Archbishop Rowan Williams spoke last week about the need for a moral state that is not theocratic or confessional.

Portions of the talk appear as a column in the Sunday Times.

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In his lecture this evening in Hull, birthplace of William Wilberforce, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, will urge politicians to rediscover the moral energy and vision which inspired Wilberforce; defend the right of the citizen to call the state to account for its actions; and ask whether we still believe in the notion of "a moral
state."

If we do, he says, we cannot leave the state to decide for itself what is moral: "The modern state needs a robust independent tradition of moral perception with which to engage. Left to itself it cannot generate the self-critical energy that brings about change...for the sake of some positive human ideal."

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Entering into a controversial political arena, some evangelical Christian leaders are beginning to paricipate in calls for immigration reform which has been a long time concern of The Episcopal Church and other mainline churches.
A new coalition of more than 100 largely evangelical Christian leaders and organizations asked Congress on Monday to pass bills to strengthen border controls but also give illegal immigrants ways to gain legal residency.
The New York Times' Neela Banerjee reports:

The announcement spotlights evangelical leaders’ increasingly visible efforts to push for what they say is a more humane policy in keeping with biblical injunctions to show compassion for their neighbors, the weak and the alien.

The new group, Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, includes members like the Mennonite Church U.S.A. and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which represents Latino evangelicals.

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Twenty Episcopalians from around the country joined an ecumenical coalition in Washington, D.C., May 6-8 to press for sustained diplomatic engagement by the Bush Administration to bring a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict and a negotiated resolution on the status of Jerusalem. Lucy Chumbley of Washington Windows reports:

Churches for Middle East Peace (CMEP), a coalition of 22 Orthodox, Protestant, Anglican and Catholic church bodies and organizations, held the conference for 150 attendees who participated in some 65 meetings with Members of Congress and key staff.

Before meeting with the law makers, the delegates worshiped together and attended "inside the beltway" briefings on related issues given by lobbyists, representatives of think tanks, academics and government officials.

A silent processional, broken only by the jingling of an incense censor, set a reflective tone for the opening prayer service at National City Christian Church, which included two songs of peace in Hebrew and Arabic, "Yerushalayim shel Zahav" and "Ya ar-Rub as-Salaami."

"These are real heart songs of Jerusalem," said Ann Staal, a CMEP board member representing the Reformed Church in America, who organized and led the service. "If you were to sing one of these on the streets of Jerusalem, I'm sure someone would join you."

Homilies were offered by Roman Catholic Bishop Denis Madden, auxiliary Bishop of Baltimore, Archbishop Vicken Aykazian of the Armenian Orthodox Church and the Episcopal Church's 25th Presiding Bishop, Frank Griswold.

Read it all HERE at Episcopal Life Online.

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From today's New York Times:

"Religious organizations have long competed for federal contracts to provide social services, and they have tried to influence Congress on matters of moral and social policy — indeed, most major denominations have a presence in Washington to monitor such legislation. But an analysis of federal records shows that some religious organizations are also hiring professional lobbyists to pursue the narrowly tailored individual appropriations known as earmarks.

A New York Times analysis shows that the number of earmarks for religious organizations, while small compared with the overall number, have increased sharply in recent years. From 1989 to January 2007, Congress approved almost 900 earmarks for religious groups, totaling more than $318 million, with more than half of them granted in the Congressional session that included the 2004 presidential election. By contrast, the same analysis showed fewer than 60 earmarks for faith-based groups in the Congressional session that covered 1997 and 1998."

The article continues: “Earmarks are bad public policy,” said Maureen Shea, director of the Episcopal Office of Government Relations in Washington. “If earmarks are not in the public interest, I would wonder why the faith community would be involved in them. It would hurt our credibility.”

Read it all.

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From the Episcopal Public Policy Network:

Beginning next week, key congressional committees will begin drafting the 2007 U.S. farm bill. The bill affects every American – and most people around the world – in one way or another. US farmers and rural communities. have an important stake in the legislation, as do hungry people in our own country and people living in deadly poverty around the world. To learn more, click here.

Reform of the current U.S. commodity-payment system would allow Congress to invest billions of dollars in farms and rural communities that need it most, and better support programs that fight hunger and poverty at home and around the world.

WHAT YOU CAN DO:

During the week of May 27, when lawmakers are home in their districts for the Memorial Day recess, Episcopalians will be joining with other people of faith to visit their Senators and Representatives and share the message of farm-bill reform. The effort will include bishops, clergy, lay people, community organizers, farmers, and others who want to see a fair and just farm bill.

If you have never set up a meeting with your member of congress, it’s easy to do – here are some simple instructions. Ask others in your congregation to join.

Interested, but nervous you won’t know what to say? Register here, so that we can invite you to a special conference call that will walk through the important information.

Together, we can help pass a 2007 farm bill that makes historic strides against hunger and poverty at home and around the world.

Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and four leaders of Protestant denominations wrote to the U. S. Congress May 10 to urge budget negotiators to preserve important investments in federal domestic and international programs that fight poverty and disease at home and around the globe.

The letter was signed by Jefferts Schori and the Rev. Mark S. Hanson, Presiding Bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America; the Rev. Dr. Clifton Kirkpatrick, Stated Clerk of the General Assembly, Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.); Bishop Beverly Shamana, President of the United Methodist General Board of Church & Society and the Rev. John H. Thomas, General Minister and President, United Church of Christ.

The Church's Office of Government Relations has the story.

The Episcopal News Service reports on a Washington DC priest speaking out in favor of amending the present Immigration reform bill making its way through the capital so that it would emphasize family reunification rather than focusing on selecting candidates for immigration solely on needed skills:

"Expressing support for immigrant family reunification at a May 23 Capitol Hill news conference, the Rev. Dr. Luis Leon, rector of St. John’s Lafayette Square Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., spoke in favor of a proposed amendment authored by Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY), Chuck Hagel (R-NE) and Robert Menendez (D-NJ) to the Border Security and Immigration Reform Act of 2007.

The Senators’ amendment would remove barriers to reunification for the nuclear families of lawful permanent residents.

'The Episcopal Church’s 2006 legislative body, General Convention, expressed strong support for comprehensive immigration legislation and regarded family unity as an imperative of any reformed system,' stated Leon. 'Sadly, the Senate compromise legislation includes provisions that devalue family sponsored immigration.' The Clinton-Hagel-Menendez amendment would reclassify the spouses and minor children of lawful permanent immigrants as 'immediate relatives,' thereby exempting them from the visa caps."

Read the rest here (which includes the full text of Leon's remarks): Episcopal Life Online - NEWS

From the Associated Press:

The personal faith of candidates has become a very public part of the 2008 presidential campaign. Seven years after George W. Bush won the presidency in part with a direct appeal to conservative religious voters _ he cited Jesus Christ as his favorite philosopher during one debate _ it seems all the leading presidential candidates are discussing their religious and moral beliefs, even when they'd rather not.

Democratic Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama have hired strategists to focus on reaching religious voters. Obama's campaign holds a weekly conference call with key supporters in early primary and caucus states whose role is to spread the candidate's message to religious leaders and opinionmakers and report their concerns to the campaign.

Meanwhile, Alan Cooperman of The Washington Post has noticed Barack Obama's new Web based religious outreach.

Senator Sam Brownback of Kansas, who is running for the Republican nomination for President, wrote a column in The New York Times recently defending his views on evolution.

While no stone should be left unturned in seeking to discover the nature of man’s origins, we can say with conviction that we know with certainty at least part of the outcome. Man was not an accident and reflects an image and likeness unique in the created order. Those aspects of evolutionary theory compatible with this truth are a welcome addition to human knowledge. Aspects of these theories that undermine this truth, however, should be firmly rejected as an atheistic theology posing as science.

The Times published eight letters, in response, an unusually high number. Almost all of these took issue with Brownback's view of science, finding it insufficiently, um, scientific. Time magazine writer Michael Lemonick argues likewise.

No one seems interested in exploring the potential theological pitfalls of Brownback's view, so here is a question to get the conversation started: If God created the natural world, and science helps us understand it more completely, shouldn't religious people be its greatest proponents?

From the Democrats, we have:

" Sen. Clinton: Faith got me through marital strife"

... which also contains segments on Barack Obama and John Edwards, including video clips of all three. Clinton provides a rare glimpse into her marriage and how faith helped give her strength when it was strained; Obama talks about the problems in seeing the world through a dichotomous, good vs. evil lens; and Edwards points out that we—including he—are all sinners, and talked at length about his mission to end poverty. The forum, which aired on CNN, was sponsored by Sojourner's/Call to Renewal and moderated by Jim Wallis.

On the other hand, "Debate evolves into religious discussion," also from CNN (and clever puns on creationism aside), takes a look at some faith-related highlights in last night's Republican debate. Among them, Mike Huckabee "offered a spirited defense of the biblical creation narrative"; John McCain, having previously indicated that he "believed in" evolution, also agreed with Huckabee's view; and Sam Brownback made a case for uniting faith and reason.

Additional coverage:

New York Times: "Mrs. Clinton said she took her faith 'very seriously and very personally' but went on to say she came from a faith tradition, Methodism, that is 'perhaps a little too suspicious of people who wear their faiths on their sleeves.' She admitted that talking about her faith in public 'doesn’t come naturally to me,' saying she often flashed back to 'the Pharisees and all of the Sunday school lessons and readings I had as a child.'"

AP: "Edwards, wearing a purple tie to match Sojourners' signature color, promoted himself as the candidate most committed to the group's mission of fighting poverty. He said he doesn't feel his belief in evolution is inconsistent with his belief in Christ and he doesn't personally feel gays should be married, although as president he wouldn't impose his belief system on the rest of the country."

Thomas J. Reese, writing on the Washington Post/Newsweek blog "On Faith," writes: "At the presidential candidates forum on religion, values and poverty, Democrats decided that it was time to show America that Democrats can be good Christians, inspired by Christian values, but not willing to impose their faith on others. The candidates showed themselves to be tempered, moderate and ecumenical. ... Many of the questions from the moderator were personal and obnoxiously intrusive. 'What was the greatest sin you ever committed?' 'Did your faith help you deal with your husband’s infidelity?' This has nothing to do with the intersection of faith and politics."

"On Faith" also continues the conversation with additional columns and comments here.

The Long Beach Press-Telegram reports:

The sanctuary movement has come to Long Beach. California.

On Friday, St. Luke's Episcopal Church announced it had begun sheltering Liliana, an undocumented woman facing a deportation order, as well as Pablo, her three-month-old boy.

Liliana's last name is being withheld. She is married to a U.S. citizen and is the mother of three children, all of whom are citizens, but she is ineligible for citizenship herself.

Liliana's family is the third in Los Angeles County to seek sanctuary and is one of about 13 families nationally who have, or soon will, go public with their requests for shelter.

St. Luke's is part of a faith-based effort calling itself the New Sanctuary Movement. It is a national coalition of congregations and religious organizations that promises "to protect immigrant workers and families from unjust deportation" by offering shelter and aid.

Read it all.

It would be interesting to know what some of the high-profile allies of the so-called Global South Primates think about offering sanctuary to people from the global south.

Should John McCain be elected President, he will feel right at home going to worship at St. John's Church at Lafayette Square. McCain is a Episcopalian who attends North Phoenix Baptist Church in Phoenix, Arizona.

The Sacramento Bee's Matt Stearns reports that while McCain has been courting evangelical Christian voters, telling them about "how his faith helped him survive 5 1/2 years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam...he says little about the current role of religion in his life."

"I think it's something between me and my creator," McCain said in an interview with McClatchy Newspapers. "It's primarily a private issue rather than a public one. ... When I'm asked about it, I'll be glad to discuss it. I just don't bring it up."

McCain is a cradle Episcopalian who attended Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia and the United States Naval Academy. He says he attends the Southern Baptist North Phoenix Church because they are "strong on redemption and so am I."

According to the story, conservative evangelical political activists want McCain to tell more of his story. In the evangelical tradition, making a testimony about the life-changing power of faith is as much a hallmark of faithfulness and reception of the sacrament and the beauty of worship is in the Episcopal tradition.

McCain "seems to have a difficulty in discussing it in terms that people relate to," said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, a leading conservative evangelical organization. "I think people want a sense of where someone stands in their relationship with the Lord. I think George Bush was able to do that in the way he communicated, using terms that evangelicals are familiar with."

The paper describes some of that faith journey as described by McCain himself in his autobiography Faith of Our Fathers and in interviews.

McCain was raised an Episcopalian in a family that "observed our faith openly and without reservation."

In his memoir "Faith of My Fathers," McCain recalled the religious model his father provided: "(He) was devout, although the demands of his (naval officer) profession sometimes made regular church-going difficult. ... My father didn't talk about God or the importance of religious devotion. He didn't proselytize. But he always kept with him a tattered, dog-eared prayer book, from which he would pray aloud for an hour, on his knees, twice a day."

Comparing his practices with his father's, McCain said ruefully, "I'm not as devout or as good."

Cindy McCain, wife of the Senator, and two of his children were baptized in the 6,000 member congregation, but the candidate himself has not been. "I didn't find it necessary to do so for my spiritual needs," he said.

McCain still identifies himself as Episcopalian, so when he's in Washington, and should he gain the White House in 2008, he will not be the first president formed in the Episcopal Church who have journeyed through other traditions along the way. He should feel right at home in the Church next door.

The ONE Campaign's commitment to make poverty history was stepped up June 11 when a mass media and mobilization effort to make global poverty a fundamental aspect of the 2008 presidential race was launched at St. Mark's Episcopal Church on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

The new initiative, "ONE Vote '08: Saving Lives, Securing our Future," promises to energize presidential candidates and ONE members "to make the fight against global poverty a key foreign policy and security issue at the 2008 ballot box."

Matt Davies has the story.

Democratic Party chairman Howard Dean, who left the Episcopal Church in a dispute over the route of a bike path, and who once identified Job as his favorite book in the New Testament, has weighed in on the Biblical evidence on gay relationships.

"I haven't seen gay marriage in the Bible once," Dean said in the keynote address at a Democratic fundraiser at a Reno hotel-casino, perhaps not the best venue for a disquisition on traditional values.

AP has a story that will have gays, lesbians and their allies wondering whether they are about to be sacrificed to Democrats' desire to cut into the evangelical vote. It includes this paragraph:

Rick Warren, a best-selling author and pastor at a Southern California church, is an example of an evangelical leader who is setting aside "those things that divide us" and doing things "that bring people together — things that really are in the Bible," Dean said. He said those priorities include fighting poverty, global warming and the bloodshed in Darfur.

Warren, remember, is among Peter Akinola's loudest cheerleaders, having written a brief profile of the Nigerian archbishop when Akinola was first named one of Time 's one hundred most influential people.

Warren noted that men like Akinola are "bright, biblical, courageous and willing to point out the inconsistencies, weaknesses and theological drift in Western churches." without ever mentioning that Akinola lobbied for anti-gay legislation that had been condemned by the European Parliament, the U. S. State Department and every major human rights organization.

Coverage in the major media today on the launch of ONE Vote '08 focuses on politicians reaching across the aisle and Bono's increasing influence on world politics.

The New York Times reports on the unlikely pairing of former senatorial leaders Tom Daschle and Bill Frist, who were "fierce adversaries" during their time in Congress. They stand united against global poverty as co-chairmen of the One Vote ’08 effort and spoke at yesterday's launch of the initiative at St. Mark's Episcopal Church in Washington, DC.

“It is in the strategic and national interest of the United States of America,” said Mr. Frist, a Republican and former Senate majority leader from Tennessee. “People do not go to war with people who save their children’s lives.”

Both Democratic and Republican presidential candidates will be asked to sign a pledge in the fall saying they will offer proposals to fight H.I.V./AIDS, tuberculosis and malaria, improve children’s health in other ways, increase access to education, provide access to clean water and reduce by half the number of people who suffer from hunger.

“Through the extraordinary challenge we now have, it is incumbent upon all of us to recognize that this must be a key part of American foreign policy,” said Mr. Daschle, a Democrat and former Senate majority leader from South Dakota.

ABC reports on Bono's increasing influence on the world stage, noting the launch of ONE Vote '08 follows closely on the heels of his presence last week at the G-8 Summit. The story also covers the initiative's bipartisan support and the significant investment from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

"The number of people whose lives will be affected by the choice you make next November is much higher than the population of America," said Bono in a video released at the ONE Vote '08 launch. "Do we have the political will to end this?"

At the campaign's launch in an Episcopal church, supporters of the campaign joked about Bono's power.

"I don't think it's written in the Bible, but if enough people suffer in the world, rock stars will start crying out," joked evangelical Pastor Brian McLaren at the campaign launch Monday in Washington, D.C.

"We're going to make sure that every candidate gets asked again and again and again what they're going to do about poverty," said McLaren.

CBS and other media outlets have picked up the AP coverage of the event:

For months, scores of volunteers wearing black-and-white ONE T-shirts and carrying placards have been attending presidential debates and some campaign events by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Barack Obama and other Democrats, as well as Republicans such as John McCain and Mitt Romney.

Activity will only increase in the coming months, with town-hall-style events, mailings, a celebrity bus tour and TV advertisements.

For now, the focus is on the early primary states of Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire and South Carolina. But the effort eventually will be expanded to the more than dozen states holding contests on Feb. 5, and will continue through the general election.

Read it here.

Stay tuned to the ONE Vote '08 blog here.

Writing in Adbusters magazine, Matt Taibi of Rolling Stone, who identifies himself as a liberal, says liberalism "needs to be fixed."

A few choice quotes:

A lot of it, surely, has to do with the relentless abuse liberalism takes in the right-wing media, on Fox and afternoon radio, and amid the Townhall.com network of newspaper invective-hurlers. The same dynamic that makes the junior high school kid fear the word “fag” surely has many of us frightened of the word “liberal.” Mike Savage says liberalism is a mental disorder, Sean Hannity equates liberals with terrorists, Ann Coulter says that “liberals love America like O.J. loved Nicole.” These people have a broad, monolithic audience whose impassioned opinions are increasingly entrenched. In the pseudo-Orwellian political landscape that is modern America, to self-identify as a liberal is almost tantamount to thoughtcrime, a dangerous admission that carries with it the very real risk of instantly and permanently alienating a good half of the population, in particular most of middle America.

And:

At a time when someone should be organizing forcefully against the war in Iraq and engaging middle America on the alarming issue of big-business occupation of the Washington power process, the American left has turned into a skittish, hysterical old lady, one who defiantly insists on living in the past, is easily mesmerized by half-baked pseudo-intellectual nonsense, and quick to run from anything like real conflict or responsibility.

It shies away from hardcore economic issues but howls endlessly about anything that sounds like a free-speech controversy, shrieking about the notorious bugbears of the post-9/11 “police state” (the Patriot Act, Total Information Awareness, CARNIVORE, etc.) in a way that reveals unmistakably, to those who are paying close attention, a not-so-secret desire to be relevant and threatening enough to warrant the extralegal attention of the FBI. It sells scads of Che t-shirts ($20 at the International ANSWER online store) and has a perfected a high-handed tone of moralistic finger-wagging, but its organizational capacity is almost nil. It says a lot, but does very little.

And:

Here’s the real problem with American liberalism: there is no such thing, not really. What we call American liberalism is really a kind of genetic mutant, a Frankenstein’s monster of incongruous parts – a fat, affluent, overeducated New York/Washington head crudely screwed onto the withering corpse of the vanishing middle-American manufacturing class. These days the Roosevelt stratum of rich East Coasters are still liberals, but the industrial middle class that the New Deal helped create is almost all gone.....

Thus, the people who are the public voice of American liberalism rarely have any real connection to the ordinary working people whose interests they putatively champion. They tend instead to be well-off, college-educated yuppies from California or the East Coast, and hard as they try to worry about food stamps or veterans’ rights or securing federal assistance for heating oil bills, they invariably gravitate instead to things that actually matter to them – like the slick Al Gore documentary on global warming, or the “All Things Considered” interview on NPR with the British author of Revolutionary Chinese Cookbook. They haven’t yet come up with something to replace the synergy of patrician and middle-class interests that the New Deal represented.

Read it and weep.

Writing on The American Prospect's Web site, Paul Waldman says research shows that the more secular people there are in a county, the more likely that people from evangelical denominations who live there will vote Republican.

One explanation:

The idea of religious conservatives as a surrounded minority, bravely holding the battlements of morality against an onrushing tide of cultural barbarism, is more than a convenient message that conservative pastors offer to their flocks. It is a key part of how the group defines its identity. And, critically, telling people they're under assault not only serves to keep them within the tribal borders -- it lends the entire enterprise an emotionally satisfying, even epic feel. You're not just a plumber or an insurance adjuster or a bond trader; by the very fact of believing what you do, you become a heroic warrior fighting a grand struggle against the enemies of all that is right and good.

Read it all.

If you aren't familiar with "Following the Money: Donors and Activists on the Anglican Right," drop in to the Diocese of Washington Web site, then read this exchange between Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and James Tonkowich, president of the right wing astroturf organization, the Institute on Religion and Democracy that occured when Tonkowich visited Capitol Hill recently to give reliigous cover to the oil industry's views on climate change.

Note the part where Tonkowich seems to say that he represents the views of everyone to whom he sends a piece of mail, but then adds that the IRD sometimes culls addresses from church directories.

Read more »

Are Republican voters really "conservative" in the culture wars sense of the word? Not really, suggests a poll from Fabrizio, McLaughlin & Associates, which you can find on MSNBC's blog, First Read.

Among the more interesting findings:

On abortion -Fifty-two percent believe abortions should be legal under certain circumstances.

On health care
-Fifty-one percent of Republicans agree that universal health care should be a right of all people. The moralists are also split on the issue.

On social welfare
-Half believe the government needs to provide a “helping hand” and safety net.

On gay rights
-Almost half of all Republicans favor gays serving openly in the military. Even four in 10 moralists think gays should be allowed to serve openly.

-Seventy-seven percent believe companies should not have the right to fire employees based on sexual orientation.

On global warming
-A third say the government isn’t doing enough on global warming.

On defense spending
-Fifty-five percent say the government is spending enough or too much on defense.

On God and politics
-Fifty-two percent believe public policy should not contradict God’s law, but moralists – who are overwhelmingly in favor of this -- drive this number.

(Hat tip, Andrew Sullivan.)

Conventional wisdom is that Democrats learned about the importance of talking about faith after the election of 2004. Madeline Bunting, writing in The Guardian, says that Gordon Brown is the third Prime Minister in a row in Great Britain to “do God.” The son of a Church of Scotland minister, he says he will bring “competence and serious moral purpose” to government.

It's a curious phenomenon that at a time when Christianity continues its steady decline in this country, religion has re-emerged as a central inspiration of political rhetoric - not as the flash-in-the-pan aberration of one individual but now well established as a convention of the centre ground, acknowledged by the Cameroons as much as by Labour. This strange afterlife of religious belief must be pretty galling to secularists and humanists.

But even as Brown talks about “moral purpose,” and is comfortable with integrating his faith into his political talk, there are differences between him and his predecessor, Tony Blair.

It's very hard to imagine Brown praying with anyone, let alone George Bush, nor is he likely to make references to God's judgment on his Iraq policy, and least likely of all is his being tempted down the path to Rome. Blair found God in emotionally charged prayer meetings in Oxford hosted by a gregarious Australian vicar. In contrast, Brown saw faith sustaining communities through hardship in his father's ministry - he describes it as "social Christianity". He was not interested in theology and personal salvation in the hereafter, the hellfire and damnation side of Presbyterianism, but in how religion inspires bonds that help individuals and communities through hard times, how it provides solidarity and ensures resilience - and that still fascinates him.

She continues:

Brown's faith bears the hallmarks of his origins. He may have done away with hellfire but he's replaced it with a dour if noble vision of endless duty, effort and obligation - his school motto of "I will try my utmost" - without even the promise of celestial reward. Self-restraint and self-discipline are principles written into the Brown DNA but to a consumer-obsessed, debt-ridden electorate, they are as foreign as Mars.

Read the rest: Madeline Bunting: The church may be struggling, but in politics its rhetoric is on the rise.

Meanwhile politicians in the U.S. continue to play the God card. Recent evidence:
-Stump Speeches Taking a Page from the Bible
-Op-Ed: The Gospel Of Obama
-Faith Has Role in Politics, Obama Tells Church

Who said that "democracy cannot live without that true religion which gives a nation a sense of justice and of moral purpose"? Why, it was that nominal Episcopalian FDR, as Lew Daly points out in his Boston Review essay on religion, politics and the concept of the common good.

John Buchanan, editor and publisher of the Christian Century, has written an interesting essay reminding us of wisdom of Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural address. In particular, it is a useful antidote to a religious tribalism that is beginning to infect political life:

Like the Gettysburg Address, [Lincoln's second inaguaral address] was a relatively brief speech in a day when public orators, particularly politicians, spoke for hours—only 703 words, 505 of one syllable. (What a model for preachers.)

Frederick Douglass said of the Second Inaugural: "The address sounded more like a sermon than a state paper." White cites Reinhold Niebuhr's comment: "Lincoln's religious convictions were superior in depth and purity to those held by the religious as well as the political leaders of the day."

The Second Inaugural contains Lincoln's notable words about the war: "Both sides read the same Bible," Lincoln said, "pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. . . . The prayers of both could not be answered: that of neither has been answered fully." White says that Lincoln was "inveighing against a tribal God" who would take the side of one part against the other, "and building a case for an inclusive God."

I can't think of more relevant words in a time when religion is used for partisan political purposes. And I don't know a more noble or apt sentiment for our time than the one with which this president concluded: "With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations."

Read it all here.

I am also reminded of the famous story of Lincoln being asked whether God was on the side of the North. He responded simply that the more important question was whether he and the rest of the Union were on the side of God.

TIME's lead story right now is "Leveling the Praying Field: How the Democrats Got Religion." The article explores what is happening as devout Christians start looking elsewhere for political leadership as the Republican strongholds no longer measure up:

The Democrats are so fired up, you could call them the new Moral Majority. This time, however, the emphasis is as much on the majority as on the morality as they try to frame a message in terms of broadly shared values that don't alarm members of minority religions or secular voters. It has become an article of faith among party leaders that it was sheer strategic stupidity to cede the values debate to Republicans for so long; that most people want to reduce abortion but not criminalize it, protect the earth instead of the auto industry, raise up the least among us; and that a lot of voters care as much about the candidates' principles as about their policies. "What we're seeing," says strategist Mike McCurry, "is a Great Awakening in the Democratic Party."

The revival comes at a time when the entire religious-political landscape is changing shape. A new generation of evangelical leaders is rejecting old labels; now an alliance of religious activists that runs from the crunchy left across to the National Association of Evangelicals has called for action to address global warming, citing the biblical imperative of caring for creation. Mainline, evangelical and Roman Catholic organizations have united to push for immigration reform. The possibility that there is common ground to be colonized by those willing to look for it offers a tantalizing prospect of alliances to come, but only if Democrats can overcome concerns within their party. "One-third gets it," says a Democratic values pioneer, talking about the rank and file. "A second third understands that this can help us win. And another third is positively terrified."

Among the assertions:

• When you wipe abortion from the values debate, a landscape of other issues opens up that Democrats are most poised to address, such as environmental stewardship, social justice and racial equality.
• 40 percent of Evangelicals now identify as Independent voters, a number that's grown rapidly in just three years even as they stop identifying as Republicans at an even faster clip.
• The Kerry campaign discovered how it was resonating with religious voters totally by accident and way too late.
• Several figures are helping influence how this plays out for 2008, including Mara Vanderslice, Randy Brinson, Jim Wallis, and others—and this isn't sitting well with organizations with more, shall we say, traditionally leftist positions.

Read it all here.

http://www.religionandsocialpolicy.org/newsletters/article.cfm?id=6756At a multi-denominational press conference on Capitol Hill on July 17, Bishop John Bryson Chane of the Diocese of Washington and five other faith leaders called upon the leadership of the United States Congress to stand for a farm bill consistent with "our nation's fundamental values of fairness and opportunity for all people." according to Alex Baumgarten, reporting for Episcopal News Service.

"Current U.S. foreign policy is a broken promise to American farmers -- especially small rural farmers -- and also is a threat to the world's poor," said Chane, speaking of the Episcopal Church's commitment to farm-bill reform to national reporters gathered one room away from where the House Agriculture Committee was slated to begin its final consideration of the U.S. farm bill later in the day.

Noting that the Committee thus far has rejected calls for reform of the U.S. commodity-crop payment program, Chane said that "the House leadership must now begin to address this bill from a moral perspective and center that transcends the typical as-you-go-politics that have sustained U.S. agricultural policy" in recent years.

Chane was joined at the press conference by Father Andrew Small of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops; the Rev. David Beckman, president of Bread for the World; Sister Simone Campbell, executive director of NETWORK, a national Catholic social justice lobby; the Rev. Earl Trent, director of missions for the Progressive National Baptist Convention; and Bishop Theodore Schneider of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's Metro Washington, D.C. synod.

The press conference also marked the public release of a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi from the heads of 13 Christian denominations and faith-based advocacy organizations, including Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori. Stressing that "the vision behind the first U.S. farm bill in the 1930s -- an economic safety net for farmers during difficult times -- is barely recognizable in today's farm bill," the leaders called for Congress to enact a "new covenant with rural America" and people living in poverty around the world.

Read it all, including the letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi here

Interested persons can sign up here, and learn more about the farm bill here.

Ethics Daily has more from Bishop Chane and others. A comprehensive roundup can be found here.

Senator David Vitter's (R-LA) association with the woman known as the D. C. Madam has touched off another round of journalistic rumination about whether private sins are a public matter. The Washington Post has featured three columns on this issue in the last five days, all by veteran Washington journalists.

E. J. Dionne raised the issue first on July 13, writing:

My defense of Vitter is qualified because I believe that married guys have a moral obligation not to seek the pleasures of "escort services."

Nor do I like hypocrisy. During the battle over the impeachment of Bill Clinton, Vitter wrote in the New Orleans Times-Picayune that if no "meaningful action" were taken against the president, "his leadership will only further drain any sense of values left to our political culture." Vitter, then a state representative, suggested that Clinton was "morally unfit to govern."

But a big part of me is rooting for Vitter to survive because I so want to return to a time when we -- that "we" includes the media -- chose to pay little attention to the extracurricular sexual activities of our politicians. The magnitude of our public problems does not afford us the luxury of indulging in crusades about politicians' private lives, even those involving a high degree of hypocrisy.

David Ignatius visited the subject in a sidelong sort of way two days later, pointing out that in the age of the blog, where anybody can report on anything, it is no longer clear what sorts of conversations and activities are "on" the record:

What are the ground rules of life? Can we assume any "right to privacy" in this digital age when everything we say or do can become part of a permanent record that anyone -- friends, enemies, the government -- can access? With cameras sprouting on every street corner in Washington and New York (and have you checked out your nearest interstate lately?) should motorists just assume that their zone of privacy ends when they leave their driveways?

Privacy isn't what it used to be, certainly. A woman known as the D.C. Madam disseminates her phone records to fight charges that her "escort service" is a prostitution ring. The disclosure exposes a first-term senator named David Vitter. Well, fine, you say, Vitter is a noisy "family values" conservative who should be indicted for hypocrisy if nothing else. But what about the thousands of other people whose phone numbers are on the D.C. Madam's call list? Are they fair game?

But yesterday, Ruth Marcus, announced htat she planend to "opt out of the 'whatever happened to privacy' pity party that's convened in the aftermath of the Sen. David Vitter sex scandal.

She writes:

For some people, adultery itself is disqualifying in a politician. I think marriage is too mysterious an enterprise to go that far. It's hard to know -- and therefore impossible to judge -- what happens inside someone else's marriage. People stray; spouses forgive, or not; that's their business. But paying for sex, in whatever form, is both illegal and repulsive. It reveals a view of women as commodities that is relevant to lawmakers' public responsibilities.

She is wise to point out that many politicians base their stand on issues such as this one on the expediencies of the moment:

One man who has understood the importance of dealing with the demand side is former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who went after prostitution in the city by targeting customers as well as prostitutes. Under "Operation Losing Proposition," Giuliani's police arrested johns and confiscated their cars. He didn't wring his hands over their lost privacy.

So what does Candidate Giuliani say now -- now that his own marital missteps are campaign fodder, and his southern regional chairman is David Vitter? At a town meeting in New Hampshire last week, Giuliani sounded like my fellow columnists. "I believe," he said, "it's a personal issue."

From the Episcopal Public Policy Network:

Already this year, you've heard a lot from us about the U.S. farm bill – the legislation that governs U.S. agricultural and food policy – and the need for reforms that will strengthen rural communities and fight hunger at home and abroad. The House Agriculture Committee is giving final consideration to the bill this week, and – despite the advocacy of an unprecedented alliance of faith groups and antipoverty advocates around the country – all signs indicate that calls for farm-bill reform have fallen on deaf ears in the committee. This means that the cause of reform is now in the hands of the full House, and that it will be critical over the next few weeks for every member of the House to hear from constituents that the status quo is not good enough. It will also be critical to ask lawmakers to press House leaders to stand with the champions of reform.

Specifically, the farm bill should:

Reform the commodity-payment program so that our nation's farm policy helps U.S. farmers of modest means and does not distort commodity prices and supply in ways that make it harder for farmers in poor countries to feed their families; AND

Increase investments in food-stamp benefits, rural development, conservation programs, and international-food aid programs that encourage local food security. (For more information, click here.)

Click here to email your representative.

Bishop Gene Robinson has publicly endorsed Barack Obama, according to published accounts of a telephone press conference today. On the one hand, Robinson is in the spotlight as a "civil rights leader," but two cautions spring to mind, both issued by the Interfaith Alliance soon after the report of Robinson's endorsement emerged.

While not listed on the barackobama.com website, the release is at Campaigns and Elections here.

Robinson said he believes that Obama’s faith and background as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer make him uniquely qualified to advance our government’s commitment to equality and compassion for those “for whom America is not working so well.”

“As my work shows me every day, leadership means bringing people together and inspiring them to live out their values,” Bishop Robinson said. “Barack Obama sees beyond the partisanship and hopelessness that have dominated in recent years, and the movement he’s building is bringing vital new energy and optimism into our democratic process. I’m excited to work with Barack to bridge the old divides and make this country one again.”

The release notes that Robinson has never publicly endorsed a candidate for office before, which leads to a question of how appropriate it is for him to do so. In a statement released by the Interfaith Alliance, Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy notes that the waters are muddy, not only because mixing faith and politics so directly can jeopardize a religious organization's protected tax status:

Today’s endorsement of Senator Barack Obama’s campaign for president by Bishop Gene Robinson is just the latest example of candidates misusing religious leaders for political gain. Over the last year we have seen many, if not all, of the presidential candidates set up websites promoting endorsements by religious leaders. While endorsements like today’s raise the possibility of legal action against religious leaders, our concerns are rooted more in the impact on the sanctity of religion and the integrity of government.

I encourage candidates to talk about the proper role of religion in public life, and I strongly defend the right of religious leaders to speak out about the important issues we are facing in the world today. However, when candidates turn religious leaders into political tools, they have crossed a line.

This is a dangerous road religious leaders are being led down. I caution them to be careful how far they go.

A short entry on the announcement at the New Hampshire Union Leader notes that a fuller story will run tomorrow.

For Labor Day weekend, a meditation on the spiritual importance of living wage legislation from Archdeacon Michael S. Kendall of the Episcopal Diocese of New York. See it here. And read this brochure from the Episcopal Network for Economic Justice.

The Café hasn't kept up with all of the conversations engendered by the arrest of Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho), but Unitarian minister the Rev. Deborah Hafner has, and she's presented an interesting perspective in this and other items on her blog.

A sample of her thinking:

I do not believe that I should judge private adult consensual behavior, but when it invades public spaces or when that person is a public figure actively working against the very behaviors that he engages in, then I think we have the right to weigh in. Yes, I expect that many of us are experiencing a sense of schadenfreude (gotta love that word, now someone needs to teach me how to pronounce it), but I also spoke out against Bill Clinton having sex with his twenty something intern.

As I have written here many times, the hallmarks of an ethical, moral sexual relationship are that it is consensual, nonexploitative, honest, mutually pleasurable, and protected -- and that ethic applies to straights and gays, married and single people, teenagers and the elderly. I fail to see how anonymous sex in a public bathroom could ever meet all of those criteria, regardless of the sex of the participants.

As one embarrassing episode follows another, with almost predictable regularity, perhaps it is time for Republicans and conservatives to ask themselves an obvious question: What makes the Republican Party -- and the conservative movement more generally -- so attractive to closeted homosexual men?