National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) chief lobbyist Richard Cizik has won plaudits from the New York Times and criticism from his own constituency for shifting NAE to the left, on global warming and other issues over the last 6 years. But endorsing same sex civil unions on National Public…
Levels of religious practice remained a key indicator of voting preferences in 2008, with the religiously observant strongly still favoring the Republican, if slightly reduced from 2004. Evangelicals remained the strongest voting bloc for Republicans, giving 74 percent to John McCain, according to…
The evangelical left, still stung by 70-75 percent evangelical support for George W. Bush in 2004, has been insisting that more evangelicals will vote Democrat if steered away from same-sex marriage and abortion and towards Global Warming and poverty. Leading the charge for this redirection has…
IN A FOURTH encounter over two years, American church officials shared an Iftar meal with the visiting Iranian president on September 28 in New York City. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad earlier in the day had delivered his usual rant against Israel and the United States at the United Nations. But hosting…
Reasons to Believe
A RECENT FRENCH POLL shows that majorities of both practicing Catholics and Protestants support France's pro-American president Nicolas Sarkozy, even as his overall polling numbers have dropped.
ARE SOUTHERN BAPTISTS "dwindling"? Recent headlines about the annual meeting of the 16.27 million member Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) refer to its ostensible struggles with membership decline. Having lost 40,000 members last year, America's second biggest religious body was described as…
SUPPOSEDLY GLOBAL WARMING IS the wedge issue that will peel evangelicals away from their conservative voting habits and their ostensible preoccupation with sexual mores. So when the president of the conservative-led 16 million member Southern Baptist Convention signed a Global Warming statement,…
NOT ALL OF Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's encounters in New York during his recent trip were testy. The Shiite theocrat had what the New York Times called a "warm, even friendly exchange" with 150 church officials at the United Methodist Women's Church Center for the United Nations.
THE MOST POIGNANT MOMENT of the May 31 dedication of the Billy Graham Library was the tribute to the 88-year-old evangelist by 82-year-old former President George H.W. Bush.
NOT MANY AMERICANS are commemorating the 250th anniversary of the French and Indian War. Outside Washington, D.C., over 100 West Virginians recently assembled for their annual commemoration of their own community's role in the "war that made America." Creditably, PBS aired a documentary with that…
GERALD SHENK, who teaches at Eastern Mennonite Seminary in Harrisonburg, Virginia, attended a theology conference on "Madhist doctrine" in Teheran last September. (For many Shiite Muslims, the Twelfth Imam is the Mahdi, or messianic savior, who returns at the end times to establish a reign of…
On May 17, 1607, English settlers landed on Jamestown Island in Virginia and created what would be the first permanent British colony. An Anglican clergyman led them in prayers of thanksgiving and in constructing the first permanent Protestant church in the Western hemisphere.
LAST SUNDAY, 13 U.S. church officials left for Iran to meet with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and build a "bridge of peace" between the two countries.
LATE LAST YEAR, dozens of faculty members at Southern Methodist University publicly opposed plans by President Bush to locate his presidential library on SMU's campus in Dallas.
Christmas honors the birth of Jesus Christ two millennia ago. But Providence has also employed subsequent Christmas days in historically powerful ways, not least of all in America.
ON SATURDAY, December 2, incoming-Senate majority leader Harry Reid asked Jim Wallis, the liberal religious activist, to give the Democrats' official response to President Bush's weekly radio address. It was a curious, odd moment--the equivalent of Republicans inviting Jerry Falwell to respond on…
A CHRISTIAN PRIEST in Iraq was dismembered and beheaded by radical Islamists a few weeks ago as a reaction against Pope Benedict's August comments about Islam. But Western church groups, more focused on denouncing the U.S. presence in Iraq than on criticizing radical Islam, have said virtually…
SOMETIMES there are pleasant surprises from the much-maligned Church of England. Last week, its former Archbishop of Canterbury defended Pope Benedict's remarks about violence in Islamic history.
IS AMERICA GETTING MORE SECULAR? Not according to a new survey on Americans' religious beliefs, "American Piety in the 21st Century," published this month by Baylor University. According to the Baylor survey, 82 percent of Americans are Christians, 90 percent believe in God, 70 percent pray…
THE JULY 30 NEW YORK TIMES gave prominent coverage to a Minnesota mega-church pastor who disavowed the Religious Right ("Disowning Conservative Politics, Evangelical Pastor Rattles Flock"). The Rev. Gregory Boyd, ostensibly fed up by the political pressures of the 2004 presidential race, gave a…
THE ACCELERATING RIFT over homosexuality in the nearly 80 million member global Anglican Communion has finally reached directly into the Washington, D.C. area.
WHEN TWO FAIRFAX COUNTY POLICE OFFICERS were slain by a deranged teenager in mid-May, their funerals were both held at the 10,000-member McLean Bible Church in Vienna, Virginia, about 15 miles outside Washington, D.C.
WHEN VENEZUELAN PRESIDENT HUGO CH VEZ met with the Pope earlier this week, he assured Benedict XVI that he is a Christian. And he told the press that has a special friend who is one too. Sort of.
ON THE RELIGIOUS LEFT, the great hope these days is that the Religious Right is melting down over Global Warming. Liberal evangelical activist Jim Wallis rejoiced about the crack-up in a recent column, claiming that "the Religious Right is losing control" thanks to environmentalist evangelicals.…
A PROMINENT HAMAS member of parliament has explained why most American Christians support Israel. The churches are run by "converted" Jews who are exploiting Christians for Zionist purposes. "Even the churches where the Americans pray are led by Jews who were converted to Christianity, but they…
AMERICAN CHURCH OFFICIALS pleaded for forgiveness for the sins of the United States last week--from the Iraq War, to Bush's rejection of the Kyoto Accord, to the racism exposed by Hurricane Katrina, to economic exploitation, and for the more general American sin of idolatry.
Exodus
NBC'S lame-duck series Book of Daniel kicked up a lot of controversy during its brief run, but perhaps not for the right reasons.
FOR OVER A HUNDRED YEARS children have gathered on the South Lawn of the White House on the Monday after Easter to roll Easter eggs across the yard and meet the Easter Bunny. Seemingly few (if any) Washingtonians have ever tried to exploit the annual White House Easter Egg Roll for political…
PRESIDENT BUSH and Vice President Cheney are both members of the United Methodist Church, as are more than 60 members of Congress and 8.2 million other Americans. But the church's bishops, when they speak politically, sound surprisingly more like Michael Moore or Noam Chomsky (neither of whom is…
IN A NEW REPORT bishops of the Church of England have urged Western Christians to apologize for the Iraq War as an "act of truth and reconciliation." The committee of bishops, chaired by the bishop of Oxford, Richard Harries, also linked U.S. "imperialism" to the influence of U.S. evangelicals, who…
MICHAEL LERNER was back on campus at Berkeley. But this time he is a portly Jewish rabbi leading 1,200 mostly middle-aged "spiritual progressives," and not the young Students for a Democratic Society agitator targeted by J. Edgar Hoover in the 1960s.
LAST MONTH, FOR THE first time in years, a member denomination withdrew from the National Council of Churches (NCC). The spunky, 400,000-member communion is the Antiochian Orthodox Christian Archdiocese of North America, and its decision to quit the reflexively left-wing NCC was based on a…
EPISCOPALIANS often get tarred as America's most liberal Christian denomination. But there is a more liberal one! (Hint: it's the one Howard Dean joined after he quit the Episcopal Church in a dispute over a bike trail.)
ONE OF AMERICA'S largest Protestant denominations voted in May to prohibit the solemnization of same-sex unions in its churches, to withhold ordination from practicing homosexuals, to ban church funding for "gay" causes, to require celibacy for its single clergy, and to endorse civil laws that…