I have always insisted that too many Americans mistakenly equate evangelical Christianity with fundamentalism. The basis of evangelical religion since the 17th century has always been a personal relationship between God and man, unmediated by ecclesiastical hierarchies. Fundamentalism, by contrast, insists on a literal interpretation of the Bible. While all fundamentalists are evangelicals, not all evangelicals are fundamentalists. I have often used former President Jimmy Carter as an example of an evangelical Christian who is not a fundamentalist, given that he has repeatedly opposed fundamentalists who want to keep Darwin's theory of evolution out of public schools. The "Evangelical Manifesto" issued last week in Washington suggests that I may have been wrong in my analysis of the relationship between evangelicalism and fundamentalism.

Continue »

I cannot imagine any political process less suited to finding out whether a candidate is either honest or trustworthy than the American way of running for the presidency in an era when "character" is defined by shrinking sound bites and endless video loops on blogs. I daresay that if any of us had been subjected to the continual and continuous scrutiny applied to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton over the past year, our ratings for honesty and trustworthiness would also have plummeted. People always seem less honest in the glare of publicity, because nearly everyone has something to conceal--or something that he or she thinks must be concealed for fear of public censure.

Continue »

The Question: Jeremiah Wright's sermons continue to be an issue in the presidential campaign. Why? What do you think of his preaching style? What do you wish you understood better about it?

I was not present at the National Press Club when the Rev. Jeremiah Wright spoke on Monday, but I have read the full text of his remarks--and I can recognize an egomaniac, black or white, when I read one. For Wright to say that an attack on him is an attack on the entire black church is utterly ridiculous, and it plays in the mainstream white press only because so many white journalists--and I mean both liberal and conservative journalists--are so ignorant about African-American religion that they think of it as a monolith. Wright represents the "black church" in the same sense that Rod Parsley, John McCain's wacko spiritual adviser, represents the "white church."

Continue »

The Question: In his speech to U.S. bishops last week, Pope Benedict XVI said: "Any tendency to treat religion as a private matter must be resisted . . . To the extent that religion becomes a purely private affair, it loses its very soul." Do you agree or disagree? Why?

One could hardly expect the head of the Roman Catholic Church to take any other position. Union of church and state was, of course, the ideal situation--from the church's point of view--in pre-Reformation Christian Europe. But Americans were an overwhelmingly Protestant people at the time of the revolution, so the Constitution's separation of church and state was a huge help to both Catholics and Jews in the young republic. Americans' prejudice against "papists" in the first half of the 19th century was much stronger than anti-Semitism (a first in western history), and Catholicism could never have flourished if that prejudice had been bolstered by a state-established Protestant church.

Continue »

The Question: Pope Benedict's recent baptism of a well-known Italian Muslim has prompted criticism in much of the Islamic world. Has Benedict done enough to build bridges to Islam?

One thing that devout believers in ecumenical dialogue simply don't get about the Roman Catholic Church is that its leaders, including Pope Benedict XVI, truly believe that theirs is the one, true faith. Although the church has given up conversion by the sword and waterboarding (a form of interrogation used on heretics during the Inquisition), the Vatican's raison d'etre remains the conversion of everyone--including Muslims. We don't hear much about this today, because the belief that your religion is truer and better than anyone else's doesn't sit well in democratic societies.

Continue »

The Question: What can Pope Benedict XVI say and do to repair the growing rifts between the Vatican, the clergy and the laity in America?

The most significant fact about modern American Catholicism appears in a recent report on the changing U.S. religious landscape by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. Although 31 percent of Americans were raised as Roman Catholics, only 24 percent consider themselves Catholics today. One in ten adult Americans--a stunning figure--have left the church for another religion or have abandoned organized religion altogether. The saying, "Once a Catholic, always a Catholic," a favorite maxim of the nuns in the parochial schools I attended, is no longer true.

Continue »

The Question: The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated 40 years ago. What are your memories of that day? What impact did it have on you? How is King relevant to you and to us today?

My memories of the night of Martin Luther King's assassination, and the days of rage that followed in Washington, are indelible. I was a young reporter for The Washington Post, and when I stepped into a cab to get to the office as early as possible the next morning, my black taxi driver turned around and said, "I want you to know that if I didn't need the money, I wouldn't pick up any white passenger today." At that moment, I understood that King had been indispensible--the only man, at the time, who was capable of bridging the vast, generally unacknowledged gap between black and white America and a leader who was uniquely capable of reaching "the better angels of our nature."

Continue »

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?

If I hear one more word about candidates' "spiritual guides" and the utter nonsense spouted by so many of these ecclesiastical and televangelical nitwits, I will be tempted to write in the name of someone--anyone--who has the guts to stand up and say that conscience is, and should be, our only guide.

Continue »

The Question: How should Barack Obama have responded to inflammatory remarks made by his former pastor, Dr. Jeremiah Wright? Are you responsible for what your spiritual leader says from the pulpit?

I wrote a very different post about this question before Barack Obama made a major speech on race relations at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia on Tuesday. I still think that the inflammatory racial remarks made by his pastor, The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr., pose a significant problem for his campaign--even though Obama has said clearly that he does not agree with these views. But the main point made by Obama in his eloquent speech is that the nation is being held back by the rage of many black Americans at this country's history of slavery and discrimination and the rage of many whites at what they view as "special preference" for blacks based on that history. Both may be understandable, Obama suggested, but both are unproductive.

Continue »

The Question: E-mail: Blessing or Curse?

Are eating utensils a blessing or a curse? They're a blessing if you want to eat food while keeping your hands clean (which people didn't seem to care about for most of the history of our species) and a curse if you want to feed yourself as quickly as possible. That's why we enjoy hands-on food like pizza and why pizza is rarely served at formal dinners. It's a great mistake to attribute a philosophical dimension to any tool--including email in particular and computers in general.

Continue »

Oh no! Not On Faith too! These questions about what Candidate Jesus might stand for have no business in our presidential election. Any candidates, liberal or conservative, who have managed to convince themselves that their policies would have been endorsed by Jesus are unfit for any public office.

Continue »

The Pew Forum's survey of the American religious landscape, with its finding that one out of four Americans have switched religions--or switched to no religion at all--during their lifetimes (and 44 percent if you count defections among Protestant denominations) suggests that American religiosity is based more on the model of a shopping mall than on the Rock of Ages.

Continue »

Apart from obligatory allusions to the God who has blessed America (mazel tov, Irving Berlin, your royalties are still rolling in) and a general tendency to be photographed making speeches in churches whenever possible, I do not think that faith has played a large and explicit role in the Democratic primary, which has now boiled down to a contest between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. That will probably change in the general election, because John McCain, in order to propitiate the angry Republican religious right, will probably have to start engaging in the politics of making the Democratic Party sound like the Party of Satan.

Continue »

I am tempted to ask whether the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, has been sampling a bit too much communion wine lately. Seriously, the archbishop's suggestion that British law should, in certain instances, recognize the authority of Islamic religious courts is the most politically destructive, anti-secular, and legally indefensible statement by a western religious leader in recent history.

Continue »

What secular ideas? The very word "secular" has been demonized and written out of America's acceptable political vocabulary. The Republican Party has been in thrall to the religious right for nearly two decades, and an increasingly vocal religious left has now convinced Democratic candidates that they must frame their ideas in terms of faith in order to sell themselves to the American public.

Continue »

This is the wrong question. Muslims around the world, depending on their interpretation of the Koran and the level of their respect for secular values (of which free expression is one) have widely varying views about everything from freedom of speech to the death penalty. A better question is whether the exercise of civil legal power by religious leaders--any leaders of any religion--is antithetical to free expression. To that question, history emphatically answers yes. It is only thanks to the separation of church and state that Christians in the West have long since stopped lopping off one another's heads over doctrinal differences concerning, say, the Holy Trinity.

Continue »

One of the few good things to be said for the inordinate length of the primary process is that in due course, a man who has received a huge amount of press coverage--a right-wing fundamentalist Christian who seems both humorous and "authentic"--reveals himself to be a humorous and authentic ignoramus. That is precisely what happened when Mike Huckabee suggested that we "amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards rather than try to change God's standards so it lines up with some contemporary view." (Huckabee also revealed himself to be as ignorant about lucid sentence structure as he is about constitutional history.)

Continue »

I've always been interested in the seven deadly sins--in purely intellectual fashion, of course--because so many of them are not sins at all unless taken to excess and extremes. Pride, for example, is not necessarily a sin (or a moral offense, in secular terms) in my book, but it can be an enormous moral failing when it leads to a reckless overestimation of one's abilities and a reckless undervaluation of the cost to others. Does anyone remember a president who declared, "Mission Accomplished," and the huge death toll that came afterward? This was nothing more than overweening pride--the sort of pride that makes you stupid--in action.

Continue »

Actually, we don't know "what Jewish Identity has meant in the past"--especially in the United States. The controversy over the title of the PBS series--"Jewish Americans" versus "American Jews"--tells us so. Only in America, and only fairly recently (since the Second World War) have Jews enjoyed the historic luxury, whether they are religious or not, of full acceptance in a country with a non-Jewish majority.

Continue »

I don't want to hear a word--not one bloviating word--about any candidate's personal "moral values." Self-assured, decent people don't feel obliged to assure the voters of their decency. Their values are evident from the way they live and the policies for which they have worked. By their fruits ye shall know them. (You don't have to consider the Bible to be the word of God to recognize its great lines--especially in the King James version.)

Continue »