Today’s graph: Obama’s presidential success, measured

Obama has the highest presidential success rate of any president since Congressional Quarterly began scoring presidential success rates in Congress.

Child trafficking suit filed against two Australian Catholic orders

Three Maltese citizens allege they were victims of a child trafficking scam by the Australia-based Congregation of Christian Brothers and the Order of the Sisters of Mercy.

The three filed a federal class action suit earlier this month in which they say, reports the Malta Independent, that “the Congregation of Christian Brothers and the Order of the Sisters of Mercy took subsidies from the British, Australian and Maltese governments for the children’s upkeep and education, but kept the money for themselves and gave the children nothing save hardship and pain, forcing them to beg for scraps of food and root around in pig troughs for sustenance.”

That nightmare is said to have emerged from a larger British migrant program which victimized perhaps 12,000 “child migrants” between 1947 and 1967l and whose origins date to “the early 17th century.”

A solvable problem

Christa Brown, the insightful proprietor of Stop Baptist Predators, explains how the American Baptist Churches can teach the Southern Baptist Convention how to take effective control of its profoundly destructive problem with sexually predatory clergy.

Or to be more precise, she relates how a group of Baptist pastors illuminated the issue in their online discussion.

As you would expect, it’s a straightforward matter of setting standards, keeping records that make it difficult for credibly accused clergy to move with impunity from church to church, leaving a trail of victims as they grow. Yet the denomination discussed which does that is the American Baptist Churches, which somewhat like the SBC prizes local church autonomy. As they say on their Web page:

As early Baptists overcame oppression by establishing a congregational church system emphasizing local church autonomy and separation from state influence, so contemporary American Baptists continue to emphasize both the importance and the responsibility of every church and the individual believer before God.

Read it all here at Stop Baptist Predators.

Were we all created in God’s (spitting) image?

As Pope Benedict XVI prepares to visit the Tempio Maggiore synagogue in Rome on Jan. 17 as part of efforts to improve relations between Catholics and Jews, dealings between them are strained on at least two fronts.

First, the Vatican has had to defend moving Pope Pius XII toward sainthood in the face of Jewish criticism that he should have done more to resist the Holocaust.

Second and less publicized are incidents of priests, monks and nuns being spat at by Orthodox Jews in Jerusalem.

The latter was reported by the Jerusalem Post in November. A Franciscan monk told the publication that he’s been spat at about 15 times in the past six months.

An article in the National Catholic Reporter cites the Post story (without linking to it), mentioning a comment by Rabbi David Rosen. He says that the spitting incidents have become “a part of life” for priests, nuns and other Christian clergy in Jerusalem.

The NCR story says Orthodox Jewish leaders have denounced harassment of Christian clergy.

USA Today religion reporter Cathy Lynn Grossman mentions the NCR story (also without linking to it) in a column about the spitting incidents, which she calls an example of people of one faith saying to another, “My God’s better than yours.”

But why would anyone think their God would be pleased with a universal sign of contempt?

Bush faith-based manipulation failed to increase churches’ social-services

Although the Bush administration’s goal for faith-based initiatives was political manipulation, the program’s failure at the congregational level was not a foregone conclusion. Duke Divinity School’s Mark Chavez, a professor of sociology and religion, performed an important public service in establishing that the program in fact had little impact.

He concluded, wrote Bob Allen of the Associated Baptist Press, that “the proportions of congregations that provide social services (82 percent of all houses of worship), that have a staff member who devotes at least a quarter of their time to providing social services (11 percent) and that receive government funding for such services (4 percent) did not change between data collected in 1998 and in 2006-2007. In both surveys, about 6 percent of social services performed by congregations were done in collaboration with the government in some form (although not necessarily financial collaboration), while 20 percent were done in collaboration with a secular non-profit agency.”

Everyone was warned before the second Bush term.

John J. DiIulio Jr., a domestic affairs expert and professor at the University of Pennsylvania, who resigned in August 2001 as the first head of Bush’s White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, said in 2002:

There is no precedent in any modern White House for what is going on in this one: a complete lack of a policy apparatus. What you’ve got is everything, and I mean everything, being run by the political arm. It’s the reign of the Mayberry Machiavellis

David Kuo in an interview about “Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction,” a book he wrote about his experience as deputy director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives, was asked if he were “the one to come up with the idea to use the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives for political gain in election campaigns.”

He answered:

Jim Towey (the second director of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives) and I did. All the protests to the otherwise are ridiculous and silly. I do not want to get in a tit for tat with the White House. There is a much broader point to Christians about politics. There is this idea, which Christians have perpetuated to Christians, that George W. Bush is, in some way, a pastor-in-chief. His faith is his soul to Christians. It is one of the most inviting things about him. The only problem with that is that he is the President of the United States. He is not a minister. He heads the GOP; he does not head a church. I think Christians have been seduced into thinking otherwise. . . .

That misdirected view helped inspire then-outgoing Southern Baptist Convention President Jack Graham to do more than accept Bush’s conversion via satellite uplink of the June, 2004, Southern Baptist Convention annual meeting into a political rally. Graham followed up with a tub-thumping stump speech, delivered only partly in the language of a sermon, calling for Southern Baptists to “look up, step up, stand up, wise up and gear up” for the culture wars.

The Bush team wasn’t grateful and did not regard Southern Baptists with respect as a result of their efforts. Conservative political analyst Tucker Carlson reached down to his journalist roots and found a clear characterization of it all for MSNBC’s Chris Matthews in October of 2006:

It goes deeper than that though. The deep truth is that the elites in the Republican Party have pure contempt for the evangelicals who put their party in power.

Contempt.

So it was from Bush’s “faith-based” outset. Use the people of faith while pretending to assist them in helping others. Result was coherent with purpose.

Scientology outshrinks the Southern Baptist Convention

In the Scientology/Southern Baptist Convention faceoff, though loathe to admit it, Scientology is winning the race toward extinction.

Whereas the SBC is apparently doomed by demographics to be the slowly shrinking denomination, declining a fraction of a percent in 2006-2007 after a long run of declining growth rates, American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) data suggests that Scientology is imploding. If you agree that 45% shrinkage over less than a decade is implosion.

ARIS reported that in 2001 there were 55,000 adults in the United States who consider themselves Scientologists. In 2008, ARIS found there were 25,000 Americans identifying themselves as Scientologists.

Tommy Davis, the church’s top spokesman, told the New York Times that the number was “impossibly low.”

Or impossible to survive for long?

Veiled reference

A religious exemption has been added to the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences ban face coverings, which had included on veils won by some Muslim women.

Ugandan Danse Macabre

The Ugandan government says it will ask lawmaker David Bahati to withdraw his gay death-penalty bill, and he says he will refuse.

Scientology hits the SBC head-on in Nashville

Yes, the Southern Baptist Convention does regard Scientology as a cult.
Indeed, it did so before the ad above was placed with a paid insert this week in the Nashville Tennessean, hometown newspaper of the SBC headquarters.
About that “free personality test,” Baptist Press quite accurately says:

Though named the “Oxford Capacity Analysis,” the 200-question Scientology assessment was not developed by Oxford University nor does it have any tie to the famed university. The Scientology “personality test” is described by various Internet sources as a Scientology recruitment tool used worldwide on Scientology websites, in Scientology churches and in public settings such as fairs and festivals. It also has been criticized by psychologists as not a bonafide personality test.

Scientology isn’t new to Nashville. It has a Nashville Celebrity Center and is active in the community.
Nor is this a new face-off for the SBC North American Mission Board, which has several Web pages devoted to the fight.
Having the Baptist Press chime in this week may mean the SBC Executive Committee is taking the fight more seriously.
Hope so.

H/T Faith & Reason

Dolphins and whales on the Southern Baptist menu?

Bottlenose Dolphin breaching in the bow wave of a boat

Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, returned from a tropical vacation admiring and willing to eat whales and dolphins, despite scientific evidence that dolphins are second only to human beings in the size and complexity of their neural architecture and that they “have distinct personalities, a strong sense of self and can think about the future.”

In extreme circumstances he would reluctantly dine on them with his family because his young earth creationist fundamentalism dictates that there is a “crucial and categorical distinction between human beings — created in God’s own image — and the rest of the created order. We must reject the very notion of ‘non-human persons.’”

Indeed, he argues that attempts to secure them against arbitrary captivity, slavery and potentially a place on his dinner plate by creating for them the status of “non-human persons” creates “confusion about the distinction between humans and animals serves to threaten human dignity.”

Thus scientific debate about the significance of the ratio of neocortex to the primitive brain, the meaning of dolphin tool use or self-recognitition seems to be of no consequence to Mohler. As made, his argument suggests that dolphins could learn to read the bible underwater and form and attend Cetacean Southern Baptist Churches without being due protection from being slaughtered and served to Japanese school children as “whale meat,” as documented in The Cove.

Although Mohler and his family would partake only “if no other food could be obtained,” as he says. Which may be no reassurance to intelligent, self-aware cetaceans.