Bill's 'Faith Matters' Blog

Is religion around the world disappearing? 8-6-19

If there's one thing we know about religion across the span of human history it's that it has undergone countless changes, starting from when a human first stared at the star-packed sky in awe and wonder.

And it's still changing. The question is how. And the question is what might it look like a generation or 10 from now.

Those are among the questions explored by this rather lengthy BBC piece. It is part of a "BBC Future" series that explores deep questions about human civilization.

Early in the religion piece, there's this useful warning: "If you believe your faith has arrived at ultimate truth, you might reject the idea that it will change at all. But if history is any guide, no matter how deeply held our beliefs may be today, they are likely in time to be transformed or transferred as they pass to our descendants – or simply to fade away."

The problem with ultimate truths is not that there aren't any but that human beings are finite and sometimes we imagine that we are capable of comprehending the infinite. We could use a little humility about all of this.

A little bit of the BBC piece seems to be contradictory. At one point the author writes this: "Today, many of our societies are huge and multicultural: adherents of many faiths co-exist with each other – and with a growing number of people who say they have no religion at all. We obey laws made and enforced by governments, not by God. Secularism is on the rise, with science providing tools to understand and shape the world.

"Given all that, there’s a growing consensus that the future of religion is that it has no future."

Well, the idea that religion is dying and before long will disappear took hold in the last 50 or 75 years among some scholars. But this "growing consensus" seems now to be fading as the evidence, as the BBC piece eventually acknowledges, suggests something quite the opposite from disappearance:

"(R)eligion is not disappearing on a global scale – at least in terms of numbers. In 2015, the Pew Research Center modeled the future of the world’s great religions based on demographics, migration and conversion. Far from a precipitous decline in religiosity, it predicted a modest increase in believers, from 84% of the world’s population today to 87% in 2050." (In politics, 84 percent is considered an almost-unheard-of landslide.)

It's true that the number of religiously unaffiliated people in the U.S. and western Europe, particularly, has been growing in recent decades while many forms of institutional religion in those areas of the world have been losing members. But if you look at the question of religious growth and shrinkage worldwide a rather different picture emerges.

The point here is that from time to time it can be helpful to take a long view of various aspects of human life, including religion. We always are in the midst of change, even if it's sometimes hard to track. This kind of journalism helps to widen our focus.

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MORE LESSONS FROM EMMETT TILL

Jemar Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise, which I reviewed here in January, has written this essay about the University of Mississippi frat boys who posed for a picture with guns in front of marker dedicated to Emmett Till. He asks good questions: How did these young men fail to learn that such behavior is racist? Did their faith communities fail to teach them that? Weren't they listening? Who taught them that such behavior was acceptable?

An understanding look at evangelical Trump voters: 8-5-19

In Ariel Burger's lovely 2018 book, Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel's Classroom, he quotes Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Nobel laureate, as saying, "It is the otherness of the other that fascinates me. . .What can I learn from him? What does he see that I do not, cannot?"

It's that same spirit of openness and inquiry that permeates journalist and Lutheran pastor Angela Denker's new book, Red State Christians: Understanding the Voters Who Elected Donald Trump, which will be officially published tomorrow.

After traveling the country, speaking mostly to Christians who identify as evangelical, 81 percent of whom voted for Trump for president in 2016, she concludes this: "All across America, people are doing surprising things that don't fit into our prescribed boxes that we used to categorize people. Evangelicals are not a monolith, not universally any one thing, and Red-State Christians defy categorization."

It's a wise lesson that people on all sides of the political divides (plural) would do well to heed. The reality that labels hide much more than they reveal often escapes people, except for those who purposefully employ such labels to win political battles and divide people.

There are good reasons for people across the country to read this book and a few special reasons for Kansas Citians and Missourians to pay attention. Denker, who has lived in Kansas City in the past, is (like me) a graduate of the University of Missouri School of Journalism. And she has family living in rural Cole Camp, Mo., about whom she writes in this book.

But the best reason to recommend the book is that Denker has done the reportorial legwork. She has talked to real people all over the country, a few of whom (but far from all) fit the stereotype of the MAGA-hat wearing people we've all seen at Trump rallies, cheering for his xenophobic remarks and applauding his worst instincts. In addition to a few of those folks, however, the book is full of interesting people with interesting and deeply human stories about what they believe and why they believe it, and why, at times, they are profoundly conflicted about Trump and why many of them voted for him.

Denker is clear that she often is personally appalled by Trump and that she didn't vote for him. But her strength is that she is usually able to set that aside to be able to listen to others who have sometimes-radically different views.

Many of those Trump voters, she writes, "have lost confidence in America's Christian identity. The United States is no longer the place where resurrection seems possible because anything is possible. . ." You begin to see in that insight reasons for the MAGA slogan that would return the country to a condition that, in fact, never existed except in the minds of some people. And "America's Christian identity," as Denker puts it, gives rise to Christian nationalism, about which I wrote most recently here.

Occasionally in a book full of helpful insights, I found some sentences that just stopped me. For instance, as she's writing about her father-in-law being drafted from rural Missouri into the Army in the Vietnam era, she calls 1968 "the most tumultuous year in American history." Oh, my. What about 1776, 1812, 1861, 1865, 1917, 1929, 1941, 1945, 2001?

But mostly this is an excellent read, in which the author not just does good reporting but, once having done that, is not afraid to draw some sharp conclusions. An example:

After spending time at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, including talking to members and staff and attending services, Denker concludes this about the pastor, the Rev. Jack Graham: ". . .Graham plays a religious leader, but he leads people away from God. He manipulates. He uses hatred of the other, fear and submission to gain power -- a distortion of the true gospel of Jesus, grounded in love, acceptance, forgiveness and the absence of fear." And then she mentions a member of Prestonwood with whom she had spoken as proof that "not every Red-State Christian at Prestonwood drips with the same anger and fear. Thank God."

Throughout the book we find various Jack Grahams, but we also find sincere, deeply faithful Christians who seek to live out their faith in consistent ways and who may or may not be ardent Trump supporters, all for reasons that make sense to them. Denker listens and learns. As readers will.

All the hot-button issues are in this book: guns, abortion, LGBTQ matters, immigration, race, the role of women, military might and more. And the lesson to be learned is that in some ways the people Denker calls Red-State Christians sometimes are all over the map on those issues. You have to talk to them to learn. You can't just assume.

Speaking of race, she asks who the anti-Trump evangelicals are. Her answer: "Most of these voices come from church leaders of color, many from the African American church. Today, in communities of color, it is still churches that serve as a beacon of hope, power and organizing, providing assistance, mentoring and a moral compass."

Among the people who, in this book, come across as much more human than they seem via press coverage of them is Paula White, one of Trump's closest spiritual advisers. Denker concludes that White "is too tired to keep up the old televangelism charade. What she has left, however, is a genuine love of Jesus and a childlike hope that she can share his gospel even with Donald Trump."

Based on Trump's relationship with White and several other strong women close to him, Denker says that "unlike so many of his evangelical pastor counterparts, Trump does appreciate a strong, smart woman. At least in that one way he is more Christlike than many of them."

Near the end of the book is this pretty fair summary of the whole thing: "While liberals often assume brown-skinned refugees are poverty-stricken invalids in need of saving and education, conservatives too often see them as radical Muslims in need of conversion. What we all need is to listen more."

Listening more. What a concept.

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ATHEISTS NEED NOT APPLY?

In this piece, The Guardian, an excellent British newspaper, explores the question of why there are so few atheists among American politicians. One of the members of Congress quoted at some length in the piece, Jared Huffman (D-Calif.), grew up in Independence, Mo., and in the church now called the Community of Christ. Interesting guy.

Are your 'biblical values' my 'biblical values'? 8-3/4-19

If you've ever tuned in to broadcast outlets that bill themselves as Christian, you've almost inevitably heard appeals to what the speakers declare are "biblical values."

What that often means is that the Bible is being used to buttress whatever value the speaker wishes to promote, whether that's anti-abortion, say, or opposition to same-sex marriage or dismissal of an environmental ethic of conservation -- all political positions dressed up as Biblical truths.

The question of what biblical values really are is, of course, much more complicated, as is made clear in a valuable new book, What Are Biblical Values: What the Bible Says About Key Ethical Issues, by John J. Collins, who teaches at Yale Divinity School.

In reality, drawing various value statements out of the Bible is a complex business, and much of what you extract from scripture and turn into foundational principles depends on how you interpret what you read. In fact, Collins asserts, "we cannot expect. . .to distill from the Bible one coherent set of values."

The Bible, written by dozens of authors over hundreds of years, is not God's master's thesis with a consistent one-author message, though both Christianity and Judaism (and in many ways Islam) revere the Bible as being in some way the word of God: But "the laws as we have them," Collins writes, "are never pristine divine revelations but always entail human authorship and human motivations and arose in particular historical circumstances that must be taken into account."

You want simple? You want obvious? You won't find it in the Bible, save for the overriding message of the need for love and respect of all people.

Which is one reason, of course, that the Bible never should have been used to defend slavery, even though Collins acknowledges that "at no point does the Bible condemn the practice of slavery." Nor, of course, does the Bible condemn the practice of hijacking airplanes and smashing them into buildings or mining battle fields with explosive devices to murder opposing soldiers. By the way, as Collins notes, the great 19th Century abolitionist Frederick Douglass said that if someone were to persuade him that the Bible supported slavery he would burn the book.

Whether you want to adopt a rigid, literalistic approach to the Bible or one that allows what you describe as your progressive political opinions to be seen as in harmony with biblical values, you will be challenged by Collins' book.

For instance, he concludes that "nothing in the Hebrew Bible excludes the application of the death penalty, and many passages demand it." And even the New Testament offers no ringing condemnation of capital punishment, causing Collins to conclude that "opposition to the death penalty receives scant support from the Bible. Perhaps the most important lesson to be drawn here is that decisions as to how the law should be applied ultimately rest with society." But all of that must be seen in the context of a Hebrew Bible in which, as Collins notes, there is "no value more central or fundamental than the demand for social justice."

On another hot-button issue, Collins notes that "there is, then, a long history of Christian condemnation of abortion, but it is not explicit in the New Testament. Neither is there any acceptance of abortion in either Testament."

And, of course, the Bible is silent on many issues confronting us today. You won't for instance, find anything in the Bible for or against net neutrality or nuclear disarmament. To adopt positions on such issues you have to look for broader biblical statements about fairness and peace.

Beyond that, some "biblical values" are simply ignored or useless today. Should farmers not harvest their whole crop, leaving the edges of the fields to gleaners today? Should women be silent in church? Should we not combine wool and polyester into a usable cloth?

I was pleased to find that in Collins' discussion of what, if anything, you can find in the Bible about homosexuality, his thoughts are largely in harmony with mine expressed in this essay, which concludes that the Bible should not be used as a weapon in this societal debate because, as Collins notes, "the Bible does not have a concept of homosexuality as a disposition or orientation. Homosexuality in this sense is a modern construct, which arose in the late nineteenth century."

One reality today has been a reality for a long time, and that is, as Collins writes, that people tend "to project their beliefs into the Bible, whether it provided a basis for them or not."

Collins also cautions against using the Bible to advocate a certain view of eschatology, or end-times theology: "(T)here is no more reason to take biblical accounts of the end of history literally than there is to take the accounts of creation as factual." True, though it's hard to convince fundamentalists and the like that Genesis isn't a book of science and history.

One thing I think Collins, and many other scholars, get wrong is his interpretation of the 13th chapter of Romans, in which the Apostle Paul seems (but only seems) to be saying that people should be obedient to whatever government is in power. As Pauline scholar Mark D. Nanos has persuasively argued, what Paul is talking about here is not the Roman government but the authorities in the Jewish synagogues. Paul was writing to Gentiles, telling them to be good guests in synagogues as they seek to find their way into a Jewish way of life -- one that asserts that the Jewish Messiah has come as Jesus of Nazareth. Paul, therefore, was not asking people to pledge allegiance to murderous dictators of civil (in this case Roman) governments. Collins interprets Paul as referring to "governing authorities" without being clear that Paul meant temple authorities, not the Roman emperor. It's a common error, but one that needs to end.

Another question to ask of Collins is why he uses this subtitle for his book "What the Bible Says on Key Ethical Issues," when he clearly writes that "the Bible does not mean anything until it is interpreted. Appeal to textual agency ('but the Bible says') is far too simple an evasion of the reader's responsibility." That "Bible Says" subtitle, thus, is a mystery, indeed.

In the end, Collins correctly insists that the Bible must be use "judiciously." The Bible can inspire and challenge us, he writes, "but the mere fact that something is found in the Bible is in itself no guarantee of right conduct or justice or anything else. Interpreters remain responsible for what they take from the Bible."

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BARR ESCAPES WITHOUT MUCH CRITICISM

Religion scholar and RNS blogger Mark Silk says Catholic leaders should be much more upset than they seem to be at Attorney General William Barr for allowing capital punishment to resume in federal cases. He's right. Barr, who is himself Catholic, is, in effect, flying in the face of Catholic teaching about this. On the other hand, when other officials who are Catholic didn't adhere to church teaching about abortion, they got lots of church criticism. Why the inconsistency?

A stand against 'Christian nationalism': 8-2-19

What is Christian nationalism? Well, as the Wikipedia page to which I just linked you says, Christian nationalists "focus primarily on internal politics, such as passing laws that reflect their view of Christianity and its role in political and social life."

In her forthcoming (Aug. 6) book, Red State Christians, which I'll review Monday here on the blog, Angela Denker notes that some Christians, particularly those among the 81 percent of self-identified evangelical Christians who voted for Donald Trump in 2016, "have turned toward the flag, feeling their patriotic fervor and nostalgic desire for a more Christian America. . .

"This desire to turn back the clock was more about national identity than Christian identity, though the two are inextricably tied together for many Red-State Christians. They wanted to be the ones who get to define what America is, and for them, it must be conservative, and it must be Christian. Otherwise the country -- and their Christian faith -- will utterly collapse."

One reason I raise this subject today is that, as this story notes, a new group has formed called "Christians Against Christian Nationalism."

The group has issued this statement, which contains this definition of Christian nationalism: "Christian nationalism seeks to merge Christian and American identities, distorting both the Christian faith and America’s constitutional democracy. Christian nationalism demands Christianity be privileged by the State and implies that to be a good American, one must be Christian. It often overlaps with and provides cover for white supremacy and racial subjugation. We reject this damaging political ideology and invite our Christian brothers and sisters to join us in opposing this threat to our faith and to our nation."

If one's primary loyalty is to a religious tradition, loyalty to a nation always comes second. In some cases, it may be a relatively close second, but it always must be second. One way to think about that is to remember the first of the Ten Commandments, which tells people to have no other gods before God. If the nation has become your god, that's trouble.

Sometimes Christian nationalists seem to forget that commandment.

At the new group's website, you can see who all has signed the statement and is behind this effort.

What has become increasingly clear in recent years is that when Americans conflate religious identity with national identity, they water down their religion and they imperil the religious liberty that their nation should protect.

Here's one way to detect whether your faith community, if it's a Christian church, is making that error: In the sanctuary, are the American flag and the Christian flag both displayed as somehow co-equal? If so, you should challenge that.

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A FIGHT OVER 'FAKE NEWS'

If you're not familiar with the online religious satire publication called The Babylon Bee, I commend it to you. It can be hilarious, though often it hits with a too-heavy hand. I have signed up to get a copy e-mailed to me each day. It now turns out that the fact-checking site Snopes and the Bee are sniping at each other over the question of whether a particular Bee article constitutes fake news. Well, when the Bee's slogan is "Fake News You Can Trust," Snopes should know that satire is the point. E. B. White once said that explaining a joke is like dissecting a frog. Nobody much cares -- and the frog dies of it. Snopes should remember that.

A group that's responding to Turkey's crisis: 8-1-19

In late 2017, I wrote this Flatland column about people in the Kansas City area from Turkey. As I noted, "The brutal, imperious reaction of Turkey’s dictatorial government to a failed coup attempt last year has turned life into a nightmare for most, if not all, Kansas City-area residents of Turkish nationality."

You can read there how several area residents, all Muslims, were dealing with that disaster.

But, of course, Kansas City area residents were not alone in this. Lots of Turkish people all over the U.S., of course, also were affected and remain so today.

One of the responses to this trouble has been the creation of an organization called Advocates of Silenced Turkey (AST). As the group explains on its website, "Since the July of 2016, the Turkish government has improperly imprisoned 130,214 homemakers, teachers, NGO workers, academics, judges, prosecutors and journalists.

"Once upon a time, the Republic of Turkey was lauded by insiders and outsiders for constituting a powerful model for democratization. In New Turkey, however, silence against the regime’s draconian laws, mass imprisonment, and frequent violations of universal human rights has become the sole norm.

"In a regime which ranks as the worst upholder of the rule-of-law in Eastern Europe & Central Asia, 187 media outlets have been shut down and 308 journalists. .  .are political prisoners of the state. Dissent in New Turkey is absent. Human rights in New Turkey are absent. Respect for human dignity in New Turkey is absent."

Recently I spoke by phone with Zeynep Girdap, a representative of Advocates of Silenced Turkey, and she added to that information.

"AST," she told me, "does a lot of things. They organize events to foster donations (to help Turkish people who now can't go back home and whose relatives may be in prison in Turkey) and to contact members of Congress to inform them about these issues." AST also writes white papers about what's happening in Turkey.

AST, she said, doesn't have a headquarters but is made up of people all over the U.S. and Europe who work together online.

People interested in staying up to date on AST's activities can sign up for a regular e-mailed newsletter on the organization's website (scroll to the bottom of the opening page).

It's always intriguing to me how people react in times of crisis, whether it's a family matter or something involving an entire nation. The people who eventually make a difference are the ones who volunteer to get engaged in the kind of information and advocacy work AST does. Such volunteers also get a chance to shape the response to the disaster and to correct course if the organization in question drifts into waters it should avoid.

Turkey, of course, is a predominantly Muslim country but under earlier national leadership it sought to create a secular government that would protect the religious freedom of all its citizens. The current regime has been violating all kinds of freedoms of its citizens, no matter their faith tradition. I don't know how much longer other NATO nations will put up with a member that does such atrocious things.

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BEYOND SEX OFFENDER REGISTRIES

More faith communities are doing background checks on potential employees to make sure they don't hire sexual offenders, but as this RNS story notes, they may need to dig deeper than the standard checks normally do. The primary goal here, in case anyone has forgotten, is to protect children. Is your congregation doing all it can to accomplish that?

Are faith communities welcoming people with disabilities? 7-31-19

The great German reformed theologian Jürgen Moltmann once declared that any religious community that doesn't include disabled people is in some way itself disabled.

I think of that quote almost each Sunday when I push my stepson's wheelchair into the sanctuary in our church building and park him next to me in a specifically cut-out row that makes room for wheelchairs. (My wife was largely responsible for getting those cut-out rows in our sanctuary.) Chris is a special needs adult who loves to go to church and give people hugs.

I also thought of it when I read this article from The Week about ways in which the article's author thinks churches are failing disabled people.

"It may come as a shock to you," writes Heather Avis, "that churches are unable or unwilling to meet the needs of kids with developmental delays and learning disabilities — especially if you're a parent of children without any significant differences. But for people like me — a parent of three adopted children and two who have Down syndrome — these revelations barely induce a yawn. This is a situation we've been wrestling with and tirelessly trying to improve for years."

And, of course, she and her family are not alone. There is considerable room for religious communities to improve the way they welcome people with various kinds of disabilities.

But it's not all a terrible story. Not only can many congregations tell stories about how they've welcomed other people like our Chris, but this past December I wrote this Presbyterian Outlook column about how a church in Michigan has intentionally created a culture of welcome for all kinds of people with disabilities.

Because you have to be a subscriber to read the online version of that column, let me tell you that it contains a story I heard from my friend Brian O'Connor of Detroit, who, like me, is a member of the National Society of Newspaper Columnists. Brian told me how and why he and his wife, Jodi Noding, and son, Casey, had joined the First Presbyterian Church of Birmingham, Michigan.

As I wrote in that column, Brian explained that Casey is “a late talker with a language delay.” Someone suggested that some help might be available for Casey at FAR Therapeutic Arts and Recreation. That organization, it turns out, is housed at First Presbyterian, so Brian, Jodi and Casey began showing up there a few years ago, first for Casey’s therapy and eventually to check out the whole church.

“We were sort of unchurched at that point,” Brian told me. “I grew up Catholic. My wife was a member of a very conservative Presbyterian denomination. It seemed like a good idea for my son to have that kind of community and upbringing. So we started looking around and one of the things we learned was that First Presbyterian emphasizes inclusion. They call themselves ‘everybody’s church.’

“Inclusion is a really basic concept there. I work with my son in a lot of other activities, where he’s accommodated. Like school and Boy Scouts and summer camps. But accommodated is not the same as inclusion. Accommodated sort of suggests we’ll make room for you and won’t be bothered by your differences or quirks.”

In addition to our experience with Chris and Brian's and Jodi's experience with Casey, I have close friends who have a son with Down syndrome, and that young man has been welcomed and included in many ways in his Catholic parish in Kansas City.

At any rate, I'm glad that Heather Avis has raised this issue in the column she wrote. And I hope faith communities will pay attention and do what they should be doing anyway to include everyone. But I want you to know that the picture in that regard is not entirely bleak.

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THE DEATH OF A DEATH EXPERT

Here is a lovely essay about the death of a man who devoted himself to helping others understand death. Rob Moll, author of The Art of Dying, was just 41 when he died recently in a hiking accident on Mount Rainer. His friend Bob Smietana of Religion News Service writes this of Moll: "He wrote about how death has disappeared in modern life. Or at least, any conversation about our own mortality and the fleeting nature of life. Death has moved from the home into the hospital, and medical professionals have taken over much of the care of the deathly ill. And we have lost track of it." Our failure to understand our own death means we often don't understand our own life. That needs to change.

Let's think again about faith and suicide: 7-30-19

In this post here on the blog recently, I wrote about attending a memorial service at a Catholic Church for a young woman (in her 20s) who had committed suicide.

In response, a representative of Paraclete Press, a Catholic publishing house, asked if I'd be interested in reading Fr. Ronald Rolheiser's 2018 book on the subject, Bruised & Wounded: Struggling to Understand Suicide. I agreed to do just that.

It's only 77 pages long so it's a really quick read. And I very much like Rolheiser's approach, which emphasizes the reality that people who commit suicide have something like a disease that they can find no way to cure. It's similar to understanding mental illness as a disease that, like a broken leg or cancer, needs treatment. But sometimes no treatment works and the result is a sad and disastrous death.

Rolheiser is right that "suicide is still perhaps the most misunderstood of all deaths. We still tend to think that because it is self-inflicted it is voluntary in a way that death through physical illness or accident is not."

As a Catholic priest, Rolheiser is naturally interested in conveying a word of hope and comfort to those who are grieving the loss of someone who died by suicide, and he gives it a sincere shot, particularly in light of Catholic teaching found in the Catechism on the subject. It says, "Suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life. It is gravely contrary to the just love of self. It likewise offends love of neighbor because it unjustly breaks the ties of solidarity with family, nation, and other human societies to which we continue to have obligations. Suicide is contrary to love for the living God."

Rolheiser does his best to soften and even ignore that view, but, in the end, he finds himself not quite able to offer the comfort that particularly Catholic families certainly seek when one of their members dies by his or her own hand. There's always a small hedge to Rolheiser's attempt to assure families that the person who died is safely in God's loving hands forever.

For instance, he writes that "in most cases, we should not worry about the victim's eternal salvation." I can imagine a grieving family hearing that and immediately wondering whether the person they lost is one of the exceptions to that "most cases" rule. In another place he writes that "we need not worry unduly about the eternal salvation" of those who commit suicide. Worry unduly? How much worry would be enough? And does that mean that someone without "eternal salvation" will spend eternity in a lake of fire, as proposed by those who believe in the physical reality of hell?

And yet Rolheiser comes close again and again to offering the kind of comfort that families need at such a time. He writes,  for instance, that "no God worth worshiping could ever condemn any of these persons to exclusion from the family of life simply because of the manner of their deaths." Well said. But if that's the case, what's with the use of "in most cases" and not worrying "unduly"?

At one point Rolheiser tries to make a distinction between "suicide" and "killing oneself." A suicide, he says, means that "a wounded, oversensitive person is overpowered by chaos and falls fatally victim to an illness." By contrast, killing oneself refers to a case in which "an arrogant, pathological narcissist, acting in strength, refuses to submit to the commonalities of human existence."

Tellingly enough, when Rolheiser wants to offer an example of someone who dies by his own hand but not of an incurable depressive situation or other emotional disaster, the one he comes up with is -- wait for it -- Adolf Hitler, almost always the terrible example of any sin or grievous behavior and surely, therefore, someone who deserves to go to hell. It strikes me that in any self-inflicted death, those left behind can never, ever fully understand the motive. But Rolheiser is convinced he knows why Hitler killed himself 74 years ago. It was what he calls an act of "strength, an act that roots itself in a pride, an intellectual arrogance and a pathological narcissism that, like Lucifer, sets itself before the schema of things and says, 'I will not serve!'"

So here he is talking with grieving readers again about hell and the manager of the property, Lucifer. How comforting. I suppose it's inevitable when the author believes in -- and perhaps feels obliged to believe in -- the reality of such eternal punishment. So he offers this to the grieving: ". . .nobody goes to hell out of weakness, out of a broken heart, out of a crushed spirit, out of the misfortune and unfairness of never having had the sense of being truly loved. Hell is for the strong, for those with a spirit so arrogant that it cannot be crushed or broken, and so is unable to surrender."

All of this sidetracks what Rolheiser wants to be his primary message, which is that "God is not a God of punishment, but a God of forgiveness."

If that's true of God -- and as a Christian I certainly believe it to be so -- then perhaps we should rethink the idea of eternal, cruel punishment for some. And that's exactly what the Christian Orthodox scholar David Bentley Hart has done in his important forthcoming book, That All Shall Be Saved. The book won't be published until Sept. 24, however. But watch for my review of it here in my Sept. 21/22 blog post.

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ADDITIONAL THOUGHTS ON JOURNALISM ABOUT RELIGION

Yesterday here on the blog I mentioned some good investigative journalism done by The National Catholic Reporter. But that kind of journalism about religious communities also can -- and should -- come from outlets that are not religious in nature. A good example is the Chicago Tribune's recent look at finances on the Catholic Church in its area. The reporter who did that writing, David Heinzmann, was interviewed recently on National Public Radio. Here is that interview. Faith traditions make up part of the whole social fabric and, therefore, should be covered by traditional journalism in the way that it also covers politics, education, sports, economics and other subjects.

What investigative religion journalism can do: 7-29-19

One reason to have good religion journalism is to keep track of the various forces that seek to shape and then influence institutional religion.

So I'm glad that The National Catholic Reporter has done a four-part series on the Eternal Word Television Network, commonly referred to simply as EWTN. The first article in the series by writer Heidi Schlumpf can be found here. In a side note found with that story are links to the other parts of the series.

If you are Catholic you almost certainly have heard of EWTN and maybe been a consumer of its many offerings. EWTN will be much less familiar to non-Catholics, though the information NCR has turned up about EWTN's reach and influence is a cautionary tale for any community of faith.

Here's a quick summary of EWTN, in NCR's words: "EWTN's 11 networks — broadcasting 24/7 — claim a reach of more than a quarter of a billion people worldwide in more than 145 countries and territories. EWTN programming is available through more than 6,000 TV affiliates as well as on ROKU, Apple TV, Amazon Fire and YouTube. In addition to the Orange County studio, ETWN has studios in Washington, D.C., and at the company's headquarters outside Birmingham, Alabama.

"And that's just the television portion of the business.

"EWTN also provides free radio programming to more than 500 domestic and international affiliates and on SIRIUS/XM and iHeart Radio, as well as through its worldwide shortwave radio station. It also owns and operates the largest Catholic website in the United States, as well as the National Catholic Register newspaper, an English- and a Spanish-language online news wire service, a book publishing arm and a religious goods online catalog.

"It is truly a global media empire, one so diversified and complex it can be difficult to estimate its total budget or net worth."

What has EWTN been doing with that amazing reach and power?

What consumers are getting, NCR says, "is a very particular slice of Catholicism from EWTN and its affiliate organizations, one not necessarily representative of the U.S. church as a whole. Polling and ongoing studies of the Catholic population in the United States consistently finds a far greater diversity of views and tolerance for questions than is the case on EWTN broadcasts. EWTN has become the only regularly televised image of Catholicism in America."

Programs often mimic Fox News in supporting Republicans who would identify themselves as conservatives. But, the NCR piece notes, "In addition to its slanted political coverage, EWTN and its affiliate journalistic enterprises also have connections to economic libertarian ideologues. . ."

Each media outlet, of course, must decide on its own editorial policy, as NCR does for itself. And in many ways NCR represents the voice of progressive Catholicism in the U.S., meaning its content often will be quite different in perspective and tone from EWTN's. But whereas NCR readers can be counted in the tens of thousands, EWTN consumer numbers dwarf such figures.

Which is another good reason to understand what EWTN is and how it approaches its work.

I wish there were more religion journalists at work doing the kinds of investigate reporting NCR has done in this series. One reason religion journalism isn't a larger national enterprise is that readers don't demand it. It's time to fix that.

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ATTACKING SIKHS IN CALIFORNIA

In the P.S. below, I mention my column about construction of a new Sikh temple in Kansas City. In that column I make note of several ways Sikhs have been attacked in this country. It just happened again in California, as this story reports. The amount of ignorance and hate related to religion here and abroad sometimes astonishes me, though by now I should expect it.

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P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about what it means that a new Sikh temple is being built in suburban Kansas City -- now is online here.

The role of religious civil disobedience: 7-27/28-19

Civil disobedience has a long and in many ways honored history in the American story, maybe beginning with the original Tea Party in Boston.

The article to which I linked you in the first two words of the previous sentence offers someone's 1971 definition, which I think is pretty good: "a public, non-violent and conscientious breach of law undertaken with the aim of bringing about a change in laws or government policies."

Sometimes, such as the Tea Party, those intentionally breaking the law do so for civil, or secular, reasons. But quite often people's religious beliefs drive them to do that.

This RNS column argues that we need more religiously based civil disobedience today.

"We need a revival of religious civil disobedience," writes John Gehring. "Along with Mohandas Gandhi and (Martin Luther) King, Catholics can look back to the prophetic activism of Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, the farmworker organizer Cesar Chavez and the Jesuit priest Daniel Berrigan, who burned draft files in protest of the Vietnam War." Gehring is the Catholic program director at Faith in Public Life and author of The Francis Effect: A Radical Pope’s Challenge to the American Catholic Church.

Why more faith-based civil disobedience? His answer: "Being a faithful Christian sometimes means breaking the rules. Moral disruption is a sacred act when the status quo is sinful.

"Christians follow a Messiah who had dark skin and who preached liberation to those on the margins of a powerful empire. Two millennia later, we face a stark choice between moral resistance and the cowardice of complicity. History will judge that decision."

I don't disagree with Gehring, but I hope people engaging in civil disobedience are prepared to pay the consequences, which may be more than a two-hour arrest, release and dismissal of charges. If it's more than that, they must be ready to comply. And, I think, they need to be sure before they jump into civil disobedience that all other legal avenues have been tried. Like actual war, civil disobedience should be a last resort as a tool for change and justice. But it must remain a tool.

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LISTING WHAT'S WRONG WITH THE BIBLE MUSEUM

The Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C., (which I wrote about here before it opened because of its Kansas City connections) has received a lot of criticism -- much of it justified -- from scholars. Now some of those scholars have collected their essays about what's wrong with the museum in a new book, and Religion News Service has done this interview with one of the editors. As Yonat Shimron of RNS writes in introducing the interview, the museum "has been accused of privileging the Protestant Bible over other versions, harboring questionable and misappropriated antiquities among its vast collection and partnering with a range of charismatic, Pentecostal and conservative Christian groups, including the Creation Museum and Ark Encounter, in ways that suggest it wants to advance an evangelical agenda." That's a lot to overcome.

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P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about what it means that a new Sikh temple is being built in suburban Kansas City -- now is online here.

Texas leads the wrong way on capital punishment: 7-26-19

Ah, Texas. Brash, proud, big and wrong about so much, including its prominent leadership among states that continue to use the death penalty, an immoral system that is wildly expensive and that sometimes lets the state kill innocent people.

At the moment, Texas has 10 executions scheduled between Aug. 15 and Nov. 6. Texas deserves, for this, a highlighted place in the Hall of Shame.

But here and there in Texas there still are voices of reason, including the authors of this recent opinion piece in The Houston Chronicle.

"As of today (July 20)," they write, "13 men have walked free from Texas death row because they were wrongfully convicted. Anthony Graves, one of the authors of this piece, is one of them. He spent more than 18 years behind bars for a crime he did not commit. Twice he faced execution dates.

"Besides the unthinkable gravity of such mistakes, the facts show that the death penalty is an extremely expensive way to seek justice. A death penalty trial, including mandatory appeals, is now estimated to cost more than $2 million. We are spending an awful lot of money on a system that has proven to be wrong a bunch of times."

But Texas has done something to make all of this worse. Earlier this year Texas banned all chaplains from being present at executions.

In response to this clear outrage, dozens of faith leaders from all around Texas have asked the state to change its mind about that.

In this interfaith statement, those leaders says they are "united in recognizing that the right of condemned people to spiritual comfort at the moment of death is a longstanding and widely-recognized religious practice." The state's decision, they say, "also infringes on the religious liberty rights of chaplains and spiritual advisers themselves. Clergy have the right to minister to those who have placed themselves in their care, up to and including the moment of death. The state cannot, and should not attempt to, regulate spiritual solace."

No telling what Texas will do next about all of this, but my guess is they'll find a way somehow to make it even worse yet again.

The death penalty should be abolished in every state and for federal crimes as well. (And speaking of federal crimes, our government has decided to start executing criminals again. Here's the story.) Most countries have done that. And you almost certainly would not want to live in some of the countries that retain capital punishment (like Iran), except for the U.S. We're in some bad company and for all the wrong reasons. It's time to change.

(The image here today came from this site.)

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'SEND HER BACK,' HE ARGUES

Time for some serious satire, folks. Fr. Thomas Reese suggests in this RNS column that it's way past time for the U.S. to send the Statue of Liberty back to France. After all, he writes, "She entered our country in 1886 without a visa and has stayed here ever since. She never applied for citizenship and does not have a green card. She does not speak one word of English."