Exploring the Connections

Frontline (PBS): Close to Home

Channel 8 PBS Houston: 9:00-10:00 PM, Tuesday, Sept 27, 2009

I've just watched this episode of Frontline—Close to Home—and was greatly moved by it. If you missed it, you can watch it online by clicking here.

The show tells the story of ordinary people in the Upper East Side of New York whose lives have been turned upside-down by the economic disasters of this past year. They are all customers of a neighborhood hair salon where they share their misfortunes with Deborah Boles—the salon's owner and sole hairdresser—and with award-winning FRONTLINE producer Ofra Bikel who chronicles the recession's impact on one unlikely American neighborhood.

The web page description follows:

In "Close to Home" Bikel sets up her cameras in the hair salon she's patronized for 20 years. It's an intimate space where she has come to know well the surprisingly diverse clientele -- from athletic trainers and housewives to high-end bankers, actors and opera singers. Despite expectations that this neighborhood is a secure bastion of privilege, these days, when clients get in the chair, they offer a window into the country in recession: Some are broke, others don't have a plan, and they're all looking to commiserate.

Deborah Boles, the owner and sole hairdresser at Deborah Hair Designs, started the business in 1985. "I wanted a place where people can go and they can feel comfortable," she says. "They know they belong here." But it's all on the line with the current downturn -- clients come less often; some skip coloring or skip the trim -- and as Deborah watches neighboring businesses go under, she wonders how long she can survive.

Barbara, Deborah's sister, helps out at the salon, but she has been struggling with her own economic crisis. After buying a home in Florida at the height of the market, she now has a subprime mortgage that she can no longer afford. Unable to pay the exorbitant interest, she has had to take in four tenants, each with their own stories of foreclosure and unemployment.

Israel pressed over ban on bishops' visit to Gaza

Ekklesia News Service
by staff writers, February 10, 2009

Leaders of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) and the Episcopal Church have sent a letter to Israel’s ambassador to the United States expressing “grave concern” and requesting help to determine why a Lutheran bishop and an Episcopal bishop were denied entry to Gaza on 4 February 2009.

The letter from the Rev Mark S. Hanson, ELCA presiding bishop, and the Most Rev Katharine Jefferts Schori, presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, was sent to Sallai Meridor, ambassador of Israel, in Washington DC.

On 4 February, the Rev Munib A. Younan, bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Jordan and the Holy Land (ELCJHL), and the Rt. Rev. Suheil Dawani, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese in Jerusalem and the Middle East, were part of a delegation of five heads of churches in Jerusalem who travelled to visit Christians in Gaza. Three members of the delegation were allowed to enter Gaza, but Israeli security officials denied entry to Younan and Dawani.

According to an ELCJHL news release, Younan and Dawani were the only Palestinians in the delegation. Both said they had obtained permits from Israeli officials to enter Gaza.

“The purpose of their visit was pastoral—to visit churches, humanitarian projects of the Middle East Council of Churches and the Al Ahli Hospital, an institution of the Episcopal Diocese of Jerusalem,” the two U.S. presiding bishops wrote. “We are concerned that they were not allowed freedom of movement into Gaza to carry out their pastoral responsibilities.”

“We believe that it is urgent that adequate humanitarian assistance reach the people of Gaza immediately, and we underscore Bishop Dawani’s statement that ‘most certainly pastoral care is an important factor in such services,’” Hanson and Jefferts Schori wrote.

The presiding bishops wrote that they support their partner bishops and churches in their Christian ministry, and they share their continued commitment to work for peace in the region. Statements from Younan and Dawani, following their denial of entry, reaffirmed their commitments to work for peace in Gaza, the presiding bishops wrote.

“We hope that, having discovered the cause of their denial, you will assure that they will be permitted to enter as soon as possible to offer support and pastoral care to the people they serve,” the presiding bishops’ letter concluded.

Copies of the letter were sent to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and George Mitchell, US special envoy for Middle East peace.

An 87-year-old archbishop was among those deported by the Israeli army last Wednesday, after it boarded a ship in international waters bound for the Gaza Strip.

The Lebanese vessel 'al-Ikhwa' was carrying several tons of humanitarian aid from Tripoli.

The Emeritus Greek-Melkite Archbishop of Jerusalem Hilarion Capucci, together with the crew of 10 Syrian and Lebanese and other nationals were detained at Israel's international airport pending repatriation.

Fall 2008 program

You may have noticed that I took a vacation from blogging over the summer. That vacation is over this weekend with the resumption of the Sunday morning education program at the Cathedral. Dates to put in your calendar are

• Sunday, APRIL 7: KICKOFF SUNDAY - Join in the festivities of Kick-Off Sunday in the Great Hall and learn about the many ministries of Christ Church and ways to become involved
• Sunday, APRIL 14: ADULT EDUCATION PREVIEW in the Great Hall
• Sunday, APRIL 21: Exploring the Connections meets in the Bride's Room at 10:00 AM

And what will we be talking about this fall? Politics, of course! Hopefully, though, it will be politics with a difference. The book we'll read as a basis for our conversation is The Great Awakening: Reviving Faith and Politics by Jim Wallis (HarperOne, 2008).

Veterans of Exploring the Connections will remember that  Wallis' God's Politics: Why The Right Gets It Wrong and The Left Doesn't Get It (2006) helped launch our group. Of course, it did a great deal more. In Wallis' own words:

God's Politics challenged America to "take back the faith" from the Religious Right. And we did—you did—as millions of Americans stood up and spoke for a different kind of faith. As I say to overflow crowds around the country, "The monologue of the Religious Right is over, and a new dialogue has now begun." And everybody cheers. In the churches, a combination of deeper compassion and better theology has moved many far beyond the partisan politics of the Religious Right. … The evangelical social agenda is now much broader and deeper, engaging issues such as poverty and economic justice, global warming, HIV/AIDS, sex trafficking, genocide in Darfur, and the ethics of the war in Iraq (The Great Awakening, pp, 4-5).

But what about the left? Are they/we "getting it"? Again, Wallis' own words:

Even more amazing, the Left—including the Democrats—is starting to get it. Progressive politics is remembering its own religious history and recovering the language of faith. Democrats are learning to connect issues with values, engaging the faith community, and running more candidates who have become emboldened to come out of the closet as believers (The Great Awakening, p. 5).

Taking both quotations together, do you find yourself in there somewhere?

Speaking for myself, I have reconnected with significant periods in my history. Wallis' book would have made perfect sense to that kid way back when who was steeped in the faith/political activism of Irish Methodism. At 12 years old, I knew the story of the Tolpuddle Martyrs who, in the 1830s, formed the Friendly Society of Agricultural Laborers - first labor union in English history. Seven members in all (five were Methodists), they were convicted of swearing an illegal oath to one another, and were sentenced to be transported to Australia in irons and to be imprisoned there for 7 years (read more of the story HERE). I learned of William Willberforce's relation with John Wesley long before Jim Wallis reminded me of it (The Great Awakening, p. 18). And very recently, some of us met and heard the Rev. Harold Good, the Irish Methodist minister who, with others, was instrumental in persauading the Irish Republican Army to decommission its arms in 2005. To crown it all, I say sincerely, that our Exploring the Connections group is the nearest thing to a Methodist Class Meeting that I have experienced in my nearly 50 years in the U.S.!

So, where are you in all of this? How do you put together aspects of your religious history with our fall curriculum? These are NOT rhetorical questions! Use the Comments at the bottom of this posting to share how you present discipleship perhaps fulfils early aspects of your own faith journey.

As we say from time to time - LET THE CONVERSATION BEGIN!

Humans are not just cogs in a vast machine

by Giles Frazer
Ekklesia Ezine, Issue No. 9, December 13, 2007

Last month, headlines were grabbed by the Archbishop of Canterbury's attack upon US foreign policy. But the deeper point, widely missed, was his attack upon western modernity in general. "There is something about western modernity which really does eat away at the soul," he insisted in his interview with the Muslim magazine, Emel. And his argument was simple: our brand of modernity turns people into things defined by their function. All too often, we are what we do.

This was the sort of thing that used to be said by Marxists back when they were a more potent cultural force. In the world of efficiency savings, productivity and league tables, humans are more and more treated as tools in some vast machine-like system. We all too easily cede our humanity to the impersonal workings of the day-to-day routine.

Which is why for the archbishop, as for a great many religious leaders, the key battleground is time. He wants us to slow things down, to resist the frantic fascism of the diary. He calls on us to fight back with a battery of practices: art, prayer, holidays. Not art to make us more sophisticated; not prayer to lobby God; not holidays to get us ready for yet more work - for all this is to render them in overly functional terms, as if they always must have some further purpose. Rather, we must learn from our children and, specifically, from children's play: something that is both joyous and yet, as far as they are concerned, wholly without deeper purpose.

In 2006 I received just such an epiphany from my kids who decided that the most important thing to do on a sunny day was to produce a world cup of crisps. Often a reluctant holiday goer, I had persuaded myself that I needed a break so I could return to work with great vigour (always the functionalist's justification for time away from the desk). For Alice and Isabella, the debate heated up and took on a world of importance. The crucial question: Wotsits or Quavers? As it happens, I too have strong opinions on this subject and I entered the fray. Graphs and lists were drawn up. New candidates considered. The winners and losers endlessly renegotiated. It was the happiest day of the year, and yet, as far as I could see, we achieved nothing beyond the sheer enjoyment of each other's company.

It's for the same reason that the archbishop commends the Muslim practise of praying five times a day. Simply put, prayer is time spent with God. "What is prayer for?" isn't an easy question because there are vast acres of time where it doesn't seem to be for anything at all. And yet, perhaps because of this, it offers the mental and spiritual space that is so hard to come by within the fraught culture of western modernity.

Religion resists the oppressive efficiency of time management because there is nothing to measure. Atheists think that it's the fatal weakness of the God idea that it lacks empirical verifiability. But a world where everything is measurable and testable, and can be turned into a league table, is a world where competition can find its way into every nook and cranny of life. And this, in turn, allows no escape from the omnipresence of market forces.

Marx made the point that capitalism turns everything into a commodity - and thus people into objects. Christians would agree, but also see Marx's uncompromising materialism as being part of the problem. For in spite of Marx, this materialism has been conscripted into the service of capital and forms the bars of our cage. Which is why the Marxists failed, and why the people offering a genuinely countercultural critique of western modernity are to be found in churches, mosques and synagogues.

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(c) Giles Fraser is vicar of Putney and a lecturer in philosophy at Wadham College, Oxford. This article is adapted from one first published by The Guardian, with acknowledgements.

At ease in Zion

Living by the Word - Amos 6:1-7, Psalm 146
(for Sunday, September 30, 2007)

by Paul Keim
The Christian Century

AMOS WAS ONE prophet who knew how to afflict the comfortable. He seemed to have it in for those who had done all right for themselves. His theological motto could well have been: If it feels good, God doesn't like it! Amos skips from warning to judgment to condemnation with a kind of zealous glee. Thus says the Lord, "You're all going to Sheeeoooool!" What a downer. Amos is such a party pooper. Such a curmudgeon. If he showed up at our church, we would do an intervention. Chill out, Amos, we would say. Get yourself into therapy. Obviously you have issues.

I think this is a misreading of Amos and the prophetic school that preserved and extended his legacy. Granted, he was a bit testy. But the times were changing, and nobody seemed to notice. When Amos left the farm and ventured north into Israel in the eighth century, business was booming. Some people were doing well, but according to Amos they weren't doing right. Amos saw an affluence that had turned the hearts of the haves from the needs of the have-nots. The robust piety of the rich was shrill and self-serving. Amos linked their neglect of the poor to the ominous signs of international politics and warned that devastation was coming. But the political and religious leaders of the north were not convinced.

We humans have a highly developed facility for denial. We imagine ourselves to be invincible. Sure, we're aware that nations have come and gone, that great civilizations have fallen and disappeared. But we tell ourselves that we're smarter and stronger than they were. Their fate has nothing to do with us. We put off the evil day and convince ourselves that every day, in every way, we're getting better and better. In the meantime the status quo must be maintained—with violence, if necessary.

What we see depends on what we look at, and what we look at depends on what we think is important. And what could be more important than ensuring our security? We look for signs that the ease and comfort we have come to accept as both a birthright and a reward for our virtues will persist indefinitely. We see plenty of reason to be confident. Yes, there are those who see things another way, but they are alarmists, prophets of doom, unpatriotic nabobs of negativism who unwittingly give aid and comfort to our enemies.

What's wrong with sleeping on a nice bed? Is indulgence in the occasional rack of lamb or veal cutlet such a sin? What's so bad about playing edifying music while sipping a little wine? Or taking long, hot showers?

The problem with those at ease in Zion, according to Amos, was that their comfort had robbed them of empathy.They were not grieved over the ruin of Joseph, and this blinded them to the moral analogy between that loss and their own impending disaster. Walter Brueggemann tells us that the first stage in prophetic criticism is embracing grief. The other's loss is also our loss: it should hurt like hell. If it doesn't, then something inside of us has died.

Grieving rituals are powerful because they belie the myth of eternal prosperity. They shake the edifice of our brittle confidence. They punch through our numbness and remind us that life is full of pain and suffering. They also propel us from the lethargy of false hopes and make it possible for us to experience true joy, true peace, true security. No, there is nothing inherently wrong with ease, comfort and security. But when the pursuit or maintenance of these transient goals is at the center of our universe, then the messengers of the Lord will speak out.

Psalm 146 is one of the "hallelujah" songs that make up the concluding doxology of the Psalter. We have been socialized to think of praise as a kind of mindless exaltation of God, but biblical praise of the Creator is deeply ethical. It spells out a moral trajectory. At the heart is an inherent tension between the sovereignty of God and that of earthly authorities. We are admonished not to trust in "princes"—or any mortals, for that matter. Perhaps some are trustworthy, even godly. But their powers (for good and evil) are limited.

Happiness is to be found with God, where true help and hope reside. The cause for this is the very nature of the Creator. The oneness of God combines the functions of Maker of heaven and earth and Keeper of faithfulness. The Creator of the world is also the one who executes justice, provides food, sets free, opens eyes, lifts up and loves. It is the sovereignty of God that endures.

We are too willing to concede God's sovereignty and glibly declare God to be Lord of heaven and earth in our prayers and hymns and sermons. Since the biblical language has become dissociated from real politics, it costs us nothing. God can be king and lord, sovereign of the universe, and threaten no ruling politician or government. We become aware of the inherent tension of a moral creation theology only when we translate the politics of divine sovereignty into our own terms: God is president and head of state. God's government has enacted laws that must be obeyed. God has a special burden for those neglected by governing authorities.

So how then does the presidency of God relate to the presidency of the president? What belongs to the President of the universe, and what belongs to the president of the land? Does the loyalty owed the One ever conflict with the loyalty owed the other? Perhaps it is enough just to ask the question. And to keep in mind that God reigns for all generations. Hallelujah!

Paul Keim is professor of Bible and religion at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana.

Bush administration denies visas for Iranian religious leaders' goodwill visit

by Staff Writers
Ekklesia News (U.K.), Sept 8, 2007

The Bush administration has denied visas to leaders of an Iranian religious delegation that was scheduled to visit the United States this week to continue a dialogue with religious leaders in the United States, the U.S. organizers of the exchanges announced today.

“We are disappointed and troubled that the administration denied the visas on what are said to be national security grounds, particularly because we received assurances from the State Department that State would move heaven and earth to make this reciprocal religious leaders’ visit possible,” said Joe Volk, Executive Secretary of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (Quakers). “The denials parallel a disturbing escalation of rhetoric against Iran and further demonstrate this administration’s current strategy of confrontation rather than diplomacy. Again, this administration appears to be choosing the war path rather than the negotiating table.”

The administration denied visas to four of fourteen Iranians invited to the United States, including the two leaders of the delegation. The Iranians were invited to meet with their counterparts in the United States this September as the next step in an ongoing dialogue with a diverse group of Christian leaders from United Methodist, Episcopal, Baptist, Catholic, Evangelical, Quaker, and Mennonite traditions. The U.S. group traveled to Iran in February 2007 at the invitation of Iranian religious leaders and the government. Members of the U.S. delegation hoped that by reciprocating the Iranians’ hospitality, they could further work to inspire the governments and people of both countries to commit to a diplomatic solution to the ongoing dispute between the United States and Iran. Words not war could answer the national interests of both peoples.

The U.S. delegation last February, which also included the National Council of Churches and Sojourners/Call to Renewal, was the first U.S. delegation to meet with an Iranian president in Iran since the fall of the Shah in the late 1970s. The delegation returned to the United States with a proposal that the U.S. and Iranian governments immediately engage in direct, face-to-face talks and promote more people-to-people exchanges among religious leaders, legislators and civil society.

“The consensus among U.S. allies in Europe and the Middle East is in favor of direct, face-to-face diplomatic talks with Iran,” said Joe Volk. “The U.S. administration continues to rely on threats and coercion not to resolve the U.S.-Iranian nuclear dispute but rather to use that dispute to escalate tensions toward some kind of military confrontation. War is not the answer. This U.S. approach actually hardens and entrenches politics of Iran resulting in diminishing rather than expanding political space for dissent. Despite the clear failure of that approach to end the current stalemate between our two governments, the administration is blocking the efforts of the faith community to explore pathways to peace.”

American Christendom, RIP

by Diane Butler Bass
God's Politics, Sept 6, 2007

The Rev. Dr. D. James Kennedy, the Christian Right leader Rolling Stone magazine described as “the most influential evangelical you’ve never heard of,” died yesterday in Florida of complications from a heart attack. His passing, only months after the death of Jerry Falwell, signals the generational shift of leadership now occurring in evangelical Christian circles.

Unlike most people, I had heard of D. James Kennedy. In the early 1970s, he created the popular program “Evangelism Explosion International” to encourage churchgoers to be more assertive in witnessing to their neighbors. My then-congregation in Scottsdale, Arizona, used the program to great success. Kennedy was a hero to us—helping us all to be grassroots Billy Grahams and to double the size of our small church.

In 1979, Kennedy’s interests took a turn. As a founding board member of Falwell’s Moral Majority, he increasingly directed his preaching toward politics. His opinions on individual issues did not differ from other Religious Right leaders. His strongest contribution to the movement was his passionate belief that America was founded as a Christian nation and developing media to carry that message across the globe. “Our job is to reclaim America for Christ,” he proclaimed, “whatever the cost.” His preaching, politics, and public ministry flowed from this central idea: to restore Christian America.

And it is at that very point—the idea of a Christian America—that evangelicalism, along with American Protestantism more generally, is changing.

Born in 1930, Kennedy lived in a world so distant from our own that it may well have been possible to believe in a Christian America. Churches stood on every public square; members of the clergy shaped public opinion on every issue; schoolchildren uttered Protestant prayers and read Protestant scriptures daily. Many people from Kennedy’s generation remember—or imagine they remember—a vanished Christian world, an ordered society with Protestant faith at the center. Much of the Religious Right’s energy derives from a desire to restore that world, or to “reclaim America for Christ.” To that end, Kennedy mixed evangelicalism with classical Reformed theology and a kind of soft Christian Reconstruction, creating the spiritual fuel for a right-wing political and media empire that meshed with the longings of a certain age.

While Kennedy’s generation was ascendant, new Christian voices began questioning such nostalgia. “Sometime between 1960 and 1980,” wrote Methodist leaders Stanley Hauerwas and William Willimon, “an old, inadequately conceived world ended, and a fresh, new world began.” They recounted “the end of Christendom” in Greenville, South Carolina (the home of Bob Jones University), when the local Fox Theater opened—for the first time ever—on a Sunday in 1963. “The gradual decline of the notion that the church needs some sort of surrounding ‘Christian’ culture to prop it up and mold its young, is not a death to lament,” they claimed. “It is an opportunity to celebrate.”

The contrast between Kennedy and Hauerwas and Willimon is dramatic. Kennedy believed in Christendom, an American Christian nation divinely designed as the leader of a global spiritual empire, and in creating a Christian politics toward that end. Hauerwas and Willimon believe that Christendom, the ideal of a Christian nation, was historically wrongheaded from the start. “The church,” they argue, “doesn’t have a social strategy; the church is a social strategy.”

The contrast defines the generational shift regarding attitudes toward Christendom. Older evangelical leaders, for the most part, want Christendom back. Emerging leaders, influenced by theologians such as Hauerwas and Willimon, are less interested in “reclaiming” Christendom and more interested in strengthening a confessing church based on the model of Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s alternative community in Hitler’s Germany. For younger Christians—evangelicals and progressives alike—Kennedy’s nostalgic world bears no resemblance to their own. The vision of a post-Christendom church, a community of pilgrims joined together in practices of faith and justice, energizes their hope for the future. As the Christendom generation passes away, a post-Christendom faith will, most probably, take its place. That may take some time, but it will eventually recreate Christian political theology in America.

D. James Kennedy, RIP. And while we are at it, let us bury American Christendom, too.

Diana Butler Bass is the author of the award-winning Christianity for the Rest of Us: How the Neighborhood Church is Transforming the Faith (Harper One). She holds a Ph.D. from Duke University—where Hauerwas and Willimon taught—in American religious history.

Don’t Be an Alibi for Social Justice

by Jim Wallis
God's Politics, Sept 7, 2007

One of the high points of the recent World Vision Triennial Council meeting in Singapore was a remarkable address by Jan Egeland, former U.N. under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs and emergency relief coordinator. Egeland has been deeply involved in the resolution of intractable conflicts in places such as northern Uganda and the eastern Congo, and was one of the early voices to bring Darfur to the world’s attention.

He reported progress in poverty reduction in many places, but he said we still need to convince the 2 billion richest people in the world that they have the responsibility to “lift up” the 1 billion still suffering from extreme poverty. And while we now have 50% fewer wars and conflicts than in 1989—when the Berlin Wall fell—the answer to the question of whether we are doing enough to resolve the toughest and most deadly conflicts “on our watch” is, “no, we’re not.”

Egeland listed 10 challenges for organizations like World Vision, which I believe are helpful to any organization or group seeking to relieve human pain and suffering:

1. To succeed, we have to promise ourselves to speak the truth of what the situation is. If we don’t speak the truth, who will? We are not there to please powerful donors and sponsors.

2. We are not there to administer a crisis, or to manage it and enable people just to survive. Egeland quoted a woman living in a Ugandan refugee camp who said, “You keep us alive, but you haven’t given us life.”

3. We are there to change things, not just to keep people alive. Humanitarian aid cannot become an alibi for moral and political change.

4. After the “watershed” 2005 Millennium +5 U.N. Summit, the international community can and must now intervene when sovereign nations are not protecting their own people from genocide, ethnic cleansing, crimes against humanity, and war crimes.

5. We must offer special protection for women and children who are the worst victims of poverty and conflict. He said women are now being abused more than ever.

6. Our energy and advocacy must be focused on the most neglected and forgotten places of the world.

7. We have to raise more resources, especially from the wealthy nations. Most people in the developed world think their levels of aid are much higher than they really are.

8. We must be conscious of the quality of our humanitarian work. The vulnerable need to be protected from our incompetence. This work is no place for amateurs.

9. We have to confront the proliferation of small arms around the world that fuel the conflicts and cause such human destruction.

10. Climate change is also a justice issue. It is primarily caused by the world’s wealthiest people, but it will first impact the world’s poorest people.

We need candidates who are really religious

by Joan Chittester, "From Where I Stand": Vol. 5 no. 12
National Catholic Reporter, September 5, 2007

The closer the United States gets to choosing a president, the more the event begins to look like a papal election: it's all about religion and little about what religion teaches.

The United States, we love to say -- and Europeans repeat in a kind of incredulous wonder -- is the most "religious" country in the world. Meaning, of course, the most church-going country in the world. Whether or not going to church correlates well with religious values is clearly a debatable subject. To wit, the corporal works of mercy -- as in, feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, house the homeless, visit the imprisoned, visit the sick, and bury the dead. It is on these criteria in Matthew 25: 31-46, however, that Jesus rests his definition of salvation. No small thing for those who considers themselves "religious." No small thing, then, one would think, if a nation -- if a candidate for political office -- were really serious about being "religious."

Point: The corporal works of mercy would, it seems, be a very clear template, a constant standard in such a nation, for the evaluation of a party platform, a legislative program or a candidate's fitness for office by those who consider themselves Christian. You can picture the score card now: Candidate A proposes keeping two of the works of mercy; Candidate B, five of them. Forget the need to count votes. The winner is ...

In the nation in which, they tell us, the last two elections were decided by Catholic and Evangelical Christians, the need to define what we mean when we say we're looking for a candidate with "religious" values is not an idle exercise. Given all our commitment to bible-quoting candidates, how do we stack up as a religious people against the religious principles we're told are essential to Christianity? The answers may make us all think again about what religion really means where politics are concerned.

If "feeding the hungry" is a basic, we're slipping, no matter how much we congratulate ourselves on our virtue. According to Bread for the World, a faith-based movement seeking justice for the world's hungry, over 35 million people -- including 12.4 million children -- live in hunger in the United States. They skip meals regularly or, when they eat, eat too little. Some of them go without food, the report says, for entire days. But hungry children develop more chronic illnesses, suffer more from anxiety and depression, and have more behavior problems than children who eat regularly. Those children we put in our institutions, call them social problems, and hire more police to keep them in line rather than feed them well.

If "clothing the naked" -- sending people into the world with dignity and propriety -- is a work of mercy, we will need legislators who are committed to spending money on education. With the amount of money we have spent on the war in Iraq -- over $449 billion -- we could have provided 21 million four-year college scholarships to young people whose parents are already strained to the financial break-point. That means, of course, that we need legislators who indicate a willingness to spend money on the intellectual future of this country. Then maybe, in the future, we wouldn't have so many wars.

If "giving drink to the thirsty" is a work of mercy, we could be doing something on a national level to save the water supply in this country. We would need legislators intent on controlling the global warming that is turning the southwest into a dust bowl and threatening to swamp property on the coastlands of the United States. We could be putting money into saving the water we have before water is no longer free and the poor cannot afford that either.

If "housing the homeless' is a work of mercy, we could at least match our housing chest with our war chest to provide four million new public housing projects. The U.S. Conference of Mayors "Hunger and Homelessness Survey" of 23 major cities in 2006 reports that 59 percent of those cities report an increase in requests for emergency shelter for families in the past year alone. Almost 30 percent of those appeals went unmet for lack of resources, the report tells us, as we agonize over which political candidate is more religious than the other ones.

If "visiting the sick" is a work of mercy, we might want to ask legislators who are seeking to renew their long-running terms in office why it is that of the 45 million uninsured people, 21 million of them are full-time workers? Whatever happened to the notion that if we worked hard in this country, we could take care of ourselves?

If "visiting prisoners" is a work of mercy, then it is time to think again about how closely religious values parallel our institutional goals. According to Human Rights Watch, September, 2007, "Most inmates [in U.S. prisons] had scant opportunities for work, training, education, treatment or counseling because of taxpayer resistance to increasing spending on prison rehabilitation programs." Clearly, we are a "lock 'em up and throw away the key" society. We send them to prison, do almost nothing to prepare them to live a decent life outside of it, and then wonder why the recidivism rate is as high as it is.

If "bury the dead" is work of mercy, then it is time to increase home health care facilities. According to the National Association for Home Care and Hospice, "one in five U.S. households are involved in home health care for an adult." Nevertheless, in August, Medicare announced proposed cuts of $7 billion dollars to local home health care agencies. Surely we need legislators who are intent on providing caregivers and families the support they need to care for their sick and earn a decent living themselves at the same time.

It's time, it seems, if we're Christian, to judge people the way Jesus told us to judge them: "By their fruits." But if that's the case, then the question is not: What do each of these candidates tell us about how religious they are? The question is: What do each of these candidates plan to do to make the corporal works of mercy a living sign of the Christian tradition in this so-called Christian culture?

In fact, how conscious are we of the silent erosion of each of these works of mercy in the society around us while we define "religion" as single-issue politics? After all, food and education and decent housing and support services are exactly the things that take the strain off families and make abortion unnecessary.

From where I stand, it may well be our own unawareness of the loss of these services that's making it so difficult for us to make a distinction between what is really "religious" about our candidates and what is only religion being used as another kind of slippery election strategy. God save us all from that kind of religion again.

Prof Caught Red-Handed Reading Jim Wallis

by Randall Balmer
God's Politics 'blog, August 15, 2007

I guess we suspected it all along, but now we have proof: Jim Wallis is a left-wing, anti-capitalist.

That’s the apparent message behind the dismissal of Andrew Paquin from the faculty of Colorado Christian University. Until Monday, Paquin was a professor of global studies who also is executive director of something called the 10/10 Project, a Colorado-based international advocacy organization that promotes development in Africa. Last year, Paquin, a popular teacher, had been named “faculty member of the year.”

His crime? According to the Rocky Mountain News, the school’s president, Bill Armstrong, former U.S. senator from Colorado, fired Paquin “amid concerns that his lessons were too radical and undermined the school’s commitment to the free enterprise system.” Specifically, Paquin had the temerity to ask his students to read books by Peter Singer, the animal-rights ethicist at Princeton University, and by our friend Jim Wallis.

This whole episode could be a reprise of the Nixon-era “enemies list,” when people who did not make the list sent condolence notes to one another. In this case, if your book didn’t appear on Paquin’s reading list, somehow it missed the mark.

I guess I wasn’t aware that capitalism was under siege – what with the collapse of the Soviet empire and China’s headlong rush into a market-based economy. But the president of Colorado Christian University apparently feels otherwise. Capitalism, in fact, appears to be Jesus’ preferred economic system.

“I don’t think there is another system that is more consistent with the teachings of Jesus Christ,” Armstrong told the Rocky Mountain News. “What the university stands for, among other things, is free markets.”

Armstrong didn’t specify exactly how the writings of Singer or Wallis contradicted his beloved free-market ideology. Paquin's own non-profit actually offers mirco-loans to help Africans start small businesses, and he has plenty of nice things to say about capitalism. "But," he told the Rocky Mountain News, "I'd stop short of deifying it."

Colorado Christian University, based in Lakewood, Colorado, adopted a set of “strategic objectives” last year, one of which was the desire to “impact our culture in support of traditional family values, sanctity of life, compassion for the poor, biblical view of human nature, limited government, personal freedom, free markets, natural law, original intent of the Constitution and Western civilization.”

Armstrong told the Rocky Mountain News that he was “probably” part of the Religious Right.

Trust me, Bill. You qualify.

Randall Balmer is professor of American religious history at Barnard College, Columbia University and a visiting professor at Yale Divinity School. He very much hopes that his book, Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts the Faith and Threatens America, was on Andrew Paquin’s reading list. His latest book, God in the White House: A History, will be released in January.