Intolerance of Christians in . . . Guess Where?

From Real Clear Politics:

As an ancient Christian minority in a mainly Muslim society, Coptic Christians have often been persecuted and marginalized.

Even so, Coptic believer Nadia Eweida was startled at the blatant discrimination she encountered in her job at the national airline. While Muslim women around her freely wore headscarves to fulfill their religious obligation, she was forbidden to wear a cross openly while working. Even Jews and Sikhs received more consideration: the policy was directed solely and explicitly towards Christians. When Nadia complained, political authorities and news media were grossly unsympathetic.

We might wonder why Nadia did not simply give up the unequal struggle, and move to a country like Great Britain, where Christianity is not just tolerated but which actually has an established national church. Why would she continue to tolerate the systematic injustice of an aggressive Islamist regime...

Oh wait, my mistake. Is my face red!

It turns out that although Nadia Eweida really is a Coptic Christian, she was living in England at the time, rather than Egypt, and that her job was with British Airways, at Heathrow. It was her British employers who concluded that public expressions of Christianity were unacceptable, in a land where the Queen is head of state, and the Supreme Governor of the Church by law established. British government lawyers defended that situation before a European court. One suggested that if Christians did not like the situation, they should find other employment. And why so much fuss about the cross, they objected? Wearing it is not an actual requirement of the faith, as opposed to an individual whim, so you can’t insist on any right to do so.

British Christians are not persecuted. Around the world, Christians are massacred, tortured, subjected to bogus show trials, starved into submission, and reduced to penury on the grounds of their faith. That’s real persecution, and nothing like that happens in the United Kingdom.

But it is legitimate to point out that in contemporary Britain, aggressive secularism on a wide variety of fronts is making life very difficult for conservative or traditional-minded Christians. Notionally, such an anti-religious campaign should be targeting all supernaturally-based faiths equally, but British secularism is accompanied by a multi-cultural principle that acknowledges some religious expressions as legitimate manifestations. Hence the tolerance for Muslim headscarves or Sikh turbans in the workplace.

Unfortunately, that respect does not extend to the beliefs or practices of Christians who often come from other non-European cultures -- to a faithful Coptic Christian like Nadia Eweida, or to African or Afro-Caribbean Pentecostals. Most media coverage of thriving African churches in Britain involves ludicrously exaggerated charges of witch-hunting and even human sacrifice by these supposedly primitive fanatics. It’s good to know the old idea of the Heart of Darkness is alive and well in the former imperial metropolis.

Legal cases resulting from religious discrimination have generated vast media attention in Britain. The Eweida affair apart, some other employment conflicts involved nurse Shirley Chaplin, ordered not to wear a cross on her ward duty; or Lillian Ladele, a marriage registrar who refused to conduct same sex civil partnerships. Relationships counselor Gary McFarlane was fired because his religious beliefs prevented him offering sexual therapy to same-sex couples. McFarlane and Ladele, incidentally, are both black.

In the United States at least, a clash between gay rights and the rights of religious believers would normally mean walking a delicate legal tightrope. Not in England, though, where the senior judge Sir John Laws -- the amazingly titled Lord Justice Laws -- proclaimed in the 2010 McFarlane case that in any such clash, religious rights would, and must, always lose out. As he said, “The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds...is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary.”

You can actually spend a good while dissecting Laws’s prolonged shriek, which also noted that “in the eye of everyone save the believer, religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence.” So much for a few thousand years of theology and apologetics -- Christian, Jewish and Islamic.

So much, too, for the British courts, who have moved beyond parody.

The only hope left for the dissident Christians, then, is the European Court of Human Rights, which in recent years has come to occupy a position in European countries parallel to that of the US Supreme Court. And that is where Eweida, McFarlane and the others are now headed. If nothing else, the cases will contribute to shaping the European Court’s developing stance on religious rights, a topic that has caused fevered debate over the past decade. The Court is at what Americans might call a John Marshall moment, deciding the proper limits of judicial power over an emerging constitutional system.

Who would have thought that in the 21st century, Europeans would still be grappling with defending the basic rights of religious believers who still, after years of secular drift, make up a sizable majority of the continent’s population?

The elites that dominate Europe, of course, are the sort of elites that attack religious freedom here in the U.S.

Raw Anti-Christian Bigotry

From the website of famous atheist Richard Dawkins:

Dawkins reproduces a manifesto from a blog called the Christian OUT.

Some typical excerpts:

We need to realize that we should be reaching out to people with true compassion and sincerity, minus the pious pharisaical cloaks; to both the saved and the lost. We need to reach out in support to our fellow Christians that are new or struggling, to give support and love through their trials, tribulations, and times of growth as a Christian; to be understanding, yet Scriptural, with a kind heart. We need also to reach out to this lost world with the saving gospel of Jesus Christ, remembering to not find it uncommon if by chance the lost person chooses to reject God and the Scriptures, to our dismay. We should not allow their rejection of it to be taken personally, but to be brought to God in prayer for their soul’s need of salvation.

We need to realize that it is necessary for a Christian to personally speak out against sin. We need to speak out against the sin in our own lives and other professing Christians, and also when we are confronted with sin by family, friends, and co-workers. At the same time we are first to examine the beam in our own eye before pointing out the dust in our neighbor’s eye. The dust in another’s eye does not make us more righteous, nor does looking around the beam in our own eye. In contrast, we also need to speak out concerning the truth, morality, and the gospel of Jesus Christ. Even when it is uncomfortable, we are to be true to Scripture and obedient to God, therefore calling good “good” and evil “evil.” Remember we are to speak and do that which is right because it is right, out of obedience to God, not for personal prestige, gain, or that we should be puffed up while others are put down, causing our pride to be lifted up causing us to fall into sin.

We needn’t be so timid or worldly that no one knows that we are a child of God, yet we must refrain from the pitfall of legalism whereby we judge the whole world by our personal moral code brow beating and demanding the lost world or fellow Christians to conform to a system that is above even that which Scripture calls for.

How do the commenters respond?

With an outpouring of naked anti-Christian bigotry. Readers can go to the comments section and peruse them.

But a warning: if you are a Christian, you are going to feel like a black guy at a Klan rally.

Of course, one can expect anti-Christian people to frequent richarddawkins.net.

But the comments aren’t that different from opinions expressed in the liberal blogosphere in Wisconsin. Check particularly Hermes’ Journeys and Illusory Tenant.

The secular leftists, of course, are not merely anti-religion. You won’t hear them say much bad about Islam. They simply have a particular grudge against Christians.

Atheists: Key Constituency of the Democratic Party

From National Review Online:

It will surprise nobody to learn that the American left is much less religious than the rest of the U.S. population. The General Social Survey tells us that in 2004, liberals were less than half as likely as conservatives to attend a house of worship weekly, and nearly three times as likely as conservatives never to attend. Furthermore, the American left is becoming more secular still: While 27 percent of American liberals attended church weekly in 1974, only 16 percent did by 2004. In contrast, the percentage of church-attending conservatives rose over the same period from 38percent to 46percent.There are still some religious liberals left in America, but today they are outnumbered by religious conservatives by about four to one.

Secular liberals, and especially those who are explicitly nonbelievers, have become a major force on the political left. Researchers have found, for example, that delegates to the Democratic National Convention — the politically-active folks who nominate the Democratic candidate for the U.S. presidency — are more than twice as likely to be completely secular as the population-at-large.

Further, secularists are by far the most politically active liberals at the grassroots level. In the 2005, the Maxwell Poll on Civic Engagement and Inequality revealed that those who never attend religious services are just 11 percent of the adult population in America. But they are 21 percent of self-described liberals, 27 percent of liberals who contribute money to political causes, and 33 percent of liberals who attend political rallies and events. The bottom line is that the Democratic party — at least at the national level — depends critically on nonbelievers. They have influence over American liberal politics that extends far beyond their actual numbers in the population.

Of course, Democratic politicians keep saying that they want to connect with the “faith community.” They claim that they have just as much right to be the party of believers as the Republicans.

But the simple fact is: they don’t.

Deep in their hearts, they think that conservative Christians are ignorant rubes who can be persuaded to vote for the party of abortion and gay marriage by some pro forma expressions of Christian faith.

But the simple fact is: they aren’t and they won’t be.

Should We Be “Offended” At the Folsom Street Fair?

Unlike most conservative bloggers, Rick Esenberg is not inclined to get upset at the 2007 Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco. He states:

I have not blogged on the controversy over Miller’s sponsorship of the Folsom Street Fair and the appearance of its logo in conjunction with a parody of DaVinci’s Last Supper.

One of my rules in life is that you ought to try very hard not to be offended. For that reason I am not a fan of Bill Donohue and the way in which he has run the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. His appetite for offense appears to border on gluttony.

It’s nice that Rick is mellow, but we think his position ignores a larger reality. As we noted in his comments section:

Rick,

I understand you logic in thinking badly of people who are perpetually offended. And maybe in some perfect world, everybody should be laid back.

The problem is that the politically correct left has changed the rules. Claiming to be “offended” demands concessions from others.

Think of it as a prisoners’ dilemma. So long as the left can play the “offended” card to silence expression they don’t like, they need to face a right that will play by the same rules.

This logic is why I rather applaud attacks on academic freedom from the right. I don’t want them to succeed, but I do want leftist academics to be afraid that their academic freedom might be taken.

Once the campus left decides that the right doesn’t have the power to take its freedom, it will proceed to fire conservative professors.

As for the academic freedom of students: the process is already far along.

Forty years ago, we would never have made a comment like this. Professors were liberals, to be sure, but had internalized the norm of free speech and academic freedom.

Now . . . we don’t think they did that because they somehow had superior reasoning powers. Rather, they thought that way because it served their interests in an era when most threats to free speech on campus came from the right.

But they had genuinely internalized that norm. They really believed it, and they really would (at least a large number would) tolerate free speech from the political right.

But academia has changed, and for the worse.

Secular Intolerance in Europe: Scientology

It seems that Tom Cruise is not allowed to film in a certain location in Germany because of his religious beliefs.

He is a Scientologist.

Tom Cruise has been banned from making a film in Berlin about a plot to kill Adolf Hitler because the German government says his belief in Scientology is akin to Nazism.

The Hollywood star is set to play Count Claus von Stauffenberg, who almost succeeded in assassinating the Nazi leader in 1944.

The project is due to start production next month but the Germans fear Cruise will use the film, which he is co-producing, as a public relations vehicle for Scientology, which many of the country’s politicians have compared to Nazism.

The German government claims it masquerades as a religion to make money, a charge Scientology leaders reject.

The country has fought against the sect for a decade. It is even under observation by the Federal Agency for the Protection of the Constitution, a body that usually hunts spies, terrorists and neo-Nazis.

One of Germany’s few war heroes, Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg had been deeply opposed to the Nazis’ treatment of the Jews and planted a briefcase bomb under a table near Hitler in his Wolf’s Lair headquarters on July 20, 1944. The bomb went off but only wounded the Fuehrer.

Two hundred of his conspirators were also arrested and killed.

German Defence Minister Franz-Josef Jung has ruled that Cruise should not be allowed to film in the inner courtyard of his ministry where von Stauffenberg was shot.

A Defence Ministry spokesman said: “The film makers will not be allowed to film at German military sites if Count Stauffenberg is played by Tom Cruise, who has publicly professed to being a member of the Scientology cult.

“In general, the German military has a special interest in the serious and authentic portrayal of the events of July 20, 1944 and Stauffenberg as a person.”

Of course, he has no evidence that the portrayal will be anything less than serious and authentic.

We have no problem with calling Scientology a cult.

We have a huge problem with any government deciding what is a cult and what isn’t, and discriminating against “cult members.”

While the word “cult” might, in principle, have some objective definition that distinguishes between a cult and a church and a movement, in practice a “cult” is a religious movement one happens to dislike.

We have heard of liberal women who label as “male cult” any religion that doesn’t ordain women as ministers. And any religion that takes its beliefs too seriously (with “too seriously” judged by secular people) is going to be called a cult.

Further, people have every right to join a cult -- a real cult that we and the secularists would agree is a cult.

This is just another example of the secular intolerance of Europe.

Liberal Religious “Leaders” Mixing Religion and Politics

A large part of the rap against deceased Rev. Jerry Falwell was that he “mixed religion and politics.”

A huge sin, supposedly.

When it is done by conservatives.

But how will the Mainstream Media interpret this?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Christian, Jewish and Muslim leaders are urging President George W. Bush and Congress to take action against global warming, declaring that the changing climate is a “moral and spiritual issue.”

In an open letter to be published on Tuesday, more than 20 religious groups urged U.S. leaders to limit greenhouse gas emissions and invest in renewable energy sources.

“Global warming is real, it is human-induced and we have the responsibility to act,” says the letter, which will run in Roll Call and the Politico, two Capitol Hill newspapers.

“We are mobilizing a religious force that will persuade our legislators to take immediate action to curb greenhouse gases,” it says.

The letter is signed by top officials of the National Council of Churches, the Islamic Society of North America and the political arm of the Reform branch of Judaism.

Top officials from several mainline Christian denominations, including the Episcopal Church, United Methodist Church, Presbyterian Church, African Methodist Episcopal Church and Alliance of Baptists also signed the letter, along with leaders of regional organizations and individual churches.

Rev. Joel Hunter, a board member of the National Association of Evangelicals, also signed the letter, though that group has not officially taken a stance on global warming due to opposition from some of its more conservative members.

This is a litmus test.

Are we going to hear any complaints from liberals and the Mainstream Media about these religious organizations jumping into the policy debate on global warming?

Of course, we know the answer to that.

But let’s talk about reality.

Religious organizations getting involved in politics is not a violation of the First Amendment. And it doesn’t threaten a nonexistent “wall of separation between Church and State.”

Indeed, religious people have exactly the same right to get involved in politics as every other American citizen.

But this applies not only to the liberal church bureaucrats who signed on to this statement, but to conservative Christians too.

Barack Obama’s Leftist, Afrocentric Church

Barack Obama has certainly been willing to use his religious beliefs, and his affiliation with the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, to try to appeal to religious voters.

Thus, since Obama himself has chosen to make an issue of it, it’s entirely fair to ask what sort of church this is.

Trinity doesn’t make any attempt to conceal its orientation, posted on its web page.

We are a congregation which is Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian . . . Our roots in the Black religious experience and tradition are deep, lasting and permanent. We are an African people, and remain “true to our native land,” the mother continent, the cradle of civilization. God has superintended our pilgrimage through the days of slavery, the days of segregation, and the long night of racism. It is God who gives us the strength and courage to continuously address injustice as a people, and as a congregation. We constantly affirm our trust in God through cultural expression of a Black worship service and ministries which address the Black Community.

Some of this sounds just fine. “Unashamedly black.” Absolutely. “Unapologetically Christian.” Right on.

But was sub-Saharan Africa the cradle of civilization?

And how about remaining “true to our native land?” Does this suggest more loyalty to Africa than to the United States? It doesn’t have to, but it sure doesn’t sound very patriotic.

Then there is the claim that:

We believe in the following 12 precepts and covenantal statements. These Black Ethics must be taught and exemplified in homes, churches, nurseries and schools, wherever Blacks are gathered. They must reflect on the following concepts:

1. Commitment to God
2. Commitment to the Black Community
3. Commitment to the Black Family
4. Dedication to the Pursuit of Education
5. Dedication to the Pursuit of Excellence
6. Adherence to the Black Work Ethic
7. Commitment to Self-Discipline and Self-Respect
8. Disavowal of the Pursuit of “Middleclassness”
9. Pledge to make the fruits of all developing
   and acquired skills available to the Black Community
10. Pledge to Allocate Regularly, a Portion of Personal Resources for Strengthening and Supporting Black Institutions
11. Pledge allegiance to all Black leadership who espouse and embrace the Black Value System
12. Personal commitment to embracement of
    the Black Value System.

While there is much here that is fine, we aren’t keen on the notion of “Black Ethics” or a “Black Value System.” So far as we are concerned, there is only “ethics” and “values.”

The Civil Rights movement, during its heyday, insisted that the same ethics and the same values applied equally to everybody; that moral standards are universal and applicable to regardless of race.

And what is so bad about “Middleclassness?” Isn’t Obama wanting the votes of millions of middle class whites? And while we are at it, blacks who have fallen into the trap of “Middleclassness?”

All of this should raise at least as many questions about Obama as Mitt Romney’s Mormonism raises about him.

If one goes deeper into the Trinity Church website, one sees a lot of ministries and activities that are little different from what one would find at a large, non-denominational suburban megachurch.

But one also finds some fairly strident leftist stuff.

For example, the February 25, 2007 number of the church bulletin contains a column by Associate Pastor for Social Justice Reginald W. Williams attacking American detention of unlawful enemy combatants (read: terrorists) at Guantanamo. Williams fumes:

This law undermines the writ of habeas corpus which empowers a prisoner to challenge the legal basis of his/her detention in court. This law also further displays the hypocrisy of a government which claims a banner of freedom for all while policies and procedures ensure that real freedom is only for a few.

Williams is apparently unaware that the protections of habeas corpus apply to U.S. nationals, and not terrorists captured fighting American forces abroad.

The same column features “Action Items” that include:

• VOTE!
• Contact your Senator and/or Representative and demand that they fight to restore habeas corpus in order to preserve the rights of people to challenge their detention.
• Boycott Wal-Mart & Sam’s Club.

This last is close to bizarre, given that poor black people (like poor white people) especially benefit from the rock-bottom prices at those stores. But then, if one attains the dread “Middleclassness” one can scoff at the concept.

And of course, the leftist politics that is standard in the United Church of Christ (reflecting the agenda of white liberals and leftists) is plain. For example, the February 18th bulletin’s “Pastor’s Page” implores readers to “Support Justice for Farm Workers Picking Tomatoes for McDonald’s!” and touts the “Coalition of Immokalee Workers’ April 2007 Truth Tour.”

But the leftist politics get even more strident. The February 18th bulletin contains the following blurb under a listing of community events:

BLOOD DIAMONDS AND WAR IN CONGO

Maurice Carney, co-founder and executive director of Friends of the Congo, Washington, D.C., speaking on the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, driven by U.S. interest in Congo’s vast minerals, Thursday, March 8, 7:00 p.m., DePaul University, Schmitt Academic Center, Room 254.

Admittedly, this program isn’t staged or even sponsored by Trinity Church, but the inclusion in the bulletin is a sort of endorsement. It clearly implies this is a worthwhile event that somebody in the congregation might want to attend.

None of this necessarily proves that Trinity Church is a bad place. Plenty of fine churches are saddled with some arcane creedal statement that they either ignore or interpret in a perfectly benign way. And plenty have a political extremist or two -- even on the ministry staff.

But if the religious commitments of George Bush were a fit topic for consideration in 2000 and 2004, and if the Mormonism of Mitt Romney is a fair topic for 2008, the religious views and affiliations of Barack Obama should be looked at too.

Anti-Christian Darwin Day

Via Patrick McIlheran, an essay discussing the evangelical hostility to religion of those who organize and promote Darwin Day.

February 12 used to be known in classrooms across the nation as Abraham Lincoln’s birthday. But over the last decade, an increasing number of schools and community groups have decided to celebrate the birthday of the father of evolution instead.

The movement to establish February 12 as “Darwin Day” seems to be spreading, promoted by a evangelistic non-profit group with its own website (http://www.darwinday.org/) and an ambitious agenda to create a “global celebration in 2009, the bicentennial of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origins of Species.”

Darwin Day celebrations provide an eye-opening glimpse into the world of grassroots Darwinian fundamentalism, an alternate reality where atheism is the conventional wisdom and where traditional religious believers are viewed with suspicion if not paranoia.

Promoters of Darwin Day deny that their activities are anti-religious, but their denial is hard to square with reality.

According to the Darwin Day website, the movement’s inspiration was an event sponsored by the Stanford Humanists and the Humanist Community in 1995. Since then the honor roll of groups sponsoring Darwin Day events has been top-heavy with organizations bearing such names as the “Long Island Secular Humanists,” the “Atheists and Agnostics of Wisconsin,” the “Gay and Lesbian Atheists and Humanists,” the “Humanists of Idaho,” the “Southeast Michigan Chapter of Freedom from Religion Foundation,” and the “San Francisco Atheists.” The last group puts on an annual festival called “Evolutionpalooza” featuring a Darwin impersonator and an evolution game show (“Evolutionary!”).

Given such sponsors, it should be no surprise that Darwin Day events often explicitly attack religion. At a high school in New York a few years ago, students wore shirts emblazoned with messages proclaiming that “no religious dogmas [were] keeping them from believing what they want to believe,” while in California a group named “Students for Science and Skepticism” hosted a lecture at the University of California, Irvine, on the topic “Darwin’s Greatest Discovery: Design without a Designer.” This year in Boston there is an event on “Biological Arguments Against the Existence of God.”

The original “honorary president” of Darwin Day was biologist Richard Dawkins, author most recently of The God Delusion. Dawkins is best known for such pearls of wisdom as “faith is one of the world’s great evils, comparable to the smallpox virus but harder to eradicate,” and “Darwin made it possible to be an intellectually fulfilled atheist.”

Darwin Day celebrations are fascinating because they expose a side of the controversy over evolution in America that is rarely covered by the mainstream media. Although journalists routinely write about the presumed religious motives of anyone critical of unguided evolution, they almost never discuss the anti-religious mindset that motivates many of evolution’s staunchest defenders.

What Darwin Day shows, however, is just how ordinary the anti-religious views expressed by Dawkins are among grassroots Darwinists. Far from being on the fringe, Dawkins’ views form the ideological core of mainstream Darwinism.

Not that this should come as a shock. According to a 1998 survey of members of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), nearly 95 percent of NAS biologists are atheists or agnostics.

The anti-religious outlook of many of Darwin’s chief boosters exposes the hypocrisy in current discussions over Darwin’s theory. The usual complaint raised against scientists who are skeptical of Darwin’s theory is that many of them (like the vast majority of Americans) happen to believe in God. It is insinuated that this fact somehow undermines the validity of their scientific views. Yet, at the same time, defenders of Darwinism insist that their own rejection of religion is irrelevant to the validity of their scientific views—and most reporters seem to agree.

Of course, in an important sense these defenders of Darwinism are right. Just because leading Darwinists are avowed atheists or agnostics does not mean that their scientific beliefs about evolution are wrong. Scientific propositions should be debated based on their evidence, not on the metaphysical beliefs of those who espouse them.

But if Darwinists have the right to be debated based on evidence, not motives, then scientists who are supportive of alternatives to Darwin’s theory such as intelligent design should have the right to expect the same treatment.

We have no problem with Darwinism as a scientific theory. But we have a considerable problem with Darwinism as the government-imposed dogma.

And we have a huge problem with Darwinism as a rallying cry for people who hate religion.

We have posted on the culture of religious intolerance in science.

The problem is not wanting to “do science,” the problem is adopting a whole complex of cultural attitudes that are typical in science, but not at all required to “do science.”

Interestingly, the Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment as prohibiting any attempt to “promote” religion on the part of government. But the same rulings also prohibit any attempt to “impede” religion.

Intolerant secularists, of course, pound on the first restriction, and entirely ignore the second.

National Council of Churches Funded by Secular Leftists

From First Things:

He Who Pays the Piper . . .

By Richard John Neuhaus

One of the most dramatic stories of religious and cultural change in recent American history is the collapse of what was viewed as the Protestant establishment. Its main institutional embodiment was the National Council of Churches (NCC), established in 1950 as the successor to the Federal Council of Churches. The NCC, like its predecessor body established in 1908, was part of the American establishment in a way comparable to, say, the American Medical Association. Over the years, I have written about how the NCC has become barely a skeleton of its former self. By the late 1990s, it was in severe financial crisis, laying off staff, shutting down programs, and struggling to pay the phone bills.

Then it brought in as its new general-secretary the Rev. Robert Edgar, a former six-term Democratic congressman, and things began to turn around, although in curious ways. The NCC has thirty-five member denominations representing various Protestant and Orthodox traditions, and its founding definition is to be “a community of Christian communions” with the purpose of advancing Christian unity in “confessing Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God, as Savior and Lord.” Beginning in the 1960s, like so many establishment institutions of the time, the NCC took a sharp leftward turn, with the predictable result that it alienated many of the members of its member churches. The contributions of those churches to the NCC precipitously declined, and continue to decline. Since 2000, the decline has been from $2.9 million to $1.75 million–a drop of 40 percent in four years. So how is the NCC recovering from its financial crisis and near collapse? The answer is that Edgar turned to non-church sources of income. In 2003, he obtained a $7 million gift from an anonymous woman who did not belong to any member church but admired the NCC’s politics. Income from other non-church sources has, since 2000, grown from $800,000 to $2.9 million–more than a threefold increase. Such income includes major grants from foundations such as Rockefeller, Ford, Tides, and Kellogg, as well as organizations such as the Sierra Club.

A recent publication by the Institute on Religion and Democracy (IRD), Strange Yokefellows, observes that “the council is more dependent financially upon the Ford Foundation than upon 32 of its 35 member denominations.” The IRD notes that the groups that are keeping the NCC alive have several characteristics in common: They are not affiliated with any church body; they have no record of interest in Christian unity or witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ; they are overwhelmingly on the political and social left. In addition to its financial sources, the NCC under Robert Edgar is very upfront about its alliance with groups such as MoveOn.org and People for the American Way in combating the political influence of what it describes in alarmist terms as “the religious right.” Mr. Edgar is indeed to be credited with the financial rescue of the NCC, but at the price of turning it into what for all the world appears to be an auxiliary of the left wing of the Democratic party.

All this is not news to some critics of the NCC. In an endorsement of Strange Yokefellows, one such critic says, “If the NCC is unable to find enough support from the very churches it supposedly represents, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised by its complete capitulation to liberal politics. But it hardly represents those churches anymore. This is more than betrayal. It’s prostitution.” Well, not quite. The fact is that the few member bodies that do contribute to the NCC probably have no problem with the new arrangement, since their politics are pretty much the politics of the NCC. One thinks, for instance, of the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.), and the United Church of Christ. No “capitulation” to the NCC’s new funding sources was required.

Neuhaus is right, of course, that the NCC didn’t change its politics in response to getting all that secular leftist money.

Rather, it attracted the secular leftist money with its secular leftist politics -- which it wraps, of course, in religious rhetoric.

It is significant that it can’t raise its budget from member denominations, even though those denominations are dominated by a clerical elite just as secular and leftist as the NCC.

What is clear is that the NCC can no longer convincingly claim to represent even “mainstream Protestantism” -- which of course is no longer mainstream.

“God Gap” Increased in 2006 Elections

From The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life, a summary of how religion affected the 2006 elections.

Bottom line: the polarization that separates religious people and secular people (the latter group including a fairly large number of nominally religious) increased. Particularly instructive were comparisons with 2002, the last national non-presidential election year.

The GOP held on to voters who attend religious services more than once a week, 60% of whom voted Republican compared with 61% in 2002. A majority (53%) of those who attend church at least once a week also supported Republicans. But less frequent churchgoers were much more supportive of Democrats than they were four years ago. Among those who attend church a few times a year, for instance, 60% voted Democratic, compared with 50% in 2002. And among those who never go to church, 67% voted Democratic; four years ago, only 55% did so. As a result, the gap in Democratic support between those who attend church more than once a week and those who never attend church has grown from 18 percentage points in 2002 to 29 points today.

In other words, there was a general swing toward the Democrats (obvious on election night) but those who frequently attend religious services moved hardly at all in a Democratic direction, while those who seldom or never attend religious services moved sharply in Democratic direction.

Click on image to enlarge
Thus two things were going on. 2006 was a “deviating” election in which short-term forces favored the Democrats. But it also continued the “secular realignment” — here “secular” means it’s happening over decades — which is sorting out the parties.

The Mainstream Media spin on the election was that white evangelical voters voters were going to defect from the Republicans in large numbers, supposedly because of the “outing” of Republican Representative Mark Foley as a homosexual who exchanged obscene e-mails with a former page. This fit nicely into the Mainstream Media stereotypes of conservative Christians as homophobes would would go ballistic at learning that a Republican congressman might be gay.

In fact, evangelical Christians yet again calculated that, on issues like abortion and gay marriage, they are better represented by the Republicans.