Bloggers Rush In

Owing to the slow pace of hometown reporting on the controversy, it remains unclear whether Saddleback Church's Pastor Rick Warren snubbed Barack Obama and Mitt Romney or they snubbed him.

So speculation abounds. Naomi Schaefer Riley thinks the president's miffed at Warren, who's being, well, pastoral and giving Obama some cover:

One...suspects that Mr. Obama's refusal to participate has much to do with Mr. Warren himself, who publicly opposed the [free birth control] mandate. In February the pastor tweeted: "I'm not a Catholic, but I stand in 100% solidarity with my brothers & sisters to practice their belief against govt pressure."

So why is Mr. Warren covering for the president by suggesting that nixing the forum was Mr. Warren's idea?

Andrew Sullivan comes right out and calls Warren a liar for saying the cancellation was his idea and speculates about why Romney would never have risked sitting down with the world's most famous Christan evangelical:

[T]he idea that Mitt Romney would ever have agreed to sit down for fifty minutes to discuss the fact that he believes God was once a human being, that humans can become gods as well, that Israelite tribes once inhabited the Americas and that polygamy exists in the after-life ... well, it was never going to happen, was it?

The Full Story Hasn't Quite Registered

The Orange County Register hasn't caught up with what others are reporting about Saddleback Church's decision to cancel its presidential forum. Pastor Rick Warren strongly implied to the Register that he'd withdrawn his invitations to Barack Obama and Mitt Romney because of their campaigns' incivility. But CNN's reporting suggests that neither candidate was ever planned to attend. As of this evening, the Register article, not updated since this morning, says it hadn't reached the campaigns. Maybe tomorrow's edition will have a followup story.

Warren announced in July that the forum would take place this week. When CNN contacted Saddleback Church today to get a comment about the candidates' evident disinterest in journeying to Lake Forest, Warren's spokeperson referred them to the Register article, which is evidently serving as a reliable expression of Warren's point of view, if not necessarily the full story.

We Can't Have Politicians Being Hypocrites!

Because he is offended by their rocking, socking campaigns, Pastor Rick Warren says he has withdrawn his invitation to the presidential candidates to participate in a forum at Saddleback Church:

It would be hypocritical to pretend civility for one evening only to have the name-calling return the next day.

Saddleback To Back

Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are coming to our neighborhood in August.

I like Gen. 1's Version Better, Anyway

As Rick Warren, Saddleback's energetic pastor, adds the the cause of America's alarming biblical illiteracy to his portfolio, Paul Wallace wonders if influential Christian leaders are contributing to a rise in scientific illiteracy:

I suspect more moderate leaders like Warren have a lot to do with it. Warren’s own views on evolution, while less hysterically expressed than those of [Albert] Mohler and [Ken] Ham, are not finally distinguishable from them. In a 2007 Newsweek debate with Sam Harris, Warren declared, “Do I believe in evolution[?] The answer is no, I don’t. I believe that God, at a moment, created man... Did God come down and blow in man’s nose? If you believe in God, you don't have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants to do it that way, it's fine with me.”

In his opinion on evolution, Warren displays his own considerable scientific illiteracy. That in itself is not too big a deal; one man rejecting evolution is not news. But when that man is Rick Warren, a major Christian figure who has, despite his conservative credentials, pushed the evangelical envelope on a number of environmental and social issues, the rejection carries a lot of freight.

Keep Your Sacred Cows Off My Grass

Opponents of the lower Manhattan mosque such as atheist (if I may) Charles Krauthammer say it's not a matter of using government power to stop it but just making clear that having an Islamic installation so close to the World Trade Center is aesthetically offensive. Sure, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has the right to build wherever he wants. But you have to wonder about the motives and basic human decency of anyone who would insist on doing something that's so disruptive to tender local sensibilities.

For his part, atheist (while I'm at it) Christopher Hitchens would like to question Rauf about his support for Iran's theocracy and his dubious theories about U.S. foreign policy and the Sept. 11 attacks. I can certainly understand that. As I've argued in this space, I'd like to ask the imam about women's rights myself -- not as an excuse for denying him permission to build his community center and mosque, you understand. But such questions would be a legitimate part of the vetting process, would they not?

Of course if the Roman Catholic Church wanted to build a new parish in an upscale neighborhood in Manhattan or San Francisco where Democrats had a 30% edge in voter registration, there might well be some pro-choice activists with questions of their own. It's not that anyone would want to take away the church's First Amendment rights. But you'd have to wonder about the capacity for empathy and basic good taste of those who want to deprive women of control over their own bodies trying to get a foothold in a neighborhood where their views would be considered noxious and even dangerous.

Now that I think about it, the hyper-Orthodox rabbi at my local Chabad Center probably has some extreme views about Arabs and their genetic links to the Amalek raiders as described in the book of Genesis. If he and his congregation want to expand their facility by building a preschool, that's all well and good. But local Arab-American groups might first want to ask, perhaps during a public hearing, about the curriculum -- though not to limit anyone's religious rights, no sirree Bob!

If I were a Latino and the LDS wanted to put a stake on my street, I'd definitely have a question or two about Mormon missionaries who dupe mis hermanos into converting by claiming that we're all descended -- get this! -- from a lost tribe of Israelites who came to North America 2600 years ago, which Mormons claim as a special revelation and anthropologists say is total bunk. I'm all for freedom of religion, but that doesn't meant I have to put up with Glenn Beck and his ilk foisting that kind of harmful racial mythology on my kids.

If I'm against gay marriage, and I think gay sex is a sin that disqualifies someone from ordained ministry, don't you dare try to put an Episcopal parish on my street. People are free to worship as they choose, but that doesn't mean you can come into my neighborhood and trumpet your radical political agenda from the pulpit.

If I'm for gay marriage, and it's legal in my state, I guarantee I'll bring a civil rights suit against any pastor who refuses to perform same-gender marriages because he insists on hewing to his narrow Bible-thumping theology. While I'm at it, I'll get a group together and picket his church -- not to deny anybody his right to worship whatever God he wants. I totally believe in freedom of religion. But I'm talking about my civil rights here, and having a bigot in my town is aesthetically offensive.

By the same token, if I believe that the protection of women's hard-won equality in the U.S. is a cultural imperative, I'm not sure the First Baptist Church of Lake Forest Saddleback Church should continue to operate with impunity, and with tax-exempt status to boot, until Rick Warren answers some questions about his denomination's refusal to allow women into the pulpit. Marginalizing any protected group in that manner is completely un-American. No one has the right to use the First Amendment as a shield for unpatriotic behavior.

What may make these hypothetical examples seem a bit far-fetched is that they're about what some mosque critics would call established American faiths -- even though Islam predates Protestantism by almost 900 years and Mormonism by 1200. Muslims comprise a fifth of the world's population. Perhaps five million live in the U.S.

Newt Gingrich may think he can help pick up a few House and Senate seats and boost his presidential chances by comparing them all to Nazis. But should he and the rest of the GOP succeed in driving Imam Rauf out of town, you just watch. The precedent will be used in unanticipated ways against other faiths and denominations that become nationally or locally non-PC -- maybe even yours. That's how politics works, as Gingrich learned after destroying Speaker Jim Wright only to be destroyed in return. Chevy Chase said it well: The Hindus speak of karma (though that doesn't mean I have to put up with their smelly sacred cows).

The Preacher Clarifies Himself

Explaining why illness and exhaustion prevented Pastor Rick Warren from taping an interview to be broadcast Easter Sunday on ABC's "This Week," a Saddleback spokesman clarifies Warren's recent comments about gay marriage and Prop. 8:

Throughout his pastoral ministry spanning nearly 30 years, Pastor Warren has remained committed to the biblical definition of marriage as between one man and one woman, for life — a position held by most fellow Evangelical pastors. He has further stressed that for 5,000 years, EVERY culture and EVERY religion has maintained this worldview.

When Pastor Warren told Larry King that he never campaigned for California's Proposition 8, he was referring to not participating in the official two-year organized advocacy effort specific to the ballot initiative in that state, based on his focus and leadership on other compassion issues. Because he's a pastor, not an activist, in response to inquiries from church members, he issued an email and video message to his congregation days before the election confirming where he and Saddleback Church stood on this issue.

During the King interview, Pastor Warren also referenced a letter of apology that he sent to gay leaders whom he knew personally. However, that mea culpa was not with respect to his statements or position on Proposition 8 nor the biblical worldview on marriage. Rather, he apologized for his comments in an earlier Beliefnet interview expressing his concern about expanding or redefining the definition of marriage beyond a husband-wife relationship, during which he unintentionally and regrettably gave the impression that consensual adult same sex relationships were equivalent to incest or pedophilia.”

Worry Or Trust?

In the early church, after Holy Eucharist (or Communion), worshipers would share the leftovers with those who were hungry in their communities. This weekend at Saddleback Church, Pastor Rick Warren distributed 10,000 grocery bags to his congregation with instructions to bring them back full so the church could increase its support for local food banks. Says Warren in the Orange County Register:

The No. 1 way that God tests your faith? Money. God wants to know: Are you going to worry, or are you going to trust me? … When I meet others' needs, God takes care of mine.

Rick Warren's Fangs

While Gustavo Arellano is proud that Orange County is on the cutting edge of American Christianity, he has some advice (and a prayer) for Pastor Rick Warren:

Saddleback Church belongs to the Southern Baptist Convention, about as socially conservative a denomination as one can find. When Warren endorsed Proposition 8 last year, and seemingly endorsed bombing Iran when he told Sean Hannity that it was fine to punish "evildoers," he shed his sheep's clothing and bared the conservative fangs long associated with Orange County, much to the detriment of his ecumenical standing.

If Warren truly wants to become "America's pastor," he'll scale back on such bombastic rhetoric. Warren has the chance to redeem Orange County as a place not of avarice but of altruism, and to show that evangelical Christianity can come free of politicking and show genuine concern for all. I'm praying for you, Rick, to consider my words and help lead us to a better future, damn the differences.

Nobody Steps On A Church In My Town*

It's often been a blessing to have Pastor Rick Warren's mammoth Saddleback Church in our backyard at St. John's in Rancho Santa Margarita, about two miles south of Warren's digs. His ministry gives inspiration and comfort to tens of thousands in our community and millions around the world. He brings the gospel alive in practical ways to help people live better, more faithful lives.

But now he's offered to help dissident Episcopalians plant a church in our neighborhood. Thanks a lot, dear colleague!

In the wake of Monday's ruling by the California Supreme Court under which three churches which tried to leave our Diocese may soon have to return their buildings and other properties, Warren wrote,

We stand in solidarity with them, and with all orthodox, evangelical Anglicans. I offer the campus of Saddleback Church to any Anglican congregation who need a place to meet, or if you want to plant a new congregation in south Orange County.

As the orthodox pastor of the closest Episcopal church to Saddleback, I'll try not to take it personally. Still, if any of the 20 million Baptists who aren't especially taken with Pastor Rick's conservative Southern Baptist Convention want to plant a church in his backyard, I'll happily talk to the St. John's Bishop's Committee about using our choir room to start Saddleback South. We could only seat about 20, compared to Pastor Rick's 50,000 Christmas Eve worshipers, but all good things start small.

Among dissidents' problems with Mr. Warren's Southern Baptists is this carefully worded policy statement from the Convention's web site:

Women participate equally with men in the priesthood of all believers. Their role is crucial, their wisdom, grace and commitment exemplary. Women are an integral part of our Southern Baptist boards, faculties, mission teams, writer pools, and professional staffs. We affirm and celebrate their Great Commission impact.

While Scripture teaches that a woman's role is not identical to that of men in every respect, and that pastoral leadership is assigned to men, it also teaches that women are equal in value to men.

That's right: Pastor Rick and his colleagues believe Jesus Christ didn't want women to be pastors. The policy is one reason former President Jimmy Carter resigned from the Convention in 2000. With us Episcopalians and many other denominations, the seeming crisis is over the sacramental status of gay and lesbian people. But an even more important problem is that many Christians haven't even come to terms with the radical equality of women in the body of Christ.

In the early church, women played a prominent role in all aspects of ministry. After all, the "apostle to the apostles" wasn't Peter, James, or Paul, or indeed Tom, Dick, or Harry. All four gospels agree (in other words, "scripture teaches") that Mary Magdalene first received the good news of our Lord's Resurrection. She believed, while Jesus's male followers (who had fled in fear after the Crucifixion) at first did not.

And yet in the 21st century, powerful Christian leaders still keep Mary's half of the population down. I can well understand why they prefer to talk instead about the 2-3% of the population who are homosexual. Safer odds.

* Name that movie!

Hat tip to Greg Larkin

Pastor Souljah?

Has there ever been such controversy about who's going to give the invocation at a Presidential inauguration? Bill O'Reilly thinks the PE's made a deft move designed to disassociate himself from Pastor Jeremiah Wright. My Episcopal colleague the Rev. Susan Russell, who heads Integrity, our church's advocacy group for gay and lesbian people, says she's disappointed because of Warren's prominent role in the culture wars.

Andrew Sullivan thinks some critics have overreacted to the Warren choice:

I think Obama is different. I think the earnestness and sincerity of his campaign, and its generational force, have given us a chance for something new, and I fear that in responding too viscerally to the Warren choice, we may be throwing something very valuable away far too prematurely.

That has always been Sullivan's hope about Obama, and while it would be churlish at this early date to say he's wrong, Obama's earnestness and generational force don't especially impress me (especially after we saw the youthful author of all that highfalutin rhetoric pawing a cardboard Clinton).

What's bothered me about the Warren choice was that it felt calculated and even a bit cynical from the beginning. Isn't there someone in the country who could've invoked the healing power of the Almighty without inspiring more anger and division? Instead, it looks as if the PE was either repaying Warren for inviting him to Saddleback Church early in the campaign cycle or using the choice to make straight (with apologies to Isaiah and my friend Susan) his pathway to the political center -- basically, a Pastor Souljah move.

I'm not saying that Pastor Rick's views on homosexuality or any issue disqualify him from a star turn at the inauguration. Any number of pastors, left, right, and center, are toting potentially controversial theological baggage. Warren's ministry has made a difference in tens of millions of lives. And yet because of his prominent role in the campaign and outspokenness on highly emotional questions, Warren lacks the magisterial, above-it-all quality of a Billy Graham.

Obama may not have grasped the difference between choosing someone to pray for the nation and someone to head HHS. As a result, the man who was supposed to bring us together politically has taken wedge politics all the way to the gates of heaven.

Two Flashes Of Light

The Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem

Cathy Lynn Grossman:

Barry Kosmin, one of the nation's top researchers on the demographics of faith, argues in a book he co-authored, Religion in a Free Market, that competition among religion groups keeps interest in God high in the USA, even as denominational identity is fading.

Now, you can see that "market" in action: The final formal break-off of a small but significant group of U.S. and Canadian parishes and dioceses from their national denominations and, quite possibly, from the Anglican Communion, the world's third largest Christian denomination, as well.

The Episcopal Church, the U.S. branch of the worldwide Anglican Communion, has been riven by dissent for years over how to read the Bible and whether homosexuals can serve as bishops.

Not to judge Kosmin's book by its title, but Jesus demonstrated that the marketplace and gospel don't mix by cleansing one in the name of the other, his only reported direct use of violence. Post-1960s American Christians do tend to be church-shoppers, tempting pastors and congregations to focus on customer service and nose-counting. We keep God popular by making him seem palatable and relatively undemanding. But the gospel is about giving, not consuming. Christians are supposed to be more interested in the fast than what tastes good. We can't follow the money or the attendance tallies to truth and salvation. As Jesus also showed, it's possible for the ten thousand to be wrong and the one right.

As for Grossman's summary of the Episcopal Church's problems -- the ordination of a partnered gay bishop and differences of opinion about how to read the Bible -- that's about right. In the end, the second problem may be far worse than the first.

By the time we're through, five or ten percent of Episcopalians will probably have left because of the church's purported permissiveness. Which of the remnants, the larger or the smaller, is righteous? The question is complex and emotional. It's about individual dignity as well as the best way to raise children. But the church is learning along with civil society about the permanence of sexual orientation. In 50 years, it could be as unthinkable to deny ordination or a blessing on the basis of homosexuality as ethnicity or eye color.

While progressives may be on the right side of the arc of history when it comes to gays and lesbians, they are whistling past the empty tomb when it comes to Grossman's second issue -- how Christians read the Bible. Tens of millions claim to do so literally, especially many U.S. evangelicals and virtually all those who are threatening to rip the Anglican Communion apart. In a way, it's hard to blame them. As Episcopal theologian Phyllis Tickle has pointed out, Anglican missionaries lugged crates of Bibles to Africa in the 19th century and proclaimed that its every dit and twiddle was the basis of salvation, including passages such as Romans 1:27 which prohibit homosexual relations. It seems almost churlish to complain when some of their bishops take umbrage now that there their newly enlightened U.S. and Canadian colleagues insist it's not a sin after all, in spite of God's authoritative word.

When it comes to Bible rules, some of which are more practical in modern life than others, it's all about authority. Roman Catholics believe God empowered the pope to explain and elaborate Bible rules, making church tradition tantamount to God's own proclamations. Since the Reformation, Protestants have been struggling to find an alternative. What many have fixed on is the unquestioned authority of the written word itself, the doctrine of sola scriptura.

The chasm between these Christians and those who read the Bible using various modern tools such as historical, textual, and canonical criticism is at least as wide as the divide over sexual orientation. Take this passage from St. Paul's First Letter to the Corinthians (14: 34-35, NRSV), for instance:

Women should be silent in the churches. For they are not permitted to speak, but should be subordinate, as the law also says. If there is anything they desire to know, let them ask their husbands at home.

While some churches may follow this proscription, no women I know attend them. Our critical tools give us permission to ask these questions: How did the role of women in the first century Roman world affect Paul's thinking? Could he have been worried that noisy women would put both them and the young Christian movement in danger? Did Paul even write the passage, or did a scribe or follower add it later to reinforce male authority in the church in spite of Jesus's egalitarianism?

Many worshiping in mainline denominations have no trouble asking these questions and yet still honoring the sacredness of the Bible. Conservative evangelicals also make some allowances as well, permitting women to pipe up occasionally but tending not to call them as preachers or pastors -- and whatever they might decide about women, ix-nay on the a-gays.

Authority in the Episcopal Church is rooted in 18th century representative democracy, right down to the bicameral legislature (with houses of bishops and deputies). Believing that the Holy Spirit is present when faithful people gather in community, TEC votes on how to interpret the Bible, when to ordain women and gays, and whether to have fish or steak for dinner. Though Anglicans have a formula for weighing three factors -- scripture, tradition, and reason -- our polity tends to give more weight to reason than the originator of the famous three-legged stool, Richard Hooker, may have intended. After all, smart, well-intentioned people can talk themselves into anything. As for tradition, even that changes as faith communities and denominations change with the times. For some, only Scripture is immutable.

The irony is that many biblical literalists don't realize that in their church practice they're participating in modern scriptural interpretation. Every woman at Saddleback who speaks her mind in Bible study instead of asking her husband to teach her at home is violating St. Paul's literal rule, because some authority in her church has correctly decided that Christ's church can't discriminate so harshly against women in our egalitarian times. But if they set aside Corinthians for the sake of women but not Romans for the sake of gay and lesbian people, then they are being selectively modern. They are choosing when to stick to a literal reading depending on a human predisposition about the sinfulness of homosexual behavior, rooted either in the traditions of the human church or their own intestines.

To a greater or lesser extent, almost every Christian observes some Bible rules and exempts himself from others. Without some central authority to set and enforce rules for Bible living, individual Christians are free to provide their own. The danger is that we will arrive at self-justifying, self-idolatrous interpretations, contrary to the thrust of Christ's radically other-focused gospel. At the root of the TEC schism is the individualistic American tendency for any community to shrink until only the like-minded remain, with the church of one (probably not including Jesus) being the ultimate solution.

For their part, some schismatics rightly fear that progressives are also carving up the Bible, keeping Jesus's humane teachings and the best stuff in the prophets about peace and justice while excluding the bits about righteous living as well as anything smacking of the magical such as miracles and healings. Also up for grabs -- focal point, perhaps, for the coming schism of schisms -- is what the Bible discloses about Christ's bodily resurrection. Whether or not they disclose it at Easter services, many modern churchpeople are squishy about whether Christ's body was literally reanimated. For decades there has been a lot of talk about how he just seemed to be alive again because his memory and teachings were so powerful.

I can't help but think that this is the real deal breaker for the Church, with debates about women, which prayers to use, and the rights of gay and lesbian people being the sideshows. The risen Lord is the hope of the world, not the imperfectly transcribed accounts of his teachings or the wisdom and piety of the human beings in his church. Perhaps Christians need a new fundamentalism with just two pillars: Insistence on the absolute dignity and equality before God of all whom he has made as he made them, and faith that he created the world with a flash of light and saved it with another.