Fact-fixing CNN on Notre Dame

One myth-besotted CNN paragraph preoccupied Mollie at GetReligion.

She was addressing the story of South Bend, Indiana Roman Catholic Bishop John D’Arcy’s boycott of the Notre Dame graduation ceremonies at which President Barack Obama will be honored.

Let her help you substitute legislative fact for fiction and filter spin out of science here.

Randall Terry has a bishop problem

Randall Terry got himself in trouble by using an interview (below) with the Vatican’s Archbishop Raymond L. Burke, in an attempt to pressure U.S. Catholic bishops:

Burke rebuked Terry and apologized for the use of his comments to attack Washington Archbishop Donald W. Wuerl and Arlington Diocese Bishop Paul S. Loverde. Terry was using the interview to pressure more U.S. Catholic bishops to deny Communion to politicians who support abortion rights, and those two were in the cross hairs.

Catholic Online has Burke’s entire statement about the matter.

Michael Sean Winters of America magazine writes that Burke’s failure to defend his brother bishops during the interview with Terry “was the Vatican equivalent of throwing them under the bus.”

The Rev. Thomas Reese, senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown University, told the Washington Post that Burke “violated the episcopal etiquette. You don’t criticize other bishops in public and you don’t tell other bishops how to run their diocese.”

Terry shoots back that Burke has been “deceived” about how the videotape is being use. Uh huh.

Everyone gains from unspinning the LifeWay/NAMB evangelism survey

Spinning a survey which shows evangelism is surpassingly difficult, the Southern Baptist Convention’s (SBC) LifeWay Research and the North American Mission Board (NAMB) both say “most people would attend [church] if invited in the right manner.”

The sometimes credibility-challenged NAMB commissioned the survey in preparation for its national “God’s Plan for Sharing (GPS)” evangelism drive, to be launched in 2010.

Buried in the body of the “spun” NAMB summary is a plain statement that the survey of more than 15,000 adults in December 12-22, 2008, found that “personal invitations from family members or friends is the only method that a majority of Americans say would effectively draw them to church.” And by ubstituting could for would and you get a straight, unspun lede for the story.

Your see, presentation data provided by Lifeway director Ed Stetzer shows that 34% of those surveyed are “somewhat willing” and 22% are “very willing” to receive information from a friend or neighbor about a local church or religious community. From family members, it’s 37% and 26% respectively.

“Somewhat willing,” the largest positive group in both cases, may include everyone who is willing to listen politely, rather than either change the subject or just get up and go home.

A little field experience with these conversations will teach almost anyone that it is a long step beyond persuading wayward family members and neighbors to (perhaps impatiently) receive information, and having them show up at church.

The friends (22%) and family members (26%) who are “very willing” to listen aren’t necessarily willing to attend church in response either.

That may be why “Baptists like to talk more about evangelism than to actually do it,” as Stetzer put it. A lot of Baptists are likely to have had had ample try-and-fail experience with unchurched family members, neighbors and others. Especially, as the survey suggests, others.

If GPS is a hard sell, the current difficulty of evangelism isn’t the only reason. Years of controversy over SBC numbers — not just the NAMB but also the International Mission Board and some state organizations — make this a good time to be as transparent as possible.

Actions like Stetzer’s provision of additional data [PowerPoint] are the best medicine for skepticism. As former North Carolina Biblical Recorder Editor R.G. Puckett often put it, “Tell the truth and trust the people.”

Italians reject Pope’s dismissive view of condoms as AIDS preventive

A majority of Italians disagreed with the Pope’s stand against using condoms to prevent AIDS, revealed a poll published in the newspaper La Repubblica:

The poll said that 52.3 per cent were “absolutely against” the Pope’s view – which overshadowed his trip to Africa last week – that condoms are not the answer to the Aids epidemic and on the contrary only “aggravate” it by encouraging sexual promiscuity. A further 21.2 per cent in the poll, conducted by Demos & Pi, said they were “fairly” opposed to the Pope’s position, making a total of 73.5 per cent.

News of this poll of nearly 1,700 Italians questioned in the six days immediately following the pope’s airborne remarks comes on the heels of two polls finding that the French are losing confidence in the Pope, possibly for similar reasons.

Neither post-facto revision of the Pope’s remarks nor any Italian equivalent of conservative pushback against scientific and medical criticism of the Pope’s stand were enough to turn the tide of public opinion in his favor. Italians have no trouble balancing such practical concerns with their religion, according to the London Times:

Ilvo Diamanti, a leading sociologist, said that Italians generally looked to the Catholic Church as a “moral compass”, especially in “difficult times.” This was not the case however when positions taken by the Church or the Vatican were seen as “different from the common consensus or the practical experiences of daily life”

The Italian Catholic newspaper Avvenire criticized the French government for “presuming” to lecture Pope Benedict XVI on AIDS and condoms, and the Archbishop of Genoa railed that the pontiff had been unjustly “mocked and insulted” on the same issue by critics. All without distracting most of the Italian people from applying sound, practical judgment to a life and death issue of daily life.

Legion of Christ manual seems revealing

The Legion of Christ has in the past filed lawsuits when copies of its various documents were published on the Web. Had them taken down.

ReasonWeekly says it knows, and offers for download “the leaked internal manual of the order [.pdf].“

ReasonWeekly says the “document reveals a totalitarian and intrusive outlook on the congregation by its leaders,” and that seems fair, but read the manual yourself. And if one manual is not enough, you can supplement it by downloading the censored Legion of Christ sect personal exams from WikiLeaks.

We await your considered assessment.

Where the Wild Things Are

First, leaked footage:

Now, your link to the official trailer:

If you loved Where the Wild Things Are, you will not be disappointed by the movie trailer.

Evangelicalism’s: ‘Collapse’ or rusting decline?

The Four Evangelists by Jakob Jordaens

Because evangelical Christianity is visibly breaking down, Internet Monk’s widely discussed prediction of the movement’s “collapse” a decade hence, resonates in the minds of all who are concerned.

The animating core of his prediction — that identification of evangelicals with the culture wars and political conservatism at the expense of faith was a historic mistake — is a long-simmering cause of general unhappiness (the New York Times wrote about it well last June.).

The political sellout by the Religious Right is especially important among evangelicals under 40, a Barna survey found, while other research says some “don’t even want the label any more.”

More broadly, in August 2008 a Pew Forum survey found that 52 percent of Americans agreed that houses of worship should keep out of politics.

Or when he predicts the money will dry up, whether you’re a religious broadcaster or pastor of an average Southern Baptist Church, you’re having that experience or probably fear it. Although catastrophic collapse of a going evangelical enterprise, is rare.

Each element he cites has some gut-level or analytical validity for those who are involved in or close to the movement.

Collapse is a powerful word. The concept of collapse may also sell well among people whose faith speaks of “the end times.” Although we agree with, Tony Cartledge, associate professor of Old Testament at Campbell University Divinity School and contributing editor to Baptists Today, who isn’t buying:

Spencer has clearly seen the spiritual hollowness that pervades much of evangelicalism, and I believe he is correct that elements of the movement will fade in influence as years go by. The idea that evangelicalism will collapse within ten years, however, appears clearly overstated. Methinks the monk has underestimated the power of inertia.

Like newspapers which are printed on paper, evangelicalism will persist and appear to be wonderfully influential during a long decline, while its eminent death is persistently forecast. And while saving reforms are persistently resisted.

Honesty is also a Catholic value

Richard Viguerie brings a refreshing clarity to the Notre Dame uproar refreshingly by combining high dudgeon with fiction:

Barack Obama is a pro-abortion extremist. He supports elective abortion at any point during pregnancy, and even afterward; he opposes protecting children who survive abortions. He supports using U.S. taxpayers’ money to pay for elective abortions in our country and in other countries. He is working to strip medical professionals of their right not to perform abortions.

After the word “pro-abortion,” everything he said was a distortion and calculated to inflame his audience.

Viguerie echoes arguments made elsewhere and closely examined by Beth Dahlman.

Update

Dan Gilgoff notes that Notre Dame’s president is unwavering in his defense of the invitation.

As for the student body, Notre Dame campus newspaper, the Observer, reported “in an Oct. 8, 2008 article that Obama led the student body with 52.6 percent of the vote in a mock election held by student government, in which 2,692 undergraduates and graduate students voted.”

‘Coal’ Land linked

Richard Land, head of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission, is in the spotlight as the global-cooling coal man of the hour.

It all started when that Associated Baptist Press noticed that coal had gotten religion, after a fashion.

George Frink has it all here.

Civil prayer on the North Carolina docket

Squared off since 2006 over civil prayer’s wording in Forsyth County, N.C., are the Americal Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Alliance Defense Fund (ADF).

The issue: Forsyth County local government meetings are opened with prayers which which as a matter of policy may be sectarian. They may, for example, enjoin Jesus Christ.

The Rev. Charlie Davis, pastor of the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem. is one of the plaintiffs. He explains “that sectarian prayer excludes people, which isn’t good. The government guarantees religious freedom and that applies to non-believers as well.”

It didn’t have to go to court. The county commissioners ignored the advice of their own attorney by refusing to ensure that invocations were non-sectarian.

A judge could rule on the lawsuit next month and legally, the smart money is with the ACLU:

In 1983, the United States Supreme Court ruled in Marsh v. Chambers that if a legislative body chooses to open its meetings with a prayer, such prayer must not be “exploited to proselytize or advance any one, or to disparage any other, faith or belief.” The prayers before the legislature that were upheld in the Marsh case were nonsectarian – in other words, the prayers were not specific to any particular religion. In addition, the Fourth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose jurisdiction includes North Carolina, has repeatedly and recently upheld this principle of government neutrality in religious matters by insisting that legislative invocations be nonsectarian in nature.

More important is the message of pluralism in America sent by pursuit of this lawsuit others like it.

Protestant prayer of the sort being defended by the ADF was the standard, especially in the South, until late in the last century. No more. Objections to the informal establishment of this Protestant civil religion, where it persists, are being adjudicated.

Bill Leonard, the dean of the School of Divinity at Wake Forest University told the Winston-Salem Journal:

This is the death rattle of implicit religious establishment in America that has been in existence since the Colonial period.

Is it constructive to adjudicate a cultural transition? As the Rev. Laura Spangler, the pastor of Winston-Salem’s historic Lloyd Presbyterian Church, put it, “. . . prayer, the main way we communicate with God, is becoming a tool for conflict. And I don’t feel good about that.”