Who thinks up those goofy, pun-laden slogans seen on church marquees and sign boards, anyway? Are phrases like "seven days without prayer makes one weak" or "forbidden fruit creates many jams" the new hermenuetic of a drive-by world?

Slate magazine's Doree Shafir explores the background and development of church signs including an interesting slide show.

There is a web-site where you can create your own church signs. Someone took this and turned into a very funny Church Sign Smackdown.

Of course, there is money to be made. There are books to help busy pastors or sign committees with writers block keep their signs current.

Photographers Pam and Steve Paulsen created a book containing 300 images of church signs across the country "Church Signs Across America." An April 8, 2007 New York Times Book Review says they "have found and documented the uncommon poetry and sly wit used to rouse the flock, and the book is curiously inspirational."

Most of the slogans are decidedly clever — “Free Trip to Heaven, Details Inside,” at the Ascension Lutheran Church in Kansas City, Mo., appears on the cover, though that’s not even the best.

Here’s a sampling: “Rapture, the Only Way to Fly,” at the Venice Baptist Church in Los Angeles; “You’ve Seen the Movie, Now Come Read the Book,” at the Central Parkway Baptist Church in Orlando, Fla.; “The Easter Bunny Didn’t Rise From the Dead,” at the Cypress Lake Baptist Church in Fort Myers, Fla.; and “Swallow Your Pride. It Contains No Calories,” at the Bridgeton Bible Church in Bridgeton, Mo. But the hippest, at the Montgomery Place Church of God in Albuquerque, is “Jesus Is the Rock That Doesn’t Roll.”

Not all are this witty, but even the somber ones, like “Exposure to the Son May Prevent Burning,” “We Are Too Blessed to Be Depressed” and “Pray Until Something Happens,” provoke a smile. Nor must one be a true believer to savor them. The agnostic who merely appreciates the art of snappy advertising copy will know exactly how difficult it is to write something as effective as the motto for the Christian Assembly Ministries in Stewartsville, N.J.: “Give Your Troubles to God. He’s Up All Night Anyway.”

Curiously inspirational or not, the signs point to the challenge and pitfalls of making the gospel comprehensible.

In a speech inflamed with passion, anger and an altar call's possibility of hope, Bill Moyers spoke to General Synod on Saturday morning about poverty and justice. His 57-minute keynote address - interrupted by applause more than three dozen times and followed by a two-minute standing ovation - lamented the growing gap between the rich and poor in America and called the UCC to act in the name of the Jesus who was a disturber of the peace and threw the rascals out. Evan Golder reporting for UCC News quotes from Moyers speech:

"I have come to say that America's revolutionary heritage – and America's revolutionary spirit – "life, liberty and the pursuit of justice, through government of, by, and for the people" – is under siege," he said. "And if churches of conscience don't take the lead in their rescue and revival, we can lose our democracy!"

"You have raised a prophetic voice against the militarism, materialism and racism that chokes America's arteries.

"You have placed yourselves in the thick of the fight for social justice.

"You have aligned yourself on the side of liberty, equality and compassion.

"And you have been a church of prominent firsts: first to ordain an African American, first to ordain a woman, and first to ordain an openly gay person."

For 30 years," Moyers said, "we have witnessed a class war fought from the top down against the idea and ideal of equality. It has been a drive by a radical elite to gain ascendancy over politics and to dismantle the political institutions, the legal and statutory canons, and the intellectual and cultural frameworks that checked the excesses of private power."

It's as if you invited 100 persons to a party, divided a pie into five pieces and gave four pieces all to one person, leaving one piece for the remaining 99, he said.

"Don't be surprised if they fight over it," he said, "which is exactly what's happening when people look at their wages and then their taxes and end up hating the government and anything it does.

"The strain on working people and on family life has become intense," he said. "Television sets and cell phones and iPods are cheap, but higher education, health care, public transportation, drugs, housing and cars have risen in price faster than typical family incomes."

Read more here

Watch the speech here

Virtually every major religious group in the United States has renounced the use of torture. Surprisingly, however, the American public still shows strong support for the use of torture as a tactic in fighting terror. Perhaps even more surprisingly, once other factors are taken into account, one's religious beliefs and frequency of worship appear to have quite modest effects on views about torture.

John G. Green, a professor of political science at the University of Akron and Senior Fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, has an article (PDF) in the Review of Faith & International Affairs that discusses a Pew Research Center for the People and the Press survey on torture and faith. Pew surveyed public opinion on torture and terrorism in 2004, 2005, and 2006, for the entire public and for six large religious groups: white Evangelical Protestants, white Roman Catholics, white Mainline Protestants, Black Protestants, all other religious communities, and the religiously unaffiliated.

The study found evidence of only a modest effect of religious denomination, particulary when political affiliation--a much more important factor--was taken into account:

Overall this survey found that 17.7 percent of the American public said that torture was “often justified” against suspected terrorists and another 27.8 percent said it was “sometimes justified.” Hence, 45.5 percent had what might be called “permissive” views on torture under these circumstances. Meanwhile, 18.8 percent said that torture was “rarely justified” and 32.8 percent said it was “never justified.” Thus, 51.6 percent of Americans held what might be called “restrictive” views on torture as a tactic in security policy. The results from the fall of 2006 survey were very similar to 2004 and 2005.

Moreover, there was only modest variation in opinion among the religious communities. White Evangelical Protestants were the most permissive of the use of torture, at just over one-half (51.6 percent), and White Catholics were almost evenly divided—47.5 percent accepting and 46.3 percent opposed. Black Protestants (52.8 percent) and white Mainline Protestants (53.2 percent) had a slim majority in opposition, while solid majorities of the composite All Others category (56.4 percent) and the unaffiliated (55.9 percent) held restrictive views.

Frequency of worship attendance was modestly associated with restrictive views on torture as well. Note that for the entire public weekly worship attenders were more likely to oppose torture by a few percentage points than the country as a whole.

The largest influence on views of torture was not religion, but political views:

Not surprisingly, party identification was strongly associated with views on torture. For example, 66.8 percent of Republicans held permissive views on torture, while 66.4 percent of Democrats had restrictive views. The independents were arranged in-between, but with a solid majority of the “pure” independents holding restrictive views. A similar pattern held for ideology: 59.0 percent of respondents who said they were “very conservative” reported permissive views, and 66.4 percent of those who said they were “very liberal” had the opposite position on torture. Here, too, a majority of moderates had restrictive views

Once the effects of political attitudes were taken into account, being a weekly attending Evangelical was associated with more restrictive views on torture, while being a less observant Evangelical had no impact on torture attitudes (due to a lack of statistical significance). A similar pattern held for Mainline Protestants, Catholics, and the composite group of all other religious groups. These findings are a bit counter-intuitive because weekly worship attenders tend to be more Republican, conservative, and supportive of the Bush administration than their co-religionists. However, it is precisely the impact of such political attitudes on torture attitudes that the statistical model has take into account.

What explains these patterns for weekly attenders? One possibility is that other demographic
characteristics of regular worship attenders are at work behind these figures. And there is some evidence for this possibility: women and older people tend to have more restrictive views of torture, overall and in each religious category. Of course, women and older people are also more likely to be religiously observant compared to men and younger people, so the order of causality is not entirely clear. However, including gender and age in the statistical analysis does not change the basic patterns . . . . very much.

Another possibility is that the flow of information within denominations and congregations encourages a restrictive view of torture. After all, people who attend worship regularly are much more likely to hear messages from denominational leaders and the parish clergy, and it could be that the leader’s statements against torture have reached receptive ears in many religious communities. A final possibility is that the weekly attenders are more familiar with religious teachings that may raise doubts about the morality of torture. While the specific beliefs may well differ from tradition to tradition, an emphasis in the dignity of human beings is common to many faiths.

Read the entire study here.

Is it surprising the religon plays such a small role in influencing views on a moral issue such as torture? Why is this not true of other issues such as abortion and stem cell research?

Much has been written about the success of recent books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Christopher Hitchens. David C. Steinmetz, the Amos Ragan Kearns Professor of the History of Christianity at the Duke University Divinity School, offers a useful guide to two of the most prominent "New Atheists."

Probably the best-known of the so-called new atheists are the journalist Christopher Hitchens of Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins of Oxford University.

Hitchens was born in Portsmouth, England, and, like Dawkins, educated at Balliol College, Oxford. His book, God Is Not Great, makes it clear that he regards religion as an enemy of civilization, an entirely toxic enterprise that ruins anything it touches.

Religion has its origin in what Hitchens regards as the perfectly understandable human fear of death (since humans are the only animals who know in advance they are going to die) and in the hope, completely unfounded, that there is some way to avoid this grim, but inescapable, fate.

Ever the pugnacious contrarian, Hitchens is witty, combative, sarcastic, intelligent and generally outrageous. He loves to rip out the shirttails of the pious (whatever their religion) and set fire to them.

Dawkins is a somewhat different animal. He was raised as a rather conventional Anglican, but abandoned his faith at 16, when he was persuaded that evolution, and not divine providence, accounted for the rich diversity of the natural world. If purely natural processes provided satisfying explanations for the world as it is, then belief in God became for Dawkins a redundant luxury.

In his book The God Delusion, Dawkins spells out his conviction that reason embraces conclusions based on evidence alone, while faith believes assertions based on no evidence whatever. Worse yet, faith often contradicts evidence that undercuts what it wants to believe.

The Oxford theologian Alister McGrath -- himself an adult convert to Christianity from atheism -- challenged Dawkins' view of faith as irrational. McGrath was convinced that Christianity provided him with a richer, more coherent and therefore more intellectually satisfying account of reality than atheism had ever offered. He conceded that his starting point was not reason alone but felt that his position was nevertheless thoroughly rational.

McGrath echoes the argument of St. Augustine that reason needs to be oriented toward the truth so that it can function properly. Faith is not about swallowing as many groundless propositions as possible. It is about an essential alignment with the way things really are. Otherwise, reason is clueless about things that genuinely matter.

Read the entire article here.

The "New Atheism" is not limited to the literary set. A group of enterprising atheists have presented a video "Blasphemy Challenge" on You Tube, urging atheists to show their confidence by denouncing the Holy Spirit. Over one thousand videos have been posted on You Tube in response to this challenge.

One response well worth viewing is that of Father Mathew Moretzs of St. Pauls Episcopal Church in Yonkers, New York. His response can be found here.

Professor Michael Behe of the Lehigh University Biological Sciences Department is the intellect behind the Intelligent Design movement, and he has a new book defending his view that Darwinian evolution is incomplete, and that there is evidence of an intelligent designer. Since Intelligent Design is attractive to Christians that believe in a Creator God, we thought that it would be useful to hear from Jerry Coyne, a University of Chicago professor who has a thorough review of Behe's new book in the New Republic.

Professor Coyne begins by summarizing Behe's new argument--as well as Behe's concessions to evolution:

For a start, let us be clear about what Behe now accepts about evolutionary theory. He has no problem with a 4.5-billion-year-old Earth, nor with evolutionary change over time, nor apparently with its ample documentation through the fossil record--the geographical distribution of organisms, the existence of vestigial traits testifying to ancient ancestry, and the finding of fossil "missing links" that show common ancestry among major groups of organisms. Behe admits that most evolution is caused by natural selection, and that all species share common ancestors. He even accepts the one fact that most other IDers would rather die than admit: that humans shared a common ancestor with chimpanzees and other apes.

Why does Behe come clean about all this? The reason is plain. There is simply too much evidence for any scientist to deny these facts without losing all credibility. "Intelligent design" is desperate for scientific respectability, and you do not get that by fighting facts about which everybody agrees. But with most of evolutionary biology accepted, what's left for a good IDer to contest? Behe finds his bugbear in evolutionary theory's view that "random mutation" provides the raw material for evolutionary change.

The first problem is that Behe's "scientific" ideas are offered to the public in a trade book, and have never gone through the usual process of vetting in peer-reviewed scientific journals. This was also the case with Darwin's Black Box. In fact, Behe has never published a paper supporting intelligent design in any scientific journal, despite his assertion in Darwin's Black Box that his own discovery of biochemical design "must be ranked as one of the greatest achievements in the history of science," rivaling "those of Newton and Einstein, Lavoisier and Schrödinger, Pasteur, and Darwin." Surely such an important theory deserves a place in the scientific literature! But the reason for the lack of peer review is obvious: Behe's ideas would never pass muster among scientists, despite the fact that anybody who really could disprove Darwinism would win great renown.

So let us put some empirical questions to Behe, since his theory is supposedly scientific. Which features of life were designed, as opposed to evolved? How exactly did the mutations responsible for design come about? Who was the Designer? To what end did the Designer work? If the goal was perfection, why are some features of life (such as our appendix or prostate gland) palpably imperfect?

. . .

Is Behe's theory testable? Well, not really, since it consists not of positive assertions, but of criticisms of evolutionary theory and solemn declarations that it is powerless to explain complexity. And it is certainly true that scientists will never be able to give Darwinian explanations for the evolution of everything. The origins of many features, such as the bony plates on the back of the Stegosaurus, are lost in the irrecoverable past. But neither can archaeology unearth everything about ancient history. We do not maintain on these grounds that archaeology is not a science.

Behe waffles when confronted with the testability problem of ID and turns it back on evolutionists, saying that "coming from Darwinists, both objections [the lack of predictions and the untestability of ID] are instances of the pot calling the kettle black." He then waffles even more when implying that ID does not even need to be testable: "Both additional demands--for hard-and-fast predictions or for direct evidence of a theory's fundamental principle--are disingenuous. Philosophers have long known that no simple criterion, including prediction, automatically qualifies or disqualifies something as science, and fundamental entities invoked by a theory can remain mysterious for centuries, or indefinitely."

But who is being disingenuous here? Evolution has been tested, and confirmed, many times over. Every time we find an early human fossil dating back several million years, it confirms evolution. Every time a new transitional fossil is found, such as the recently discovered "missing links" between land animals and whales, it confirms evolution. Each time a bacterial strain becomes resistant to an antibiotic, it confirms evolution. And evolutionary biology makes predictions. Here is one that Darwin himself made: that the earliest human ancestors will be found in Africa. (That prediction was confirmed, of course.) Another was made by Neil Shubin at the University of Chicago: that transitional forms between fish and amphibians would be found in 370-million-year-old rocks. Sure enough, he discovered that there were rocks of that age in Canada, went and looked at them, and found the right fossils. Intelligent design, in contrast, makes no predictions. It is infinitely malleable in the face of counterevidence, cannot be refuted, and is therefore not science.

Behe's book can be found here.

Several studies have noted that scientists, as a group, are much less religious than the general public. Now a survey published in the journal Social Problems finds that this is not the result of scientific training--those who choose science as a career are already less religious before their education.

LiveScience offers a good summary. Here are highlights:

Scientists are less religious than the general population, a new study shows, but the reason has little to do with their study of science or academic pressures.

The findings challenge notions that science is responsible for a lack of faith among researchers, indicating that household upbringing carries the biggest weight in determining religiousness.
"Our study data do not strongly support the idea that scientists simply drop their religious identities upon professional training, due to an inherent conflict between science and faith, or to institutional pressure to conform," said Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo and co-author of the study.

. . .

Detailed in the latest issue of the journal Social Problems, the study is based on a survey of 1,646 scientists at 21 elite research universities and in-depth interviews with 271 of the scientists. Specifically, the survey contacted researchers specializing in physics, chemistry, biology, sociology, economics, political science, psychology and other fields.

Ecklund said nearly 75 percent of the subjects responded, which she said is extremely high for a faculty survey.

So why are scientists less religious? The data indicate that being raised in a religious home is the best predictor of how religious someone will be—scientist or member of the general population.

For general population information, Ecklund used data from the 1998 and 2004 General Social Survey (GSS), which is a national survey conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Ecklund then compared the data to the scientists’ set, which was modeled after the GSS.

Read the entire article here.

The difference between scientists and the general public is large. 52 percent of scientists surveyed said they had no religious affiliation, compared with only 14 percent of the general population. Interestingly, however, younger scientists were more likely to believe in God and attend religious services than older scientists.

The implication of this study seems to be that those with religious faith are less likely to choose a religious career than those without faith. Why is that? And why has there been a change in this trend with younger scientists?

Faith-based investment products that speak to people's moral and spiritual conscience are following in the footsteps of "socially responsible" investing, which was making headlines some months back as a place that the progressive/liberal affluent could put their money. Now, this morning's Washington Post examines mutual funds with a mission, which have a lot of appeal for the socially conservative evangelical investor:

Religious conservatives are mobilizing to attach a voice to the cash they have on Wall Street. For example, the Tupelo, Miss.-based American Family Association is for the first time urging its 2.8 million online members to purge their investment portfolios of companies that support a "gay agenda" or "anti-family" practices.

Yet, as social conservatives increasingly tether their agendas to their investments, they're hardly walking in lockstep. On the contrary, they're choosing among a range of religious financial products -- including 16 families of faith-based mutual funds -- that vary in how they define corporate responsibility.

Evangelicals, for instance, are getting behind more than one vision. Some have contributed to the $600 million Timothy Plan, a family of mutual funds with evangelical roots and a pledge to avoid "securities of any company that is actively contributing to the moral decline of our society." Translation: screening out companies -- including many in the benchmark S&P 500 Index -- affiliated with pornography, abortion, gambling, tobacco, alcohol and non-married lifestyles.

However, evangelicals are also behind much of the $900 million invested with the politically enigmatic Mennonite Mutual Aid Praxis Mutual Funds. This group avoids companies such as Pfizer, which fund managers regard as manufacturers of abortion products. But it also lobbies on behalf of shareholders for eco-friendly corporate policies, and its pacifist orientation screens out stocks in defense contractors and bonds issued by the U.S. Treasury.

It's not just the Christian evangelicals hopping on the God-money bus. Catholics, on the one hand, have their funds, and so do Muslims. But it's important to note their buzzword is "morally responsible" investing, according to the article--as if they did in fact take their cue from the progressive movement, and they say as much.

Until now, the American Family Association, for instance, has focused on consumer action, such as a successful 2006 boycott that led to the demise of NBC's racy "The Book of Daniel." Consumer pressure is easier than investor pressure to explain and to use in rallying a broad base of supporters, according to AFA President Tim Wildmon.

But he says his organization has been remiss in letting agenda-driven investing be the near-exclusive province of left-leaning mutual funds with a "socially responsible" label.

"We just dropped the ball on that," he said. "We haven't been very smart in that regard. But now that's about to start changing."

The entire article is here.

The headline "The Church of Baseball," evoking a line from the Bull Durham movie, will be familiar to Daily Episcopalian readers who saw Heidi Shott's reflection on the parallels between devotion to one's baseball team and the Episcopal Church earlier this year (here, if you missed it). But Religion and Ethics Weekly, in a piece with the same title, this week is examining a new marketing campaign designed to attract church groups to baseball games:

Fans and families cheered in the parking lot of Prince George's Stadium in Bowie, Maryland, as Jason Dunn, lead singer of the Christian Canadian punk band Hawk Nelson, with his mohawk haircut and cut-off-shirt sleeves revealing the tattoos on his arms, took a break from jumping around stage to explain how the song "Everything You Ever Wanted" was about trying to live up to the expectations of his father.

"But I am here to tell you that Jesus Christ is better than any father any of us could have," said Dunn.

Pre-game Christian concerts like this one, held on a humid summer evening at the home of the Bowie Baysox, a Class AA affiliate of the Baltimore Orioles, are part of a rapidly growing promotional -- some would say controversial -- event called Faith Night being offered at major and minor league baseball stadiums around the country.

...

But baseball, still widely regarded as America's national pastime, seems to have embarked on something of a new era with Faith Night, searching for higher ticket sales and different fan markets. As baseball groupie and spiritual seeker Annie Savoy, played by Susan Sarandon, said in the 1988 movie Bull Durham, "I've tried 'em all, I really have, and the only church that truly feeds the soul, day in, day out, is the Church of Baseball."

Faith Night "has gone from one team in Nashville in 2002 to 46 this year," according to Brent High, president and partner of Third Coast Sports Inc., the self-described "foremost authority in church marketing and event planning for sports teams."

"This rolling tour is now literally coast-to-coast," said High, who produces the Faith Night tour.

It's all here.

As readers of The Lead are well aware, there has been a rush of best selling books challenging religion by several noted atheists. Are these books saying anythng different from atheist tracks of the past? Harvard Professor Harvey Mansfield thinks that the New Atheism really is new. While atheists in the past attacked the church, these new atheists are attacking religion itself:

As if we were back in eighteenth-century France, atheist tracts are abroad in our land, their flamboyant titles defiant. The God Delusion, God Is Not Great, Letter to a Christian Nation, Atheist Manifesto, Atheist Universe: These are not subtle insinuations against God, requiring inferences from readers, but open opposition inviting readers to join in thumbing their noses. The Cambridge Companion to Atheism, newly published, offers comfort and scholarly reassurance, if not consolation, to atheists who might otherwise feel lonely--as, believing what they do, they surely must.

Atheism isn't what it was in the eighteenth century. Now, the focus of the attack is not the Church, which is no longer dominant, but religion itself. The disdain one used to hear for "organized religion" extends now to the individual believer's faith. Despite the change, politics is still the thrust of the attack. It's just that the delusion of religion is now allowed to be the responsibility of the believer, not of some group that is deluding him. A more direct approach is required.

In our time, religion, having lost its power to censor and dominate, still retains its ability, in America especially, to compete for adherents in our democracy of ideas. So to reduce the influence of religion, it is politically necessary to attack it in the private sphere as well as in the public square. This suggests that the distinction between public and private, dear to our common liberalism, is sometimes a challenge to maintain.

Read it all here.

Is Mansfield correct? Is the focus of the New Atheism different than in the past?

In Wandering Around an Albuquerque Airport Terminal poet Naomi Shihab Nye tells of an encounter that revealed to her, "This is the world I want to live in. The shared world."

After learning my flight was detained 4 hours, I heard the announcement: "If anyone in the vicinity of gate 4-A understands any Arabic, please come to the gate immediately."

Well -- one pauses these days. Gate 4-A was my own gate. I went there.

An older woman in full traditional Palestinian dress, just like my grandma wore, was crumpled to the floor, wailing loudly. "Help," said the flight service person. "Talk to her. What is her problem? we told her the flight was going to be four hours late and she did this."

I put my arm around her and spoke to her haltingly. "Shu dow-a, shu- biduck habibti, stani stani schway, min fadlick, Sho bit se-wee?"

The minute she heard any words she knew -- however poorly used -- she stopped crying.

She thought our flight had been cancelled entirely. She needed to be in El Paso for some major medical treatment the following day. I said "No, no, we're fine, you'll get there, just late. Who is picking you up? Let's call him and tell him."

We called her son and I spoke with him in English. I told him I would stay with his mother till we got on the plane and would ride next to her -- SouthWest.

---------------

Soon after, she pulled a sack of homemade mamool cookies -- little powdered sugar crumbly mounds stuffed with dates and nuts -- out of her bag and was offering them to all the women at the gate.

To my amazement, not a single woman declined one. It was like a sacrament. The traveler from Argentina, the traveler from California, the lovely woman from Laredo -- we were all covered with the same powdered sugar. And smiling. There are no better cookies.

And then the airline broke out the free (non-alcoholic) beverages from huge coolers and the two little girls for our flight -- one African American, one Mexican American -- ran around serving us all Apple Juice and Lemonade. And they were covered with powdered sugar too.

Read it all here

In an effort to help ease prison overcrowding by providing opportunities for inmates to improve their behavior and reduce recidivism, faith-based criminal justice programs are springing up in correctional institutions around the country. An Associated Press series on prison overcrowding shines a spotlight on this phenomenon, highlighting several programs in the Oklahoma region that encourage inmates to turn to God.

The one-year motivational course is among a growing list of alternative and diversionary criminal justice programs designed to either direct offenders away from costly prison stays through specialized drug and mental health courts or change the behavior of inmates — changes that can lead to less misconduct in prison, fewer repeat offenders and lower prison costs.

“That’s what we’re all about — changing criminal thinking,” said Millicent Newton-Embry, warden at Mabel Bassett.

Since a robbery conviction four years ago, Mabel Bassett inmate Jimmie Jones said she has struggled to cope with her anger. “Personal issues that I didn’t want to accept,” said Jones, 34, of McAlester, who is enrolled in the faith-based program.

Jones said her anger used to boil over into fights with other inmates at the women’s prison. Participation in the prison’s faith program has helped her become calmer.

“Before this program I wanted to change but I had no direction,” Jones said. “I’ve learned that it’s all right to be angry. You’ve just got to control it. You’ve got to find a way to channel.

The programs are not without their detractors, with some groups saying it's a breach of the establishment clause in the First Amendment:

Critics of the legislation have said it may violate the constitutional separation between church and state and give faith-based groups some of lawmakers’ oversight authority over the state Department of Corrections.

Last year, a federal judge ruled that a Bible-based prison program at a prison in Iowa violated the First Amendment’s freedom of religion clause by using state funds to promote Christianity to inmates.

Read more about the programs here.

The Federal Bureau of Prisons has directed the departments chaplains to purge their libraries of all religious books which are not on list approved developed by the Bureau. According to a New York Times report by Laurie Goodstein, the move is supposed to prevent inmates from getting relgiously-based terrorist ideas.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

The list, which has reduced religious libraries to a list of 150 approved books and 150 multi-media for each of 20 religions or religious categories, does not ban liturgical texts, prayer books or scriptures.

The lists are broad, but reveal eccentricities and omissions. There are nine titles by C. S. Lewis, for example, and none from the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller.

Chaplains already watch out for materials that promote violence or disparage groups or classes of people, so, they say, the effort is unnecessary. The department has not provided funds for Chaplains to purchase the approved materials. This means that many prison library have simply been cleared of materials.

This effort has managed to displease nearly everyone: evangelical Christian groups have found their materials banned as well as Jewish and Muslim groups. Already some prisoners have filed suit.

If bureaucrats are concerned about radical ideas that are infectious, they may want to have another look at those Gospels.

Read the rest here including a multi-media description of the banned materials.

While the Bishops meeting in New Orleans may well be making some history of their own, we thought that a little historical perspective about the history of faith in America would be appropriate. This week was actually a fairly important week in American church history according to Christian History & Biography:

September 23, 1595: Led by Fray Juan de Silva, the Spanish begin an intensive missionary campaign in the American southeast. In the following two years, 1,500 Native Americans in the area of Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina convert to the Catholic faith.

September 23, 1857: Layman-turned-evangelist Jeremiah C. Lanphier holds a lunchtime prayer meeting for businessmen on Fulton Street in New York City. At first, no one shows up, but by the program's third week, the 40 participants requested daily meetings. Other cities begin similar programs, and a revival—sometimes called "The Third Great Awakening"—catches fire across America

September 24, 1757: Jonathan Edwards, perhaps America's most brilliant theologian and a father of American revivalism, becomes president of the College of New Jersey (later Princeton). He served as president until his death in 1758

September 24, 1794: Russian Orthodox priest-monk Father Juvenaly, his brother Stephen, and eight other monks arrive at Kodiak Island, Alaska. After two years of ministry, the team had led 12,000 Alaskans to embrace the gospel. Juvenaly then extended his mission to the mainland, where he was reportedly martyred in 1796.

September 25, 1789: Congress amends The U.S. Constitution to prohibit establishment of a state church or governmental interference with the free exercise of religion.

September 27, 1944: Aimee Semple McPherson, founder of the Church of the Foursquare Gospel and the most famous female evangelist of her day, dies

Read it all here.

If you have ever seen "Jesus, save me from your followers" as a bumper sticker, then you've seen a symptom of a real problem. David Kinnaman's new book (co-authored with Gabe Lyons), UnChristian, paints the picture revealing what may be the true cause of declining mainline church attendance in the 21st Century. Time takes a thoughtful look at "Christianity's Image Problem."

Back in 1996, a poll taken by Kinnaman's organization, the Barna Group, found that 83% of Americans identified themselves as Christians, and that fewer than 20% of non-Christians held an unfavorable view of Christianity. But, as Kinnaman puts it, "That was then."

New polls sampling 440 non-Christians (and a similar number of Christians, according to the report) between 16 and 29 found that 38 percent had a "bad impression" of present-day Christianity.

Kinnaman says non-Christians' biggest complaints about the faith are not immediately theological: Jesus and the Bible get relatively good marks. Rather, he sees resentment as focused on perceived Christian attitudes. Nine out of ten outsiders found Christians too "anti-homosexual," and nearly as many perceived it as "hypocritical" and "judgmental." Seventy-five percent found it "too involved in politics."

Not only has the decline in non-Christians' regard for Christianity been severe, but Barna results also show a rapid increase in the number of people describing themselves as non- Christian. One reason may be that the study used a stricter definition of "Christian" that applied to only 73% of Americans. Still, Kinnaman claims that however defined, the number of non- Christians is growing with each succeeding generation: His study found that 23% of Americans over 61 were non-Christians; 27% among people ages 42-60; and 40% among 16-29 year olds. Younger Christians, he concludes, are therefore likely to live in an environment where two out of every five of their peers is not a Christian.

Here's where it gets really interesting. According to this, you might well find that bumper sticker on the car of a young Christian, too:

Christians have always been aware of image problems with non-believers. Says Kinnaman: "The question is whether to care." But given the increasing non-Christian population and the fact that many of the concerns raised by non-believers are shared by young Christians, he says, there really is no option but to address the crisis.

The article is here, and other stories in the feature include an interview with the author, David Kinnaman, titled "Facing Christianity's Crisis" and older commentary by noted gay conservative blogger Andrew Sullivan--who suggests "that we take back the word Christian while giving the religious right a new adjective: Christianist. Christianity, in this view, is simply a faith. Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism."

Updated: Because I reference the decline in church attendance, it's interesting to note that the Rev. Mike Kinman of Episcopalians for Global Reconciliation seems to have reflected on it as well today on his blog and drawn a different but fascinating conclusion that again points to our shrinking world:

Besides people of every theological/political bent succumbing to the "post hoc ergo propter hoc" fallacy, which assumes that just because something preceded an event it caused that event (i.e. -- the church has declined since GenCon 2003 so that's what caused the decline), the debate is generally confined to finding "THE cause" for the decline. The world is much more complex than that (praise God!). And as much as we might not like to think so, individually and corporately we are all heavilly influenced by many societal factors. There is no ONE marker event cause for the decline. There are enormous global forces at work.

Read more here.

Revolution in Jesusland is a plea for secular and mainline progressives to understand a growing evangelical movement. The author, Zack, writes in his blog profile:

... (and we know how difficult this is to believe) there is an incredibly large and beautiful social movement exploding among evangelicals right now that stands for nearly all of the same causes and goals that secular progressives do. Those goals include: eliminating poverty, saving the environment, promoting justice and equality along racial, gender and class lines and for immigrants—and even separation of church and state.

Zack is currently attending the Christian Community Development Association Conference in Missouri. His coverage is worth a look:

From "Prayer, Service, Development":

Right now I’m at one of the first CCDA classes. This one is on “Empowerment,” led by Bob Lupton, who’s done incredible neighborhood economic development work over decades in his city of Atlanta—and has taught others all over the country. (Thanks to UrbanMinistry.org, you can listen to many different classes and lectures by Bob here. I highly recommend listening to one of those talks. He’s a great speaker and he’s speaking from decades of humble and brilliant trial and error.)

He just told a story about a talk he was invited to give recently at a “very, very biblical” college.

He asked the students, “What is the number one mandate in the Bible?”

One student answered, “Evangelize!”

He pressed them, and finally another answered, “You mean ‘love God and Love your neighbor’?”

Bob answered, “Yes. And so, who teaches the courses on neighbor loving here?”

Blank stares.

“You have a whole department here on evangelism,” Bob said to them, “But you’re telling me that you don’t have a single course on neighbor loving? No ‘Love Your Neighbor 101′ here?” And then he joked with them: “You know the problem with this place? You’re not biblical enough.”

He told us (I’m paraphrasing): “You get what they were doing? They were skipping over the great command on their way to the great commission. You can’t do that. The commission flows through the command—it’s a by product of the great command.”

And from "I'm doing this for God, not for you," notes on how to help the poor without becoming paternalistic:

I haven’t seen any counterproductive white guilt here yet. I think there is something about these folks’ spirituality that cancels it out. It’s already part of their theology to accept and confess that they are utterly flawed sinners—broken people living in a broken world. That’s a pretty humble platform from which the Haves can go make relationships with the Have Nots. It seems to work pretty well for them (despite the mishaps they’re confessing, there’s a foundation of unmistakable, astounding success at helping huge numbers of people and developing communities).

The leadership of the Christian Community Development Association is multi-racial. The founder is black. The new executive director is Latino. At least a few of the top leaders in the movement are white. They all live in poor urban communities.

I’ve had friends who were the children of the Catholic Worker movement—whose parents moved into poor urban areas in the 60’s. I remember thinking that must have been some dying gasp of the Christian progressive (then, socialist) movement.

But, as it turns out, (conservative!) evangelical Christians picked up where that movement left off. A lot of these leaders moved in to their neighborhoods starting in the 80’s and 90’s. And now the movement to move into “broken” neighborhoods seems to be reaching a fever pitch. I don’t have any stats to back that up, and I doubt anyone does. But it’s the new must-do thing for Christians who are “on fire for Jesus.”

...

A year ago, I would have thought that sounded crazy. But I’ve seen that having God as the primary intellectual motivating factor in service has advantages. For example, it solves the biggest problem with The Haves trying to be part of the solution rather than part of the problem—it can help overcome the paternalism problem.

Hear me out. When that kid moves into some poor neighborhood, he’ll have a better defense against paternalism than most, because—as he helps set up after school tutoring programs, job training programs, etc…—his stance will NOT be, “I’m the great white hope come to save you,” (normally, the default) but instead: “I’m not here to help you. I’m here to serve God. My God wants to alleviate poverty, and I’m doing his will.”

Lots more here.

A recent poll of American voters indicates a distaste for, as they perceive it, candidates' use of their faith to influence the electorate. Sixty-eight percent of respondents agreed with this statement: "Presidential candidates should not use their religion or faith to influence voters to support them." The poll, conducted by Greenberg Quinlan Rosner Research for the Interfaith Alliance, surveyed 1,000 adults and had a margin of error of ±3.1 percentage points. And it wasn't just the atheists and agnostics who responded in the affirmative, according to a report from Religion News Service:

Even regular churchgoers think presidential hopefuls should not use their faith as a campaign tool: Almost 60 percent of survey respondents who regularly attend religious services agreed with the statement.

The Rev. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance, said candidates went "too far" at the Value Voters summit as they tried to "out-Christian" each other.

"We're not electing a pastor-in-chief, we're electing a commander-in-chief," he told reporters on Tuesday.

Candidates can certainly speak about their religion and beliefs as "points of identification for who they are," Gaddy said, but they push the limits when they imply that voters should support them because of their religion.

The whole article is available at the Pew Forum.

Roman Catholic bishops have been providing guidance to their flock on political issues for ages, and for the past thirty-odd years they've even explicitly sounded off about various matters at stake in the voting booth. But this year, the bishops have taken it further by addressing how what voters tick on their ballot ties in with their salvation, according to an article in today's Chicago Tribune. But what those issues are may surprise you:

... The guidelines issued Wednesday for the first time spelled out possible consequences as well as giving much more nuanced instruction to the Catholic electorate than in years past.

Voters are implored not to support abortion-rights political candidates but also advised that views on abortion should not be the sole factor. Catholics should also weigh church teaching on such moral issues as immigration, just war and poverty, bishops said.

"It was groundbreaking not in the sense that it changed any doctrine or added any doctrine," said Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Conn. "What we did provide for the first time in this document is some concrete guidance in how a voter goes about making prudential judgments."

The article notes that this may be a sign that the church is emerging from its sexual abuse crisis, moving beyond the abortion argument and emerging to lead on issues such as peace and immigration. You can read the whole thing here.

Morning Edition on NPR also did a short piece on it here.

Calling for tithing is becoming a subject of some controversy in a number of congregations according to an article today in the Wall Street Journal. While the Episcopal Church has called for a tithe to be the "minimum standard of giving" since 1982, and most Episcopalians are not tithers, many other congregations are reevaluating whether the tithe is a biblical pillar of the faith.

"Can you put a price on faith? That is the question churchgoers are asking as the tradition of tithing -- giving 10% of your income to the church -- is increasingly challenged. Opponents of tithing say it is a misreading of the Bible, a practice created by man, not God. They say they should be free to donate whatever amount they choose, and they are arguing with pastors, writing letters and quitting congregations in protest. In response, some pastors have changed their teaching and rejected what has been a favored form of fund raising for decades.

The backlash comes as some churches step up their efforts to encourage tithing. Some are setting up 'giving kiosks' that allow congregants to donate using their debit cards when they attend services. Others are offering financial seminars that teach people in debt how they can continue tithing even while paying off their loans. Media-savvy pastors, such as Ed Young in Grapevine, Texas, sell sermons online about tithing. And in a shift, more Catholic parishes are asking churchgoers to tithe, says Paul Forbes, administrator of McKenna Stewardship Ministry, a nonprofit that says it has encouraged more than 500 parishes to tithe in the last decade. Popes haven't requested tithes in recent decades."

Read the rest here.

Starting in 2006 a number of clergy and congregations began to push back against the increasing commercialization of Christmas by inviting their members to consider giving gifts to charity instead. In the first year hundreds of thousands of dollars were raised.

An article on Ethics Daily describes how the movement gained steam and expanded across the nation and beyond from its start in the Portland Oregon area:

"...pastor friends from around the country hatched what they called the Advent Conspiracy. They challenged their congregations: Spend less on Christmas, give relational gifts and donate the money saved to the poor.  

...In the following few months, word of the Advent Conspiracy spread over the Internet. McKinley and like-minded people such as 'Purpose Driven Life' author Rick Warren talked about it every chance they got.

This year, about 491 churches from 10 nations have joined the conspiracy, says Jeanne McKinley, who directs the program from Imago Dei Community with her husband Rick. World Relief, an evangelical mission group, has recruited 500 more churches to participate. About 1,700 individuals have joined on the Internet, she says.

Rick McKinley asks one thing of his co-conspirators--that they donate at least 25 percent of their Christmas savings to clean water projects. The United Nations Development Program estimates that $10 billion a year would help solve the shortage of clean water.

'The church needs to be on the leading edge of solving this problem,' he says."

Read the rest here.

The Dallas Morning News reports that stores are almost out of a best selling Talking Jesus Messenger of Faith doll. The 12-inch doll is made by one2believe of Valencia, Calif., which also sells Nativity scenes and other Bible action figures such as Samson and Goliath Spirit Warriors.

The toys were sold at about 600 Wal-Mart stores and online at Target.com, and almost 20 percent of the Wal-Mart stores that sell Talking Jesus are in Texas.

"We sold out at Wal-Mart, and the toys are still available in a very limited supply at Target.com," said spokesman Joshua Livingston. The company won't restock again before Christmas.

Read all about it here

Christmas famously "comes but once a year." In fact, however, it comes twice. The Christmas of the Nativity, the manger and Christ child, the wise men and the star of Bethlehem, "Silent Night" and "Hark the Herald Angels Sing" is one holiday. The Christmas of parties, Santa Claus, evergreens, presents, "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer" and "Jingle Bells" is quite another.

But because both celebrations fall on Dec. 25, the two are constantly confused.

The Wall Street Journal tells all here.

The History Channel has more here.

And a letter from those internet chains follows:

Read more »

The Associated Baptist Press is reporting on an architectural revival, of sorts, among Christians trying to get away from sterile, stadium-like box-shaped megachurches. Tim Blonkvist, an Episcopalian and one of the architects profiled in the piece, says that church buildings are "God's calling card," and, as the article continues:

Almost everybody who commutes to work or school drives by one or a dozen churches every day. Those structures either grab the attention of passersby - and, like the Gothic cathedrals of old, perhaps steer their thoughts heavenward - or they blend into an increasingly nondescript urban landscape.

Christian architects like Blonkvist and Cook are passionate about their work with churches. But they are troubled by what many congregations have been building lately - "big box" churches that look like warehouses or office buildings, denominational cookie-cutter models, and prefabricated buildings built as fast and cheaply as possible.

But after 300 years of mostly plain, utilitarian buildings - capped by three decades of what Cook calls megachurch "monster barns" devoid of Christian symbols - American Christians are poised for a revival in their church architecture. The architects say there is a hunger for spiritually expressive buildings that recapture a sense of sacred space, are rooted in a congregation's specific location and lifestyle, use indigenous artwork and symbolism, and are environmentally sensitive.

The architects agreed the tide is turning - both in the church and culture - toward more overt spiritual values, and the days of spiritually neutral churches may be ending.

Read the whole thing here.

Gallup released the results of a poll on faith in America done earlier this month, and has a useful analysis of the importance of faith in the United States over the last few decades:

The percentage of Americans who identify with a Christian religion is down some over the decades. This is not so much because Americans have shifted to other religions, but because a significantly higher percentage of Americans today say they don't have a religious identity. In the late 1940s, when Gallup began summarizing these data, a very small percentage explicitly told interviewers they did not identify with any religion. But of those who did have a religion, Gallup classified -- in 1948, for example -- 69% as Protestant and 22% as Roman Catholic, or about 91% Christian.

. . .

Sixty-two percent of Americans in Gallup's latest poll, conducted in December, say they are members of a "church or synagogue," a question Gallup has been asking since 1937.

It's down in the recent years of this decade and down a little more compared to the time period prior to the late 1970s. In the 1937 Gallup Poll, for example, 73% of Americans said they were church members. That number stayed in the 70% range in polls conducted in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. By the 1970s, however, the number began to slip below 70% in some polls, although as recently as 1999, 70% said they were church members. Since 2002, self-reported church membership has been between 63% and 65%.

. . .

One measure Gallup has tracked over time asks respondents to indicate how important religion is in their own lives -- very, fairly, or not very important.

This year, 56% of Americans have said religion is very important. Only 17% say religion is not very important.

. . . A couple of measures of this question from the 1950s and 1960s indicated that at that time, over 70% of Americans said religion was very important in their daily lives. That percentage dropped into the 50% range by the 1970s, and since then it has fluctuated somewhat, but has generally been in the 55% to 65% range.

. . .

[S]ince 1957 Gallup has periodically asked this question: "At the present time, do you think religion as a whole is increasing its influence on American life or losing its influence?"

In December of this year, 32% said religion was increasing its influence, and 61% losing its influence, with the rest volunteering that it was staying the same or not giving an answer.

There's been a lot of variance in these responses over the decades. Back in 1957 -- during the halcyon days of the Eisenhower administration -- 69% of Americans said religion was increasing its influence. And in December 2001 -- just months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States -- 71% said religion was increasing its influence in American life, which is the highest reading on that measure in Gallup Poll history. But by 2003, the percentage saying religion was increasing its influence had dropped back into the 30% range and though it has been as high as 50% since then, it is just 32% today.

On the other hand, in a couple of polls conducted in 1969 and 1970, only 14% said religion was increasing its influence -- the lowest readings on record. That of course was during an era replete with hippies, protests, Woodstock, drug use, and other indications of a less than devout, religious population. Another time period with a low "increasing its influence" percentage was in the early 1990s.

Read it all here.

Last week, Beliefnet conducted an online poll of 980 self-identified "evangelical/born again" respondents, and it showed that 85 percent of respondents marked the economy and "cleaning up government" as top issues. While most still identify as conservative and express their views of the Bible as being "the inerrant word of God," many would be surprised by what comes next:

Generally speaking, however, evangelicals ranked traditionally progressive or Democratic causes as more important than traditionally conservative or Republican ones. Twenty three percent said their views had become less positive about Republicans, twice the number who said they'd soured on Democrats, though half of respondents said they had become less positive about both parties. Almost 60-percent said they favored a more progressive evangelical agenda focused more on protecting the environment, tackling HIV/AIDs, and alleviating poverty and less on abortion and homosexuality.

Combining those who labeled an issue "most important" or “very important,” the results were:

The economy (85%)
Cleaning up government (85%)
Reducing poverty (80%)
Improving public education/access to health care (78%)
Protecting the environment (70%)
Ending torture (68%)
Ending Iraq war (67%)
Ending abortion (61%)
Combating sex and violence in the media and entertainment (59%)
Illegal immigration (59%)
Stopping gay marriage (49%)
Helping Africa (48%)
Winning Iraq war (46%)
Fighting Islamic radicalism (58%)

Additionally, more than half of the respondents answered yes to this question:
"Lots of media attention has been paid to a progressive evangelical agenda focused more on protecting the environment, tackling HIV/AIDS, alleviating poverty, and promoting human rights and less on abortion and homosexuality. Does this more progressive agenda reflect your political priorities?"

68 percent of evangelicals polled felt that the best way to reduce the number of abortions is by changing the culture through education and other means, as opposed to the 26 percent that think the best way is by limiting abortion rights, such as by overturning Roe v. Wade.

The story is here, and the complete poll results are here.