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?

Heavensgate

David Mason commits clarity on the relationship between the LDS and orthodox Christianity:

I want to be on record about this. I’m about as genuine a Mormon as you’ll find — a templegoer with a Utah pedigree and an administrative position in a congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I am also emphatically not a Christian.

For the curious, the dispute can be reduced to Jesus. Mormons assert that because they believe Jesus is divine, they are Christians by default. Christians respond that because Mormons don’t believe — in accordance with the Nicene Creed promulgated in the fourth century — that Jesus is also the Father and the Holy Spirit, the Jesus that Mormons have in mind is someone else altogether. The Mormon reaction is incredulity. The Christian retort is exasperation. Rinse and repeat.

Leaving aside Mason's sloppiness about the nature of the Holy Trinity (in my Trinity Sunday sermon, I doubt I did much better), his point is akin to the question of whether Christians and Muslims worship the same God. Look at the Quran, and you might say the answer is yes, since Allah is described as the God of Abraham and the great prophet Jesus. Ask an orthodox Christian, and she might say no, since the Islamic God isn't the father of a risen savior whose sacrifice of himself once offered is sufficient for all the world's salvation and liberation and who shares indissolubly in God's nature (they are consubstantial, as Benedict XVI now insists that Roman Catholics say in the Nicene Creed). Islam has long since proclaimed its own conception of the Godhead and its teachings, completely separate from Jewish or Christian worship and practice, and Mormons, in their bid to be the fourth Abrahamic faith, are heading in the same direction.

Insisting they were just another Christian denomination helped protect Mormons from suspicion and persecution. Let's hope that motive for theological obfuscation is now inoperative. Permission to speak freely? Christians have an issue with many, or most -- heck, all -- of the claims in the Book of Mormon. And yet the revelation to Joseph Smith, on whom all depends for the LDS, is no more unsettling for the modern mind than the revelation to Muhammad or Jesus's bodily resurrection and ascent into heaven where he sitteth on the right hand of God the father, judging the quick and the dead.

Saying my miracle is real and yours a fable or fraud pretty much sums up interfaith dialog unless we look beyond insuperable doctrinal debates and decide that all people of faith will be judged not by what they believe but how they behave. But that's a difficult step in itself for those who've been taught that their salvation is absolutely contingent on belief. I can do it either if my belief is leavened by profound humility and just a bit of common sense (why did God put all those people in western China without any Episcopal churches?) or if I actually don't take my orthodoxy seriously -- if I'm an OINO (you figure it out!). The interfaith dilemma amounts to the struggle for real community among serious believers who locate in their doctrines, and hear echoing in their hearts, God's eternal summons to the faithful to promote wholeness for all God's creatures, both individually (each created being's divine right to be healed and whole) and corporately.

Steeped in our founding, Enlightenment virtues, Americans are well-positioned to learn and practice religious tolerance in our civic life, though it hasn't always been easy. For centuries, there had been no more deadly quarrel than between Roman Catholics and Protestants. It persists in churches and seminaries, but Richard Nixon finally wrote it out of our politics in 1960.

The dynamics are more complicated this year. People have been called bigots for agreeing with David Mason that Mormons, including Mitt Romney, aren't really Christians. That's because Romney's supporters feared the charge would hurt him with evangelicals. Some of the same evangelicals think Barack Obama, who came up in the mainline UCC, isn't a Christian, either. St. Santorum added a whiff of that ugliness to the GOP primaries. His ilk would probably erase my little denomination from the book of life as well. Remember, the Reformation ain't over till it's over. Do a Google on "antichrist," and see how many pictures of Obama and Benedict you get. For some conservative people of faith, and not as few as you may think, this is the first election in U.S. history in which neither man who wants to spend the next four years in the White House has a snowball's chance of spending eternity in heaven.

Hat tip to Paul Matulic

All About Sex After All

Ed Kilgore believes evangelical Christians prefer Mormon to mainline:

[A]ny evangelical distrust of Mormon theology pales beside the evangelical distrust of mainstream Protestantism—which happens to be the strand of Christianity that Barack Obama belongs to. This attitude can be seen in Rick Santorum’s dismissal of mainline U.S. Protestants as “gone from the world of Christianity”—a comment from 2008 that came to light during the heat of this year’s primary season. While Santorum’s statement was widely criticized, it’s a broadly held, even axiomatic, view for many conservative evangelicals and Catholics. Indeed, conservative minorities in the mainline denominations (most notably Episcopalians) have become accustomed to accusing mainline leaders of heresy and apostasy.

Sure, conservative Christians would have preferred a candidate with a less complicated and controversial belief system than Mitt Romney’s. But...their doubts about Romney probably owe more to the conservative anxiety about his slipperiness than to any particular concerns about the LDS. And in the end...the only religious test that matters is whether you support the “Biblical values” of hostility to feminists, gays, and liberal Protestants like the president.

Conservative Christians have frequently insisted that their primary worry is not the mainline church's policies toward women, gays, and lesbians but its undependable orthodoxy when it comes to such matters as the creeds, Biblical inerrancy, and the bodily resurrection of Christ. If you believe, as I do, that Jesus rose from dead without beaming down in north America (as the LDS teaches he did) and yet that the church needn't be confined by first-century social mores as expressed in the New Testament, the self-styled orthodox insist that I'm not one of them. But if you can support someone who thinks the Bible has been superseded by the Book of Mormon just because you think his views on women and gays coincide with yours, you are far more interested in public policy outcomes than Christian orthodoxy. For you, it really is all about sex.

At Least They'd Stopped Saying "Perfidious Jews"

When African-Americans received full sacramental status in the LDS church in 1978, Mitt Romney, who was 30, said he wept with joy. Nevertheless some commentators promise to confront him during the campaign about the Mormons' racist past.

But is there any religion or denomination whose history or awkward doctrines couldn't be held against a candidate-adherent? When it comes to religion and politics, better to adhere to the Nixon covenant -- which is why, since it was in effect during the 1960 election, no reporter probably asked John F. Kennedy about the version of the prayer for conversion of the Jews that was still being used in Roman Catholic Good Friday liturgies:

Let us pray also for the Jews: that almighty God may remove the veil from their hearts; so that they too may acknowledge Jesus Christ our Lord. Let us pray. Let us kneel. Arise. Almighty and eternal God, who dost also not exclude from thy mercy the Jews: hear our prayers, which we offer for the blindness of that people; that acknowledging the light of thy Truth, which is Christ, they may be delivered from their darkness. Through the same our Lord Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever. Amen.

Ironical? Or Moronical?

The state that might well clinch the GOP nomination for Mitt Romney? Utah.

LDS 411

Randall Balmer, an historian and Episcopal priest, says that Mitt Romney will eventually have to give us a peek at how his devotion to his church would influence his conduct of the presidency:

What ought to interest us about Romney’s faith are not the vagaries of Mormon theology, fascinating as they are, but how he understands that theology, how his faith informs the way he lives, his sense of responsibility toward others and how that might affect the way he governs. Granted, there are relevant political questions peculiar to Mormon teaching. The Latter-day Saints, for example, teach that the United States Constitution is divinely inspired. It’s fair to ask Romney how that affects his understanding of the Constitution. Although Mormons are hardly the only group that claims to be the “true” religion, how does that teaching inflect Romney’s notions about pluralism and toleration?

But the more pertinent question applies to all presidential candidates who make declarations of faith: How does religion shape your policies? Unfortunately, Romney has remained studiously tight-lipped about all matters of faith, referring only vaguely to “my church.”

Antichrist? But Where's He On The Life Issue?

Rick Perlstein argues that Christian evangelicals are already getting over their worries about an LDS nominee and president:

[Their critical language was] strikingly similar to the way they characterized Catholics generations ago. As the Baptist college president quoted by the [New York] Times put it, they fear "the Mormon Church will use [Romney’s] position around the world as a calling card for legitimizing their church and proselytizing people." But they're getting over it. Here is Billy Graham's much more political son Franklin, for instance, speaking in December on the air of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network: "the fact that he is a Mormon doesn’t bother me at all."

That's the way cultural change works in America: the rest of us discard a prejudice that the right still clings to; in the fullness of time, the right comes around too, deploying clever rationalizations to forget they ever bore the prejudice in the first place.

But it's not exactly a matter of discarding religious prejudice. The faithful have just realized that the purpose of political activism is obtaining policy outcomes. Perlstein notes the antipathy to Barack Obama shared by evangelicals and conservative Roman Catholics and shows how they first linked up over abortion and gay rights. Romney will probably win them if they're sure he's not squishy on social issues. But the most theologically conservative won't ever get over his religion. Untold thousands are saying to themselves even as they vote for Mitt: "Nice guy. Too bad he's going to hell."

Even more interesting than the demons of religious prejudice that conservative evangelicals and their political toadies are keeping under wraps for politics' sake are the ones they're proudly taking out for a walk. In 2010 Newt Gingrich and others in and out of government made constitutional history by arguing that U.S. citizens who were Muslims should not be permitted to worship as they choose within a certain distance of the World Trade Center. Just as insidious is the implicit conservative evangelical proposition that mainline Christians --such as Obama, for instance -- aren't Christian at all.

The Hardly Believing Two Billion

The Economist blithely equates the claims of Mormonism (14 million adherents) with those of orthodox Christianity (two billion):

Like most religions, Mormonism has other issues that invite derision, such as its history of polygamy and institutional racism. But its greatest vulnerability may simply be that it is relatively young, so has not yet become established in America's religious pantheon, and that it came of being at a time when good records were kept, which means we are better able to scrutinize its origins. Nevertheless, the divinely-inspired events of two centuries ago are hardly less believable (or unbelievable) than those that preceded them by some two millennia.

Romney's Tie (And I Don't Mean Iowa)

When Erik Eckholm writes about Christian evangelicals' increasingly frantic efforts to find an alternative to Mitt Romney, you have to read between the lines to find the real story.

They're afraid he's squishy on abortion and same-sex marriage, Eckholm writes. They want a real conservative, like health care mandate-favoring climate change hawk Newt Gingrich. The head of the Florida Family Policy Council goes so far as to say that Gingrich is "probably...the most viable candidate in the general election." Say what? Gingrich comes with more baggage than the Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. President Obama loves his chances in that match-up, and everybody knows it, including, I'd assume, Erik Eckholm.

You can't see dark matter, which holds the universe together, and at least in this article you can't see what's bringing these evangelicals together: Their dislike of the LDS. You'd think Romney's Mormonism would be worth at least a paragraph, if only to let evangelical leaders deny that it's an issue. But Eckholm doesn't go near it. Reuters reporters Ros Krasny and Patricia Zengerl, possibly saucy Brits, aren't so shy. They report speculation that Rick Santorum played the religion card against Romney just yesterday while on the stump in New Hampshire:

Santorum has been challenged for comments such as likening same-sex relationships to bestiality and saying states should be allowed to ban birth control. In Concord, New Hampshire, on Thursday, he was booed after appearing to compare gay marriage to polygamy and saying children of same-sex couples were being "harmed."

Some in the audience wondered if the polygamy reference was a coded reference to Romney's Mormonism.

Polls last year showed both that most evangelicals don't believe that Mormons are Christians and that they were less supportive of Romney that GOP voters in general. Sure, their lukewarm political support might be because of his more moderate views on social issues while serving as governor of Massachusetts. The Times' Eckholm seems inclined to give them the benefit of the doubt. In a June 2011 post, journalist Mark Joseph wasn't:

Years ago I once interviewed comedian Jay Leno and he told me something I've never forgotten and think of quite often: when he wants to make fun of a fat man, he never makes fun of him for being fat; rather, he makes fun of his tie.

I think of Leno's maxim whenever I hear conservative Christian voters criticizing Mitt Romney for his alleged failings like Romneycare, flip-flopping, lack of personality etc. because like Leno, what I think they're really doing is describing his "tie" instead of saying what they truly mean to say: he's a Mormon.

As this obfuscation indicates however, it's a prejudice that nobody wants to cop to because there seems to be a general feeling that it's an icky one and so as a result, mainstream journalists continue to be befuddled over Romney's lack of success and try to blame it on the various criticisms of his "tie," only it's not about his "tie," it's about his religion.

Bless Me, But "Big Love" Ended Surprisingly

A regular visitor to St. John's is married to a bishop who retired several years from the Anglican church in Canada. When she was introduced in church Sunday morning, she said that she'd sometimes been called the "mama bishop." So I bent my head and asked for her blessing, which she graciously -- in the Christian sense of that adverb -- provided.

It wasn't an especially remarkable moment except for our denomination's adherence to the ancient tradition in which the act of sacramental blessing, along with the celebration of Holy Eucharist and the granting of absolution, is usually reserved to ordained people -- deacons, priests, and bishops. Even within the Holy Orders, the blessings usually flow from the top down. Deacons and priests in the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles are sometimes discomfited, if only briefly, when our bishop, J. Jon Bruno, asks us to reach up to his broad, 6'4"-tall forehead and bless him. The mama bishop on Sunday also looked a little surprised by my request, but she gave me a good one anyway. All of us baptized, after all, are priests of the most high God.

Something similar happened on Sunday evening, during the series-ending episode of HBO's "Big Love," the unlikely hit drama about a polygamist businessman and politician, Bill Henrickson (Bill Paxton). He's just taken three rounds in the chest from an angry monogamist neighbor in front of his house in Salt Lake City. His three wives hover over him in horror, watching him die. He looks at his first wife, Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn), and says weakly, "I need your blessing." She hesitates, and then complies.

It was a moment of sheer beauty and the last thing I expected in this completely weirded-out show which started in 2006 as an broad parody of plural marriage and ended up witnessing for women's ordination and being a little squishy on polygamy.

Much of the tension in the fifth and final season resulted from Barb's discerning that she has the priesthood, which in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints is reserved for men. Henrickson is following what he takes to be his destiny to advocate for "the principle," polygamy, by founding a polygamist LDS offshoot and getting himself elected to the Utah legislature to try to legalize plural marriage. Meanwhile Barb risks tearing her family apart by attending a Mormon-like church which, unlike her husband, recognizes the sacramental equality of women. Ultimately she doesn't join it, for the sake of the unity among her, Henrickson, and her two sister wives. By this time, we've been deftly manipulated into feeling relieved when she puts family about principle, even though it's a plural family, and we all know that polygamy is disgusting.

HBO also got us to root for Tony Soprano, the murdering narcissist. Appreciating the nobility "Big Love" drapes over Henrickson in its final reels doesn't mean viewers have been transformed into advocates of polygamy. But I did get the feeling that series creators Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer had on their agendas persuading us to be less judgmental about lifestyles we don't fully understand and more mindful of the way most denominations and faiths fail to empower women.

No Longer A Sin To Feel

Andrew Sullivan describes and credits the Mormon church's changes in its teachings and policies about homosexuality.

No Separation Of Church And Politics

Heck yes we have the right to ask candidates about religion, says the "Economist":

Some atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, believe that religious education is a form of child abuse. It should be considered perfectly appropriate to ask an atheist candidate whether he agrees with this blatantly intolerant position. Various religious groups, meanwhile, encourage their members to believe things that might clash with the requirements of holding high office. Mormons teach that the head of their church is a prophet of God and his mouthpiece on earth. A large portion of evangelical Protestants affirm biblical inerrancy and reject science as a method for determining the truth about the natural world. Many Pentecostals believe that God is directing world history toward an apocalyptic cataclysm in the Middle East.

Needler And Thread

Is Glenn Beck using his TV pulpit to freight, um, weird LDS stuff?

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).

Friendship Makes For Strange Pewmates

A lesbian priest and Mormon father of three make friends and then common cause.