In a Religion Dispatches essay that deserves more attention than it is likely to get, Ivan Petrella argues that "progressive religion isn’t good enough for our nation. Instead, we need a shift in paradigm. We need to become progressive about religion." What does that mean? He explains:

Being progressive about religion requires rescuing the best of atheism and progressive Christianity while discarding their mistakes. From atheists, I’d rescue the commitment to reason. Like them, I’m unwilling to abdicate the use of my rational capacity in the name of faith. Unlike atheists, however, I don’t believe religions are false. Billions of people practice religions; in that sense they’re true. Billions of people believe in God, in that sense God does exist. Religions are true, but they’re not sacred. We need to be as self-reflective and critical of religion as we are of any other part of life.

From progressive Christians, I’d rescue the commitment to progressive understandings of faith and politics. But I’d reject their reliance on the Bible and Jesus. Here they are no different from the religious right, picking and choosing what suits them while ignoring what doesn’t.

It would be a relief to see the national discourse over religion shift to the rhetorical space Petrella is offering up here, if only because he offers a starting point that is firmly rooted in the realities of religious life in the United States. John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge, authors of God is Back: How the Global Revival of Faith Is Changing the World, declare secularization theory dead in a recent piece for the Fox Forum:

Today it is secularization theory that is dead rather than religion. Religion continues to flourish in the United States. Megachurches across the country are full to overflowing. Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life” has sold almost thirty million copies. Granted, the latest religious surveys show a rise in the number of non-believers, to around 15% of the population. But that is a tiny portion by European standards. The reason why so many atheists such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens have written books attacking God is that they feel on the defensive. You do not engage in battles that you think that you won years ago.

Sources: Religion Dispatches, Fox Forum 

Religious Americans are up to four times more likely to be active in their communities than nonreligious Americans—and the link is causal, according to new research from Robert Putnam and David Campbell. The scholars have observed increases in civic involvement that come after individuals join a religious group.

“The reason for the increased civic engagement may come as a surprise to religious leaders,” the Christian Century writes. “It has nothing to do with ideas of divine judgment or with trying to secure a seat in heaven. Rather, it’s the relationships that people make in their churches, mosques, synagogues and temples that draw them into community activism. . . . The theory is if someone from your ‘moral community’ asks you to volunteer for a cause, it’s really hard to say no.”

Source: Christian Century

Healing lepers, giving sight to the blind, the Bible portrays Jesus as a one-man health care reform plan. A significant portion of the gospels are devoted to the idea of healing the sick, and much of the political debate in Washington currently centers around the same idea. Karin Granberg-Michaelson writes for Sojourner’s, “Faith and healing are integrally related, as demonstrated in all the healings recorded in Scripture.”

Beyond political reform, Granberg-Michaelson writes that churches should work toward a “whole person health care [the treatment of a person as a unity of body, mind, and spirit].” This can work in tandem with modern medicine, and neither spiritual nor medical care should be neglected. She writes:

Problems occur when we isolate and compartmentalize either source of healing. A wholly scientific approach lacks the resource of God's power, and a wholly spiritual approach overlooks God's confidence in human beings.

This spiritual approach can point the way toward a more progressive health care system, according to Rose Marie Berger on Sojourner’s God’s Politics blog. She writes: 

We want to craft a health-care system that honors a fair exchange of money for services, that redistributes our social capital toward the health and healing of all over the long-term, and that allows for philanthropy and generosity of heart by those who can give freely for the betterment of all.

(Thanks, The Immanent Frame.)

Source:  Sojourner’s  

How well do religion and politics really play together, wonders Will Braun in the Summer 2009 issue of Geez. The co-editor/publisher of the irreverent Canadian spirituality magazine confesses to being a “pessimist in a time of promise,” after pondering the religious bracketing in President Obama’s inauguration speech. It was in that speech that Obama spoke of reaffirming “the greatness” of the United States, and drawing confidence from “the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny.”

“Does the narrative of ‘richest, most powerful’ fit with religion?” Braun asks. “At one point, Obama heralded ‘the God-given promise that all are equal, all are free and all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness.’ If this God-given promise applies to all God’s children—not just Americans—then how can the U.S. guard its top spot and strive for equity at the same time?”

Braun offers some food for thought: “Consider the biblical lines that would never make it into a presidential speech (in any country): ‘love your enemies,’ ‘the last shall be first,’ and from the beatitudes, ‘blessed are the poor,’ and ‘blessed are the meek.’ My point is not that presidents should be preachers but that God is not in any country’s corner. And perhaps the parts of the biblical story that could never make their way onto a presidential tele-prompter indicate the exact elements that Christians should bring to the discourse of a nation.”

Bonus time: Not too long ago, Will Braun was our guest on Alt Wire, a morning digest of links and information collected and explained by a rotating cast of alternative-press luminaries.

Source: Geez

In 1979, a class on transcendental meditation was banned from New Jersey public schools on the grounds that it violated the separation between church and state. Today, transcendental meditation is making a comeback, supported by stars including filmmaker David Lynch and ex-Beatle Paul McCartney.

“Slowly but steadily, TM seems to be gaining a foothold in public schools across the country,” Church & State magazine reports. No matter how you package the practice, Church & State asserts that transcendental meditation is rooted in Hinduism, and any classes taught in public schools would violate the first amendment. The article quotes one angry parent who called the practice a “cult.”

Adherents, according to Church & State, are “promoting the program as the solution for everything from poor academic performance and fidgety kids to unruly student behavior and gang violence.”

David Lynch, in an article for Utne Reader, gave people this advice on the benefits of meditation: “Grow in happiness and intuition. Experience the joy of doing. And you'll glow in this peaceful way. Your friends will be very, very happy with you. Everyone will want to sit next to you. And people will give you money!”

Image by Kanzeon Zen Center, licensed under Creative Commons. 

Sources:  Church & State ,  Utne Reader  

“When Barack Obama moved into the Oval Office in January, he inherited a military not just drained by a two-front war overseas but fighting a third battle on the home front, a subtle civil war over its own soul.” So writes Harper’s contributing editor, Jeff Sharlet, in a deeply-reported, equally troubling essay (not yet available online) chronicling the rise of the evangelical right in the U.S. Military since the Vietnam War.

At the end of the piece, titled “Jesus Killed Mohammed: The Crusade for a Christian Military,” the reader is left with the strong impression that if tens-of-thousands of recruits, along with certain high-ranking officers—including General David Patraeus—get their way, evangelical Christians will bring the “Lord of all’ to the entire armed forces. The U.S. Constitution be damned.

According to Sharlet, there is a “small but powerful movement of Christian soldiers concentrated in the officers corps” who see themselves not as subversives or radicals, but as “spiritual warriors” and “government paid missionaries.” Within this “fundamentalist front,” the best organized group is the Officers’ Christian Fellowship, which has 15,000 active members at 80 percent of military bases and an annual growth rate of 3 percent. The group equates military duty with Godly duty and routinely casts the world in stark terms of good and evil. The men and women in American uniform are the Lord’s to do with what he pleases. Everyone else is, literally, on the side of Satan.

While reading the piece, I couldn’t help but recall that in 2006 the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Report warned that white supremacists and neo-Nazis were infiltrating the U.S. military, joining up with “the world’s best-trained, best-equipped fighting force” in order to walk away with valuable combat training and weapons skills. The magazine followed up in its Winter 2008 issue, concluding that since its original report, military officials “seem to have made no sustained effort to prevent active white supremacists from joining the armed forces or to weed out those already in uniform.”

Of course, there’s more than a fine line between Neo-Nazism and evangelical Christianity. Yet, it deeply concerns a number of military personnel, both conservative and liberal, when any group, no matter their religious or political agenda, is allowed to bring their beliefs to work. As Sharlet writes, “a soldier in uniform can’t endorse a political candidate, advertise a product, or proselytize. That rule is for the good of the public—no one wants men with guns telling them who to vote for—and for the military itself. And officer can tell a soldier what to do, but not what to believe; conscience is its own order.”

Yet, as the Harper’s story makes clear, preaching the word—which sometimes morphs into harassment and abuse of nonbelievers—is becoming both more common among the rank-and-file and too often ignored by commanders all the way up to Obama himself. It’s gotten so bad, in fact, that lifelong republican Mikey Weinstein, a former graduate of the Air Force Academy, a ten year veteran of JAG, and former assistant general counsel in the Reagan White House, is serving as president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, a small, scrappy organization whose primary mission is to protect soldiers who don’t walk the evangelical line from harassment. He tells Sharlet that his enemy is “weaponized Christianity.” And he believes this “country is facing a pervasive and pernicious pattern and practice of unconstitutional rape of religious rights of our armed forces members.”

Ultimately, what makes Sharlet’s story so haunting is the on-the-ground reportage. The writer weaves together a host of troubling anecdotes to make his case, including the opening scene (from which the story gets its name) about a National Guard Infantry Unit stationed in Samarra on an Easter Sunday. They begin the day eating breakfast while watching Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ. They end the day in a Bradley Assault Vehicle, its armor decorated in red Arabic script that’s meant to agitate the enemy. Its rough translation: “Jesus Killed Mohammed.”

The story concludes at the Air Force Academy in Colorado, long-considered ground zero for the military’s evangelical movement, where Sharlet asks a cadet what he would do if he ever received an order that contradicted his faith. What if he was ordered to bomb a building in which terrorists were hiding, even though there were civilians in the way?

“He shook his head. ‘Who are you to question why God build up nations just to destroy them, so that those who are in grace can see that they’re in grace?’ A smile lit up half his face, an expression that might be taken for sarcastic if [he] wasn’t a man committed to be earnest at all times.”

Image of the US Air Force Academy chapel by Mark Gallagher, licensed under Creative Commons.

Source:  Harper’s, Intelligence Report