Bill's 'Faith Matters' Blog

Dancing around the 'In God We Trust' issue: 6-13-19

Earlier this week the U.S. Supreme Court turned away a case in which the plaintiff wanted the government to get rid of "In God We Trust" on American currency.

The case was brought by a man well known for fighting this and similar fights for years, Michael Newdow. I even interviewed him some years ago about all of his efforts in such matters.

The court's action -- it rejected the case without comment -- left everyone wondering what individual justices might have thought about the case. And it left us as a people to talk about why some Americans want the government to spread religious ideas, such as trusting in God.

So maybe it would be a good idea to have such conversations.

Putting such language on government documents does absolutely nothing to advance the cause of any religion. In fact, it neuters God, in effect, turning the deity into an amorphous civil spirit disconnected from the often-mysterious stories about God in the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, the Qur'an and other sacred writ.

When we read "In God We Trust" on our money, the first obvious question we would do well to ask is: "Which god?"

I'll never understand people of faith who want to turn over religious language and religious symbols to the government. Displaying a Nativity Scene, for instance, on a courthouse lawn along with Santa, Frosty and Rudolph simply degrades a precious religious symbol.

And surely the Supreme Court could see that agreeing to decide the case about "In God We Trust" would simply turn into another needlessly divisive issue in a nation that now has 650 billion such issues that turn neighbor against neighbor, daughter against father, cousin against cousin.

The health of religion and the health of the nation are simply not dependent on whether "In God We Trust" adorns the money in our pockets. And yet, in a more perfect nation, to borrow a phrase, such God language should have no place on public dough. Discuss.

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SUPPORT FOR ORDAINING WOMEN

The recent controversy over whether a Southern Baptist woman was preaching, which women aren't allowed to do in that tradition, has raised the question of what people in the pews there and in Catholic churches think about women as pastors. It turns out there's a lot of support for the idea, this RNS story reports. Those of us who have had women as pastors and preachers know the skills and approaches they bring and wish others could experience the same.

Does anything on this list function as your religion? 6-12-19

A few days ago here on the blog, I wrote about a University of North Carolina teacher who says that belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials is becoming a kind of religion in the U.S.

Today we're going to expand the list of non-religion religions by a bunch. There's a long list of them in David Zahl's new book, Seculosity: How Career, Parenting, Technology, Food, Politics and Romance Became Our New Religion and What To Do About It.

This interesting work is written from a Christian perspective, but the phenomenon it describes seems common to people of many faith traditions.

Zahl, founder and director of Mockingbird Ministries, begins by noting what most of us already know, which is "that confidence in the religious narratives we've inherited has collapsed." But, he asserts, "the marketplace in replacement religion is booming."

But what exactly does Zahl mean when he uses the term religion? "It is what we lean on to tell us we're okay, that our lives matter, another name for all the ladders we spend our days climbing toward a dream of wholeness. It refers to our preferred guilt-management system. . .Our religion is that which we rely on not just for meaning or hope but enoughness."

The result, he says, is that "If we used to go to church once a week, we now go every hour. It's exhausting, to put it mildly."

Zahl isn't suggesting that career, parenthood, technology and other things on his list of small-r religions are bad in and of themselves: "Quite the opposite -- they are by and large great. It's only when we lean on these things for enoughness, when we co-opt them for our self-justification or make them into arbiters of salvation itself, that they turn toxic."

He spends most of the book unpacking each of the activities he describes as a religion and comparing each (briefly at the end of each chapter) to what Christianity has to offer instead.

One of the first false gods he attacks is "busyness," which he contends "has become a virtue in and of itself." But, of course, unrelenting busyness is an idol with feet of clay. Related to busyness is "performancism," which he describes as "the assumption, usually unspoken, that there is no distinction between what we do and who we are." (Zahl likes italics.)

In the end, this book is an argument for a religion of grace and a plea for "Christianity to function as a religion of grace today," which he implies it often doesn't. If it did, he contends, it could help rescue us from all the seductions of seculosity.

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EXACTLY THE WRONG ANSWER

You may remember that on Easter this year, Islamist terrorists murdered some 250 people in Sri Lanka. How has Sri Lanka responded? As this Economist piece reports, Sri Lanka now is terrorizing Muslims in return. Which, of course, will just lead to more terrorism. And on the world will go in a downward spiral.

A new papal edit of 'The Lord's Prayer': 6-11-19

From my early childhood on I have been a little out of sorts with this phrase from what we Christians call "The Lord's Prayer" or the "Our Father": "lead us not into temptation."

That wording seems to assume that God makes a habit of testing us by tempting us with evil, sin or simply bad decisions. But that's not the God that Jesus revealed.

I'm happy to report that Pope Francis now agrees that the phrase needs to be replaced. As The Guardian piece to which I just linked you reports, "Instead of saying 'lead us not into temptation', it will say 'do not let us fall into temptation'."

That's better, though I still prefer the wording used in an alternative version in some Episcopal services: "Save us from the time of trial." In fact, those are the words I use, silently, when my congregation around me prays together aloud: "Lead us not into temptation."

The wording we use in prayers, liturgy and hymns say a good deal about our theology, about the kind of God we imagine. Two competing images of God are these: God of wrath and vengeance and God of love and mercy. The biblical witness is that they are not mutually exclusive. Which is to say that if we leave out either side of that spectrum we may end up -- and we almost inevitably do anyway -- with a God of our own creation. Even if we do our best to root our image of God in the stories we read in the Bible, we will fail to comprehend God fully. That's because comprehending God fully is beyond our capacity.

And yet there's something attractive about the pope's explanation of why he's ordered the change: "'It is not a good translation because it speaks of a God who induces temptation,' he told Italian TV. 'I am the one who falls. It’s not him pushing me into temptation to then see how I have fallen. A father doesn’t do that; a father helps you to get up immediately."

But of course, there he goes again creating a human image of God as a father. Which is also what Jesus did to try to make God more comprehensible to people. Why should God need to be made more comprehensible? Because God is beyond all categories. And if we fail to see that we have fallen into temptation.

One voice pushing back a bit against the pope on this is biblical scholar Meredith Warren, who teaches at Sheffield University in England. She told National Public Radio the other day that the original Greek in the New Testament supports the "lead us not. . ." translation in English. Hmmmm.

(The image here today shows a Protestant version of the Lord's Prayer that uses "trespasses." Those of us who are Presbyterians, just FYI, use "debts and debtors.")

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ARE BAPTISTS LEARNING WHAT NOT TO DO FROM CATHOLICS?

A new report from the Southern Baptist Convention acknowledges its failures in dealing well with myriad allegations of sexual abuse in SBC congregations and institutions. If the Baptists have been paying attention to the Catholics, they now know lots of paths to avoid in seeking to fix things. But we'll see. (By the way, here is a link to the whole SBC report.)

Could all Christians receive the Catholic Eucharist? 6-10-19

Last week, in a story that didn't get quite the play it deserved, Pope Francis, in remarks to reporters covering his trip to Romania, left the impression that it would be all right with him if all Christians were welcome to participate in the sacrament of the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, in Catholic churches.

As things stand now, the Catholic Church declines to allow non-Catholics to receive the elements of bread and wine. One reason is that those non-Catholics have not committed themselves to the doctrine of transubstantiation, which attempts to explain how the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ.

This Religion News Service story describes the pope's remarks and links readers to stories about this from both Crux and the National Catholic Reporter.

Francis, the RNS story said, "stresses the ecumenism of shedding blood together and of working together in service to the poor, the sick and the marginalized. This fits with his famous statement that 'facts are more important than ideas.' How we live our faith is more important than how we explain it.

"But during the press conference Francis went further. As he explained on the plane, 'there is already Christian unity,' according to the National Catholic Reporter. 'Let’s not wait for the theologians to come to agreement on the Eucharist.'

"Is the pope signaling his willingness to move toward Eucharistic sharing without total theological agreement? This would be consistent with everything else he is saying."

One of the problems in all of this is that most non-Catholic Christians, I would guess, and even many Catholics cannot explain what the transubstantiation doctrine says and, thus, why it should separate them.

I will offer this brief explanation of the doctrine, which seeks to explain what's called the "Real Presence" of Christ in the Eucharist.

To begin, it's important to understand that the doctrine is rooted in Aristotelian science, which divides the world into "accidents" and "substance." The term "accidents" refers to the taste, color, texture, smell and other observable facts about the bread and wine. The term "substance" refers to the essence of those materials, which is to say, if you will, their "breadness" and their "wineness."

What happens in the sacrament, according to transubstantiation, is that the accidents of the bread and wine stay the same -- same smell, same taste, same looks and so forth -- but the substance of the bread and wine change to the substance of the body and blood of Christ.

What we may be about to find out is whether the pope now recognizes that this complicated doctrine, and the science on which it's based, should not be a barrier to all Christians participating in the sacrament. Other branches of Christianity have different ways of explaining what happens in Communion. For instance, we Presbyterians are also "Real Presence" people, but we simply don't use transubstantiation to explain how that's possible. We don't, in fact, use any explanation. We simply say that in some mysterious way Christ is present. Other Christians are classified as "memorialists," meaning they agree with the old reformer Ulrich Zwingli, who believed that Communion was simply a memorial to remember Christ and that nothing objective happens to the bread and wine. In that case, there is no "Real Presence" claimed.

In the gospel of John, Jesus is reported praying that all of his followers "may be one." So all this division must break his sacred heart. Imagine if Catholics and others (including Lutheran Church Missouri Synod congregations) who now fence the Communion table were to take down the barrier. What a great model it would be for ecumenical and interfaith cooperation.

(The photo here today shows the altar at the Catholic Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in downtown Kansas City.)

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AIR FORCE FINALLY ACCOMMODATING A SIKH

A Sikh member of the U.S. Air Force has been granted permission to wear a turban and keep his beard -- in accordance with his religious tradition -- while on active duty. It's the first such allowance granted to a Sikh and came as a result of a lawsuit. How sad that it took court action to accomplish this and how sad that it didn't happen before now. Sikhs have served in the military in other countries for a long time.

Does UFO belief constitute a new religion? 6-8/9-19

The question of what constitutes a religion seems to be coming up more and more these days in different venues. It's a good question and worth trying to answer.

One of the places I just found this question raised is in this Vox article about a so-called new American religion that has to do with UFOs.

The piece talks about a new book, American Cosmic, in which the author, Diana Pasulka, a professor at the University of North Carolina, writes that belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials is becoming a kind of religion in the U.S.

Pasulka, in fact, was shocked to discover that reputable scientists from well-known universities and research institutions are quietly looking into evidence of life beyond our planet.

But why does she call this search and its targets of extraterrestrial life a new religion?

"The problem is that we tend to think of our own religions when we think of religiosity," she said. "And in the United States, most people are Christian or Jewish or Muslim. These are the traditional 'religions of the book' that shape most of our Western understanding of history.

"But there are many different religions, and some don’t involve things like gods or even dogmas. Zen Buddhism, for instance, eschews the idea of a god. It also tries to cure its practitioners of dogmas. Today, there are religions based on movies like Star Wars. So we do have to understand that religion is not exactly what we think it is.

"Part of what I want to say in this book is that religion can take many forms, and the same religion can take different shapes in different places. What we’re seeing now are new forms of religion emerging from our infrastructure of digital technology and technology in general. Religions are shaped by their environments, just like most things."

Another new book that I plan to review fairly soon here on the blog, Seculosity, by David Zahl, also proposes that aspects of our lives like career, parenting, technology, food, politics and romance also have become new religions in America.

Zahl calls religion "that which we rely on not just for meaning or hope but enoughness."

But back to the idea of UFO enthusiasm becoming a religion. Pasulka says this: "Often, a religion begins with contact from something divine, something beyond the normal plane of human experience, and that thing communicates with a person on earth. And then there’s a story told about it. And then from that story, we get a larger narrative that erupts into what we call religious traditions. Something very similar is happening right now around belief in extraterrestrial life."

It's hard for me to imagine that in a cosmos stretching out billions of light years Earth is the only planet able to sustain life, though so far that's the only one on which Earthlings have found life. But if life -- whether the simple-cell variety or complex human-like life -- is found elsewhere, is there room enough in your religious beliefs to make sense of that? I think there is in mine. But I'll know for sure only when that happens.

(The photo here is one I took from an airplane. I've looked at it closely but can't see any UFOs in the frame.)

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SLAMMING THE 'PROSPERITY GOSPEL'

The other day here on the blog I wrote about the dangers and swindle of the "Prosperity Gospel" preached by some allegedly Christian televangelists. Here is a column by someone who used to be a prosperity preacher and is the nephew of one. The author of the column has seen the light and condemns that approach pretty harshly, which it deserves.

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THE BOOK CORNER

From Suffering to Peace: The True Promise of Mindfulness, by Mark Coleman. Some decades ago the only people who talked about or even had heard about the idea of mindfulness were Buddhists and some scholars who study Buddhism. But use of the term has exploded since then and, almost inevitably, come to mean many things to many people and become further removed from its original source, the Buddha himself some 2,600 years ago. This new book by the founder of the Mindfulness Training Institute, seeks to recover much of that original meaning and find ways to infuse today's work on mindfulness with that meaning (or meanings). Coleman makes it clear that he's not against the spread of mindfulness practice: "(A)lmost every week I hear of some new application for mindfulness. . .The movement of mindfulness from cloistered monasteries into research labs, hospitals, schools, prisons and organizations is helping unprecedented numbers of people worldwide." But, he says, "it is vital that the depth, limitations and potential of the practice are clearly and accurately conveyed." One way he does that in this book is by providing some exercises with each major chapter. Mindfulness, properly practiced, he insists, can lead you to "the jewel of awareness."

The Young Earthers are still at it: 6-7-19

FULTON, Mo. -- I was driving to this mid-Missouri town this past Saturday for a funeral, and was doing a little flipping around on the car radio as I was stalled in a traffic jam near Concordia due to a bad truck accident.

I somehow came across an insistent voice telling me to go to this website of the Institute for Creation Research so I could learn that Earth is only about 6,000 years old.

I forgot about it for couple of days but finally looked it up and discovered this article, "Four Geological Evidences for a Young Earth." It was written by a guy named Tim Clarey, who, I've learned, holds a Ph.D. in geology from Western Michigan University.

You can read it for yourself, of course, and I hope you do to see the acrobatic lengths Young Earthers go through to stick to a literalistic reading of the Bible, especially the creation and flood stories.

After outlining his four points of alleged evidence, Clarey concludes this: "These four strong geological evidences demonstrate that Earth is just thousands of years old, as the biblical narrative and genealogies indicate. In fact, there is no empirical evidence to the contrary. Only biased interpretations based on unverifiable assumptions, such as the radioisotope dates that secular science relies on so heavily, continue to argue for an old earth. The rocks do not show great age. The fossils do not show great age. Earth is young."

For an alternative view, I found two online pieces. This one from 2015 is by David R. Montgomery, professor of earth and spaces sciences at the University of Washington. It argues that one can set aside the whole debate about evolution and simply look at the geological evidence because ". . .there is more to the geologic record than creationists describe in their scripturally interpreted version of earth history. A single grand flood cannot explain it all. Embracing young Earth creationism means you have to abandon faith in the story told by the rocks themselves."

Then I found this 2014 post by someone who teaches geology at Northern Virginia Community College. It takes on Clarey directly and then dismisses Young Earthers this way: "I am amazed anew by the young-Earth perspective. It is a blinkered, resolute, evidence-free piece of sacrosanct silliness immune to any rational line of argument."

Somehow I find the fragility of human reasoning displayed by the Young Earthers both intriguing and alarming. It's more evidence that people will fall for almost anything, as our 2016 U.S. presidential race proved.

(The photo above of part of this old Earth is not one I took in Fulton but, rather, a few years ago on the coast of Maine.)

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SHOULD THIS WOMAN BE PREACHING?

Some Southern Baptist leaders and seminary teachers are expressing discontent about a female leader preaching to men. That has to do with how to interpret some things in scripture attributed to the Apostle Paul. Maybe a better time to engage in such a debate would be after the Southern Baptists fix their prominent scandals having to do with sex abuse. It's hard to listen to condemnation of women's voices when men's voices have either been silent or untruthful about such abuse.

Islam, like other religions, has many divisions: 6-6-19

I have often noted here and in other venues that every religion is in some ways internally split. In Christianity, for instance, the three major divisions are the Catholics, the Protestants and the Orthodox. Of those three, the Protestants are wildly internally split again into thousands of denominations and independent churches.

All of this is to say that when we speak of any of the world's religions we'd do well to differentiate between and among its various branches and to note that there is not single "Judaism" or "Buddhism" or "Islam."

Further evidence of that reality is found in this interesting piece in The Economist about a varied collection of Muslims who have written an appeal to Saudi Arabia not to execute three people it currently holds as prisoners.

As the article notes, "At least 80 respected scholars and teachers of the Muslim faith, from many countries but mostly Anglophone ones, have lent their names to a plea to the Saudi authorities. It urges the kingdom to spare the lives of three well-known figures in the world of Islam. The trio have been incarcerated on 'terrorism' charges since 2017."

What I find interesting is that those 80 people are representative of the many divisions within Islam -- divisions that go well beyond the traditional Sunni-Shi'a split -- a split that pays no attention to the Sufi branch, which is Islam's mystical path.

So who signed the petition? The piece reports this: "Virtually none of the signatories is based in a Muslim country. Yet among those who enjoy the freedom of the Western world, the theological range is remarkably broad."

The reality is that Saudi Arabia remains ground zero for Islam. Its holiest sites are there. Muslims from around the world are obligated, if health and wealth allow, to make at least one pilgrimage to the country -- specifically Mecca -- in their lives. And the rigid form of Islam called Wahhabism is spread around the globe from a Saudi base.

But Saudi Arabia controls Islam in sort of the same way that the Vatican controls Christianity, which is to say only partially and ineffectively. And that leaves many divisions and disagreements within the Muslim faith. Which gives Muslims a whole lot in common with Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs. . . (Think of the graphic here today with this change: A full moon with a whole bunch of stars, not just one.)

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ADAM HAMILTON ON THE FUTURE OF UNITED METHODISM

And speaking of religious traditions with divisions, there's the on-the-verge-of-schism United Methodist Church. I've just linked you to a Flatland column I wrote after the denomination in February voted to keep its ban on LGBTQ clergy and on clergy performing same-sex weddings. But Religion News Service has done this good interview with the Rev. Adam Hamilton, founding pastor of the United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in suburban Leawood, Kan. Adam for now favors staying in the UMC but resisting the LGBTQ ban rules. He says, however, that "Resistance is not a permanent solution. Resistance is a means to getting to another place." Whether he can lead the Methodists to that other place in harmony remains to be seen.

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THE BOOK CORNER

Reforming American Politics: A Christian Perspective on Moving Past Conflict to Conversation, by Harold Heie. There is sincere debate about when American politics went off the rails and turned into a 24-hour shouting match. It didn't start with the Trump era, though it seems only to have gotten worse in this period. There is a persuasive case to be made that the worst of this began with former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich and his uncompromising approach to governance. In any case, American Christians have been caught up in all of this both as shocked observers and as destructive participants, especially in this presidency, which the author contends "is antithetical to the Christian faith." And Heie, a senior fellow at the Colossian Forum, tries to sort out why in this just-published book and to offer a path forward for Christians who real want to help heal the nation and not add to its sorry divisions. A big part of the problem, he points out, is "confirmation bias," by which he means "listening only to an echo of yourself." This bias, he writes, "has the most destructive long-term effects because it feeds the tribalism that is increasing in American society." Heie writes as "an evangelical Christian who is not among the 80-plus percent of evangelicals who voted for Trump in 2016." The author spends much of the book describing various efforts at civil conversation among people who have fundamental disagreements. And he urges readers to return to essential approaches to life that Christianity teaches, including love of neighbor and self. Treating people with whom one disagrees disrespectfully and not listening to them, he asserts, is a violation of Christian ethics. There are lots of good ideas in this book. The question is whether the people who most regularly violate Christian principles in their political lives are even willing to listen any more.

A rabbi unpacks how trauma can live on and on: 6-5-19

Trauma can happen to an individual, of course, but also to an entire people.

In the latter case, there's a growing body of evidence that extreme trauma doesn't die out when the generation that experienced that trauma dies. Rather, it can last in some form unto the third and fourth and even further generations.

That's what Rabbi Tirzah Firestone explores in her compelling new book, Wounds into Wisdom: Healing Intergenerational Jewish Trauma.

Yes, it focuses on the Holocaust and other traumas experienced by Jews, but what Firestone writes is applicable to almost anyone who has experienced the disruptive, shocking ways in which trauma can change our lives and can flow unbidden from one generation to the next.

"The residue of our ancestors' unresolved injury," she writes, "does not simply disappear. In fact, it often weighs most heavily on the introspective, sensitive members of the next generations."

Already we are seeing that in families who lost loved ones in various terrorist attacks, for instance. William Faulkner was right when he said that "The past isn't dead. It isn't even past."

Firestone says that something like post-traumatic stress disorder can affect people generations after their ancestors experienced the original trauma.

"Symptoms such as emotional numbness, hyperreactivity, shame, isolation and the inadvertent compulsion to reenact traumatic injuries appear similarly in the aftermath of both individual and collective trauma," she writes.

Firestone has experienced some of this in her own family, given that she is a descendant of Holocaust survivors. She describes how she even left Judaism when she "left my parents' home, casting off the burden of my birth religion like a heavy wool coat in spring." Eventually, this St. Louis native made peace with her faith tradition and rediscovered in Judaism a path that has helped her understand collective trauma and how it can be healed. "(I)t was never Judaism that I had rebelled against; it was the unintended repercussions of unhealed trauma that I was attempting to flee."

The problem, she says, is that "trauma often stores itself in layers, not unlike the sedimentations found in an archaeological dig. With attuned treatment and a safe environment, the psyche reveals itself one level at a time."

She describes several examples of individual and collective trauma and how those who experienced it have worked through a process that is bringing resolution and healing. And what she most wants us to know is that such resolution and healing are possible: "Freeing ourselves from our inherited family patterns is possible for both survivor and future generations."

The second half the book describes seven principles that can form the basis for healing. And these principles are desperately needed today, for as she writes: "The tribes and ethnic groups around the world that are suffering political and religious oppression, displacement and ethnic cleansing are among the world's 68.5 million refugees. Continuously exposed to terror, homelessness, poverty and unthinkable conditions, masses of Syrians, Central Americans and Africans are reshaping the face of their own cultures. . .The future that our children will inherit is shaped by the traumas of the present."

This is a wise book rooted in both personal experience and professional study. Its promise is that it can help reduce the disastrous effects that trauma can have on individuals and on whole communities.

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MORE ON ABUSE AMONG SOUTHERN BAPTISTS

Thank goodness, again, for good journalism. This time it's kudos to The Houston Chronicle for another in its series of articles about sexual abuse inside the Southern Baptist Convention. The latest piece focuses on the SBC's failure to discipline missionaries engaged in such abuse: "The Chronicle found a long trail of alleged cover-ups involving sexual misconduct or crimes committed abroad by a small number of Southern Baptist missionaries, all salaried employees of the mission board. Collectively, five men were credibly accused or convicted of abusing about 24 people, mostly children, court records, documents and interviews show." If religious organizations won't police themselves, good investigative journalists should and have. I wrote about this most recently here in February.

More progress against the death penalty: 6-4-19

As you may know, the state motto of New Hampshire is "Live Free or Die." It's a rather strange phrase, but as you might imagine, it has a long history that, if you care, you can read about here.

I was thinking about that motto late last week when I learned the good news that New Hampshire has abolished the state's death penalty.

It required that both houses of the state's legislature override the veto of Gov. Chris Sununu, but that good accomplishment has made the Granite State the 21st state to abolish capital punishment.

Within the story to which I've linked you about the veto override there's a link to a site kept by the Death Penalty Information Center, which is an excellent source of data about capital punishment in the U.S.

I'm increasingly frustrated that capital punishment continues to be legal in many parts of the U.S. In addition, of course, there's still a federal death penalty.

It's clear to me that capital punishment is itself immoral, to say nothing of being so expensive compared with life in prison without the possibility of parole. That latter reality has helped to move some lawmakers who describe themselves as conservative to begin working against the death penalty. Oh, and, of course, the death penalty completely shuts off any hope of prisoner rehabilitation.

But capital punishment is still an option in my state, Missouri, perhaps because the so-called pro-life people have been focusing so narrowly on stopping abortion here. In my view, that's a case of mixed-up priorities.

At any rate, let's give a cheer for New Hampshire and hope that other states -- and the federal government -- soon will follow suit and do away with capital punishment for good, which is what most developed nations (and some not so developed) have done. In the meantime, should New Hampshire change its motto to more accurately reflect any prisoners on death row there -- "Live Incarcerated and Die Eventually"?

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THE FUTURE OF RELIGION IN THE U.S.?

Mark Silk, one of the wisest scholars and observers of religion in the U.S., has some worthwhile thoughts here about the future of religion in the Northern Hemisphere based on what's been happening in the Pacific Northwest. He is convinced that what we're seeing there in the land of the religiously unaffiliated is going to spread to the rest of the nation. And he might be right.

When greedy televangelists take your money: 6-3-19

Often when I am speaking with people who reject religious affiliation, the reasons they express have something to do with their anger over charlatan religious leaders who are in it for the money and who exploit vulnerable people.

Well, no doubt there are some people like that. And certainly there are supposedly Christian preachers around who proclaim the phony "Prosperity Gospel," which maintains that God wants you to have health and wealth on demand. It's a terrible perversion of the religion.

But because so many of the religious professionals I know are honest, sincere (underpaid) people trying to do the right thing, I tend to dismiss much of the broad-stroke criticism I hear about money-grubbing preachers.

Perhaps I should not be so quick to do that. For as this BBC piece reports, there still are lots of examples in the U.S. of televangelists who are, in fact, in it almost exclusively for the dough.

"Televangelists," the report says, "are not as talked about today as they were in the 1980s and 1990s, when many rose to fame and fortune through mushrooming cable channels.

"But they have never gone away. Even after numerous press exposés, the rogue elements have often bounced back. Some have got even richer. Many have taken their appeals on to social media.

"A number of those making the most persistent pleas for money tap into something called the prosperity gospel, which hinges on a belief that your health and wealth are controlled by God, and God is willing you to be prosperous. Believers are encouraged to show their faith through payments, which they understand will be repaid -- many times over -- either in the form of wealth or healing."

The story then describes how one couple in particular got sucked into giving away to such preachers money they couldn't afford to give.

"For followers," the story notes, "it (the prosperity gospel) is a way to make sense of sickness and poverty. It can feel empowering and inspiring amid despair. The hard-up donors are often not oblivious to the preachers' personal wealth --  though they may not know the extent of it -- but they take the riches as a sign of a direct connection with God. If seed payments have worked for them, maybe they can work for you too?

"And if the seeds never flourish? Some are told their faith is not strong enough, or they have hidden sin."

This kind of evangelism is not just appalling, it goes against everything Christianity stands for, including aiding the poor and needy, not stealing from them.

And what do these poor people do when they really need pastoral care? Speak to a flickering late-night image on their TV screen? That's not where help lies. Rather, it's available from live congregations that understand the call of the gospel to comfort the afflicted (and sometimes afflict the comfortable).

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THEY FIND HAPPINESS IN TRADITIONAL WAYS

Religious women in traditional marriages express more satisfaction with their lives than other women, new studies how, and this opinion column insists that those religious women are not "brainwashed." In fact, "brainwashed" is a demeaning term that negates the authentic experience of the women expressing their satisfaction. Let's believe the women.