some, to think that Toyota knew about sticking gas pedals is akin to finding out that the bishops knew the game all along in the recent Catholic scandals – and even that did not receive as much national coverage despite the fact that nearly one quarter of America is Catholic. This is a secular breach of trust at a deep level, and so a generational consciousness seems to seek healing by processing the trauma aloud in a kind of media therapy.
The healing will come. And it may come in much the same way that it has for Catholics. Some will leave in disgust and irreparable distrust. Others will stay because it is all they have known and cannot imagine anything else. And some will heal, precisely at the moment when we see that all cars, and all institutions, are human-made. To place our trust in anything human-made is to invite ourselves to an inevitable journey of disappointment that leads either to cynicism or to wise maturity. Cars, and churches too, are important vehicles for the journey; but they can break down and betray us. Staying on the journey is what counts.

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All Saints Day: A Progressive Call to Remember

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:40:29 -0800

Posted by: Diana Butler-Bass in Beliefnet

I've often wondered why progressive Christians don't typically celebrate All Saints Day on November 1 with more enthusiasm. It is, next to Christmas and Easter, my favorite church holy day--I eagerly await reading the texts of our Christian ancestors and the communal singing, "For All the Saints," in my Episcopal church.
Earlier this year, I published a history of Christianity, A People's History of Christianity, a book focused on "saints" of the liberal and progressive tradition--people like Origen, Perpetua, Abelard and Heloise, Katarina Zell, Lazarus Spengler, Anne Askew, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Harry Emerson Fosdick, Maria Stewart, and Samuel Green. The stories told therein are about generosity and justice, about prophetic preaching and speaking truth to power.   As a result, I've spent the better part of 2009 in mainline churches and with progressive Christian groups talking about history and why history is important to both our spiritual lives and to enacting social justice.
And I've listened to many mainline Christians share their reticence about engaging history, thinking about tradition, and the stories of our saints.
Of all Christians, liberal and progressive ones have the most awkward relationship with history and tradition.  After all, liberal Christianity developed from "modernism," a way of looking at the world that privileged new ideas, philosophies, and sciences as part of God's revelation in human culture. Modernists broke with tradition. They looked to the human past and saw much wanting--superstition, violence, and repression--and willingly abandoned that past, especially the religious past, in favor of reason and enlightenment. In the nineteenth century, many Christians accepted modernism and worked to adapt their faith to the new intellectual climate. At its birth, progressive religion was the offspring of a certain sort of historical ambiguity. In the last two centuries, western Christians willingly shattered memory because the past was too painful, too oppressive, and too morbid for modern sensibilities of tolerance and equality. Better forget than remember.
The other reason that progressive Christians don't engage history as eagerly as more conservative ones is that progressives are more critical and less given to hagiography. Indeed, progressive Christians actually look for flaws in their "saints" (I once heard William Sloan Coffin make this point) instead of celebrating the contributions of the wise leaders in their community. Indeed, we will often dismiss the insights of an otherwise good leader or role model by whispering, "Well, did you know that he wasn't very open about women?" or "She was really a racist..." Over the years, we've developed a bad habit of undermining the wisdom of the past on the basis of contemporary attitudes--thus displaying a spiritually unpleasant lack of historical humility. Not a nice trait in people who claim to believe in human goodness.
On this All Saints Day, I'd like to call progressives back to history for two important reasons:
First, progressive faith takes new ideas seriously and we try to bring the best of contemporary thought into our theology and congregations. That's who we are and we will always be. But--and this is important--western societies no longer suffer from too much history. We are suffering from too little history. Two hundred years ago, it was a very good idea to step away from the past's darkness. Today, however, most people suffer from spiritual amnesia--that we have no idea what our history is, and have little idea who we are because we are disconnected from that past.   Younger generations of seekers are yearning to find their story--and to experience meaning that comes through belonging to a community that remembers.
Second, one needn't engage in uncritical ancestor worship in order to celebrate our past. Hagiography is one thing; a realistic view of history is another. In our quest for realism, we've forgotten that people may do good as well as evil. Every great leader in the history of Christianity had flaws--some had seriously misguided ideas and violent prejudices. Our ancestors were both saints and were profoundly human at the same time. To use the language of prayer, they did things they "ought not to have done." They were, as we are, men and women of their own times--even sparkling insights of the divine were mixed with their own personal sins and the sins of their own cultures. We need to engage a practice of historical generosity when studying the past. Indeed, one day, we too will be held accountable for what our great-great-grand children deem hypocritical, stupid, or wrong. We hope they might be kind to us; we hope they will understand that we were doing our best.
A few months ago, I heard Jon Meacham explain why he'd written about Andrew Jackson--a flawed historical character if ever there was one. Meacham explained, "History is to a country what memory is to an individual." Indeed. History is to a religious movement, a tradition, a denomination, a church what memory is to an individual. Loss of memory isn't funny. Loss of memory can be fatal. Progressive Christians have much to celebrate about the past.  We have much to learn from history. And we have much to reclaim.  Progressive faith is a great Christian tradition--and we have many great saints.
This All Saints Day, remember.

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Bad Religion Leaves Big Bruises: When Christians Threaten Health Care Reform

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 13:30:26 -0800

Posted by: Peter Laarman in ReligionDispatches

Late last week, as extreme right-wing shock troops swarmed over the Capitol, I was laid very low with a food-borne microbe and required some emergency medical care. My attending ER nurse, a kindly pro, told me that he cannot afford to retire after 30 stressful years with Kaiser Permanente because—like so many others ready and willing to retire—he needs the insurance! We quickly agreed that achieving comprehensive health care reform would be a big win-win for everyone of every age in this wildly unequal society.
But this is by no means obvious to huge numbers of anxious Americans. They have a zero sum view of changing the health care system to cover everyone, to bar insurers from charging women higher premiums, and to prevent them from screening out or dropping people for preexisting conditions. They think that if these changes are made, their existing coverage will be diminished or degraded. That’s what a zero sum mentality means: the gains for some, in this case mainly for the poor and uninsured, must necessarily result in losses for others.
Neoliberal economists can always be dredged up to lend a veneer of respectability to this view, but a religiously-informed ethical sensibility rebels strongly against it—especially in the case of health care. “We are one body, one blood,” is a common liturgical expression in my own Christian tradition. For Jews there are few more significant scriptural passages than Isaiah 58, where one’s own healing and blessing are said by God to be intricately bound up with the healing and care of others in bodily need.
Why then are so many American Christians so devoutly opposed to even very modest steps toward affordable and universal health care coverage? (I do not speak of the adherents of other faiths. In contrast to the behavior of American Christians, for example, nearly 80 percent of American Jews continue to “earn like Episcopalians and vote like Puerto Ricans,” in the famous and funny phrase attributed to Milton Himmelfarb a half century ago.)
This is a question that has haunted me for a long time. The reluctant conclusion I draw is that these are Ayn Rand Christians, never touched by the spirit of the Christ whose ministry was emphatically defined from the start by his compassion for the sick and for his healing of the multitudes who came to him with all manner of diseases. Jesus did not seem to think that it was taking anything away from the already-healthy to restore the health of the physically and psychologically afflicted. He did not operate from a zero sum mentality nor from a neoliberal economics of scarcity. In his economy of radical abundance—one version of what Lewis Hyde calls the “gift economy”—the more health you give, the more health you get.
We are one body. And when a member of that body denigrates or deprives another member, particularly a poorer member, Christ is crucified yet again and the spirit of Christ is absent. Or as St. Paul put it in sternly rebuking a class-obsessed community in Corinth:
The members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect… If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it. (I Corinthians 12.22-23, 26)
That’s the way it’s supposed to be even now for Christian people. But the Ayn Rand types with their “Kill the Bill” rhetoric never got that message, apparently.
Then there are the patriarchal Christians: those leaders who continue to believe that women are morally, even ontologically, inferior, and who vividly demonstrate that conviction by excluding women from sacramental leadership and by seeking to control women’s bodies and women’s choices in various ways. Ironically, these patriarchal Christians (many, but not all of them Roman Catholic clergy) reject the possessive individualism of the mostly Protestant Ayn Rand types. They retain a strong sense that social progress is about us advancing together, advancing communally, and not about me feathering my private nest. Yet they managed to land a telling blow against progressive health reform last week—a bit of poison-pill sabotage in the form of the Stupak Amendment, which garnered 240 votes in the House, 64 of them from Democrats.
What Stupak is about politically has been capably reported here by Sarah Posner and others. It will represent a massive setback for women if it is enacted into law. In my view the real devilment is that getting it included in the House bill now gives the Catholic bishops and their non-Catholic patriarchal friends an undeserved moral high ground as the bill moves toward conference committee and eventually to the President’s desk. Because who would dare to stand in the way of providing coverage to the great majority of the currently uninsured over such a trifle as requiring insurance companies to drop existing coverage of abortion services if they want to stay in business? What kind of narrow obstructionist would make any kind of fuss over telling American women that they will now have to purchase a special rider if they want abortion services included in the private insurance plans they pay for with their own money?
As with the Ayn Rand types, my question about misogynist Christians is just how Christian are they, really? I do not ask this facetiously. I am no church historian, but I do know that leading scholars are now in considerable agreement that women played very significant leadership roles as disciples, apostles, and teachers during Christianity’s radical early life. The Romans despised the Jesus movement in no small measure for precisely this: they did not properly subjugate their women! Then, as the Empire turned up the heat—sometimes literally—on the Jesus people, the movement began to accommodate itself to imperial values, eventually in the fourth century becoming the supreme defender and enforcer of patriarchy as the religion of empire and no longer a resistance movement against empire and its values.
As women leaders were re-subjugated within the Church, so were the memories of women’s leadership excised from the Church’s official record—from what eventually became the New Testament. No surprise there: in every imperial creed, official history must be made to support the current power reality. Some tantalizing subversive bits were left in, however, and from these fragments and from other texts that were excluded from the canon or entirely suppressed, biblical scholars were eventually able to reconstruct what the radical early movement looked like.
Here again is St. Paul (no great friend of women, himself, we should note) from the very early days when baptism was the great equalizer and also a great enemy of patriarchy:
For in Christ you are all children of God through faith. As many of you as were baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ. There is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female: for all of you are one in Christ Jesus. (Galatians 3: 26-28)
As before, the “one” language is striking, only this time not so much in terms of wealth and class as in terms of ethnicity, caste, and gender. But just as today’s Ayn Rand Christians conveniently dropped—or never heard—one part of the “one” message, so too have today’s misogynist Christian clerics, some of them still defenders of a long-vanished Empire, dropped or never heard the other part.
This all may seem arcane and boring, but I believe it has everything to do with the current travails facing progressive health care reform. I see two powerful but (to my mind) quite errant forms of Christianity, both running with their heads down against progressive health reform from different directions and both leaving big nasty bruises in the body of what remains.
Forgive the note of bitterness, but my word to American Christians who show more devotion to John Locke than to Jesus in respect to their “I’ve got mine” ideology: We’ll see you in Hell with your good buddy, Dives. And to the patriarchal types who told Speaker Pelosi late last week that they could not support any legislation giving them less than total victory on the abortion issue: Why not be man enough to just come out and say it? You have never liked women, you fear women, and now you would even sink the chance of providing coverage for 36 million currently uninsured persons—including many of the children and immigrants you claim to love—rather than accept a carefully-negotiated compromise on women’s reproductive health.
With Christians like these, who needs other enemies? And will anyone wonder why, with each new poll or census, more Americans will be marking “none” or “atheist” or “anything but Christian” on the religion section?

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Orrin Hatch: Health Care Dollars for Prayer Cures, But Not One Cent for Abortion

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 12:39:46 -0800

Posted by: Peter Laarman in ReligionDispatches

As they say, you can’t make this stuff up. You can only read it and weep. Today’s Los Angeles Times includes a front-page piece by Tom Hamburger and Kim Geiger on an itty-bitty provision in one Senate health care bill that would require insurers to cover Christian Science “prayer treatments” as medical expenses.
Hamburger and Geiger write that the measure, introduced by Utah Republican Orrin Hatch, would put prayer treatments “on the same footing” as clinical medicine and would prohibit discrimination against “religious and spiritual health care.”
Oh, my. It doesn’t matter to me—and I hope it won’t matter to you—that the sums of money that might be paid to spiritual healers are relatively small. It matters hugely to me—and I hope it will matter to you—that a spokesperson for the Christian Science Church could tell Times reporters with a straight face that public funding of prayer treatment is part of “finding effective health care.” It matters greatly that this appalling provision, if enacted into law, will undoubtedly invite other faiths to get into the healing business in order to compete with Christian Science for those subsidized insurance payments.

The Hatch provision is not yet in the consolidated healthcare bill that Majority Leader Harry Reid will bring to the floor—it is only in the bill reported out of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, and Labor—so we might pray that Reid will have the good sense to strip it out, as Speaker Pelosi has already done on the House side.
We all know that the Christian Science mother church is in Boston, but it was still a bit shocking to learn from the Times piece that the Hatch madness is also supported by Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry. Kerry’s spokesperson said it is merely about nondiscrimination against a form of “care” that is recognized by the IRS as a legitimate medical expense. OK, then may I also ask why the IRS still treats prayer as a itemized medical expense that can be deducted from one’s taxes? Am I the only person who thinks this is an insane provision to have in the tax code?
Medical science is evidence-based and faith is the “evidence of things not seen,” according to the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews. So I guess they’re really the same, right? Let’s fund them both! But no, no, and NO to any federal dollars for abortion, saith the good senator from Salt Lake. Hatch narrowly lost his push to get this prohibition into the Senate Finance Committee’s health bill, but he vows that he’s not finished: he will fight again on the floor.
If Hatch gets his way, women who purchase comprehensive private insurance packages that include abortion services would have to pay for the entire cost of the package (even if they qualify for federal subsidies) and obtain a separate rider for abortion coverage. Michigan’s Sen. Debbie Stabenow said that Hatch would impose an “unprecedented restriction on people who paid for their own health care insurance.”
I say look on the bright side, Sen. Stabenow! Women who lose existing abortion coverage thanks to Hatch will have nothing to worry about. They can get paid for prayer sessions to make their pregnancies magically disappear.
Hatch taketh away, but he also giveth. What’s not to like?

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Greenspace: LA Times

Thu, 5 Nov 2009 12:21:11 -0800

Posted by: Louis Sahagun in LATimes.com

An activist religious group has joined the effort to designate the San Gabriel Mountains as a national recreational area eligible for additional federal resources including law enforcement personnel, interpretive signs and hiking trails.
The group, Progressive Christians Uniting, is touting the proposal to congregants of dozens of San Gabriel Valley churches near the 650,000-acre range that constitutes about 70% of Los Angeles County's open space.
"We are helping to bring the moral compassion of people of faith to bear on an urgent public issue," said Rev. Peter Laarman, executive director of the Los Angeles-based group. "This is an ambitious effort. It involves public health, an important natural resource and millions of people who live near it. We want to be on board."
The designation would be made by the National Park Service, which is conducting an ongoing "special resource study" of the San Gabriels and the San Gabriel Watershed. The study includes three draft alternatives for new collaborative approaches to managing the range currently run by the U.S. Forest Service for purposes other than recreation.
A final recommendation could come in 2011. In the meantime, a coalition led by conservation groups and community organizations plans to present its "San Gabriel Mountains Forever" campaign to as many churches as possible.
"Religion and stewardship connect gracefully," said Sierra Club spokesman John Monsen.
Pastor Arthur Cribbs of San Marino Congregational Church, United Church of Christ, said his congregation recently forwarded a letter of support for the proposal to U.S. Rep. David Dreier (R-San Dimas), whose district includes a large portion of the San Gabriels.
"We are blessed to have such a natural resource," Cribbs said. "It is a place where we can step out of our everyday business in the metropolis of greater Los Angeles and find quietude and stillness, strength and magic."

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Mainline Protestants: America’s Moral Conscience

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 15:32:35 -0700

Posted by: Dr. Diana Butler Bass in Beliefnet.com

Recently Pew Research Center released a survey on the views of religious Americans regarding torture. They survey found that white evangelical Protestants were the most supportive of torture--only 16% of evangelicals reject the use of torture. A whopping 62% of white evangelical Protestants think that torture is justified in most or many circumstances. Since the findings became public, numerous columnists, pundits, and bloggers have opined on why evangelicals support torture.
The unaddressed question is, however, why white mainline Protestants--those belonging to the historic "brand name" churches--do not support torture. Indeed, approximately twice as many mainline Protestants (31%) believe that torture is never justified and an additional 22% think it is almost always wrong. Their attitude toward torture is nearly opposite of evangelical Protestant opinion. More than half of mainline Protestants reject the use of torture against other human beings as justifiable means to political ends. They are the religious community most strongly opposed to torture.
Despite the fact that evangelicals garner most media attention, they do not represent the entire Protestant community. Depending upon what survey one believes, mainline Protestant churches--even after many years of numerical decline, internal struggles, and bad press--still comprise somewhere between 15-20% of the American population. The Pew survey on torture makes it startlingly clear why mainline Protestantism remains an important constituency in American political life: Mainline Protestants are the nation's moral conscience.
And it isn't just torture. In recent years, mainline Protestants were also the religious group that most strongly opposed the Iraq War, rejected waterboarding, and expressed worry about the admixture of religion and politics at the nation's military academies. In every survey, mainline Protestants see torture, violence, and military intervention as the strategies of last resort in national politics.
What makes mainline Protestant reject violence? Critics argue that mainline Protestants are wimps, theologically soft, and adhere to an "unmanly" and "feminized" version of Christianity (if you don't know, this is an unoriginal critique--it goes back to the nineteenth century) with no stomach for hard decisions. Real Christians, they will insist, are tough and know when to wield the sword in defense of faith and democracy.
But mainline Protestant apprehension regarding torture is more than taste or a matter of character. No, the divide between evangelical Protestants and mainline Protestants regarding violence is a sharp difference in theology that continues to shape the two communities.
The most significant Christian theological question is: What does the death of Jesus on the cross mean? In the last century, evangelicals and mainliners have answered this question in surprisingly different ways.
Evangelicals believe that Jesus' death on the cross--with all its brutality--saves them. Put bluntly, an act of political torture resulted in their "personal salvation" and entry into heaven. Jesus' death "substitutes" for the death of Christian believers and, in that his suffering, the rest of humanity is granted a reprieve for their sins. In a very real sense, God allowed the Romans to kill Jesus in order that God might accomplish a holy end. Hence, they don't see torture as fundamentally bad. Indeed, some evangelical theologians argue that torture is redemptive--that one person may die for the sake of the whole community.
Mainline Protestants generally reject this conception of Jesus' death. Instead, they argue that Jesus was a victim of political violence that revealed the essential ruthlessness of sin. And, in that demonstration, he also demonstrated that to "lay down one's life for one's friends," instead of revenge, was the way to redeem the world. Mainline theologians switched the focus away from the violence-as-salvation toward self-sacrificial love as the route to human wholeness. They do not believe that Jesus' suffering was good. They believe that it was a demonstration of the evil of a human political system that placed Caesar before God. Torture, as Jesus himself suffered, has no redemptive qualities. Salvation occurs as one loves one's neighbor as one's self.
We don't typically think of theology as having immediate social consequences. But, in the case of torture, the difference between evangelicals and mainliners should underscore that the fact that theology is important. The ways in which different religious communities interpret the meaning of scripture has profound political implications. This isn't an obscure argument between rival religious groups--it is a meaningful difference in a fundamental way of understanding the nature of suffering, sin, and human nature based on sacred texts.
Although some people think that mainline religion is irrelevant and deserves to go the way of the dodo, I don't. Their churches may be small, their congregations aging, and their worship, well, can be dull. But they are also right. What would we do without them? Somebody's got to protect America's moral conscience by respecting the dignity of every human being. And, while there may be some individual exceptions to the rule, from the results of the Pew survey, it doesn't look like we can depend on white evangelical Protestants to do so.

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Escalating Afghanistan: What Did YOU do in the Class War Daddy?

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 14:25:38 -0700

Posted by: Peter Laarman in Religion Dispatches

Thirty-four years ago this month the young James Fallows published (in the Washington Monthly) what still remains a definitive article about the class divide in times of war—“What Did You Do in the Class War, Daddy?” I still have a yellowed original copy somewhere. Fallows was writing about the sickening reality that as a Harvard student he, like so many other Ivy Leaguers, could quite easily avoid fighting in Vietnam. They had the ways and means to avoid military service: exemptions, deferments, lawyers, connections.
I was reminded of Fallows’ awkward question a couple of weeks ago when I was in New Haven to receive Yale Divinity School’s William Sloane Coffin ’56 Peace and Justice Award. Coffin famously commenced his 17-year chaplaincy at Yale by telling the members of the 1959 freshman class that “the Lord forbids our using our education merely to buy our way into middle-class security.” Coffin and other antiwar religious activists of the time never could persuade a majority of upper-middle class students to take to the streets against the Vietnam madness, though they made a valiant effort—and they understood the ugly race and class dimension of American imperialism.
Thinking about Coffin’s legacy, I had to ask myself exactly what I have been doing during the current class war—a siege that is far more severe and ugly than the one that sent mainly working-class and rural kids to fight and die for nothing in the rice paddies of Vietnam.
Today, obviously, our privileged young people do not have to worry about a military draft: there is absolutely no chance that they will be compelled to serve. But what is far worse than Vietnam-era draft evasion by the young and well-connected is the complete insulation from the consequences of bad policy enjoyed by today’s jeunesse doree. Not only do they not have to go to the burning deserts of Iraq or to the chilly forbidding heights of Afghanistan: they don’t even have to know anything about the lives of those who are going. The idea that they might experience any Fallows-like guilt or have any second thoughts about their degree of insulation is simply not an issue today.
This extreme stratification and insulation of the privileged is what weighs on my mind, and what should weigh on all concerned religious leaders, on the cusp of President Obama’s decision whether or not to let Gen. MacArthur (oops, sorry—Gen. McChrystal) steamroll him into increasing US troop strength in Afghanistan by 40,000 or more; even 85,000.
Earlier this month the Pentagon crowed that it had just completed its best recruiting year in three and a half decades. The announcement made no secret of the fact that a devastatingly bad job market is just terrific news for military recruiters waving hefty signing bonuses. The question of conscience: How do we feel about taking advantage of the economic vulnerability of the majority of American youth in order to make them still more vulnerable: i.e., vulnerable to suicide bombers, IEDs, mortar rounds, and even “friendly fire”?
We might do well to recall that the ancient military state of Sparta used a class of people called helots to wage its many wars. The helots were not exactly private property in the manner of Athenian slaves; rather, they could best be described as serfs or slaves of the public: available and expected to do the public’s bloody business of conquest and pillage.
Let us say it clearly and see how it feels upon the tongue: today’s “all-volunteer” military represents a contemporary form of helotry. We give the great majority of our young very little hope for a foothold in our collapsed economy; then we send them off to fight and die (or, given the significant advancements in military field medicine, to return home horribly damaged) in order to “defend” the grossly unequal society that dealt them such a bad hand in the first place.
There is nothing new about this, you say, and you are right. But tell me when it has been quite this bad? Two-thirds of all income gains between 2002 and 2007 went to the top one percent of Americans. The ratio of CEO compensation to average worker compensation in 1965 (when the catastrophic Vietnam “surge” began) was bad enough at around 25-to-1. Today that ratio is 300-to-1 and soaring, despite the fact that Wall Street’s best and brightest just pushed the economy over the brink.
People ask why there is so little outrage over the absurd idea that we can make ourselves more secure by putting down a huge military footprint in a little-known (by us) region of the world and by routinely assassinating that region’s indigenous leaders (bear in mind that Obama ordered more drone attacks in his first six months in office than Bush ordered in his last three and a half years).
I will tell you why I think there is so little outrage: the people making these decisions remain as arrogant as ever while enjoying more insulation than ever from the consequences of their bad decisions; whereas the people being deployed to fight come from a population that has been effectively rendered voiceless. After all, economic desperation is about much more than just having no money—it’s about being anxious and stressed and having to hustle in two or three junk jobs just to survive.
Do the stressed-out strike you as people who are likely or able to articulate and express a strong antiwar view and then to vote accordingly? I don’t think so. And this is in part because these likely military recruits are not simply cannon fodder; they are also fodder for the well-heeled demagogues who tell them all the time that what holds them back is Big Government, or brown people sneaking across the border to steal their jobs, or Jews, or even a Black (possibly foreign? possibly Muslim?) president.
And even if economically-desperate Americans do actually see the proposed Af-Pak surge as a looming catastrophe (as I believe many do), does it really matter to the policymakers what they think? The economically distressed and marginal count for less than ever in this hollowed-out and corrupt formal democracy. The Democratic Party’s dirty little secret for the past 30 years is that it has as little interest in mobilizing the poor and marginal as does the Republican Party. What was once the party of “the little guy” has unmistakably hitched its wagon to the party of wealth.
Religiously speaking, the right descriptor for a system that insulates some and exposes others to the horrors of imperial war (and that relies on the same growing inequality to stifle dissent) is demonic. These are demons that won’t be cast out until we first name them properly. For clergy, naming them is not just an option or something that only some bold and reckless colleagues might wish to undertake. Religious leaders are not allowed to sit out the class war. It’s our job to be combatants, ready or not.

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Vatican Woes Conservative Anglicans: This is News?

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 15:04:32 -0700

Posted by: Dr. Diana Butler Bass in Beliefnet.com

This week, the Vatican announced that it would make it easier for conservative Anglicans and Episcopalians--those uncomfortable with women priests and accepting gay people--to join the Roman Catholic Church. The move surprised Anglican leaders who, evidently, had no idea that the Vatican planned a massive sheep-stealing campaign. The news sparked lively--and sometimes mean-spirited--debate in both print and online media.
Most stories pointed to the historic nature of the Vatican's action. Evidently, not since the Protestant Reformation has Rome invited so many of its former children to come home. There have been many remarkable individual "returns" of Anglicans to the Roman Catholic Church--most notably the English theologian John Henry Newman or the American bishop Levi S. Ives in the nineteenth century. But historians strain to remember a mass invitation like this one.
Reporters, however, have missed something important. While it might be unusual for Rome to formally invite Protestant to return to Mother Church, it is in no way odd for Roman Catholics--especially those in Europe, North America, and Australia--to abandon Rome for Protestant denominations. For decades, cradle Roman Catholics have been leaving their church in favor of finding congregations that are open to divorce, practice birth control, support women in the ministry, and respect the dignity of gay and lesbian people. Indeed, according to a 2008 Pew survey, one in ten adult Americans is an ex-Roman Catholic--with the Roman Catholic Church showing intense decline among Anglo- and African-American populations (Hispanic immigration is helping RC membership hold steady).
A Catholic News service story from 2005 noted that the change was a "constant trickle," saying:
Among those changing denominations, the Roman Catholics generally say they long to breathe the "free air" of the Anglican Communion, with Catholic priests usually saying they plan to marry, the bishop said. The Anglicans usually say they have had enough of the "woolly thinking" of their leadership, he added. "Anglicans who become Roman Catholic generally become very conservative Roman Catholics, while Roman Catholics who become Anglican tend to become very liberal Anglicans," he said.

These observations have been backed up in a number of academic studies--including my own work. From 2002-2006, I conducted a Lilly Endowment funded research project on vital mainline churches (findings may be found in Christianity for the Rest of Us) and found that successful mainline congregations had large populations of former Roman Catholics, sometimes as many as a fifth of the members would have once been Catholic (in two Hispanic congregations, every member was a former Catholic). Several of the project pastors had also been Catholic. In every case, the former Catholics praised the intellectual and spiritual openness of the mainline church as the major reason for switching. And the mainline congregations had accommodated many Roman Catholic faith practices--everything from centering prayer to Marian devotion--to help converts be more comfortable in the new Protestant setting.
In western Christianity, religious switching is a way of life. That the Vatican has just figured that out only proves they read polls. That's it. This isn't really news. Churchgoers are a migrant lot--and they are voting for their favorite theologies with their feet. Sometimes they vote liberal (as in the case of RC's leaving their church) and sometimes they vote conservative (as in the case of Protestants becoming Catholic). But that they do it--and that their denominations engage in sheep-stealing to boast sagging membership rolls--should surprise no one. When liberal Anglicans join the Roman Catholic Church en masse or conservative Catholics chose to become Episcopalians....well, that would be news.

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A Great Gulf Fixed: Implications of the Vanishing Religious Middle

Thu, 8 Oct 2009 16:10:39 -0700

Posted by: Rev. Peter Laarman in Religion Dispatches

**This is the continuation of a discussion that PCU has been at the center of for the last few weeks. To see our original discussion questions click here, and feel free to comment. You can also email Peter your opinion at director@pcu-la.org**

The release of new research last month indicating that activists from the religious right and religious left occupy two separate universes prompts me to reflect yet again on the extreme difficulty of attempting to find meaningful common ground positions, except on sky-is-blue issues like opposition to human trafficking and state-sponsored torture.
There are occasions in life in which polarization simply means that the opposing parties should try harder to forge common positions. This is not one of them. An inconvenient truth here is that religious conservatives often sacralize their positions in ways that make them immune to compromise, whereas many religious liberals are only too willing to yield on their positions. This makes for an unstable mix (or, in biblical terms, an unequal yoking) in which conservative positions steadily gain ground, issue after issue.
Health care reform provides a good case in point. A significant part of the conservative community is determined to insert a hard prohibition on federal abortion funding into the final reform legislation—a provision that will remove existing access to abortion services from the insurance plans of millions of women. Conservatives unhesitatingly frame this as an issue of fundamental conscience. In response, many good liberals bite their tongues and go along for the sake of the supposed greater good of achieving universal coverage.
The silencing of a progressive religious voice for the sake of creating an imaginary common ground is also evident in the informal agreement to remove entire issues—marriage equality, for example—from the table. Whereas abortion can be admitted to the conversation on the right’s terms, equal rights for sexual minorities cannot be admitted at all. The religious right’s position, “we’re not even going to discuss this,” becomes tacitly accepted by everyone else.
It wasn’t supposed to work this way. Four and a half years ago, after the religious right’s pivotal role in reelecting George W. Bush spurred a frenzy of anguished discussion and planning among progressive religious leaders, the operative rationale for building new “open source” structures was that progressives would slowly domesticate the conservatives; tempering their rhetoric if not actually winning them over to more moderate positions. But there is scant evidence that anything like this has happened. What has happened instead amounts to moving the goalpost rightward: some notably sex-phobic evangelical and Roman Catholic individuals and entities have been rebranded as the progressive forces watch, while actual progressives (solidly feminist and pro-LGBTQ religious leaders) have disappeared from view.
The silencing of the religious left is so effective that even to call attention to the rebranding process is to make oneself persona non grata. Some colleagues have dressed me down both publicly and privately on more than one occasion for pointing out that certain men with long histories of indifference or hostility to the concerns of women and gays should not be lifted up as exemplars of progressive religious leadership.
In seeking to understand why rubrics like “dialogue” and “search for common ground” are wildly inappropriate for what actually happens when religious liberals and religious conservatives engage one another, it helps to bear in mind what has been going on among American conservatives generally. According to the always-astute Neal Gabler, the conservative movement as a whole has been subject to “religification” over the past 30 years to the point that American conservatism is no longer really about politics, with all of the “limitations, hedges, and forbearances” that a healthy politics implies.
As Gabler writes:
You cannot beat religion with politics, which is why the extreme right “wins” so many battles. The fundamentalist political fanatics will always be more zealous than mainstream conservatives or liberals. They will always be louder, more adamant, more aggrieved, more threatening, more willing to do anything to win. Losing is inconceivable. For them, every battle is a crusade—or a jihad—a matter of good and evil.
Gabler correctly views the extreme polarization of national political life as an extension of the polarization that characterizes our religious life. Why, then, should anyone expect conservative religious types to be interested in forming any kind of common ground with moderates or liberals on difficult issues? They have nothing to gain, and everything to lose in admitting that others might also have a conscience; or that there might be something godly in the liberal insistence that women’s capacity for moral discernment is equal to that of men.
The way religious conservatives punish those of their own who deviate from the Righteous Path should tell us everything we need to know about a cast of mind that has no interest in “dialogue.” I have heard the anguished stories of more than one Evangelical leader who was put out of the fold—and whose illusions about Christian love and forbearance were shattered—when they began to show signs of thinking for themselves.
With joblessness and foreclosures continuing to surge, conservative religion can be expected to cement its hold on millions more of our fellow citizens over the next few years. The Christian Right is also clearly reverting to its racialist roots after a brief show of pretending to care about racial reconciliation.
These people are not content merely to occupy the right: they also intimidate and police what there is of the religious middle. Which is why I maintain that liberals make nice to them at their own peril. They, and those whom they are able to intimidate, are not operating in the same psychological/spiritual space as we are. We believe we are struggling toward the light; they believe they already have all the light they need. We seek a place at the table for everyone; they claim to know who is worthy and who is not worthy to be invited. We cringe to see the civil state colonized by religion; they have no hesitation at all about using the civil state to advance a sectarian agenda. It seems to me that the only common ground here is a killing ground for democratic aspiration.

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Widening Gulf Between Religious Progressives and Conservatives: Can Common Ground Be Found?

Thu, 1 Oct 2009 15:13:00 -0700

Posted by: Peter Laarman & Casey Crosbie

It surprises no one to learn the extent to which American religious conservatives and progressives part ways on a range of issues, both theological and social. This is no less true in their respective activist communities, where both the Right and the Left struggle to make their public voices known.

A recent study, conducted by leaders in the field--John Green of the University of Akron and Robert Jones of Public Religion Research--merit close reading on this issue. Not surprisingly, their study finds vast (and deeply intrenched) differences in the views and working goals of these communities.

Just a few of their findings:

1) Conservative and progressive religious activists have strikingly different beliefs about scripture. Nearly half of conservatives (48%) view scripture as the literal word of God, a view held by only 3% of progressives.

2) Conservative religious activists are nearly universally opposed to legalized abortion: 95% say either that abortion should be illegal in all cases (60%) or most cases (35%). In sharp contrast, 80% of progressive religious activists say abortion should be legal in all (26%) or most (54%) cases.

3) On the issue of same-sex marriage, conservatives overwhelmingly oppose (82%) both same-sex marriage and civil unions, while nearly 6-in-10 (59%) progressives support same-sex marriage, and another third support civil unions.

4) Sixty-eight percent of progressive religious activists believe government should increase spending and provide more services; 89% say tax cuts should be directed toward lower income people. By even larger margins, conservative religious activists believe that government should provide fewer services and cut spending (86%). Sixty-one percent back tax cuts targeted at upper-income individuals.

These findings raise a number of questions:

-Given the extreme differences, what is to be made of the much publicized struggle for “common ground” endorsed by Jim Wallis and others? Is this still an ideal worth pursuing when both sides are so clearly working towards different ends?

-To what degree should progressives be willing to moderate their own positions to persuade conservatives to moderate theirs? Will such compromise strengthen the progressive witness, or weaken it?

-Should organizations like PCU spend their energy attempting to reach out to conservatives?

Share your own thoughts on how we should proceed. Your input will help inform ongoing reflection among board and staff members of PCU.

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