Jesus Camp

The film documentary Jesus Camp spends a week with a summer camp of Pentecostal kids. There, they get a version of Christianity that is wrapped in the American flag and double-dipped in a gooey adoration of policies of George W. Bush. This is a video of a group of kids from a large, conservative Dallas church. These kids put on a camp that reflects a different sort of Christianity. It is one where the cross is picked up, not pinned on. It is one where “values” aren’t simply slapped on T-shirts. They are lived out. Can I get an “Amen”?

The Third Great Awakening

The first Great Awakening featured the Calvinistic preaching of men like George Whitefield. The result was a burgeoning young country falling to its knees to confess personal and corporate transgressions and embrace the crucified Christ. The second Great Awakening was of a different sort. It featured the man-centered, manipulative techniques of men like Charles Finney. The result were short-lived conversions, burned-overed districts and shallow, religious emotions. Now Republican congressman Mike Pence predicts a third Awakening. Apparently it will feature Bible-pounding Glenn Beck bigotry, a growing fear of goverment and a tea-party-caffinated resentment of taxation (it is, after all, the root of socialism). All which has this third Great Awakening shaping up in manner that would make Whitefield spin in his grave. A true, biblical Awakening will recognize that the evil in the world isn’t in rooted Hollywood or D.C., but in our own wicked hearts.

Beckworld

If you think the placards are scary, wait until you talk to the people holding them.

“The village idiot”

Wow! And I thought I was hard on the Christian Right. Frank Schaeffer, son of evangelical apologist Francis Schaeffer, lashes out at the evangelical political block. Or as he likes to call them, “the fifth column of insanity.”

Let us pray

Mordecai had his Esther and we have our Michele Bachmann. Clearly, God must be against healthcare reform. Or so that seems to be the idea here. If we fast and humble ourselves before Jehovah, He will unleash His terrible, swift wrath against imaginary death panels and the left’s wicked attempts to intervene for the poor. Congresswoman Bachmann explains:

“We all need to consider that in God’s timing that he may have allowed us, as members of Congress, to be in the position that we’re in just for this specific issue right now,” she said. “Everything that all of us have worked together and labored for over the years, all of it could be undermined with this one bill. President Obama realizes that. The radicals that are on the pro-abortion left, they realize that. They could win it all. And the unborn, and the vulnerable, the disabled and those at the end of life could lose it it all.”

But it was Bachmann’s fervent call to utilize prayer and fasting to beat back health-care reform efforts that was the true highlight of the call.

“That’s really where this battle will be won — on our knees in prayer and fasting,” she told the listeners. “Remember: faith without works is dead. So we’re asking you to do all of it: pray, fast, believe, trust the Lord, but also act.”

Queer Eye on health care

Obamacare doesn’t just want to kill granny. They want to perform a sex change on her. No wonder we will have to wait three years to get treated for breast cancer and brain tumors! It is all starting to make sense. You see, in Obama’s Brave New World the hospitals will be run by homosexuals. I’m sure everything will look fa-a-a-bulous! But those people couldn’t organize an apendectomy if their Sunday Brunch Mimosas depended on it. For more information on the absolute terror that is health care reform, just go to prayinjesusname.org.

Nice girls get abortions

If a recent study is correct, a girl who has attended private religious schools is more likely to get an abortion than a girl who has attended public schools.

Despite Adamczyk’s finding that rates of reported abortions were higher for young women educated at private religious schools, the type of religious school was not a factor: Catholic schools had similar rates as other religious schools.”Religious school attendance is not necessarily indicative of conservative religious beliefs because students attend these schools for a variety of reasons,” Adamczyk said. “These schools tend to generate high levels of commitment and strong social ties among their students and families, so abortion rates could be higher due to the potential for increased feelings of shame related to an extramarital birth.”

Sadly, American Christianity has done a bang up job in making men and women feel more shame than mercy. Their learning institutions from 4K to grad school has also done a swell job of demanding a strong witness for their schools (i.e., Don’t get caught drinking or knocked up while unmarried, after all, what would Jesus do?). Conservative schools and well-meaning parents have encouraged Christian kids to put off marriage and never to settle for less than perfection. They have given religous girls a bubble in which to live that knows little of grace and forgiveness and plenty about not dressing trashy. A bubble that, in the end,  is as useless as a faulty condom.  The message is clear. Bad behavior must be kept on the down low, and upstanding, church-going parents must never be dissappointed. Worst of all, in this uptight, graceless system Jesus is reduced that cool dude hanging on the cross who we must never fail, rather than the Incarnate friend of sinners who understands and forgives messy lives. Maybe it’s time for Amercian Christianity to come to Jesus. After all, he is the one who famously had little patience with shame-bound religiosity. “Woe unto you, Scribes, Pharisees, hypocrites! You have omitted the weightier matters of the law––justice, mercy and faith.”

In your face, Darwin

The Brits look at Ned Flanders and the Evangelical survival of the fittest:

The great battle has to do with religion and modernity. Ever since the Enlightenment, intellectuals have predicted that religion – and particularly the effusive brand of religion now practised by evangelicals – would be doomed by modernity. The high priests of the Enlightenment mocked Christianity as a refuge for superstitious freaks. Edward Gibbon was never happier than when chronicling the absurd activities of the likes of Saint Simeon Stylites, who for more than 30 years lived on top of a pillar 21m (70ft) high and 1m square. In his novel La Religieuse Diderot mocked the religious for their psychological oddities and deviant pastimes, not least flagellation.

The founders of modern sociology, Max Weber and Émile Durkheim, predicted the secularisation of the world. Ned’s fellow moustache-wearer, Friedrich Nietzsche, loudly announced God’s death. Marx cursed the opium of the people. Freud saw religion as a mere neurosis. Ever since Darwin, educated European thought has viewed religion as a dying cult – the refuge of the ignorant, the superstitious and a few guilt-ridden Catholic novelists such as Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh.

The land of Ned and Homer, of course, has always been different. While the French slaughtered priests during their revolution, seeing religion as a bulwark of the ancien régime, America’s Founding Fathers separated Church from State, in large part to protect the former from the latter. The First Amendment set off a fierce competition between America’s “multiplicity of sects”, with a succession of evangelising religions vying for people’s attentions: the Methodists converted an eighth of the country within a generation of the revolution. While Europe’s state-sponsored religions shrivelled, America’s free market kept faith alive.

Eye for an eye?

For all my pro-Israeli Evangelical readers: Can you please  tell God’s “chosen people” to take a break from slaughtering helpless Palestinian woman and children long enough to crack open a Bible. Yes, Hamas has been lobbing primitive rockets into Israel for several months now. But do we really think that doing surgical strikes on civilians is honoring the Mosiac law of proportionality? Can we please hold off on Armageddon just long enough to enjoy the Great Tribulation/Depression that the housing crisis has handed us?

The Prophetic Voice

Jeremiah the prophet never published a best-seller, never flew in a corporate jet, and never, to my knowledge, owned a Hawaiian shirt. But he did speak truth to power. And he had the welts to prove it. As Andrew Sullivan observes, Rick Warren is no Jeremiah or Jeremiah Wright, for that matter. Maybe that’s why he will be bringing the invocation at the inaugral.

Having Sex Religiously

Pastor Ed Young recently challenged his Baptist congregation to have more sex. Okay, not exactly the sort of sermon you might expect from an Evangelical preacher. But probably not a sermon you’d sleep through, either. Tucker Carlson pontificates:

The most comprehensive study of American sexual behavior ever undertaken (published by the University of Chicago and marketed under the notably non-arousing title The Social Organization of Sexuality) found that, in fact, “having a religious affiliation was associated with higher rates of orgasm for women.” The devout are actually having better sex than the rest of us.

So maybe it’s worth listening to the megachurch pastor. Ed Young says compulsory, scheduled sex will improve your marriage. Doesn’t sound very romantic. But is it true? Try the following thought experiment:

Let’s say your marriage was falling apart. Alienated, angry, frustrated with couples therapy, you decide to divorce. But before you do, you agree to try one last thing: Every day for a month, you’ll have sex. You don’t particularly want to, but you will, and you’ll be disciplined about it: half an hour minimum, naked, both striving for orgasm.

Let’s say you actually did that. Do you think by the end of the month you’d go through with the divorce? Maybe you would. Likely you wouldn’t.

A losing coalition

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Running the numbers on the election, it appears that evangelicals supported the McCain-Palin ticket in greater numbers than they did Bush-Cheney  four years ago. Considering that McCain started the primary season with little support among Religious Right honchos like James Dobson and Pat Robertson, this was quite a feat. Considering he lost the election, this was no great accomplishment. The GOP tent is shrinking. Look at Proposition 8. It passed in the blue state that handed Obama the victory. That didn’t happen without those who voted for Obama also voting against gay marriage. This year, conservative values and voting for Obama was not mutually exclusive. The GOP has there work cut out for them.

Hail to the other Chief

The headline reads: Obama Pushes Abortion on Day One with Emanuel Pick. Wow! Is the pro-life movement single-issue or what? The article in LifeNews.com, a website which assumes that the Obama’s agenda is as myopic as theirs, goes on to point out that as a congressman Obama Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has had a consistent pro-choice record. Not a great surprise. However, what they fail to point out is the fact that Emanuel has been out there recruiting every patriotic pro-life Democrat he can find to challenge Republican-held seats throughout the country. This is a giant step for the Democratic Party. Clearly, it is a tactical move. But nevertheless, a significant move. Already we have seen the Democratic plank on abortion inching away from a radical pro-abortion stance to advocate for financially-strapped pregnant women to aid them in choosing life. This is big news and I am surprised that a pro-life journal would totally overlook it. Of course, you have to look at the politics of your average pro-life group. They are usually opposed to government assistance to poor mothers and their children. The pro-life compassion abruptly stops at the birth canal.

Obama is ahead in the God-off

That’s right, it’s something I thought I would never see in my lifetime. The Democrats are actually out-Godding the Republicans. What has put Obama over? Is it the fact that he said (without looking apoplectic) he had “received Jesus Christ as his personal Saviour” instead of the more politically-correct  “I hold a deep and abiding personal faith.” Or the fact that the benediction at the Democratic Convention was delivered by someone other than a New Age Unitarian lesbian agnostic as in years past? Or was it his long-format infomercial with its featured shots of a middle-class people studying their bibles and soundbites of the candidate promising to pray for someone? Or is it simply the fact that the choice of  Penecostal V.P. actually knock points off for conspicuous pandering? God only knows.