The Question: John McCain's spiritual guide, televangelist Rod Parsley, calls Islam a "false religion" that should be "destroyed." Should McCain renounce Parsley? Will Islam be an issue in this year's U.S. presidential election?

Will the recent media obsession with statements made by Barack Obama’s former pastor soon be replaced by a new national obsession – statements made by John McCain’s spiritual guide Rod Parsley and endorser John Hagee, both of whom are popular televangelists – and both of whom have said things that easily rival statements by Jeremiah Wright?

We certainly could have a new media feeding frenzy like the one we’ve had in recent weeks, this one favoring Democrats who seek to embarrass the Republican nominee by demanding that he renounce and denounce his spiritual associates. I suppose that would be “fair,” if we want to indulge in eye-for-an-eye politics.

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For people in the U.S., the Archbishop's recent statements are easy to misunderstand. Many of us assume that England is "a secular society." Although church attendance and other religious observance in England is significantly lower than the U.S., England does not have the same tradition of "separation of church and state" that we have in the U.S. As the name "The Church of England" implies, England is officially a Christian country with both a state church and a commitment to religious diversity.

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A few weeks ago, I posted on this subject of torture for the God's Politics blog on beliefnet.com.

I began with this reflection: "I remember about eight years ago when then presidential candidate George W. Bush repeatedly claimed that he would restore honor to the presidency, soiled as it had been by our previous president's infamous affair. I remember hoping he would succeed. But a new kind of shame has come to the office and to our nation as reports surface about our government's secret authorization of torture. We all share in this shame."

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E. O. Wilson is, I believe, right and wise to engage in this conversation about protecting life on earth. The scientific community must engage with Southern Baptists and others of sincere faith - as long as their engagement is truly "forged in an atmosphere of mutual respect." The alliance Wilson calls for is both necessary and possible.

But its progress will be halting and shallow until both sides experience a deep shift in their thinking.

On the scientific side, I agree with Dr. John Haught, who reflected on a similar conversation convened by Wilson, Carl Sagan and Stephen Jay Gould back in 1992. Haught said, "It is hard to imagine how any thorough transformation of the habits of humans will occur without a corporate human confidence in the ultimate worthwhileness of our moral endeavors." This confidence requires, he said, "a conviction that the universe carries a meaning, or that it is the unfolding of a 'promise.'"

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I think Christopher Hitchens is, sadly, too often right. History makes this clear, and many of us who are religious have experienced our share of religious irrationality, intolerance, bigotry, contempt, exclusion, violence (if not physical, then verbal insult), and so on - whether with members of our own religion or members of other religions, or even members of no religion.

Unfortunately, religious people don't have a monopoly on these behaviors. This fact may be obscured by the fact that most people in history, by a very large majority, have been religious, so the sample of irreligious people is smaller to begin with. That means that the total number of acts of ignorance and bigotry will be most commonly associated with religious people.

That's why, I think, if we focused in on irreligious people, Hitchens could make the same kind of generalization, substituting "irreligiosity" for "religion." There are plenty of irreligious people who treat women and children badly, who say and do stupid things, and who are full of prejudice.

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Doubt, in my experience, is like a spiritual drought that forces our roots to go deeper. Nearly all of us experience these dry, dark, difficult times when God doesn't seem real and it's hard to keep going, much less growing. Sometimes these low tides of faith are connected with events … the death of a loved one, a broken relationship, the loss of a job, a prolonged illness, questions raised by a book or professor. But sometimes they seem to come out of nowhere; it's sunny and bright outside, but inside you feel dark, cloudy, gray, empty.

As a pastor, I have had to deal with matters of faith and doubt on a daily basis. But it's not just other people's faith struggles I have had to face; I experience my own high and low tides of faith even in the midst of ministry. Through it all I have learned that doubt is far more common than most admit. That's why it helps so much when leaders like Mother Teresa are honest about their doubts.

When people come to me to talk about their doubts, one of the first things I say to them is this: doubt is not always bad. Sometimes doubt is absolutely essential. I think of doubt as analogous to pain.

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I recently heard a provocative interview between Chicago pastor Bill Hybels and British filmmaker Richard Curtis. You will probably know of Curtis' work, even if you don't know his hame: "Four Weddings and a Funeral," "Notting Hill," "Love Actually," "The Girl in the Cafe," the Mr.
Bean films.

What you may not know is Curtis' pivotal role in raising awareness and money regarding poverty, HIV, refugees, and other crises in our world today.

For example, earlier this year he piloted the "American Idol Gives Back" project which raised $73 million to help desperately poor people around the world, and Curtis is one of the creative geniuses behind Comic Relief and the UK's leadership regarding the Millennium Development Goals. His "red nose day" is one of the most creative social interventions I've ever heard of.

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Although I served as a pastor for 24 years, I've always been a person
who questions, doubts, wonders, and re-thinks. As soon as I answer my
questions, I begin questioning my answers. So I've been sympathetic to
people who come to me with questions about tenets or traditions,
doctrines or practices.

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The recent Sojourners forum was, I think, groundbreaking. True, it was only a beginning, and there is much more to do, but I believe one positive outcome is that it shows there are more than three alternatives: religious right, religious left, and secular left.

I think we all sensed that the three candidates were striving to find higher ground and common ground and creative space beyond the current left-right polarizations where the air is hot and pretty stale.

Sadly, the questions were sometimes relics from the polarized territory - questions about evolution, abortion, and so on. I think what is becoming possible is a new kind of question deeply rooted in faith and values.

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I think my favorite songwriter of all times is Bruce Cockburn. In one of his songs ("Down Where the Death Squad Lives"), he has this haunting line: "Around every evil, there gathers love. Bombs aren't the only things that fall from above down where the death squad lives."

This image of love gathering around evil is especially poignant to me because one of our sons is a leukemia survivor. Learning about his illness meant learning about white blood cells, which quite literally gather around infection so it can be removed from the body.

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Atheism, I believe, becomes more popular when religious communities become more corrupt – and especially when their corruption includes violence. This occurred in the decades after the Thirty Years War in European history, and I think we're entering a similar period today. When religion seems to produce violent or arrogant or hypocritical believers, many people decide it is more ethical not to believe.

Interestingly, Jesus said something about this phenomenon in his “Sermon on the Mount.”

He said, “You are the salt of the earth. But if the salt loses its saltiness, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled underfoot.” A resurgence of atheism could be seen as people “throwing out and trampling underfoot” a version of religion that has lost its "salt," a religion which is doing too few good works but instead is either doing too much nothing (other than talk) or doing too many evil things.

So when the world’s second largest religion seems (to many people) too tolerant of terrorism and sectarian violence, and sometimes even encourages and justifies them, we shouldn’t be surprised that many people reject religion. When the world’s largest religion seems (to many people) too tolerant of militarism, unjustified war, and consumerism, and sometimes even encourages and justifies them, we should be even less surprised.

When both religions do too little to promote active peacemaking, care for the poor, concern for the environment, and the renewal of communities, when they seem more concerned with “straining out gnats” of religious trivia than “swallowing camels of massive social injustice, we should only be surprised that more people haven’t become atheists.

Many if not most of us who are believers are so because of people and faith communities we have met ... groups characterized not by the bitter taste of violence and hypocrisy, and not by the bland taste of nominalism and lukewarmness, but by the salty taste of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness, generosity, faithfulness, and self-discipline. Where faith communities are helping people be formed in these qualities of character and daily living, it's hard not to believe in God, just as when the opposite is happening, it becomes hard to believe in God.

So, I would say that much of the appeal of today’s popular atheists – from Richard Dawkins to Sam Harris – lies in the corruption of religion. There are other factors too – the ongoing celebrity death-match between a form of aggressive scientific reductionism and a form of reactionary fundamentalism that won’t engage with science constructively, for example.

But I am more interested in a new phenomenon: a growing desire for dialogue among professed atheists and people of faith in regards to global crises. (This is the subject of the book I am currently working on.) A few years ago, a group of leading scientists (many of them convinced atheists) whose science increasingly alarmed them about the environmental crisis called for a meeting with religious leaders. “We have the scientific data that tells us we’re in trouble,” they said. “But we don’t have the means of motivating people to change their behavior and their values. We need you to do that. Let's work together.”

That’s where I believe some of the recent attempts at “atheist evangelism” will be counterproductive in the end. The atheists are right: there is a lot of unhealthy, unsavory religion out there. But they are not necessarily right that the world would be better off if religion just went away and everyone joined them in their atheism. Their aggressive posture will, I think, have the unintended consequence of increasing the reactivity of the religious … and perhaps the arrogance of the irreligious too. A world with more reactive religious people and more arrogant irreligious people is not a pleasant thought.

In light of our pressing global crises, in a world like that, everybody loses.

There’s a better alternative than a death-match between religion and atheism: for people of faith (including readers of this blog) to seek to take the logs out of our own religious eyes by dealing with the racism, militarism, imperialism, terrorism, sectarianism, consumerism, judgmentalism, nominalism, and other –isms that are corrupting our religious communities … and to collaborate for the common good, to make our world more the kind of place that our Creator would desire, working side by side with everyone who is willing, including those who don’t believe in a Creator.

As with so many questions, we need to respond to “Is America a Christian nation?” with another question: “What do you mean by a Christian nation?”

If we mean, “Are the majority of the people in America affiliated with the Christian religion?” we would have to say, as Dr. Albert Mohler says elsewhere on this site, “Yes.” That’s simply a matter of fact.

If we mean, “Were the original inhabitants of America Christians?” the answer would be “No. They were native peoples with their own indigenous religions.” If we mean, "Were the original framers of the U.S. Constitution Christians," the answer would be, "Some were. Some weren't."

But if we mean, “Is the U.S. Consitution an explicitly Christian document?” we’d have to say, “It no doubt reflects the values of the largely Christianized European populace that produced it. But no, it doesn’t establish Christianity as the national religion. In fact, it forbids the establishment of a national religion.”

If we mean, “Are America’s domestic and foreign policies consistent with the teachings of Jesus?” I think we’d have to say, “Maybe partially at our best moments, but certainly not on many occasions.”

If the question is meant to explore whether Christians in America should be allowed to express their faith in public (saying, for example, “Merry Christmas” to one another), that would prompt me, speaking personally, to say, “Sure. And Jewish people should be able to say Happy Chanuka, and so on. Each person should be able to express his or her faith publicly, as long as doing so doesn’t violate the rights of another person.” The alternative – not allowing people to express their faith in public – would create a kind of totalitarian state few if any of us want. Besides, as this site demonstrates, respectful dialogue about religion is a fascinating and sometimes meaningful and even life-changing experience.

If the question is intended to privilege some (Christians) and marginalize others (nonChristians), I think it’s not the kind of question a follower of Jesus would even ask, because sincere followers of Jesus are taught to love their neighbors as themselves, which would mean they wouldn’t want to marginalize them.

Everything I know about Jesus leads me to believe that Jesus himself would be most pleased for those of us who are Christians to celebrate his birthday by actually seeking to follow his teachings about neighborliness – and especially, during these times of heightened religious tension in our world, neighborliness towards those of different faiths, and those of no faith. Which raises one further question: what if we asked, not "Is America a Christian nation," but "What would it mean for America to become a more Christ-like nation?"

This important question brings to mind some words from literary critic Stanley Fish, decades old now, I think.

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