Bill's Faith Matters blog

Would you be OK if institutional religion just disappeared?

Although people dedicated to their church, synagogue, temple, mosque or other house of worship have worried for decades now about the drift away from institutional religion, new studies show there's no single cause for the decline and, therefore, no single idea that will work to fix it.

As this Religion News Story reports, the "nones," as the religious unaffiliated are called, sometimes have "been pegged as a group that’s wholly secular and hostile to religion, or conversely as a cohort that has uniformly adopted spirituality rather than religion. They’ve also been characterized as morally directionless or civically disengaged." But, a new Pew Research Center report on America’s nones "shows the truth is more complicated."

The RNS story quotes Ryan Cragun, a professor of sociology at the University of Tampa and an adviser on the Pew study, this way: “Today, the nones kind of look like everybody else. . .At some level, we’re saying, hey, actually, this is just your neighbor.”

As this NPR story notes, the nones now make up some 28 percent of the American adult population, a figure that has been growing steadily for more than a decade -- from 16 percent in 2007, for instance.

So is it possible that at least some of the nones can be moved to return to institutional religion? Great question. But there's no certain answer.

For one thing, the beliefs and ethical standards of the nones vary all over the lot. As the RNS story puts it: "Pew’s study shows many nones do believe in something, even if it doesn’t fall into traditional religious categories. While 20% say they are agnostic and 17% identify as atheist, the majority of nones (63%) fall into the more ambiguous 'nothing in particular' category. And though only 13% say they believe in the God of the Bible, more than half (56%) say they believe in some other higher power."

One obvious question institutional religion's leaders need to ask before they come up with plans to draw in more of the nones is just who are the religiously unaffiliated saying that the "God of the Bible" is. Is it a vengeful, wrathful God who gets sick of humanity's sinfulness and failure until, finally, God decides to wipe out almost the whole population except for a guy named Noah and his family? Or is it the God who promises Abraham and later others that he'll always be their god and watch over them as a protector? Or is it maybe the God of Jesus Christ, who teaches sacrificial love and the tender care of neighbors in distress? Or all of them? Or none?

In trying to move the nones back to traditional religion of some kind, religious leaders need to know, as the NPR story reports, that "demographically, Nones also stand out from the religiously affiliated. Nones are young. 69% are under the age of fifty. They're also less racially diverse. 63% of Nones are white."

And, maybe most importantly, institutional religion must show that it isn't hypocritical. Which means it doesn't, for instance, allow priests to molest children without doing everything possible to stop them. It doesn't preach a Prosperity Gospel when such a gospel runs completely counter to the gospel Jesus preached. It doesn't merge uncritically with a political power just to be close to that power.

So if you were to draw up a plan to attract the nones back to institutional religion, what would such a plan look like? Or are you happy just to let the influence of generative religion in the country and the world slowly disappear?

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IS A RATIONAL IMMIGRATION POLICY POSSIBLE?

There's no question that our southern borders are a mess and that the U.S. needs comprehensive immigration reform. In fact, as this RNS opinion piece puts it, "America can both secure our borders and respect human dignity. And we are confident the voters will defy the cable TV pundits and stand up for those elected officials who follow through." I hope the authors of the piece are right, though many elected officials seem much more interested in making political points by striking fear of immigrants into the hearts of voters. This nation has depended on immigrants for a long time as we have followed the teachings of Judaism, Christianity and other faiths to "welcome the stranger." And we still need the skills and ideas that immigrants (like my maternal grandparents and paternal great-grandparents) bring to the country. But the immigration system simply must work better than it does now.

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P.S.: Change is what happens in congregations. The ones that survive and thrive understand that and deal with it creatively and without always hoping to return to the old days. Now it's the turn of the New Reform Temple, a Reform Jewish synagogue, in Kansas City deal with that again. As the congregation's leadership just announced, "After 13 years as the pulpit rabbi of The New Reform Temple, Rabbi Alan Londy will retire at the end of May and assume the title as the synagogue’s first Rabbi Emeritus. Rabbi Londy has spent more than 40 years in the rabbinate, serving congregations in New York, Florida and Maryland, before moving to Kansas City with his family in 2011 to join The New Reform Temple."

Some younger scientists seem more open to religious ideas

The intellectual (sometimes) struggle between science and religion is quite old, and so far neither side has surrendered. Indeed, there are plenty of examples of people on both sides of the divide working together and appreciating what each side brings to the table.

Maybe not intermarriage, but certainly some serious dating here and there.

For instance, as this Word on Fire piece explains, a Jesuit priest has written a new book (I haven't read it yet) in which he notes that quite a few younger scientists are suggesting that a lot of recent scientific thinking and discoveries increasingly point to the existence of a god.

In some ways, it's an unexpected development, considering a lot of conventional wisdom that insists many scientists have walked away from religion on the theory that it almost inevitably conflicts with science much more than it supports scientific thinking. For the most part, of course, science and religion are interested in different questions. To describe things over-simplistically, religion asks about purpose, for example, whereas science asks about facts and processes.

Fr. Robert Spitzer's new book is Science at the Doorstep to God, and the article to which I've linked you above contains an interview with Spitzer by Word on Fire’s Senior Publishing Director, Brandon Vogt.

Spitzer says there are at least five good reasons why young scientists are coming to think that the work they do shows evidence for a god.

"First, among young physicists, there is considerable awareness of the need for something like transcendent intelligence to explain the exceedingly improbable occurrence of the finely-tuned initial conditions and constants needed for the development of life.

"Second, few young scientists believe in the materialistic/physicalistic explanation of our universe. . .

"Third, among young physicians and neuroscientists, the awareness of evidence for a transphysical ground of consciousness, which can exist outside the body and survive clinical death, is widely known. . .

"Fourth, many young scientists have distanced themselves from old prejudices against religion, coming from incomplete or exaggerated accounts of the Galileo affair and early challenges of religion to science. . .

"Fifth, contemporary evidence showing the compatibility and complementarity of science and faith has opened the way for many religious students to study science. This has not only freed them from having to hide their religious beliefs among colleagues, but also to find probative scientific evidence corroborating their beliefs."

Well, no doubt there will continue to be scientists who dismiss religion and people of faith who continue to imagine that all the science they need can be found in sacred scripture.

But I find it encouraging when there's at least a willingness to have a bit of dialogue about all of this. Let me know if you get a chance to read Spitzer's book and what you think of it.

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NASHVILLE -- Because I'm here to celebrate the birthday of a grandson who is a first-year student at Belmont University and because from here I'm headed to Delavan, Ill., for the funeral Saturday of my late father's brother, there won't be the usual second item on this blog post. My Uncle Lawrence died this past Sunday just a couple of months shy of his 102nd birthday. Here is a link to a piece I wrote about him after attending his 100th birthday party in 2022. What a fabulous man. Proud to be part of his extended family. And here is a link to his obituary.

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P.S.: In my latest Flatland column, which posted this morning, I've got some ideas for the Mayor's Reparations Commission. 

When our moral compass abandons us, evil results

For well over 50 years, the story about the decline in religious participation in the U.S. has been followed, told and retold. And it's an intriguing phenomenon with many ramifications.

But a story that gets told less often is about how people committed to a particular faith tradition can -- and sometimes do -- take actions that are radically contrary to the teachings of that tradition. We see it happen both inside the institutions of religions and outside of those institutions in secular settings. Obvious examples are abuse of children by priests and stock market manipulations and other crimes by committed members of an institutional religion.

I was both intrigued and appalled by one such case described in an important new book, After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America's Stolen Lands, by University of Nebraska history professor Margaret D. Jacobs.

The story I'm about to tell from the book is far from the only example of people of faith ignoring or willfully rejecting some of the essential moral or ethical teachings of their religion, but I found this particular story among the most appalling.

The crux of the story occurred on Nov. 29, 1864, in what history knows now as the Sand Creek Massacre of Cheyenne and Arapaho Native Americans in Colorado by American troops led by a Methodist pastor serving in the U.S. military at the time, John Chivington.

The killing started at daybreak and went on, Jacobs writes, "until the middle of the afternoon, perhaps seven to eight hours. . .We don't know the exact number of Indian people that Chivington's troops killed. The National Park Service estimates that 230 people died. . .

"While the Cheyenne and Arapaho survivors mourned their dead, most of the soldiers rejoiced and made merry. . .They sheared scalps from heads. They severed beringed fingers from hands. They carved women's breasts from their chests and sliced men's and women's genitalia from their bodies. They even castrated the Cheyenne peace leader White Antelope and used his scrotum as a tobacco pouch."

The evidence suggests that nearly all -- if not all -- the white colonial settlers in the military unit were Christians, which led Jacobs to ask this question: "I ponder how these men could reconcile what they had done at Sand Creek with the hymns they sang in church on Sundays. . .I wonder, too, how the citizens of Colorado could sanction and celebrate such violence.

"To live with what they had done, the soldiers and settlers who supported them had to come up with a powerful justification for engaging in and supporting such violence. They needed to narrate a history that erased Indian people and their claims to the land and utterly denied their humanity. They needed a lore that authorized their right to take over the land. That is how our winning-the-West narratives developed and became so popular."

And one answer to how they justified all this was the 1493 Doctrine of Discovery, rooted in white supremacy, promulgated by the Vatican and then picked up by early European invaders of what is now the U.S. as a way to justify cultural and physical genocide. That document gave those invaders religious cover for taking over land they didn't own and dehumanizing the people whose tribes had lived on that land for thousands of years.

Maybe the only good news about the Sand Creek Massacre was that two soldiers serving under Chivington -- Capt. Silas Soule and Lt. Joseph Cramer -- opposed the action from the beginning and ordered the soldiers under them not to fire. After the massacre, as Jacobs writes, Soule and Cramer "broke ranks and reported the abominable violence they witnessed at Sand Creek." For the most part, their refusal to act inhumanely won them popular condemnation.

But sometimes that's the reward for doing the right thing. Our job, of course, is to do the right thing anyway.

As Jacobs writes, "We could be deeply disappointed in the 673 men who took part in the killings and held their tongues. But we could also marvel at the two men who refused to obey orders that they knew to be wrong, who had the moral courage to step forward and testify to what they saw. It only takes a few committed persons to turn the course of history."

I don't know what makes some people (well, most people at least some of the time) not act in morally justifiable ways. Maybe the old comedian Flip Wilson got it right when he said so often, "The Devil made me do it." What I do know is that each of us is capable of evil and none of us gets it right all the time. I also know that sometimes the moral choices facing us -- like whether to commit mass murder on people who have indicated a desire for peace -- should be so easy to decide that a child could do it. How sad that, instead, at Sand Creek, most of the children present got slaughtered.

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A NEW ROLE FOR WOMEN IN ISRAEL

Israel, where Judaism is dominated by the Orthodox branch of the tradition, seems now to be moving toward the possibility of having female rabbis, this RNS story reports. Female rabbis are common among the Conservative and Reform branches of Judaism, but those branches have little presence in Israel. However, Israel’s Supreme Court recently ruled that "women may be considered rabbis for the purpose of electing the country’s chief rabbi," the story says. The road to gender equality of opportunity throughout the world has been long and bumpy. May it finally reach its goal.

Confronting trauma not with explanations but with love

Every human being at some point experiences pain, grief, catastrophe, loss. In fact, I wrote about a few examples in my own life in my most recent blog post here.

The ultimate question is how we respond to disasters so they don't irrevocably break us. Institutional religion and psychology have several possible answers to that question, but no one has a single answer that works for everyone in every situation.

A compelling new book (its publication date is Jan. 30 but can be ordered now) offers generative ways to live through catastrophe and become whole again. It's Telling Stories in the Dark: Finding Healing and Hope in Sharing Our Sadness, Grief, Trauma and Pain, by Jeffrey Munroe. And it's one of the best in this category I've ever read.

Munroe, a pastor in the Reformed Church in America, says the goal of his book is "to transform pain and discover resilient resources that can heal us all."

That makes it an enormously helpful book that, for the most part, avoids drifting into the deep theological snowbanks of the old theodicy question, which asks why, if God is good and loving and powerful, there is evil and suffering in the world.

There is, in the end, no exhaustive answer to that prickly question that satisfies everyone. Munroe is smart enough to know that, so instead of exploring that tired old territory in depth, he describes in several engaging stories how various people found their way through grief to something like healing.

In fact, the author acknowledges that several times in his life he has "been stuck on the theodicy questions when I would have been better off entering deeply into lament. Lament is a beginning step to transforming pain. Telling our story can be the next step."

So the book tells nine stories of catastrophe and grief, beginning with the author's own account of the massive stroke his fiancée suffered shortly before they were to be married (they were, but the stroke meant life wasn't what they imagined it would be).

There are stories of suicide, accidental death, fatal medical error and other disasters that for the most part are told by the people who suffered through all of that. Then Munroe finds a pastor or counselor of some kind to explore how the people handled the catastrophe and what the rest of us might learn from that.

At one point, quoting a therapist, Munroe introduces the concept of "the stewardship of pain," meaning, the therapist explains, that "it's not that you get over trauma or pretend it isn't there but instead the idea is to learn to become a good steward of it. You let it instruct you. You let it make you more sensitive and empathic with other people."

The idea is that ignoring pain never works. The pain will always be present in some form and, if not acknowledged and processed, will simply cause more pain.

In response to another story of pain, Munroe quotes a man who teaches pastoral care and counseling at a seminary. "As we engage and truthfully tell our stories," the man says, "we become more integrated and pull away the layers so we may become a whole person, able to hold pain and joy together, able to hold complexity and embrace oneness. That's resilience. . ."

What Munroe ultimately concludes about suffering, grief and resilience is that "there is so much bad theology out there about why traumatic events happen and what God is supposedly accomplishing through these events that I believe we've reached a tipping point where we just need to keep our mouths shut and simply love people instead of offering explanations for the unexplainable. . .Real people need compassion and empathy, not our explanations."

Compassion and empathy are what this fine book is all about.

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WHEN FAITH AND POLITICS INTERSECT

I'm glad to see some people of faith starting to organize meetings and conferences to talk about threats to American democracy and how that relates to religious practice and belief. This Good Faith Network story describes such an event held recently in Charlotte, N.C.

The chairman of the group sponsoring the event said, "This conversation is intended to deal with a whole corpus of ideas to help us reckon with in a responsible way how we treat each other, how we practice our faith, how we live together, and how we elect those that govern us.”

Let me know (I'm at [email protected]) if you're aware of similar gatherings in the Kansas City area.

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P.S.: The Community of Christ, formerly the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has just announced that a woman has been called to the highest church office prophet-president. It's the first time a woman has ever held that position. She's Stassi Cramm, who will be prophet-president designate until 2025 World Conference delegates vote on her call. Here's what the church, which has its headquarters in Independence, Mo., announced about her:

"Cramm, of Independence, Missouri, and Boston, is the first woman in the history of the church. . .to be called to the office. Women were ushered into the priesthood and leadership almost 40 years ago with the adoption of Doctrine & Covenants Section 156. Cramm currently is a member of the First Presidency. She previously was presiding bishop, an office that directs church finances. Before full-time employment with the church, Cramm was an engineer."

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ANOTHER P.S.: With the recent resurgence of antisemitism, we're seeing a fairly wide display of swastikas. Alvin H. Rosenfeld, the director of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism at Indiana University, has been paying attention to this despicable phenomenon and has some thoughts about it in this Tablet Magazine article.

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A THIRD P.S.: Recently I wrote an endorsement for an upcoming book, Lord: Do You Mean Me?: A Father-Catechist!, by Francis Etheredge. That book now is in print and available via Amazon. Just click on the link on the book's name. Here's what I wrote about it:

This intriguing book is the result of a gift, the gift of faith. As Francis Etheredge explains, he was given that gift after some years of being just intellectually curious about the Catholic Church in which he grew up. He writes that because of that gift, “I understood my life in the light of a call to conversion which God alone made possible.” The book is his effort to share that gift with others, especially his children. Readers, no matter their own faith commitment or lack of it, will understand more fully how faith can shape life in generative and generous ways.

Even amidst painful memories life offers redemptive gifts

Sometimes I think we don't stop often enough to put the highs, lows and so-so's of our lives in perspective. (The top photo here shows my family of origin, including my sisters, and, in the other photo, oldest to youngest, right to left, Karin, Barbara and Mary. We are scattered now coast to coast -- Bay Area, K.C., Chicagoland, Cape Cod.)

Birthdays are a time to do that kind of reflecting, and I have one coming tomorrow -- one that ends in neither 0 nor 5. So just a birthday.

As I sort through memories, I'm both astonished at the blessings and yet still pained by some of what I've experienced. First, let's get a couple of the lows out of the way:

• My first marriage ended in divorce because of her unfaithfulness. The experience -- including sorting out how my own failures may have contributed to this catastrophe -- was among the most painful I've ever endured. But support from friends, family (including her side) and members of my church brought me through. In fact, as of this past fall, I've now been married to my current amazing bride a little longer than I was married the first time.
• Next, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, in which the son of my sister Barbara and her husband Jim, was murdered. Karleton, a remarkable young (31) man with whom I was very close, was a passenger on the first plane to strike the World Trade Center. I wrote about the trauma this caused in my extended family in my last book, Love, Loss and Endurance.
• * And, of course, the death of parents, grandparents, other family members, dear friends and coworkers. Some day I should count how many funerals I've been to, but I'm sure even I wouldn't believe it. I've also officiated at several funerals. It's a high honor but a deep responsibility. I prefer officiating at weddings, of which I've done several, even though I'm not ordained as clergy.

There is more, of course, and yet I must say that my life has been full of blessing after blessing, of wonderful people, remarkable experiences, enormous satisfactions and astonishing joy. Yes, a life full of joy but wildly unpredictable. I was born in Woodstock, Ill., northwest of Chicago, to two farm kids who found each other at the University of Illinois and wound up as the parents of four of us. From that start, how could I ever have imagined that:

* I would live for part of a year in the same house with actor Paul Newman?

* Or that one day Jimmy Carter and I would stand near each other in the same Georgia peanut field?

* Or that I would have my eleventh birthday in the United States, my twelfth in India and my thirteenth in Sweden?

* Or that one day I would swipe a Schlitz beer glass from the now-defunct Italian Village bar in Columbia, Mo., after having thrown up on the bar’s floor from having consumed too much beer even though I wasn’t legally old enough to drink? I still have the glass.

* Or that I would marry twice, each time to a woman named Marcia? (See a photo of us at the end of this post.)

* Or that I would serve for two years as president of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists? Or that I'd be part of a newspaper staff that would win a Pulitzer Prize? Or that I would score a hole-in-one on a course in upstate New York while playing with my then-father-in-law and using his clubs and a ball with his initials on it?

The surprises are simply endless, and the people I've met -- from several U.S. presidents to India's first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru (pictured here with my sister Mary and then-U.S. Ambassador to India Ellsworth Bunker), to baseball Hall of Famers, to almost nameless and certainly fameless people who taught me a lot and on and on as I've lived in the U.S. and traveled to more than 30 different countries, some because of my career as a journalist and some just because of family choices.

But no doubt highest on my list of blessings has been the gift of two daughters, (right to left Lisen and Kate in the picture here) -- remarkable women who make the world brighter and better every day. Add to that four stepchildren -- Chris, Dan, Kathryn and David -- each of whom has brought joy to our family. Chris, by the way, is a special-needs adult who is the very embodiment of love. He just wants to hug the whole world and, well, tell any woman he meets this: "You're so pretty." They inevitably understand it's not some annoying sexist comment.

And now add eight grandchildren (pictured here recently) -- a stunning collection of brains, beauty and love.

Friends, if I don't make it to my birthday next year, it will have been, nonetheless, a shockingly wonderful life even when the disasters are figured in. I deserved none of the joy. (But if and when I have a chance, I might ask God about the catastrophes.)

Over all this time I've found lovely people like you have been interested in reading my words in various venues -- primarily through a long career at The Kansas City Star, but also through other outlets, including my books. So thanks for your attentive presence, even when you castigate me for some perceived (and often real) fault.

Well, these words here today have mostly been about me. But I want to encourage you to take your own long-view look at your life and its highs and lows, its joys and sorrows. We simply can't avoid trouble in this wounded world (even Jesus told us that) and, sad to say, we will be the source of trouble for others, even when we try not to be.

Still, we can (and I think should) periodically set aside a little time for reflection about our journey -- not to become self-absorbed but to help us understand better where we went astray and what we got right. And then to say this both to our creator and to our fellow human beings: Thank you, thank you, thank you.

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ANOTHER VOICE AGAINST CAPITAL PUNISHMENT

I also have spent a lot of time in my professional life making arguments against use of the death penalty. To add to that today, I am linking you to this Good Faith Media column by a counselor and pastor who has worked for decades inside prisons and also opposes capital punishment. In many ways his is much more the voice of experience than is mine. So I urge you to pay attention to what he says.

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P.S.: Speaking of India, as I was, briefly, above, my boyhood friend Markandey Katju, a former justice on India's Supreme Court, is in favor of the death penalty, while I am not -- as I've mentioned a time or two before. Just FYI, then, here is his latest column in which he seeks to justify using the death penalty. I still disagree.

Is art used as political or religious propaganda really art?

From cave wall drawings to digital images, various forms of art have reflected the pain, joys and hopes of people. So it should be no surprise that the Hamas-Israel war has spurred a new wave of art, which is described in this National Public Radio piece.

As the story notes, "In Israel's cultural capital of Tel Aviv, a vibrant artistic community leaves its colorful mark with murals and other art painted throughout the narrow streets of the city's ancient Jaffa neighborhood and on the walls of businesses within the financial-centered downtown.

"Within this same space is a Palestinian community that has long turned to art as a form of resistance, using it to bring light to the struggles of Palestinians in Tel Aviv, the Israeli-occupied West Bank and Gaza.

"Since Oct. 7, much of this work has turned heartbroken, mournful, angry and fearful, as members of these artistic communities confront heavy, unimaginable emotions that are bleeding into their craft."

Art almost inevitably reflects its time, and the art that's the focus of the NPR story is no different. But it does raise the question of when, if ever, art becomes propaganda. If and when it does that, is it still art or is it something less? I have no clear answer to that question, but it always has seemed to me that if art somehow loses its timelessness, its ability to be its authentic self no matter what its origin or setting, then it risks becoming something less than art.

But, as I've confessed before, I'm not an artist. The only thing I can draw with any competence is conclusions. And some readers would disagree even with that.

That said, I have seen examples of art drafted to communicate political or propagandistic messages -- from pictures of Uncle Sam urging young men to join the military in World War II to despicable Nazi anti-Jewish images used to prepare the population for the Holocaust. Such "art," somehow seems less to me than art that simply represents the joy or pain of a people living in particular historical circumstances.

Religious art has ranged all over the lot, from stunning expressions of happiness and wonder to intentional misrepresentations of reality, such as all the blue-eyed, white-skinned Jesus portraits that have adorned church walls.

I'm not yet sure how to interpret the art now being produced in response to war in the Middle East. The NPR piece, however, notes this:

"Artists are processing the crisis in a myriad of ways: through paintings of the horrors of war, through anguished song and in dance. The work has been shared in places like Tel Aviv's Hostages Square, where protesters regularly gather to demand the release of Israeli captives being held by Hamas, and on social media, where a Palestinian diaspora say they can more safely post their work than those still living under the Israeli government.

"'I think that if art can function as something, not only for the viewer, but for myself, it's to create a space for reflection and reassessing and trying to dissect and process and understand,' said Addam Yekutieli, an Israeli artist based in Tel Aviv."

If art can do what Yekutieli suggests it can, then let's have more of it.

(The image above is taken from the NPR story. There, it bears this caption: "Oren Fischer's political cartoon of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Tanya Habjouqa/NOOR Images for NPR."

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THE RISE OF NON-RELIGIOUS CONGREGATIONS

What is an "atheist church?" Good question. This CBS News story, written by an assistant professor of sociology at Purdue University, describes this relatively new phenomenon in the U.S. and elsewhere this way: "Atheist churches are still fairly new, but studies have shown that participation in them and other types of atheist organizations can bring social and emotional benefits. In particular, it can help atheists buffer the negative effects of experiencing stigma or discrimination." There are groups in the Kansas City area that meet her definition of atheist churches. Are you part of one? Let me know your experience in an email sent to me at [email protected].

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P.S.: In honor of the annual Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday on Monday, here is a link to some interesting late 2023 survey results about how Americans think about his influence and legacy. One interesting -- but unsurprising -- point in the survey is that 67 percent of people who identify as Republican or who lean Republican think America has made a great deal or fair amount of progress in ensuring racial equality in the last 60 years, while only 38 percent of Democrats and people who lean Democrat believe that's true. Hmmm.

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ANOTHER P.S.: Nazarene Theological Seminary in Kansas City has a "day of learning" event coming up on Monday, Feb. 26. It's called "Nurturing Care: With Children in Worship and Prayer." It will feature Dr. Léon van Ommen, senior lecturer in Practical Theology at the University of Aberdeen and co-director of the Center for Autism and Theology. The day's focus will be on how churches minister to and treat children with autism. You may register for this free event at the link I've given you in the first sentence of this P.S.

Does anyone have 'moral clarity' in the Hamas-Israeli war?

In some ways it has been reassuring to see so much concern about "moral clarity" from some U.S. political leaders on the question of whether American colleges and universities have permitted or even encouraged expressions of antisemitism in light of the Hamas-Israel war.

One problem is that a shocking percentage of the American electorate in this putridly divisive political era seems to have lost track of what constitutes moral clarity. How else to explain how a man twice impeached and now defending himself in several courts on charges ranging from a sexual attack to insurrection against the U.S. has been, by far, the leading contender to be nominated for president by one of our country's two main political parties?

If the democratic process has a serious flaw it's the willingness of voters to support knaves and fools. Which is not to say that knaves and fools don't sometimes get things right -- sort of like a stopped watch that's right twice a day. Or that they don't at least sometimes ask the right question.

For instance, Rep. Elise Stefanik (R.-N.Y.), who has been criticized repeatedly for lacking moral clarity, did recently manage to ask a good and important question (never mind her motives for asking it) about antisemitism and the encouragement of genocide that could have been adequately answered with just one word, "yes."

As no doubt you know, in a Congressional hearing, Stefanik asked the now-resigned Harvard University president, Claudine Gay, whether "calling for the genocide of Jews" violates Harvard's rules prohibiting bullying and harassment. Gay said, in response, that it "depends on the context" and added that "antisemitic rhetoric, when it crosses into conduct, it amounts to bullying, harassment, intimidation."

Gay later apologized for her fuzzy, wimpy, silly answer, saying, “I neglected to clearly articulate that calls for the genocide of Jewish people are abhorrent and unacceptable.” But by then it was too late to save her job, especially when charges of plagiarism in her academic work were added to her troubles.

Stefanik, who continues to want to elect as president a man with no moral compass whatever, somehow managed to ask a good question that anyone with any sense of history should have answered simply this way: Calling for the genocide of Jews is always and everywhere a moral failing. Gay paid for her failure to say that by having to resign her job -- as she should have -- even though the result may well be a furious and damaging controversy about academic freedom on college campuses across the country.

Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Will Bunch put it this way: "This will be used by the very worst people to make higher education worse, not better. It will be used to cut funding, end diversity, stifle academic freedom."

(Another university president who also testified to the congressional committee, Liz Magill of the University of Pennsylvania, has resigned her post, too. So far, Sally Kornbluth, the third university president to testify that day, has not resigned as president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Kornbluth, who is Jewish, has been the target of both criticism and admiration, as this Jewish Telegraph Agency article notes.) 

All of this comes at a time when, as Axios reported a few weeks ago, "The vast majority of Jewish college students say they have seen or experienced antisemitism on their campus since the start of the school year, according to a new report by the Anti-Defamation League and Hillel International published Wednesday."

As this Taz report, by Gunther Jikeli of the Institute for the Study of Contemporary Antisemitism, shows, on campus after campus in the U.S., some students, in showing support for the Palestinian people, have ignored or downplayed the stark and brutal terrorism by Hamas in its initial Oct. 7 attack -- an attack for which there can be no defense.

So the Hamas-Israeli war, obviously, has contributed a lot to all of this. And it should be clear to everyone that Israel's response has at times moved beyond what was necessary and humane and, instead, degenerated into actions that its morally compromised president, Benjamin Netanyahu, simply will not be able to defend. Indeed, I'd hoped that President Joe Biden would have been more critical of Netanyahu than he has been. More than 75 years after modern Israel's creation, it's way past time for regional and world leaders, working directly with both the Palestinians and the Israelis, to find a stable two-state solution that values everyone.

All of this shows that one-dimensional thinking can miss some of the complications and nuances of things. For instance, should it be possible to criticize policies of the Israeli government without that criticism being antisemitic? Yes. Should it be possible to want a better, safer future for the Palestinian people without that desire being seen as support for Hamas, clearly a terrorist organization? Of course.

So I can hope only that wiser heads -- if there are some -- can have a bigger influence on domestic and world events than they seem to have had in 2023, a year that despite offering times of joy for many individuals, left the building without much applause. And deservedly so.

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OH, THE TIMES SEEM TO BE CHANGING IN CATHOLICISM

There are more Vatican stirrings about changing practices in the Catholic Church. Just weeks after Pope Francis said that priests could bless same-sex couples (but not gay marriage), a top Vatican official suggests it's time to change the rule that requires priests to be celibate. As this Guardian story reports, "A senior Vatican official has said that the Roman Catholic church should revise the requirement for priests to be celibate, while acknowledging that some will view the idea as 'heretical.'

"Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta, who is based in the Vatican’s doctrinal office and is an adviser to Pope Francis, said: “If it were up to me, I would revise the requirement that priests have to be celibate. Experience has shown me that this is something we need to seriously think about.” One of the forces leading to a call for change is the growing shortage of priests.

Sometimes change happens in institutional religion this way: A modest change creates pressure for more changes. The serious work of that religion when that happens is to be open to useful changes that don't tear apart the core of what that religion teaches or stands for. That can be a delicate business, and history is full of examples of how religions failed to get it right. Both the Protestant Reformation, which began in the early 1500s, and the Great Schism of 1054, which divided the church into Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, are examples.

If religious leaders aren't thinking about AI, they should be

Several times in the last year I've written about Artificial Intelligence (AI) and what relationship, if any, it has to religion and to morality.

An example from late last year is this post in which I wrote about a book that offered lots of warnings about the damage AI can or could do if we don't understand its limits and do our best to control AI's future.

The idea behind my writing about AI on a blog that focuses on religion is that it's important to think theologically (which includes ethically and morally) about everything, including AI. Our views about the world inevitably seem grounded -- or at least influenced -- by our views about eternal matters. If we leave those matters out of our thinking, we may find ourselves devaluing and even dehumanizing others.

All of which is why I was glad to see this article from a Catholic publication called The Pillar. Drawing on the thinking of scholars, it offers a Catholic perspective on several essential aspects of AI and how humans are wise to think about AI. The article is a good model for all faith leaders who want to help their flocks understand both the promises and the dangers of AI.

Among the questions editors asked scholars was this major one contained in a double query: Is AI a person? Could it become a person?

Here's part of how that question got answered:

Brian Green, a Catholic moral theologian who serves as director of technology ethics at Santa Clara University, told The Pillar that AI is not conscious now, and can not become conscious in the future. 

“AI is not even alive,” he said. “And there is no reason to believe that consciousness can exist in non-living beings.”

Green warned that AI developers are going to try their best to make AI seem to act like a conscious person would.

“But we should not be fooled,” he warned.

So should we quit worrying if AI can't be thought of as a person? Well, not quite. The Pillar story adds this:

Luis Vera, associate professor and theology department chair at Mount St. Mary’s University, says. 

“We need an ethic for relating properly to robots, full stop,” Vera insisted.

Even if AI-driven robots are not conscious persons, Vera believes that treating them virtuously is “part of an ethic of our proper relationship to God's creation.”

In addition, while treating AI-powered robots “like dirt” might help remind people that machines aren’t persons, Vera worries that “this might corrupt our ability to treat real persons with justice and charity.”

And if that ability gets corrupted, what happens is what today you see happening all around: People dehumanize other people, removing both the aggressor and the victim from being considered fully human. And that opens all kinds of dangerous doors.

So look around to see what your own faith tradition, if any, is teaching its followers about AI. If nothing, you might want to ask your leaders to get busy before we get all of this irredeemably wrong. To get things started,  here is one report at least tangentially about AI from my own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA).

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USING SCIENCE TO VERIFY BIBLICAL STORIES

Scientists from several universities in Israel have used a special technology to corroborate a story from the book of II Kings in the Hebrew Bible, this Jerusalem Post story reports. The findings say that the conquest of the Philistine city of Gath by Hazael, King of Aram, as described in that biblical book, actually did happen based on their study of the magnetic field recorded in burnt bricks found at the site. It's additional evidence that the Bible is a collection of real history as well as metaphorical stories that make some point about God and humanity. The trick, so to speak, is to figure out which stories are historically accurate and which are told for some purpose beyond verifiable history. This II Kings story now is an example of the first kind of biblical account. Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden or the Noahic flood are examples of the second kind.

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P.S.: On this weekend's anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection attempt in Washington, D.C., here is a good piece from The Guardian chiding the mainstream media for focusing on its coverage of the commemoration of the event mostly on the current race for president and not on the current threat to American democracy. It's a common media failure when covering politicians -- focusing on the horse race and not their policy ideas or broader issues.

As Margaret Sullivan writes, "In a constant show of performative neutrality, journalists tend to equalize the unequal, taking coverage down the middle even though that’s not where true fairness lies. . .But journalists do have an obligation to get beyond delivery and appearances, to get beyond poll numbers and approval numbers – all the things that they are most comfortable with.

"The mainstream media is not nearly as comfortable with communicating the larger concepts, even when the stakes are this high. Constantly under attack from the right, they fear looking like they are 'in the tank' for a particular candidate or party, so they fall back on those traditional building blocks of coverage – numbers, polls, approval ratings. That may have worked in the past, or at least been relatively unobjectionable. Not any more." I think she's right. Do you?

Is the pope's recent statement about blessing gay couples progress?

As we begin another year here on the blog, I want to return to a story from last month -- the one about Pope Francis saying that priests in the Catholic Church, with certain limitations, now are allowed to bless same-sex couples.

I first wrote about this as the second item of this recent post.

This Associated Press story described the change as "a radical shift in policy that aimed at making the church more inclusive while maintaining its strict ban on gay marriage."

In fact, it's tempting to think of this as a truly "radical shift," but it's really less than that. It is, for sure, welcome news for all people of faith who understand that it's wrong for any religious tradition to treat any group of people as, at best, second-class citizens because they are members of a particular group. (That's how we got slavery, antisemitism and other evils.) But institutional religion generally moves so slowly to make changes that when there appears to be a small step in a good direction, it's easy to overreact with joy.

I suggest we slow down a bit and -- even while recognizing that Pope Francis has made some progress here -- not forget that there still is much to be done not just in Catholicism but in all of Christianity (and not just in Christianity but in nearly all faith traditions) to make sure that people are not singled out for criticism or disdain merely because of who they are or how they happen to identify in terms of gender or sexuality.

There are, in fact, some branches of Protestant Christianity that identify as conservative, evangelical or fundamentalist that are nowhere close to taking the modest step that Pope Francis has taken.

For just one example, here is information from the Southern Baptist Convention on its views on homosexuality and how those restrictive views have been reasserted in different words over the years. And here is a not-dissimilar anti-LGBTQ+ position expressed by the Church of the Nazarene.

My own denomination, the Presbyterian Church (USA), was among the churches that restricted its welcome to LGBTQ+ people until 2011. It was embarrassing but I thought it was worth staying inside the denomination to work for change rather than leaving. Members of the United Methodist Church, now in schism over LGBTQ+ issues, are facing the same choice. It's sad and unnecessary because much opposition to homosexuality is based on a misreading of scripture, as I point out in this essay.

Despite all the wonderful good that institutional religion has done over the centuries, a fair accounting of that history also must acknowledge that it has injured many people through its actions, doctrines and flawed leaders.

Still, the pope's recent statement allowing the blessing of same-sex couples should be welcomed, even as we all ask when all faith communities will treat gay people (and women and people of color and on and on) with love and inclusion. It's not yet time for a ticker-tape parade to celebrate, but a bit of applause for Pope Francis is in order.

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THE MAJOR RELIGION STORIES COMING THIS YEAR

In some ways, good riddance to 2023 with its wars and arrests and disinformation and on and on. I thought you might want to know what the Religion News Service reporters think will be the big faith-related stories of 2024. It turns out that they've offered their thoughts about that here. Wondering what you think should be on the list that isn't there. You can tell me by email at [email protected]. And Happy New Year.

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P.S.: A new survey suggests that Utah is no longer a Mormon-majority state. It says Mormons now make up just 42 percent of the population there. That's a surprise, as the RNS story to which I've linked you suggests -- partly because the survey was measuring something a bit different from what the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was measuring in 2019 when it found that Mormons make up 60 percent of Utah's population. But as far as I know, Utah still makes up 2 percent of the states that are part of the U.S.