'Faith changed people's lives'

This American Life's Ira Glass on his relationship with Christians who reach out to Chicago gang kids, and how they tried to convert him to Christianity:

"In the end ... believe or not believing in God wasn't something I felt like I had a choice about. I simply found I didn't believe. It seemed attractive to believe. It seems like you get a lot out of belief, if you have it. And I had witnessed with my own eyes the change that belief had made in the lives of people I had met .... I witnessed how faith totally changed people's lives. But when I looked at what I believed myself, I just found I didn't believe."

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How New Atheists are like Victorian-era bishops

The secularization thesis -- the most traditional version, rather crude, which predicted religion would disappear from the modern world -- is dead. I don't know that there's a generally agreed upon moment when that theory died. Certainly by the late 90s it was clear to sociologists that while certain social relationships, such as that between the general population and religious authorities, were changing, and that many religious beliefs and practices were morphing and diversifying, religion itself wasn't going away.

About a decade later, there were the New Atheists. While of course this movement made arguments about the validity of theistic beliefs, a major emphasis was actually on the moral imperative of secularization. The argument was that religion was a destructive, negative force that should disappear from the modern world. The New Atheists didn't rely on secularization as an empirical claim, particularly, saying that religion was, observably, disappearing (though sometimes they said that too), but made, more, a normative moral claim that religion ought to disappear.

Is there a connection between the demise of the sociological theory of secularization and the emergence of New Atheists' arguments for secularization?

Philosopher Charles Taylor, author of A Secular Age, said that there might be during an international, interdisciplinary graduate seminar at the University of Tübingen this last week.

Asked about the New Atheists during a question-and-answer period, Taylor said:

They are people who are really in a position where they’re, where they have a feeling ... of being besieged. I think I understand why they’re so upset. They had this sense that history was on their side and then this didn’t happen. It’s rather like bishops in the Victorian church and then there was Darwin.... That’s a very interesting phenomena. It used to be the picture, where dogmatic views were dying and freethinkers felt they owned the future. I don’t really understand this development. I’m just reporting on it. But it’s very interesting that there’s been this reversal, so that they now feel besieged.

Taylor's suggestion was that the much commented-upon style of the New Atheists -- the "militancy" and aggression -- comes from a sense that history is arcing in the wrong direction. In that way, if not in any other, these public atheists might be compared to American fundamentalists.

For their part, at least some of the New Atheists remain committed to the sociological thesis of secularization that sociologists have now either completely abandoned or dramatically modified (into various neo-secularization theories, including Taylor's own). In an interview to promote their recent documentary, both Richard Dawkins and Lawrence Krauss said they thought theistic beliefs would, eventually, come to an end.

Krauss said, "When I was a kid in the ’60s, I was sure that by now there would be no religion. In a way it’s very surprising that there are these momentary resurgences. I think it’s going to be a long road."

Dawkins was more adamant that religion is vanishing, even if not as evenly and as quickly as was once commonly predicted. He said, "If you look at the broad sweep of history, then clearly we’re on the winning side. I think things are moving in the right direction, probably not as fast as I would like to see."

Only time will tell "who owns the future." There's an interesting question, though, that could be further explored, about how the sense of whether or not historical trends are tending towards or against one's position shape the way that position is articulated and the tenor of the general arguments.

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Atheist takes questions in Mississippi church

A Mississippi Church of Christ -- a conservative church in a conservative state -- interviews an atheist, Neil Carter of Godless in Dixie, in a very open, cordial discussion. Carter starts the conversation:

People like me are out there, and it'd be interesting to have a conversation. What I have found is now that I'm on the outside of this tradition, I'm often misunderstood by people who just two or three or years ago would not have had such strange reactions to me. It's like I'm painted a different color and have a third eye on my forheard, sometimes, if I tell them I'm not a Christian.

Starting at 7:08, Carter lists top 11 things atheists wish Christians knew about them.

At 29:09, Carter talks about how Christians can better evangelize, and challenges American Christians to experience how atheists are treated in their communities.

At 30:05, Carter takes questions. The first is pretty fascinating, and represents the tenor of this conversation: "We as Christians have periods of doubt. Do you have periods of doubt in reverse?"

Hemant Mehta writes, "If you want an example of what an ideal Christian/atheist dialogue looks like, watch this video."

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What 'Mormon' means to the media when you're murdered

Travis Alexander was a Mormon.

He converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in high school. He did his two-year mission in Denver. He abstained from alcohol, tobacco and caffeine, in keeping with the common understanding of the church's health codes, and cared about eating nutritional meals, which isn't always true for financially successful 30-year-olds. He wanted to live in a community with a strong Mormon presence. That was part of why he moved to Mesa, Az. He wrote a spiritual self-help book, titled Raising You, and was trying to get it published when he died.

When he died, the Arizona Republic said Alexander was a "a devout Mormon." It was the first sentence of their first story about how he was murdered in his shower: "Travis Alexander was a young, successful businessman, a well-known motivational speaker and a devout Mormon."

It's never really clear what news reports mean by "devout." It's often a kind of content-free intensifier, like "really" or "literally." The stylebook for religion reporters discourages use of the word, since "It's a subjective term without a precise meaning to all readers." Sometimes it seems to mean the person adheres more to a religion's teachings than others do (with the journalist sweeping right by the always-present internal struggles over the right understanding of a religion's teaching). Sometimes it seems to mean measurable practices, like prayer or proselytizing, are practiced by this person -- practiced, sometimes, vaguely more, or a lot, or even at all. Sometimes it doesn't even mean anything observable, but is a gesture at how the person presented themselves as if religion and religiousness were important. Or maybe the word works to justify religion's inclusion in a story, since after all the vast majority of people in America identify with

In any case, it's all very hand-wavy.

When Travis Alexander was murdered, though, the Arizona Republic made mention of his Mormonism and did the hand waving, and dubbed him "devout."

That was five years ago, though. In more recent stories, covering the high-profile trial of Alexander's girlfriend, who is charged with murdering him, the man's Mormonism has been described a bit differently. On Jan. 2, for example, as the trial began, the paper summed up the court case this way:

An outwardly religious young man is shot down and slashed apart by the angry young woman who was his secret sex partner. Prosecutors call it first-degree murder; [...] defense attorneys call it self-defense. The network TV news magazines call it the trial of the year.

On Jan. 30, as the defense phase of the trial began, the Arizona Republic repeated the description of the murdered man as an "outwardly religious Mormon." The story reads:

[Jodi] Arias is on trial in the 2008 killing of Alexander, 30, an outwardly religious Mormon who was found shot and stabbed in the shower of his home. Arias, his secret sex partner, admits killing Alexander but claims it was in self-defense.

Presumably Alexander's piety -- his Mormon-ness -- has not changed in five years of being dead. How the major Arizona paper describes that piety has changed, however.

Why?

It is still true that Alexander converted in high school, did a mission, didn't smoke or drink alcohol or caffeine, wanted to live in a place where there were lots of other Mormons, wrote a spiritual self-book, etc., etc. What's different now is that with the trial, information about Alexander's relationship with Arias have come out, and there's lots of evidence that lots of that relationship did not conform with his church's teachings. There's evidence, too, that he lied about the church's teaching in order to manipulate his girlfriend, a new convert, to perform certain sex acts.

As the Associated Press reported, "Alexander's religion and sex life have been a constant theme throughout the trial."

More precisely: the contradiction between how this man apparently believed he should live and how he did live, have been a critical aspect of the accused's defense. And a critical aspect of the trial. The very first witness called in this case -- herself described as a "devout" Mormon by the Arizona Republic -- was grilled about "what constitutes sin in the Mormon religion."

She ranked sexual immorality the second worst Mormon sin, right after murder.

Whether or not Arias is guilty of the worst sin is still up to the jury to decide, but there's a lot of agreement that Alexander was definitely guilty of the second worst sin. In one report, Alexander is said to have convinced his girlfriend that sodomy was not frowned on by the church. Arias testified "She believed the Mormon vow of chastity, based on Alexander's interpretation, meant that most sexual acts were 'more or less OK' as long as they did not involve premarital vaginal intercourse -- which they eventually engaged in." In the accused's testimony, she further said Alexander gave her her own copy of the Book of Mormon the same day he asked her to perform oral sex on him in a parking lot. He had sex with her the same day he baptized her into the faith. He apparently also lied to another girlfriend about being a virgin, and pursued multiple women at the same time.

There was also a phone sex recording, nude photos, and claims of public sex, acted-out fantasies, pornography, and day-long trysts. Alexander and Arias were, of course, also unmarried.

As the Arizona paper glosses this: "although they both professed to be faithful Mormons, their relationship was anything but chaste."

This is what it means, in the paper's estimating, to be only outwardly Mormon. Inwardly -- or, perhaps, better, privately -- Alexander wasn't really Mormon, because he behaved in ways disapproved of by his church. When they didn't know about his sexual behavior, the paper deemed Alexander devout. Now that they know, his faith is seen as just for show.

It's certainly true that the Latter-day Saints actively teach against the behavior that this murdered man was engaged in. Alexander likely would have agreed, if asked by his bishop, that he was sinning. The church does not teach, though, that one somehow ceases to be Mormon when one sins. Acting badly, by ones own lights and even in the judgement of the church, doesn't delegitimize one's conversion, or undercut one's Mormon-ness. The church teaches morals, but it doesn't simply equate being a part of the church with consistently living in accordance with the morals that are taught.

Inward and private struggles to live up to the standards of one's religion do not mean that one only has that religion outwardly, at least not in Mormonism, not in how it's understood by Mormons or by the church hierarchy.

The paper, however, has confused a moral code for the whole of a religion. Adherence has been interpreted as hypocritical, or even fraudulent, unless it means perfectly doing what you say you believe you're supposed to do. This is a misunderstanding of Mormonism, and more than that a gross overreach on the part of the paper, going well beyond the bounds of what a newspaper has the authority to say.

Alexander himself could have said whether or not his was a devout Mormon, or whether he was only one outwardly. Other Mormons could judge his piety, based on their understanding of Mormonism. The church has authorities who, as part of their job, do make such judgements.

A newspaper, though, is not a religious authority, and shouldn't pretend to speak as such. According to the rules of American newspapers, reporters are only allowed to say what's verifiable, what's known to be fact or can be attributed. Really, in this case, the Arizona Republic should have avoided the evaluations of the murdered man's piety, and kept it simple:

Travis Alexander was a Mormon.

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Atheist seeks to free Hispanics from faith, community

What holds American Hispanics to their faiths? Community.

That was the claim made at the American Atheist's 2013 convention in a talk by David Tamayo about how to reach out to Hispanics. According to a conference report, Tamayo thinks a substantial number of Hispanics in America are skeptical of religion -- even "natural atheist allies" --  but trapped by their families and their communities, and their needs for the infrastructure and social support that religion provides.

Whether or not this is generally true, it is the case that this is what happened in Tamayo's own life, as he told a Virginia newspaper last year. The paper reported:

Tamayo cites his own life as a case in point. Raised in a Catholic household, he described himself as an extremely devout youth who even pondered whether to become a priest. 

By the time he realized he was an atheist at around 40, it still took him years to explain his beliefs to his parents, who remain skeptical, he said. 

He has been asked not to attend marriages of friends and why he hates God. He feels uncomfortable discussing his beliefs at work, where a prayer group meets regularly.

Tamayo said many Hispanics, especially younger Hispanics, are religious mostly for such social reasons. It's not belief, per se, in these of individual propositional statements one mentally affirms, that makes them religious, but social reality. The good that religion does in their lives is the good of community and support systems -- somethings he thinks freethinking groups and networks can replace. And should replace. And must.

The promotional material available from Tamayo's website, though, takes a different approach. There the approach is more New Atheist, in style, depicting non-believers as heroic and strong for the ability to dispense with the fictions relied on by the mentally and morally feeble. A brochure that's billed as something that can be given to family and friends, for example, states:

Some Hispanics live without the fear of imaginary beings and superstitions. Some of us put our hope in science instead of prayer, witchcraft, or homeopathic medicine [....] Sometimes we have struggles, heartaches, disappointments, and trials just like anyone else, but we solve our problems without the comfort or help of imaginary beings such as angels, ghosts, gods, fairies, or even chupacabras.

Such statements seem to be more about affirming atheists in their non-belief and promoting antagonism towards the religious, rather than outreach or recruiting allies or giving people community support alternative to the established religious communities. Perhaps their are other forms of outreach, though, that Tamayo and other atheists are using to reach Hispanics and, as the conference commentator put it, "unlock the demographics."

"Unlocking the demographics" has brought about a lot of interest in Hispanics, recently, political and religious. A number of Catholics have been talking about Latin American immigration as a source of possible spiritual renewal. Political conservatives have speculated that "mass immigration" could save social conservatism in America.

The most interesting comparison for atheists wanting to reach Hispanics, however, might be Pentecostals.

It strikes me, at least, that American Hispanics joining Pentecostal churches can face similar serious opposition from friends and family, of the same sort that Tamayo describes. These matters of faith are matters of communal rupture. In addition to the questions of specific beliefs and practices, it can be issues of community and support and connection that are decisive in such conversions or de-conversions.

Arlene Sánchez-Walsh, for example, a professor at Azusa Pacific University, writes that for many, becoming Pentecostal means a life of tension with fathers and mothers, siblings, aunts and uncles. Of herself, she writes:

I was born and raised Catholic, and you can ask just about anyone who made this sojourn to Pentecostalism, whether through a dramatic Damascus-like narrative, or, like me, through a painful year-long process of searching, it is, as my colleague Fr. Allen Figueroa Deck has written, "a familial rupture" that separates you from the weddings, funerals, quinceaneras, and family get togethers that have marked our lives for years. Where, if they are anything like the family gatherings I have had -– the dancing, drinking, and partying is part of the package. As my colleague tells me, once the music played at the weddings, his Pentecostal mom took her kids and left–before all the craziness ensnared her impressionable young boys. Well I don’t know anything of that high-tension piety, I don’t know what its like to have one’s faith played out on that field -- and perhaps one reason why I study this community, is because I am trying to understand how my community lives, how it worships, and if I ever will cross over from the feeling I have had for nearly 20 years, that I am an interloper.

One of the ways Pentecostal churches help Hispanics maintain the decision they've made, despite family and social pressures, is a steady flow of anti-Catholicism. A sustained fusillade against the church, its teachings and practices, works to counteract or at least tempter the tolerance new converts might otherwise have for the validity of family members' faith. Promoting antagonism -- such as public displays of disapproval like leaving a party when the dancing starts -- is one strategy. Another, though, is exactly what Tamayo was talking about at the conference of atheists, Easter weekend.

At least one of the ways Pentecostalism has helped converts maintain the decision they've made is to offer alternatives to the communities they've known.

A third-generation Pentecostal woman (who's now pursuing a degree in the sociology of religion) writes, for example, of how her whole life, growing up, was wrapped up in her church. Erica Ramirez writes:

I spent my adolescence at Westover Hills Assembly of God, in the Northwest side of San Antonio, completely immersed in the life of the community there. I sang in the choir and was part of the youth group. I went to camps and conventions because I wanted to. I imagined there: I imagined myself whole, I imagined the world meaningful; I envisioned a future for myself that replicated the most healing experiences I have had in my life -- I would lead worship I would help people. It was simplistic, but it was a safe space to be, emotionally. I could remake myself in the space of that church and people would, people did help me.

It's this sort of social reality, and especially the attendant personal imaginaries, that Tamayo is saying would have to be replaced by freethinking associations in order for Hispanics who are actually (he says) already skeptical of religious claims and supernatural stuff, to be freed from what they don't believe.

"There isn't anything a church can do that a secular organization can't do," Tamayo told the Virginia newspaper.

It's not clear to me that, strictly sociologically speaking, that's true. But it does seem right that if your goal is to de-convert American Hispanics and liberate them from the "comfort or help of imaginary beings,"talking about the existence of supernatural realities may be less important than offering social replacements for baptisms, confirmations, funerals, feast days, family prayers, and all the other ritual, social ways in which beliefs are communal realities.

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Doubt in the library

Megan Phelps-Roper, once thought to be the future of Westboro Baptist's campaign to tell America how very much it is hated by God, has now left her grandfather's church.

As she told journalist Jeff Chu, doubt came, as it so often does, from questions of epistemology and a sense of the expanse of history. Megan's situation is unusual, but this thought process follows a well-travelled route.

Chu writes:

She kept trying to conquer the doubts. Westboro teaches that one cannot trust his or her feelings. They’re unreliable. Human nature 'is inherently sinful and inherently completely sinful,' Megan explains. 'All that's trustworthy is the Bible. And if you have a feeling or a thought that’s against the church's interpretations of the Bible, then it's a feeling or a thought against God himself.'

This, of course, assumes that the church's teachings and God's feelings are one and the same. And this, of course, assumes that the church's interpretation of the Bible is infallible, that this much-debated document handed down over the centuries has, in 2013, been processed and understood correctly only by a small band of believers in Topeka. 'Now?' Megan says. 'That sounds crazy to me.'

In December, she went to a public library in Lawrence, Kansas. She was looking through books on philosophy and religion, and it struck her that people had devoted their entire lives to studying these questions of how to live and what is right and wrong. 'The idea that only WBC had the right answer seemed crazy,' she says. 'It just seemed impossible.'

Phelps-Roper has left the church, and Topeka, and is currently trying to figure out what she does believe.

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The postmodern technique of the most-sold Christian novel of 2012

The Harbinger begins by addressing its own problem of unbelievability.

It opens by directly dealing with the readers' likely problem of suspending disbelief for this novel. The subtitle is The Ancient Mystery that Holds the Secret of America's Future. The first page begins with that same phrase spoken as dialogue -- a bit of dialogue that could be between the author and the reader, or the author imagining that conversation, acting it out, playing both parts, his and the reader who's going to read this. And it starts by repeating that line:

'An ancient mystery that holds the secret of America's future.'
'Yes.'
'What would I think?'
'Yes, what would you think?'
'I'd think it was a plot for a movie. Is that it? Is that what you're presenting ... a movie manuscript?'
'No.'
'A plot for a novel?'
'No.'
'Then what?'
He was silent.
'Then what?' she repeated.

It is the plot for a novel, actually, though within the fiction-world of the narrative the "ancient mystery" isn't fiction, as the character named Nouriel Kaplan insists twice on page two. And as the author Jonathan Cahn has also said in multiple interviews outside the fiction-world of The Harbinger.

On a Christian, apocalypse-oriented radio program, he said "the form is a narrative" but "90 percent of it is non-fiction." On a Charismatic TV show, he repeated the message of the book without any reference to narrative or a novel or fictions of any sort, but only to the "prophetic message known as The Harbinger." The host represented the work as revelation from the Holy Spirit, a characterization Cahn didn't dispute. In an e-mail interview with a Charismatic podcast, Cahn said,

[The Harbinger] reveals things that believers have felt in their hearts but without the evidence to back it up. It reveals a biblical mystery of specific template of judgment that is now playing out in America, before our eyes, lying behind everything from 9/11 to the crash of Wall Street, biblical harbingers of judgment appearing in New York City, Washington, D.C., involving some of the highest of American leaders, the replaying of an ancient drama of judgment, even giving exact dates.

This is also all presented in the dialogue in the first few pages of the novel, meaning the author, a messianic Jewish minister from New Jersey, contends that he is presenting non-ficiton as fiction, but within the fiction, the main character is arguing that the story seems like fiction but "it's not fiction -- it's real."

It's a fascinating bit of metafictionality, I think.

A similar thing happened in Left Behind, where criticisms of the book, specifically that it was badly written and unbelievable, were written into the book. Left Behind briefly calls attention to its own status as fiction, predicts the readers' response, and makes that response a part of the narrative, thus re-framing its own problem of plausibility as the readers' struggle with belief. The problem of believing that God is directing the apparently chaotic events of history, and that the Bible is relevant to todays world and to an individuals life, is collapsed into the problem of suspending disbelief to read a novel.

The Harbinger does the same thing, but more so, and more directly. Here the very postmodern technique of self-reflexivity is used, and used aggressively, but to a very different end.

This has caused some deal of controversy among those who, actually, are open to the idea of the imminent return of Christ at Armageddon to reign for 1,000 years.

I wouldn't want to say that this is at all related to that, but that novel, The Harbinger, is the only Christian fiction to make it onto Amazon.com's list of 100 most-sold books of 2012. It comes in at number 23 for the year -- ahead of J.K. Rowling's foray into adult fiction, the Steve Jobs biography, and John Grisham's latest.

Many would likely scoff at that news, a response that's expected by the text and anticipated, written into the story. "I don't expect you to believe me yet," the main character says. "But hear me out!"

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The obsession with the obsession with the end of the world

The first episode of the reality TV show Doomsday Preppers was watched by 1.29 million people. It is the most-watched show in National Geographic's history. By the time the fourth episode of the second season aired last month, ratings had suffered a little, but still there were more than 700,000 viewers.

It's very unlikely that all those 700,000 viewers were themselves interested in ways to prepare for the end of the world. It seems unlikely even that such a show would make sense, economically, if it catered only to those sympathetic to the ideas of the subjects of the show. And really, the people featured in this show are presented as strange, as freaks, as laughable.

To quote the New York Times review:

Watch [...] for a short while and, unless you’re a prepper yourself, you might be moderately amused at the absurd excess on display and at what an easy target the prepper worldview is for ridicule.

It may be the case that there's a "burgeoning 'prepper' movement," as USA Today claims, but there's little actual evidence of that. Such people do clearly exist, but that's not a new thing. And that's not why such a show exists.

If you want to explain the reason such a show as this exists, you have to look not only at the existence of the people featured in the show, asking why there are so many people dedicating their lives to preparing for the end of the world, but also at the audience.

Why are there so many people so fascinated by people so obsessed by the end of the world?

This is true, too, with the slate of apocalyptic predictions all due tomorrow, the Mayan calendar and the black hole at the center of the galaxy and the hidden planet set to collide with earth. The number of people who take such theories seriously is vanishingly miniscule. The number of people who take seriously the people who take such theories seriously, however, is quite sizable. How do we explain that?

I'm very skeptical, personally, about reports of how widely such apocalyptic theories are believed. A lot of the accounts of belief seem to be very vague or very naive about what it means to believe, and there's also a strong, strong tendency towards credulity when it comes to other people's credulity. However, even if we accept the phenomenon of apocalyptic beliefs without any skepticism, that wouldn't explain the cultural phenomena of obsession with the end of the world. Because that obsession, in American culture at this moment, is not just and not even most basically obsession with the end of the world, but obsession with obsession about the end.

Beyond the matter of "true believers," there's a cultural phenomenon right now of avid interest in true believers. There's a market, here, and it's booming.

It's not enough to just explain the people featured on Doomsday Preppers, the people out there who aren't joking about Nibiru, the people who are violent in their belief in the possibility of zombie apocalypse. If we want to understand this, we can't just look at the obsessed on the TV screen. We have to also look at us looking at the TV screen.

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Did Billy Graham just try to convert Mitt Romney?

Billy Graham has been challenged, many times, on his relationship to power. The famed evangelist has "met with every sitting American president from Harry Truman to President Obama," as the Washington Post puts it, and has, at least on some occasions, been used politically by powerful figures, made into a  religious fig leaf for presidents without much faith of their own.

His relationship to Nixon, especially, has been criticized. It was said his presence as Nixon's spiritual adviser served to lend tacit if not explicit approval of the administration. His presence implied his blessing.

Graham has, in recent years, admitted he made some mistakes in this regard. He's said if he could do it again, he'd do it differently. Yet, his argument has always been and continues to be that he would go anywhere, talk to anyone, accept any audience, as long as he could preach the gospel.

He told Christianity Today in 1974:

"I have said for many years that I will go anywhere to preach the Gospel, whether to the Vatican, the Kremlin, or the White House, if there are no strings attached on what I am to say. I have never had to submit the manuscript to the White House or get anybody's approval. I have never informed any President of what I was going to say ahead of time. They all know that when I come to preach, I intend to preach the Gospel."

A year ago, he reiterated this, telling the magazine that he was "grateful for the opportunities God gave me to minister to people in high places; people in power have spiritual and personal needs like everyone else, and often they have no one to talk to."

This context of "no strings attached" might inform how one views yesterday's closed-door meeting between the now 93-year-old Graham and Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney.  Of course there are many reasons Graham might have wanted the 30-minute meeting to be private, allowing only for a few pictures at the end, but one also has to wonder: Did Graham preach the gospel to the Mormon Mitt Romney?

Did Graham ask Romney if he'd been born again, or tell Romeny he needed Jesus in his life, to accept Jesus as his Lord and Savior?

And what did Romney say?

L-R: Romney, Billy Graham, Franklin Graham.

Reporters were given an official statement at the meeting, a statement that said nothing about Jesus or the cross or Graham's position on the Church of Jesus Christ of the Later-day Saints, and whether or not Mormons are, from his Baptist perspective, saved. Rather, as reported by the Washington Post, "Mitt Romney asked the Rev. Billy Graham for his prayers Thursday and the ailing evangelist came through by praying with the Republican presidential candidate and offering his support."

Politically, the point of the meeting was to get Graham's support for Romney and hopefully sway leery religious right voters, assuaging any lingering fears they have about Romney's religion, and his soft and shifting commitment to religious right issues such as abortion. The meeting came, after all, only a day after Romney told the Des Moines (Iowa) Register that his administration would not make banning abortion a priority. If one believers, as many conservative evangelical Christians do, that babies are being slaughtered wholesale across America, and that this is the crucial moral struggle of the age, Romney's inconsistent and lackadaisical stance on the issue is not confidence-inspiring. Getting a public statement of support from a conservative evangelical as respected as Graham, then, could be important.

And Graham gave the benediction the Romney camp was looking for. Campaign staff told the press that Graham said, "I'll do all I can to help you. And you can quote me on that." Graham's organization released a statement in his name after the meeting that said as much. As CNN reported it, the statement read:

"What impresses me even more than Governor Romney's successful career are his values and strong moral convictions. I appreciate his faithful commitment to his impressive family, particularly his wife Ann of 43 years and his five married sons .... It was a privilege to pray with Governor Romney—for his family and our country. I will turn 94 the day after the upcoming election, and I believe America is at a crossroads. I hope millions of Americans will join me in praying for our nation and to vote for candidates who will support the biblical definition of marriage, protect the sanctity of life and defend our religious freedoms."

The politics of the meeting were pretty much the focus of the news reports, along with some things Romney said at the end of the meeting as pictures were being taken about his father's death. The idea is that "The 30-minute meeting between the world-renowned Christian leader and Romney could provide the former governor with a major boost among evangelical Christians skeptical of supporting the first Mormon nominated for president."

Perhaps Graham's meeting and endorsement will work to encourage evangelical support.

I suspect, though, even if it does that, it will also raise this issue: Did Graham present the gospel to Romney?

The religious right has always had very strong utilitarian tendencies in their voting patterns. From the beginning, when they formed as a bloc to support the ambiguously religious Ronald Reagen over Jimmy Carter, the very first self-declared evangelical in the White House, policies have mattered more than a candidate's personal faith. I don't see that changing just because Romney's Mormon. His bigger weakness with this voting bloc is that he hasn't convincingly demonstrated a deep commitment to the things that are important to the religious conservatives. His personal ballast seems to be political expediency. That has little to do directly with whether he's been "born again," in evangelical terminology.

Franklin Graham -- Billy Graham's son and successor -- made this point during the Republican primaries, when he supported Rick Santorum. The younger Graham said he wasn't opposed to Romney, and thought that "He would be a good president if he won the nomination because I think he’s got the strength, business-wise, politics-wise. He’s sharp guy. And he's proven himself."

That comment, though, came in the context of Franklin Graham saying that Romney was not a Christian, but a Mormon. Pressed on whether Mormonism wasn't part of the broader, "Judeo-Christian faith," Franklin Graham said "Most Christians would not recognize Mormons as part of the Christian faith."

The Billy Graham Evangelical Association, for the record, lists Mormonism as a cult.

For the Grahams, as for evangelicals generally, this question of Christianity is the most important question. While it may not be necessary to be a good president that one have accepted Jesus, prayed the prayer, asked for sins to be forgiven, it is the most important thing, eternally. It is the most important thing for an individual. Which is why Billy Graham dedicated so much of his life to exactly that message. As much as the Grahams really do care deeply about these other issues, personal salvation and internal transformation are more important.

So one wonders about those 30 minutes, and those closed doors.

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Obama's blasphemy law

Ruling in favor of Westboro Baptist Church, last year, Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts wrote that the church members' very offensive speech was still protected by the First Amendment's guarantee of freedom of speech. Even though that speech was offensive, and even though it was outside a U.S. soldier's funeral.

Roberts wrote, "The fact that Westboro spoke in connection with a funeral ... cannot by itself transform the nature of Westboro’s speech."

Those opposing the church's protests -- which are famous for provocative slogans such as "God Hates Fags," "God Hates America," "Pray for More Dead Soldiers," and "You Will Eat Your Babies" -- had argued that, specifically because these signs were outside a funeral, they were different than if they'd been elsewhere.

President Barack Obama endorsed that argument that funerals are different this month, in a statement he made as he signed HR 1627 into law. The law -- sponsored by Republican congressmen from Florida, Ohio, Colorado and Tennessee -- limits just a little bit more Westboro Baptist's ability to protest America, declare God's condemnations and generally be provocative in the exercise of their religion. Obama supported this limiting of speech, he said, because of a "sacred duty." Where the lawyers in the Westboro court case and Samuel Alito, the one justice who dissented from the Supreme Court ruling, argued this sort of speech is different because at a funeral it's more hurtful and harmful, Obama instead argued this speech is wrong because it is blasphemous.

Blasphemous not against God, per se, but against a sense of secular sacredness. Against that which is holy in what has been called America's civil religion.

 The relevant portion of the bill reads:

"PROHIBITION.—For any funeral of a member or former member of the Armed Forces .... it shall be unlawful for any person to engage in an activity during the period beginning 120 minutes before and ending 120 minutes after such funeral, any part of which activity—

(1)(A) takes place within the boundaries of the location of such funeral or takes place within 300 feet of the point of the intersection between—

(i) the boundary of the location of such funeral; and (ii) a road, pathway, or other route of ingress to or egress from the location of such funeral;

(B) and includes any individual willfully making or assisting in the making of any noise or diversion—

(i) that is not part of such funeral and that disturbs or tends to disturb the peace or good order of such funeral; and (ii) with the intent of disturbing the peace or good order of such funeral."

President Obama on Aug. 6, the day he signed HR 1627.

Obama said in his signing statement:

"I think all Americans feel we have a moral, sacred duty towards our men and women in uniform.  They protect our freedom, and it’s our obligation to do right by them.  This bill takes another important step in fulfilling that commitment."

Highlighting this specific section of the 45-page law that seeks to restrain the Westboro Baptist protests (or others like it), he said:

"I am very pleased to be signing this bill into law.  The graves of our veterans are hallowed ground.  And obviously we all defend our Constitution and the First Amendment and free speech, but we also believe that when men and women die in the service of their country and are laid to rest, it should be done with the utmost honor and respect."

The argument here is one of sacred time and sacred space, which ought not be defiled.

For Roberts, the funeral changes nothing. Speech on "broad issues of interest to society at large" is the same as it was two hours before or after, the same 100 feet away as it is 300. Space and time remain secular; nothing is transformed by the fact of the funeral. For Obama, on the other hand, there is a transformation. A sanctification. The time around the funeral of a soldier and the space around the funeral become "hollowed."

As Robert Bellah said, famously, in 1967, "American civil religion is still very much alive."

It's in this sense of "American civil religion" that Obama's invocation of a sense of sacredness is perhaps best understood. Where there are other arguments for limiting this sort of speech, he chose this one. "Civil religion" is a tricky term. Not least because Bellah -- who hasn't himself been in love with the term he popularized in this context -- offered descriptions that were somewhat unwieldy. The basic idea, though, involves exactly this sort of argument. Civil religion involves public rhetoric that appeals to a transcendent reality that's not related to any revealed religion, but to a sacred that's sensed as revealed in America and American history. That "transcendence" is understood as immanent to all Americans, making it secular at the same time it's decidedly not. It's supposed to be easily and immediately recognizable to Americans, and also act as the ultimate ground of an argument, justification for a policy.

Bellah says this civil religion is about the "universal and transcendent religious reality as seen in or, one could almost say, as revealed through the experience of the American people."

Classic examples of this include the rhetoric of Martin Luther King Jr. and Abraham Lincoln, and also such everyday occurrences as invocations of the "Founding Fathers." Every president in recent memory has made this appeal to the transcendent truth understood and accepted by Americans to be revealed in America, to the point it's hard to imagine a president not doing this. It's like American exceptionalism plus.

The important point is that the appeal can be contrasted to an appeal to the common welfare. Most arguments in the public sphere are grounded finally in something being generally, socially good. A proposal is understood as justified to the extend it's beneficial for the general public. When there is a dispute about policy in modern democracies, be taxes or abortion or whatever, the assumption on all sides is that each side respectively believes itself to be right, and there's agreement on what "right" means and what it would mean to be that. That is, it's accepted without question that policies are to be judged by their results in the lives of the people. This is the so-called "naked" public square, where the grounds for arguing for that which is good are strictly secular.

This can be contrasted to a directly religious argument, where a given religion and, importantly, that religion's authority, serves as ground for argument. I.e., "because the Bible says," and arguments of that nature. These grounds don't offer themselves up to general evaluation and deliberation, but are understood as fixed and final, "absolute," affirmed not by the demos of democracy, but by the (holy) ground itself. Such grounds are not even rightly considered res publica, in that they're essentially inaccessible to the public except for purposes of invocation. 

What Obama is doing here, in making an appeal to the sacred and the hallowed, but a "sacred" and a "hallowed" accessible and immanent to (ostensibly) all Americans regardless of creed, is thus neither secular nor, in an important way, not secular.

A child from Westboro Baptist protests at a funeral.

The argument isn't that Westboro Baptist's exercise of speech is somehow bad for the American people (though that argument could be made). It's not that the social costs of allowing their offensive behavior is so egregious it's necessary to curtail the right of Free Speech at least a little. But it's also not appeal to special revelation, some fixed truth separate from the general experience of the American people. It's supposed to be something that all Americans know and affirm instinctively, and yet is also absolute in the sense it's affirmed as good and true entirely apart from the general welfare, and affirmed as essentially not needing any affirmation.

That is to say, the argument underlying the President's decision to sign into law a limitation of the First Amendment's guarantee of the freedom of speech is that the space and time around a soldier's funeral are fundamentally different from other spaces and times. They're transformed. And holy. But holy in this very peculiar way, where the secular is transcendent, the transcendent secular.

And protesting at a funeral, instead of an exercise of a fundamental American right, is blasphemous, an offense against that special "hallowedness" revealed in America.

One can almost hear Justice Roberts repeating that "The fact that Westboro spoke in connection with a funeral ... cannot by itself transform the nature of Westboro’s speech."

There's really no way that I know that one can argue about whether it does or doesn't. As with all matters of revelation, one either accepts that soldiers' funerals are self-evidently different, or one doesn't. Westboro's placards either appear as simple speech, offensive in the normal way, or as more than that, as a violation of something sacred.

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Shane Claiborne, symbol of a possibility

Shane Claiborne, it turns out, can stand for Germans symbolically as representing one end of a range of the possibilities of what Christianity can be.

Claiborne -- of The Simple Way -- was referenced in a recent German opinion piece about (re)discovering the Christian faith, mentioned as an example of Christianity that is "radikaler als Punk oder Revolution," "more radical than punk or revolution." The authors, Elke Naters and Sven Lager, are Germans living in South Africa, where they escaped their Berliner ennui and found their faith. They speak of that faith specifically in the context of South Africa, but the raise Claiborne as an example of this kind of thing they're talking about existing in the West.

He's cited, too, as a counter-example to the one their German friends raise when they think of active and committed Christianity: George W. Bush. Claiborne is a representative of another alternative American Christianity, and is used in the piece to represent a version of Christianity that bourgeois and broadly liberal Germans might find compelling.

They affirm this kind of Christianity, which they present, kind of, as a challenge to Germans: They believe the Bible, they believe Jesus resurrected "und in uns lebt," "and lives in us," and they believe in eternal life, heaven and hell. This, they add, has a practical effect, a social consequence, as "wir glauben an ein Leben vor dem Tod," "we believe in life before death."

Naters and Lager write that Claiborne is an example of this life:

"Seither sehen wir die Kraft des Glaubens nicht nur in Südafrika. Der Amerikaner Shane Claiborne zum Beispiel hat schon viele Jahre vor der Occupy-Bewegung 10.000 Dollar in Münzen und kleinen Scheinen auf die Wall Street gekippt, und einen Tumult verursacht, dass die Straße abgesperrt werden musste. Radikale Großzügigkeit verschließt die Türen der Gier – so lautete seine christliche Botschaft."

"Since then, we have seen the power of faith not only in South Africa. The American Shane Claiborne, for example, had been at it already many years before the Occupy Movement dumped $10,000 in coins and small bills on Wall Street and the tumult caused the street to have to be locked down. Radical generosity closes the doors of greed -- that was his Christian message."

Claiborne strikes me as an odd figure to have this function. Not because he doesn't preach this message Naters and Lager describe, but just because he's such a relatively minor figure, in the scheme of things. Why wasn't Jimmy Carter the counterpoint to George Bush? Here Claiborne is, though, in the German press, representing a different kind of Christianity.

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America's first atheist

"Almighty Freedom! give my venturous song
The force, the charm that to thy voice belong;
Tis thine to shape my course, to light my way,
To nerve my country with the patriot lay,
To teach all men where all their interest lies,
How rulers may be just and nations wise:
Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee,
Invoke no miracle, no Muse but thee."

-- Joel Barlow, The Columbiad: Book I.

Barlow is not thought of as a significant figure of late 18th, early 19th century America. He's a little noted epic poet, and a minor diplomat remembered only really for drafting the 1796 Treaty of Tripoli, which contains the controversial clause, "As the government of the United States of America is not founded in any sense on the Christian religion."

He is significant, though, as possibly America's first atheist.

James Turner, in his book Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America, suggests Barlow is a plausible candidate for America's first atheist. There may, of course, have been an underground of unbelief in America in the late 1700s, but the evidence we have of the era's skepticism indicates it was directed towards the authority of the clergy, the specifics of creeds and dogmas, and the status of revelation. Not towards God per se. Skepticism was skepticism of "superstition," but that didn't often extend to include metaphysics as such, or the idea of God as revealed in the order of things. The deists and those of that inclination wanted to rationalize religion, but considered atheism a slur to be avoided. Tom Paine, for example, started out his attack or revelation and organized religion by stating, "I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life."

According to Turner, God was understood as epistemologically necessary, even for those who rejected organized religion. Knowledge was thought only possible via science, and science required nature be consistent and regulated by discoverable rules. "God" was the ground of those rules, and thus the guarantor of rationality. To be skeptical of God was to be skeptical of the possibility of knowledge.

That was more radical than most of the era's radicals were willing to be.

Turner writes, "The known unbelievers of Europe and America before the French Revolution numbered fewer than a dozen .... disbelief in God remained scarcely more plausible than disbelief in gravity."

One of those who came to disbelief with the French Revolution was Barlow.

At least to an extent.

Turner suggests Barlow flirted with the idea of atheism, but then drew back. Perhaps because it was too radical. Perhaps because that active unbelief was only sustainable in the context of France at the time of revolution. Even if he didn't withdraw from the idea of atheism, or at some point again take up deist beliefs, Barlow masked his unbelief, and didn't openly proclaim it. This might of been because, as his biographer Richard Buel, Jr., explains, with the failure of the revolution in France and the increase in religiousness in America with the Second Great Awakening, an outright rejection of all conceptions of God was politically untenable. Propagating atheism would have completely marginalized Barlow, so he maintained a public position of "rational religion," skeptical but within the bounds acceptable to the American public.

Barlow came to his tentative atheism through the influence of Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d'Holbach, who published anti-religious works anonymously in Amsterdam and hosted the Parisan salon that contained many or most of the known unbelievers preceding the French Revolution. D'Holbach argued that "The universe, that vast assemblage of every thing that exists, presents only matter and motion: the whole offers to our contemplation nothing but an immense, an uninterrupted succession of causes and effects." Holding to that conception of materialism, he was, it has been noted, "long and loud" in his "expressions of atheism." This was so provocative a position, at that point, even Voltaire disavowed it.

In 1795, six years after the French Revolution began, Barlow wrote a letter from France to America praising d'Holbach's work. "I rejoice," he wrote, "in the progress of good sense over the damnable imposture of Christian mummery." In the same letter, Barlow endorsed d'Holbach's depiction of the Apostle Paul as a "famous Montebank."

According to Buel, Barlow was slow, though, to move from criticism of Christianity to outright atheism. Buel writes,

"Entries Barlow made in his notebooks between 1799 and 1801 are sprinkled with references to writings that maintained there was no such thing as an intelligent God and that all religions were illusions. By 1802 these ideas had become Barlow's own. He then objected to prayers to a sentient Supreme Being on the grounds that reason and intelligence were attributes of a dependent rather than an independent agent. If God were indeed sovereign, he would be the equivalent of nature and, as such, without intelligence."

Implicit in this account of his rejection of the God of deists is the epistemological problem of atheism Turner describes. Whereas "natural theology," be it orthodox or deist, posits a supernatural designer of nature, ensuring the orderedness of nature, Barlow finds this idea of an intelligent Supreme Being nonsensical. Specifically because he thinks the conditions necessary for "Supreme" and for being "intelligent" are contradictory. Note, though, that this would also imply that nature is reason-less, which, as Turner explains it, would have undermined the foundational idea of the science of the time, which was that reason and order, in the forms of natural laws, could be detected. It's not clear how or if Barlow imagined himself getting out of this conundrum, but it seems possible, at least, from what Buel says, that he managed it with what might be called philosophical secularization. That is, by just not allowing reference to an "ultimate reality" grounding the rules of nature, preferring instead what Charles Taylor calls "the ethic of freedom and mutual benefit" that constitutes the "Modern Moral Order."

Barlow may not have gone that far, though. These are tentative steps. The move from appealing to the ultimate reality of the order of things to appealing to immediate, immanent question of mutual benefit is at least embryonic in this advent of American atheism, but then it's embryonic, also, in a lot of the political philosophy of the 17th and 18th centuries. That doesn't mean it could have been articulated.

Comparing his earlier and later poems, one can note the progress of disbelief in Barlow's thought, from generic Christian sentiment to deism to something more (or less).

Though Barlow was apparently never exactly orthodox, he was a Congregationalist, earlier in his life, and served, even, as a chaplain during the American Revolution. In an early poem written for his graduation from Yale and noted mostly for strongly stating opposition to slavery, Barlow imagines "the Lord of Life" addressing Christopher Columbus, offering a somewhat standard Christian account of the coming resurrection.


The Lord of the poem says the "sons of earth" will "Rise to life" and "behold the promised birth." In the final moment of human history, as described by the God of the poem, "Stern vengeance softens and the God descends, / The atoning God, the pardoning grace to seal, / The dead to quicken and the sick to heal."

In 1787, nearly a decade later, the year before leaving for France, Barlow published his epic The Vision of Columbus. In that, the deity discernible is less Christian, more deist. The God described seems more an abstract principle, the first cause and ground of the laws of nature held to be deists. As found in the first book of the poem, the divine is "that great Source, that life-inspiring Soul, / Suns drew their light and systems learn'd to roll." Barlow's poem speaks of the "trace" of "Heaven's own conduct," which is visible when people "look thro' nature" and has been "stamp'd the mind of man."

Twenty years later, Barlow published an expanded and revised version of the epic, re-titled The Columbiad. Here, in 1807, the divine seems almost completely rejected -- or if not rejected, replaced. Barlow invokes no god but Freedom, and proclaims, "Strong in thy strength I bend no suppliant knee, / Invoke no miracle, no Muse but thee."

As the Guardian noted in a review of Buel's book last year, The Columbiad involved some major revisions of the earlier poem, "transforming his Christian epic The Vision of Columbus into a secular, republican epic." In the later poem, "one of the strangest pieces of literature produced by a 19th-century American," released just five years after Barlow's notebooks evidence a personal atheism, Barlow

"versifies about geological evidence contrary to the Christian creation story, describes the secular apocalypse that will come if Americans fail to emancipate their slaves, and ends with representatives of the major religions discarding the symbols of their faith to join into one world-governing council, based in a crystal palace in Mesopotamia."

A progression of skepticism is visible in Barlow's poetry, but the final version visible in The Columbiad does not actually seem to go as far as outright atheism. What's presented would not be problematic for deists, though it would be for Christians. The skepticism presented in the poetry doesn't seem to go as far as his private notebooks.

It's notable, too, that when Barlow was attacked as an atheist in the American press in subsequent years, his defenders argued he wasn't an atheist, but merely another deist. Atheism was beyond the bounds of reasonable discourse, and Barlow didn't publicly cross that border. Even if he was a committed atheist, he made sure he could still pass as a deist.

Whether this is because he himself wasn't entirely confident in the position, as Turner claims, or because taking such a controversial stand would have been political suicide, as Buel argues, may be a matter of speculation. Perhaps it was both. But Barlow wasn't open about his lack of belief, whether he lacked with deep conviction or was merely flirting.

He didn't publicly promote d'Holbach-style atheism with something like the equivalent of Tom Paine's book. To the extent he did promote such ideas, he did so anonymously.

In 1802, for example, the year "these ideas had become Barlow's own," he translated the final portion of Constantin Volney's Les Ruines, ou Méditations sur les révolutions des empires (The Ruins, or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires). The first half of the work, which exposited a philosophy of history, had been translated by Thomas Jefferson, but Jefferson stopped before translating the sections of the book dedicated to religion, realizing it would open him up to significant criticism from his political opponents. Volney had already fled America ahead of an expected deportation, and acknowledged the final section of his book was meant to provoke doubt about religion. Barlow finished the work, including the controversial chapter entitled "The Origin and Filiation of Religious Ideas," which argued that humans had invented religion and gods to explain astronomical phenomena. He did this secretly, though. Neither Jefferson nor Barlow had themselves cited as the book's translator.

Buel notes,

"both of the responsible parties now preferred avoiding public identification with Volney's ideas .... Barlow grew increasingly mindful of his reputation among his countrymen. The Ruins would prove to be a tough sell in an America beset by the religious fervor accompanying the Second Great Awakening."

Barlow managed to keep his unbelief quiet enough to be appointed in 1811 to negotiate a commercial treaty with Napoleon. Not that he was entirely free from suspicion. The New York Evening Post, opposing the diplomatic appointment, called Barlow an "apostate priest and reviller of the very religion he publicly professed ... a phrenzied and bloody-minded jacobin, a modern philosopher and a sycophant of those in power" (sic). This seems to have been pretty standard political rhetoric, though, of the sort common directed at deists and those sympathetic to the French Revolution.

If Barlow was America's first atheist, he was tentative about it. "Flirtation," Turner's term, seems to be accurate. He came to his unbelief privately, in the context of his reading and his private notebooks, and he kept it private too. It's significant, nonetheless, that he did go so far as to disbelieve, even if only cautiously. It was, in his notebooks, a crazy thought. And not one without consequences. Barlow hesitated, in the face of those consequences, but still might be rightly understood as marking an early moment in a significant societal shift.

Barlow's private unbelief, as possibly America's first atheist, is an important moment in that move Charles Taylor describes as "a move from a society where belief in God is unchallenged and indeed, unproblematic, to one in which it is understood as one option among others, and frequently not the easiest to embrace," the shift from a society in which "it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, to one in which faith, even for the staunchest believes, is one possibility among others."

In this sense, Barlow is significant to late 18th, early 19th century America. There may have been a historical moment, there, where in the privacy of his notebooks Barlow was the only American anywhere who thought of himself as rejecting all conceptions of God. Where he was the one who thought what was almost unthinkable, that there is no God, and thought it even to the point of tentatively, privately, accepting for himself what to most was an insult, a slur, the name "atheist."

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Protecting belief

"Christian theology never expressly identified God and nature; but the point is that natural theology and nature-preaching had implanted within Protestantism an increasingly strong leaning in this direction. Ministers often forgot Calvin's warnings, misunderstood Edwards, ignored Bushnell; natural theologians wanted not just to glorify God in nature but to see Him there ....

In the end, the most influential church leaders tried to protect belief by making peace with modernity, by conceiving God and His purposes in terms as nearly compatible as possible with secular understandings and aims. A minority insisted that a transcendent God must utterly elude human grasp."

-- James Turner, Without God, Without Creed: The Origins of Unbelief in America.

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