Atheism, how Christian is Christianity? and the danger of religion to the state, etc.

The older I get, the more useless I personally find religion. In South Africa, where I grew up, religion was politics. You used it either to prove that apartheid came from the Bible and from God, or to damn apartheid as a very un-Christian system. These days I find religion driving much of politics in the U.S., and words like "faith-based initiative" fill me with suspicion. There's really no excuse for any civilized person to be devout, I think; at its heart, religion is totally anti-modernist. The biggest difference between America's radical Christian Right and Afghanistan's Taliban seems to me to be merely a matter of geography.

On the other hand, where would Civil Rights have been if it weren't for Black churches and black church leaders? The most admired American of the 20th century, besides FDR, was Martin Luther King, whose politics grew from his faith, and whose goodness comes from the fact that he was a devout Christian. That the same religion can produce Martin Luther King and Pat Robertson is pretty unbelievable. Indeed, that an asshole like Pat Robertson is a leading spokesman of Christianity, and that there is no famous Martin Luther King-type Christian speaking out today, says much about how Christianity is now failing the nation as any true moral arbiter.

To anyone interested in these matters, I recommend Sam Harris's The End of Faith as a current book that assails religion quite robustly. The book tellingly reminds us that we don't need religion to be either moral or spiritual, two qualities often associated with religion, and two qualities notably absent from the kind of American Christianity hitting the news these days.

Anyway, given the bad name that terrorism has given Islam and the Christian Right has given Christianity, today atheism seems to me the last refuge of a truly moral person. Here are a few articles around the subject of atheism and religion.

1. From the Star:

Just give me that old-time atheism! by Salman Rushdie

"Not believing in God is no excuse for being virulently anti-religious or naïvely pro-science," says Dylan Evans, a professor of robotics at the University of West England in Bristol.

Evans has written an article for the Guardian of London deriding the old-fashioned, "19th-century" atheism of such prominent thinkers as Richard Dawkins and Jonathan Miller, instead proposing a new, modern atheism which "values religion, treats science as simply a means to an end and finds the meaning of life in art."

Indeed, he says, religion itself is to be understood as "a kind of art, which only a child could mistake for reality and which only a child would reject for being false."

Evans' position fits well with that of the American philosopher of science Michael Ruse, whose new book, The Evolution-Creation Struggle , lays much of the blame for the growth of creationism in America — and for the increasingly strident attempts by the religious right to have evolutionary theory kicked off the curriculum and replaced by the new dogma of "intelligent design" — at the door of the scientists who have tried to compete with, and even supplant, religion.

A staunch evolutionist himself, he is nevertheless highly critical of such modern giants as Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson.

Evans' "Atheism Lite," which seeks to negotiate a truce between religious and irreligious world views, is easily demolished. Such a truce would have a chance of working only if it were reciprocal — if the world's religions agreed to value the atheist position and to concede its ethical basis, if they respected the discoveries and achievements of modern science, even when these discoveries challenge religious sanctities, and if they agreed that art at its best reveals life's multiple meanings at least as clearly as so-called "revealed" texts. No such reciprocal arrangement exists, however, nor is there the slightest chance that such an accommodation could ever be reached.

It is among the truths believed to be self-evident by the followers of all religions that godlessness is equivalent to amorality and that ethics requires the underpinning presence of some sort of ultimate arbiter, some sort of supernatural absolute, without which secularism, humanism, relativism, hedonism, liberalism and all manner of permissive improprieties will inevitably seduce the unbeliever down immoral ways.

To those of us who are perfectly prepared to indulge in the above vices but still believe ourselves to be ethical beings, the godlessness-equals-morality position is pretty hard to swallow. Nor does the current behaviour of organized religion breed confidence in the Evans/Ruse laissez-faire attitude. Education everywhere is seriously imperilled by religious attacks.

In recent years, Hindu nationalists in India attempted to rewrite the nation's history books to support their anti-Muslim ideology, an effort thwarted only by the electoral victory of a secularist coalition led by the Congress party. Meanwhile, Muslim voices the world over are claiming that evolutionary theory is incompatible with Islam. And in America, the battle over the teaching of intelligent design in U.S. schools is reaching crunch time, as the American Civil Liberties Union prepares to take on intelligent-design proponents in a Pennsylvania court.

It seems inconceivable that better behaviour on the part of the world's great scientists, of the sort that Ruse would prefer, would persuade these forces to back down.

Intelligent design, an idea designed backward so as to force the antique idea of a Creator upon the beauty of creation, is so thoroughly rooted in pseudoscience, so full of false logic, so easy to attack that a little rudeness seems called for. Its advocates argue, for example, that the sheer complexity and perfection of cellular/molecular structures is inexplicable by gradual evolution. However, the multiple parts of complex, interlocking biological systems do evolve together, gradually expanding and adapting — and, as Dawkins showed in The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without Design , natural selection is active at every step of this process. But, as well as scientific arguments, there are others that are more, well, novelistic. What about bad design, for example? Was it really so intelligent to come up with the birth canal or the prostate gland? Then, there's the moral argument against an intelligent designer who cursed his creations with cancer and AIDS. Is the intelligent designer also amorally cruel?

To see religion as "a kind of art," as Evans rather sweetly proposes, is possible only when the religion is dead or when, like the Church of England, it has become a set of polite rituals. The old Greek religion lives on as mythology, the old Norse religion has left us the Norse myths and, yes, now we can read them as literature. The Bible contains much great literature, too, but the literalist voices of Christianity grow ever louder, and one doubts that they would welcome Evans' child's storybook approach.

Meanwhile religions continue to attack their own artists: Hindu artists' paintings are attacked by Hindu mobs, Sikh playwrights are threatened by Sikh violence and Muslim novelists and filmmakers are menaced by Islamic fanatics with a vigorous unawareness of any kinship.

If religion were a private matter, one could more easily respect its believers' right to seek its comforts and nourishments. But religion today is big public business, using efficient political organization and cutting-edge information technology to advance its ends. Religions play bare-knuckle rough all the time, while demanding kid-glove treatment in return.

As Evans and Ruse would do well to recognize, atheists such as Dawkins, Miller and Wilson are neither immature nor culpable for taking on such religionists. They are doing a vital and necessary thing.

(Salman Rushdie is the author of The Satanic Verses, Fury and many other books.)

2. On Faith
SACRED AND SECULAR: Religion and Politics Worldwide by Pippa Norris and Ronald Inglehart.
Reviewed by Os Guinness

Religion is the key to history, Lord Acton wrote. In today’s intellectual circles, however, it’s more like the skunk at the garden party. To many intellectuals, religion is a private matter at best, and most appropriately considered in terms of its functions rather than the significance of its beliefs, let alone its truth claims. At worst, it’s the main source of the world’s conflicts and violence—what Gore Vidal, in his Lowell Lecture at Harvard University in 1992, called “the great unmentionable evil” at the heart of our culture.

Such grim assessments are certainly debatable. It’s a simple fact, for example, that, contrary to the current scapegoating of religion, more people were slaughtered during the 20th century under secularist regimes, led by secularist intellectuals, and in the name of secularist ideologies, than in all the religious persecutions in Western history. But there is little point in bandying about charges and countercharges. If we hope to transcend the seemingly endless culture-warring over religion, we need detailed, objective data about the state of religion in today’s world, and wise, dispassionate discussion of what this evidence means for our common life.

Is religion central or peripheral? Is it disappearing, as Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Max Weber, Émile Durkheim, Sigmund Freud, and other proponents of the strong secularization thesis have claimed? Or is religion actually resurgent, as more recent observers such as Peter Berger, David Martin, Rodney Stark, and Philip Jenkins have claimed? Is it a positive force, as some have argued from the evidence of the “South African miracle,” the peaceful transition from apartheid to equality? Or is it pathological, as much of the post-9/11 commentary has assumed without argument?

In their new book, political scientists Pippa Norris, of Harvard, and Ronald Inglehart, of the University of Michigan, contribute three things to the old debate: first, a summary of the present state of academic analysis of religion; second, new evidence on the state of religion in the modern world; and third, a new theoretical framework that they claim makes better sense of the evidence than previous theories.

The massive and detailed evidence of religion’s significance worldwide is unquestionably the chief benefit of the book, helpful even for those who will disagree with the authors’ conclusions. The data come from World Values Surveys, an international cooperative overseen by Inglehart, for which social scientists polled residents of more than 80 countries between 1981 and 2001. The findings cover a comprehensive sweep of topics, ranging from the personal importance of religion to the electoral strength of religious parties in national elections.

The weight of all the data, interestingly, points somewhere between the extremes of the debate. Religion is far from dead, and it certainly hasn’t disappeared—even in Europe, where the evidence for its demise is most powerful. But there is strong evidence that it has lost its decisive authority over the lives of adherents in the developed world—even in the United States, where American exceptionalism has long defied European trends toward secularization. There was certainly too much of an unacknowledged secularist bias in secularization theory, but at the same time much of the talk of the unabashed resurgence of religion is premature. For those who take faith seriously, the general trends in the modern world are sobering; the still-potent role of religion in the global south offers only false comfort, as most of the region is still premodern and has yet to go through the “fiery brook” of modernity.

Norris and Inglehart’s theoretical explanation of religion’s current condition will be more controversial: a revised version of the secularization thesis, which they base on the “existential security” offered by religion. In contrast to Weber’s view of modernization as “rationalization,” or Durkheim’s as “differentiation,” they trace the growing irrelevance of religion in the modern world to the fact that people can take security for granted. The more secure people become in the developed world, the more they loosen their hold on religion; religion, meanwhile, retains its authority among the less secure but faster-growing populations of the less developed world. “The result of these combined trends,” the authors conclude, “is that rich societies are becoming more secular but the world as a whole is becoming more religious.”

The main response to this theory will properly come from Norris and Inglehart’s fellow scholars, and is likely to focus on three aspects: the authors’ interpretation of the data they offer, their critiques of some of the currently flourishing theories, and their view of secularization as driven by the accrual of “existential security.” Their articulation of the last seems to me particularly disappointing, little more than a restatement of Lucretius’s “Fear made the gods,” and a crude explanation for the crisis of religion, which could be explained as easily by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s simple observation, “Men have forgotten God.”

What really ought to be addressed, however, are the implications of Norris and Inglehart’s findings for the Western democracies. They nowhere discuss religion as having more than a generic, functional role in assuring existential security. Such a view is inadequate for those who take the specific content of faith seriously, and who argue that faiths of a certain shape produce citizens of a certain shape, who in turn produce societies of a certain shape—in other words, that faith must be considered as a set of beliefs with particular consequences and not others. Weber’s magisterial work led the way in this direction, and Baylor University sociologist Rodney Stark’s important work on monotheism adds to it currently.

The condition of religion in the modern world is especially crucial to a society that links religion and public life in any way—and nowhere more crucial than in the United States. Religion in America has flourished not so much in spite of the separation of church and state as because of it. Far from setting up “Christian America,” or establishing any orthodoxy, religious or secular, the Framers envisioned the relationship of faith and freedom in what might be called a golden triangle: Freedom requires virtue, virtue requires faith (of some sort), and faith requires freedom. If the Framers were right, then as faiths go, so goes freedom—and so goes the Republic.

America has yet to experience the discussion of religion in 21st-century national life that “the great experiment” requires and deserves, not just from scholars but from a host of Americans—schoolteachers and political leaders alike. Norris and Inglehart provide data and arguments that will be an invaluable part of that discussion.

(Os Guinness is a writer and speaker living in Virginia. His books include The American Hour (1993), Time for Truth (2000), and the newly published Unspeakable: Facing Up to Evil in an Age of Genocide and Terror.)


3. The Fundamentalist Attack on Separation of Church & State Defames America and Its Founders -- by Harvey Wasserman

The right-wing's multi-front war on American democracy now aims at our core belief in separation of church and state. It includes an attempt to say the founding fathers endorsed the idea that this is a "Christian nation," with an official religion. But the founders---and a vast majority of Americans---repeatedly, vehemently and with stunning clarity denounced, rejected and despised such beliefs.

Nowhere in the Constitution they wrote does the word "Christian" or the name of Christ appear. The very first phrase of the First Amendment demands that "Congress shall make no law concerning an establishment of religion."

One major reason Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Tom Paine, Ethan Allen and the vast majority of early Americans rejected the merger of church and state was the lingering stench of Puritan intolerance. The infamous theocratic murders of the Salem witch trials sickened the American soul, just as today's power grab by Karl Rove's new corporate fundamentalists creates an atmosphere of intolerance and fear, defined by the world's largest prison gulag.

With characteristic duplicity, the radical right is attempting to re-write another of this nation's most cherished beliefs. Consider a widely circulated screed by the University of Dayton's Larry Schweikart. With astonishing inaccuracy, Schweikart asserts that Jefferson's famous demand for a "wall of separation between church and state" doesn't really mean what it says. Jefferson's observation that the founding fathers were not particularly devout is also dismissed, as if Schweikart knew them all and Jefferson didn't.

Twisting metaphors, changing meanings and ignoring Jefferson's Unitarianism, Schweikart conjures a completely fictitious endorsement for a Christian state.

Then comes the astonishing assertion that the incomparably urbane, tolerant and ever-eclectic Benjamin Franklin was somehow a Christian soldier. Never mind that in his Autobiography the Puritan-born Franklin, with his usual wry wit, laments having been dragged by a friend to church, from which he fled back to his books and experiments. Never mind also that the legendary atheism of the wildly popular Tom Paine and Ethan Allen was embraced throughout a new nation that loved rational reason. Instead, the Rovewellian claim that the US belongs to Puritan fundamentalists and their corporate sponsors is fed with random shreds deliberately misused as if by divine right.

The Deistic God of Franklin, Jefferson, and their Enlightened cohorts was in fact a humanistic divinity, rooted in the possibilities of the mind and spirit. America's true founding faith drew strength from diverse sources, including native America, pacifist Quakerism and the actual teachings of Jesus from the Sermon on the Mount: broad, peace-loving, tolerant, egalitarian, pluralistic, loving.

In other words, the precise opposite of G. W. Bush's totalitarian jihad. Today's theocratic crusaders promote the mean spirit of Puritan fanatics who ruled Boston from 1630 with an iron fist and a hangman's noose. To claim that this infamously repressive (and repressed!) state church was somehow supported by its most focused opponents is to defame America's founders and Truth itself.

It is not the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments that form the bedrock of American values. It is the first Ten Amendments to the Constitution. If anything should be chiseled in stone on our public buildings, it's the Bill of Rights.

Which is precisely what this attack on our history means to burn at the stake. Awakened America rose up in revolt against King, corporation and clergy. Its rejection of a state-sponsored church, Christian or otherwise, was fiercely explicit and decidedly mainstream.

Today's corporate-funded fundamentalist jihad is at war with America's uniquely diverse revolutionary soul. Spitting in the face of our historic core, the Big Lie of a "Christian nation" is vintage Rove at his most Orwellian.

America's founding genius lit up the world with secular pluralism. Those who attack our uniquely open spirit with phony scholarship are those whom George W. Bush might most accurately describe as "people who hate America."

(Harvey Wasserman is author of Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States.)


4. Robert Sawyer, "Hominids"
In this book, Robert J. Sawyer argues that religion has been the single greatest negative force in human history, responsible for most human suffering, intolerance, injustice and war. The author puts forward the view that ironically it’s our belief in an afterlife that allowed us to send our children off to die in battle, to keep slaves and so on… Is religion the root of all evil?

How to deal with the matter of religion and public life was one of the central questions facing the framers of the Constitution as they invented a new nation. (I have written about this on my web site and in my book Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy.)

For 150 years, the colonies had, for the most part, been little theocracies, run by different established churches. The framers knew well the problems posed by religious supremacism, although they certainly did not call it that in those days. They understood what can happen when religions wield state power. And they knew that in order to bind together the potentially fractious new nation they needed to inoculate it against the ravages of religious bigotry and worse -- the religious warfare that had wracked Europe for a millennium.

What did they do? Well, in the first place they made no mention of God in the Constitution. What they did do, was to put in Article 6, a key phrase, "...no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." (Cornell University historian Issack Kramnick details the history of Article 6 in his book The Godless Constitution.)

What this meant was that for the first time in the history of the world, religious orientation would not be a consideration as to one's qualifications for office. By logical extension, this also meant that one's religious identity would be irrelevant to one's status as a citizen. This clause, set in motion the disestablishment of the churches, by making religious equality the law of the land. It was a radical idea, and it passed overwhelmingly and with little debate. When the Constitution was sent to the state legislatures for ratification, the absence of mention of God and Christianity in the Constitution led the the Christian Right of the day to fight ratification. They lost.

While it was deeply significant that Catholics, atheists, Quakers, and Jews would enjoy equal status as citizens in the United States along with Protestants of various sorts, they key was that people had the right to believe differently. Religious freedom, as we think of it now, is the right of individual conscience. In terms of our role as citizens this is perhaps best framed as religious equality. I believe that when we are grounded in this history and are able to articulate this history and its contemporary meaning, progressives will own the moral and political high ground in the public debate with the theocratic Christian Right.

The First Amendment built on and clarified the implications of Article 6. But what Article 6 did was to establish the right to believe and to think differently without having to answer to a state sponsored religious orthodoxy. The right to believe and therefore to think differently, is a necessary prerequisite for speaking freely and worshipping freely. It is this right to believe differently that is the foundation for every advance in civil and human rights in our history.

It is also the historical fact of our right to believe differently as enshrined in Article 6 that unravels the false claim that the U.S. was founded as a "Christian nation." Indeed, it was Christians, members of established churches, who wrote the Constitution and who ratified it in the state legislatures. In that sense it was Christian political leaders who believed so deeply in the need for religious equality that they disestablished their own churches.

If religious equality is to survive in our time, I believe it is necessary for us to reclaim our history and stand up to the historical revisionism of today's theocratic Christian Right.


5. The Lights are Coming on in America -- by Frederick Clarkson

All over America people are waking up to the threat posed by the theocratic Christian Right -- in their lives, in their communities, in their thinking and in their actions. As I wrote yesterday, the lights are coming on in America. No question there is alot of darkness, Kossacks, and some places face a deeper gloom than others.  But I want you to know that I think what I see is not merely silver linings. Nor do I think I am I clinging to false hopes. Nor am I claiming that the struggle is over. Far from it.

First a little perspective. This is not about conservatives vs. liberals. I have more in common with most conservatives I have known over the years than any of us has with the Christian theocrats bent on overturning the rough consensus we have enjoyed about the meaning of constitutional democracy.  In the diaries and threads on related topics in recent days, we have seen lots of stories about people whose Republican friends and relatives are expressing grave reservations about the fanatical actions of the leaders of Congress and the president in the Terri Schiavo case, not to mention the threats against judges.  

Yes, many people are also skeptical. An editorial in the New York Times is not enough, they say. And besides, maybe its too little too late.  But does that mean its all over folks? Does that mean we are giving up? Because if we are, I hear beaches and margaritas calling out to me. But if you are reading this, odds are, you don't think its over, or at least you don't want to think its over. So I guess the beaches and margaritas will have to wait.  

A few weeks ago, I wrote a diary titled How to Beat the Christian Right Part I. (I will do a more formal part II in a few weeks.) But in a way, most of my diaries are about this one way or the other.

One thing that I think is so true that it almost goes without saying. But I will say it anyway. You don't win at politics if you are not in the game. And a strong corollary is that you face a significant disadvantage if you do not know the nature of the game.

This is part of the significance of yesterday's editorial in The New York Times that inspired The Lights are Coming on in America. Their clear and unequivocal statement that we are up against a Christian theocratic movement -- was and is a breakthrough. The editorial voice of the Times is no small thing. And we may reasonably expect that the struggle that they must have gone through to arrive at this way of thinking, and their extraordinary articulation, will continue to inform their thinking and writing on these subjects.

Anyway, yesterday I celebrated the snapping on of this powerful light. But the Times is far from the only light that has come on recently. I have had the awful experience of watching this movement grow in strength and sophistication these 20 odd years. And I have never in my adult life seen people so politicized, really trying to come to grips with the theocratic movement, and inventing new ways of trying to address it. The lights are coming on in America, Kossacks. As dark as it seems, darker in some places than others, to be sure. But as one who has seen alot of darkness, I want you to know that I see lights coming on, and I am encouraged.

What I want to address in this essay is that many have been wanting progressive and moderate people of faith to play a greater and more visible role in public life.  This is, infact, starting to happen.

Let's start by taking a look at what some bloggers are doing.

Our own pastordan has launched The Affirmation Project on his blog faithforward. In taking this on, Pastordan is taking a pioneering role in raising the voices and the visibility of people of faith who are not part of the theocratic Christian Right.

"I don't know about you, but I've had enough," writes pastordan. "It's time Dr. Frist, Tom DeLay, James Dobson, the Family Research Council, and anyone else who would make adherence to political goals a literal article of faith heard from another side of the country. To that end, and for the time being, I am suspending the regular business of this blog and giving it over to a single project."

"It is time for us to state, simply and directly, that we can affirm faith while disagreeing with the Republican legislative agenda. By "we," I mean anyone who can get under that statement. You don't have to be religious yourself. You don't even have to be a Democrat. You just have to be willing to say that you are willing to affirm faith, but you don't believe that it should be used as a weapon in a partisan campaign to increase the political power of a single party in the American commonwealth."

Another blog, Jesus Politics has more or less daily lists of the most to-the-point articles and blog posts on politics and religion on the web. If you think that the moderate and progressive religious community isn't buzzing about what to think about and do about the Christian Right, you are not reading Jesus Politics.

Bruce Prescott at Mainstream Baptist has been posting a flurry of incisive and illuminating commentaries and important links on these subjects.  

Chuck Currie often has stuff I see nowhere else, surfacing important conversations and significant actions being taken.

There are others. Many others. And you can find them. Visit any of these sites, and you will find a rapidly growing list of progressive religious bloggers, and a widening and substantive conversation that spreads out all over the bloggosphere. If you are looking for passion and political energy and vision, these are gateways.

Let's underscore that this is a communications infrastructure that was in its infancy just a few months ago. It has grown rapidly in audience, quality of content, and ability to zero in on what is important. I have no doubt that this network will play a powerful role in the next few months and beynd.

Meanwhile, let's not forget that the Clergy and Laity Network is calling for a national prayer vigil on April 24th in response to the Family Research Council's national telecast featuring Senator Bill Frist, James Dobson and other leading Christian Rightists. They are waging the campaign in collaboration with linguist (and new Kossack) George Lakoff, best known for his popular work on "framing."

Many fine organizations have been working in the trenches for years, providing first rate analysis, up-to-date reporting, and significant activism, partly but not exlusively in the religious community. The depth of thier knowledge and maturinty of thier presentation will be indispensable as we go forward. Among these are Americans United for Separation of Church and State and Political Research Associates.  My own belief is that it is necessary to take the information and analysis you can glean from organizations like this, into electoral work. The Christian Right has come to power via elections, and it is by electing people who believe in constitutional democracy that the threat of creeping theocracy will be diminished.

Meanwhile, moderate and progressive people of faith are not only getting together in cyberspace. For example, yesterday I was notified that there an ecumenical conference coming right up that is intended to do just that. Its titled: "Reclaiming our Voices: Progressive Religious Values:  Promoting Liberty and Justice For All," Saturday, May 7, 2005.  Plenary speakers include: Rev. Dr. Robert W. Edgar, General Secretary, National Council of Churches, Robyn Lundy, Executive Director, The Tikkun Community, National Office, Rev. Dr. Paul Smith, Senior Minister, First Presbyterian Church in Brooklyn. Workshop topics include: "Religious and Secular Progressives," "Framing Religious Ideas in the Public Dialog," and "A Religious Basis for Marriage Equality and Reproductive Rights."  

Finally, there's been a national conference, also in New York:    

"Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right," April 29-30 in New York, was an opportunity to hear as remarkable and impressive a group of experts on the Religious Right as has been assembled anywhere in a long time. I am honored to be included along with Rev. Bob Edgar, General Secretary of the National Council of Churches, Rev. Joe Hough, president of Union Theological Seminary, authors Karen Armstrong, Chip Berlet and many others.  

My topic? "Learning about the Christian Right, and What in the World to Do."  

The darkness is far from over, Kossacks. And things may well get worse before they get better. The Christian Right in Washington is at the peak of its power. But again, the lights are coming on in America. I see them all over. I see them where once there was darkness, and thanks to those lights, I am starting to see more signs of an America I recognize. [A version of this diary will be posted tomorrow on my blog, FrederickClarkson.com]
                      

7. I never heard of it before, but evidently it scares the puddin' out of some liberals.

"Dominionist Domination": The Left runs with a wild theory.

What is the real agenda of the religious far Right? I’ll tell you what it is. These nuts want to take over the federal government and suppress other religions through genocide and mass murder, rather than through proselytizing. They want to reestablish slavery. They want to reduce women to near-slavery by making them property, first of their fathers, and then of their husbands. They want to execute anyone found guilty of pre-martial, extramaritial, or homosexual sex. They want to bring back the death penalty for witchcraft.

But aren’t extremists like this far from political power? On the contrary, the political and religious movement called "Dominionism" has gained control of the Republican party, and taken over Congress and the White House as well. Once they take over the judiciary, the conversion of America to a theocracy will be sealed. The Dominionists are very close to achieving their goal. Once they have the courts in their hands, a willing Dominionist Republican-controlled Congress can simply extend the death penalty to witchcraft, adultery, homosexuality, and heresy. The courts will uphold all this once conservatives are in control, since Scalia himself appears to be a Dominionist.

Shocking as it seems, Dominionists have gained extensive control of the Republican party, and the apparatus of government throughout the United States. Yet Dominionists continue to operate in secrecy. It is estimated that 35 million Americans who call themselves Christian adhere to Dominionism, although most of them are unaware of the true nature of their own beliefs and goals. Dominionism has met its timetable for the complete takeover of the American government. It would be a mistake, by the way, to think of Dominionists as fundamentalist Protestants alone. Dominionism has stealthily swept over America, incorporating conservative Roman Catholics and Episcopalians within its ranks. And of course, Dominionists are allied with the neoconservative followers of the political philosopher, Leo Strauss. The quest of these neoconservatives for power and world domination is a self-conscious program of pure, unmitigated evil."

If this is any indication.

Dominion Mandate
The term dominion means control over, in this case control over all the democratic institutions in this country. Sara Diamond in her book Road to Dominion is credited with recognizing dominion as a political goal. She defines Dominion Theology in an article for Z Magazine in 1985:

Christians are mandated to gradually occupy all secular institutions until Christ returns.

"Our aim," according to Pat Robertson at a banquet in 1984, "is to gain dominion over society." The path to dominion was made clear when Robertson told the Denver Post in 1992 that his goal was to "take working control of the Republican Party."

Katherine Yurica's article, The Despoiling of America provides a comprehensive overview of Dominionism, the Bush administration, and the Neoconservatives.

Authors Mark Beliles and Stephen McDowell have written an influential textbook for Christian schools titled America's Providential History.

"The Puritans are prime representatives of this "spirit of dominion... They recognized the scriptural mandates requiring Godly rule, and zealously set out to establish that in all aspects of society."

Dominion theology provides the theological rationale for a "Christian" nation. John F. Sugg writes in the Weekly Planet, Tampa, Florida, March 2004:

Dominion theologians ... preached ... that it was Christians' job to take over the world and impose biblical rule. Christ would not return, they said, until the church had claimed dominion over all of the world's governments and institutions ...

In 2000, the Republican Party of Texas declared that it "affirms that the United States is a Christian nation." Last month, [February 11, 2004,] that sentiment reached the national level. The Constitution Restoration Act of 2004 would acknowledge Christianity's God as the "sovereign source" of our laws. It would reach back in history and reverse all judicial decisions that have built a wall between church and state, and it would prohibit federal judges from making such rulings in the future.

An article appeared in Harper's, March, 2003 called "Jesus Plus Nothing: Undercover among America's secret theocrats" by Jeff Sharlet. While the term "dominion" isn't used, the goal is the same. Says Sharlet, the ultimate goal of the Family is "a government built by God," which is by definition a theocracy.

Sharlet's most recent article, Inside America's most powerful megachurch, along with Chris Hedges' Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters, make up a two-part series called Soldiers of Christ. (Harpers, May, 2005) Sharlet's description of the New Life Church in Colorado springs illustrates how the dominionism movement is organized socially.

Comment:
On Dominionism, based on what I have read before I think this website is pretty much the headquarters on the web for the movement - www.chalcedon.edu
Some info:
"Misconception 2: Political Dominion
Because we believe that the Bible should apply to all of life, including the state; and because we believe that the Christian state should enforce Biblical civil law; and finally, because we believe that the responsibility of Christians is to exercise dominion in the earth for God's glory, it is sometimes assumed that we believe that capturing state apparatus and enforcing Biblical law on a pervasively unbelieving populace is one of our hidden objectives. Our critics sometimes imply or state outright that we are engaged in a subtle, covert attempt to capture conservative, right-wing politics in order to gain political power, which we will then use to "spring" Biblical law on our nation. This is flatly false. We do not believe that politics or the state are a chief sphere of dominion.

It is understandable why many people assume that we do hold this position, however. We believe firmly in social change. Liberals believe firmly in social change. Liberals believe that social change is the effect almost exclusively of politics and state coercion. For example, they believe that we can change society by means of state-financed and governed "public education"; health, education, and welfare programs; and speech codes. In other words, they believe, like communists, that man is essentially a plastic being that can be fundamentally reshaped by external means — education, wealth, health, penitentiaries, and so forth. Since no later than the French Revolution, most civil governments in the West have believed that social change occurs by revolution, not by regeneration. When, therefore, liberals (and even some alleged Christians) see us supporting and working toward social change, they presume that we are interested in political power. In simpler words, because they believe in social change exclusively by means of politics, they assume that anyone who supports social change or gets involved in politics is attempting to gain state power in order to further a social agenda.

This is a serious miscalculation. We believe in regeneration, not in revolution. Men are not changed fundamentally by politics, but by the power of God. Men's hearts are changed by regeneration (Jn. 3:3). They are translated from the kingdom of darkness to the kingdom of God's dear Son (Col. 1:13). From that point, they progressively work to reorient their lives and every sphere they touch in terms of God's holy, infallible Word. Long-term, pervasive social change is the result of extensive regeneration and obedience by the people of God. This means, of course, that there can be no Christian society of any significance or longevity unless a large number of its members are Christians.

We do encourage Christian political involvement, but not for the reason that many people suppose. In fact, we believe it is important for Christians to get involved in politics because we do not believe politics is too important. The great problem with modern politics is that it is used as an instrument of social change. We at Chalcedon passionately oppose this. The role of the state is in essence to defend and protect, in the words of the early American Republic, life, liberty, and property. It is to reward the externally obedient by protecting them from the externally disobedient (Rom. 13:1-7). Its role is not to make men virtuous; we have a name for civil governments that attempt to create a virtuous society: totalitarian. Biblically, the role of the state is to suppress external evil: murder, theft, rape, and so forth. Its role is not to redistribute wealth, furnish medical care, or educate its citizens' children.

We do believe that the state one day will be Christian, but this no way implies that the role of the state is to Christianize its citizens. The Christian state is highly decentralized (localized). Our objective, therefore, in supporting Christian political involvement is to scale down the massive state in Western democracies, reducing it to its Biblical limits. We do not believe in political salvation of any kind."
-- www.chalcedon.edu/credo.php

Dominionism, if I understand it sufficiently, is postmillennial. I have a great deal of sympathy for postmillennialism. I do not know enough about the Chalcedon Foundation to state how much of it particular brand of postmillennialism I agree with.


9. 'A spiritual olive branch for the far-right faithful' -- by Ellis Henican, Newsday

Chip Berlet isn't the devil. He doesn't even look the part.

He's a big, burly guy in suspenders and a sport shirt who was raised Presbyterian in northern New Jersey. He's spent most of his adult life at the intersection of journalism and community activism - in Colorado, Chicago and Boston. Over the years, he's become one of America's leading experts on the steady rise of conservative Christianity and its growing role in political life. He was onto this long before George W. Bush came into the White House.

These days, Berlet thinks of himself as an organizer, a researcher and a radical left-wing Christian. Yet he counts among his friends quite a few people whom his other friends consider whacked-out right-wing religious zealots.

"Actually," Berlet was saying on Friday afternoon, "I don't like those labels at all, calling people 'religious extremists' or 'radical religious right.' You can't have a conversation when you start that way. I want to talk to these people. I want to engage them. ... I want to have a real discourse about religion and politics."

Welcome to backlash against the latest scary rise of America's Religious Right.

There's plenty of anger and exuberance and outrage in the room. This is New York, after all, where skepticism is always in style. But Berlet might be onto something here, something that could actually work in the battle against religious extremists, by whatever name: Don't insult them. Engage them. And don't back down.

The group is gathered for the weekend at the CUNY Graduate Center on West 34th Street. They're some of the brightest minds and shrewdest strategists among people who look with alarm at the collusion between Christian evangelicals and Republican politicos. The word theocracy keeps coming up.

The conference, sponsored by CUNY and the New York Open Center, is called "Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right."

"That name," Berlet said, crinkling his nose just a little.

"I want to be able to ask conservative Christians, 'Do you think it's OK to demonize your opponents, even if you think they are sinful?' And, 'We may never agree on abortion or gay rights. But can't we find some things to agree on?' You'd be surprised how long that list can be."

The timing couldn't be more perfect for talk like this.

It was just last weekend that another conference, covering this very terrain but from a very different point of view, elbowed its way onto the center stage of American politics. Televised from the Highview Baptist mega-church outside Louisville, "Justice Sunday: Stopping the Filibuster Against the People of Faith" demanded that President Bush be allowed to appoint more conservative judges.

God, apparently, has a position on Senate filibusters.

Such a claim could simply be laughed off were it not embraced in such high places. But the closest allies of these groups include Bill Frist and Tom DeLay, the most powerful men in the U.S. Senate and the House. Their supporters are a crucial part of today's Republican Party base.

And there's plenty of stuff they want.

A constitutional amendment banning abortion. Prayers back in public school. The Ten Commandments hanging in public buildings. Laws against gay marriage, embryonic stem-cell research and government-funded birth control.

This isn't the first time in American history that politics and religion have collided like this. The results have been both good and bad. Abolitionism. The civil rights movement. Anti-Catholic nativism. The Salem witch trials.

And today's Republican-evangelical alliance didn't spring up overnight. "It's a 30-year process begun by [conservative strategists] Kevin Phillips, Paul Weyrich and Richard Viguerie," Berlet was saying as he prepared for his talk to the group.

Only now, with Republicans in control of the White House, the Congress and much of the courts, it is finally taking hold - and getting more extreme.

Berlet is especially interested in the strain of belief called Dominionism and its most extreme version, Reconstructionism. These concepts are plucked from the book of Genesis, where God is said to give man dominion over the Earth. But what exactly does that mean? A careful stewardship? Or religious dominance over all civil society?

Couple that with a growth in Apocalyptic thinking on the Christian right, and religious belief can move quite swiftly from "love your fellow man" to "my version of God's way - or the highway."

"Some people really do believe they have a pipeline to God," Berlet said. "There is no compromise there. Who would compromise with Satan? But democracy requires compromise."

But Berlet keeps plugging for dialogue.

"Thankfully, most Americans are not in either camp," he said. "They are just good people, trying to make their way. They get up in the morning, and if they see a kid fall off a bicycle, they go over to help. That's who we should all be talking to."


10. Fascism arrives in America: the Elephant in the Bathtub -- by Black Maned Pensator

Many here are unwilling to call the November elections fraudulent; most are uncomfortable with doing so without proof; others are uncomfortable with the very idea that our elections may no longer represent Democracy at its finest.

An Austin, Texas-based Unitarian Universalist minister, Davidson Loehr, is not only willing to claim that the elections are fraudulent; he uses this fraud as a given in his proof that the U.S. is now more nearly a fascist state than a democracy.

Fascism is here, he says, and, unless we fight, here to stay.  

The following was sent to me as a forwarded e-mail.  Davidson Loehr, the author, is apparently a senior minister at the First UU Church of Austin, where his political sermons have garnered him a reputation as being somewhat controversial.
Given the nature of the sermon, and that the www.austinuu.org site does not seem to be working, I hope he will not mind my quoting him in full here.

First UU Church of Austin - Sermons
Living Under Fascism
Davidson Loehr
7 November 2004
First UU Church of Austin
4700 Grover Ave., Austin, TX
78756 512-452-6168 - www.austinuu.org

SERMON: Living Under Fascism

You may wonder why anyone would try to use the word "fascism" in a serious discussion of where America is today. It sounds like cheap name-calling, or melodramatic allusion to a slew of old war movies. But I am serious. I don't mean it as name-calling at all. I mean to persuade you that the style of governing into which America has slid is most accurately described as fascism, and that the necessary implications of this fact are rightly regarded as terrifying. That's what I am about here. And even if I don't persuade you, I hope to raise the level of your thinking about who and where we are now, to add some nuance and perhaps some useful insights.

The word comes from the Latin word "Fasces," denoting a bundle of sticks tied together. The individual sticks represented citizens, and the bundle represented the state. The message of this metaphor was that it was the bundle that was significant, not the individual sticks. If it sounds un-American, it's worth knowing that the Roman Fasces appear on the wall behind the Speaker's podium in the chamber of the US House of Representatives.

Still, it's an unlikely word. When most people hear the word "fascism" they may think of the racism and anti-Semitism of Mussolini and Hitler. It is true that the use of force and the scapegoating of fringe groups are part of every fascism. But there was also an economic dimension of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and '30s as "corporatism," which was an essential ingredient of Mussolini's and Hitler's tyrannies. So-called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a model by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago (in "The Corporation Will Eat Your Soul"), Fortune magazine ran a cover story on Mussolini in 1934, praising his fascism for its ability to break worker unions, disempower workers and transfer huge sums of money to those who controlled the money rather than those who earned it.

Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s. Yet reviewing our past may help shed light on our present, and point the way to a better future. So I want to begin by looking back to the last time fascism posed a serious threat to America.

In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray advocates of traditional American democracy as those concerned with individual rights and freedoms as anti-American. That was 69 years ago.

One of the most outspoken American fascists from the 1930s was economist Lawrence Dennis. In his 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism a coming which he anticipated and cheered as Dennis declared that defenders of "18th-century Americanism" were sure to become "the laughing stock of their own countrymen." The big stumbling block to the development of economic fascism, Dennis bemoaned, was "liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights."

So it is important for us to recognize that, as an economic system, fascism was widely accepted in the 1920s and '30s, and nearly worshiped by some powerful American industrialists. And fascism has always, and explicitly, been opposed to liberalism of all kinds.

Mussolini, who helped create modern fascism, viewed liberal ideas as the enemy. "The Fascist conception of life," he wrote, "stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual." (In 1932 Mussolini wrote, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, an entry for the Italian Encyclopedia on the definition of fascism. You can read the whole entry at  http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/mussolini-fascism.html)

Mussolini thought it was unnatural for a government to protect individual rights: The essence of fascism, he believed, is that government should be the master, not the servant, of the people.

Still, fascism is a word that is completely foreign to most of us. We need to know what it is, and how we can know it when we see it.

In an essay coyly titled "Fascism Anyone?," Dr. Lawrence Britt, a political scientist, identifies social and political agendas common to fascist regimes. His comparisons of Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Suharto, and Pinochet yielded this list of 14 "identifying characteristics of fascism." (The following article is from Free Inquiry magazine, Volume 23, Number 2. Read it at http://www.secularhumanism.org/library/fi/britt_23_2.htm) See how familiar they sound.

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism
Fascist regimes tend to make constant use of patriotic mottos, slogans, symbols, songs, and other paraphernalia. Flags are seen everywhere, as are flag symbols on clothing and in public displays.

2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights
Because of fear of enemies and the need for security, the people in fascist regimes are persuaded that human rights can be ignored in certain cases because of "need." The people tend to look the other way or even approve of torture, summary executions, assassinations, long incarcerations of prisoners, etc.

3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause
The people are rallied into a unifying patriotic frenzy over the need to eliminate a perceived common threat or foe: racial, ethnic or religious minorities; liberals; communists; socialists, terrorists, etc.

4. Supremacy of the Military
Even when there are widespread domestic problems, the military is given a disproportionate amount of government funding, and the domestic agenda is neglected. Soldiers and military service are glamorized.

5. Rampant Sexism
The governments of fascist nations tend to be almost exclusively male-dominated. Under fascist regimes, traditional gender roles are made more rigid. Opposition to abortion is high, as is homophobia and anti-gay legislation and national policy.

6. Controlled Mass Media
Sometimes the media are directly controlled by the government, but in other cases, the media are indirectly controlled by government regulation, or sympathetic media spokespeople and executives. Censorship, especially in wartime, is very common.

7. Obsession with National Security
Fear is used as a motivational tool by the government over the masses.

8. Religion and Government are Intertwined
Governments in fascist nations tend to use the most common religion in the nation as a tool to manipulate public opinion. Religious rhetoric and terminology is common from government leaders, even when the major tenets of the religion are diametrically opposed to the government's policies or actions.

9. Corporate Power is Protected
The industrial and business aristocracy of a fascist nation often are the ones who put the government leaders into power, creating a mutually beneficial business/government relationship and power elite.

10. Labor Power is Suppressed
Because the organizing power of labor is the only real threat to a fascist government, labor unions are either eliminated entirely, or are severely suppressed.

11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts
Fascist nations tend to promote and tolerate open hostility to higher education, and academia. It is not uncommon for professors and other academics to be censored or even arrested. Free expression in the arts is openly attacked, and governments often refuse to fund the arts.

12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment
Under fascist regimes, the police are given almost limitless power to enforce laws. The people are often willing to overlook police abuses and even forego civil liberties in the name of patriotism. There is often a national police force with virtually unlimited power in fascist nations

13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption
Fascist regimes almost always are governed by groups of friends and associates who appoint each other to government positions and use governmental power and authority to protect their friends from accountability. It is not uncommon in fascist regimes for national resources and even treasures to be appropriated or even outright stolen by government leaders.

14. Fraudulent Elections
Sometimes elections in fascist nations are a complete sham. Other times elections are manipulated by smear campaigns against or even assassination of opposition candidates, use of legislation to control voting numbers or political district boundaries, and manipulation of the media. Fascist nations also typically use their judiciaries to manipulate or control elections.

This list will be familiar to students of political science. But it should be familiar to students of religion as well, for much of it mirrors the social and political agenda of religious fundamentalisms worldwide. It is both accurate and helpful for us to understand fundamentalism as religious fascism, and fascism as political fundamentalism. They both come from very primitive parts of us that have always been the default setting of our species: amity toward our in-group, enmity toward out-groups, hierarchical deference to alpha male figures, a powerful identification with our territory, and so forth. It is that brutal default setting that all civilizations have tried to raise us above, but it is always a fragile thing, civilization, and has to be achieved over and over and over again.

But, again, this is not America's first encounter with fascism. In early 1944, the New York Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many fascists have we? How dangerous are they?"

Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis powers of Germany and Japan. See how much you think his statements apply to our society today.

"The really dangerous American fascist," Wallace wrote, is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more power."

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism he saw rising in America, Wallace added, "They claim to be super-patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection." By these standards, a few of today's weapons for keeping the common people in eternal subjection include NAFTA, the World Trade Organization, union-busting, cutting worker benefits while increasing CEO pay, elimination of worker benefits, security and pensions, rapacious credit card interest, and outsourcing of jobs not to mention the largest prison system in the world.

The Perfect Storm

Our current descent into fascism came about through a kind of "Perfect Storm," a confluence of three unrelated but mutually supportive schools of thought.

1. The first stream of thought was the imperialistic dream of the Project for the New American Century. I don't believe anyone can understand the past four years without reading the Project for the New American Century, published in September 2000 and authored by many who have been prominent players in the Bush administrations, including Cheney, Rumsfleid, Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Kagan, to name only a few. This report saw the fall of Communism as a call for America to become the military rulers of the world, to establish a new worldwide empire. They spelled out the military enhancements we would need, then noted, sadly, that these wonderful plans would take a long time, unless there could be a catastrophic and catalyzing event like a new Pearl Harbor that would let the leaders turn America into a military and militarist country. There was no clear interest in religion in this report, and no clear concern with local economic policies.

2. A second powerful stream must be credited to Pat Robertson and his Christian Reconstructionists, or Dominionists. Long dismissed by most of us as a screwball, the Dominionist style of Christianity, which he has been preaching since the early 1980s, is now the most powerful religious voice in the Bush administration.

Katherine Yurica, who transcribed over 1300 pages of interviews from Pat Robertson's "700 Club" shows in the 1980s, has shown how Robertson and his chosen guests consistently, openly and passionately argued that America must become a theocracy under the control of Christian Dominionists. Robertson is on record saying democracy is a terrible form of government unless it is run by his kind of Christians. He also rails constantly against taxing the rich, against public education, social programs and welfare and prefers Deuteronomy 28 over the teachings of Jesus. He is clear that women must remain homebound as obedient servants of men, and that abortions, like homosexuals, should not be allowed. Robertson has also been clear that other kinds of Christians, including Episcopalians and Presbyterians, are enemies of Christ. (The urica Report. Search under this name, or for "Despoiling America" by Katherine Yurica on the internet.)

3. The third major component of this Perfect Storm has been the desire of very wealthy Americans and corporate CEOs for a plutocracy that will favor profits by the very rich and disempowerment of the vast majority of American workers, the destruction of worker's unions, and the alliance of government to help achieve these greedy goals. It is a condition some have called socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor, and which others recognize as a reincarnation of Social Darwinism. This strain of thought has been present throughout American history. Seventy years ago, they tried to finance a military coup to replace Franklin Delano Roosevelt and establish General Smedley Butler as a fascist dictator in 1934. Fortunately, they picked a general who really was a patriot; he refused, reported the scheme, and spoke and wrote about it. As Canadian law professor Joel Bakan wrote in the book and movie "The Corporation," they have now achieved their coup without firing a shot.

Our plutocrats have had no particular interest in religion. Their global interests are with an imperialist empire, and their domestic goals are in undoing all the New Deal reforms of Franklin Delano Roosevelt that enabled the rise of America's middle class after WWII.

4. Another ill wind in this Perfect Storm is more important than its crudity might suggest: it was President Clinton's sleazy sex with a young but eager intern in the White House. This incident, and Clinton's equally sleazy lying about it, focused the certainties of conservatives on the fact that "liberals" had neither moral compass nor moral concern, and therefore represented a dangerous threat to the moral fiber of America. While the effects of this may be hard to quantify, I think they were profound.

These "storm" components have no necessary connection, and come from different groups of thinkers, many of whom wouldn't even like one another. But together, they form a nearly complete web of command and control, which has finally gained control of America and, they hope, of the world.

What's coming

When all fascisms exhibit the same social and political agendas (the 14 points listed by Britt), then it is not hard to predict where a new fascist uprising will lead. And it is not hard. The actions of fascists and the social and political effects of fascism and fundamentalism are clear and sobering. Here is some of what's coming, what will be happening in our country in the next few years:

The theft of all social security funds, to be transferred to those who control money, and the increasing destitution of all those dependent on social security and social welfare programs.

Rising numbers of uninsured people in this country that already has the highest percentage of citizens without health insurance in the developed world.

Increased loss of funding for public education combined with increased support for vouchers, urging Americans to entrust their children's education to Christian schools.

More restrictions on civil liberties as America is turned into the police state necessary for fascism to work.

Withdrawal of virtually all funding for National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting System. At their best, these media sometimes encourage critical questioning, so they are correctly seen as enemies of the state's official stories.

The reinstatement of a draft, from which the children of privileged parents will again be mostly exempt, leaving our poorest children to fight and die in wars of imperialism and greed that could never benefit them anyway. (That was my one-sentence Veteran's Day sermon for this year.)

More imperialistic invasions: of Iran and others, and the construction of a huge permanent embassy in Iraq.

More restrictions on speech, under the flag of national security.

Control of the internet to remove or cripple it as an instrument of free communication that is exempt from government control. This will be presented as a necessary anti-terrorist measure.

Efforts to remove the tax-exempt status of churches like this one, and to characterize them as anti-American.

Tighter control of the editorial bias of almost all media, and demonization of the few media they are unable to control as the New York Times, for instance.

Continued outsourcing of jobs, including more white-collar jobs, to produce greater profits for those who control the money and direct the society, while simultaneously reducing America's workers to a more desperate and powerless status.

Moves in the banking industry to make it impossible for an increasing number of Americans to own their homes. As they did in the 1930s, those who control the money know that it is to their advantage and profit to keep others renting rather than owning.

Criminalization of those who protest, as un-American, with arrests, detentions and harassment increasing. We already have a higher percentage of our citizens in prison than any other country in the world. That percentage will increase.

In the near future, it will be illegal or at least dangerous to say the things I have said here this morning. In the fascist story, these things are un-American. In the real history of a democratic America, they were seen as profoundly patriotic, as the kind of critical questions that kept the American spirit alive are the kind of questions, incidentally, that our media were supposed to be pressing.

Can these schemes work? I don't think so. I think they are murderous, rapacious and insane. But I don't know. Maybe they can. Similar schemes have worked in countries like Chile, where a democracy in which over 90% voted has been reduced to one in which only about 20% vote because they say, as Americans are learning to say, that it no longer matters who you vote for.

Hope

In the meantime, is there any hope, or do we just band together like lemmings and dive off a cliff? Yes, there is always hope, though at times it is more hidden, as it is now.

As some critics are now saying, and as I have been preaching and writing for almost twenty years, America's liberals need to grow beyond political liberalism, with its often self-absorbed focus on individual rights to the exclusion of individual responsibilities to the larger society. Liberals will have to construct a more complete vision with moral and religious grounding. That does not mean confessional Christianity. It means the legitimate heir to Christianity. Such a legitimate heir need not be a religion, though it must have clear moral power, and be able to attract the minds and hearts of a voting majority of Americans.

And the new liberal vision must be larger than that of the conservative religious vision that will be appointing judges, writing laws and bending the cultural norms toward hatred and exclusion for the foreseeable future. The conservatives deserve a lot of admiration. They have spent the last thirty years studying American politics, forming their vision and learn how to gain control in the political system. And it worked; they have won. Even if liberals can develop a bigger vision, they still have all that time-consuming work to do. It won't be fast. It isn't even clear that liberals will be willing to do it; they may instead prefer to go down with the ship they're used to.

One man who has been tireless in his investigations and critiques of America's slide into fascism is Michael C. Ruppert, whose postings usually read as though he is wound way too tight. But he offers four pieces of advice about what we can do now, and they seem reality-based enough to pass on to you.

This is America; they're all about money:
* First, he says you should get out of debt.
* Second is to spend your money and time on things that give you energy and provide you with useful information.
* Third is to stop spending a penny with major banks, news media and corporations that feed you lies and leave you angry and exhausted.
* And fourth is to learn how money works and use it like a (political) weapon as he predicts the rest of the world will be doing against us. (from http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/110504_snap_out.shtml)

That's advice written this week. Another bit of advice comes from sixty years ago, from Roosevelt's Vice President, Henry Wallace. Wallace said, "Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels."

Still another way to understand fascism is as a kind of colonization. A simple definition of "colonization" is that it takes people's stories away, and assigns them supportive roles in stories that empower others at their expense. When you are taxed to support a government that uses you as a means to serve the ends of others, you are ironically in a state of taxation without representation. That's where this country started, and it's where we are now.

I don't know the next step. I'm not a political activist; I'm only a preacher. But whatever you do, whatever we do, I hope that we can Remember some very basic things that I think of as eternally true. One is that the vast majority of people are good decent people who mean and do as well as they know how. Very few people are evil, though some are. But we all live in families where some of our blood relatives support things we hate. I believe they mean well, and the way to rebuild broken bridges is through greater understanding, compassion, and a reality-based story that is more inclusive and empowering for the vast majority of us.

Those who want to live in a reality-based story rather than as serfs in an ideology designed to transfer power, possibility and hope to a small ruling elite have much long and hard work to do, individually and collectively. It will not be either easy or quick.

But we will do it. We will go forward in hope and in courage. Let us seek that better path, and find the courage to take it a step, by step, by step.

 What does it mean, then, to call America under Bush not merely a corporate haven but a burgeoning fascist state?  Is it merely name calling?  Or is this the plain and simple acknowledgment of reality?  

Is this the first step to a fundamental paradigm shift?  How can Democrats win elections if the elections are gamed, manipulated, or purely fraudulent?  Are Republicans the proper targets of Democratic and Green Party ire, or is it the system of which they are but a part and a symptom?  Can we win elections without first reforming them?  Can we reform elections without reforming the media?  Can we reform the media without limiting the political power of corporations?  Can we limit the political power of corporations without severing the ties between lobbyists and politicians?  Can we sever those ties without first winning a presidential election?  Can we win a presidential election without improving the American education system and quality of media reportage?  Can we do either of those last two things without first winning an election?

My point is that we are looking at a vastly intermeshed system of power structures, and that unless we begin to look at the underlying construct and pattern, and critique them as what they are (correctly identifying the elephant in the bathtub as an elephant, and not merely a collection of body parts), and begin to talk about how to evict it as a whole and at once, our efforts may well be futile.

Are we living in a democracy, or nascent fascist state?  What do you think?


11. The Arm of Flesh -- by Martin G. Selbrede

As I write this, I’m preparing to fly to New York to attend a two-day conference entitled “Examining the Real Agenda of the Religious Far Right,” cosponsored by the New York Open Center and the CUNY Graduate Center. You can sense the milieu from some of the conference Media Supporters: People for the American Way, Americans United for Separation of Church and State, and (no big surprise) the National Council of Churches. The list of speaker bios tends to confirm one’s suspicions: they’re peppered with titles like Toward a New Political Humanism, Right-Wing Populism in America: Too Close for Comfort, and Eternal Hostility: The Struggle Between Theocracy and Democracy, not to mention invidious labels like “religious extremists,” “ultra-right,” etc. The occasional irony protrudes as well. One speaker is currently writing on “the culture of fear,” while speaking at a conference that itself inculcates fear: fear of Christians being effective.

From a humanistic perspective, I can understand their concern. There’s a perfectly good reason to fear someone who fears God. Someone who fears God places his ultimate loyalty in something outside the system that humanists control. Control is never willingly relinquished by humanists, as the acrimony over homeschooling illustrates. The antithesis is pointedly revealed in the movie Chariots of Fire, when British royalty confronts Eric Liddell about his unpatriotic refusal to race on a Sunday. “In my day it was King first, God second,” mutters one antagonist, to which Liddell answers, “God made kings.” As Edward Powell observed in reference to humanism and Christianity, differing juridical principles drive each side: they therefore indict each other for apostasy. I expect to witness confirmation of Powell’s prediction.

If the humanists really want to strike a blow for their side, they need to use the tactics of Balaam, who knew exactly how to drive a wedge between God and His people: cast an enticing stumbling-block in just the right place. Encourage Christians to seek political power, while subtly inculcating in them a reliance on “Egypt.” Slowly draw them into a position where they’ll unknowingly trigger Jeremiah 17:5: “Thus saith the LORD; Cursed be the man that trusteth in man, and maketh flesh his arm.” Entice them to drift away from the commandment laid down in Isaiah 2:22: “Cease ye from man, whose breath is in his nostrils: for wherein is he to be accounted of?”

Balaam was far wiser than today’s humanists: he at least acknowledged the Mighty One ruling in the heavens and factored that into his strategy against God’s people. Humanists today conceive of all forces coming into play on the same plane (which would make Christians just one of many special interest groups and little more). Humanists, then, will run afoul of the God they fail to acknowledge in their prognostications. That is, if we Christians don’t run afoul of Him first by drifting into a forbidden reliance on political means.

Whether humanists want to acknowledge it or not, the government is on His shoulders (Isa. 9:6). They are fighting against God, but He will still refuse to bless His people’s efforts in the political sphere unless they consistently uphold His preeminence in all things and spurn the arm of flesh. As Christians, we must consciously live out the truth of Psalm 75:6: “For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south.” Humanism disagrees with the psalmist’s verdict — in fact, it’s betting its life on its falsity, since the psalm concludes with a promise that the horn of the wicked shall be cut off.

That someone’s horn ought to be clipped, and soon, is the burden of this conference. With talks bearing titles like “Is an Unholy American Theocracy Here or Has Jim Jones Gone Mainstream?” (see the speaker’s website, www.YuricaReport.com), such alarmist fare will implicitly justify the sentiment to rein in, muzzle, defang, and otherwise disenfranchise such “dangerous extremists.”

Politically, Christians must aspire to the ideal set forth in 2 Samuel 23:3: “The God of Israel said, the Rock of Israel spake to me, He that ruleth over men must be just, ruling in the fear of God.” In working toward this, how do we avoid reliance on the arm of flesh, which would make us no better off than Samson with a crew cut? R.J. Rushdoony boiled it down to three simple words: “Regeneration, not revolution.” This was Rush’s powerful paraphrase of St. Paul’s strategy in 2 Corinthians 10:4–5, wherein we’re given a choice between weapons that are carnal, and spiritual weapons that are, in actual fact, mighty. The strongholds we face will not be torn down with carnal weapons — with political tactics and manipulation. If we adopt such weapons as the conference speakers bemoan are in our hands, we’ll have chosen peashooters and spitwads over the spiritual bazookas God has provided. We’ll have made flesh our arm, and praising Him with our lips won’t alter how far our hearts will have departed from Him.

(Martin G. Selbrede, Vice President of Chalcedon, lives in Austin, Texas. Martin is a PCA Elder and the Chief Scientist at Uni-Pixel Displays, Inc. He has been an advocate for the Chalcedon Foundation for a quarter century, and is set to take over the scholarly responsibilities of R. J. Rushdoony in research and writing.)


12. They ban textbooks, don't they? - by Frederick Clarkson

Texas school officials rejected a widely used environmental textbook, claiming it was filled with errors. The author says they're censoring him because they didn't like his green views -- and he's suing.

A federal lawsuit filed last week in Texas may very well turn into the Lone Star State's own version of the Scopes "Monkey Trial" -- the famous 1925 court battle in which two of America's most famous attorneys debated whether evolution should be taught in the public schools. Then, the underlying issue was whether Christianity should trump science; today, it is the scientific status of mainstream environmentalism. In the current case, the author of a widely used environmental textbook is suing five present and former members of the Texas State Board of Education, who two years ago rejected his book because of alleged factual errors and pervasive bias. Claiming that the author's free speech and equal protection rights were violated by an act of censorship, the lawsuit asserts that the real reason the book was rejected was the author's environmentalist views, which clash with those of right-wing school-board members.

The lawsuit, filed Oct. 30 in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas by the Washington-based Trial Lawyers for Public Justice, was also filed on behalf of several Texas high school students, who the suit alleges have been denied access to this book. The plaintiffs want the book included on the state list of approved texts, a court order declaring that the board members' rejection of the book was unconstitutional, and unspecified damages stemming from the lost sales.

The stakes of the suit could hardly be higher. The battle is a veritable microcosm of the culture wars, pitting the Christian right, energy industry supporters, and defenders of Texas' right to control the textbooks its students read against environmentalists, the publishing industry, First Amendment advocates, and professional educators.

The textbook at the center of the suit is "Environmental Science: Creating a Sustainable Future," by Daniel D. Chiras. The book, which is in its sixth edition and has been taught in many colleges and high schools in Texas and across the country for 20 years, passed the usual rigorous peer review process and had been recommended by the commissioner of education, along with two others. However, in a last-minute hearing before the board in November 2001, the book was rejected by conservative board members, who said it was factually inaccurate and espoused a "radical" environmental agenda. The board called it "anti-Christian" and "anti-American" because, among other things, it claimed there is a scientific consensus regarding global warming.

The unusual feature of the rejection was that the board and its individual members ignored the formal review, apparently relying on a 24-page critique prepared by a conservative think tank, the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF), an organization closely tied to the state Republican Party and one of whose board members is married to the chairperson of the board of education. The board was also apparently influenced by testimony from members of a right-wing activist group, Citizens for a Sound Economy, at the hearing. After a stormy hearing, the board, which is made up of 10 Republicans and five Democrats, voted to reject the book along straight party lines.

At the hearing the TPPF charged that the book was not acceptable for use in Texas classrooms. Asserting that the "vitriol against Western civilization and its primary belief systems is shocking," the TPPF's critique, written by Duggan Flanakin, alleged that the book is full of "errors of fact and significant omissions, in addition to the heavy bias toward radical politics." At times, the TPPF's critique veered into shrill rhetoric more reminiscent of Rush Limbaugh than a sober academic review, as when it charged that by championing solar energy and turning "producers and marketers of traditional energy sources into bogeymen ... this text provides yet another form of flag burning." The TPPF also engaged in some crude smearing, saying that Chiras' claim that air travel has an "increasingly high environmental cost ... makes Osama Bin Laden into a hero of sorts for discouraging air travel in the United States and elsewhere."

The director of Citizens for a Sound Economy claimed, among other things, that the book "blames Christianity, Democracy and Industrialization ... as causing the so-called [environmental] 'crisis'" and that this is "highly offensive to patriotic Americans and Christians."

Most of the alleged factual errors cited in the TPPF's critique appear to be matters of ideological controversy or irresolvable philosophical disputes, not matters of provable fact. For example, Flanakin attacked as an "inaccuracy" Chiras' statement that indigenous peoples practiced sustainable development, which required an integrated set of goals. "One can hardly reason that these primitive societies set clearly definable goals, or even that they practiced sustainability," Flanakin wrote. "It is more likely that most of these largely nomadic peoples espoused a 'frontier ethic' that was made possible by the fact of very small populations and large territories." As Flanakin's use of the words "more likely" indicate, this would not appear to be a point that can be definitively proved one way or the other.

According to Texas law, the board has the right to reject a textbook if it contains factual errors, but not because it disagrees with the author's viewpoint. Burt Neuborne, a professor of First Amendment law at New York University, says, "You can't choose a book based on the viewpoint of the author. A government official has the power to make determinations based on quality and accuracy, but he does not have the power to censor what school children hear, and turn the school system into a propaganda mill." At the same time, he cautions, "If there really are questions of fact, and quality, the courts can't second-guess."

There is no question that Chiras is an active and committed environmentalist. His book sounds loud alarms about the state of the world environment, including global warming, deforestation and other crises. He argues that the current situation is not sustainable and that the developed nations, which consume a disproportionate share of the earth's resources, urgently need to change their ways. He points out that the rise of industrialized civilization had serious negative consequences for the environment. He critiques current policies and lays out a number of alternatives to them.

None of these viewpoints is particularly controversial within environmental science -- in fact, they could be said to pretty much represent mainstream environmentalist thinking. But mainstream environmentalism hardly seems mainstream to conservative board members, who note that Texas law requires that its textbooks promote democracy, patriotism and free enterprise. Chiras insists that his book is completely consistent with those goals.

Since environmentalism is not a hard science, like mathematics or physics, questions of fact can be hard to establish. The TPPF critique attacks Chiras' book for being one-sided, but the line between being biased and simply having a point of view -- and in Chiras' case, a point of view that is far from heterodox in his field -- is almost impossible to define. As a result, the outcome of the lawsuit is hard to call.

Whatever its fate, the Chiras case is a shot across the bow of a powerful, assertive and increasingly successful conservative faction on the board that openly boasts of its ability to affect the national textbook publishing industry. As the nation's second-largest textbook market (after California, which also has a statewide approval process for public school textbooks), Texas is likely to purchase some $700 million worth of school textbooks over the next two years. Because of the scale of the Texas market, publishers often cater to what they think will sell to the board. "Publishers fear offending the Texas board, which often sets the agenda for textbooks nationwide," says Adele Kimmel, an attorney with Trial Lawyers for Public Justice.

The bottom line, in Neuborne's words: "The market is such that if publishers can't print separate editions, Texas censors not only its own books, but the entire nation's."

Most states select textbooks on a school-by-school or district-by-district basis. Texas subjects proposed textbooks to a rigorous review process according to what subjects are scheduled for review that year. Then the state's schools are given a list of approved books. The state will only pay for books on the list.

For decades, Christian right activists have made the Texas board a principal battleground in the culture wars. The book-selection process eventually became so politicized that in 1995, the state Legislature stepped in and largely cut the board out of the process. Book approval is now supposed to be primarily handled by professionals in the Texas Education Agency, and by outside review panels, with the board's role limited to approving or rejecting books based on whether the book is well made, factual and conforms to the educational standards measured by the statewide standardized test. Chiras' book is the first to be rejected since the law was passed.

Critics say that conservatives on the board have found a way around this by using bogus claims of "factual error" to get rid of books they disagree with. What's more, they charge that the board is using conservative groups like the TPPF as fronts, allowing them to provide critiques that authors and publishers must respond to -- which means rewriting their books -- in order to gain approval. "They are basically a mouthpiece for the board in these issues," according to attorney Adele Kimmel. She says the unstated but obvious message is that "if you don't correct what we think are errors, your book will not be adopted. Anything they disagree with is described as a factual error."

Suspicions that the board and conservative groups are working together are not allayed by the fact that current board chairwoman Geraldine Miller's husband, Vance, is a board member of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

Don McLeroy, a board member from Bryan named as a defendant in the lawsuit, had not heard much about the suit when Salon reached him on his cellphone as he drove across west Texas. Before his cell connection broke up, McLeroy said that he made his decision because of factual errors in the book. "It's the only book we've rejected since I've been on the board for five years," he explained. "We can reject a book for factual errors and inaccuracies. And that's the basis for why we rejected the book." He referred Salon to an article he had written at the time in which he explained his action. The piece reads in part: "The entire construct of the book is based on a factual error and false premise ... The Western Christian civilization countries [sic] are the cleanest, and have the most stable population growths in the world ... The claim that the root cause of environmental problems is economic growth is simply wrong."

Steve Baughman Jensen, one of Chiras' lawyers, says the board's actions were "not based on any legitimate concerns for factual accuracy or curriculum fulfillment," but on disagreement with "Dr. Chiras' viewpoints on environmental and economic issues, views based on 30 years of scientific study." He adds, "We really think that this is a case not just of officials going beyond their authority, but officials censoring speech and viewpoints."

David Bradley, a board member from Beaumont and another defendant, rejects the argument that Chiras' First Amendment rights were violated. "That position just doesn't hold water," he said angrily. "You need to qualify for the right to speak to 4 million Texas public school children. He didn't meet the qualifications. His case is meritless. It's just opportunistic grandstanding."

In comments to the Galveston County Daily News, Bradley took issue with the fact that Chiras' book used panoramic photos of housing developments as examples of a negative impact on the environment.

"I'm in real estate," he said. "I see that and I see $250,000 homes; I see mortgage bankers; I see carpenters; I see jobs. I see a tax base."

For his part, Chiras said, "I was stunned by the board's decision to reject my textbook. Texas public high schools used an earlier edition of my book, and colleges across the country, including a state university in Texas, have used the current edition. It is incredibly offensive and unfair that my book was falsely portrayed as 'anti-Christian' when this same book is used at Baylor University -- a top-tier Christian school and Texas' oldest university."

The spectre of right-wing ideologues using financial pressure to force textbooks to be rewritten hangs over other Texas textbooks as well. This month, the Texas board will consider the adoption of statewide biology textbooks. The process has been shaping up for months, involving many of the same dynamics as with the environmental books. A conservative research group, the Discovery Institute of Seattle, has argued that the biology textbooks contain factual errors; the books' defenders say the criticisms, as with Chiras' book, are nothing more than viewpoint censorship. The Discovery Institute has presented the publishers with its criticisms, and is already crowing about "corrections" they have gained from publishers in advance of the final review by the state board.

Board member Bradley thinks the filing of the Chiras suit is intended to influence that debate. "The board is considering the adoption of biology textbooks this year, which has also been somewhat controversial and a hot issue." McLeroy agrees, adding, "You've got all this heavy lobbying, the National Center for Science Education on one side and the Discovery Institute on the good science side, or the anti-evolution side, whatever you want to call it."

The Discovery Institute is best known for promoting the "intelligent design" theory of the origin of the universe as a counter to conventional evolution theory. Intelligent design theory holds that the origin and development of the universe and living things are best explained by an "intelligent cause" rather than by such processes as natural selection and random mutation, cornerstones of the theory of evolution.

Charlotte Coffelt, a leader in the Houston chapter of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, asserts that the Christian right members of the board are on a "mission to stop certain textbooks for children over the issue of evolution." She claims that the board's real agenda is to promote creationism -- the view held by fundamentalist Christians that God created the world, for which no scientific evidence exists -- by "masking it as intelligent design." The Discovery Institute denies that it is seeking to include intelligent design in the textbooks.

The lawsuit also discusses how the other two books that had been approved by the professional review process and recommended by the commissioner of education were handled, as further examples of the board's intentions and methodology. Their fate may be even more chilling than the banning of Chiras' book.

The second book, "Environmental Science: How the World Works and Your Place in It," was initially rejected by the board. It was finally published -- but only after its publisher, who desperately wanted the sale, agreed to allow it to be censored. According to the suit, unnamed state education officials and the publisher, J.M. LeBel Enterprises, had a late-night editing session during which the publisher agreed to change crucial passages about, among other things, global warming. (Cynthia Thornton, a member of the state Board of Education, called the text's pre-edited section on global warming "alarmist poppycock.")

A New York Times story on textbook censorship revealed some of the alterations. The Times reported, for example, that the sentence "Destruction of the tropical rain forest could affect weather over the entire planet" was changed to "Tropical rain forest ecosystems impact weather over the entire planet." The following remarkable sentence was added: "In the past, the earth has been much warmer than it is now, and fossils of sea creatures show us that the sea level was much higher than it is today. So does it really matter if the world gets warmer?" And this sentence was deleted: "Most experts on global warming feel that immediate action should be taken to curb global warming."

The publisher later told the New York Times that the process was akin to "book burning" and "100 percent political."

The third book reviewed and approved for use was "Global Science: Energy, Resources, Environment," 5th edition, by John W. Christensen, published by Kendall/Hunt Publishing Company. Flanakin of the TPPF approvingly noted that the book was prepared with the help of the industry organization American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical, and Petroleum Engineers. Also, according to the New York Times, the book was partly funded by the Mineral Information Institute, a nonprofit group whose board is almost entirely composed of top mining industry officials. In his statement to the board, Duggan said he felt it was the "finest and most readable textbook" he had ever reviewed.

Board chairwoman Grace Shore, co-owner of an oil and gas company, TEC Well Service, of Longview, Texas, told the Austin American Statesman, "[t]he oil and gas industry should be consulted" regarding environmental science textbooks because "[w]e always get a raw deal."

Adele Kimmel of TLPJ said that it "was not an accident" that the board "ultimately chose to adopt a book financed by the mining industry over one that emphasizes the importance of critical thinking."

Chiras vs. Miller may very well turn out to be a landmark case, even if the plaintiffs do not prevail. Neuborne told Salon, "It's a hard case to win. The board is going to say that they are acting within their authority and made their decision based on quality issues. They [the plaintiffs] are going to have to prove that the members of the board were not acting in good faith and that they are not telling the truth. And that's very hard to do." If the suit prevails, he thinks the board will probably be required to send the book out for an independent professional review. But he notes that there may be nothing to prevent them from rejecting the book over and over again.

"The only real defense against this [textbook censorship]," he said, "is better public school officials."


13. The Answer to Religion in Politics: Spirituality -- by Jerry Rose

What do you call a person who believes in God beyond the context of religion? He or she is intuitively aware of a supernatural force from which all order, including life, originates. He or she also recognizes the human propensity for manipulating spiritual wisdom into religious doctrines that promote ignorance, violence and exploitation.

The best word the English language has to offer with respect to classifying such an individual is spiritual. However, when you look up the word spiritual in your thesauruses, the first word that pops up is religious. The fact is, there is no word or term in our language that exclusively describes the millions of believers whose suspicions about religion are reflected in the message of one of the most popular books of our time- The Da Vinci Code.

In America today, the word religious triggers the image of the Bible Belt culture, while the word spiritual tends to be associated with the New Age culture of karma, chakras and mantras. What word or term would appropriately classify the millions of believers who don't identify with either of these two cultures? Since the words religious and spiritual are not mutually exclusive, the term religious-spiritual comes to mind. Accordingly, for exploratory purposes, we'll place believers in God into one of three categories. Those who believe outside of the context of organized religion will be called spiritual. Second are the religious and third, the religious- spiritual.

How does one distinguish the religious from the religious- spiritual? To gauge your own opinion, consider whether you believe the following people to be spiritual, religious or both.

Osama bin Laden, a follower of the Muslim religion believes that God has appointed him to wage a holy war against all those who oppose his beliefs. He and his followers are religious people but are they spiritual?

George W. Bush, a devout Christian who believes God has appointed him to spread democracy through out the world. He exploited the 911 tragedy and used blatant deception to launch an invasion that has maimed and killed countless men, women and children. He is also determined to uphold the sanctity of marriage by denying homosexuals the same rights as heterosexuals. His domestic policies are exemplified by his support of the profit appetites of big pharmaceutical companies at the expense of struggling senior citizens. He continues to promote the plundering of the earth's environment, ignoring or denying alarming scientific evidence. George W. Bush is a religious man but is he spiritual?

Martin Luther King, a devout Christian who dedicated his life to the non violent fight for equal rights as did Mahatma Gandhi of the Hindu faith. Both men were religious but were they also spiritual?

John Lennon was dedicated to stopping the Viet Nam war and to "Give Peace a Chance." His trademark song Imagine evokes us to imagine a world where there's no religion and all people live in peace. He wasn't a religious man but was he spiritual?

Having explored your feelings, consider the following characteristics which arguably set the two terms apart.

Religions are based on stories. The Jewish Religion is based on the story of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. The Christian religion adds the story of Christ. The Moslem religion is founded on the stories of Mohammad. Buddhism grew from the story of Buddha. The faith of the religious person is founded on the belief that the story of their religion is historical fact. In contrast, the faith of the spiritual person is nurtured by what their religion's story teaches about man, God and their relationship. Whether their religion's story is fact, metaphor or a combination of both doesn't matter to them.

Spiritual people enthusiastically embrace rational scientific knowledge, accepting evolution as the physical means through which God created all life. The religious person must categorically reject such provable facts because it conflicts with their religion's story that God created everything in 6 days, some 5000 years ago. This acceptance or denial of rational evidence is a wide-ranging marker for distinguishing the religious from the religious-spiritual. For instance, we often hear religious people claim that allowing same-sex marriage would start us down a "slippery slope" towards legalized polygamy, incest and all kinds of other horrible consequences. Religious- spiritual people recognize that such fears are irrational and they themselves see no rationale reason why granting equal rights would threaten the sanctity of their own marriage.

Religions tend to provoke judgment. The purely religious believe that those who don't abide by their laws are inferior, misguided or immoral. The spiritual and religious-spiritual are non-judgmental and tolerant of other people's differences. They believe that all people have the same rights regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation. And finally, in the broadest definition, the religious believe their religion holds all the truth and answers. In contrast, the spiritual and religious- spiritual see life as a God- given opportunity for discovery.

If America is to ever be reclaimed from those who promote violence, ignorance and exploitation, a Phoenix must rise from the ashes of the Democratic Party. He or she will capture the hearts and mobilize the millions of believers who have no collective identity or political network. He or she may be of the Christian religion but their religiosity will be the antithesis of George W. Bush's and in harmony with Albert Einstein's who said: The path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge.

14. And from an article in Harper's: The Christian Paradox: How a faithful nation gets Jesus wrong -- by Bill McKibben

Only 40 percent of Americans can name more than four of the Ten Commandments, and a scant half can cite any of the four authors of the Gospels. Twelve percent believe Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife. This failure to recall the specifics of our Christian heritage may be further evidence of our nation’s educational decline, but it probably doesn’t matter all that much in spiritual or political terms. Here is a statistic that does matter: Three quarters of Americans believe the Bible teaches that “God helps those who help themselves.” That is, three out of four Americans believe that this uber-American idea, a notion at the core of our current individualist politics and culture, which was in fact uttered by Ben Franklin, actually appears in Holy Scripture.(...)

Having been told to turn the other cheek, we’re the only Western democracy left that executes its citizens, mostly in those states where Christianity is theoretically strongest.(...)

It’s hard to imagine a con much more audacious than making Christ the front man for a program of tax cuts for the rich or war in Iraq. If some modest part of the 85 percent of us who are Christians woke up to that fact, then the world might change.(...)

...the co-opters—the TV men, the politicians, the Christian “interest groups”—have found a way to make each of us complicit in that travesty, too. They have invited us to subvert the church of Jesus even as we celebrate it. With their help we have made golden calves of ourselves—become a nation of terrified, self-obsessed idols. It works, and it may well keep working for a long time to come. When Americans hunger for selfless love and are fed only love of self, they will remain hungry, and too often hungry people just come back for more of the same ...


SO THAT'S the roundup. Hope you found some food for thought. I could've thrown in a link to the Brit atheist and evolution spokesperson Dawkins, but decided not to. You can go on the internet and hunt him down yourself.