Exploring the Connections

Elijah and the prophetic truth of the ‘still, small voice’

by Jonathan Sacks
The Times, July 7, 2007

What makes terror so hard to understand is that its perpetrators often confound our stereotypes of evil. They can be well integrated, successful, with no apparent reason to commit an act of violence. We forget that wrong can be done in the name of right, sometimes in the name of the holy itself.

There is no more searching exploration of this theme than the biblical story of Elijah. Elijah was one of the greatest of the prophets, a man of justice unafraid to confront kings, condemn corruption and speak truth to power. What distressed him most was the spread of idolatry among his people. He decided to stake his faith on a trial at Mount Carmel between himself and prophets of Baal. He and they would offer a sacrifice. The God who sent fire to consume the offering would be the true God.

His opponents prepared the sacrifice, said their prayers and waited. No fire came. Elijah taunted them. They began working themselves into a frenzy. Still no fire came. Then Elijah said a prayer. Fire descended from heaven. Elijah was decisively vindicated. The people proclaimed “The Lord is God” and slew the false prophets.

Thus far the story is what you might expect from a religious narrative. Truth wins, falsehood is defeated, faith is restored. But the story does not end there. What happens next is one of the strangest episodes in the entire history of the Abrahamic faiths.

Queen Jezebel orders Elijah’s arrest. He eventually takes refuge on Mount Horeb, otherwise known as Mount Sinai, where God had revealed himself to the Israelites.

God asks: “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Elijah replies: “I have been very zealous for the Lord God Almighty.” God says: “Go and stand on the mountain in the presence of the Lord, for the Lord is about to pass by.” Suddenly there was a whirlwind, “tearing the mountains apart and shattering the rocks”. But God was not in the wind. Then came an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake. Then there was a fire, but God was not in the fire. Then came a “still, small voice”. Immediately, Elijah recognised that this was the voice of God.

God then repeated his question, “What are you doing here, Elijah?” Elijah replied in the same words as before. God then told Elijah to appoint Elisha as his successor. Elisha’s career was similar to that of Elijah. He spoke the same message. He performed similar miracles. There was only one difference: Elisha was not a zealot.

In effect, God was saying to Elijah: false prophets believe in power. At Mount Carmel you showed that I am a greater power. You defeated idolatry on its own terms. That may be fine for those tempted by idolatry, but that is not who I am. The supreme power cares for the powerless. The creator of life loves life. The voice that summoned the universe into being is still and small, hardly louder than a whisper. To hear God you have to listen.

Elijah had to learn that zealotry is profoundly dangerous. Jewish tradition went further, holding that Elijah would one day return to earth to herald an age of peace.

God is not in the fire, or the whirlwind, or the earthquake. Zealotry wins the battle but not the war. It creates fear, not love. It risks desecrating the very cause it seeks to sanctify. Faith speaks in an altogether different voice, urging us, in Robert Kennedy’s fine phrase, to “tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world”.

Religion fails when it seeks to impose truth by force, whatever the truth, whatever the force. Only when it divests itself of earthly power does faith learn to speak the healing truths of heaven. This applies even to the greatest of the prophets, how much more so to their imitators in lesser times.

Until we understand this, good men and women will do evil for altruistic reasons, turning people away from the very God they seek to serve. The purity of their motives will not cleanse the blood they seek to shed.

Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks is the Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of the Commonwealth

Faith is on the front line in the war on terror

by Giles Fraser
Church Times, July 6, 2007

“Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” This question, directed by James and John at Jesus in last Sunday’s Gospel reading from Luke 9, must have sent a shiver down many a pew.

On Saturday, two men drove a Jeep packed with petrol into Glasgow Airport. On Sunday, I am dressed up in my finery reading how Jesus’s followers asked whether they might unleash that same flame of religious hatred upon the theological heterodox Samaritans. Of course, Jesus “rebuked them”, but, even so, James and John are heroes of our faith. In this story, they look terrifyingly similar to today’s religious terrorists.

What is there to learn here? Perhaps this: that the most dangerous people in the world are those who are absolutely convinced of their own moral virtue and innocence. It is not the scoundrel who is responsible for the darkest moral evil in the world, but the person who is assured of his or her own virtue.

The man who tried to blow up the airport was reported to have emerged from the car, covered in flames. As the fire melted his flesh, he kept repeating the name of God, punching anyone who tried to put his fire out. Here was a man thoroughly convinced that he was doing the right thing. Make no mistake: it was faith that provided him with his moral alibi.

I always fear “real” believers. Whatever their belief system, there are those who think it is so morally watertight that it allows them carte blanche. You can sometimes see it in their faces: not a flicker of self-doubt; not an iota of self-critical awareness. It is not the bad person from whom society has most to fear. The person to be afraid of is the “good” person. I wager there has never been an agnostic suicide-bomber.

All those with religious conviction are called to recognise how dangerous faith can be. That is why it needs a whole raft of checks and balances. And, thank God, these checks and balances are there throughout the Bible. The Gospel passage on Sunday was itself a warning about faith.

This is why the people of faith need more epistemic humility, a great deal more self-awareness, a longer pause before answering the big questions of faith, a more open reflection upon our less flattering motivations. It might be difficult to find the confidence to develop self-critical vigilance when so many others want to disparage faith. But develop it more we must. The people of faith are on the front line in the war on terror.

The Revd Dr Giles Fraser is Team Rector of Putney.

Reflections on poverty and climate change

by Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori
San Francisco Chronicle , May 20, 2007

Before I became a priest, I was a professor of oceanography. One of the things I learned was that oceanographers couldn't just study squid or fish in isolation. We had to study interconnected systems. We had to understand not only the animals' environment, such as the water, but its chemistry and circulation, the atmosphere above the ocean and the geology below it. And that, I believe, is how we must understand our world: We must see everything, and everyone, as interconnected and intended by God to live in relationship.

Two of the most significant crises facing our world -- climate change and deadly poverty -- offer an example of such interconnectedness. By under- standing how the two crises, and the people they affect, are connected, we can begin to understand how humanity can triumph over both. Extreme poverty -- that is, poverty that kills -- afflicts more than a billion of God's people around the world. Nearly 30,000 of these people will die today. That's 1 every 3 seconds. The factors that propel this kind of deadly poverty include hunger, diseases like AIDS and malaria, conflict, lack of access to education and basic inequality. Climate change threatens to make the picture even more deadly. As temperature changes increase the frequency and intensity of severe-weather events around the world, poor countries -- which often lack infrastructural needs like storm walls and water-storage facilities -- will divert previous resources away from fighting poverty in order to respond to disaster. Warmer climates will also increase the spread of diseases like malaria and tax the ability of poor countries to respond adequately. Perhaps most severely, changed rain patterns will increase the prevalence of drought in places like Africa, where only 4 percent of cropped land is irrigated, leaving populations without food and hamstrung in their ability to trade internationally to generate income.

Conversely, just as climate change will exacerbate poverty, poverty also is hastening climate change. Most poor people around the world lack access to a reliable-energy source, an imbalance that must be addressed in any attempt to lift a community out of poverty. Unfortunately, financial necessity often forces the choice of energy sources such as oil and coal that threaten to expand significantly the world's greenhouse emissions and thus accelerate the effects of climate change. This cycle -- poverty that begets climate change, and vice versa -- threatens the future of all people, rich and poor alike, and of all things in the world that God so loves.

This relationship between deadly poverty and the health of creation was not lost on the world's leaders when, at the turn of the 21st century, they committed to an ambitious yet attainable plan to cut global poverty in half by 2015. This plan, which established the eight Millennium Development Goals, included a specific pledge to create environmental sustainability. 2007 marks the halfway point in the world's effort to achieve these goals, and while progress has been impressive in some places, we're nowhere close to halfway there. President Bush and other world leaders have made bold commitments, but many of them have yet to be realized. How can the United States help put the world back on track?

First, our nation should make good on the promises it has made to expand foreign aid targeted at fighting poverty, cancel the debts of poor countries and seek fairer international-trade rules that allow people living in poverty to empower themselves in the fight against poverty.

Second, our nation's leaders should recognize the emerging consensus that we can no longer ignore our role in safeguarding the health and balance of God's creation. We must take seriously our share in the global responsibility for reducing carbon emissions, and work with other nations to provide the resources and technology transfers that will allow poor countries to address their energy needs through clean-energy sources that will not hasten the rate of climate change.

Of course, it is not the United States alone that needs to deliver. When the leaders of the G8 meet in early June in Germany, climate change will be at the top of their agenda. The health and well-being of Africa is also on the agenda, but much further down. Now is an ideal time for Americans to write, call, or e-mail President Bush and urge him to work with other leaders in the G8 to consider climate change and deadly poverty side-by-side as facets of the same problem. The good news is that Americans are getting involved like never before. Faith communities such as the Episcopal Church, from which I come, are organizing in communities all over the country, as are citizens from many other walks of life. Millions of Americans have joined the call for comprehensive solutions to poverty through efforts like ONE: The Campaign to Make Poverty History, and groups like the U.N. Millennium Campaign are working with citizens in all parts of the world. To be successful, though, the effort needs even more voices. It needs all of us.

At the very beginning of the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, we hear of God's creation of the universe and his proclamation that the whole of it is very good. Ultimately, this story is an account of relationships: the bond of love between God and the world, and the interconnectivity of all people and all things in that world. It is only when we take seriously those relationships -- when we realize that all people have a stake in the health and well-being of all others and of the Earth itself -- that creation can truly begin to realize the abundant life that God intends for every one of us.

Katharine Jefferts Schori is presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church.

Yes, but who will you invite next year?

by Joan Chittister, OSB
From Where I Stand, Vol. 4 no. 3, May 11, 2007

"A real Christian prays," Karl Barth wrote, "with the Bible in one hand and the daily newspaper in the other." I have never been able to forget that image. There is something about the insight that rings true. After all, if what we learn about the mind of God, the heart of Jesus, in Scripture has nothing to do with the way we live, then the spiritual life is at best an exercise designed to make God a private devotion.

Nevertheless, the problem is clear: the temptation is to get mired in one of those elements of the Christian life to the exclusion of the other -- the scripture to the exclusion of the newspaper, the newspaper to the exclusion of the scripture.

One thing is obvious, however. If you want to know the state of the culture you’re in -- as well as the spiritual task of the time -- read the paper.

Three newspaper stories, for instance, gave me particular pause this week. The first headline from Reuters news agency as compiled by the Catholic Media Report of May 9 read "Pope Warns Catholic Politicians Who Back Abortion."

The second headline from the same source, citing the online edition of Britain’s newspaper, The Independent, read "Infant Mortality in Iraq Soars as Young Pay the Price for the War."

The third appeared in the Washington Post, May 9, and read, "For Bush the Welcome Mat Seems A Little Less Welcoming."

The first story deals with Pope Benedict’s recent public statement that politicians who vote for the legalization of abortion must consider themselves excommunicated from the church and deprived of the Eucharist, however sincere they may be in working to eliminate abortion by other means.

The second story is about protecting the lives of children, too. But this story is about the hundreds of thousands of children who have died in Iraq as a direct result of the two Gulf Wars waged by the United States against that country since 1990. But this story carries no threat of moral consequences or even hints that such a position may be in the making.

These two stories, in other words, draw the line that separates Catholic morality from itself. On one side, moral values are defined as sexual life. They deal with contraception, abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia and are absolute on all counts.

On the other side, the concerns are also for the right to life but concentrate on the issue from the perspective of a broader array of social justice issues: from the effect on all life from preemptive war, for instance, or nuclearism, or poverty, or immigration, or ecology or civil rights or the death penalty.

On the one side lies the "hold-the-line" position. This position argues that the standards of the country, the ones we all took for granted prior to the present scientific revolution and all the new life questions with which it faces us, must not be breached. Must, in fact, be maintained at whatever cost to all other issues.

On the other side stand those whose life questions are more global than personal, more public than private. They argue on the basis of the great documents on Catholic social teaching and assume that justice is of the essence of personal morality.

Both positions are very, very Catholic. One cannot exclude the other.

Maybe that’s why the third story is the one we need most to hear and heed if both scripture and society are to come together in our lifetime.

This third story is about a small Benedictine college in Latrobe, Pa., which, thanks to the fact that its new president is a past director of the Bush White House Office for Faith-based and Community Initiatives, managed to contract the president of the United States as this year’s commencement speaker. No small coup.

They did it, they said, to bring attention to a small college that lives in the shadow of some of the great ones in the country: Pitt, Duquesne, Carlow, Carnegie Mellon and a myriad of others. And it worked. They got attention, all right.

The question of whether or not President Bush represented the Catholic ideals of the college and should therefore be showcased as a graduation speaker began to overshadow the fact of the graduation itself. The amount of division the question generated might have weakened any number of other institutions.

Instead, we may all be getting a model of how to handle dissent in a period when dissent and division are of the essence of the time.

In this case, the Benedictine community of St. Vincent’s Archabbey, rather than simply either canceling the speaker or repressing the dissenters, had its own discussion of the implications of the event. The college held faculty meetings, student forums and public exchanges on the question. Peace groups -- including other religious and even Benedictine Sisters themselves -- held vigils and public demonstrations on campus to remind the campus community and the country of all those other Catholic values which, they argue, are either not being stressed or are being damaged by the policies of the Bush administration.

And then, tenured faculty, both religious and lay, that disagreed with the invitation, wrote an open letter to President Bush, the subject of the third news story, explaining their concerns about his choice as commencement speaker.

It is in this letter that the world gets a clear schema of how to deal with differences in a time of social turmoil and equally competing positions about crucial issues. They made three points very clearly:

First, "In the spirit of Benedictine hospitality," they welcomed him in the hope that his stay would be "warm, engaging, and enlightening." And they added, "Just as we will welcome your presence, we have the opportunity to welcome those who protest your visit."

Second, they pointed out that this "visit affords us the opportunity and the obligation to bear witness ourselves." Then, citing principles of Catholic social teaching, they expressed their disagreement with the preemptive war on Iraq, the environmental policies that threaten the welfare of the globe, the economic policies that favor "the rich and powerful" to the detriment of the poor, and the fear mongering that poisons public discussion in the United States.

Finally, they ended the letter in the same spirit of welcome and honesty with which they began it. They wrote, out of the Benedictine commitment to conversion, "Just as we have graduated generations of men and women committed to peace, care, community, stewardship and hospitality, we pray that your visit with this graduating class turns your heart to these same values."

They made the whole incident a display of concerns rather than simply one more instance of repression.

From where I stand, in a period when it is becoming ever more popular for the church to bar speakers from platforms on the basis of single-issue politics than to talk about those issues, we might all take a lesson from the way this community handled this situation.

And we’ll know if they really meant it if they invite John Kerry, or better yet, Hillary Clinton, to give next year’s commencement address.

War, religion, and gay rights

By James Carroll  |  Boston Globe | November 13, 2006

IN JERUSALEM, Muslims and Jews have found common cause: attacking gay people.

A gay pride parade was scheduled for Friday. In Palestinian areas, Muslim leaders vigorously condemned homosexuality as criminal, and in ultra-Orthodox neighborhoods, Jewish demonstrators staged raucous protests. As a result, organizers canceled the parade. One of them said, "Now we are being dragged back into the dark world of religion."

In US elections last week, while a wave of change was reversing the nation's conservative direction, a counterwave crested, and it, too, attacked gays.

On the ballot in eight states were amendments defining marriage as between a man and woman, a direct repudiation of the right of homosexual couples to marry. In seven of those states, the amendment passed. One of those was Colorado, where a leader of the anti-gay-marriage movement, Pastor Ted Haggard, had, the week before, been forced out of his position as head of New Life Church in Colorado Springs because of an alleged relationship with a male prostitute. In his resignation letter, Haggard confessed, "I am a deceiver and a liar. There is a part of my life that is so repulsive and dark that I've been warring against it all my adult life."

In Massachusetts, ahead of last week's constitutional convention, the Commonwealth's four Catholic bishops took a rare political initiative, calling on Catholics to pressure legislators to support an anti-gay-marriage amendment here. The convention recessed without taking action, but the bishops had demonstrated the absolute priority of rolling back the right of gays to marry. When public crises are defined by an immoral American war, universal cuts in social services, violence among young people, resurgent nuclear arsenals, rising global inequity, unprecedented jeopardy of the earth itself, why are the bishops obsessed with this particular question?

Same-sex erotic love is not the issue. Humans, including Catholic bishops, have long accommodated it. But that accommodation assumes denial and shame. What brings demonstrators into streets across cultures, and what shows up in the United States as "values" politics, mobilizing bishops, is the movement to bring homosexuality out of the dark.

When gay people openly assert their identities as such, whether through parades or through the demand for full and equal social recognition, reactionaries cannot stand it. Why?

Two answers, one personal and one political. The open affirmation of gay identity can pose a mortal threat to people whose own sexual identity is insecure. The Haggard story is a cautionary tale. As it happens, I was present last year to hear Pastor Ted preach a sermon at his mega-church, and it included a digressive attack on homosexuals that was as venomous as it was gratuitous. He equated gay sex with bestiality.

Even at the time, I wondered about the dark energy of his hatred. That it is revealed now as self-hatred comes as no surprise. One needn't draw a direct line from Haggard's behavior to the private morality of Catholic bishops to sense that the church's own deepening insecurity on all matters of sexuality, especially those surfaced by the still unresolved crisis of priestly sexual abuse of children, informs its exceptional opposition to gay rights.

And so in Jerusalem. The insecurities of male establishments, whose dominance over women is threatened, readily explode in contempt for any expression of gay pride. Patriarchy is at issue.

There is a deflection here, and that points to the political use of gay bashing. At the end of the Cold War, when the Pentagon defined itself as the world's largest closet by decreeing "don't ask, don't tell," the issue of gays in the military was being used to deflect attention from the military's real problem: how to maintain Cold War levels of spending, and a Cold War nuclear arsenal, without a Cold War enemy?

The real "don't ask, don't tell" was "Don't ask us about our budgets and nukes, and we won't tell you about the future wars they will enable." All of the Sturm und Drang about gays in the military deflected American attention from the real issue of the moment, and it worked. The American Cold War ethos is still with us.

The human race is undergoing a massive cultural mutation. The meaning of sexuality is being transformed as biology revolutionizes reproduction. Women are demanding equality across the globe. Men are being forced to reimagine their familial and social roles. Gays and lesbians are at the center of these changes. Their refusal to be silent and invisible is one of the era's great resources, a magnificent sign of hope.

A Hint of Possibility in the Air

By Garrison Keillor
The Chicago Tribune

Wednesday 08 November 2006

    So now we have thrown some rascals out and left some rascals in power and sent some new folks to Washington to learn the art of rascality, and what in the end, after all the hoopla, will really change? Or will the town drunk continue to run the municipal liquor store?

    Perhaps there will be some rational debate on the war. The voters have said they don't want the 30 Years War that Vice President Dick Cheney envisions, so it's time for him and his friend to start making other arrangements. This happens all the time in the real world. If you can't accomplish the mission, then you accept it and find a graceful way out.

    The health insurance crisis may be addressed, and the crippled behemoth that is Homeland Security. And surely Congress will rediscover the use of the subpoena and require public servants to account for themselves under oath. This would be a novelty. After six years of ingenious spin, we could get a history lesson while we're still young enough to profit from it.

    People still care deeply about our government, despite every invitation to disillusionment. This is the astonishment. For my generation, the first big blow was the failure of Washington to get to the truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and then its inability to change a disastrous course in Vietnam. You stand at the majestic polished wall with the 57,000 names on it, and you look across the river to Arlington, and here, within one mile, are two enormous aching sorrows, and a mile behind you is the U.S. Supreme Court, which threw the election of 2000. Some people killed our president and got away with it; men were shipped off to die in a lousy war promulgated by Democrats afraid to be called weak on communism; and an election was stolen, no protest. And yet we still stroll down to the church and cast our ballots. We live on hope.

    Forty years ago I drove to Baltimore for a friend's wedding and then, on a powerful urge, veered off toward Washington. It was night. I drove through a confusing grid of diagonals and circles, saw the great dome illuminated, drove up to it and parked and walked in. You could do that then. A few cops stood around, and you strolled past them and into the rotunda, and stood dazed and humbled in this space where great men had moved. The tragedy of secession was played out in these halls, and the New Deal was launched, and FDR was carried up here after Pearl Harbor to declare World War II, after which wise men designed the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe and the GI Bill of Rights that built an American middle class.

    It has been a long time since we had reason to be proud of these people, though they are essentially the same people as those who accomplished great things. So what's wrong?

    One problem with Congress is that 90 percent of it is ceremonial and so little has to do with elucidation. The Honorable meets with representatives of the American Beer Can Association, the Swizzle Stick Foundation, the League of Tutu Manufacturers, and poses for photos and listens to their pitches, and then goes to the floor and proclaims Eugene P. Fenstermaker Day, and then to a subcommittee hearing to read a two-page statement praising the arts as a triumphant manifestation of the human spirit, and then back to the office to welcome 10 fat men in beanies and the 4-Hers from Hooperville, then off to the banquet of the American Ferret Federation, and seldom during the day is the Honorable ever challenged or questioned or asked to listen to anything that wasn't vetted and paid for. The Great Personage is either regarded with servile deference or heartily abused by bloggers. This is not a good life for an inquiring mind.

    You meet congressmen in private and they're perfectly thoughtful and well-spoken people, nothing like the raging idiots they impersonate in campaign ads, and you think, maybe Congress needs more privacy. Send them off on unchaperoned trips to see the world firsthand. More closed-door caucuses where they can say what they think without worrying that one stray phrase may kill them.

    Or maybe Congress simply needed more Democrats. We are a civil bunch, owing to our contentious upbringings. With a smart, well-spoken woman for speaker instead of that lumbering, mumbling galoot who covered for the Current Occupant, perhaps life will get more interesting. Maybe they'll do something good. It's possible.

    --------

    Garrison Keillor is an author and host of "A Prairie Home Companion."

Jim Wallis: An Insider Reveals Faith-Based Manipulation by the White House

[From the God's Politics 'blog, October 16, 2006]

David Kuo is the author of a new book called Tempting Faith and was interviewed last night on 60 Minutes. Kuo could be a big problem for the Bush Administration, because he asserts that the famous White House “Faith-based Initiative” fell far short of its bold promises, was a cover-up for very bad domestic policies on poverty, and was cynically politicized to serve partisan Republican purposes. Kuo was a Special Assistant to the President and the number two official at the White House Office on faith-based initiatives from 2001-2003.

It’s strong stuff. Kuo says he was “dazzled” by George W. Bush and his idea of “compassionate conservatism,” but that Bush never followed through with his promises. The actual funding fell far, far short—about one percent—of the 8 billion dollars the President personally pledged for his faith-based initiative, while effective domestic programs for low-income families were slashed to pay for tax cuts mostly favoring the rich. Bush talked a lot about his faith-based program, but never fought for it, according to Kuo. He believes the President’s stated campaign vision for faith-based initiatives “was one of the most important political addresses given in the last generation," but he says the failure to deliver on those promises came before 9/11. In the end, Bush delivered only “a whisper” of the promise, and let the "compassion agenda" languish.

Not only was only a fraction of the money promised ever appropriated and disbursed, but it also tended to favor organizations friendly to the White House political agenda, claims Kuo. Personally, I have also been told of extremely pro-administration, pro-Republican, and anti-Democratic political rhetoric at meetings of the faith-based initiative grantees. MSNBC also reports Kuo's further allegations that former White House political affairs director Ken Mehlman used the office to mobilize religious voters in 20 targeted races - nineteen of which were won by Republicans. Kuo says the outreach was directed both at conservative evangelicals and at traditional Democratic allies in racial/ethnic communities that are highly sensitive to religious messages and Republican wedge issues. Kuo charges that this was the exploitation of religion for political ends in which “good and well meaning people are manipulated,” and that “God and politics were fused together.”

Is anybody surprised that a White house ruled by the likes of Karl Rove and Dick Cheney would engage in manipulation of religion—or anything else? I recall the reflections of the first head of the faith-based program office, John Dilulio, who left after six months, and later cited the disconnects between the White House's faith-based office and the domestic policy advisors, referring to them as “Mayberry Machiavellians.” Kuo describes the cynical character of the faith-based program, where White House officials would regularly “roll their eyes” privately about religious leaders, and refer to them with disdain, even as “nuts” while, at the same time, praising them as public allies and reaching out to their constituencies for votes. MSNBC quotes Kuo as writing, “National Christian leaders received hugs and smiles in person and then were dismissed behind their backs and described as ‘ridiculous,’ ‘out of control,’ and just plain ‘goofy.’” “You name the important Christian leaders, and I have heard them mocked, by serious people in serious places,” said Kuo on 60 Minutes.

For full disclosure, I should say that I've known David Kuo for years. We met at a retreat and began a conversation which has lasted ever since. He was, and is indeed, a conservative evangelical Christian, as he said on 60 Minutes, and was quite unhappy with the many contradictions and hypocrisies of liberalism. I had to agree with much of his critique. But he also genuinely cared about the poor and that was our point of connection. David Kuo was one of those genuine “compassionate conservatives” which many liberals don’t believe really exist, but truly do. Yet he eventually came to realize that there weren’t many compassionate conservatives in the White House, which preferred to use the religious community for their own political purposes.

When asked if he believed the White House will now come after him, Kuo replied, “Of course they will, I can hear the attacks, ‘Oh, he’s really a liberal, or maybe that brain tumor really messed up his head.” (Kuo survived a bout with brain cancer while serving in the White House). But, he says, “I have this burden on my heart that the name of God is being destroyed in the name of politics … I felt like I had to write this.”

I am interested to see how much Kuo talks about Bush in his book - whether he ever was really a compassionate conservative himself or not, or whether he was either distracted or overruled by other conservative agendas. David and I had lunch just before he left the White House, and he told me of his plans to resign. “I believe the president really has a heart for the poor,” he told me, “but I don’t think it matters.” It was a stunning statement, clearly suggesting that other priorities ruled at the White House. “So," he told me, "I am going to leave before he breaks my heart." Now Kuo is the Beliefnet editor that hosts this blog (another full disclosure).

The White House Office on Faith Based and Community Initiatives (its full title) hired some of the best people around. Its first and second directors, John Dilulio and Jim Towey are people I greatly respect and consider friends, along with David Kuo. Dilulio realized quickly what the White House priorities were and got out, while Towey stayed too long in my opinion. In the beginning, I supported the initiative too and met with President Bush and other religious leaders on several occasions to discuss it. I believed, and still do, in a level playing field for faith-based organizations who ought to be eligible for public funding if they obey federal law and guidelines, and not use social service funding for explicitly religious purposes. "Fund results, not religion" as Dilulio used to say. But I said to President Bush early on that partnerships with faith-based organizations should never become a substitute for sound domestic policies aimed at serious poverty reduction. And that’s exactly what happened. Then political manipulation of religion only compounded the crime of political neglect of the poor.

Read Tempted by Faith - by a real compassionate conservative - and weep for the loss of what could have been, then beware of those who would manipulate genuine faith for partisan political purposes.

Jim Wallis: Top Ten GOD'S POLITICS Epiphanies

by Jim Wallis, God's Politics Blog, Friday, October 13, 2006

When I first went out on the book tour for God’s Politics, I often got asked the standard media question, “Why did you write this book?” I answered, “Because the Right gets it wrong and the Left doesn’t get it!” It worked. Now reporters tell me it’s “the book that changed the conversation.” The new essay in the paperback edition of God’s Politics talks about all the ways the conversation has changed.

But now that God’s Politics is out in paperback and the publisher has me on another book tour, there is a new question I’m getting asked—both by the media and by people who come out to the events and talk to me at the book signing tables. The new question is, “What gives you the most satisfaction about the success of God’s Politics?” Or, “What makes you feel best about having written this book?” I’ve thought a lot about this and here are the top ten things that give me the most encouragement from the impact that God’s Politics has had.

1. Young people are streaming out to the God’s Politics events and, invariably, one of them says to me, “I came to faith because of this book; what’s next?” I now realize how much the church’s lack of commitment to social justice has been an obstacle to faith, and am thrilled by so many young people now coming to faith—it must be the evangelical in me.
2. Parents tell me they are giving the book to their children—some of whom have lost their faith, or are seeking to make the connections between personal faith and social justice.
3. Many pastors tell me their church is studying God’s Politics, and that it is bringing together people from all sides of the political spectrum. (To help them do that, we’ve now published a new companion study volume designed for small groups called Living God’s Politics.)
4. Young evangelical pastors and students tell me they are searching for “new options” beyond the Religious Right and Secular Left. And the hold of just one political party (the GOP) on the religious community has dropped significantly even since the 2004 elections. Why? Because more and more Christians are demonstrating their concern for more than just two “moral values” issues.
5. Jon Stewart [the first of the "Featured Links] was interested in what Jesus' words would mean to politics, and his millions of fans now know that Jesus' top priorities might not have been a capital gains tax cut or the occupation of Iraq.
6. Many progressive and Democratic political leaders are coming out of the closet with their faith, and opening up to faith communities and the role of faith in movements for social change; and Sen. Barack Obama is speaking so clearly about faith and Sen. John Edwards so passionately about poverty.
7. There are Republicans now who want to take back their party from the Religious right, and are voting against cutting effective programs for low-income families.
8. The American people can now hear Katie Couric, Tim Russert, and many of their media colleagues fairly profiling the diverse views of faith leaders across the spectrum, and not just from the Relgious Right.
9. The bestseller tables and shelves at the book stores across America don’t only feature Ann Coulter, Bill O’Reily, and Sean Hannity anymore; now they display progressive religious voices too. I was especially pleased that two books on progressive faith (God's Politics and Jimmy Carter’s Our Endangered Values) both made The New York Times best-seller list for four months each during the same year!
10. The release of God’s Politics simply revealed what was already there—a large and growing constituency of faith-inspired people who had felt unrepresented by a small group of narrow, vitriolic, and partisan religious voices. That they feel their voice is now being heard is one of the greatest satisfactions for me. The best thing I hear after God's Politics events from so many people is, "I don't feel alone anymore." As I say at almost every stop, “The monologue of the Religious Right is finally over, and a new dialogue has just begun.” Now all our voices are changing the conversation. Amen.

"Is God Green?"

A new holy war is growing within the conservative evangelical community, with implications for both the global environment and American politics. For years liberal Christians and others have made protection of the environment a moral commitment. Now a number of conservative evangelicals are joining the fight, arguing that man's stewardship of the planet is a biblical imperative and calling for action to stop global warming.

But they are being met head-on by opposition from their traditional evangelical brethren who adamantly support the Bush administration in downplaying the threat of global warming and other environmental perils. The political stakes are high: Three out of every four white evangelical voters chose George W. Bush in 2004. "Is God Green?" explores how a serious split among conservative evangelicals over the environment and global warming could reshape American politics.

The second of three programs in the series Moyers on America will be broadcast on PBS Wednesday evening, October 11, 2006, at 9:00 PM on Channel 8. Don't miss it!

Christianity and the 'Pride of Power'

by Brian McLaren, God's Politics 'Blog, October 9, 2006

I recently came across this quote from Dietrich Bonhoeffer, from his sermon on 2 Corinthians 12:9:

"Christianity stands or falls with its revolutionary protest against violence, arbitrariness and pride of power and with its plea for the weak. Christians are doing too little to make these points clear rather than too much. Christendom adjusts itself far too easily to the worship of power. Christians should give more offense, shock the world far more, than they are doing now. Christians should take a stronger stand in favor of the weak rather than considering first the possible right of the strong."

These words struck me all the more because I just returned from a five-week, seven-country speaking tour of Latin America. This follows tours of Europe, Africa, Australia, and New Zealand earlier this year - twenty countries in all.

In each country, I heard Christian leaders - Evangelicals, Pentecostals, Traditional Protestants, and Roman Catholics - express amazement and dismay at the relative silence of the church in the USA. They see us, by and large, as a prime example of Bonhoeffer's lament about Christendom "adjusting itself far too easily to the worship of power." We are giving offense, but sadly, the wrong kind. For example, they hear frequent defenses by Christians in the USA - not of the weak and poor, but of the strong and powerful. About torture and violence, about "pride of power," they hear too little protest from too few of us. They know we are against terrorism, but they don't know if we are against American empire and domination.

I tried to tell our fellow Christians in Latin America that many of us are speaking out against these things, but I had to admit that doing so feels like an exercise in going against the current, not only in the culture at large, but in the Christian community as well.

The degree to which Christianity in the USA has capitulated to a neo-Constantinian compromise with empire is disturbing to our Christian brothers and sisters around the world ... and it should be to all of us in the church in the USA. Perhaps these powerful words of Dietrich Bonhoeffer will catch fire among more and more of us in the US, and perhaps we will see afresh that we can not, indeed, serve two masters - whether those masters are Greed and God, Caesar and Christ, or the Sword and Spear of violence and the Basin and Towel of service.

Brian is posting letters to Christians in America from their counterparts in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia. You'll find them on his site. brianmclaren.net