Under God

Is the Christian Right retooling, regrouping or just rebranding?

Leaders of two dozen organizations announced this past week the latest alliteration iteration of concerned conservative Christians. They are calling it the Freedom Federation, a direct descendant of the Moral Majority, the Christian Coalition and Values Voters.

Founders say the new group will have a broader membership and a kinder, gentler, more nonpartisan approach than its ancestors. "The stereotypical media-exacerbated image of the angry white evangelical will be replaced by an evangelical movement that will reconcile uncompromised values of compassion, truth with mercy, and righteousness with justice," Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, told reporters last week.

We shall see. But what's most interesting about the Freedom Federation isn't who's participating.

The Southern Baptist Convention's decision to DISfellowship a Texas Baptist congregation has led a Kentucky Baptist college to DISinvite the congregation's youth group from a summer mission trip to help poor people.

My question: WWJD? Who Would Jesus Dis?

-- The SBC, which last week voted to sever 125-year-old ties with Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth because the congregation allowed homosexual members to have their photos in the church directory.

-- The University of the Cumberlands, which just informed Broadway that its youth choir is no longer welcome to stay in dorms or perform mission work through the school's Mountain Outreach construction program, which build houses for the poor in Appalachia.

-- The Broadway Baptist Chapel Choir, whose 30 young members decided to give up 12 days of their summer, follow the words of Matthew 25, and go to rural Kentucky to serve the poor.

"All these kids want to do is praise God with their singing and serve God by helping those in poverty," Broadway Pastor Brent Beasley told Associated Baptist Press.

My guess is it wouldn't be the kids.

It was a pastoral talk, it was a political speech. It was a "veiled swipe" at President Obama, it was not about Obama at all. It was a message for his fellow pastors, it was a message for his potential voters.

The intent and content of Mike Huckabee's appearance earlier this week at the 2009 Southern Baptist Pastors' Conference turned out to be a Tale of Two Sermons, depending on who heard it and which Baptist news organization reported it.

Huckabee, the former presidential candidate, Arkansas governor and Southern Baptist pastor, got a prime spot in Monday's high-profile pastors' meeting on the eve of the 2009 Southern Baptist Convention. His 30-minute sermon touched on a wide range of issues -- the pastoral and political, the moral and material, God and government.

It was not a sermon easily summarized, there was no central text on which it focused, but reading the two Baptist press accounts makes you wonder if the former president of the Akansas Baptist Convention delivered two sermons that night.

It's official. Liberty University's student Democrats club will be granted the same status as Liberty's student Republicans club. That status? Unofficial.

"We decided to go ahead and implement (the policy)," Chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. told the Lyncburg News & Advance. "The (College) Republicans have been removed from official status and been moved to the new unofficial status that we just created."

The slowly shrinking Southern Baptist Convention voted on Tuesday to sever 125-year-old ties with a Texas church that allowed homosexual members to have their photos in the church directory.

Messengers (delegates) to the SBC's annual meeting voted overwhelmingly to disassociate from Forth Worth's Broadway Baptist Church, following an executive committee ruling Monday that the congregation "failed to establish its compliance" with the SBC rules that ban churches that "act to affirm, approve or endorse homosexual behavior."

According to the Associated Baptist Press, "it was the first time the SBC has ejected a church simply because denominational officials perceive that the congregation is in violation of a policy prohibiting affiliation with pro-gay churches."

Since doctrinal conservatives took control of the Southern Baptist Convention in the early 1980s, the association has been getting smaller and more exclusive, at various times rejecting Baptist liberals and moderates, women clergy, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Cater, Mormons and Muslims and Jews, public schools and Walt Disney, and, in 1993, churches that are welcoming and affirming of gays.

In the July issue of Sojourners magazine, the Rev. Jim Wallis calls the Daily Show's Jon Stewart a prophet. "The Hebrew prophets often use humor, satire, and truth-telling to get their message across, and I feel you do a combination of all three," Wallis told Stewart. "I think you are a little like a Hebrew prophet after all."

Stewart, who deflates big egos for a living, would have none of it. "It may be true that the Hebrew prophets used humor in that regard, to create social change, but it was also used by Borscht Belt social directors. We've got a lot more in common with them than the prophets."

Stewart is more than a comedian. He's the Will Rogers of our time, laughing with us as he sharply and satirically mocks the absurdities of politics, media and popular culture. But a prophet? Seems like quite a stretch, at least in the theological sense of the word.

PBS is banning all new religious programs to comply more faithfully with 1985 bylaws that require programs to be "noncommercial, nonpartisan and nonsectarian." The PBS board's decision doesn't effect any religious programs now airing.

Only a few PBS affiliates have any religious programs at all. Unless you count Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, which I do but only because the late, great Fred Rogers -- an ordained Presbyterian minister -- saw his kind and gentle, soft-shoe and sweater work as a ministry and a calling. Mister Rogers never talked about Jesus. He just acted like him.

I digress. Only six of the 356 PBS members stations currently broadcast "sectarian" programs, but three of those stations are owned and operated by religious organizations with clear sectarian missions. Should the PBS board have paid less attention to the handful of religious programs and looked more closely at their religious programmers?

Good news for Americans of faith who aren't happy with the Democratic or Republican parties. The Communist Party USA has created a new Religion Commission to reach out to "welcome people of faith into the party."

Wait. Wasn't it Marx who said this? "Religion is the impotence of the human mind to deal with occurrences it cannot understand." And wasn't it Lenin who said this? "Religion is the opium of the people." Isn't communism by definition anti-religion?

This isn't your great-grandfather's Communist Party, apparently. "Some of the greatest leaders in our history have been men and women of faith, and our party has been proud to work with them," Tim Yeager, Religion Commission chairman, Chicago trade unionist and Episcopalian, said in a statement.

An African-American pastor has put his fellow Southern Baptists in the awkward position of having to decide whether to congratulate President Obama, a mainline Christian and liberal Democrat with whom they disagree on just about every major social and political issue.

Rev. Dwight McKissic, pastor of Cornerstone Baptist Church in Arlington, Texas, has filed a resolution asking the Southern Baptist Convention to celebrate "the historic nature of the election of President Barack Hussein Obama as a significant contribution to the ongoing cause of racial reconciliation in the United States."

McKissic's resolution will be considered at the SBC's annual meeting June 23-24 in Louisville, Ky. The 16-million member SBC, the nation's largest body of Protestants, has never been shy about expressing its official position on anything from Disney to Mormons. It recent years, it was one of George W. Bush's biggest supporters and one of Bill Clinton's harshest critics.

Would it be hypocritical of the conservative evangelical Southern Baptist Convention to congratulate Obama, or hypocritical not to? It's hard to say.

In a powerful display of their First Amendment rights, Pace (Fla.) High School's graduating seniors, many wearing crosses on their mortar boards, remained standing after the National Anthem was played at their commencement ceremony last month and proceeded to recite in unison the Lord's Prayer.

The students were respectfully -- though misguidedly -- rebelling against a May federal court consent decree, based on an ACLU lawsuit, that prohibited the public school officials from violating the First Amendment by "promoting, advancing, endorsing or participating in" religious activities at the school or school events.

"What was meant for evil has turned to good," Mary Allen, president of Pace High's student government, told the Florida Baptist Witness, which framed the series of events as the Godly Christians vs. the Godless ACLU types. ""We were supposed to fight this battle. And I think people fully intend to keep fighting."

No doubt they will. This is a battle that never seems to end.

It doesn't rank with last year's Exorcism of Sarah Palin, but the Blessing of Newt Gingrich is an early contender for Church-Based Political Moment of the 2012 presidential campaign. It's also the clearest evidence yet that Gingrich is positioning himself to the far Christian Right of fellow 2012 presidential hopefuls Sarah Palin and Mike Huckabee.

Gingrich's latest venture into the conservative evangelical world came when he spoke/preached at Lou Engle's "Rediscovering God in America" conference last Friday, hosted by Rock Church in Virginia Beach and broadcast on GodTV. "The first thing we need in America is spiritual," Gingrich told the congregation. "The first job we have as Americans is to reach out to everybody in the country who is not yet saved, and to help them understand the spiritual basis of a creator-endowed society."

Spoken like a man who wants the Republican Party nomination for president in 2012. But can Gingrich the new Catholic convert outflank ex-Pentecostal Palin and Southern Baptist pastor Huckabee on the party's religious right?