“Religious groups are strongly partisan these days, and deeply embedded into the party coalitions [meaning that groups like black Protestants and Jews are important parts of the Democratic coalition, while white evangelicals play a similar role for the Republican Party.] In the short run, there is only a limited capacity for religious groups to move.”
– John Green, a political science professor at the University of Akron and a senior fellow at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, in a Boston Globe article.
“I’m against promiscuity—love ought to be expressed in committed relationships, not through casual sex, and I think the church should recognize the validity of committed same-sex relationships.”
— The Rev. Terry Davis, pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Hartford, CT, where has been presiding over “holy unions” since 1992. Quoted in Newsweek magazine’s Dec. 9 cover story on gay marriage, “Our Mutual Joy.”
Why should the environmental movement be involved with religion? That is a question Martin Palmer, secretary general of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation, often gets asked, and he sought to answer it recently at a climate summit in a historic Swedish university city north of Stockholm.
Margot Wallström, first vice-president of the European Commission, also addressed the question at the Nov. 28-29 Uppsala Interfaith Climate Summit attended by 1,000 people from many religions.
“Faith communities can play an important role on the issue of climate change,” Wallström told Ecumenical News International. Although religion should be separated from politics, noted Wallström, who is a Swede, she stressed that political and religious institutions must cooperate over climate issues. “Religions influence a lot of perspectives and people,” she said.
The gathering, which met at the invitation of (Lutheran) Church of Sweden Archbishop Anders Wejryd, hammered out a manifesto calling for an extensive and speedy reduction of carbon dioxide emission in the wealthy parts of the world.
The manifesto, signed by 30 religious leaders and scholars from different faiths, targets the world’s political and religious leaders. Archbishop Wejryd and the World Council of Churches presented the document to a United Nations global meeting on climate change, which began in Poznan, Poland on Dec. 1.
“We are planning to present the manifesto when the WCC addresses the Poznan conference,” said Guillermo Kerber Mas, who heads the WCC’s human rights and climate change program. “We need to bring the ethical and spiritual dimensions to the discussion because they will affect us all in the near feature. We need to act fast, and need to act now.”
Still, why should the environmental movement and religions be joining hands, and why the tie up with international organizations?
The Alliance of Religions and Conservation’s Palmer, who addressed the Uppsala summit, noted that his organization, known by its acronym ARC, was a secular foundation and a sister organization of the WWF, the global conservation group.
“When we say we are a secular organization established solely to work with religions,” Palmer said, “many in the environmental movement still look at us and reply, ‘Why bother with the religions?’” Palmer believes the answer lies in a number of factors.
“First and foremost, we look at the sheer amount of land that is owned by the 11 major religious traditions we work with,” said Palmer. “These range from Baha’is and Buddhists through to Shinto and Zoroastrianism, and take in every major faith … Within those we are working with there are 25 or 26 forms of Buddhism, about 30 different forms of Islam and … more than 50 forms of Christianity.”
Palmer explained that the 11 religions with whom ARC works, “own about 8 percent of the habitable surface of the planet, and that figure is growing the whole time.” ARC has been helping Cambodian Buddhists in their attempt to recover the 28 percent of Cambodia that they lost under communist rule. “And, of course, as communism has fallen or transmogrified, a great deal of land has been given back to faiths,” said Palmer. “So we [religions] own a lot of the land.”
Palmer also points out that religions are the third largest investing group in the world. In 2001, ARC began a major process of working with major faiths on social investment and ecological principles. Religions also own 5 percent of the forests of the world, and are heavily involved in education.
“Religions either founded, set up, still contribute to, run or own over 50 percent of all schools worldwide,” said Palmer, who also explains that media belonging to religious organizations produce more magazines in the expanded E.U. than any other group.
“So,” Palmer says, “the question is, ‘Why on earth wouldn’t you work with religions?’” He adds, “Most people thought the role of religion was to tell you what not to do. Now, they are learning they can be proactive.”
More information:
• Alliance of Religions and Conservation
• World Council of Churches
Peter Kenny is editor-in-chief at Ecumenical News International (ENI). This article is reprinted with permission from ENI and may be found on their Web site.
Once during Advent I was in Billings, Montana for a cabinet meeting and our Christmas party. One evening we took to the (icy) streets to see the local Christmas parade, where I saw something I have never seen before or since: on the back of a hay wagon, a live nativity scene was assembled, using real sheep and children dressed-up as Mary and Joseph and the kings. What was surprising was the Boy Scouts stationed around the manger as a sort of honor guard, all of them toting genuine hunting rifles. Nobody was going to wake this baby Jesus (or steal those sheep)!
Those were the early days for me as a bishop. Since then I have traveled many places in this country and around the world. I have seen many cultures, many surprising things, and eaten a “variety” of foods. I’ve seen how cultures overlap and shape one another to create new (and sometimes confusing) expressions in storytelling, music, visual and theater arts, and worship. It is clear that God delights in diversity, and so should we.
And yet that diversity often leads to division, and becomes the source of conflict, sometimes irritating, sometimes tragic. The recent bombings in Mumbai, India have economic, political and religious roots. But fundamentally, one group sees another as different in the extreme, and therefore a target for the extreme actions of destruction. For many, diversity’s divisiveness is fatal.
This comes to mind after reviewing a new book, The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop with Robert G. Cushing, published this year by Houghton-Mifflin.
We already know about the divisions of red and blue states, Fox versus MSNBC, rural versus urban, NRA versus NPR. What the authors point to is that we have always had this diversity, but at least we were bound together by the necessities of economy, physical proximity, and a common “three networks” media. Now, people move less for economic reasons than lifestyle choices; these days, market researchers can tell you all about you and your choices based on just your zip code. Mr. Bishop writes:
“We have built a country where everyone can choose the neighbors (and church and news shows) most compatible with his or her lifestyle and beliefs. And we are all living with the consequences of this segregation by way of life: pockets of like-minded citizens that have become so ideologically inbred that we don’t know, can’t understand, and can barely conceive of ‘those people’ who live just a few miles away.”
The writers continue and illuminate their central idea, based on psychological and sociological studies: as New York Times reviewer Scott Stossel notes: “…when like minded people are grouped together, they don’t settle around the average point of view … but rather become more extreme in the direction toward which they are already inclined.” [5.18.08] Bishop says it this way: “Mixed company moderates; like-minded company polarizes. Heterogeneous communities restrain group excesses; homogeneous communities march toward the extremes.”
To my mind, this means God’s creative diversity is not a nicety, not an entertaining accessory to the human experience, but a deep necessity. When we truly encounter and embrace the other, we are drawn to the center of the human-divine experience. I think this is why Jesus came not as king or conqueror: even then, the world had enough of those. What was needed was something radically different—a child in a manger, with the power to draw both shepherds and kings to a stable filled with dung and starlight. The radical otherness of the Divine was made radically simple, so that we might recognize our commonality in otherness, in diversity.
For us as disciples of this Christ, that means forming communities of diversity, fellowships where the people do not look alike, act alike, think alike, etc. In this way, we embody the alternative to homogenous clustering and its divisiveness. Instead, hospitality and diversity become symbiotic in the church, enriching and strengthening each other and all of us.
This is what we find in the manger, what we wait for this season. Come! Lord Jesus!
Bishop Mary Ann Swenson is episcopal leader of the Los Angeles Area of The United Methodist Church. This column is adapted with permission from her weekly “e-360″ message.
The press release from the National Council of Churches’ annual assembly sounded just like a standard denominational article:
“The General Secretary of the National Council of Churches tonight began what he said would be an ongoing conversation with ecumenical communicators about the theology of communication and the way the NCC story should be told.”
The Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, who was elected general secretary a year ago, was speaking to the NCC Communication Commission. On the surface, he was making an overture to a program committee about whose work he acknowledged he knows little. On the other hand, however, when the ecumenical movement’s top staff executive laid on the table issues of “the way the NCC story should be told” and a “theology of communication,” he stepped onto much more questionable ground.
Thirty-five years as a professional journalist, the past 20 of them specializing in religion, have taught me to be suspicious whenever any institutional executive begins to talk about the noble motives of “communication.” In my experience the unspoken subtext of such talk invariably has been about keeping information vital to the public interest away from journalists, who serve as the public’s institutional watchdogs.
Dr. Kinnamon isn’t without bona fides in this arena, having served with a Utah television station early in his career. Nor is the NCC without scars from past media campaigns against it. What deeply concerns me, however, is that the conversation – especially “the way the NCC story should be told” – sounds a lot more like a bureaucrat attempting to engage his constituents in a campaign to control news. And that’s just what the NCC, with its history of troubled relations with the media, doesn’t need.
In this era of “citizen journalists” armed to the teeth with every conceivable word-image-sound technology, it may seem quaint to differentiate between “communication” and “journalism.” After all, these days all one needs to “communicate” is a digital camera, a computer and Internet access. Yet “journalism” and “communication” are not the same thing. “Communication” involves sending a message through a medium to a receiver to achieve a response. “Journalism” is the professional practice of accurately reporting events and issues, analyzing and verifying facts and interpreting the meaning of those facts in proper context – to which this grizzled old newshen would add “for the public’s best interest.”
Judging from the NCC’s web site, http://www.ncccusa.org/ its staff is already doing a bang-up job of communicating the organization’s many valuable resources. If the NCC’s communication commission wishes to model the best spirit of both communication and journalism, it can do a real service for its member churches, and by extension for society’s common good, by considering a program something like this:
___Promote and support the First Amendment.
___ Promote and support editorial freedom for all denominational publications, especially freedom from control and/or interference by church leaders.
___ Recommend and support opening all church meetings to the public, including media representatives, unless they involve personnel, lawsuits or sensitive negotiations. In regard to the latter three situations, support the practice of giving as much of a report as possible after the meeting, without equivocation on facts that can’t be shared.
___ Develop or find and circulate materials for NCC churches to use in teaching their members how critically to analyze and use the information they get from media outlets.
___ Advocate with governments everywhere for media access for all people, especially those in low-income situations and in politically repressed countries.
___ Teach the NCC and its member churches one simple skill: Answer the question. Whatever the situation, tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.
After all, Jesus’ theology of communication was simple: You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free (John 8:32, NRSV* paraphrased).
*New Revised Standard Version Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
On the eve of its general assembly, the General Secretary of the National Council of Churches began what he said would be an ongoing conversation with ecumenical communicators about the theology of communication and the way the NCC story should be told.
The Rev. Dr. Michael Kinnamon, who was elected General Secretary a year ago, addressed the NCC Communication Commission on the eve of the annual General Assembly of the NCC and Church World Service and said he knows less about the communicators’ work than that of the Council’s three other program commissions. But Kinnamon, who in 1968 was on the night news staff of KSL in Salt Lake City and anchored the nightly news program on his college station, said he was deeply concerned about the issue of “credible communication” when he was on the Geneva staff of the World Council of Churches in the early 1980s.
“Tonight I want to raise questions with you that I hope we will be able to discuss more thoroughly in our future meetings together,” Kinnamon told commissioners who represent communications offices of the NCC’s member communions and other church organizations. For example, he said, “is there a need for more work in articulating a theology of communication?”
He quoted Dr. Pauline Webb, an internationally known religious broadcaster, writer and ecumenical leader from London, England, who warned against a church tendency to reduce communication to technique and not ask what is the purpose of communication in God’s plan.
“Communication in the Christian perspective is inherently personal,” Kinnamon said. “It begins with God’s communication with us, most especially in the person of Jesus Christ,” and results in the building of community.
Kinnamon also asked the communicators how churches can balance the tension between the freedom of communication and the need to protect those who are harmed by various forms of communication. “Some groups don’t have equal access to media,” he said, and many are victims of distorted media stereotypes. “Communication has the power to divide us as well as the power to bring us together in community,” he said.
A third question Kinnamon raised was about the style of ecumenical communication. “Face-to-face communication or direct dialogue has been the central discipline of the ecumenical movement,” he said, citing the series of church-to-church visits that are taking place among member communions this year. Given the development of new communications technologies, he said, it was worth discussing how this discipline could be maintained.
Kinnamon’s fourth question invoked one of his central themes since he became General Secretary. “Is there a tendency among communicators to think of the National Council of Churches as a cooperative agency rather than a community of the churches?” he asked. “Churches think they have joined an organization that does ecumenical things on their behalf. But our constitution is quite clear that the essence of the Council is a community of Christian communions (that) come together as the Council in common mission.”
“The purpose of the Council,” he said, “is to renew the church through the sharing of gifts.”
In a brief discussion that followed before Kinnamon left for another meeting, the Rev. Dr. William F. Fore, retired chief of NCC Communication, made an ironic reference to the questions, saying, “I hate ‘em because they’re difficult to deal with, but they are the right questions.” One of the basic roles of ecumenical communicators, Fore said, “is to tell our stories — how we got here, what we went through, what we did. There are a number of ways we can do this — drama or music or one-on-one — but telling the stories is important.”
]]>A few weeks ago at the University of Southern California, I attended a lecture given by Monte Neil Stewart, Utah lawyer and president of the Marriage Law Foundation. Mr. Stewart argued that same-sex marriage, which he calls “genderless marriage,” was part of a plan to destroy the institution of marriage altogether. He said it would water down the meaning of marriage to the point where it would lose its meaning completely. His argument hinged on the idea that genderless marriage would eliminate the social value of marriage as the structure in which children are raised.
Based on what was said in the question-and-answer session that followed, it appeared to me that all of the 50 attendees, except myself, were voting for Prop 8, the California ballot initiative that would eliminate the newfound right of same-sex couples to marry in this state. The proposition inserted this unprecedented elimination of a civil right into the state’s constitution.
I spoke up and said, “I am a Protestant pastor who has counseled and performed ceremonies for hundreds of loving, deeply committed couples, heterosexual and homosexual. I am a man married to a woman, and my wife and I feel no threat whatsoever to our marriage from the fact that same-sex couples can marry. In fact, we feel that our marriage is ennobled by our knowing that gay and lesbian couples can marry. I pastored a church that had a gay couple raising two happy, well-adjusted children who love their same-sex parents as dearly as other children love their heterosexual parents. Your argument that same-sex marriage eliminates the social value of marriage as the institution in which children are raised is hard to understand, when so many heterosexual couples marry late in life with no intention of having kids. I’ve performed such marriages many times and find these couples to be no less invested in the concept of marriage than younger couples who do plan to have children. People seem as eager to be married, and as clear about it as a social value, as ever – despite the fact that there are so many divorces and so many different forms of family life.”
I got no response from Mr. Stewart to my comments except for a pained expression on his face. He then said that it upset him that liberal clergy would support same-sex marriage, because it was a threat to religious liberty. He invoked the specter of the loss of tax-exempt status for church organizations if they didn’t go along with gay marriage. I responded by saying that no church would ever be forced to perform a same-sex marriage, so I didn’t understand how this could be a problem. (There might be a challenge for churches that don’t want to hire or provide marital benefits for a person in a same-sex marriage, but in effect this existed before same-sex marriage was legal in California, due to other rules about non-discrimination and provision of benefits. And it’s hard to feel too badly for folks who are frustrated in their attempt to deny rights and benefits to any class of people.)
Same-sex marriage is a reality today, it will be a reality when Proposition 8 goes into effect, and it will be a reality whether or not the state ever recognizes it as a legal status. I am scheduled to perform a same-sex service for a loving lesbian couple in the next few months, and that ceremony will happen no matter how this proposition plays out in the courts. The young people of California overwhelmingly voted against Proposition 8. That means that in 20 years, this issue will be history, and people will wonder how same-sex marriage was ever a matter of debate.
Meanwhile, to advance that day, the progressive pastors and rabbis and imams of California will continue to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies, recognizing that such unions deserve the celebration and support of faith communities. Over time, as more and more of these ceremonies are performed, same-sex marriage is going to become a normal, publicly recognized reality. And then the law will change to reflect it. This is an example of civil initiative: the establishment of law by the exercise of a natural right, even if it is yet to be codified by government.
Civil initiative is a concept I first discovered in the writings of Jim Corbett, the co-founder of the Sanctuary Movement in the 1980’s. Corbett, an Arizona cowboy, Quaker, and activist, helped Central American refugees enter the United States to escape persecution and death during the civil wars of that era. When the movement started, these refugees were deported back to their war-torn countries. Beginning with his efforts, a nationwide effort to protect the refugees in churches and synagogues helped convince the government to change the asylum rules to enable Central Americans to get legal protection in the United States. Corbett saw his work not as civil disobedience, but rather as following the law that would one day emerge into full recognition as a consequence of its exercise:
“Civil initiative maintains and extends the rule of law – unlike civil disobedience, which breaks it, and civil obedience, which lets the government break it. The heart of a societal order guided by the rule of law is the principle that the nonviolent protection of basic rights is never illegal. These basic rights and their matching obligations constitute standards of just conduct that government counter-enforcement is unable to nullify, short of destroying the societal order itself. While openly submitting to the trials and penalties imposed by government, the free community refuses to be coerced into collaborating with violations of the law (that is, of right). Rather, it exercises its rights and protects the violated. This is how liberty grows and free societies form.” (Goatwalking by Jim Corbett, Viking Press, 1991, p. 104)
As the Central Americans, with faith communities at their sides, exercised their fundamental right to asylum until it became recognized as the law of the land, so will same-sex couples exercise their right to marry, with faith communities by their sides, until Proposition 8 is repealed!
This article is adapted with permission from the Rev. Jim Burklo’s blog, “Musings,” on The Center for Progressive Christianity web site. Burklo is the author of Birdlike and Barnless: Meditations, Prayers and Songs for Progressive Christians.
]]>In opening sessions of the National Council of Churches’ Nov. 11-13 general assembly observing the first 100 years of the ecumenical movement in the U.S., a nationally known theologian told delegates that the movement has “an historic opportunity to change.”
Dr. Gary Dorrien, Reinhold Niebuhr Professor of Social Ethics at Union Theological Seminary and Professor of Religion at Columbia University in New York, traced the history of the social gospel movement and said the recent election of President-elect Barack Obama opens the door to new possibilities.
Dorrien suggested the ongoing worldwide economic crisis creates a new scenario for churches whose original response to modern economic globalization was the social gospel.
“This year we have witnessed a presidential candidacy that carries the burden of America’s entire history of racial prejudice and exclusion,” he said. “Regardless of which candidate you supported in the election, it is undeniable that Barack Obama’s election represents an historic breakthrough in the American experience, symbolizing the hope of an American society that affirms and celebrates its multiracial diversity. That hope reverberated in the enormous cheering crowds of mostly white people that convinced him to run for the presidency sooner than he had expected.”
But Obama himself has not claimed that racism in America has ended, Dorrien said. “He talks about racial justice as little as possible; he plays down the racial prejudice that his campaign encountered; and he required his campaign workers to follow his example. Yet he does not regard himself as a symbol of ‘post-racial politics,’ for on the few occasions that Obama has explicitly addressed the issue, he has stated that it’s premature to imagine such a thing in American society.”
Most whites are impatient with black grievances and the Obama campaign played them down, Dorrien said. “But bear in mind that these very guidelines reflect the persistence of the problem. Obama’s favorite image of how we should think about racial justice is a split screen. One side of the screen holds in view the just, multi-racial society that must be created; the other side shows the existing America that is far from a just society.”
Obama’s election gives the U.S. “an historic opportunity to change the second half of this screen. [With Obama’s election] the world changed, and we woke up in a better country,” Dorrien said.
Even so, he suggested the festering economic crisis will impede President Obama’s agenda for progress, and the churches will have to reexamine their attitudes toward capitalism that they began to develop in the 19th century and through the Great Depression of the 1930s.
“A month ago I went around the country saying that because our banks don’t know what their assets are worth, and it’s impossible to sort out the toxic debt, we might as well half-socialize the banks to unfreeze credit lines. Then Gordon Brown did it in England, France and Germany followed suit, Paul Krugman said we should do it too, he won the Nobel Prize, suddenly [U.S. Treasury Secretary] Henry Paulsen agreed, and on October 13 the Bush administration invested $250 billion in senior preferred bank stock in nine major banks, take it or take it, there was no choice. We’re bailing like it’s 1933 … The next several years will be devoted to cleaning up the financial mess and coping with a bad recession.”
Dorrien also suggested that the bygone social gospel movement rose to heights that will challenge modern church leaders. “For all its faults and limitations,” he said, “the social gospel movement produced a greater progressive religious legacy than any generation before or after it. Christian realism inspired no hymns and built no lasting institutions. It was not even a movement, but rather, a reaction to the social gospel centered on one person, Reinhold Niebuhr.
“The social gospel, by contrast, was a 60-year movement and enduring perspective that paved the way for modern ecumenism, social Christianity, the Civil Rights movement, and the deep involvement of the ecumenical movement in the Civil Rights movement. It had a tradition in the black churches led by Reverdy Ransom, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Benjamin E. Mays, Mordecai Johnson, and Martin Luther King Jr. It had anti-imperialist, socialist, feminist and theologically conservative advocates in addition to its liberal reformers. It created the ecumenical and social justice ministries that remain the heart of American Christianity. And it expounded a vision of economic democracy that is as relevant and necessary today as it was a century ago.”
Full text of Dorrien’s address
“If we believe God created the world — and that doesn’t preclude believing in Darwin or evolution — I think he then created us to use, not abuse. If we want to live for a while, we better do something.”
– Carolyn Spencer, a Green Initiative Committee member at Williamsburg (VA) UMC. Quoted on HamptonRoads.com.
“John Calvin is one of the most powerful theologians in history. His work provided the Reformation movement with a first systematization of its thought, which strengthened the movement and helped the churches to organize themselves. Very soon it allowed the ideas of the Reformation to undergo an unprecedented geographical expansion,” asserted Thomas Wipf, president of the Council of the Federation of Swiss Protestant Churches.
“Calvin, the visionary Reformer, sparked off a movement which has spread to the four corners of the earth: more than 80 million Christians living in 107 countries today acknowledge his legacy.” With these words Setri Nyomi, general secretary of WARC, and Clifton Kirkpatrick, WARC president, opened the ceremony at the Reformers’ Wall. Representatives of Reformed congregations from all over the world were present at the traditional ceremony of the Company of Pastors, which this year was devoted to the founder of the company, John Calvin (known in Europe by the French spelling of his first name, Jean).
The inauguration brought out the legacy of Calvin rather than his portrait: Calvin democratized the ministry of the church and in so doing inaugurated a culture of collegiality in the affairs of a community. Calvin put God above all authority. He strengthened the unity between believing and doing, between freedom and responsibility. Calvin reinforced bridges between humanist thought and Christian convictions.
“The church would be different without Jean Calvin,” concluded Wipf, “and so would Geneva.”
The main lines of the festivities were unveiled at a press conference that followed. The calvin09 year will be marked by key occasions, spectacles, exhibitions, public courses and concerts. The International Museum of the Reformation will present the exhibition “A Day in the Life of Calvin,” while congregations can download or order a ready-to-use mini-exhibition.
TPC NeXus compiled this report from a World Alliance of Reformed Churches’ Press Release and information on the above noted websites.
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