Abusing Native American Religious Rites to Deadly Effect

James Arthur Ray ran high-end “Spiritual Warrior” retreats which desecreated Sioux sweat-lodge rituals. Until an Oct. 8, 2009, incident in Sedona, Arizona, which resulted in three deaths and 20 other hospitalizations. On Feb. 3, 2010, the Yavapai County Arizona Sheriff’s Dept. arrested Ray, charging him with three counts of manslaughter

Those three were simply the most recent deaths resulting from the “commodification” of American Indian cultural and religious practices, observed Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University professor of religion and associate faculty in the Center for African American Studies.

Native Americans have not responded passively to the desecration of their traditions. The Lakota Nation has filed a lawsuit under the Sioux treaty of 1868.

Wikipedia says, in summary:

The Lakota Nation holds that James Arthur Ray and the Angel Valley Retreat Center have “violated the peace between the United States and the Lakota Nation” and have caused the “desecration of our Sacred Oinikiga (purification ceremony) by causing the death of Liz Neuman, Kirby Brown and James Shore”. As well, the Lakota claim that James Arthur Ray and the Angel Valley Retreat Center fraudulently impersonated Indians and must be held responsible for causing the deaths and injuries, and for evidence destruction through dismantling of the sweat lodge. The lawsuit seeks to have the treaty enforced and does not seek monetary compensation.

The Lakota have also published a “Declaration of War Against Exploiters of Lakota Spirituality,” which does a great deal to clarify the cultural/religious issues involved.

The tony, $9,000 a head retreats are regarded by Native Americans as altogether corrupt. There is, explains Chief Arvol Looking Horse, “19th Generation Keeper of the Sacred White Buffalo Calf Pipe Bundle,” no for-pay Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Oyate spiritual rite [.pdf]:

When you do ceremony, you can not have money on your mind. We deal with the pure sincere energy to create healing that comes from everyone in that circle of ceremony. The heart and mind must be connected. When you involve money, it changes the energy of healing. The person wants to get what they paid for; the Spirit Grandfather will not be there, our way of life is now being exploited! You do more damage than good. No mention of monetary energy should exist in healing, not even with a can of love donations. When that energy exists, they will not even come.

The issues here are clearly more complex than “buyer beware,” although a visit to New Age Frauds & Plastic Shamans is a good place to begin is you are considering the purchase of such services.

Bottom line? That path is not for sale, either.

[H/T Judith Weisenfeld]

Using the attacker’s words to blame the victim

Abused by Baylor University when she had to courage to report being assaulted by “murdering minister” Matt Baker when he was a student there, Lora Wilson is still a target of reflexive abuse.

Blame the victim is a hideous American practice, not exclusively a Southern Baptist sin — one at which Christa Brown fired back when Lora Wilson was maligned with Baker’s words in a recent blog comment.

The smear continues in part because the Southern Baptist institutions which are at fault have failed to acknowledge their responsibility. Christa writes:

To this day, no Baylor official has made any public expression of remorse. No one at First Baptist of Waco, a church that had two reports of Baker’s abuse, has expressed any sorrow about letting the man move on without consequence. No one at the Baptist General Convention of Texas has offered any explanation for how someone with so many abuse and assault reports could move so easily through its affiliated churches and organizations. And no one in Baptistland has made even the feeblest of effort to reach out to the many more who were likely wounded by “murdering minister” Matt Baker — the many who are probably still silent.

Beyond hype, hope for spirit-minded sports

Nothing demonstrates the outrageous devotion of sports fans like the overwhelming hype of Super Bowl week.

This year’s version has a particularly religious flavor with Focus on Family buying some of the famously expensive commercial time with an anti-abortion ad featuring University of Florida quarterback Tim Tebow. And just a little more than a week before the big game, Phoenix Cardinal quarterback Kurt Warner announced his retirement by thanking God for the opportunity to play.

But amid the hoopla, Shirl James Hoffman, emeritus professor of kinesiology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, encourages a different approach to sports. His article in Christianity Today, is called “Sports Fanatics: How Christians have succumbed to the sports culture — and what might be done about it.”

Hoffman has spent 40 years in sports as an athlete, an official, a coach, a professor and an administrator. He sees an evangelistic fascination with sports like the call, “Onward Christian Athletes,” and the seemingly omnipresent “skin-deep evangelism.”

Christian evangelicals, he says, “have been quick to harness sports to personal and institutional agendas,” but also points out that organized sports too often bring out the worst in people. He believes that Christians have a “duty to seek the redemption of sports, and to point society toward a better way of playing.”

Hoffman cites numerous difficulties, including that the “big-time sports culture lifts up values in sharp contrast with what Christians for centuries have understood as the embodiment of the gospel.” Nonetheless he calls for a Christian view “that sports are derivatives of the God-given play impulse—intended less to test our spiritual limits than as times and places to recover our spiritual centers of gravity and to rehearse spiritual truths, dim images of the real game that will begin when we leave this world behind.”

The piece is well worth the read for sports-minded Christians and spirit-minded sports fans.

Farewell NAMB/IMB merger

Merger of the big, troubled North American Mission Board (NAMB) with the big, troubled International Mission Board (IMB) is apparently off the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC) drawing boards.

Thus spake the Great Commission Resurgence Task Force (GCRTF) Chairman Ronnie Floyd in a speech Monday at a Florida pastor’s conference. Although SBC President Johnny Hunt once called stories reporting the possibility of such a merger “ludicrous,” Floyd confessed:

There was great, great, great discussion studying, planning and even to the point of having strategic formation of the possibility of the other. But we just really sensed in our heart that wasn’t right at this time.

“Sensed” presumably means heard the uproar set off by the GCRTF’s fog-enshrouded considerations of merger and objection by SBC elder statesman Duke K. McCall and others to the further concentration of SBC executive authority such a merger would entail.

GetReligion nails the Haggard book event

Steve Rabey writing about coverage of Gayle Haggard’s promotion of her new book about life with Ted:

The Haggard story has now evolved into the type of media events Neal Gabler called “lifies,” which are celebrity-driven, media-friendly stories about failure and redemption that serve up big, gooey life lessons for viewers.

Protecting Haitian children from harm, inadvertent or deliberate [Addendum]

It is not clear that this is a case in which good intentions, uninterrupted, would have had no adverse consequences. A great deal was at stake for the children in the arrest of 10 Southern Baptists as they attempted to take 33 Haitian children to the Dominican Republic on a bus, Friday.

Those children were subsequently taken to an orphanage run by Austrian-based SOS Children’s Villages, where spokesman George Willeit said:

One (8-year-old) girl was crying, and saying, ‘I am not an orphan. I still have my parents.’ And she thought she was going on a summer camp or a boarding school or something like that.

He also said the children, ages 2 months to 12 years-old, were “very hungry, very thirsty.”

A 2- to 3-month old baby was dehydrated and had to be hospitalized, he said.

Haitian Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive told ABC News that some of the children were not orphans and were asking about their parents.

Monday, Derrick Henry of the New York Times wrote:

“The instinct to swoop in and rescue children may be a natural impulse but it cannot be the solution for the tens of thousands of children left vulnerable by the Haiti earthquake,” Deb Barry, a protection expert at Save the Children, told The Associated Press on Sunday. Her group wants a moratorium on new adoptions. “The possibility of a child being scooped up and mistakenly labeled an orphan in the chaotic aftermath of the disaster is incredibly high.”

Statements by the arrested group’s spokesman suggest that allegations that the group was “falsely arrested” were misguided. Specifically, according to the Associated Press, speaking for those arrested in Haiti Friday, Laura Silsby “admitted she had not obtained the proper Haitian documents for the children, whose names were written on pink tape on their shirts.”

Haiti declared last week that no new adoptions could take place without the Prime Minister’s express permission. “The government has given very clear instructions for everything concerning adoptions of children,” said public security secretary Amarick Louis in an interview with Canada’s Globe and Mail. “Everything must be done in a formal manner, following the norms that have been established.”

Five of the 10 Americans arrested were reportedly members of the Central Valley Baptist Church at 600 N. Ten Mile Rd., Meridian, ID, which posted on its Web site a “News Update” which said:

A ten member church team traveled to Haiti to help rescue children from one or more orphanages that had been devastated in the earthquake on January 12. The children were being taken to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic where they could be cared for and have their medical and emotional needs attended to. Our team was falsely arrested today and we are doing everything we can from this end to clear up the misunderstanding that has occurred in Port au Prince.

Senior Pastor Clint Henry of Central Valley Baptist Church said:

They’ve been charged with child trafficking. You need to understand that obviously those are serious charges, but they’re in a nation where this has been a practice, a wicked and evil practice.

Central Valley is affiliated with the Utah/Idaho Southern Baptist Convention [.pdf], which is headquartered in Draper, UT.

The Twin Falls [Idaho] Times-News reported that Eastside Baptist Church Pastor Paul Thompson was also among those jailed in Port-au-Prince Friday night.

The case is to go before a judge on Monday.

The reasons for action are clear. The U.S. State Department issued a cautionary statement on Jan. 26 which addresses the general issue:

In the aftermath of a crisis such as the Haiti earthquake, children are especially vulnerable; and there is increased potential for abuse of, and trafficking in, children. The United States remains committed to working with the Government of Haiti to implement safeguards to protect children and their families in Haiti.

UNICEF is taking the most constructive approach. In a January 19 statement, UNICEF Executive Director Ann M. Veneman said, about unaccompanied (not necessarily orphaned) children in Haiti: “Every effort will be made to reunite children with their families. Only if that proves impossible, and after proper screening has been carried out, should permanent alternatives like adoption be considered by the relevant authorities. Screening for international adoption for some Haitian children had been completed prior to the earthquake. Where this is the case, there are clear benefits to speeding up their travel to their new homes.”

That approach keeps families together when that is possible, reduces the likelihood of inadvertent harm and helps make it more difficult for child traffickers to take advantage of a natural catastrophe to prey on children.

Addendum

From Montreal, Canada, television:

Plan Canada President and CEO Rosemary McCarney says she’s not sure if the accused were attempting to engage in child trafficking. But even if they weren’t, just by taking the children away, they could do them more harm than good.

“Whether this is trafficking or not, it puts children at risk,” McCarney told Canada AM from Toronto. “Because even well-intentioned people who remove children from their communities and their country, by crossing borders, it makes it almost impossible for us to track them and find their parents and extended families and caring adults who could take care of these children.”

The social justice imperative

Skye Jethani, writing at Out of Ur, raises — then dashes — hopes for the end of a 100-year-old conflict within Christianity:

The impact of the Modernist-Fundamentalist controversy shaped the direction of the American church for most of the 20th century by creating an ‘either/or’ scenario. Either a church cared about social justice or it focused on saving souls.

In “The Battle Lines Over Justice,” Jethani cites findings by LifeWay Research that younger evangelicals are increasingly likely to regard social justice as a “gospel imperative.” The post considers whether the trend indicates the closing stages of a century-old division between Christians who emphasize social issues and those who stress repentance and salvation.

Hopes that “both/and” thinking might replace the “either/or” conflict, are dim. While some think fundamentalism is on life support, the heated debate cited by Jethani and further articulated in user comments shows that last rites for the either/or are premature.

Certainly this isn’t the first time evangelicals have shown an interest in social action movements.

Sojourners, a group that seeks to “articulate the biblical call to social justice, inspiring hope and building a movement to transform individuals, communities, the church, and the world” formed in 1971.

In 1973, a group of evangelicals released the Chicago Declaration of Evangelical Social Concern, which led to the formation of Evangelicals for Social Action. And a second Chicago statement was issued 20 years later. (Both statements are available here.)

A 1979 article in Christian Century outlined “A Fundamentalist Social Gospel,” tracing the rise of social action in the 1970s to the “neoevangelical” movement in the 1940s.

The highly publicized controversy within the Southern Baptist Convention that started in 1979 was a reaction to a perceived rise in the liberalism in SBC seminaries.

The recent Out of Ur article shows that similar perceptions are alive and well. It first references an article by J. Mack Stiles, a former InterVarsity Christian Fellowship staff worker. Stiles fears InterVarsity is “slipping into the errors of liberal theology” due to the elevation of justice issues by the ministry and says the pursuit of justice is a gospel implication not a gospel imperative.

On the other side is Richard Stearns, president of World Vision, who says, “Proclaiming the whole gospel, then, means much more than evangelism in the hopes that people will hear and respond to the good news of salvation by faith in Christ.”

Commenters on the post stake out both positions, with few taking a conciliatory approach.

In 2000, Richard Mouw called for “Reclaiming Evangelicalism” from the Religious Right in a column on BeliefNet:

I wish that we evangelicals could work together to promote a third way — a middle course between withdrawal from politics and campaigns that give the impression that we are attempting to impose a full range of moral and religious specifics on our fellow citizens.

That “third way” can only be found by a broad cross-section of Christian believers who respect and work with each other. And Jethani at Out of Ur sees an unresolved dichotomy:

One side is vowing to guard the gospel against neo-liberalism; the other side is hoping to restore the gospel to its fullest expression by reconciling proclamation and demonstration.

Still work to be done.

Martin Amis goes ‘Soylent Green’

Conservative Catholic site Pew Sitter warned, “UK Author Calls for ‘euthanasia booths’ on street corners.” That author is Martin Amis, who is getting his nose bloodied primarily because the son of “the finest British comic novelist of the second half of the 20th century” showed his ageism.

Writer Joan Brady responded, when Amis called the elderly “an invasion of terrible immigrants, stinking out the restaurants and cafes and shops:”

That’s what racists say about anybody with a different skin color or an alien headdress: “They stink.”

Amis explains that his words had satiric intent, although that doesn’t excuse him. Nor does it help that he confesses that he is soon to be old himself. But it is enlightening to know that he lost “his stepfather, Lord Kilmarnock, the former SDP peer and writer, in March aged 81, and his friend Dame Iris Murdoch,” a novelist who died in 1999 at the aged of 79, two years after her husband revealed that she was suffering from Alzheimer’s. His stepfather “died very horribly … ”

Knowing those things, we can at least begin to understand why he told the Guardian:

What we need to recognize is that certain lives fall into the negative, where pain hugely dwarfs those remaining pleasures that you may be left with. Geriatric science has been allowed to take over and, really, decency roars for some sort of correction.

None of that will quiet the voices at Pew Sitter, who regard both both euthanasia and abortion as different forms of murder.

Amis is apparently one of those who seek no dialog on that:

I increasingly feel that religion is so deep in our constitution and in our minds and that is something we should just peel off. Of course euthanasia is open to abuse, in that the typical grey death will be that of an old relative whose family gets rid of for one reason or another, and they’ll say ‘he asked me to do it’, or ‘he wanted to die.’ That’s what we will have to look out for. Nonetheless, it is something we have to make some progress on.

His point of departure from conservative Roman Catholic, fundamentalist Southern Baptist and like views is a commonplace one:

Frankly, I can’t think of any reason for prolonging life once the mind goes. You are without dignity then.

While that stand is logically arguable, his careless invocation of “euthanasia booths” burdens any rational debate with the unappetizing husk of “Soylent Green:”

Devilish comments help none

Moscow Mayor Yuri Luzhkov said yesterday that he would not allow a gay pride parade in the city, and repeated comments he made two years ago that such a march would be “Satanic.”

Luzhkov is reportedly a “devoted Orthodox Christian believer.”

That an Orthodox Christian would strongly oppose homosexuality is not surprising.

The Orthodox Church’s teaching on homosexuality, however, focuses on ministering to homosexuals and separates what it considers to be sinful acts from concern for the people involved.

Labeling a gay-pride event “Satanic” hardly exhibits such concern. Mean-spirited rhetoric effectively reverses the ministry called for by Christian compassion.

In 2007, homosexuals who marched in spite of a ban were “beaten up by right-wing counter-demonstrators or detained by police,” according to a BBC report. Last year, some activists were detained before the parade began.

More crackdowns can be expected this year, unless Luzhkov sets aside meanness for ministry.

U.S. religious prejudice unmeasured

Gallup released Thursday a poll which asked Americans about their views of Islam, Christianity, Judaism and Buddhism. Having rolled all of Christianity into a single ball while ignoring Scientology, atheism and others altogether, it found that a whopping 53 percent see Islam unfavorably.

Mark Silk gets it exactly right when he says:

If Gallup had wanted to do something more useful, it would have gotten responses for other faiths, and differentiated the Christian category.

Read the entire, concise, piece here.