Without A Doubt
By Ron Suskind
The New York Times

October 17th, 2004

CONTINUED FROM PART ONE

This is where the faith-based presidency truly takes shape. Faith, which for months had been coloring the decision-making process and a host of political tactics - think of his address to the nation on stem-cell research - now began to guide events. It was the most natural ascension: George W. Bush turning to faith in his darkest moment and discovering a wellspring of power and confidence.
Of course, the mandates of sound, sober analysis didn’t vanish. They never do. Ask any entrepreneur with a blazing idea when, a few years along, the first debt payments start coming due. Or the C.E.O., certain that a high stock price affirms his sweeping vision, until that neglected, flagging division cripples the company. There’s a startled look - how’d that happen? In this case, the challenge of mobilizing the various agencies of the United States government and making certain that agreed-upon goals become demonstrable outcomes grew exponentially.

Looking back at the months directly following 9/11, virtually every leading military analyst seems to believe that rather than using Afghan proxies, we should have used more American troops, deployed more quickly, to pursue Osama bin Laden in the mountains of Tora Bora. Many have also been critical of the president’s handling of Saudi Arabia, home to 15 of the 19 hijackers; despite Bush’s setting goals in the so-called “financial war on terror,” the Saudis failed to cooperate with American officials in hunting for the financial sources of terror. Still, the nation wanted bold action and was delighted to get it. Bush’s approval rating approached 90 percent. Meanwhile, the executive’s balance between analysis and resolution, between contemplation and action, was being tipped by the pull of righteous faith.

It was during a press conference on Sept. 16, in response to a question about homeland security efforts infringing on civil rights, that Bush first used the telltale word “crusade” in public. “This is a new kind of - a new kind of evil,” he said. “And we understand. And the American people are beginning to understand. This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.”

Muslims around the world were incensed. Two days later, Ari Fleischer tried to perform damage control. “I think what the president was saying was - had no intended consequences for anybody, Muslim or otherwise, other than to say that this is a broad cause that he is calling on America and the nations around the world to join.” As to “any connotations that would upset any of our partners, or anybody else in the world, the president would regret if anything like that was conveyed.”

A few months later, on Feb. 1, 2002, Jim Wallis of the Sojourners stood in the Roosevelt Room for the introduction of Jim Towey as head of the president’s faith-based and community initiative. John DiIulio, the original head, had left the job feeling that the initiative was not about “compassionate conservatism,” as originally promised, but rather a political giveaway to the Christian right, a way to consolidate and energize that part of the base.

Moments after the ceremony, Bush saw Wallis. He bounded over and grabbed the cheeks of his face, one in each hand, and squeezed. “Jim, how ya doin’, how ya doin’!” he exclaimed. Wallis was taken aback. Bush excitedly said that his massage therapist had given him Wallis’s book, “Faith Works.” His joy at seeing Wallis, as Wallis and others remember it, was palpable - a president, wrestling with faith and its role at a time of peril, seeing that rare bird: an independent counselor. Wallis recalls telling Bush he was doing fine, “‘but in the State of the Union address a few days before, you said that unless we devote all our energies, our focus, our resources on this war on terrorism, we’re going to lose.’ I said, ‘Mr. President, if we don’t devote our energy, our focus and our time on also overcoming global poverty and desperation, we will lose not only the war on poverty, but we’ll lose the war on terrorism.”‘

Bush replied that that was why America needed the leadership of Wallis and other members of the clergy.

“No, Mr. President,” Wallis says he told Bush, “We need your leadership on this question, and all of us will then commit to support you. Unless we drain the swamp of injustice in which the mosquitoes of terrorism breed, we’ll never defeat the threat of terrorism.”

Bush looked quizzically at the minister, Wallis recalls. They never spoke again after that.

“When I was first with Bush in Austin, what I saw was a self-help Methodist, very open, seeking,” Wallis says now. “What I started to see at this point was the man that would emerge over the next year - a messianic American Calvinist. He doesn’t want to hear from anyone who doubts him.”

But with a country crying out for intrepid leadership, does a president have time to entertain doubters? In a speech in Alaska two weeks later, Bush again referred to the war on terror as a “crusade.”

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn’t like about Bush’s former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House’s displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn’t fully comprehend - but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality - judiciously, as you will - we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

Who besides guys like me are part of the reality-based community? Many of the other elected officials in Washington, it would seem. A group of Democratic and Republican members of Congress were called in to discuss Iraq sometime before the October 2002 vote authorizing Bush to move forward. A Republican senator recently told Time Magazine that the president walked in and said: “Look, I want your vote. I’m not going to debate it with you.” When one of the senators began to ask a question, Bush snapped, “Look, I’m not going to debate it with you.”

The 9/11 commission did not directly address the question of whether Bush exerted influence over the intelligence community about the existence of weapons of mass destruction. That question will be investigated after the election, but if no tangible evidence of undue pressure is found, few officials or alumni of the administration whom I spoke to are likely to be surprised. “If you operate in a certain way - by saying this is how I want to justify what I’ve already decided to do, and I don’t care how you pull it off - you guarantee that you’ll get faulty, one-sided information,” Paul O’Neill, who was asked to resign his post of treasury secretary in December 2002, said when we had dinner a few weeks ago. “You don’t have to issue an edict, or twist arms, or be overt.”

In a way, the president got what he wanted: a National Intelligence Estimate on W.M.D. that creatively marshaled a few thin facts, and then Colin Powell putting his credibility on the line at the United Nations in a show of faith. That was enough for George W. Bush to press forward and invade Iraq. As he told his quasi-memoirist, Bob Woodward, in “Plan of Attack”: “Going into this period, I was praying for strength to do the Lord’s will. . . . I’m surely not going to justify the war based upon God. Understand that. Nevertheless, in my case, I pray to be as good a messenger of his will as possible.”

Machiavelli’s oft-cited line about the adequacy of the perception of power prompts a question. Is the appearance of confidence as important as its possession? Can confidence - true confidence - be willed? Or must it be earned?

George W. Bush, clearly, is one of history’s great confidence men. That is not meant in the huckster’s sense, though many critics claim that on the war in Iraq, the economy and a few other matters he has engaged in some manner of bait-and-switch. No, I mean it in the sense that he’s a believer in the power of confidence. At a time when constituents are uneasy and enemies are probing for weaknesses, he clearly feels that unflinching confidence has an almost mystical power. It can all but create reality.

Whether you can run the world on faith, it’s clear you can run one hell of a campaign on it.

George W. Bush and his team have constructed a high-performance electoral engine. The soul of this new machine is the support of millions of likely voters, who judge his worth based on intangibles - character, certainty, fortitude and godliness - rather than on what he says or does. The deeper the darkness, the brighter this filament of faith glows, a faith in the president and the just God who affirms him.

The leader of the free world is clearly comfortable with this calculus and artfully encourages it. In the series of televised, carefully choreographed “Ask President Bush” events with supporters around the country, sessions filled with prayers and blessings, one questioner recently summed up the feelings of so many Christian conservatives, the core of the Bush army. “I’ve voted Republican from the very first time I could vote,” said Gary Walby, a retired jeweler from Destin, Fla., as he stood before the president in a crowded college gym. “And I also want to say this is the very first time that I have felt that God was in the White House.” Bush simply said “thank you” as a wave of raucous applause rose from the assembled.

Every few months, a report surfaces of the president using strikingly Messianic language, only to be dismissed by the White House. Three months ago, for instance, in a private meeting with Amish farmers in Lancaster County, Pa., Bush was reported to have said, “I trust God speaks through me.” In this ongoing game of winks and nods, a White House spokesman denied the president had specifically spoken those words, but noted that “his faith helps him in his service to people.”

A recent Gallup Poll noted that 42 percent of Americans identify themselves as evangelical or “born again.” While this group leans Republican, it includes black urban churches and is far from monolithic. But Bush clearly draws his most ardent supporters and tireless workers from this group, many from a healthy subset of approximately four million evangelicals who didn’t vote in 2000 - potential new arrivals to the voting booth who could tip a close election or push a tight contest toward a rout.

This signaling system - forceful, national, varied, yet clean of the president’s specific fingerprint - carries enormous weight. Lincoln Chafee, the moderate Republican senator from Rhode Island, has broken with the president precisely over concerns about the nature of Bush’s certainty. “This issue,” he says, of Bush’s “announcing that ‘I carry the word of God’ is the key to the election. The president wants to signal to the base with that message, but in the swing states he does not.”

Come to the hostings on Labor Day and meet the base. In 2004, you know a candidate by his base, and the Bush campaign is harnessing the might of churches, with hordes of voters registering through church-sponsored programs. Following the news of Bush on his national tour in the week after the Republican convention, you could sense how a faith-based president campaigns: on a surf of prayer and righteous rage.

Righteous rage - that’s what Hardy Billington felt when he heard about same-sex marriage possibly being made legal in Massachusetts. “It made me upset and disgusted, things going on in Massachusetts,” the 52-year-old from Poplar Bluff, Mo., told me. “I prayed, then I got to work.” Billington spent $830 in early July to put up a billboard on the edge of town. It read: “I Support President Bush and the Men and Women Fighting for Our Country. We Invite President Bush to Visit Poplar Bluff.” Soon Billington and his friend David Hahn, a fundamentalist preacher, started a petition drive. They gathered 10,000 signatures. That fact eventually reached the White House scheduling office.

By late afternoon on a cloudy Labor Day, with a crowd of more than 20,000 assembled in a public park, Billington stepped to the podium. “The largest group I ever talked to I think was seven people, and I’m not much of a talker,” Billington, a shy man with three kids and a couple of dozen rental properties that he owns, told me several days later. “I’ve never been so frightened.”

But Billington said he “looked to God” and said what was in his heart. “The United States is the greatest country in the world,” he told the rally. “President Bush is the greatest president I have ever known. I love my president. I love my country. And more important, I love Jesus Christ.”

The crowd went wild, and they went wild again when the president finally arrived and gave his stump speech. There were Bush’s periodic stumbles and gaffes, but for the followers of the faith-based president, that was just fine. They got it - and “it” was the faith.

And for those who don’t get it? That was explained to me in late 2002 by Mark McKinnon, a longtime senior media adviser to Bush, who now runs his own consulting firm and helps the president. He started by challenging me. “You think he’s an idiot, don’t you?” I said, no, I didn’t. “No, you do, all of you do, up and down the West Coast, the East Coast, a few blocks in southern Manhattan called Wall Street. Let me clue you in. We don’t care. You see, you’re outnumbered 2 to 1 by folks in the big, wide middle of America, busy working people who don’t read The New York Times or Washington Post or The L.A. Times. And you know what they like? They like the way he walks and the way he points, the way he exudes confidence. They have faith in him. And when you attack him for his malaprops, his jumbled syntax, it’s good for us. Because you know what those folks don’t like? They don’t like you!” In this instance, the final “you,” of course, meant the entire reality-based community.

The bond between Bush and his base is a bond of mutual support. He supports them with his actions, doing his level best to stand firm on wedge issues like abortion and same-sex marriage while he identifies evil in the world, at home and abroad. They respond with fierce faith. The power of this transaction is something that people, especially those who are religious, tend to connect to their own lives. If you have faith in someone, that person is filled like a vessel. Your faith is the wind beneath his or her wings. That person may well rise to the occasion and surprise you: I had faith in you, and my faith was rewarded. Or, I know you’ve been struggling, and I need to pray harder.

Bush’s speech that day in Poplar Bluff finished with a mythic appeal: “For all Americans, these years in our history will always stand apart,” he said. “You know, there are quiet times in the life of a nation when little is expected of its leaders. This isn’t one of those times. This is a time that needs - when we need firm resolve and clear vision and a deep faith in the values that make us a great nation.”

The life of the nation and the life of Bush effortlessly merge - his fortitude, even in the face of doubters, is that of the nation; his ordinariness, like theirs, is heroic; his resolve, to whatever end, will turn the wheel of history.

Remember, this is consent, informed by the heart and by the spirit. In the end, Bush doesn’t have to say he’s ordained by God. After a day of speeches by Hardy Billington and others, it goes without saying.

“To me, I just believe God controls everything, and God uses the president to keep evil down, to see the darkness and protect this nation,” Billington told me, voicing an idea shared by millions of Bush supporters. “Other people will not protect us. God gives people choices to make. God gave us this president to be the man to protect the nation at this time.”

But when the moment came in the V.I.P. tent to shake Bush’s hand, Billington remembered being reserved. “‘I really thank God that you’re the president’ was all I told him.” Bush, he recalled, said, “Thank you.”

“He knew what I meant,” Billington said. “I believe he’s an instrument of God, but I have to be careful about what I say, you know, in public.”

Is there anyone in America who feels that John Kerry is an instrument of God?

“I’m going to be real positive, while I keep my foot on John Kerry’s throat,” George W. Bush said last month at a confidential luncheon a block away from the White House with a hundred or so of his most ardent, longtime supporters, the so-called R.N.C. Regents. This was a high-rolling crowd - at one time or another, they had all given large contributions to Bush or the Republican National Committee. Bush had known many of them for years, and a number of them had visited him at the ranch. It was a long way from Poplar Bluff.

The Bush these supporters heard was a triumphal Bush, actively beginning to plan his second term. It is a second term, should it come to pass, that will alter American life in many ways, if predictions that Bush voiced at the luncheon come true.

He said emphatically that he expects the Republicans will gain seats to expand their control of the House and the Senate. According to notes provided to me, and according to several guests at the lunch who agreed to speak about what they heard, he said that “Osama bin Laden would like to overthrow the Saudis . . .

then we’re in trouble. Because they have a weapon. They have the oil.” He said that there will be an opportunity to appoint a Supreme Court justice shortly after his inauguration, and perhaps three more high-court vacancies during his second term.

“Won’t that be amazing?” said Peter Stent, a rancher and conservationist who attended the luncheon. “Can you imagine? Four appointments!”

After his remarks, Bush opened it up for questions, and someone asked what he’s going to do about energy policy with worldwide oil reserves predicted to peak.

Bush said: “I’m going to push nuclear energy, drilling in Alaska and clean coal. Some nuclear-fusion technologies are interesting.” He mentions energy from “processing corn.”

“I’m going to bring all this up in the debate, and I’m going to push it,” he said, and then tried out a line. “Do you realize that ANWR [the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge] is the size of South Carolina, and where we want to drill is the size of the Columbia airport?”

The questions came from many directions - respectful, but clearly reality-based. About the deficits, he said he’d “spend whatever it takes to protect our kids in Iraq,” that “homeland security cost more than I originally thought.”

In response to a question, he talked about diversity, saying that “hands down,” he has the most diverse senior staff in terms of both gender and race. He recalled a meeting with Chancellor Gerhard Schroder of Germany. “You know, I’m sitting there with Schroder one day with Colin and Condi. And I’m thinking: What’s Schroder thinking?! He’s sitting here with two blacks and one’s a woman.”

But as the hour passed, Bush kept coming back to the thing most on his mind: his second term.

“I’m going to come out strong after my swearing in,” Bush said, “with fundamental tax reform, tort reform, privatizing of Social Security.” The victories he expects in November, he said, will give us “two years, at least, until the next midterm. We have to move quickly, because after that I’ll be quacking like a duck.”

Joseph Gildenhorn, a top contributor who attended the luncheon and has been invited to visit Bush at his ranch, said later: “I’ve never seen the president so ebullient. He was so confident. He feels so strongly he will win.” Yet one part of Bush’s 60-odd-minute free-form riff gave Gildenhorn - a board member of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and a former ambassador to Switzerland - a moment’s pause. The president, listing priorities for his second term, placed near the top of his agenda the expansion of federal support for faith-based institutions. The president talked at length about giving the initiative the full measure of his devotion and said that questions about separation of church and state were not an issue.

Talk of the faith-based initiative, Gildenhorn said, makes him “a little uneasy.” Many conservative evangelicals “feel they have a direct line from God,” he said, and feel Bush is divinely chosen.

“I think he’s religious, I think he’s a born-again, I don’t think, though, that he feels that he’s been ordained by God to serve the country.” Gildenhorn paused, then said, “But you know, I really haven’t discussed it with him.”

A regent I spoke to later and who asked not to be identified told me: “I’m happy he’s certain of victory and that he’s ready to burst forth into his second term, but it all makes me a little nervous. There are a lot of big things that he’s planning to do domestically, and who knows what countries we might invade or what might happen in Iraq. But when it gets complex, he seems to turn to prayer or God rather than digging in and thinking things through. What’s that line? - the devil’s in the details. If you don’t go after that devil, he’ll come after you.”

Bush grew into one of history’s most forceful leaders, his admirers will attest, by replacing hesitation and reasonable doubt with faith and clarity. Many more will surely tap this high-voltage connection of fervent faith and bold action. In politics, the saying goes, anything that works must be repeated until it is replaced by something better. The horizon seems clear of competitors.

Can the unfinished American experiment in self-governance - sputtering on the watery fuel of illusion and assertion - deal with something as nuanced as the subtleties of one man’s faith? What, after all, is the nature of the particular conversation the president feels he has with God - a colloquy upon which the world now precariously turns?

That very issue is what Jim Wallis wishes he could sit and talk about with George W. Bush. That’s impossible now, he says. He is no longer invited to the White House.

“Faith can cut in so many ways,” he said. “If you’re penitent and not triumphal, it can move us to repentance and accountability and help us reach for something higher than ourselves. That can be a powerful thing, a thing that moves us beyond politics as usual, like Martin Luther King did. But when it’s designed to certify our righteousness - that can be a dangerous thing. Then it pushes self-criticism aside. There’s no reflection.

“Where people often get lost is on this very point,” he said after a moment of thought. “Real faith, you see, leads us to deeper reflection and not - not ever - to the thing we as humans so very much want.”

And what is that?

“Easy certainty.”

———————————-

Ron Suskind was the senior national-affairs reporter for The Wall Street Journal from 1993 to 2000. He is the author most recently of “The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House and the Education of Paul O’Neill.”

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Honor Your Father and Mother
By Jim Wallis
Sojourners

May 2nd, 2005

The following is an open letter written by Jim Wallis as convenor of Call to Renewal, a coalition of churches and faith-based organizations working to overcome poverty. The letter was distributed last week to all members of the US Congress as the House and Senate begin hearings on Social Security, and outlines the moral framework with which Social Security should be discussed.

“Honor your father and your mother, so that you may live long in the land…” (Exodus 20:12)
As discussion about Social Security reform begins in the Senate Finance Committee, beware of those who tell you that God spoke to them and they have the “fix” for Social Security. To guarantee the solvency of this bedrock institution in American life will not be easy; it will require our best bipartisan thinking and collaboration. But one aspect of this debate does indeed raise some fundamental moral - and even religious - issues that we ought to consider.

The Judeo-Christian faith tradition has much to say about intergenerational commitments. The Old and New Testaments could not testify more clearly that we must “honor thy father and thy mother” - and care for widows and orphans, the ill, and the disabled. And there is no trust more sacred to biblical faith than the injunctions to care not only for our immediate families but also the larger family of all humanity, especially the least, the last, and the lost. In Jesus’ words from Matthew 25, “As you have done to the least of these, you have done to me.”

We are commanded to “Honor your father and your mother,” which is linked to our own well-being and security, “so that your days may be long in the land that the Lord your God is giving you” (Exodus 20:12). Deuteronomy 5:16 repeats the commandment and adds the motivation “that it may go well with you,” again connecting the generations in a mutual sense of responsibility for one another. Proverbs 23:22 tells us to respect the generation that has gone before: “Listen to your father who begot you, and do not despise your mother when she is old.” Proverbs 28:24 goes further and warns against any economic ill treatment: “Anyone who robs father or mother and says, ‘That is no crime,’ is partner to a thug.” Ezekiel 22:7 extends the warning to “orphans and widows.” The Christian New Testament picks up the same themes and in Matthew reminds us again to “honor your father and your mother.” Ephesians 6:1-3 says: “Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right. ‘Honor your father and mother,’ this is the first commandment with a promise, ’so that it may be well with you and you may live long on the earth.’”

The constant theme is that the well-being of our parents and the next generation is spiritually connected to our own. Social Security is a major way in which our society honors the previous generation by representing a civilized nation’s answer to the age-old problem of old-age poverty. This covenant assures the old in our community that growing old should not be a tragedy, and this commitment is strongly interwoven into the fabric of American society. Without Social Security, nearly half of elderly Americans would be in poverty; with it, only 10 percent are. For nearly two-thirds of the elderly, Social Security provides the majority of their income. In addition, over one-third of benefits from Social Security go to non-retirees, increasing opportunity for families facing unpredictable challenges. Social Security helps more low-income children than welfare (TANF), providing support to children who have lost a parent to death or disability. And when a worker becomes disabled or dies, the entire family is protected from poverty by benefits. There are now more than 4.5 million widows and widowers who depend on Social Security.

Privatizing Social Security threatens to dismantle our nation’s commitment and breach a covenant held between child and parent, worker and retiree, employed and unemployed, able and disabled. Casting it aside disrespects the biblical covenant. Social Security offers a guarantee of security for the elderly and many others that the stock market can never provide. President Bush’s plan to privatize Social Security would take a significant portion out of the Social Security benefits that so many Americans depend upon and divert it for private investment in the stock market. Turning what was a public promise into a private gamble could create a serious breach in the covenant between generations and raises deep questions about the moral priorities of our society. Social Security privatization could easily “rob” mother and father. Our faith requires that we consider carefully how privatization would hurt children, women, and people with disabilities.

Social Security is about we, not me, and us, not I. It is a common thread for the common good, a tie that binds a nation’s people together. Social Security is about faithfulness to a covenant between “we the people” not to forsake our parents, grandparents, children, and neighbors. It is a modest but critical bedrock of hope. To go from assuring the elderly and needy of this critical and dependable support to offering “private accounts” is a potential risk to seniors, a boon to the stock market, and an uncertain “prize” for younger generations. Putting our commitment at risk and increasing debt for a transition to a private system has implications for the old and young. For the old, the danger is the anxiety of potential poverty; for the young, the danger is in endangering their own children with massive debt.

Social Security is an expression of national values - and for Christians, our biblical priorities. It is about protecting the American dream, but also honoring God’s community by providing opportunity and dignity. Fostering dignity for families, children, and elders in need is the true measure of our compassion, the true measure of our commitment to - and covenant with - the common good. Those who want to radically change a system that has worked so well are saying, in principle, that “me” is better than “we,” that private solutions are better than shared responsibility. They want to weaken and shrink the places where we solve problems in common. They would rather each of us seek our own private solution to the issues of security, which always works to the detriment of the most vulnerable.

Honoring the intergenerational covenant has everything to do with our society’s moral behavior. We are intimately bound across lines of age, economics, and community. Let us not be a nation where “Father and mother are treated with contempt in you; the alien residing within you suffers extortion; the orphan and the widow are wronged in you” (Ezekiel 22:7).

——————

Rev. Jim Wallis is an evangeligal preacher and the founder of Soujourners, a Christian ministry whose mission is to proclaim and practice the biblical call to integrate spiritual renewal and social justice.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Our Godless Constitution
By Brooke Allen
The Nation

February 21, 2005 issue

This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20050221&s=allen

It is hard to believe that George Bush has ever read the works of George Orwell, but he seems, somehow, to have grasped a few Orwellian precepts. The lesson the President has learned best–and certainly the one that has been the most useful to him–is the axiom that if you repeat a lie often enough, people will believe it. One of his Administration’s current favorites is the whopper about America having been founded on Christian principles. Our nation was founded not on Christian principles but on Enlightenment ones. God only entered the picture as a very minor player, and Jesus Christ was conspicuously absent.
Our Constitution makes no mention whatever of God. The omission was too obvious to have been anything but deliberate, in spite of Alexander Hamilton’s flippant responses when asked about it: According to one account, he said that the new nation was not in need of “foreign aid”; according to another, he simply said “we forgot.” But as Hamilton’s biographer Ron Chernow points out, Hamilton never forgot anything important.

In the eighty-five essays that make up The Federalist, God is mentioned only twice (both times by Madison, who uses the word, as Gore Vidal has remarked, in the “only Heaven knows” sense). In the Declaration of Independence, He gets two brief nods: a reference to “the Laws of Nature and Nature’s God,” and the famous line about men being “endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.” More blatant official references to a deity date from long after the founding period: “In God We Trust” did not appear on our coinage until the Civil War, and “under God” was introduced into the Pledge of Allegiance during the McCarthy hysteria in 1954 [see Elisabeth Sifton, “The Battle Over the Pledge,” April 5, 2004].

In 1797 our government concluded a “Treaty of Peace and Friendship between the United States of America and the Bey and Subjects of Tripoli, or Barbary,” now known simply as the Treaty of Tripoli. Article 11 of the treaty contains these words:

As the Government of the United States…is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion–as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquillity of Musselmen–and as the said States never have entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mehomitan nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from religious opinions shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

This document was endorsed by Secretary of State Timothy Pickering and President John Adams. It was then sent to the Senate for ratification; the vote was unanimous. It is worth pointing out that although this was the 339th time a recorded vote had been required by the Senate, it was only the third unanimous vote in the Senate’s history. There is no record of debate or dissent. The text of the treaty was printed in full in the Philadelphia Gazette and in two New York papers, but there were no screams of outrage, as one might expect today.

The Founding Fathers were not religious men, and they fought hard to erect, in Thomas Jefferson’s words, “a wall of separation between church and state.” John Adams opined that if they were not restrained by legal measures, Puritans–the fundamentalists of their day–would “whip and crop, and pillory and roast.” The historical epoch had afforded these men ample opportunity to observe the corruption to which established priesthoods were liable, as well as “the impious presumption of legislators and rulers,” as Jefferson wrote, “civil as well as ecclesiastical, who, being themselves but fallible and uninspired men, have assumed dominion over the faith of others, setting up their own opinions and modes of thinking as the only true and infallible, and as such endeavoring to impose them on others, hath established and maintained false religions over the greatest part of the world and through all time.”

If we define a Christian as a person who believes in the divinity of Jesus Christ, then it is safe to say that some of the key Founding Fathers were not Christians at all. Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Tom Paine were deists–that is, they believed in one Supreme Being but rejected revelation and all the supernatural elements of the Christian Church; the word of the Creator, they believed, could best be read in Nature. John Adams was a professed liberal Unitarian, but he, too, in his private correspondence seems more deist than Christian.

George Washington and James Madison also leaned toward deism, although neither took much interest in religious matters. Madison believed that “religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprize.” He spoke of the “almost fifteen centuries” during which Christianity had been on trial: “What have been its fruits? More or less in all places, pride and indolence in the Clergy, ignorance and servility in the laity, in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.” If Washington mentioned the Almighty in a public address, as he occasionally did, he was careful to refer to Him not as “God” but with some nondenominational moniker like “Great Author” or “Almighty Being.” It is interesting to note that the Father of our Country spoke no words of a religious nature on his deathbed, although fully aware that he was dying, and did not ask for a man of God to be present; his last act was to take his own pulse, the consummate gesture of a creature of the age of scientific rationalism.

Tom Paine, a polemicist rather than a politician, could afford to be perfectly honest about his religious beliefs, which were baldly deist in the tradition of Voltaire: “I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life…. I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish church, by the Roman church, by the Greek church, by the Turkish church, by the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.” This is how he opened The Age of Reason, his virulent attack on Christianity. In it he railed against the “obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries, the cruel and torturous executions, the unrelenting vindictiveness” of the Old Testament, “a history of wickedness, that has served to corrupt and brutalize mankind.” The New Testament is less brutalizing but more absurd, the story of Christ’s divine genesis a “fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not exceeded by any thing that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.” He held the idea of the Resurrection in especial ridicule: Indeed, “the wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told, exceeds every thing that went before it.” Paine was careful to contrast the tortuous twists of theology with the pure clarity of deism. “The true deist has but one Deity; and his religion consists in contemplating the power, wisdom, and benignity of the Deity in his works, and in endeavoring to imitate him in every thing moral, scientifical, and mechanical.”

Paine’s rhetoric was so fervent that he was inevitably branded an atheist. Men like Franklin, Adams and Jefferson could not risk being tarred with that brush, and in fact Jefferson got into a good deal of trouble for continuing his friendship with Paine and entertaining him at Monticello. These statesmen had to be far more circumspect than the turbulent Paine, yet if we examine their beliefs it is all but impossible to see just how theirs differed from his.

Franklin was the oldest of the Founding Fathers. He was also the most worldly and sophisticated, and was well aware of the Machiavellian principle that if one aspires to influence the masses, one must at least profess religious sentiments. By his own definition he was a deist, although one French acquaintance claimed that “our free-thinkers have adroitly sounded him on his religion, and they maintain that they have discovered he is one of their own, that is that he has none at all.” If he did have a religion, it was strictly utilitarian: As his biographer Gordon Wood has said, “He praised religion for whatever moral effects it had, but for little else.” Divine revelation, Franklin freely admitted, had “no weight with me,” and the covenant of grace seemed “unintelligible” and “not beneficial.” As for the pious hypocrites who have ever controlled nations, “A man compounded of law and gospel is able to cheat a whole country with his religion and then destroy them under color of law”–a comment we should carefully consider at this turning point in the history of our Republic.

Here is Franklin’s considered summary of his own beliefs, in response to a query by Ezra Stiles, the president of Yale. He wrote it just six weeks before his death at the age of 84.

Here is my creed. I believe in one God, Creator of the universe. That he governs it by his providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of Man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this. These I take to be the fundamental points in all sound religion, and I regard them as you do in whatever sect I meet with them.

As for Jesus of Nazareth, my opinion of whom you particularly desire, I think his system of morals and his religion, as he left them to us, the best the world ever saw or is likely to see; but I apprehend it has received various corrupting changes, and I have, with most of the present dissenters in England, some doubts as to his divinity; though it is a question I do not dogmatize upon, having never studied it, and think it needless to busy myself with now, when I expect soon an opportunity of knowing the truth with less trouble. I see no harm, however, in its being believed, if that belief has the good consequence, as it probably has, of making his doctrines more respected and better observed, especially as I do not perceive that the Supreme takes it amiss, by distinguishing the unbelievers in his government of the world with any particular marks of his displeasure.

Jefferson thoroughly agreed with Franklin on the corruptions the teachings of Jesus had undergone. “The metaphysical abstractions of Athanasius, and the maniacal ravings of Calvin, tinctured plentifully with the foggy dreams of Plato, have so loaded [Christianity] with absurdities and incomprehensibilities” that it was almost impossible to recapture “its native simplicity and purity.” Like Paine, Jefferson felt that the miracles claimed by the New Testament put an intolerable strain on credulity. “The day will come,” he predicted (wrongly, so far), “when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin, will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerva in the brain of Jupiter.” The Revelation of St. John he dismissed as “the ravings of a maniac.”

Jefferson edited his own version of the New Testament, “The Life and Morals of Jesus of Nazareth,” in which he carefully deleted all the miraculous passages from the works of the Evangelists. He intended it, he said, as “a document in proof that I am a real Christian, that is to say, a disciple of the doctrines of Jesus.” This was clearly a defense against his many enemies, who hoped to blacken his reputation by comparing him with the vile atheist Paine. His biographer Joseph Ellis is undoubtedly correct, though, in seeing disingenuousness here: “If [Jefferson] had been completely scrupulous, he would have described himself as a deist who admired the ethical teachings of Jesus as a man rather than as the son of God. (In modern-day parlance, he was a secular humanist.)” In short, not a Christian at all.

The three accomplishments Jefferson was proudest of–those that he requested be put on his tombstone–were the founding of the University of Virginia and the authorship of the Declaration of Independence and the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom. The latter was a truly radical document that would eventually influence the separation of church and state in the US Constitution; when it was passed by the Virginia legislature in 1786, Jefferson rejoiced that there was finally “freedom for the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mohammeden, the Hindu and infidel of every denomination”–note his respect, still unusual today, for the sensibilities of the “infidel.” The University of Virginia was notable among early-American seats of higher education in that it had no religious affiliation whatever. Jefferson even banned the teaching of theology at the school.

If we were to speak of Jefferson in modern political categories, we would have to admit that he was a pure libertarian, in religious as in other matters. His real commitment (or lack thereof) to the teachings of Jesus Christ is plain from a famous throwaway comment he made: “It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” This raised plenty of hackles when it got about, and Jefferson had to go to some pains to restore his reputation as a good Christian. But one can only conclude, with Ellis, that he was no Christian at all.

John Adams, though no more religious than Jefferson, had inherited the fatalistic mindset of the Puritan culture in which he had grown up. He personally endorsed the Enlightenment commitment to Reason but did not share Jefferson’s optimism about its future, writing to him, “I wish that Superstition in Religion exciting Superstition in Polliticks…may never blow up all your benevolent and phylanthropic Lucubrations,” but that “the History of all Ages is against you.” As an old man he observed, “Twenty times in the course of my late reading have I been upon the point of breaking out, ‘This would be the best of all possible worlds, if there were no religion in it!’” Speaking ex cathedra, as a relic of the founding generation, he expressed his admiration for the Roman system whereby every man could worship whom, what and how he pleased. When his young listeners objected that this was paganism, Adams replied that it was indeed, and laughed.

In their fascinating and eloquent valetudinarian correspondence, Adams and Jefferson had a great deal to say about religion. Pressed by Jefferson to define his personal creed, Adams replied that it was “contained in four short words, ‘Be just and good.’” Jefferson replied, “The result of our fifty or sixty years of religious reading, in the four words, ‘Be just and good,’ is that in which all our inquiries must end; as the riddles of all priesthoods end in four more, ‘ubi panis, ibi deus.’ What all agree in, is probably right. What no two agree in, most probably wrong.”

This was a clear reference to Voltaire’s Reflections on Religion. As Voltaire put it:

There are no sects in geometry. One does not speak of a Euclidean, an Archimedean. When the truth is evident, it is impossible for parties and factions to arise…. Well, to what dogma do all minds agree? To the worship of a God, and to honesty. All the philosophers of the world who have had a religion have said in all ages: “There is a God, and one must be just.” There, then, is the universal religion established in all ages and throughout mankind. The point in which they all agree is therefore true, and the systems through which they differ are therefore false.

Of course all these men knew, as all modern presidential candidates know, that to admit to theological skepticism is political suicide. During Jefferson’s presidency a friend observed him on his way to church, carrying a large prayer book. “You going to church, Mr. J,” remarked the friend. “You do not believe a word in it.” Jefferson didn’t exactly deny the charge. “Sir,” he replied, “no nation has ever yet existed or been governed without religion. Nor can be. The Christian religion is the best religion that has been given to man and I as chief Magistrate of this nation am bound to give it the sanction of my example. Good morning Sir.”

Like Jefferson, every recent President has understood the necessity of at least paying lip service to the piety of most American voters. All of our leaders, Democrat and Republican, have attended church, and have made very sure they are seen to do so. But there is a difference between offering this gesture of respect for majority beliefs and manipulating and pandering to the bigotry, prejudice and millennial fantasies of Christian extremists. Though for public consumption the Founding Fathers identified themselves as Christians, they were, at least by today’s standards, remarkably honest about their misgivings when it came to theological doctrine, and religion in general came very low on the list of their concerns and priorities–always excepting, that is, their determination to keep the new nation free from bondage to its rule.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Jesus Was No GOP Lobbyist
By Jack Hitt
The Los Angeles Times

April 26th, 2005

A tortured version of his message is being marketed for political gain.

What would Jesus filibuster? The question is bizarre, of course, but the fact that many prominent religious and political leaders believe that there is an answer surely marks our time as pretty strange.
How quickly it has all happened - that the media, particularly television, has convinced itself that Christianity is little more than a Republican political action committee. When the pope died, CNN’s Wolf Blitzer introduced former Clinton aide Paul Begala and right-wing pundit Robert Novak this way: “Bob is a good Catholic; I’m not so sure about Paul Begala.” At the bottom of the screen, CNN ran an informative factoid for the audience: “Many Catholic doctrines are conservative.”

Broadcast media prefer to cast Christianity in the role of “right-wing values PAC” because it’s so neat and tidy. They don’t much like even to say the name Jesus on air because then we might have to talk about his ideas. “Evangelical Christianity” is much simpler because you can treat it as just another special-interest group, like the Teamsters or the neocons.

Leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson have used the media to redefine Christianity as the “Republican base” - all between commercials hawking family-values videotapes or pleading for more contributions.

Gosh, WWJD? It makes me wax nostalgic for the days when people wore those bracelets and asked the question, “What would Jesus do?” At least people said his name then and pondered his ideas, using the question as the beginning of an engaged moral debate. Few would have appreciated those bracelets as much as the man himself - Jesus, who preached a new way of thinking about religion. Instead of taking orders from temple chieftains, Jesus provoked his followers into thinking for themselves. His preferred media outlet? A literary genre called the parable. It’s a style of Q&A wherein the teacher doesn’t give the answer but challenges the listener with a half-finished story that forces him to think through to the answer by himself. The radical right has swapped out this genius preacher for some easy listening. They insist that everything will be fine if we just nail the Ten Commandments above every courthouse.

Curious. Jesus updated the Ten Commandments in his most famous speech, the Sermon on the Mount. In it, one finds the Eight Beatitudes. Why don’t we ever hear about nailing those somewhere? Here’s why: It’s not simply the law in the Ten Commandments that attracts fundamentalists. Rather, it’s the syntax. The authoritarianism of so many “Thou Shalt Nots.”

The syntax of Jesus’ Eight Beatitudes is not so easy (Blessed are the poor in spirit. Blessed are the peacemakers). These words invite the kind of hard questions that Jesus loved to tweak his followers with. How are they blessed? And why? It’s just like Jesus to leave us with questions instead of answers.

The Jesus who speaks in the Gospels is nothing like the fuming Republican Jesus I see on TV now. Jesus was a leader who understood that ambiguity and doubt are not to be feared but are, simply, facts of life that a great teacher exploits to guide his followers on their own paths toward conviction and belief.

Here is a quote from Jesus that you almost never hear: “What do you think?” It’s right there in the Bible. Jesus asks this question all the time.

One parable Jesus taught was this one, from Matthew: “What do you think? A man had two sons. And he went to the first and said, ‘Son, go and work in the vineyard today.’ And he answered, ‘I will not,’ but afterward he changed his mind and went. And he went to the other son and said the same. And he answered, ‘I go, sir,’ but did not go.” Jesus’ disciples all strenuously raised their hands. They knew the answer! The first son was the most virtuous!

Whereupon Jesus (whose sense of humor is underrated) replied: “Truly, I say to you, the tax collectors and the prostitutes go into the kingdom of God before you.”

What does that parable mean? Frankly, I am not sure. I have my own thoughts, but they all feel tentative, and I can only hope I’m right. Jesus doesn’t accuse his disciples of being wrong; he just mocks the easiness of their quick answer.

Taken as a whole, it’s not a parable with a clear and right answer. None of them are, and that is the point. You have to sort of toss it around in your head, think about people you’ve dealt with who’ve said one thing and done another, and then try to come to some answer. Chances are that few will agree in their interpretations, an outcome that is rhetorically so sly. Jesus makes you work through your own doubt and hesitation to arrive at an answer that becomes the very foundation of your own certainty.

This guy’s good, isn’t he?

But that Jesus is nowhere to be found on our televisions or in our newsweeklies. Ironically, mass-market Christians rarely cite or emphasize the living Jesus, the Jesus who speaks. They like their Christ dead. Or nearly dead, as in Mel Gibson’s movie. In that film, the entire Sermon on the Mount - the most important words Jesus spoke - is relegated to a few seconds of flashback.

Yet the living Jesus always finds a way of getting past the money-changers, doesn’t he? Every generation produces a Jesus to suit its own purposes. How fitting that in the Age of Information our broadcasters have marketed a Jesus so narrowly defined that he resembles little more than a lobbyist loitering outside Tom DeLay’s office hoping for a few minutes of the great man’s time.

But these people always underestimate the actual words that Jesus spoke. They are right there in the Gospels for those willing to hear Jesus, rather than rely upon videotape salesmen to re-interpret him as a furious political hack. The living Jesus will come again. It’s the other meaning of being reborn.

————————

Jack Hitt is the author of Off the Road: A Modern-Day Walk Down the Pilgrim’s Route Into Spain (Simon & Schuster, 2005).

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.) corruption,” says Lawrence Cockcroft, chairman of TI UK.

Constitution, Not Religion, Under Attack
By Kit Kincade
The Louisville Courier-Journal

April 24th, 2005

The religious right is demanding a unique and special privilege in its battle to support President Bush. They want to challenge civil policy from behind the cloak of religious freedom.

The advertising for today’s television show at Highview Baptist Church claims that some of the President’s judicial nominees are being persecuted for their religious beliefs. It is a clever strategy to advance their cause vigorously, all the while claiming to be the victim of aggression.
Conservative Christians have some very specific ideas on how our civil society should work. Most of us do. Unfortunately, they have developed the hard position that their ideas spring from the sole religious truth and that anyone who disagrees is persecuting them.

Is religion under attack or is the Constitution?

In our age of religious fervor, it is popular to extol the religious faith of our nation’s Founding Fathers, but the framers of the Constitution left God out of that document. There is no mention of a deity or a creator, divine providence or anything similar.

In the original document, the framers did write a prohibition of “religious tests” for government office. They had in mind a 1673 law passed by the British Parliament, the Test Act, which said that no person could serve in public office who refused to take the oaths of allegiance and supremacy, who refused to receive the communion according to the rites of the Church of England, or who refused to renounce belief in the Roman Catholic doctrine of transubstantiation. Although directed primarily against Roman Catholics, it also excluded Protestant nonconformists, most of them Puritans, many of whom had already fled to North America.

Note the reference to specific religious belief and practice. The denominational descendants of those who would have failed the Test Act would include all Catholics and nearly all Protestants in America today, not to mention all non-Christians.

As the U.S. Constitution was ratified, many complained that the additional restrictions were necessary to keep the government off the people. The first Congress promptly approved the Bill of Rights in 10 amendments, the first of which said, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof. . . .”

Eleven of the 13 original colonies had official, state-supported churches, mainly the Church of England, and the framers debated whether the United States needed an official religion.

Baptists and Presbyterians in particular argued against it. Patriot Patrick Henry proposed a broadly inclusive, generalized form of Christianity. The answer was firmly, no. None. Keenly aware of the century of religious warfare behind them, the framers decided Americans would live without an official religion and be free to make up their own minds on religious belief and practice.

Historians have often said the United States now has the most vibrant and diverse religious culture in the world because of its broad religious freedom. The power of that religious vibrancy has been an enormous force in shaping our society. Great reform movements such as abolition of slavery, women’s rights, prohibition, civil rights, antiwar activism, have been driven by persons of strong religious convictions.

Our greatest national conflict was a bloody Civil War, appropriately named because the fight was about ending the civil government’s support of slavery. Strong moral feelings drove both sides as Christians, Jews and others in the North fought their religious counterparts in the South. Religious denominations were torn asunder over the issue, but we have never seen it as a religious war.

The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., was not jailed in Birmingham in 1963 because he believed in the insufficiency of infant baptism. He was jailed for challenging civil laws of Alabama which his religious beliefs persuaded him were unjust and oppressive.

The Rev. Philip Berrigan did not spend 11 years in jails and prisons to protest oppression as a Roman Catholic priest. Beginning with a bonfire of draft cards at Catonsville, Md., in 1968, Berrigan constantly protested for peace and against the nation’s defense and foreign policies.

Both fought vigorously against the laws and policies of the civil government, and both understood the consequences of their civil disobedience. Neither complained of religious persecution.

The radical right tries to position itself as being in the nation’s long line of religiously driven reform movements. Wise to the ways of Republican political strategists, however, they also seek the cover of religious freedom. They seek to change civil policies all the while complaining that anyone who opposes them is persecuting them for their religious beliefs. This is a try for political power and should be seen as such.

Much in modern medicine offends them — abortion, birth control, stem-cell research and withdrawing life-support technology from persons near death, to name a few. These are all issues of civil public policy, whether or not there may be profound moral or religious reasons for supporting or opposing them. Should the civil government ignore, permit or prohibit them? Should the government support them with tax dollars?

All citizens have a stake in them. The religious right may claim to know the divine truth in deciding these issues, but it cannot have a special position in the public debate on them. The framers of the Constitution specifically rejected that. The traditions and political values that have grown from that great document support that rejection.

Conservatives consider themselves tough-minded, looking sternly on a dangerous world. In the battle over federal judgeships, they should be made of sterner stuff and should look to the likes of King and Berrigan.

They should stand up and face the debate without their religious vestments.

The writer, a certified financial planner, is a former chief of the Associated Press Kentucky bureau.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Faith-Based Pandering
By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post

April 19th, 2005

Totally by mistake, I was summoned to meet Sen. Bill Frist shortly after he first arrived in Washington. This happened because someone in Frist’s office confused me with the congressional affairs correspondent of the National Journal, Richard E. Cohen, but I stayed to meet Frist anyway and found him impressive. Time and tide have changed my view. He is now the Senate majority leader and an undeclared but neon-lit presidential candidate who is getting into shape for the long run to the White House by shedding anything that weighs him down. In his case it’s principles.
Frist initially led the Senate’s effort to keep poor Terri Schiavo alive even though every court that had heard her case had concluded she was, technically and sadly, dead. Now Frist will be joining a telecast that will attack Democrats as being hostile to “people of faith.” It will focus on the filibuster, which the Democrats have used to block 10 of George W. Bush’s 229 judicial appointments. Some of the nominees are quaintly anachronistic in their views but to a person I assume they believe in God and therefore cannot be opposed no matter what else they think or do.

“The filibuster was once abused to protect racial bias, and it is now being used against people of faith,” the telecast’s sponsoring organization has declared. Among the participants are some, if not all, who believe that any abortion is wrong, that a stem cell is an inviolate human life, that homosexuality is a sin, that sex before marriage is both a mistake and a sin (don’t even ask about homosexual sex before marriage), and that the rights of both Terri Schiavo and her husband should have been brushed aside — along with a couple of hundred years of allowing state courts to settle such matters.

I am pausing now to wonder if the phrase “people of faith” is meant to include Muslims with several wives, Hindus with several deities or even the odd person here and there who believes, as I am sometimes tempted to, that God can be found in a pint of Ben & Jerry’s Coffee Heath Bar Crunch. But I think somehow that “people of faith” is meant to embrace only conservative Christians and maybe Orthodox Jews, who are sometimes lumped together as Judeo-Christians. People of faith, you may rest assured, are people of their faith. All others need not apply.

I don’t think a gay Presbyterian would be considered a person of faith, no matter how devout, nor, for that matter, a pro-choice Methodist — say, someone such as Hillary Clinton. The category would certainly not include a Baptist such as Husband Bill or a Jew such as Chuck Schumer or, I venture to say, an Episcopalian such as John McCain, whose faith sustained him in a Vietnamese prison. As for a Roman Catholic such as Ted Kennedy, whose faith informs his liberalism, take it on faith that he would not be considered a person of faith. The phrase would also exclude anyone of any faith who believes in a limited role for religion in public life, especially the schools, if only on the pragmatic grounds that otherwise we will be at each other’s throats. This is a lesson of history.

The invocation of the phrase “people of” is no different when preceding “faith” than it is when preceding “color.” It’s a bold signal of mushy thinking, a corralling of people who have nothing in common other than a perceived — and often fictionalized — enemy. “People of faith” mischaracterizes what the political debate is all about. What Senate Democrats lack is not faith but 50 votes. Frist knows this, of course, but his mad pursuit of the presidency requires him to prove to the Christian right, the core of the Republican Party, that its cause comes before his principles.

He did this with Terri Schiavo, going so far as to use his medical bona fides (he’s a heart surgeon) to view a neurologist’s videotape of the poor woman and pronounce her somewhat alert. Now he is lending his name and his fast-diminishing prestige to this reprehensible effort to enlist faith on the side of a single political issue. This sort of stuff will not, as he hopes, make him the next president of the United States. Instead, it shows what raw ambition has made him: a person of pander.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

There Is No Tomorrow
By Bill Moyers
The Star Tribune

January 30th, 2005

One of the biggest changes in politics in my lifetime is that the delusional is no longer marginal. It has come in from the fringe, to sit in the seat of power in the Oval Office and in Congress. For the first time in our history, ideology and theology hold a monopoly of power in Washington.
Theology asserts propositions that cannot be proven true; ideologues hold stoutly to a worldview despite being contradicted by what is generally accepted as reality. When ideology and theology couple, their offspring are not always bad but they are always blind. And there is the danger: voters and politicians alike, oblivious to the facts.

Remember James Watt, President Ronald Reagan’s first secretary of the interior? My favorite online environmental journal, the ever-engaging Grist, reminded us recently of how James Watt told the U.S. Congress that protecting natural resources was unimportant in light of the imminent return of Jesus Christ. In public testimony he said, “after the last tree is felled, Christ will come back.”

Beltway elites snickered. The press corps didn’t know what he was talking about. But James Watt was serious. So were his compatriots out across the country. They are the people who believe the Bible is literally true - one-third of the American electorate, if a recent Gallup poll is accurate. In this past election several million good and decent citizens went to the polls believing in the rapture index.

That’s right - the rapture index. Google it and you will find that the best-selling books in America today are the 12 volumes of the “Left Behind” series written by the Christian fundamentalist and religious-right warrior Timothy LaHaye. These true believers subscribe to a fantastical theology concocted in the 19th century by a couple of immigrant preachers who took disparate passages from the Bible and wove them into a narrative that has captivated the imagination of millions of Americans.

Its outline is rather simple, if bizarre (the British writer George Monbiot recently did a brilliant dissection of it and I am indebted to him for adding to my own understanding): Once Israel has occupied the rest of its “biblical lands,” legions of the antichrist will attack it, triggering a final showdown in the valley of Armageddon.

As the Jews who have not been converted are burned, the messiah will return for the rapture. True believers will be lifted out of their clothes and transported to Heaven, where, seated next to the right hand of God, they will watch their political and religious opponents suffer plagues of boils, sores, locusts and frogs during the several years of tribulation that follow.

I’m not making this up. Like Monbiot, I’ve read the literature. I’ve reported on these people, following some of them from Texas to the West Bank. They are sincere, serious and polite as they tell you they feel called to help bring the rapture on as fulfillment of biblical prophecy. That’s why they have declared solidarity with Israel and the Jewish settlements and backed up their support with money and volunteers. It’s why the invasion of Iraq for them was a warm-up act, predicted in the Book of Revelations where four angels “which are bound in the great river Euphrates will be released to slay the third part of man.” A war with Islam in the Middle East is not something to be feared but welcomed - an essential conflagration on the road to redemption. The last time I Googled it, the rapture index stood at 144 - just one point below the critical threshold when the whole thing will blow, the son of God will return, the righteous will enter Heaven and sinners will be condemned to eternal hellfire.

So what does this mean for public policy and the environment? Go to Grist to read a remarkable work of reporting by the journalist Glenn Scherer - “The Road to Environmental Apocalypse.” Read it and you will see how millions of Christian fundamentalists may believe that environmental destruction is not only to be disregarded but actually welcomed - even hastened - as a sign of the coming apocalypse.

As Grist makes clear, we’re not talking about a handful of fringe lawmakers who hold or are beholden to these beliefs. Nearly half the U.S. Congress before the recent election - 231 legislators in total and more since the election - are backed by the religious right.

Forty-five senators and 186 members of the 108th Congress earned 80 to 100 percent approval ratings from the three most influential Christian right advocacy groups. They include Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, Assistant Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, Conference Chair Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania, Policy Chair Jon Kyl of Arizona, House Speaker Dennis Hastert and Majority Whip Roy Blunt. The only Democrat to score 100 percent with the Christian coalition was Sen. Zell Miller of Georgia, who recently quoted from the biblical book of Amos on the Senate floor: “The days will come, sayeth the Lord God, that I will send a famine in the land.” He seemed to be relishing the thought.

And why not? There’s a constituency for it. A 2002 Time-CNN poll found that 59 percent of Americans believe that the prophecies found in the book of Revelations are going to come true. Nearly one-quarter think the Bible predicted the 9/11 attacks. Drive across the country with your radio tuned to the more than 1,600 Christian radio stations, or in the motel turn on some of the 250 Christian TV stations, and you can hear some of this end-time gospel. And you will come to understand why people under the spell of such potent prophecies cannot be expected, as Grist puts it, “to worry about the environment. Why care about the earth, when the droughts, floods, famine and pestilence brought by ecological collapse are signs of the apocalypse foretold in the Bible? Why care about global climate change when you and yours will be rescued in the rapture? And why care about converting from oil to solar when the same God who performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes can whip up a few billion barrels of light crude with a word?”

Because these people believe that until Christ does return, the Lord will provide. One of their texts is a high school history book, “America’s Providential History.” You’ll find there these words: “The secular or socialist has a limited-resource mentality and views the world as a pie … that needs to be cut up so everyone can get a piece.” However, “[t]he Christian knows that the potential in God is unlimited and that there is no shortage of resources in God’s earth … while many secularists view the world as overpopulated, Christians know that God has made the earth sufficiently large with plenty of resources to accommodate all of the people.”

No wonder Karl Rove goes around the White House whistling that militant hymn, “Onward Christian Soldiers.” He turned out millions of the foot soldiers on Nov. 2, including many who have made the apocalypse a powerful driving force in modern American politics.

It is hard for the journalist to report a story like this with any credibility. So let me put it on a personal level. I myself don’t know how to be in this world without expecting a confident future and getting up every morning to do what I can to bring it about. So I have always been an optimist. Now, however, I think of my friend on Wall Street whom I once asked: “What do you think of the market?”I’m optimistic,” he answered. “Then why do you look so worried?” And he answered: “Because I am not sure my optimism is justified.”

I’m not, either. Once upon a time I agreed with Eric Chivian and the Center for Health and the Global Environment that people will protect the natural environment when they realize its importance to their health and to the health and lives of their children. Now I am not so sure. It’s not that I don’t want to believe that - it’s just that I read the news and connect the dots.

I read that the administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has declared the election a mandate for President Bush on the environment. This for an administration:

* That wants to rewrite the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act and the Endangered Species Act protecting rare plant and animal species and their habitats, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act, which requires the government to judge beforehand whether actions might damage natural resources.
* That wants to relax pollution limits for ozone; eliminate vehicle tailpipe inspections, and ease pollution standards for cars, sport-utility vehicles and diesel-powered big trucks and heavy equipment.
* That wants a new international audit law to allow corporations to keep certain information about environmental problems secret from the public.
* That wants to drop all its new-source review suits against polluting, coal-fired power plants and weaken consent decrees reached earlier with coal companies.
* That wants to open the Arctic [National] Wildlife Refuge to drilling and increase drilling in Padre Island National Seashore, the longest stretch of undeveloped barrier island in the world and the last great coastal wild land in America.

I read the news just this week and learned how the Environmental Protection Agency had planned to spend $9 million - $2 million of it from the administration’s friends at the American Chemistry Council - to pay poor families to continue to use pesticides in their homes. These pesticides have been linked to neurological damage in children, but instead of ordering an end to their use, the government and the industry were going to offer the families $970 each, as well as a camcorder and children’s clothing, to serve as guinea pigs for the study.

I read all this in the news.

I read the news just last night and learned that the administration’s friends at the International Policy Network, which is supported by Exxon Mobil and others of like mind, have issued a new report that climate change is “a myth, sea levels are not rising” [and] scientists who believe catastrophe is possible are “an embarrassment.”

I not only read the news but the fine print of the recent appropriations bill passed by Congress, with the obscure (and obscene) riders attached to it: a clause removing all endangered species protections from pesticides; language prohibiting judicial review for a forest in Oregon; a waiver of environmental review for grazing permits on public lands; a rider pressed by developers to weaken protection for crucial habitats in California.

I read all this and look up at the pictures on my desk, next to the computer - pictures of my grandchildren. I see the future looking back at me from those photographs and I say, “Father, forgive us, for we know not what we do.” And then I am stopped short by the thought: “That’s not right. We do know what we are doing. We are stealing their future. Betraying their trust. Despoiling their world.”

And I ask myself: Why? Is it because we don’t care? Because we are greedy? Because we have lost our capacity for outrage, our ability to sustain indignation at injustice?

What has happened to our moral imagination?

On the heath Lear asks Gloucester: “How do you see the world?” And Gloucester, who is blind, answers: “I see it feelingly.’”

I see it feelingly.

The news is not good these days. I can tell you, though, that as a journalist I know the news is never the end of the story. The news can be the truth that sets us free - not only to feel but to fight for the future we want. And the will to fight is the antidote to despair, the cure for cynicism, and the answer to those faces looking back at me from those photographs on my desk. What we need is what the ancient Israelites called hochma - the science of the heart … the capacity to see, to feel and then to act as if the future depended on you.

Believe me, it does.

———————————–

Bill Moyers was host until recently of the weekly public affairs series “NOW with Bill Moyers” on PBS. This article is adapted from AlterNet, where it first appeared. The text is taken from Moyers’ remarks upon receiving the Global Environmental Citizen Award from the Center for Health and the Global Environment at Harvard Medical School.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

The Faith Factor
By Barbara Ehrenreich
The Nation

November 29th, 2004

http://www .thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20041129&s=ehrenreich

Of all the loathsome spectacles we’ve endured since November 2, the vampire-like gloating of CNN commentator Robert Novak, Bush embracing his “mandate”–none are more repulsive than that of Democrats conceding the “moral values” edge to the party that brought us Abu Ghraib. The cries for Democrats to overcome their “out-of-touch-ness” and embrace the predominant faith all dodge the full horror of the situation: A criminal has been enabled to continue his bloody work with the help, in no small part, of self-identified Christians.
With their craven, breast-beating response to Bush’s electoral triumph, leading Democrats only demonstrate how out of touch they really are with the religious transformation of America. Where secular-type liberals and centrists go wrong is in categorizing religion as a form of “irrationality,” akin to spirituality, sports mania and emotion generally. They fail to see that the current “Christianization” of red-state America bears no resemblance to the Great Revival of the early nineteenth century, an ecstatic movement that filled the fields of Virginia with the rolling, shrieking and jerking bodies of the revived. In contrast, today’s right-leaning Christian churches represent a coldly Calvinist tradition in which even speaking in tongues, if it occurs at all, has been increasingly routinized and restricted to the pastor. What these churches have to offer, in addition to intangibles like eternal salvation, is concrete, material assistance. They have become an alternative welfare state, whose support rests not only on “faith” but also on the loyalty of the grateful recipients.

Drive out from Washington to the Virginia suburbs, for example, and you’ll find the McLean Bible Church, spiritual home of Senator James Inhofe and other prominent right-wingers, still hopping on a weekday night. Dozens of families and teenagers enjoy a low-priced dinner in the cafeteria; a hundred unemployed people meet for prayer and job tips at the “Career Ministry”; divorced and abused women gather in support groups. Among its many services, MBC distributes free clothing to 10,000 poor people a year, helped start an inner-city ministry for at-risk youth in DC and operates a “special needs” ministry for disabled children.

MBC is a mega-church with a parking garage that could serve a medium-sized airport, but many smaller evangelical churches offer a similar array of services–childcare, after-school programs, ESL lessons, help in finding a job, not to mention the occasional cash handout. A woman I met in Minneapolis gave me her strategy for surviving bouts of destitution: “First, you find a church.” A trailer-park dweller in Grand Rapids told me that he often turned to his church for help with the rent. Got a drinking problem, a vicious spouse, a wayward child, a bill due? Find a church. The closest analogy to America’s bureaucratized evangelical movement is Hamas, which draws in poverty-stricken Palestinians through its own miniature welfare state.

Nor is the local business elite neglected by the evangelicals. Throughout the red states–and increasingly the blue ones too–evangelical churches are vital centers of networking,” where the carwash owner can schmooze with the bank’s loan officer. Some churches offer regular Christian businessmen’s “fellowship lunches,” where religious testimonies are given and business cards traded, along with jokes aimed at Democrats and gays.

Mainstream, even liberal, churches also provide a range of services, from soup kitchens to support groups. What makes the typical evangelicals’ social welfare efforts sinister is their implicit and sometimes not so implicit–linkage to a program for the destruction of public and secular services. This year the connecting code words were “abortion” and “gay marriage”: To vote for the candidate who opposed these supposed moral atrocities, as the Christian Coalition and so many churches strongly advised, was to vote against public chousing subsidies, childcare and expanded public forms of health insurance. While Hamas operates in a nonexistent welfare state, the Christian right advances by attacking the existing one.

Of course, Bush’s faith-based social welfare strategy only accelerates the downward spiral toward theocracy. Not only do the right-leaning evangelical churches offer their own, shamelessly proselytizing social services; not only do they attack candidates who favor expanded public services–but they stand to gain public money by doing so. It is this dangerous positive feedback loop, and not any new spiritual or moral dimension of American life, that the Democrats have failed to comprehend: The evangelical church-based welfare system is being fed by the deliberate destruction of the secular welfare state.

In the aftermath of election ‘04, centrist Democrats should not be flirting with faith but re-examining their affinity for candidates too mumble-mouthed and compromised to articulate poverty and war as the urgent moral issues they are. Jesus is on our side here, and secular liberals should not be afraid to invoke him. Policies of pre-emptive war and the upward redistribution of wealth are inversions of the Judeo-Christian ethic, which is for the most part silent, or mysteriously cryptic, on gays and abortion. At the very least, we need a firm commitment to public forms of childcare, healthcare, housing and education–for people of all faiths and no faith at all. Secondly, progressives should perhaps rethink their own disdain for service-based outreach programs. Once it was the left that provided “alternative services” in the form of free clinics, women’s health centers, food co-ops and inner-city multi-service storefronts. Enterprises like these are not substitutes for an adequate public welfare state, but they can become the springboards from which to demand one.

One last lesson from the Christians–the ancient, original ones, that is. Theirs is the story of how a steadfast and heroic moral minority undermined the world’s greatest empire and eventually came to power. Faced with relentless and spectacular forms of repression, they kept on meeting over their potluck dinners (the origins of later communion rituals), proselytizing and bearing witness wherever they could. For the next four years and well beyond, liberals and progressives will need to emulate these original Christians, who stood against imperial Rome with their bodies, their hearts and their souls.

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

Apocalypse (Almost) Now
By Nicholas Kristof
The New York Times

November 24th, 2004

If America’s secular liberals think they have it rough now, just wait till the Second Coming.

The “Left Behind” series, the best-selling novels for adults in the U.S., enthusiastically depict Jesus returning to slaughter everyone who is not a born-again Christian. The world’s Hindus, Muslims, Jews and agnostics, along with many Catholics and Unitarians, are heaved into everlasting fire: “Jesus merely raised one hand a few inches and . . . they tumbled in, howling and screeching.”
Gosh, what an uplifting scene!

If Saudi Arabians wrote an Islamic version of this series, we would furiously demand that sensible Muslims repudiate such hatemongering. We should hold ourselves to the same standard.

Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, the co-authors of the series, have both e-mailed me (after I wrote about the “Left Behind” series in July) to protest that their books do not “celebrate” the slaughter of non-Christians but simply present the painful reality of Scripture.

“We can’t read it some other way just because it sounds exclusivistic and not currently politically correct,” Mr. Jenkins said in an e-mail. “That’s our crucible, an offensive and divisive message in an age of plurality and tolerance.”

Silly me. I’d forgotten the passage in the Bible about how Jesus intends to roast everyone from the good Samaritan to Gandhi in everlasting fire, simply because they weren’t born-again Christians.

I accept that Mr. Jenkins and Mr. LaHaye are sincere. (They base their conclusions on John 3.) But I’ve sat down in Pakistani and Iraqi mosques with Muslim fundamentalists, and they offered the same defense: they’re just applying God’s word.

Now, I’ve often written that blue staters should be less snooty toward fundamentalist Christians, and I realize that this column will seem pretty snooty. But if I praise the good work of evangelicals - like their superb relief efforts in Darfur - I’ll also condemn what I perceive as bigotry. A dialogue about faith must move past taboos and discuss differences bluntly. That’s what blue staters and red staters need to do about religion and the “Left Behind” books.

For starters, it’s worth pointing out that those predicting an apocalypse have a long and lousy record. In America, tens of thousands of followers of William Miller waited eagerly for Jesus to reappear on Oct. 22, 1844. Some of these Millerites had given away all their belongings, and the no-show was called the Great Disappointment.

In more recent times, the best-selling nonfiction book of the 1970’s was Hal Lindsey’s “The Late Great Planet Earth,” selling 18 million copies worldwide with its predictions of a Second Coming. Then, one of the hottest best sellers in 1988 was a booklet called “88 Reasons Why the Rapture Will Be in 1988.” Oops.

Being wrong has rarely been so lucrative.

Now we have the hugely profitable “Left Behind” financial empire, whose Web site flatly says that the authors “think this generation will witness the end of history.” The site sells every “Left Behind” spinoff imaginable, including screen savers, regular prophecies sent to your mobile phone, children’s versions of the books, audiobooks, graphic novels, videos, calendars, music and a $6.50-a-month prophesy club. This isn’t religion, this is brand management.

If Mr. LaHaye and Mr. Jenkins honestly believe that the end of the world may be imminent, why not waive royalties? Why don’t they use the millions of dollars in profits to help the poor - and increase their own chances of getting into heaven?

Mr. Jenkins told me that he gives 20 to 40 percent of his income to charity, and that’s commendable. But there are millions more where that came from. Mr. LaHaye and Mr. Jenkins might spend less time puzzling over obscure passages in the Book of Revelation and more time with the straightforward language of Matthew 6:19, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth.” Or Matthew 19:21, where Jesus advises a rich man: “Sell your possessions and give the money to the poor. . . . It will be hard for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.”

So I challenge the authors to a bet: if the events of the Apocalypse arrive in the next 10 years, then I’ll donate $500 to the battle against the Antichrist; if it doesn’t, you donate $500 to a charity of my choosing that fights poverty - and bigotry.

Gentlemen, do we have a deal?

(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)

‘Evangelical Christianity Has Been Hijacked’: An Interview with Tony Campolo Interview by Laura Sheahen
BeliefNet.com

Friday 12 November 2004

Speaking out on gays, women and more, a progressive evangelical says ‘We ought to get out of the judging business.’

Evangelical leader, sociology professor, and Baptist minister Tony Campolo made headlines in the 1990s when he agreed to be a spiritual counselor to President Bill Clinton. A self-described Bible-believing Christian, he has drawn fire from his fellow evangelicals for his stance on contemporary issues like homosexuality. He talked with Beliefnet recently about his new book, Speaking My Mind.
It’s a common perception that evangelical Christians are conservative on issues like gay marriage, Islam, and women’s roles. Is this the case?

Well, there’s a difference between evangelical and being a part of the Religious Right. A significant proportion of the evangelical community is part of the Religious Right. My purpose in writing the book was to communicate loud and clear that I felt that evangelical Christianity had been hijacked.

When did it become anti-feminist? When did evangelical Christianity become anti-gay? When did it become supportive of capital punishment? Pro-war? When did it become so negative towards other religious groups?

There are a group of evangelicals who would say, “Wait a minute. We’re evangelicals but we want to respect Islam. We don’t want to call its prophet evil. We don’t want to call the religion evil. We believe that we have got to learn to live in the same world with our Islamic brothers and sisters and we want to be friends. We do not want to be in some kind of a holy war.”

We also raise some very serious questions about the support of policies that have been detrimental to the poor. When I read the voter guide of a group like the Christian Coalition, I find that they are allied with the National Rifle Association and are very anxious to protect the rights of people to buy even assault weapons. But they don’t seem to be very supportive of concerns for the poor, concerns for trade relations, for canceling Third World debts.

In short, there’s a whole group of issues that are being ignored by the Religious Right and that warrant the attention of Bible-believing Christians. Another one would be the environment.

I don’t think that John Kerry is the Messiah or the Democratic Party is the answer, but I don’t like the evangelical community blessing the Republican Party as some kind of God-ordained instrument for solving the world’s problems. The Republican Party needs to be called into accountability even as the Democratic Party needs to be called into accountability. So it’s that double-edged sword that I’m trying to wield.

Are the majority of evangelicals in America leaning conservative because they see their leaders on TV that way? Or is there a contingent out there that we don’t hear about in the press that is more progressive on the issues you just talked about?

The latest statistics that I have seen on evangelicals indicate that something like 83 percent of them are going to vote for George Bush and are Republicans. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just that Christians need to be considering other issues beside abortion and homosexuality.

These are important issues, but isn’t poverty an issue? When you pass a bill of tax reform that not only gives the upper five percent most of the benefits, leaving very little behind for the rest of us, you have to ask some very serious questions. When that results in 300,000 slots for children’s afterschool tutoring in poor neighborhoods being cut from the budget. When one and a half billion dollars is cut from the “No Child Left Behind” program.

In short, I think that evangelicals are so concerned with the unborn—as we should be—that we have failed to pay enough attention to the born—to those children who do live and who are being left behind by a system that has gone in favor of corporate interests and big money.

So as an evangelical, I find myself very torn, because I am a pro-life person. I understand evangelicals who say there comes a time when one issue is so overpowering that we have to vote for the candidate that espouses a pro-life position, even if we disagree with him on a lot of other issues.

My response to that is OK, the Republican party and George Bush know that they have the evangelical community in its pocket—[but] they can’t win the election without us. Given this position, shouldn’t we be using our incredible position of influence to get the president and his party to address a whole host of other issues which we think are being neglected?

Like what you just said - poverty, or our foreign policy

Exactly. And we would also point out that the evangelical community has become so pro-Israel that it is forgotten that God loves Palestinians every bit as much. And that a significant proportion of the Palestinian community is Christian. We’re turning our back on our own Christian brothers and sisters in an effort to maintain a pro-Zionist mindset that I don’t think most Jewish people support. For instance, most Jewish people really support a two-state solution to the Palestinian crisis. Interestingly enough, George Bush supports a two-state solution.

He’s the first president to actually say that the Palestinians should have a state of their own with their own government. However, he’s received tremendous opposition from evangelicals on that very point.

Evangelicals need to take a good look at what their issues are. Are they really being faithful to Jesus? Are they being faithful to the Bible? Are they adhering to the kinds of teachings that Christ made clear? In the book, I take issue, for instance, with the increasing tendency in the evangelical community to bar women from key leadership roles in the church. Over the last few years, the Southern Baptist Convention has taken away the right of women to be ordained to ministry. There were women that were ordained to ministry—their ordinations have been negated and women are told that this is not a place for them. They are not to be pastors.

They point to certain passages in the Book of Timothy to make their case, but tend to ignore that there are other passages in the Bible that would raise very serious questions about that position and which, in fact, would legitimate women being in leadership positions in the church. In Galatians, it says that in Christ there’s neither Jew nor Greek, bond nor free, male nor female, all are one in Christ Jesus. In the Book of Acts, the Bible is very clear that when the Holy Spirit comes upon the Church that both men and women begin to prophesy, that preaching now belongs to both men and women. Phillip had four daughters, all of whom prophesied, which we know means preaching in biblical language. I’d like to point out that in the 16th chapter of Romans, the seventh verse, we have reference to Junia. Junia was a woman and she held the high office of apostle in the early Church. What is frightening to me is that in the New International Translation of the Scriptures, the word Junia was deliberately changed to Junius to make it male.

I’m saying, let’s be faithful to the Bible. You can make your point, but there are those of us equally committed to Scripture who make a very strong case that women should be in key leaderships in the Church. We don’t want to communicate the idea that to believe the Bible is to necessarily be opposed to women in key roles of leadership in the life of early Christendom.

What position do you wish American evangelicals would take on homosexuality?

As an evangelical who takes the Bible very seriously, I come to the first chapter of Romans and feel there is sufficient evidence there to say that same-gender eroticism is not a Christian lifestyle. That’s my position.

So you mean homosexual activity?

That’s right. What I think the evangelical community has to face up to, however, is what almost every social scientist knows, and I’m one of them, and that is that people do not choose to be gay. I don’t know what causes homosexuality, I have no idea. Neither does anybody else. There isn’t enough evidence to support those who would say it’s an inborn theory. There isn’t enough evidence to support those who say it’s because of socialization.

I’m upset because the general theme in the evangelical community, propagated from one end of this country to the other–especially on religious radio–is that people become gay because the male does not have a strong father image with which to identify. That puts the burden of people becoming homosexual on parents.

Most parents who have homosexual children are upset because of the suffering their children have to go through living in a homophobic world. What they don’t need is for the Church to come along and to lay a guilt trip on top of them and say And your children are homosexual because of you. If you would have been the right kind of parent, this would have never happened. That kind of thinking is common in the evangelical Church and the book attacks on solid sociological, psychological, biological grounds.

But even if evangelicals came to believe that it was not a choice, how should they approach the topic?

Well, beyond that, they seem to offer an absolute solution to the problem. They are saying, We can change every gay. We can change every lesbian. I have heard enough of the brothers and sisters give testimonies of having changed their sexual orientation to doubt them…I believe them. But that’s rare: people who stand up and say, I was gay but Jesus came into my life and now I’m not homosexual anymore.

But the overwhelming proportion of the gay community that love Jesus, that go to church, that are deeply committed in spiritual things, try to change and can’t change. And the Church acts as though they are just stubborn and unwilling, when in reality they can’t change. To propose that every gay with proper counseling and proper prayer can change their orientation is to create a mentality where parents are angry with their children, saying, “You are a gay person because you don’t want to change and you’re hurting your mother and your father and your family and you’re embarrassing us all.”

These young people cannot change. What they are begging for, and what we as Church people have a responsibility to give them, is loving affirmation as they are. That does not mean that we support same-gender eroticism.

What do you wish evangelicals might accept in terms of salvation for non-Christians?

We ought to get out of the judging business. We should leave it up to God to determine who belongs in one arena or another when it comes to eternity. What we are obligated to do is to tell people about Jesus and that’s what I do. I try to do it every day of my life.

I don’t know of any other way of salvation, excerpt through Jesus Christ. Now, if you were going to ask me, “Are only Christians going to get to heaven?” I can’t answer that question, because I can only speak from the Christian perspective, from my own convictions and from my own experience. I do not claim to be able to read the mind of God and when evangelicals make these statements, I have some very serious concerns.

For instance, they say unless a person accepts Jesus as his personal savior or her personal savior, that person is doomed forever to live apart from God. Well, what about the many, many children every year who die in infancy or the many children who die almost in childbirth and what about people who are suffering from intellectual disabilities? Is there not some grace from God towards such people? Are evangelical brothers and sisters of mine really suggesting that these people will burn in hell forever?

And I would have to say what about all the people in the Old Testament days? They didn’t have a chance to accept Jesus.

I don’t know how far the grace of God does expand and I’m sure that what the 25th chapter of Matthew says is correct–that there will be a lot of surprises on Judgment Day as to who receives eternal life and who doesn’t. But in the book I try to make the case that we have to stop our exclusivistic, judgmental mentality. Let us preach Christ, let us be faithful to proclaiming the Gospel, but let’s leave judgment in the hands of God.

But in the book you also mention the decline of mainline churches. Some people would say that this lack of taking a firm stand is wishy-washy, and that if evangelicalism is infected by relativism, that could be its downfall as well.

I didn’t say anything that was relativistic. I am just saying that when we don’t know what we’re talking about, we shouldn’t make absolute statements. And we don’t know how God will judge in the end. We do not know the mind of God.

As for mainline churches declining, my own particular analysis is that they’re declining because they have been so concerned about social justice issues that they forgot to put a major emphasis on bringing people into a close, personal, transforming relationship with God. The Pentecostal churches, the evangelical churches, attract people who are hungry to know God, not just as a theology, not just as a moral teacher, not just as a social justice advocate, but as someone who can invade them, possess them, transform them from within, strengthen them for their everyday struggles, enable them to overcome the guilt they feel for things in the past.

Mainline churches have not sufficiently nurtured that kind of Christianity. They believe in it, they articulate it, it’s not where they put enough emphasis. They are not putting enough emphasis on getting people into a personal, I use the word mystical, transforming relationship with Christ.

I think that Christianity has two emphases. One is a social emphasis to impart the values of the kingdom of God in society—to relieve the sufferings of the poor, to stand up for the oppressed, to be a voice for those who have no voice. The other emphasis is to bring people into a personal, transforming relationship with Christ, where they feel the joy and the love of God in their lives. That they manifest what the fifth chapter of Galatians calls “the fruit of the Spirit.” Fundamentalism has emphasized the latter, mainline churches have emphasized the former. We cannot neglect the one for the other.

In your book, you put forward a sort of ideal creed for 21st-century evangelicals. What’s most crucial to understand about the additions you made to this creed?

The Apostle’s Creed I think is the ultimate measure for Christians. Some say it goes back as far as 1800 years. It has been the standard statement of faith that the Church has maintained, and I wanted to say, “An evangelical is someone who believes in the doctrines of the Apostle’s Creed.” However, the thing that evangelicals would add to the Apostle’s Creed is their view of holy scripture. They contend, and I contend, that the Bible is an infallible message from God, inspired. The writers were inspired by the Holy Spirit and [the Bible] is a message that provides an infallible guide for faith and practice.

And not only that. It’s necessary to know Jesus in an intimate and personal way. That’s what it means to be an evangelical. I don’t think it means evangelicals are necessarily in favor of capital punishment. I’m one evangelical that is opposed to capital punishment. I do not believe being an evangelical means women should be debarred from pastoral ministry. I believe women do have a right to be in ministry. It doesn’t mean evangelicals are supportive of the Republican party in all respects, because here’s one evangelical who says “I think the Republican party has been the party of the rich, and has forgotten many ethnic groups and many poor people.”

I am an evangelical who holds to those three positions [Creed, Bible, personal relationship with Jesus] and is a strong environmentalist. I am an evangelical who raises very specific questions about war in general, but specifically the war in Iraq. The evangelical community has been far too supportive of militarism.

You were criticized when you counseled Bill Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal. Are you still in touch with Clinton?

Yes, and very much in the way I was before: trying to be a faithful follower of Jesus. I think it’s the task of Christians to speak truth to power.

The president of the United States called upon me to help him and nurture him into some kind of relationship with God. He obviously had strayed away from what he knew was right, and he called me one day and said can you help me?

I don’t know what you’re supposed to say to that: “I’m sorry, but evangelicals only pray with Republicans?”

I was appalled that evangelical leaders wrote me nasty letters and said you should have no time for this man after what he’s done to this country, to Monica Lewinsky, to his family. I can’t understand that mentality. We’re talking about being the follower of a Jesus who would never turn his back on any person seeking help.

If you’re an evangelical, you should believe that every person, no matter how low or high, is capable of being converted, of repentance.

If John Kerry or George W. Bush were to call you up and ask for your guidance on issues facing America today, what would you tell each of them in turn?

To Kerry, I think my major issue would be “Do you understand us? Do you understand evangelicals and why we’re so upset about the pro-life issue? Do you understand why we believe all life is sacred?” I’d encourage him to do justice and to do righteousness.

To George Bush, I’d say “The God of scripture is a God who calls us to protect the environment. I don’t think your administration has done that very well. The God of scripture calls us to be peacemakers. We follow a Jesus who said those who live by the sword will die by the sword, who called us to be agents of reconciliation.”

I would point out to George Bush that the Christ that he follows says “blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy”-which doesn’t go along with capital punishment.

I would say different things to each candidate, but I would respond instantaneously to the invitation to speak to each of them. All the way to the White House, I would be praying, “God, keep me from chickening out. Help me to not be so overawed by the high office of these people that I fail to recognize I answer to a higher authority.”

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