History > 2007 > USA > Faith, sects (III)

Death Penalty Tests a Church

as It Mourns

October 28, 2007
The New York Times
By ALISON LEIGH COWAN

CHESHIRE, Conn., Oct. 25 — The United Methodist Church here is the kind of politically active place where parishioners take to the pulpit to discuss poverty in El Salvador and refugees living in Meriden. But few issues engage its passions as much as the death penalty.

The last three pastors were opponents of capital punishment. Church-sponsored adult education classes promote the idea of “restorative justice,” advocating rehabilitation over punishment. Two years ago, congregants attended midnight vigils outside the prison where Connecticut executed a prisoner for the first time in 45 years.

So it might have been expected that United Methodist congregants would speak out forcefully when a brutal triple murder here in July led to tough new policies against violent criminals across the state and a pledge from prosecutors to seek capital punishment against the defendants.

But the congregation has been largely quiet, not out of indifference, but anguish: the victims were popular and active members of the church — Jennifer Hawke-Petit, 48, and her two daughters, Hayley, 17, and Michaela, 11. On July 23, two men broke into the family’s home. Mrs. Hawke-Petit was strangled and her daughters died in a fire that the police say was set by the intruders.

The killings have not just stunned the congregation, they have spurred quiet debate about how it should respond to the crime and whether it should publicly oppose the punishment that may follow. It has also caused a few to reassess how they feel about the punishment.

At the heart of the debate are questions about how Mrs. Hawke-Petit’s husband, William, who survived the attack, feels about the death penalty. The indications are conflicting. Sensitive to his grief, many of the church’s most ardent capital punishment opponents have been hesitant to speak against the capital charges brought against two parolees charged with the killings, Joshua Komisarjevsky and Steven Hayes.

“I’m treading lightly out of respect for the Petit family,” said the church’s pastor, the Rev. Stephen E. Volpe, a death penalty opponent. “I do not feel we, in this church, ought to make this tragedy the rallying cry for anything at this point.”

At the same time, there is a widespread belief that Mrs. Hawke-Petit was opposed to capital punishment. Having her killers put to death would be the last thing she would want, many say.

“It’d be so dishonoring to her life to do anything violent in her name,” said Carolyn Hardin Engelhardt, a church member who is the director of the ministry resource center at Yale Divinity School Library. “That’s not the kind of person she was.”

At least two church members say they think that Mrs. Hawke-Petit endorsed an anti-death-penalty document known as a Declaration of Life. The declaration states a person’s opposition to capital punishment and asks that prosecutors, in the event of the person’s own death in a capital crime, do not seek the death penalty. The documents have been signed by thousands of people, including Mario M. Cuomo, the former governor of New York, and Martin Sheen, the actor.

“She was a nurse and she would not cause harm to anyone,” said Lucy Earley, a congregant who notarized at least a dozen declarations during an appeal at the church and said she thought Mrs. Hawke-Petit’s was among them.

Declarations of Life are often kept with a person’s will or other important papers; sometimes they are filed with registries. But it could not be independently determined whether Mrs. Hawke-Petit had signed one. Although the family’s home was heavily damaged in the fire and no independent copies have surfaced, death penalty opponents both inside and outside the church have kept trying to find one. A clear indication that Mrs. Hawke-Petit rejected capital punishment could help them mobilize, they say, not only in the Cheshire case but also on behalf of the nine people on Connecticut’s death row in Somers.

The opponents also say that a signed declaration by Mrs. Hawke-Petit opposing capital punishment could help counter the public outrage to the killings — outrage that has pressured state officials to suspend parole for violent criminals.

Still, if proof of Mrs. Hawke-Petit’s sentiments did surface, it would have little standing in court, lawyers and prosecutors say.

“Our job is to enforce the law no matter who the victim is or what the victim’s religious beliefs are,” said John A. Connelly, a veteran prosecutor in Waterbury who is not involved in the Cheshire case. “If you started imposing the death penalty based on what the victim’s family felt, it would truly become arbitrary and capricious.”

Michael Dearington, the state’s attorney who is prosecuting the suspects in the Petit killings, said he did not know whether Mrs. Hawke-Petit had signed a Declaration of Life. Asked if he knew Dr. Petit’s views on the death penalty, he replied, “I have a no comment on that.”

Not surprisingly, there has been much speculation within the church about whether William Petit, a physician, supports capital punishment. Though he has participated in tributes to his family and has attended church in recent weeks, Dr. Petit has not granted interviews since the killings. “He’s just not ready,” his mother, Barbara Petit, said recently.

A friend and member of United Methodist, Dr. Phil Brewer, said he came away from a recent meeting with Dr. Petit with the impression that his friend “was strongly in favor of executing these guys, once they were found guilty.”

Dr. Brewer said that Dr. Petit had no quarrel with individuals from United Methodist speaking out against the death penalty. But he would “not take it kindly if our congregation as a whole took a position against the death penalty,” Dr. Brewer said.

“It would be seen as an effort to force him into choosing between being part of the congregation or wanting to have the death penalty,” he added.

At a memorial service in September for his family, Dr. Petit read from the Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi, which included the passage, “Where there is injury, pardon.”

Some members took that as a sign that he was grappling with his feelings about capital punishment.

“What really took my breath away when he cited the Prayer of St. Francis and either lingered on the word ‘pardon’ or got stuck on the word ‘pardon,’ ” Dr. Brewer said. “There was a long pause after he spoke the word, and to me, that signaled that this was on his mind.”

Dr. Brewer’s wife, Dr. Karen Brown, said, “I think it’s what he wants to feel, but it’s hard to get there.”

The killings have prompted the church to slow down in other ways. Because of sensitivities about Dr. Petit’s feelings, church members called off plans to invite a prominent death penalty opponent to address the congregation. There was also talk of skipping the church’s annual collection of goods for holiday packages for local prison inmates, though congregants decided to undertake the drive after all. The killings have even caused some congregants to reconsider their personal views.

“I think we’ve all rethought it because it’s pretty easy to believe something when it’s far away and then when something happens and it’s a real situation you have to examine what you believe,” said Dr. Brown. She said she remained opposed to capital punishment.

The Rev. Diana Jani Druck, who led the Cheshire congregation from 2001 to 2005, said the Petit case would be an interesting test for the congregation and the state.

The case, she said, lacks some of the factors that make some people object to the death penalty as patently unfair, like race. (The suspects are white, as were the Petits.) Because both defendants were caught fleeing the crime scene, there may be fewer questions about mistaken identity. And the gruesome nature of the crime, combined with the kinship many congregants felt for the Petits, may stir feelings of vengeance even in death penalty opponents, she said.

She herself acknowledged feeling “real violent anger” when first shown photographs of the suspects. But on reflection, she said, “I just don’t see what purpose is served in putting them to death.”

United Methodists have a long tradition of embracing those on the fringes of society, and concern over the death penalty has long found a home on the denomination’s social agenda. Dissent is permitted, but those who agree with the policy are encouraged to work to end capital punishment.

Mrs. Hawke-Petit was raised in that tradition. Her father, the Rev. Richard Hawke, led six Methodist congregations in western Pennsylvania and was the district superintendent in Pittsburgh before retiring in 1994. He is an opponent of capital punishment.

Four years after Jennifer and William Petit married in 1985, they bought a house in Cheshire and began to attend the local Methodist church regularly. Though William remained a Roman Catholic, “he was a member in everything but name only,” said the Rev. George C. Engelhardt, who was the congregation’s pastor for 29 years before becoming superintendent for several churches in the region.

Mrs. Hawke-Petit taught Sunday school. Michaela played the flute and sang in the church’s musical programs. Hayley learned how to wield a drill while doing home improvements for the disabled with the church’s summer teen brigade.

All four Petits participated in the church’s annual Living Nativity pageant, posing as human statues in the parking lot for 20-minute shifts in support of local charities. Mrs. Hawke-Petit often played Mary or a shepherdess. The girls were angels and Dr. Petit often played a king.

These days, when Dr. Petit attends church, his daughters’ friends sit by him and take turns placing a hand on his shoulder.

Many congregants expect the congregation’s strong anti-death-penalty sentiments to become more public as the Petit case develops.

“Eventually, it’s something that has to be talked about,” said Carol Wilson, a death penalty opponent who leads several church community projects. “We’re just not there yet.”

    Death Penalty Tests a Church as It Mourns, NYT, 28.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/nyregion/28cheshire.html?hp

Evangelical Crackup

October 28, 2007
The New York Times
By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK

The hundred-foot white cross atop the Immanuel Baptist Church in downtown Wichita, Kan., casts a shadow over a neighborhood of payday lenders, pawnbrokers and pornographic video stores. To its parishioners, this has long been the front line of the culture war. Immanuel has stood for Southern Baptist traditionalism for more than half a century. Until recently, its pastor, Terry Fox, was the Jerry Falwell of the Sunflower State — the public face of the conservative Christian political movement in a place where that made him a very big deal.

With flushed red cheeks and a pudgy, dimpled chin, Fox roared down from Immanuel’s pulpit about the wickedness of abortion, evolution and homosexuality. He mobilized hundreds of Kansas pastors to push through a state constitutional ban on same-sex marriage, helping to unseat a handful of legislators in the process. His Sunday-morning services reached tens of thousands of listeners on regional cable television, and on Sunday nights he was a host of a talk-radio program, “Answering the Call.” Major national conservative Christian groups like Focus on the Family lauded his work, and the Southern Baptist Convention named him chairman of its North American Mission Board.

For years, Fox flaunted his allegiance to the Republican Party, urging fellow pastors to make the same “confession” and calling them “sissies” if they didn’t. “We are the religious right,” he liked to say. “One, we are religious. Two, we are right.”

His congregation, for the most part, applauded. Immanuel and Wichita’s other big churches were seedbeds of the conservative Christian activism that burst forth three decades ago. In the 1980s, when theological conservatives pushed the moderates out of the Southern Baptist Convention, Immanuel and Fox were both at the forefront. In 1991, when Operation Rescue brought its “Summer of Mercy” abortion protests to Wichita, Immanuel’s parishioners leapt to the barricades, helping to establish the city as the informal capital of the anti-abortion movement. And Fox’s confrontational style packed ever more like-minded believers into the pews. He more than doubled Immanuel’s official membership to more than 6,000 and planted the giant cross on its roof.

So when Fox announced to his flock one Sunday in August last year that it was his final appearance in the pulpit, the news startled evangelical activists from Atlanta to Grand Rapids. Fox told the congregation that he was quitting so he could work full time on “cultural issues.” Within days, The Wichita Eagle reported that Fox left under pressure. The board of deacons had told him that his activism was getting in the way of the Gospel. “It just wasn’t pertinent,” Associate Pastor Gayle Tenbrook later told me.

Fox, who is 47, said he saw some impatient shuffling in the pews, but he was stunned that the church’s lay leaders had turned on him. “They said they were tired of hearing about abortion 52 weeks a year, hearing about all this political stuff!” he told me on a recent Sunday afternoon. “And these were deacons of the church!”

These days, Fox has taken his fire and brimstone in search of a new pulpit. He rented space at the Johnny Western Theater at the Wild West World amusement park until it folded. Now he preaches at a Best Western hotel. “I don’t mind telling you that I paid a price for the political stands I took,” Fox said. “The pendulum in the Christian world has swung back to the moderate point of view. The real battle now is among evangelicals.”

Fox is not the only conservative Christian to feel the heat of those battles, even in — of all places — Wichita. Within three months of his departure, the two other most influential conservative Christian pastors in the city had left their pulpits as well. And in the silence left by their voices, a new generation of pastors distinctly suspicious of the Republican Party — some as likely to lean left as right — is beginning to speak up.

Just three years ago, the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement could almost see the Promised Land. White evangelical Protestants looked like perhaps the most potent voting bloc in America. They turned out for President George W. Bush in record numbers, supporting him for re-election by a ratio of four to one. Republican strategists predicted that religious traditionalists would help bring about an era of dominance for their party. Spokesmen for the Christian conservative movement warned of the wrath of “values voters.” James C. Dobson, the founder of Focus on the Family, was poised to play kingmaker in 2008, at least in the Republican primary. And thanks to President Bush, the Supreme Court appeared just one vote away from answering the prayers of evangelical activists by overturning Roe v. Wade.

Today the movement shows signs of coming apart beneath its leaders. It is not merely that none of the 2008 Republican front-runners come close to measuring up to President Bush in the eyes of the evangelical faithful, although it would be hard to find a cast of characters more ill fit for those shoes: a lapsed-Catholic big-city mayor; a Massachusetts Mormon; a church-skipping Hollywood character actor; and a political renegade known for crossing swords with the Rev. Pat Robertson and the Rev. Jerry Falwell. Nor is the problem simply that the Democratic presidential front-runners — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, Senator Barack Obama and former Senator John Edwards — sound like a bunch of tent-revival Bible thumpers compared with the Republicans.

The 2008 election is just the latest stress on a system of fault lines that go much deeper. The phenomenon of theologically conservative Christians plunging into political activism on the right is, historically speaking, something of an anomaly. Most evangelicals shrugged off abortion as a Catholic issue until after the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision. But in the wake of the ban on public-school prayer, the sexual revolution and the exodus to the suburbs that filled the new megachurches, protecting the unborn became the rallying cry of a new movement to uphold the traditional family. Now another confluence of factors is threatening to tear the movement apart. The extraordinary evangelical love affair with Bush has ended, for many, in heartbreak over the Iraq war and what they see as his meager domestic accomplishments. That disappointment, in turn, has sharpened latent divisions within the evangelical world — over the evangelical alliance with the Republican Party, among approaches to ministry and theology, and between the generations.

The founding generation of leaders like Falwell and Dobson, who first guided evangelicals into Republican politics 30 years ago, is passing from the scene. Falwell died in the spring. Paul Weyrich, 65, the indefatigable organizer who helped build Falwell’s Moral Majority and much of the rest of the movement, is confined to a wheelchair after losing his legs because of complications from a fall. Dobson, who is 71 and still vigorous, is already planning for a succession at Focus on the Family; it is expected to tack toward the less political family advice that is its bread and butter.

The engineers of the momentous 1980s takeover that expunged political and theological moderates from the Southern Baptist Convention are retiring or dying off, too. And in September, when I called a spokesman for the ailing Presbyterian televangelist D. James Kennedy, another pillar of the Christian conservative movement, I learned that Kennedy had “gone home to the Lord” at 2 a.m. that morning.

Meanwhile, a younger generation of evangelical pastors — including the widely emulated preachers Rick Warren and Bill Hybels — are pushing the movement and its theology in new directions. There are many related ways to characterize the split: a push to better this world as well as save eternal souls; a focus on the spiritual growth that follows conversion rather than the yes-or-no moment of salvation; a renewed attention to Jesus’ teachings about social justice as well as about personal or sexual morality. However conceived, though, the result is a new interest in public policies that address problems of peace, health and poverty — problems, unlike abortion and same-sex marriage, where left and right compete to present the best answers.

The backlash on the right against Bush and the war has emboldened some previously circumspect evangelical leaders to criticize the leadership of the Christian conservative political movement. “The quickness to arms, the quickness to invade, I think that caused a kind of desertion of what has been known as the Christian right,” Hybels, whose Willow Creek Association now includes 12,000 churches, told me over the summer. “People who might be called progressive evangelicals or centrist evangelicals are one stirring away from a real awakening.”

The generational and theological shifts in the evangelical world are turning the next election into a credibility test for the conservative Christian establishment. The current Republican front-runner in national polls, Rudolph W. Giuliani, could hardly be less like their kind of guy: twice divorced, thrice married, estranged from his children and church and a supporter of legalized abortion and gay rights. Alarmed at the continued strength of his candidacy, Dobson and a group of about 50 evangelical Christians leaders agreed last month to back a third party if Giuliani becomes the Republican nominee. But polls show that Giuliani is the most popular candidate among white evangelical voters. He has the support, so far, of a plurality if not a majority of conservative Christians. If Giuliani captures the nomination despite the threat of an evangelical revolt, it will be a long time before Republican strategists pay attention to the demands of conservative Christian leaders again. And if the Democrats capitalize on the current demoralization to capture a larger share of evangelical votes, the credibility damage could be just as severe.

“There was a time when evangelical churches were becoming largely and almost exclusively the Republican Party at prayer,” said Marvin Olasky, the editor of the evangelical magazine World and an informal adviser to George W. Bush when he was governor. “To some extent — we have to see how much — the Republicans have blown it. That opportunity to lock up that constituency has vanished. The ball now really is in the Democrats’ court.”

I covered the Christian conservative movement for The New York Times during the 2004 election, at the moment of its greatest triumph. To the bewilderment of many even in the upper reaches of his own party, Karl Rove bet President Bush’s re-election on boosting the conservative Christian turnout, contending that Bush lost the popular vote in 2000 because four million of those voters stayed home. President Bush missed few opportunities to remind evangelicals that he was one of them — and they got the message.

I bowed my head in a good number of swing-state churches in 2004. I saw the passion Bush aroused among theologically orthodox Protestants. And I got to know many of the most influential conservative Christian leaders, most of whom threw themselves into urging their constituents to the polls.

Now, as the 2008 campaign heated up in the months before the first primaries, I wondered how the world was looking from the pulpits and pews. And so I went to Wichita, as close as any place to the heart of conservative Christian America. Wichita has a long history of religious crusades. A hundred years ago, Carrie Nation made her name smashing up Wichita’s bars. More recently, the presence of Dr. George Tiller, a specialist in late-term abortions, has kept anti-abortion passions high, attracting Operation Rescue to Wichita for the Summer of Mercy protests in 1991. Two years later, a lone activist shot and wounded Dr. Tiller. Evolution, the flash point that split mainline and evangelical Protestants in the early 20th century, is still hotly debated in Wichita. The Kansas school board has reversed itself on the subject again and again in recent years.

At the same time, Wichita is also a decent proxy for plenty of other blue-collar but socially conservative places like Allentown, Pa., and Columbus, Ohio — the swing districts of the swing states that decide elections. A center of aerospace manufacturing, Wichita was a union town and a Democratic stronghold for much of the last century. But all that changed when the conservative Christian movement took root in its suburban megachurches three decades ago, turning theological traditionalists into Republican activists. That story was the centerpiece of the liberal writer Thomas Frank’s 2004 book, “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” He might have called it “What’s the Matter With Wichita?”

I arrived just in time for the annual Fourth of July Patriotic Celebration at the 7,000-member Central Christian Church, where Independence Day is second only to Christmas. Thousands of people drove back to the church Sunday evening for a pageant of prayers, songs, a flag ceremony and an American history quiz pitting kids against their parents. “In God We Still Trust” was the theme of the event. “You place your hand on this Bible when you swear to tell the truth,” two men sang in the opening anthem.

“There’s no separation; we’re one nation under Him.”

“There are those among us who want to push Him out And erase

His name from everything this country’s all about.

From the schoolhouse to the courthouse, they are silencing

His word Now it’s time for all believers to make our voices heard.”

Later, as a choir in stars-and-stripes neckties and scarves belted out “Stars and Stripes Forever,” a cluster of men in olive military fatigues took the stage carrying a flag. They lifted the pole to a 45-degree angle and froze in place around it: a re-enactment of the famous photograph of the American triumph at Iwo Jima. The narrator of a preceding video montage had already set the stage by comparing the Iwo Jima flag raising to another long-ago turning point in a “fierce battle for the hearts of men” — the day 2,000 years ago when “a heavy cross was lifted up on top of the mount called Golgotha.”

A battle flag as the crucifixion: the church rose to a standing ovation.

There was one conspicuous omission from the Patriotic Celebration: any mention of President Bush or the Iraq war. The only reference to the president was a single image in a video montage. Bush was standing with Donald Rumsfeld, head bowed at a grave in Arlington National Cemetery.

Every time I visited an evangelical church in 2004, it seemed that a member’s brother or cousin had just returned from Iraq with reports that much greater progress was being made than the news media let on. The admiration for President Bush as a man of faith was nearly universal, and some talked of his contest with John Kerry as a spiritual battle. It would have been hard to overstate the Christian conservative leadership’s sense of the presidential race’s historical significance. In the days before the election, Dobson told me he believed the culture war was “rapidly approaching the climax, with everything that we are about on the line” and the election might be “the pivot point.”

The morning after the Republican triumph, a White House operative called Dobson to thank him personally for his support, as Dobson told me in conversation later that day. He bluntly told the operative that the Bush campaign owed his victory in large part to concerned Christian voters. He warned that God had given the nation only “a short reprieve” from its impending “self-destruction.” If the administration slighted its conservative Christian supporters, most importantly in filling Supreme Court vacancies, Dobson continued, Republicans would “pay a price in four years.”

On that front, at least, Bush has not disappointed. President Bush’s two appointees, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., have given Dobson and his allies much to be thankful for. Nor has Bush flinched from any politically feasible Christian conservative goal, even when it has been unpopular. He has blocked federal financing for embryonic stem-cell research and intervened to help keep Terri Schiavo on life support. But of course there were moments when the White House seemed to care more about Social Security reform, and in the end the culture did not change.

Today the president’s support among evangelicals, still among his most loyal constituents, has crumbled. Once close to 90 percent, the president’s approval rating among white evangelicals has fallen to a recent low below 45 percent, according to polls by the Pew Research Center. White evangelicals under 30 — the future of the church — were once Bush’s biggest fans; now they are less supportive than their elders. And the dissatisfaction extends beyond Bush. For the first time in many years, white evangelical identification with the Republican Party has dipped below 50 percent, with the sharpest falloff again among the young, according to John C. Green, a senior fellow at Pew and an expert on religion and politics. (The defectors by and large say they’ve become independents, not Democrats, according to the polls.)

Some claim the falloff in support for Bush reflects the unrealistic expectations pumped up by conservative Christian leaders. But no one denies the war is a factor. Christianity Today, the evangelical journal, has even posed the question of whether evangelicals should “repent” for their swift support of invading Iraq.

“Even in evangelical circles, we are tired of the war, tired of the body bags,” the Rev. David Welsh, who took over late last year as senior pastor of Wichita’s large Central Christian Church, told me. “I think it is to the point where they are saying: ‘O.K., we have done as much good as we can. Now let’s just get out of there.’ ”

Welsh, who favors pressed khaki pants and buttoned-up polo shirts, is a staunch conservative, a committed Republican and, personally, a politics junkie. But he told me he was wary of talking too much about politics or public affairs around the church because his congregation was so divided over the war in Iraq.

Welsh said he considered himself among those who still support the president. “I think he is a good man,” Welsh said, slowly. “He has a heart, a spiritual heart.”

But like most of the people I met at Wichita’s evangelical churches, his support for Bush sounded more than a little agonized — closer to sympathy than admiration. “Bush may not have the best people around him,” he added, delicately. “He may not have made the best decisions. He is in a quagmire right now and maybe doesn’t know how to get out. Because to pull out now would say, ‘I was wrong from the very beginning.’ ”

Some were less ambivalent. “We know we want to get rid of Bush,” Linda J. Hogle, a product demonstrator at Sam’s Club, told me when I asked her about the 2008 election at her evangelical church’s Fourth of July picnic.

“I am glad he can’t run again,” agreed her friend, Floyd Willson. Hogle and Willson both voted for President Bush in 2004. Both are furious at the war and are looking to vote for a Democrat next year. “Upwards of a thousand boys that have been needlessly killed, it is all just politics,” Willson said.

The 16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention — the core of the evangelical movement — may be rethinking its relationship with the Republican Party, too. Three years ago, I attended its annual meeting in Indianapolis and tagged along as the denomination’s former president and several of its leaders invited the assembled pastors across a walkway to an adjacent hotel for a Bush-Cheney campaign “pastors’ reception.”

Over soft drinks, Ralph Reed, the former Christian Coalition director then working for the Bush campaign, told the pastors just how far they could go for the campaign without jeopardizing their churches’ tax-exempt status. Among the suggestions: “host a citizenship Sunday for voter registration,” “identify someone who will help in voter registration and outreach” or organize a “ ‘party for the president’ with other pastors.”

Republicans should not expect that kind of treatment from Southern Baptists again any time soon. In June of last year, in one of the few upsets since conservatives consolidated their hold on the denomination 20 years ago, the establishment’s hand-picked candidates — well-known national figures in the convention — lost the internal election for the convention’s presidency. The winner, Frank Page of First Baptist Church in Taylors, S.C., campaigned on a promise to loosen up the conservatives’ tight control. He told convention delegates that Southern Baptists had become known too much for what they were against (abortion, evolution, homosexuality) instead of what they stand for (the Gospel). “I believe in the word of God,” he said after his election, “I am just not mad about it.” (It’s a formulation that comes up a lot in evangelical circles these days.)

I asked Page about the Bush-Cheney reception at the 2004 convention. He sounded appalled. “That will not be happening with me,” he said, repeating it for emphasis. “I have cautioned our denomination to be very careful not to be seen as in lock step with any political party.”

Southern Baptists called their denomination’s turn to the right the “conservative resurgence,” meaning both a crackdown on unorthodox doctrine and a corresponding expulsion of political moderates. Page said he considered his election “a clear sign” that rank-and-file Southern Baptists felt the “conservative ascendancy has gone far enough.”

Page is meeting personally with all the leading presidential candidates in both parties — Republican and Democrat. (His home state of South Carolina is holding an early primary.) But unlike some of his predecessors, he won’t endorse any of them, he said.

“Most of us Southern Baptists are right-wing Republicans,” he added. “But we also recognize that times change.” For example, Page said Christians should be wary of Republican ties to “big business.”

Elders like Dobson say the movement has been through doldrums before. Think of the face-off between the Republican Bob Dole and President Bill Clinton in the 1996 election. Dobson later said he had cast his ballot for a third party rather than vote for a moderate like Dole. But then, it was defeat that sapped morale; today, it is victory. Some younger evangelical conservatives say they are fighting just to keep their movement together. (Dobson told me he was too busy to comment for this article.)

The Rev. Rick Scarborough — founder of the advocacy organization Vision America, author of a book called “Liberalism Kills Kids” and at 57 an aspiring successor to Falwell or Dobson — has been barnstorming the country on what he calls a “Seventy Weeks to Save America Tour.”

“We are somewhat in disarray right now,” he told me, beginning a familiar story. “As a 26-year-old man, I heard there was a born-again Christian from Georgia running for president.” Millions of evangelicals turned out for the first time in 1976 to vote for Jimmy Carter. But then, the story goes, his support for feminism and abortion rights sent them running the other way.

“The first time I voted was for Carter,” Scarborough recalled. “The second time was for ‘anybody but Carter,’ because he had betrayed everything I hold dear.

“Unfortunately,” Scarborough concluded, “there is the same feeling in our community right now with George Bush. He appeared so right and so good. He talked a good game about family values around election time. But there has been a failure to follow through.”

For the conservative Christian leadership, what is most worrisome about the evangelical disappointment with President Bush is that it coincides with a widening philosophical rift. Ever since they broke with the mainline Protestant churches nearly 100 years ago, the hallmark of evangelicals theology has been a vision of modern society as a sinking ship, sliding toward depravity and sin. For evangelicals, the altar call was the only life raft — a chance to accept Jesus Christ, rebirth and salvation. Falwell, Dobson and their generation saw their political activism as essentially defensive, fighting to keep traditional moral codes in place so their children could have a chance at the raft.

But many younger evangelicals — and some old-timers — take a less fatalistic view. For them, the born-again experience of accepting Jesus is just the beginning. What follows is a long-term process of “spiritual formation” that involves applying his teachings in the here and now. They do not see society as a moribund vessel. They talk more about a biblical imperative to fix up the ship by contributing to the betterment of their communities and the world. They support traditional charities but also public policies that address health care, race, poverty and the environment.

Older evangelical traditionalists like Prof. David Wells of Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary near Boston argue that the newer approaches represent a “capitulation” to the broader culture — similar to the capitulation that in his view led the mainline churches into decline. Proponents of the new evangelicalism, on the other hand, say their broader agenda reflects a frustration with the scarce victories in the culture war and revulsion at the moral entanglements of partisan alliances (Abu Ghraib, Jack Abramoff). Scot McKnight, an evangelical theologian at North Park University in Chicago, said, “It is the biggest change in the evangelical movement at the end of the 20th century, a new kind of Christian social conscience.”

Secular sociologists say evangelicals’ changing view of society reflects their changing place in it. Once trailing in education and income, evangelicals have caught up over the last 40 years. “The social-issues arguments are the first manifestation of a rural outlook transposed into a more urban or suburban setting,” John Green, of the Pew Research Center, told me. “Now having been there for a while, that kind of hard-edged politics no longer appeals to them. They still care about abortion and gay marriage, but they are also interested in other, more middle-class arguments.”

Some rebellious evangelical pastors and theologians of the new school refer to themselves as the emergent church. Others who are less openly rebellious but share a similar approach point to the examples of Rick Warren and Bill Hybels. “What Warren and Hybels are doing is reshaping the perception of what it means to be a Christian in our country and our world,” McKnight says.

Warren and Hybels are also highly entrepreneurial. Each has built a network of thousands of mostly evangelical churches that rely on their ministries for sermon ideas, worship plans or audio-video materials to enliven services. As a result, their influence may rival that of any denominational leader in the country.

Warren, pastor of the Saddleback church in Lake Forest, Calif., is the author of the best seller “The Purpose Driven Life.” His church has sold materials to thousands of other churches for “campaigns” called 40 Days of Purpose and, more recently, 40 Days of Community. If more Christians worked to alleviate needs in their local communities, he suggests in the church’s promotional materials, “the church would become known more for the love it shows than for what it is against” a thinly veiled dig at the conservative Christian “culture war.”

Warren is clearly a theological and cultural conservative. Before the 2004 election, he wrote a letter to other pastors emphasizing the need to combat abortion rights and same-sex marriage. But these days Warren talks much more often about fighting AIDS and poverty. He raised hackles among conservatives last year by having Barack Obama give a speech at his church. And he also came under fire last year when he traveled to Damascus, Syria, where he implicitly criticized the Bush administration for refusing to talk with unfriendly nations.

“Isolation and silence has never solved conflict,” he said in a press release defending his trip.

Hybels, founder of the Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago, is very possibly the single-most-influential pastor in America; in the last 15 years, his Willow Creek Association has grown to include more than 12,000 churches. Many invite their staff members and lay leaders to participate by telecast in Willow Creek’s annual leadership conferences, creating a virtual gathering of tens of thousands. Dozens of churches in Wichita, including Central Christian and other past bastions of conservative activism, are part of the association.

As his stature has grown, Hybels has seemed more willing to irk Christian conservative political leaders — and even some in his own congregation. He set off a furor a few years ago when he invited former President Bill Clinton to speak at one of his conferences. And the Iraq war has brought into sharp relief Hybels’s differences with conservatives like Dobson.

Most conservative Christian leaders have resolutely supported Bush’s foreign policy. Dobson and others have even talked about defending Western civilization from radical Islam as a precondition for protecting family values. But on the eve of the Iraq invasion, Hybels preached a sermon called “Why War?” Laying out three approaches to war — realism, just-war theory and pacifism — he implored members of his congregation to re-examine their own thinking and then try to square it with the Bible. In the process, he left little doubt about where he personally stood. He called himself a pacifist.

Hybels traced the “J curve” of mounting deaths from war through the centuries. “In case you are wondering about this, wonder how God feels about all this,” he said. “It breaks the heart of God.”

At his annual leadership conference this summer, Hybels interviewed former President Jimmy Carter. To some Christian conservatives, it was quite a provocation. Carter, after all, was their first great disappointment, a Southern Baptist who denounced the conservative takeover and an early critic of the Bush administration. Some pastors canceled plans to attend.

“I think that a superpower ought to be the exemplification of a commitment to peace,” Carter told Hybels, who nodded along. “I would like for anyone in the world that’s threatened with conflict to say to themselves immediately: ‘Why don’t we go to Washington? They believe in peace and they will help us get peace.’ ” Carter added: “This is just a simple but important extrapolation from what a human being ought to do, and what a human being ought to do is what Jesus Christ did, who was a champion of peace.”

In a conversation I had with him, Hybels told me he considered politics a path to “heartache and disappointment” for a Christian leader. But he also described the message of his Willow Creek Association to its member churches in terms that would warm a liberal’s heart.

“We have just pounded the drum again and again that, for churches to reach their full redemptive potential, they have to do more than hold services — they have to try to transform their communities,” he said. “If there is racial injustice in your community, you have to speak to that. If there is educational injustice, you have to do something there. If the poor are being neglected by the government or being oppressed in some way, then you have to stand up for the poor.”

In the past, Hybels has scrupulously avoided criticizing conservative Christian political figures like Falwell or Dobson. But in my talk with him, he argued that the leaders of the conservative Christian political movement had lost touch with their base. “The Indians are saying to the chiefs, ‘We are interested in more than your two or three issues,’ ” Hybels said. “We are interested in the poor, in racial reconciliation, in global poverty and AIDS, in the plight of women in the developing world.”

He brought up the Rev. Jim Wallis, the lonely voice of the tiny evangelical left. Wallis has long argued that secular progressives could make common cause with theologically conservative Christians. “What Jim has been talking about is coming to fruition,” Hybels said.

Conservative Christian leaders in Washington acknowledge a “leftward drift” among evangelicals, said Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and the movement’s chief advocate in Washington. He told me he believed that Hybels and many of his admirers had, in effect, fallen away from orthodox evangelical theology. Perkins compared the phenomenon to the century-old division in American Protestantism between the liberal mainline and the orthodox evangelical churches. “It is almost like another split coming within the evangelicals,” he said.

Wondering how those theological and political debates were unfolding in conservative Wichita, I sought out the Rev. Gene Carlson, another prominent conservative Christian pastor who left his church last year. He spent four decades as the senior pastor of the Westlink Christian Church, expanding it to 7,000 members. He was one of the most important local leaders of the Summer of Mercy abortion protests. He tapped Westlink’s collection plate to help finance its operations and even led a battalion of about 40 clergy members and hundreds of lay people to jail in an act of civil disobedience.

Sitting with his wife in a quiet living room with teddy bears on the bookshelves, Carlson, who is 70, told me he is one member of the movement’s founding generation who has had second thoughts. He said he still considers abortion evil. He called the anti-abortion protests “prophetic,” in the sense of the Old Testament prophets who warned of God’s wrath. But Carlson was blunt about the results. “It didn’t really change abortion,” he said.

“I thought in my enthusiasm,” he told me with a smile, “that somehow we could band together and change things politically and everything will be fine.” But the closing of Dr. Tiller’s clinic was fleeting. Electing Christian politicians never seemed to change much. “When you mix politics and religion,” Carlson said, “you get politics.”

In more recent battles, Carlson has hung back. On the Sunday before the referendum on a state constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage, Carlson reminded his congregation that homosexuality was hardly the only form of sex the Bible condemned. Any extramarital sex is a sin, he told his congregation, so they should not point fingers.

“We wouldn’t want to exclude some group because we thought their sin was worse than ours,” Carlson told me with a laugh.

Carlson is a registered Republican, though he now considers himself an independent. He volunteered that he now leans left on some social-welfare issues and the environment. He considers himself among the “green evangelicals” who see a biblical mandate for government action to stop global warming. The Westlink church is another member of Hybels’s Willow Creek Association and a satellite location for telecasts of the annual leadership conference. Carlson said he admired Hybels for “challenging some of the sacred cows that we evangelicals have built.”

“There is this sense that the personal Gospel is what evangelicals believe and the social Gospel is what liberal Christians believe,” Carlson said, “and, you know, there is only one Gospel that has both social and personal dimensions to it.” He once felt lonely among evangelicals for taking that approach, he told me. “Now it is a growing phenomenon,” he said.

“The religious right peaked a long time ago,” he added. “As a historical, sociological phenomenon, it has seen its heyday. Something new is coming.”

These days, Westlink has found less confrontational ways to oppose abortion, mainly by helping to pay for a medical center called Choices. Housed in a cozy-looking white-shingled cottage next to Dr. Tiller’s bunkerlike abortion facility, Choices discourages women from ending pregnancies by offering 3-D ultrasound scans and adoption advice.

Carlson’s protégé and successor, Todd Carter, 42, said: “I don’t believe the problem of abortion will be solved by overturning Roe v. Wade. It won’t. To me, it is a Gospel issue.”

The Rev. Joe Wright, the longtime senior pastor who built Central Christian to 7,000 members, was the third leading pastor in Wichita to step down at the end of last year. He is a tall, heavy man, and he embraced me in a sweaty bear hug the first time we met, at a local chain restaurant.

Wright, who is 64, had been another leader of the Operation Mercy protests. But unlike Carlson, he plunged further into conservative politics, eventually as a host of the radio show “Answering the Call,” with Fox. They spent months together traveling the state and lobbying the Statehouse during the same-sex marriage fight.

Wright retired in good standing with his congregation, but he told me the political battle had taken a toll.

“On Sunday morning when I would mention it, there were people who would hang their heads and say, ‘Oh, here we go again,’ ” he said. “And then, of course, some of them wouldn’t come back.”

Wright said he was worried about theological and political trends among young evangelicals, even in Kansas. “If we had to depend on the young evangelical pastors to get us a marriage amendment here in Kansas it never would have happened,” Wright said.

He went on to say he was dismayed to feel resistance to his political sermons and voter-registration drives from younger associate pastors at his own church, some of whom moved elsewhere. (Some of his parishioners had already told me the same thing, separately.)

“Even in the groups I travel in and grew up in — the preachers who are from the same background I was in, who run in the same circles I ran in, who went to the same schools I did — I don’t find many young evangelical preachers who are willing to stand up and take a stand on the hard issues, because they think they might offend somebody,” he said.

“I think the Gospel is offensive, and I think the cross is offensive,” Wright continued. “I think Jesus loved everybody and I think he loved the Pharisees, but he certainly told them how the cow eats the cabbage.”

Paul Hill is one of the young associate pastors who left Central Christian after philosophical clashes with Wright. He took a band of young members with him when he started his own emergent-style church, the Wheatland Mission. “Even in Wichita, times have changed,” Hill said. “I think people will hear the Gospel better when it is expressed not just verbally but holistically, through acts of hospitality and by bringing people together.

“In the evangelical church in general there is kind of a push back against the Republican party and a feeling of being used by the Republican political machine,” he continued. “There are going to be a lot of evangelicals willing to vote for a Democrat because there are 40 million people without health insurance and a Democrat is going to do something about that.”

With Wright, Carlson and Fox out of the spotlight, new religious leaders are stepping to the fore. When legalized gambling was proposed in the Wichita area this year, the pastor who took the lead in rallying other clergy members to stop the measure was Michael Gardner of the First United Methodist Church, a mainline liberal who supports abortion rights and jousted with Fox over the same-sex marriage amendment on competing church telecasts.

After decades when evangelical megachurches have exploded at the expense of dwindling mainline congregations, Gardner is poaching the other way. Each Sunday night he convenes an informal emergent church worship group of his own, known as Next Wichita. Several dozen people, mostly 20 to 30 years old, show up to break bread, talk Scripture and plan volunteer projects. “People in that age group are much more attracted to participatory theology, very resistant to being told what to do or what to think,” he said.

Patrick Bergquist, a former associate pastor at a local evangelical church who as a child attended Immanuel Baptist, became a regular. “From a theological standpoint, I am an evangelical,” Bergquist, who is 28, explained to me. “But I don’t mean that anyone who is gay is necessarily going to hell, or that anyone who has an abortion is going to hell.” After a life of voting Republican, he said, he recently made a small contribution to the Democratic presidential campaign of Barack Obama.

“Is the religious right dead?” Tony Perkins of the Family Research Council told me that question was the title of the first chapter of a new book he is writing with Harry Jackson, a socially conservative African-American pastor.

Perkins’s answer is emphatically no — “we are seeing a lot of pastors coming back like never before” — but the 2008 election is the movement’s first big test since the triumph and letdown with President Bush. And so far most Christian conservative leaders do not like what they see. Although all the Republican primary candidates, including Giuliani, spoke at the Family Research Council’s “values voters” meeting last weekend, only the dark horses have consistent conservative records on abortion, gay rights and religion in public life.

Of these, Mike Huckabee, a Southern Baptist minister before he became governor of Arkansas, stands out in the polls and in his rhetoric. At last fall’s values-voters meetings, the other candidates focused on establishing their Christian conservative credentials. Huckabee dispensed with that by reminding his audience of his years as a pastor. Then he challenged the crowd to give more money to their churches and talked about education and health care. On the campaign trail, he criticizes chief executives’ pay and says his faith demands environmental regulation. “We shouldn’t allow a child to live under a bridge or in the back seat of a car,” Huckabee said in a recent debate. “We shouldn’t be satisfied that elderly people are being abused or neglected in nursing homes.”

Huckabee told me that he welcomed a broadening of the evangelical political agenda. “You can’t just say ‘respect life’ exclusively in the gestation period,” he said, repeating a campaign theme.

But the leaders of the Christian conservative movement have not rallied to him. Many say he cannot win because he has not raised enough money. Perkins and others have criticized Huckabee for taking too soft an approach to the Middle East. Others worry that his record on taxes will anger allies on the right. And some Christian conservatives take his “gestation period” line as a slight to their movement.

“They finally have the soldier they have been waiting for, and they shouldn’t send me out into the battlefield without supplies,” Huckabee told me in exasperation. He argued that the movement’s leaders would “become irrelevant” if they started putting political viability or low taxes ahead of their principles about abortion and marriage.

“In biblical terms, it is like the salt losing its flavor; it’s sand,” Huckabee said. “Some of them have spent too long in Washington. . . . I think they are going to have a hard time going out into the pews and saying tax policy is what Jesus is about, that he said, ‘Come unto me all you who are overtaxed and I will give you rest.’ ”

Up to this point, though, most conservative Christian leaders are still locked in debate about which front-runner they dislike the least. Dobson’s public statements have traced the arc of their dissatisfaction. Last October, he observed that grass-roots evangelicals would have a hard time voting for Mitt Romney because he is a Mormon. In January, he said he could never vote for Senator John McCain. More recently, Dobson panned Fred Thompson, too, for opposing a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage. “He has no passion, no zeal, and no apparent ‘want to,’ ” Dobson wrote in an e-mail message to allies. “Not for me, my brothers. Not for me!”

Finally, at the end of last month, Dobson was the foremost among the roughly 50 Christian conservative organizers who declared they would support a third-party candidate if the nomination went to Giuliani, who is their greatest fear. Some even talk of McCain — once anathema to them — as a better bet.

I could see why they were worried. Among the evangelicals of suburban Wichita, I found that Giuliani was easily the most popular of the Republican candidates, even among churchgoers who knew his views on abortion and same-sex marriage. Some trusted him to fight Islamic radicalism; others praised his cleanup of New York.

“There are a few issues we are on different sides of — a lot of it is around abortion — and he is not the most spiritual guy,” said Kent Brummer, a retired Boeing engineer leaving services at Central Christian. “But to me that doesn’t mean that he would not make a good president, if he represents both sides.

“What I liked about George Bush is all of his moral side and all that,” Brummer added. “But somehow he didn’t have the strength to govern the way we hoped he would and that he should have.”

Democrats, meanwhile, sense an opportunity. Now the campaigns of all three Democratic front-runners are actively courting evangelical voters. At a White House event to mark the National Day of Prayer that I attended in the spring, Senator Clinton even walked over to shake hands with Dobson. Visibly surprised, he told her she was in his prayers.

All three Democratic candidates are speaking very personally, in evangelical language, about their own faith. What does Clinton pray about? “It depends upon the time of day,” she said. Edwards says he cannot name his greatest sin: “I sin every single day.” Obama talks about his introduction to “someone named Jesus Christ” and about being “an instrument of God.”

Many evangelicals are not sure what to make of it. “Shouldn’t we like it when someone talks about Christ being the missing ingredient in his life?” David Brody, a commentator for Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network, asked approvingly in response to Obama’s statements.

Many conservative Christian leaders say they can count on the specter of a second Clinton presidency to fire up their constituents. But the prospect of an Obama-Giuliani race is another matter. “You would have a bunch of people who traditionally vote Republican going over to Obama,” said the Rev. Donald Wildmon, founder of the Christian conservative American Family Association of Tupelo, Miss., known for its consumer boycotts over obscenity or gay issues.

In the Wichita churches this summer, Obama was the Democrat who drew the most interest. Several mentioned that he had spoken at Warren’s Saddleback church and said they were intrigued. But just as many people ruled out Obama because they suspected that he was not Christian at all but in fact a crypto-Muslim — a rumor that spread around the Internet earlier this year. “There is just that ill feeling, and part of it is his faith,” Welsh said. “Is his faith anti-Christian? Is he a Muslim? And what about the school where he was raised?”

“Obama sounds too much like Osama,” said Kayla Nickel of Westlink. “When he says his name, I am like, ‘I am not voting for a Muslim!’ ”

Fox, meanwhile, is already preparing to do his part to get Wichita’s conservative faithful to the polls next November. Standing before a few hundred worshipers at the Johnny Western Theater last summer, Fox warned his new congregation not to let go of that old-time religion. “Hell is just as hot as it ever was,” he reminded them. “It just has more people in it.”

Fox told me: “I think the religious community is probably reflective of the rest of the nation — it is very divided right now. This election process is going to reveal a lot about where the religious right and the religious community is. It will show unity or the lack of it.”

But liberals, he said, should not start gloating. “Some might compare the religious right to a snake,” he said. “We may be in our hole right now, but we can come out and bite you at any time.”

David D. Kirkpatrick is a correspondent in the Washington bureau of The New York Times.

    Evangelical Crackup, NYT, 28.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/28/magazine/28Evangelicals-t.html?hp

Religion Today

October 25, 2007
Filed at 1:50 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) -- James Dobson has become synonymous with the empire that is Focus on the Family. Tourists clamor for photos of the group's founder when he's not taping a radio show, talking about the presidential race on a TV news show or writing another child-rearing book.

Some staff confess to asking ''What Would Dr. Dobson Do?'' when faced with a dilemma.

But out of public view, a new generation of executives is laying the groundwork for sustaining the conservative Christian group as a cultural and political force once the 71-year-old Dobson has left the scene. And most of their efforts are concentrated not in the political realm, but in finding new ways to deliver marriage and parenting advice to a younger generation of families, many of whom distrust institutions or dislike evangelical engagement in politics.

Consider Jim Daly, the group's 46-year-old president and chief executive officer. He shares Dobson's conservative evangelical beliefs about marriage and the culture wars. But Daly is more likely to talk or blog about his troubled childhood or the challenges of raising his own kids, ages 5 and 7, than stage voter-registration rallies.

''With (Dobson's) interest in public policy, we have quite a strong bicep in that arena,'' Daly said.

But, he adds, ''94 percent of our budget goes to marriage and parenting, the bread and butter stuff. We don't have to reduce the muscle in the public policy area. We just need to start doing curls in the other area in the public square.''

Dobson stepped down as Focus on the Family president in 2003 but remains the board chairman and the ministry's public voice on its flagship radio broadcast. While Dobson has not hinted at retirement, the board has been plotting succession for years.

Passing up a better-paying corporate job at a paper company, Daly joined Focus on the Family in the late 1980s and rose through the ranks. Daly is not heir apparent to the radio show because, he acknowledges, that isn't his strength. He views himself as an administrator and delegator.

Daly's public profile is growing, however, illustrated by the release of his first book, ''Finding Home,'' in which he describes growing up in foster care after the deaths of his alcoholic parents and the joys of raising his own kids. The message: Parents can consider Daly a peer rather than an authority figure in the mold of Dobson, a child psychologist.

That kind of peer-to-peer connection is central to Focus on the Family's efforts to reach a younger audience. An example is a Webzine called Boundless.org that invites young adults ages 18 to 34 to talk to each other in moderated forums about everything from dating and courtship to the ethics of playing online poker.

''This generation, Gen Y and even Gen X, they are skeptical,'' said Motte Brown, 39, who oversees the Boundless 'zine as family formation ministry manager. ''They've been marketed to their entire lives, so they look to their peers and they reject anything with an authoritarian tone. They are looking for truth, but look to their peers for that.''

Brown acknowledges that hunger poses a challenge for an institution founded on one man's vision. Young adults on the online forums revere Dobson, he said, but also want to hear each other's voices.

The ministry also is customizing content to adapt to an on-demand world, said Glenn Williams, 44, a senior vice president. Dobson's radio show is now available through podcast, audio-stream and video-stream. The ministry's movie reviews, one of its most popular products, can be delivered by text message.

An initiative called ''My Family'' allows Web site visitors to customize their home pages. The flagship Focus on the Family magazine was too general for the times, so now five versions based on different life-stages are published.

''Focus for a long time took a shotgun approach: Let's throw out a topic today and talk about it, and if it touches someone's heart, we'll respond,'' Daly said. ''Now, people are just too busy. They say, 'I don't have time to find it. I need you to feed it with me ... That's a huge change between the leadership (at Focus on the Family).''

The group also is trying to forge stronger relationships with churches, offering a new curriculum called ''How to Drug-Proof Your Kids'' meant to be shared in small groups at churches.

Daly emphasized that Focus on the Family is not backing off its public policy work, and he said the renewed emphasis on relationship advice is not meant to blunt criticism that the group is too political.

But if the goal is to reach younger adults, downplaying politics might be wise. The Christian polling firm Barna Group found this year that nearly half of born-again Christians between 16 and 29 believe conservative Christian political involvement poses a problem for America.

Steve Maegdlin, another Focus on the Family senior vice president, said he doesn't believe supporters view the group's political engagement as a negative.

''I don't think there's a disconnect with our constituency,'' said Maegdlin, 41. ''In general, I think they would say, 'I appreciate that you stand up for righteousness and Biblical values.'''

Under IRS rules, nonprofits such as Focus on the Family can spend a limited amount of money on lobbying and issues advocacy but cannot get involved in candidate races. In 2004, Dobson spun off a new political arm called Focus on the Family Action, which has supported social conservative Republican Senate candidates and held voter rallies.

As evangelicals struggle to coalesce around a presidential candidate, Dobson has been at the forefront, most recently pledging to vote for a minor-party candidate if Democrats and Republicans nominate an abortion rights candidate.

Corwin Smidt, director of the Henry Institute for he Study of Christianity and Politics at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., said Focus on the Family in the post-Dobson era will likely struggle to mobilize people politically -- and not only because of the absence of its famous founder. Smidt said developing niche products might give people what they want, but it also makes it harder to unite people around a political cause.

Already, Focus on the Family is discovering the financial implications of attracting a younger crowd. Maegdlin said that in the last year the organization has identified about 280,000 people who have been exposed to Focus on the Family for the first time through the Internet but haven't donated.

The total number of donors has declined from 755,000 in 2004 to 564,000 as of last month, ministry officials said. Supporters are giving more money more often, but the overall numbers are still down: Focus on the Family brought in $132.5 million in donations in the fiscal year ending in September 2004 compared to $130.8 million this year, officials said.

''Those who grew up with Dr. Dobson are empty nesters now,'' Daly said. ''They might support Focus, but to a lesser degree. Our challenge is to engage the young family. And there are positive signs we're on the right course.''

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On the Net:

http:/www.family.org/ 

(This story corrects the program name to ''How to Drug-Proof Your Kids'' instead of ''How to Drug-Proof Child''.)

    Religion Today, NYT, 25.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-Today.html

Religion News in Brief

October 18, 2007
Filed at 12:07 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

SPRINGFIELD, Ill. (AP) -- Illinois public school students will be required to observe a moment of silence at the beginning of every school day under a new law.

Supporters say the goal is to give students a bit of peace and quiet to reflect on the day ahead -- ''to listen to the rustling of leaves, to listen to the chirping of a bird, to listen to the tip-tap of a child walking,'' said state Rep. Monique Davis.

But critics called the measure an attempt to promote organized school prayer.

''It may not mandate prayer, but that's what it's about,'' said Rep. Lou Lang.

The law originally passed during the spring legislative session, but Gov. Rod Blagojevich vetoed it, saying the law's requirement of a moment ''for silent prayer or for silent reflection'' might be unconstitutional.

The Senate overrode the veto last week. The House did the same Thursday, voting 74-37.

The law takes effect immediately, so every public school must now begin the day with a moment of silence.

An Illinois law called the Silent Reflection and Student Prayer Act already allowed schools to observe a moment of silence if they wanted. The new provision changes just one word: ''may'' observe becomes ''shall'' observe.

The sponsor of the change, Rep. Will Davis, a Democrat from Homewood, said his goal is not to open the door for teachers to lead their classes in morning prayer but help students calm down and think about their plans.

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http://www.ilga.gov/

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Settlement fund helps former polygamous sect members

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- A fund for young people cast out of a southern Utah polygamous sect has helped about a dozen since it was created two months ago.

So far, $6,600 has been spent on school tuition, books, a desk, appliances, utilities and car insurance. A woman who was a possible witness in a criminal trial against sect leader Warren Jeffs received clothing.

The fund is ''just ramping up,'' attorney Roger Hoole said. ''We're interested in helping more people.''

The $250,000 Lost Boys Fund was part of a settlement of lawsuits filed by seven young men against the United Effort Plan Trust, the financial arm of Jeffs' Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Six claimed they were cast out of the church by Jeffs, the FLDS president. The seventh man claimed he was sexually abused.

Neither the church nor Jeffs responded to the lawsuits, and the claims were never proved in court. But the trust, now controlled by a court-appointed accountant, approved the settlement.

The seven men were awarded land, and the fund was established to help young people cut off from the FLDS community.

Jeffs, 51, is in jail awaiting his sentence for rape as an accomplice in the arranged marriage of a 14-year-old follower and her 19-year-old cousin. Sentencing is scheduled for Nov. 20.

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Detroit suburb to vote over nativity dispute

BERKLEY, Mich. (AP) -- It's an early skirmish in this year's edition of the Christmas wars. Voters in this Detroit suburb will decide Nov. 6 whether to return a Christian nativity scene to City Hall.

Under threat of a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union, the city council voted last year to relocate figures of an infant Jesus, Mary and Joseph in a manger off city land and onto church property.

A group of citizens collected 952 signatures to force a vote on returning the nativity scene to its home for at least two decades -- a small patch of grass behind City Hall.

''I'm tired of these organizations coming into a small-town community and threatening us with lawsuits and the city rolling over,'' said 37-year-old Georgia Halloran. ''We are celebrating a national holiday. We are not promoting a religion. The government isn't supposed to be hostile toward religion.''

After the ACLU threatened the city with a lawsuit in 2005, it moved a Santa mailbox closer to the nativity scene. But the ACLU returned in 2006 and the council sent the figures packing after lengthy public debate and examining several options from its legal department.

The U.S. Supreme Court has found that nativity scenes are permissible on public land as long as secular symbols are displayed, too.

Similar disputes over Christmas decorations have broken out in cities and towns across the country in recent years, part of a debate about religion's place in the public square.

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http://www.berkleymich.org/

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Synagogue finds a home, with help from a Muslim contractor

FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (AP) -- A Jewish synagogue is rising in the hills of Arkansas, in large part because of the generosity of the project contractor: a Muslim immigrant from the West Bank.

Since 1981, members of Temple Shalom have practiced their faith where they could. The congregation bought a home to convert into a temple, but members abandoned their plans after residents complained that the synagogue would bring traffic to their neighborhood.

The Reform congregation then bought new land -- and Fadil Bayyari got involved. The Springdale, Ark., general contractor agreed to waive his regular fee, saving Temple Shalom at least $250,000.

''Abraham is our forefather,'' Bayyari said. ''We're first cousins. How we got to hate each other is beyond me.''

Bayyari, who built the mosque in Fayetteville, said his kinship with the Jewish congregation also stems from the fact that his faith community, too, lacked its own building until the mosque was completed.

Jeremy Hess, a founding member of Temple Shalom and the building project coordinator, said the synagogue will be open to all. He said working with Bayyari taught him that ''you can't judge anyone except by the character of who they are.''

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http://www.atempleofpeace.com

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Evangelical umbrella group names new leader after scandal

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A Minnesota megachurch pastor has been named president of the National Association of Evangelicals, nearly a year after former president Ted Haggard resigned in scandal.

The Rev. Leith Anderson, 62, has been interim president since Haggard's fall in November 2006, and held the job before Haggard's tenure. The NAE board, at a meeting here Oct. 11, voted unanimously to make the position permanent.

Anderson, 62, has not been as outspoken about politics as his predecessor but is among a generation of evangelical pastors seeking to broaden the movement's tent, including speaking out about climate change.

''Leith Anderson is a man of astute mind and has a wealth of experience the NAE needs,'' Israel Gaither, national commander of the Salvation Army and NAE executive committee member, said in a statement. ''In my view he is just the right leader for the NAE for this critical time.''

Anderson is senior pastor of 5,000-member Wooddale Church in Eden Prairie, Minn., a Minneapolis suburb. He also is the author of eight books and the radio voice of Faith Matters, which is heard on Christian stations nationwide.

The NAE claims 45,000 member churches and 30 million members from 60 Christian denominations. Haggard resigned as president and was fired from his Colorado Springs church after a former male prostitute alleged a three-year cash-for-sex relationship. Haggard acknowledged undisclosed ''sexual immorality.''

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http://www.nae.net/

    Religion News in Brief, NYT, 18.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-Briefs.html 

Religion Today

October 18, 2007
Filed at 12:07 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

WALKERSVILLE, Md. (AP) -- A Muslim group's plan to build a mosque and convention site on a 224-acre farm has met with resistance from many residents of this rural, overwhelmingly Christian town who fear its tranquility and security may be jeopardized.

The Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA insists it will be a friendly neighbor, but its proposal -- including an annual national gathering of thousands of Ahmadis -- could be blocked by a measure under consideration by the town commissioners.

''Muslims are a whole different culture from us,'' said the mayor, Ralph Whitmore, taking a break at his livestock feed store. ''The situation with the Muslims is a touchy worldwide situation, so people are antsy over that.''

Two days after Ahmadiyya leaders fielded questions at a public forum in August, town Commissioner Chad Weddle introduced a zoning amendment that would prohibit places of worship, schools and private clubs on land zoned for agriculture -- including the farm the Ahmadis have contracted to buy.

If the five commissioners approve the measure in a vote expected as early as next week, the Ahmadis could be blocked from building a mosque on the site. Even if the amendment fails, the group still would need a special exception to proceed -- their request for one is pending before the town's planning commission.

To some, Weddle's amendment smacks of discrimination.

''The situation indicates this is an action that is being directed toward one specific faith community and, as such, that makes it highly suspect,'' said Roman P. Storzer, a Washington attorney who has been retained by the land's prospective seller, David Moxley.

Muqtedar Khan, a political science professor at the University of Delaware, said the blunt opposition voiced by some Walkersville citizens is reminiscent of the persecution Ahmadis have endured in Pakistan. There, they are forbidden to practice their religion because they believe there was a prophet after Muhammad -- Hadrat Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, who died in 1908.

''It is quite ironic,'' Khan said, that the Ahmadis -- allowed to worship freely in the United States -- ''are suffering a backlash because of their association with Islam.''

But Syed Ahmad, a federal economist who is managing the Walkersville project for the group, said the persecution in Pakistan is far worse.

''Here, people are civilized and they get up and they talk and they oppose you,'' Ahmad said, ''but they're not going to kill you.''

Ahmad, who emigrated from Pakistan in 1980, says members of his community won't go where they're not wanted. The group's leaders have gone door-to-door to persuade Walkersville residents that Ahmadis are not terrorists.

Ahmad acknowledged that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and the U.S. campaign against terrorism have made residents wary.

''They hear 'Muslims,' and they don't know anything beyond that,'' he said. ''To me, it's natural until they get a chance to ask questions what our beliefs are -- and then they realize these are good people.''

Some residents aren't convinced. When the Ahmadis visited Kambra Minor, a clerk at the Walkersville Market, ''I told them, you have to understand -- there's a certain connotation to a Muslim group, especially in a blue-collar area like this,'' Minor said.

Resident David Sample testified during a hearing last month that he is an intelligence officer whose office at the Pentagon, about 40 miles away, was destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

''I just stress to the board and the community that we pay attention to what's going on, what the motive is, who the people are,'' he said.

Others worry about the traffic that large-scale Muslim gatherings would generate in the town of 5,600. Mark Mowen suggested that the Ahmadis continue holding their conventions at an exposition center in Chantilly, Va., where this year's three-day event drew about 4,200 participants a day.

Weddle said he offered his amendment not to block the Muslims but as part of a plan to preserve open space and help the Banner School, a private, nonsectarian institution for grades K-8. The school, now located in nearby Frederick, won a special exception last year to build on a tract of Walkersville farmland, but construction was stalled by Frederick County's refusal to extend public sewer lines to land zoned for agriculture.

The town responded by rewriting its comprehensive plan to include a new ''institutional'' zoning category, Weddle said. The commissioners approved the category during the same meeting in August at which Weddle offered his amendment barring schools and places of worship on agricultural land. The timing, so soon after the Ahmadis' community forum, was coincidental, he said.

Weddle said the Banner School plans to have its land rezoned for institutional use, and the Ahmadis could do likewise.

''My ordinance should benefit that group if they want to build on that property'' because without rezoning, the site can't be served by public water and sewer, Weddle said.

However, Ahmad said the Ahmadis plan to use the farm's private well and septic systems and won't need public water and sewer.

Resident Kris Anderson said he doesn't trust the Ahmadis and that unless they're stopped, ''we're opening the door to something we may not know and we may not like.''

But others, including two neighboring farmers, said the community should welcome the Ahmadis as property owners who will help preserve open space.

As for the once-a-year traffic congestion, said 64-year-old farmer Robert Ramsburg ''that's no worse than the carnival, and I've learned to live with the carnival.''

------

On the Net:

Ahmadiyya Muslim Community USA: http://www.ahmadiyya.us

Town of Walkersville: http://www.walkersville-md.com

    Religion Today, NYT, 18.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-Today.html

Political Memo

Gingerly, Romney Seeks Ties to Christian Right

October 16, 2007
The New York Times
By MICHAEL LUO

He has invoked the Rev. Rick Warren, a popular evangelical author and megachurch pastor. He has quoted Scripture and alluded to the Gideon Bible as favorite late-night reading. And he has cited his belief in Jesus Christ as his personal “savior.”

As Mitt Romney has had to grapple with suspicions about his Mormon religion during his presidential run, he has tried in various ways to signal his kinship with evangelical Christians, who represent a crucial constituency of the Republican base but consider his religious beliefs to be heretical.

He faces a delicate task in trying to stake out common ground with conservative Christians, while not running afoul of deeply rooted evangelical sensitivities about any blurring of distinctions between Mormonism and conventional Protestantism.

“He has to be very cautious,” said Oran P. Smith, president of the Palmetto Family Council, a conservative Christian group in South Carolina. “When he actually says things that make Mormonism sound like orthodox Christianity, I think that’s where he runs into a lot of trouble.”

Mr. Romney faces one of his most important tests on Friday, when he addresses a gathering of conservative Christians at the Values Voter Summit in Washington. His advisers are still undecided about whether Mr. Romney will directly address concerns about his religion in his 20-minute address and, if so, how much to dwell on it relative to his stances on particular social issues. In the end, they said, because his religion is so personal to him, Mr. Romney’s own feelings on how to handle it will be most important. They made clear it would not likely be a major address on his religion, akin to how John F. Kennedy confronted the issue of his Catholicism in 1960. The decision about if and when to give such a speech, they said, has still not been settled.

Mr. Romney’s advisers, however, believe there is now an opening for him with members of this pivotal constituency in the Republican base. Fred D. Thompson, the former Tennessee senator for whom many conservative Christians had held out hope, has faltered in the rollout of his campaign. Former Gov. Mike Huckabee of Arkansas, another potential evangelical standard-bearer, is struggling to raise money. And prominent conservative Christian leaders are becoming increasingly restive about the prospect of former Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of New York, a supporter of abortion rights, winning the Republican nomination.

Much depends on how Mr. Romney continues to handle the complicated obstacle of his religion as voters begin to focus more on their choices, especially in early-voting states like Iowa and South Carolina, where conservative Christians dominate the nominating process for Republicans.

Polls continue to show that significant numbers of Americans would not vote for a Mormon. But the questions about Mr. Romney’s religion that consumed his candidacy early on, largely retreated into the background in recent months as he struggled to parry attacks about his authenticity.

The questions have begun bubbling up again, however, with the continuing uncertainty among Christian conservatives about whom to support and after a Newsweek cover article recently that focused on Mr. Romney’s reluctance to embrace his personal faith on the stump.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Romney deflects questions about the specifics of Mormon beliefs, saying he is not a spokesman for his church. Instead, he seeks to emphasize common values across religions.

“The values of my faith are much like, or are identical to, the values of other faiths that have a Judeo-Christian philosophical background,” he said at a campaign event in New Hampshire this month. “They’re American values, if you will.”

But he has sometimes edged further in his efforts to establish a common bond with Christian conservatives. His references to Jesus as his personal savior align with evangelical vernacular. Although it is consistent with Mormon doctrine, evangelicals caution that this is potentially dangerous territory for Mr. Romney, because their conception of who Jesus Christ is differs markedly from what Mormons believe.

“Doctrinally, they understand, ‘No, no we don’t worship the same God,’” said Charles W. Dunn, dean of the school of government at Regent University, an evangelical institution founded by Pat Robertson.

Joseph Smith founded Mormonism as a restoration of what he considered to be the true Christian church. Among the major differences with traditional Christianity: Mormons do not believe in the concept of the unified Trinity; the Book of Mormon is considered to be sacred text, alongside the Bible; and Mormons believe that God has a physical body and human beings can eventually become like God.

Nevertheless, at a speech in April before a conservative group, Mr. Romney offered something of a Sunday school lesson when talking about the recent shootings at Virginia Tech.

“I picked up my Bible yesterday to reread the account of the senseless murder of Abel by his brother,” he said. “It’s only one page after the fall of Adam and Eve from the garden, where they were told by God that he would place what he called ‘enmity’ on the earth.”

Peter Flaherty, Mr. Romney’s deputy campaign manager and a Roman Catholic who coordinates the campaign’s outreach to religious conservatives, said Mr. Romney personally wrote those lines into the speech. Similarly, Mr. Flaherty said, it was Mr. Romney’s idea to refer to Mr. Warren’s best-selling book, “The Purpose-Driven Life,” in speeches. Mr. Romney had met with Mr. Warren while governor of Massachusetts and is a fan of his book, Mr. Flaherty said, even though its thrust is decidedly evangelical.

Mr. Romney alluded to the book over the summer at a house party in Iowa, sponsored by the Iowa Christian Alliance, explaining that America’s strength as a nation came from its culture, which included the belief in “something greater.”

“Rick Warren’s book, ‘The Purpose-Driven Life,’ suggests something — the idea of something greater in life than just yourself,” he said. “And by virtue of belief in a creator, there’s a sense of the worth of each individual.”

More recently, in a Fox News interview, Mr. Romney made an unusual aside when he described how charged up he often gets after a day of campaigning.

“I find myself having to read for an hour or so before I can fall asleep,” he said. “And thanks to the Gideons, I’ve got good material.”

    Gingerly, Romney Seeks Ties to Christian Right, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/us/politics/16romney.html?hp

Obama Reaches Out to Religious Voters

October 16, 2007
Filed at 3:18 a.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

The invitation appeared one Sunday in Joanna Chase's church bulletin: Come to a ''faith forum'' and join a conversation about the intersection of religion and politics.

Living in New Hampshire, Chase is accustomed to pitches from presidential hopefuls, especially those focusing on values-voting Republicans. But this one came from the team of a Democrat, Sen. Barack Obama.

The candidate himself wasn't on the bill. But about 50 people showed up to talk about the war, poverty and trying to seize back the moral mantle some in the GOP claim. The night also featured an Obama video and a campaign altar call -- an invitation to become a ''congregation contact'' and rally support for the candidate.

''I don't know if I will vote for Barack Obama,'' said Chase, 62, who was inspired enough to organize a similar forum at her United Church of Christ congregation in Northwood, N.H. ''There are several candidates I like very much. But I love that he has the character and confidence to allow people to do this. He doesn't have to own every bit of it.''

The leading Democratic contenders for the White House all have made a point of talking about religion this campaign season. They discuss their faith journeys and how their beliefs influence their policies. The campaigns of Obama, Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards all are doing outreach to religious communities.

But Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, has made religion a signature part of his campaign through his own public appearances in places where Democrats rarely venture, and a faith-based voter mobilization, topped by forums in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina that could prove key to organizing.

''I don't think a Democratic presidential candidate has come close to doing anything like this before,'' said Mark Silk, director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College in Hartford, Conn. ''If you are going to parse the different dimensions of how a presidential candidate does religion, he's doing them all.''

Will it win votes? Create a backlash from Democrats angry that religion and politics are too intertwined? Obama has drawn criticism from the Rev. Welton Gaddy of the liberal Interfaith Alliance, who said the senator ''has sounded precisely like George W. Bush'' in recent church appearances.

A member of the liberal United Church of Christ, Obama has said he was raised in a nonreligious home and had a conversion experience after doing community organizing in Chicago churches. He spoke last year -- before announcing his candidacy -- of a desire to tackle ''mutual suspicion'' between religious and secular America.

He invokes biblical imagery, saying that because government alone cannot solve problems, ''we have an individual responsibility to be our brother's keeper and our sister's keeper.'' At the same time, Obama has lauded the separation of church and state and has paid homage to America's religious pluralism.

Campaigning in Iowa over the weekend, Obama framed the climate change debate in religious terms, saying: ''We are not acting as good stewards of God's earth when our bottom line puts the size of our profits before the future of our planet.''

Obama's religious affairs director, Joshua DuBois, said his charge is to create a ''robust, grass-roots outreach program'' -- including nonreligious people who view issues through a moral lens and want a voice in the debate. DuBois is a former Obama Senate aide and former associate minister with the Assemblies of God, a Pentecostal denomination.

The faith forums, like the one Chase attended in New Hampshire, are perhaps the most visible illustration of the Obama faith ground game.

More than 25 were staged in Iowa and New Hampshire. The campaign is now in the midst of a ''40 Days of Faith and Family'' drive of forums, gospel concerts and candidate appearances in South Carolina, where Obama is lagging behind Clinton in polls and fighting the former first lady for the state's black vote.

At a recent forum at a public library in Myrtle Beach, S.C., 58-year-old Vietnam veteran Bennie Swans walked in ''lukewarm'' about the Obama campaign, supportive of Obama's opposition to the Iraq War but otherwise unsure.

Swans said he walked out invigorated by what he saw: ''People coming together from various points of life, ages and races, working collectively on issues of faith and politics. Our churches are so segregated. You usually don't see that.''

The Mount Olive AME Church member signed on as a ''congregation contact.''

DuBois said the campaign is clear that political organizing cannot take place within houses of worship, which would land them in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service. The goal is to reach friends and family, some of them church members, he said.

Beyond the forums, the campaign stages a weekly interfaith prayer conference call, runs a ''People of Faith for Barack'' Web site and has a page on FaithBase.com, a social networking site modeled on Facebook and MySpace.

Traditionally, Democratic religious outreach has meant mobilizing support in black churches and bastions of liberal mainline Protestantism. Obama has done those things, but he's also taken part in a summit on AIDS hosted by evangelical mega-pastor Rick Warren and appeared at Southern Baptist churches in South Carolina.

At an evangelical church in Greenville, S.C., Obama said he seeks to be an ''instrument of God'' and expressed confidence ''we can create a kingdom right here on Earth.''

That prompted Gaddy, of the Interfaith Alliance, to criticize the candidate in a conference call with reporters. Gaddy cautioned against any presidential candidate talking about building such a kingdom while ''in an evangelical church in which that terminology has a very specific, indisputable definition that is exclusive rather than inclusive.''

Obama's own church background could cause problems as well. His Chicago pastor and spiritual mentor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, emphasizes ''black values'' in a church message that has stirred controversy.

Polling data suggest religion may help Obama set himself apart from Clinton, the front-runner. A poll last month from the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found 84 percent of Americans considered Obama very or somewhat religious, compared with 69 percent for Clinton, a Methodist.

Edwards, also a Methodist, had numbers comparable to Obama's and was more likely to be considered ''very'' religious.

Clinton has cited the influence of Methodism's social gospel and has hired Democratic strategist Burns Strider, a Southern Baptist, to direct her religious outreach. Edwards has stressed how his faith shaped his desire to combat poverty.

Mara Vanderslice, a Democratic consultant on religious issues, said it's striking that Democrats are engaging religious voters in the primary season after virtually ignoring them in 2004.

''That will solidify the involvement of the religious community in Democratic campaigns going into the general (election),'' she said. ''But it will also change the culture. This will become part of what we do.''

    Obama Reaches Out to Religious Voters, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obama-Religion.html

Faith `plays Every Role' in Obama's Life

October 7, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:05 a.m. ET
The New York Times

GREENVILLE, S.C. (AP) -- White House hopeful Barack Obama stood in front of a pulpit Sunday and told worshippers that his faith ''plays every role'' in his life.

''It's what keeps me grounded. It's what keeps my eyes set on the greatest of heights,'' Obama told members of the Redemption World Outreach Center, whose 4,200-seat sanctuary was mostly full.

Faith, he said, is ''what propels me to do what I do and when I am down it's what lifts me up.'' The Democratic presidential candidate said God ''is with us and he wants us to do the right thing,'' including breaking down the divisions between Democrats and Republicans and among religions.

When people work together, he said, there is ''nothing that can stop us because that's God's intention.''

The Illinois senator is a member of the United Church of Christ, a church of about 1.2 million members that is considered one the most liberal of the mainline Protestant groups.

The service at the center, founded by an International Pentecostal Holiness Church minister, had members on their feet much of the time singing, swaying and raising their hands. Thumping, rock-concert loud music played from a pulpit sometimes awash with fog and filled with a band and choir.

Obama asked the church's members to pray for him and his family. ''Sometimes this is a tough role, being in politics. ... Sometimes you can become fearful. Sometimes you become vain and sometimes you will seek power just for power's sake,'' he said.

Obama told the audience that people ask him, ''`What role does faith play?' I say, `It plays every role.'''

Last week, Obama attended services at a black Baptist church in West Columbia and a white Baptist church a few miles away in Columbia.

His campaign is in the midst of what it calls ''40 Days of Faith & Family'' -- an effort to introduce early voting South Carolina to how Obama's family life and faith have shaped his values.

In an interview with The Associated Press last week, Obama was asked about walking the line where politics and the pulpit meet.

''There are no set guidelines or play book. When I go to church, I go there to worship. I am perfectly content to sit and listen to the music and pray and listen to the sermon,'' Obama said after last weekend's church services.

Other times -- such as this Sunday -- Obama takes to the pulpit.

In those instances, he said, ''my job is to try to draw a connection between the values that I express to the church and the challenges and issues that we face in politics. ... I don't think there's anything wrong with expressing faith in the public square and I think there's nothing wrong public servants expressing religiously rooted values.''

    Faith `plays Every Role' in Obama's Life, NYT, 7.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Obama-Churches.html

Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church

October 7, 2007
The New York Times
By MATT RICHTEL

First the percussive sounds of sniper fire and the thrill of the kill. Then the gospel of peace.

Across the country, hundreds of ministers and pastors desperate to reach young congregants have drawn concern and criticism through their use of an unusual recruiting tool: the immersive and violent video game Halo.

The latest iteration of the immensely popular space epic, Halo 3, was released nearly two weeks ago by Microsoft and has already passed $300 million in sales.

Those buying it must be 17 years old, given it is rated M for mature audiences. But that has not prevented leaders at churches and youth centers across Protestant denominations, including evangelical churches that have cautioned against violent entertainment, from holding heavily attended Halo nights and stocking their centers with multiple game consoles so dozens of teenagers can flock around big-screen televisions and shoot it out.

The alliance of popular culture and evangelism is challenging churches much as bingo games did in the 1960s. And the question fits into a rich debate about how far churches should go to reach young people.

Far from being defensive, church leaders who support Halo — despite its “thou shalt kill” credo — celebrate it as a modern and sometimes singularly effective tool. It is crucial, they say, to reach the elusive audience of boys and young men.

Witness the basement on a recent Sunday at the Colorado Community Church in the Englewood area of Denver, where Tim Foster, 12, and Chris Graham, 14, sat in front of three TVs, locked in violent virtual combat as they navigated on-screen characters through lethal gun bursts. Tim explained the game’s allure: “It’s just fun blowing people up.”

Once they come for the games, Gregg Barbour, the youth minister of the church said, they will stay for his Christian message. “We want to make it hard for teenagers to go to hell,” Mr. Barbour wrote in a letter to parents at the church.

But the question arises: What price to appear relevant? Some parents, religious ethicists and pastors say that Halo may succeed at attracting youths, but that it could have a corroding influence. In providing Halo, churches are permitting access to adult-themed material that young people cannot buy on their own.

“If you want to connect with young teenage boys and drag them into church, free alcohol and pornographic movies would do it,” said James Tonkowich, president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy, a nonprofit group that assesses denominational policies. “My own take is you can do better than that.”

Daniel R. Heimbach, a professor of Christian ethics at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, believes that churches should reject Halo, in part because it associates thrill and arousal with killing.

“To justify whatever killing is involved by saying that it’s just pixels involved is an illusion,” he said.

Focus on the Family, a large evangelical organization, said it was trying to balance the game’s violent nature with its popularity and the fact that churches are using it anyway. “Internally, we’re still trying to figure out what is our official view on it,” said Lisa Anderson, a spokeswoman for the group.

There is little doubting Halo’s cultural relevance. Even as video games have grown in popularity, the Halo series stands out. The first Halo and Halo 2 sold nearly 15 million copies combined. Microsoft says that Halo 3 “is on track to become the No. 1 gaming title of all time.”

Hundreds of churches use Halo games to connect with young people, said Lane Palmer, the youth ministry specialist at the Dare 2 Share Ministry, a nonprofit organization in Arvada, Colo., that helps churches on youth issues.

“It’s very pervasive,” Mr. Palmer said, more widespread on the coasts, less so in the South, where the Southern Baptist denomination takes a more cautious approach. The organization recently sent e-mail messages to 50,000 young people about how to share their faith using Halo 3. Among the tips: use the game’s themes as the basis for a discussion about good and evil.

At Sweetwater Baptist Church in Lawrenceville, Ga., Austin Brown, 16, said, “We play Halo, take a break and have something to eat, and have a lesson,” explaining that the pastor tried to draw parallels “between God and the devil.”

Players of Halo 3 control the fate of Master Chief, a tough marine armed to the teeth who battles opponents with missiles, lasers, guns that fire spikes, energy blasters and other fantastical weapons. They can also play in teams, something the churches say allows communication and fellowship opportunities.

Complicating the debate over the appropriateness of the game as a church recruiting tool are the plot’s apocalyptic and religious overtones. The hero’s chief antagonists belong to the Covenant, a fervent religious group that welcomes the destruction of Earth as the path to their ascension.

Microsoft said Halo 3 was a “space epic” that was not intended to make specific religious references or be more broadly allegorical. Advocates of using the game as a church recruiting tool say the religious overtones are sufficiently cartoonish and largely overlooked by players.

Martial images in literature or movies popular with religious people are not new. The popular “Left Behind” series of books — it also spawned a video game — dealt with the conflict preceding the second coming of Christ. Playing Halo is “no different than going on a camping trip,” said Kedrick Kenerly, founder of Christian Gamers Online, an Internet site whose central themes are video games and religion. “It’s a way to fellowship.”

Mr. Kenerly said the idea that Halo is inappropriately violent too strictly interpreted the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” “I’m not walking up to someone with a pistol and shooting them,” he said. “I’m shooting pixels on a screen.”

Mr. Kenerly’s brother, Ken Kenerly, 43, is a pastor who recently started a church in Atlanta and previously started the Family Church in Albuquerque, N.M., where quarterly Halo nights were such a big social event that he had to rent additional big-screen TVs.

Ken Kenerly said he believed that the game could be useful in connecting to young people he once might have reached in more traditional ways, like playing sports. “There aren’t as many kids outdoors as indoors,” he said. “With gamers, how else can you get into their lives?”

John Robison, the current associate pastor at the 300-member Albuquerque church, said parents approached him and were concerned about the Halo games’ M rating. “We explain we’re using it as a tool to be relatable and relevant,” he said, “and most people get over it pretty quick.”

David Drexler, youth director at the 200-member nondenominational Country Bible Church in Ashby, Minn., said using Halo to recruit was “the most effective thing we’ve done.”

In rural Minnesota, Mr. Drexler said, the church needs something powerful to compete against the lure of less healthy behaviors. “We have to find something that these kids are interested in doing that doesn’t involve drugs or alcohol or premarital sex.” His congregation plans to double to eight its number of TVs, which would allow 32 players to compete at one time.

Among parents at the Colorado Community Church, Doug Graham, a pediatric oncologist with a 12-year-old son, said that he was not aware of the game’s M rating and that it gave him pause. He said he felt that parents should be actively involved in deciding whether minors play an M-rated game. “Every family should have a conversation about it,” he said.

Mr. Barbour, the youth pastor at the church, said the game had led to a number of internal discussions prompted by elders who complained about its violent content. Mr. Barbour recently met for several hours with the church’s pastor and successfully made his case that the game was a crucial recruiting tool.

In one letter to parents, Mr. Barbour wrote that God calls ministers to be “fishers of men.”

“Teens are our ‘fish,” he wrote. “So we’ve become creative in baiting our hooks.”

    Thou Shalt Not Kill, Except in a Popular Video Game at Church, NYT, 7.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/07/us/07halo.html?hp

New Mormon Leader Named

October 6, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:15 p.m. ET
The New York Times

SALT LAKE CITY (AP) -- Gordon B. Hinckley, president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, named a new top church official at the 177th gathering of faithful Mormons Saturday.

Elder Henry B. Eyring was appointed as the second counselor in the organization's First Presidency.

Eyring replaces James E. Faust, who died Aug. 10 from age-related causes and was remembered at the gathering Saturday.

''He was an extremely able man, a man of great faith and capacity who contributed much to our meetings,'' said Hinckley, who counted Faust among his closest and oldest friends. ''We greatly miss him.''

Eyring previously served 12 years in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, the church's second-tier of leadership.

A native of Princeton, N.J., he was president of the church-owned Rick's College in Rexburg, Idaho, from 1972 to 1977 and taught in the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University from 1962 to 1971.

Mormons gather in April and October to hear words of guidance and faith building inspiration from the highest church leaders. The conference draws thousands to Salt Lake City, where those lucky enough to secure tickets gather inside the church's 21,000 seat conference center, while others mingle on the church's manicured downtown campus and temple grounds.

The proceedings are simultaneously transmitted to church centers and homes around the world via satellite, Internet and radio broadcasts in more than 80 languages.

    New Mormon Leader Named, NYT, 6.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mormon-Conference.html

Amish Gather for Shooting Anniversary

October 1, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:09 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NICKEL MINES, Pa. (AP) -- Amish families in buggies and wagons, and some on foot, streamed toward a farmhouse Monday to mark the first anniversary of a massacre at a one-room schoolhouse.

Dressed in their fine clothes, the Amish adults and children passed the New Hope Amish School, which replaced the one torn down after the attack. The new school was closed Monday and will remain shut Tuesday, the anniversary of the shootings.

State Police Commissioner Jeffrey Miller arrived in an unmarked police car to attend the private, noontime gathering at the farmhouse.

Though grateful for all the help and sympathy it has received, the Amish community is hoping to be left alone as much as possible Tuesday during the one-year anniversary of the shootings.

A year ago, life here went largely unnoticed by the wider world -- and its residents liked it that way. But all that changed Oct. 2, 2006, when a gunman killed five girls at the Amish school and wounded five others.

It was about 10:30 a.m. a year ago when Charlie Roberts, a milk truck driver from a neighboring village, showed up at the door of the Amish school an hour's drive west of downtown Philadelphia.

Roberts carried firearms, tubes of sexual lubricant and the hardware he thought he might need to lock himself inside West Nickel Mines Amish School and immobilize his victims.

In a horrifying attack that unfolded over the ensuing 40 minutes, the 32-year-old son of a police officer would shoot 10 girls, killing five, and then kill himself with a shot to the forehead from his 9 mm handgun.

In a brief cell phone conversation with his wife and in suicide notes he left behind, Roberts indicated he was angry with God for the death of his infant daughter in 1997 and riven by the guilt of having molested two girls 20 years earlier.

He seems to have prepared for a lengthy siege, but if that was the case, his plan was foiled when teacher Emma Mae Zook dashed out the door to summon help. About 20 minutes after the siege began, the first state troopers were on the scene.

Their sudden appearance led a panicked Roberts to insist they back off. There was virtually no time for negotiation before he abruptly shot the girls in rapid succession.

Roberts left behind a puzzling trail of evidence that authorities today find as senseless as the day the attack occurred. He had no criminal history, had never been treated for mental illness and there seems to be nothing to substantiate his claim of having molested his two relatives decades earlier.

In Nickel Mines, where life had been marked by the predictable rhythms of the growing season and the church calendar, Roberts' attack made the modern world suddenly inescapable.

The usual quiet was shattered by the arrival of hundreds of police and emergency workers and the ominous sound of medical and news helicopters overhead.

Amid the chaos and heartbreak, the Amish instinctively reached out to Roberts' widow, Marie, the three children he left behind and his parents. Even before their own five daughters had been buried, the victims' families were showing Roberts' family kindness, condolence and compassion.

At the end of the week, a series of horse-and-buggy corteges carried the dead girls' coffins from private funeral ceremonies, past the Roberts' home and on to freshly dug graves in the Bart Township Amish cemetery.

Roberts' family quietly laid him to rest in an unmarked grave five days after the murders, beside the body of his late daughter in Georgetown.

About half the 75 mourners at Roberts' graveside were Amish, including family members of victims, and the Amish later designated a portion of the millions in donations they have received to benefit Roberts' children and widow.

On Oct. 12, the Amish had the schoolhouse torn down before dawn, converting the land where it stood into pasture. It only took a few months to erect a new and more secure school nearby.

Four of the five wounded girls returned to class before the end of December, although the fifth and most seriously injured suffered a head wound that left her completely disabled. She is confined to a wheelchair and is fed by a tube.

One girl recently had an operation to help restore function in her shoulder and arm, and another has been plagued by vision problems.

Each day has brought pain and grief for the Amish, a community spokesman said recently, but also a tremendous sense of gratitude and the need to share their experiences with others.

Four months after the massacre at Virginia Tech, members of the Amish community traveled to Blacksburg, Va., to pass along a comfort quilt.

''All that has been done to lift our burden is greatly appreciated and leaves us with a sense of indebtedness to everyone, but also makes us more aware of our gracious God to whom we owe a larger debt,'' the Amish community said in a statement last week.

------

On the Net:

Anabaptist Foundation: http://www.afweb.org/foundation/nmsvictimsfund/

    Amish Gather for Shooting Anniversary, NYT, 1.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Amish-School-Shooting.html

Religion News in Brief

September 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:10 p.m. ET
The New York Times

DES MOINES, Iowa (AP) -- An instructor at an Iowa community college claims he was fired after he told his students that the biblical story of Adam and Eve is a fairy tale and should not be interpreted literally.

Steve Bitterman, 60, said officials at Southwestern Community College in Red Oak sided with a handful of students who threatened legal action over his remarks in a western civilization class.

''I'm just a little bit shocked myself that a college in good standing would back up students who insist that people who have been through college ... have to teach that there were such things as talking snakes or lose their job,'' Bitterman said. ''As a taxpayer, I'd like to know if a tax-supported public institution of higher learning has given veto power over what can and cannot be said in its classrooms to a fundamentalist religious group.''

School President Barbara Crittenden would not comment on whether Bitterman was fired over the Bible reference, saying it was a personnel issue.

''There was no action taken that violated the First Amendment,'' she said.

Bitterman, who taught part time at Southwestern and Omaha's Metropolitan Community College, said he uses the Old Testament in the course and teaches it from an academic standpoint.

He said he called the story of Adam and Eve a fairy tale in a conversation with a student after the class and was told the students had threatened to see an attorney.

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http://www.swcc.cc.ia.us/

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Cuban archbishop: Catholic faith overcoming restrictions

MIAMI (AP) -- A top Roman Catholic prelate in Cuba said during a visit to Miami's Cuban exile community that religious practice is slowly spreading in the communist nation despite rigid restrictions.

Archbishop Dionisio Guillermo Garcia Ibanez, named earlier this year to lead Catholics in Santiago, Cuba's second-largest city, said the church has been able to expand its reach, though it will be years before it achieves goals of even more openness.

''The faith of our community has manifested, it has been reborn,'' he said in a recent interview during a visit here. ''The Catholic faith in our community has resurrected.''

Garcia would not pin the loosened restrictions on Fidel Castro's decision to temporarily hand over the government last year to his brother Raul. He said he has witnessed piecemeal improvements since his ordination in 1985.

Catholics once hoped simply to knock on doors and spread the Gospel, Garcia said, a dream that has since been realized. They prayed they could hold religious processions in the streets; he says there have now been more than 90. They pushed for Catholic radio broadcasts, which are now allowed once or twice a year.

''Hope is relative,'' the 62-year-old archbishop said after a Mass at Ermita de la Caridad, the spiritual heart of Cuban exiles here. ''We always need to work toward what we think is necessary, is fair.''

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http://www.ermitadelacaridad.org/

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Woman says agency discriminated because she's a Christian

CONCORD, N.H. (AP) -- A former employee has accused a New Hampshire child advocacy agency of harassing and discriminating against her because she shared her Christian beliefs in the office.

In her lawsuit, Penny Nixon of Concord said she was sarcastically referred to as the ''good Christian'' at Casey Family Services. She says she was forbidden from giving out religious Christmas cards.

Nixon also claims that although the agency promoted tolerance and diversity, it would not allow her to hold voluntary lunch-hour Bible studies but permitted a gay and lesbian group to meet during business hours.

''Penny Nixon is not saying she has any objection to working with gay men or lesbians,'' Nixon's attorney, Chuck Douglas, wrote in a lawsuit filed in Merrimack County Superior Court. ''She does not object to diversity training that is evenhanded. However, she does assert her right to have her practice and belief in Christianity unmolested in the workplace.''

Casey Family Services has not yet responded to the lawsuit in court. Lee Mullane, a spokeswoman at the agency's Connecticut headquarters, said the agency promotes respect and tolerance for all beliefs and believes Casey will be vindicated in court.

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http://www.caseyfamilyservices.org/index.php

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Martyred priest proposed for Roman Catholic sainthood

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Oklahoma City has begun the process of seeking sainthood for an Oklahoma-born priest who was gunned down by Guatemalan guerrillas in the 1980s.

The Rev. Stanley Rother, who was born in Okarche, Okla., in 1935, would become the first Oklahoman to be canonized.

Rother was ordained as a priest in May 1963 and served parishes in three Oklahoma cities during the 1960s.

He spent 13 years as a missionary in Guatemala, working with two parishes. While in Guatemala, Rother assisted in the translation of the New Testament into the Tzutuhil language and in 1973, he began to celebrate Mass in that language.

He was shot to death in his rectory by left-wing guerillas early one Tuesday morning in 1981.

Oklahoma City Archbishop Eusebius Beltran said the process of seeking beatification for Rother, the step before sainthood, will formally begin Oct. 5 with the commissioning of a canonization committee after a special mass at Holy Trinity Church in Okarche.

The committee members will interview people who knew Rother in Guatemala and Oklahoma. They will also determine and record instances of miracles attributed to Rother, which is required for elevation to the Catholic sainthood.

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http://www.catharchdioceseokc.org/

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Petition seeks public vote on huge Colorado church development

LONGMONT, Colo. (AP) -- Critics of an evangelical church's plans to effectively develop a new community anchored by a worship center, residential subdivision and sports complex are seeking to reverse the city's decision to annex land for the project.

The City Council has approved the annexation of 300 acres for LifeBridge Christian Church's proposed Union development. Opponents say they've collected more than 5,000 petition signatures calling for the council to either repeal the action or put it to a citywide vote.

Officials with LifeBridge and its business arm plan to develop 300 to 700 homes at the site; as much as 680,000 square feet of commercial development, including a 150,000-square-foot sports and fitness center; and 1 million square feet of religious and civic construction including a 6,000-seat sanctuary.

Several residents have objected because of questions over the tax-exempt status of the church as well as the traffic congestion and the school crowding the development could generate.

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http://www.www.lbcc.org/

    Religion News in Brief, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-Briefs.html

Religion Today

September 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:09 p.m. ET
The New York Times

It's not easy being a Roman Catholic theologian these days. Trying to explain a centuries-old faith's place in modern times is hard enough. Now some Catholic thinkers worry the Vatican is more concerned with unity than messy debates that can lead to new ideas.

The case of the Rev. Peter Phan is the latest example of the tension between church authorities and Catholic theologians. A 2004 book by Phan, a Georgetown University professor, has come under scrutiny for going beyond the Vatican's comfort zone in suggesting that other religions might have merit.

''Individual theologians can be creative, or they can be irresponsible,'' said the Rev. James Heft, director of the Institute for Advanced Catholic Studies at the University of Southern California. ''The exercise of central authority can be overbearing, or it can be a necessary corrective. So it's a complex situation.''

American Catholics and the broader public have good reason to care about what may look like an intramural squabble, Heft said. Theologians often do the thinking that contributes to profound changes in Catholic teaching -- on everything from the church's relationship with Jews and other Christians to the role of lay people.

The conflict at the heart of the Phan case, he said, strikes at ''one of the major questions of our time, especially in the coming decades: How we can speak of one faith expressed distinctively in a variety of cultures?''

Over recent decades, the Vatican has clamped down on theologians who advocate fighting poverty and injustice through the social gospel and liberation theology. More recently, the focus has shifted to the nature of Jesus Christ and salvation, one of the defining concerns of Pope Benedict XVI's papacy and his previous work as a cardinal.

Earlier this year, Benedict released a document reasserting the primacy of the Roman Catholic Church, reiterating themes in the 2000 Vatican document Dominus Iesus. That document states non-Christians are ''in a gravely deficient situation in comparison with those who, in the church, have the fullness of the means of salvation.''

Phan explored salvation and other themes in his 2004 book, ''Being Religious Interreligiously,'' the focus of the Vatican inquiry. The Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith said the book is ''notably confused on a number of points of Catholic doctrine and also contains serious ambiguities,'' according to the National Catholic Reporter.

Among the chief concerns, said the independent Catholic weekly: that Phan's writings could be interpreted as saying non-Christian faiths ''have a positive role in salvation history in their own right, and are not merely a preparation for the Christian Gospel.'' A committee of U.S. bishops is conducting a separate inquiry into Phan's work.

The increasing diversity of Catholic theologians, Phan among them (he is Vietnamese-American), is greatly influencing the debate about Catholicism's place among other religions, said Terrence Tilley, chairman of the Fordham University theology department.

''What we have in the last 20 years is a new development,'' said Tilley, president-elect of the Catholic Theological Society of America. ''Discussions of the saving value of other faith traditions had been carried on in a European context by European theologians who had little deep and rich understanding of other religious traditions. Their conversations ran on some pretty clear rails. But the train these days is on a different set of tracks.''

A refugee from the Vietnam War, Phan is a priest of the Dallas Diocese and former president of the Catholic Theological Society of America. He was the first non-Caucasian to hold the post.

Phan has declined comment on the investigation. Officials at Georgetown, the nation's oldest Catholic university, issued a statement saying the Jesuit school ''embraces academic freedom and supports the free exchange of ideas in order to foster dialogue on critical issues of the day, especially those related to faith, ethics and international affairs.''

The Rev. Thomas Reese, a senior fellow at the Woodstock Theological Center at Georgetown, said the Vatican too often views the Catholic theologian as working in an echo chamber, repeating back church teachings and documents.

The process of debating theology can be messy, but better to endure the messiness than stifle thought, said Reese, who was forced to resign as editor of America magazine after it published articles challenging church teaching.

''If you knew a company where the executive leadership was not on speaking terms with the research division, would you invest in that company?'' Reese said. ''That's what we have in the Catholic church today. The hierarchy is very suspicious of the theologians and the theologians are very suspicious of the hierarchy. And that's a very unhealthy situation.''

The Rev. Joseph Fessio, a former doctoral student of Pope Benedict whose publishing house is the primary publisher of the pope's writings in English, said the Vatican is neither heavy-handed nor close-minded in weighing questionable theology. What often fails to be disclosed, he said, is the long process allowing all sides to be heard.

''It's important for theologians to talk to each other, reflect and try to reformulate and understand more deeply what the church's belief is,'' Fessio said. ''But if they move outside the realm of the church as soundly defined, then it's a sign that they have gone beyond their competence as a theologian.''

''You can boil it down pretty simply,'' Fessio said. ''Who has the final say in on what Catholics must believe? The answer is, 'not the theologians.'''

    Religion Today, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Religion-Today.html

Prisons to Restore Purged Religious Books

September 27, 2007
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 — Facing pressure from religious groups, civil libertarians and members of Congress, the federal Bureau of Prisons has decided to return religious materials that had been purged from prison chapel libraries because they were not on the bureau’s lists of approved resources.

The bureau had said it was prompted to remove the materials after a 2004 Department of Justice report mentioned that religious books that incite violence could infiltrate chapel libraries.

After the details of the removal became widely known this month, Republican lawmakers, liberal Christians and evangelical talk shows all criticized the government for creating a list of acceptable religious books.

The bureau has not abandoned the idea of creating such lists, Judi Simon Garrett, a spokeswoman, said in an e-mail message. But rather than packing away everything while those lists were compiled, the religious materials will remain on the shelves, Ms. Garrett explained.

In an e-mail message Wednesday, the bureau said: “In response to concerns expressed by members of several religious communities, the Bureau of Prisons has decided to alter its planned course of action with respect to the Chapel Library Project.

“The bureau will begin immediately to return to chapel libraries materials that were removed in June 2007, with the exception of any publications that have been found to be inappropriate, such as material that could be radicalizing or incite violence. The review of all materials in chapel libraries will be completed by the end of January 2008.”

Only a week ago the bureau said it was not reconsidering the library policy. But critics of the bureau’s program said it appeared that the bureau had bowed to widespread outrage.

“Certainly putting the books back on the shelves is a major victory, and it shows the outcry from all over the country was heard,” said Moses Silverman, a lawyer for three prisoners who are suing the bureau over the program. “But regarding what they do after they put them back, I’m concerned.”

The bureau originally set out to take an inventory of all materials in its chapel libraries to weed out books that might incite violence. But the list grew to the tens of thousands, and the bureau decided instead to compile lists of acceptable materials in a plan called the Standardized Chapel Library Project. The plan identifies about 150 items for each of 20 religions or religious categories.

In the spring, prison chaplains were told to remove all materials not on the lists. The bureau said it planned to issue additions to the lists once a year. Chaplains packed up libraries with thousands of books collected over decades. Unidentified religious experts helped the bureau shape the lists of acceptable materials, which independent scholars said omitted many important religious texts.

Bob Moore, director of prison policy oversight at Aleph, an advocacy group for Jews in prison, said the lack of detail and transparency about how the lists were determined troubled him.

“This is a positive step: it means they are not throwing the baby out with the bath water,” Mr. Moore said of keeping books on the shelves for now. “But our position is there should not be a list of what should be on the shelves, but what shouldn’t be.”

Mr. Silverman said the return of the books would “go a long way” to resolving the lawsuit. But he added, “I remain concerned that the criteria for returning the books will be constitutional and lawful.”

    Prisons to Restore Purged Religious Books, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/washington/27prison.html?hp

Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin

September 27, 2007
The New York Times
By CORNELIA DEAN

A few months ago, the evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins received an e-mail message from a producer at Rampant Films inviting him to be interviewed for a documentary called “Crossroads.”

The film, with Ben Stein, the actor, economist and freelance columnist, as its host, is described on Rampant’s Web site as an examination of the intersection of science and religion. Dr. Dawkins was an obvious choice. An eminent scientist who teaches at Oxford University in England, he is also an outspoken atheist who has repeatedly likened religious faith to a mental defect.

But now, Dr. Dawkins and other scientists who agreed to be interviewed say they are surprised — and in some cases, angered — to find themselves not in “Crossroads” but in a film with a new name and one that makes the case for intelligent design, an ideological cousin of creationism. The film, “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed,” also has a different producer, Premise Media.

The film is described in its online trailer as “a startling revelation that freedom of thought and freedom of inquiry have been expelled from publicly-funded high schools, universities and research institutions.” According to its Web site, the film asserts that people in academia who see evidence of a supernatural intelligence in biological processes have unfairly lost their jobs, been denied tenure or suffered other penalties as part of a scientific conspiracy to keep God out of the nation’s laboratories and classrooms.

Mr. Stein appears in the film’s trailer, backed by the rock anthem “Bad to the Bone,” declaring that he wants to unmask “people out there who want to keep science in a little box where it can’t possibly touch God.”

If he had known the film’s premise, Dr. Dawkins said in an e-mail message, he would never have appeared in it. “At no time was I given the slightest clue that these people were a creationist front,” he said.

Eugenie C. Scott, a physical anthropologist who heads the National Center for Science Education, said she agreed to be filmed after receiving what she described as a deceptive invitation.

“I have certainly been taped by people and appeared in productions where people’s views are different than mine, and that’s fine,” Dr. Scott said, adding that she would have appeared in the film anyway. “I just expect people to be honest with me, and they weren’t.”

The growing furor over the movie, visible in blogs, on Web sites and in conversations among scientists, is the latest episode in the long-running conflict between science and advocates of intelligent design, who assert that the theory of evolution has obvious scientific flaws and that students should learn that intelligent design, a creationist idea, is an alternative approach.

There is no credible scientific challenge to the theory of evolution as an explanation for the complexity and diversity of life on earth. And while individual scientists may embrace religious faith, the scientific enterprise looks to nature to answer questions about nature. As scientists at Iowa State University put it last year, supernatural explanations are “not within the scope or abilities of science.”

Mr. Stein, a freelance columnist who writes Everybody’s Business for The New York Times, conducts the film’s on-camera interviews. The interviews were lined up for him by others, and he denied misleading anyone. “I don’t remember a single person asking me what the movie was about,” he said in a telephone interview.

Walt Ruloff, a producer and partner in Premise Media, also denied that there was any deception. Mr. Ruloff said in a telephone interview that Rampant Films was a Premise subsidiary, and that the movie’s title was changed on the advice of marketing experts, something he said was routine in filmmaking. He said the film would open in February and would not be available for previews until January.

Judging from material posted online and interviews with people who appear in the film, it cites several people as victims of persecution, including Richard Sternberg, a biologist and an unpaid research associate at the National Museum of Natural History, and Guillermo Gonzalez, an astrophysicist denied tenure at Iowa State University this year.

Dr. Sternberg was at the center of a controversy over a paper published in 2004 in Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, a peer-reviewed publication he edited at the time. The paper contended that an intelligent agent was a better explanation than evolution for the so-called Cambrian explosion, a great diversification of life forms that occurred hundreds of millions of years ago.

The paper’s appearance in a peer-reviewed journal was a coup for intelligent design advocates, but the Council of the Biological Society of Washington, which publishes the journal, almost immediately repudiated it, saying it had appeared without adequate review.

Dr. Gonzalez is an astrophysicist and co-author of “The Privileged Planet: How Our Place in the Cosmos Is Designed for Discovery” (Regnery, 2004). The book asserts that earth’s ability to support complex life is a result of supernatural intervention.

Dr. Gonzalez’s supporters say his views cost him tenure at Iowa State. University officials said their decision was based, among other things, on his record of scientific publications while he was at the university.

Mr. Stein, a prolific author who has acted in movies like “Ferris Bueller’s Day Off” and appeared on television programs including “Win Ben Stein’s Money” on Comedy Central, said in a telephone interview that he accepted the producers’ invitation to participate in the film not because he disavows the theory of evolution — he said there was a “very high likelihood” that Darwin was on to something — but because he does not accept that evolution alone can explain life on earth.

He said he also believed the theory of evolution leads to racism and ultimately genocide, an idea common among creationist thinkers. If it were up to him, he said, the film would be called “From Darwin to Hitler.”

On a blog on the “Expelled” Web site, one writer praised Mr. Stein as “a public-intellectual-freedom-fighter” who was taking on “a tough topic with a bit of humor.” Others rejected the film’s arguments as “stupid,” “fallacious” or “moronic,” or described intelligent design as the equivalent of suggesting that the markets moved “at the whim of a monetary fairy.”

Mr. Ruloff, a Canadian who lives in British Columbia, said he turned to filmmaking after selling his software company in the 1990s. He said he decided to make “Expelled,” his first project, after he became interested in genomics and biotechnology but discovered “there are certain questions you are just not allowed to ask and certain approaches you are just not allowed to take.”

He said he knew researchers, whom he would not name, who had studied cellular mechanisms and made findings “riddled with metaphysical implications” and suggestive of an intelligent designer. But they are afraid to report them, he said.

Mr. Ruloff also cited Dr. Francis S. Collins, a geneticist who directs the National Human Genome Research Institute and whose book, “The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief” (Simon & Schuster, 2006), explains how he came to embrace his Christian faith. Dr. Collins separates his religious beliefs from his scientific work only because “he is toeing the party line,” Mr. Ruloff said.

That’s “just ludicrous,” Dr. Collins said in a telephone interview. While many of his scientific colleagues are not religious and some are “a bit puzzled” by his faith, he said, “they are generally very respectful.” He said that if the problem Mr. Ruloff describes existed, he is certain he would know about it.

Dr. Collins was not asked to participate in the film.

Another scientist who was, P. Z. Myers, a biologist at the University of Minnesota, Morris, said the film’s producers had misrepresented its purpose, but said he would have agreed to an interview anyway. But, he said in a posting on The Panda’s Thumb Web site, he would have made a “more aggressive” attack on the claims of the movie.

Dr. Scott, whose organization advocates for the teaching of evolution and against what it calls the intrusion of creationism and other religious doctrines in science classes, said the filmmakers were exploiting Americans’ sense of fairness as a way to sell their religious views. She said she feared the film would depict “the scientific community as intolerant, as close-minded, and as persecuting those who disagree with them. And this is simply wrong.”

    Scientists Feel Miscast in Film on Life’s Origin, NYT, 27.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/27/science/27expelled.html?hp

Episcopal Leaders Try to Avoid Schism

September 26, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:03 a.m. ET
The New York Times

NEW ORLEANS (AP) -- Even the fiercest critics of the Episcopal Church's liberal drift say it's too soon to know whether the bishops' latest pledge to ''exercise restraint'' in approving another gay bishop will go far enough to help prevent an Anglican schism.

''It will take months and years to really see,'' said Bishop Martyn Minns, who leads a conservative network of breakaway Episcopal parishes.

Overseas, people on both sides of the debate registered their unhappiness Wednesday. Some supporters of gay clergy accused Episcopal leaders of caving in to conservatives led by African archbishops, while traditionalists criticized what they saw as a cleverly worded declaration of defiance.

The 77-million-member fellowship has been splintering since 2003, when Episcopalians consecrated the first openly gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. The Episcopal Church is the Anglican body in the U.S.

Episcopal bishops released their pledge to ''exercise restraint'' Tuesday in the final moments of a six-day meeting -- and as the decades-long debate over interpreting the Bible threatens to shatter the world Anglican Communion.

Anglican leaders had set a Sunday deadline for the Americans to pledge unequivocally not to consecrate another gay bishop or approve an official prayer service for same-sex couples.

On Wednesday, the Rev. Colin Coward, director of Changing Attitude England, said he believed the bishops had met the Anglican request.

''If conservatives continue to press for the exclusion of the Episcopal Church, transgress provincial boundaries and decide not to attend the Lambeth Conference in 2008, they will take responsibility for provoking a tear in the Anglican Communion and will have withdrawn from the our fellowship,'' Coward said.

Martyn Minns, a former Episcopal priest who was consecrated as a bishop in the Church of Nigeria to serve Episcopalians alienated from their own bishops, said on Tuesday that the American bishops' statement was ''the totally wrong response.''

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the Anglican spiritual leader, took the unusual step of attending the meeting for the first two days, pushing bishops to make concessions for the sake of unity. Anglican lay and clergy representatives from overseas also participated, chastising Episcopal leaders for the turmoil they've caused.

Episcopal bishops responded by affirming a resolution passed last year by the Episcopal General Convention that urged bishops to ''exercise restraint'' by not consenting to a candidate for bishop ''whose manner of life presents a challenge'' to Anglicans and the church. The promise falls short of an outright ban.

Episcopal leaders also promised they wouldn't approve official prayers to bless same-gender couples and insisted that most Episcopal bishops do not authorize the ceremonies. However, it is widely acknowledged that many individual priests offer blessings informally in their own parishes and will continue to do so despite Tuesday's pledge.

Williams and other Anglican leaders will evaluate the bishops' statement in the coming weeks. But before he left New Orleans, the archbishop of Canterbury played down the significance of the Anglican demands, saying ''there is no ultimatum involved.''

Canon Jim Naughton, a spokesman for the Diocese of Washington, said the statement ''reassures our partners in the Anglican Communion that we have taken their concerns seriously.'' However, Minns said the bishops' statement was ''the totally wrong response,'' and said many Episcopalians are already ''voting with their feet.''

Four of the 110 Episcopal dioceses -- Fort Worth, Texas; Pittsburgh; Quincy, Ill.; and San Joaquin, Calif. -- are taking steps to split off from the national church and align with an overseas Anglican church. And about 60 of the more than 7,000 Episcopal parishes have left or have lost a significant number of clergy and members, according to the national church.

Anglican leaders from Nigeria, Rwanda, Kenya, Uganda and elsewhere have violated Anglican tradition that they minister only within their own provinces and have consecrated bishops to oversee breakaway Episcopal congregations in the United States. In their statement Tuesday, bishops said they ''deplore'' the incursions and ''call for them to end.''

Conservative Bishop John Howe of the Diocese of Central Florida said the statement wouldn't satisfy all Anglican leaders, but predicted ''most will find it acceptable.'' Howe is staying in the Episcopal Church, even though his diocese, based in Orlando, has rejected Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as a leader because she is liberal.

The next crucial event for the communion will be the Lambeth Conference, in July in England. The once-a-decade meeting brings together all the bishops in the Anglican world. Whether Williams can persuade bishops to attend will be a measure of the strength of the communion.

Williams did not invite Robinson or Minns. But some Anglican prelates don't even want to be at the same table as Episcopalians who consecrated Robinson. Still, Robinson has been in private talks with Williams to find a way he can attend, possibly as an observer.

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On the Net:

Episcopal Church: http://www.episcopalchurch.org

Anglican Communion: http://www.anglicancommunion.org

    Episcopal Leaders Try to Avoid Schism, NYT, 26.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Episcopal-Bishops-Gays.html

Sect Leader Is Convicted as an Accomplice to Rape

September 26, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN DOUGHERTY and KIRK JOHNSON

ST. GEORGE, Utah, Sept. 25 — The polygamist Warren S. Jeffs, hailed by his followers as a prophet but denounced by critics as a tyrannical cult leader, was convicted here on Tuesday of being an accomplice to the rape of a 14-year-old church member.

Mr. Jeffs, 51, faces up to life in prison.

The verdict, by an eight-member state jury here in Washington County, was a vindication of the prosecution’s argument — which some experts had thought might be hard to accept — that orchestrating a marriage of a young girl under duress made Mr. Jeffs culpable even though he was not present when the rape occurred.

The girl at the center of the case, who is now 21, testified that she was pressed by Mr. Jeffs in early 2001 into a “celestial marriage” she did not want, to a cousin she did not like. The girl’s cousin has not been charged.

Prosecutors said Mr. Jeffs, the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a Mormon sect with an estimated 10,000 members, knew that the marriage would lead to nonconsensual sex.

The jurors, who began their deliberations on Friday after a week of testimony, announced in a note on Monday that they were deadlocked on one of two charges. The judge, James L. Shumate, pressed them to continue, and then early on Tuesday, for reasons the court did not explain, an alternate juror was substituted for one of the original panel members. A unanimous verdict came a few hours later.

When the verdict was read, about 2:30 p.m., Mr. Jeffs showed no emotion, and his followers who had filled the back rows of the courtroom remained silent.

In the deeply isolated polygamist communities of Hildale, Utah, and adjacent Colorado City, Ariz., about an hour southeast of St. George, residents said the verdict would probably just harden the lines of resistance.

“That just makes him all the more the prophet,” said Isaac Wyler of Colorado City. Mr. Wyler said Mr. Jeffs ordered him to leave the church in 2004 but gave no reason.

Benjamin Bistline, who left the church voluntarily, said he thought the verdict would shift the balance of church activities — especially marriages — away from the historic base here in southern Utah to more recently established compounds that the leadership tightly controls in Texas, South Dakota and elsewhere.

“They believe that polygamy is God’s word, and they will still do under-age marriages,” said Mr. Bistline, who has written a history of the sect.

Mr. Jeffs, whose sentencing was scheduled for Nov. 20, still faces state charges in Arizona related to performing under-age or incestuous marriages, and a federal indictment for flight to avoid prosecution. He was arrested in August 2006 near Las Vegas after four months on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted List.

Mr. Jeffs’s trial was not about polygamy or religion — at least on the surface. But the decades of bitter relations between the state of Utah, dominated by mainstream Mormons from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and Mr. Jeffs’s renegade sect was never far away.

The mainstream church renounced plural marriage in 1890. In response, some fundamentalist Mormons formed a sect, declaring that the teachings of Mormonism’s founder, Joseph Smith, had been forsaken. Mr. Jeffs’s lawyer told the jury the trial was really about that old conflict, and about the freedom of religion — a deeply resonant theme here.

The prosecutor, Brock Belnap, said religion was not only irrelevant, but also a deliberate distraction that he said the defense was trying to inject to cloud jurors’ judgment. He said after the verdict that he expected an appeal.

One of Mr. Jeffs’s lawyers, Walter F. Bugden, said they would appeal.

The girl in the case, who was identified by the court as Jane Doe, said in a statement read outside the courthouse that the case was not about vengeance.

“The trial has not been about religion nor a vendetta,” she said. “It is simply about child abuse and preventing further abuse.”

The eight jurors, who agreed to be interviewed by reporters inside the courtroom, said Mr. Belnap’s closing statement was crucial in giving them a roadmap of the law.

“It was the closing statement that did it,” said Rachel Karimi, the alternate juror who joined the panel Tuesday morning. Ms. Karimi, 28, and the other jurors, declined to discuss the dismissed juror except to say she had also favored conviction.

Some jurors said they were convinced that Mr. Jeffs had overwhelming power over the lives in his community — a conclusion crucial to reaching the verdict. One juror, Lynn Maxwell, 40, said, “He was not there to help her when things went wrong, and she was raped.”

The jurors said they also dismissed the defense argument that the focus on Mr. Jeffs was unfair because others in the church could have done something to help. The girl’s mother and her sister to whom she went for help would have faced repercussions, the jurors said.

“He was the only one who had the power,” said another juror, Diedre Shaw, 32.

    Sect Leader Is Convicted as an Accomplice to Rape, NYT, 26.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/us/26jeffs.html

Man Who Wed Girl in Arranged Union Testifies for Polygamist Leader

September 20, 2007
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON and JOHN DOUGHERTY

ST. GEORGE, Utah, Sept. 19 — The final defense witness in the case against the polygamist leader Warren S. Jeffs testified on Wednesday that there had been no rape in the consummation of the marriage of a 14-year-old girl who was a member of Mr. Jeffs’s offshoot Mormon sect.

Shortly after that testimony, the evidentiary part of Mr. Jeffs’s trial came to a close after less than a week, leaving the jury with starkly different he-said, she-said accounts. Closing arguments are set for Friday, and jurors are expected to begin deliberating before the end of the day.

Prosecutors argue that Mr. Jeffs was an accomplice to rape in arranging the marriage of the girl to her 19-year-old first cousin. The bride, who is now 21 and has been identified in court only as Jane Doe, testified for the prosecution.

The defense maintains that Mr. Jeffs simply put together a marriage between members of his flock that proceeded to consensual sex, as Allen Steed, the cousin and “spiritual husband,” said in his testimony Wednesday as the final defense witness.

“I felt like she was ready to go forward,” said Mr. Steed, now a 26-year-old truck driver. In describing the night he first had sex with the girl, he told the jury that she snuggled up to him in bed and asked him to scratch her back. “One thing led to the next,” he said.

If convicted, Mr. Jeffs, 51, faces up to life in prison, not for condoning or advancing polygamy, but for what prosecutors describe as a raw abuse of power.

Jane Doe testified last week that she had felt coerced by Mr. Jeffs into a marriage that she had told her mother and other members of the church she was not ready for and did not want. Mr. Steed said Wednesday under cross-examination by the prosecutor, Craig Barlow, that he still felt bound by Mr. Jeffs’s authority, up to and including violating the law.

“If you were told by the prophet,” Mr. Barlow said of Mr. Jeffs, “to disobey the laws of man, would you do it?”

“I would,” Mr. Steed replied.

On some elements, the former couple agreed. He admitted that after they married, he exposed himself to her in a park, hoping to interest her in sex, and that doing so did not work. That testimony corroborated her account.

She said that he fell asleep after they first had sex and that she swallowed two bottles of over-the-counter pain medicine, hoping to commit suicide, but then vomited the pills back up. Mr. Steed agreed that he had gone to sleep, and said he knew nothing of her next few hours.

The sect led by Mr. Jeffs, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has an estimated 10,000 members, most of them in rural Utah and Arizona. It broke off from the mainstream Mormon faith decades ago over the issue of polygamy, which the mainstream church renounced in 1890, in the middle of Utah’s struggle for statehood.

    Man Who Wed Girl in Arranged Union Testifies for Polygamist Leader, NYT, 20.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/20/us/20jeffs.html

Mormon Book Sold at Auction

September 19, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:31 p.m. ET
The New York Times

GENEVA, N.Y. (AP) -- A rare first edition of the Book of Mormon found in a home near Palmyra, the birthplace of the Mormon religion, fetched $105,600 at auction Wednesday.

The 177-year-old book was sold at an upstate New York estate auction to an undisclosed buyer who paid a 10 percent commission on top of a winning bid of $96,000, said Joseph Hessney of the Hessney Auction Co.

Mormons consider the Book of Mormon to be scripture on par with the Bible. Church founder Joseph Smith said he translated the book from gold plates delivered to him by an angel.

The first editions were printed and published by E. B. Grandin in Palmyra in 1830. While there were roughly 5,000 copies printed, only a few hundred still exist.

The copy auctioned was discovered at the bottom of a box of books by workers cleaning out a house.

There are about 250 first editions held in private collections, perhaps an equal number yet undiscovered, and research libraries and museums hold about 50 copies, collectors say.

    Mormon Book Sold at Auction, NYT, 19.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Mormon-Book-Auction.html

Episcopal Church Faces Deadline on Gay Issues

September 16, 2007
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

Ever since the Episcopal Church consecrated an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire four years ago, forecasts of a rupture over homosexuality within the church or with the rest of the global Anglican Communion accompanied each big church meeting, only to fade.

But as the bishops of the Episcopal Church approach their semiannual meeting this week in New Orleans, the predictions are being taken very seriously.

At the top of the agenda for the Sept. 20-25 gathering will be a directive issued by the leaders of the Anglican Communion to stop consecrating openly gay and lesbian bishops and to ban blessings of same-sex unions or risk a diminished status in the communion, the world’s third-largest Christian denomination.

The Most Rev. Rowan Williams, archbishop of Canterbury, who is the spiritual leader of the communion, will attend the meeting. It will be the first time Archbishop Williams has met with the church’s House of Bishops since the 2003 consecration of the gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

The communion’s directive asks for a response from the Episcopal Church by Sept. 30.

In interviews last week, bishops and church experts who hold a range of views on homosexuality said they expected the House of Bishops would stop short, perhaps far short, of meeting the directive’s demands. That could widen rifts, as several dioceses have said they would break away from the Episcopal Church and primates of several provinces, or regions, have spoken of leaving the global communion.

“I think the meeting will add some clarity to what has already taken place,” said Bishop Kirk S. Smith of Arizona. “I think clearly there is going to be some sort of exodus from the communion.”

Currently, the Episcopal Church urges, but does not require, dioceses and bishops to refrain from electing openly gay and lesbian bishops. None have been elected since Bishop Robinson, but the Rev. Tracey Lind, who is a lesbian, is among the candidates to become the new bishop of Chicago.

The church does not have rites of blessing for same-sex unions, but some individual bishops permit blessing ceremonies in their dioceses.

At a February meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, three dozen primates of the Anglican Communion issued the directive on gay bishops and same-sex unions. They also demanded that the Episcopal Church create a parallel leadership structure to serve the conservative minority of Episcopalians who oppose their church’s liberal stance on homosexuality.

Conservative Anglicans hailed the primates’ directive as an affirmation of traditional biblical teachings on homosexuality for the world’s 77 million Anglicans, of whom 2.4 million are Episcopalians.

A month later, Episcopal bishops rejected the parallel structure, saying it would compromise the church’s autonomy. Since then, several more parishes among the 7,700 Episcopal congregations in the United States have left the church and placed themselves under the authority of foreign bishops, mostly in Africa.

Moreover, the provinces of Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda and Uganda, passionate critics of the Episcopal Church, have consecrated conservative American clergy as their bishops in the United States to serve disaffected congregations, a move Episcopal Church leaders view as a violation of the church’s authority.

“There already is a separation,” said the Rev. William Sachs, director of the Center for Reconciliation and Mission at St. Stephen’s Church in Richmond, Va. “The question is, how far does it spread?”

The answer may soon become apparent. Several dissident dioceses, like Quincy, Ill., San Joaquin, Calif., and Pittsburgh, are taking steps to align themselves with a foreign province, should the Episcopal bishops refuse the terms of the directive, said Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, who leads a network of conservatives seeking alternative oversight. Such departures would probably lead to years of litigation over church property, experts said.

Unlike bishops in provinces that are more hierarchical, bishops in the Episcopal Church cannot legislate on behalf of the church, experts said. Only the church’s General Convention can do that, they said, and its next meeting is in 2009.

Still, the bishops could overturn their earlier decision regarding the alternative oversight structure or state that they would categorically refuse to approve the election of openly gay and lesbian clergy members to the episcopate.

Few expect that to happen, and some bishops, including some theological conservatives, take issue with outsiders telling the American church what to do.

“I think they’re pushing us because they want to polarize the issue,” said Bishop Henry Parsley of Alabama, who did not vote for Bishop Robinson’s consecration. “The primates want us to say that we don’t approve public rites of blessing, and we have not done that. They don’t want us to approve gay bishops in committed relationships, and the 2006 general convention resolution makes that unlikely. Basically, what I’m saying is that what they are asking is essentially already the case.” If the bishops take such a position, that would amount to a rejection of the directive. Archbishop Williams would “have a hard time carrying on with business as usual,” said the Rev. Ephraim Radner, a leading Episcopal conservative and professor of historical theology at Wycliffe College in Toronto.

The archbishop might then take steps to reduce the Episcopal Church’s role and representation in the communion, Mr. Radner and others said.

Some African primates have also spoken openly about leaving the Anglican Communion, which would create great disarray in their provinces, as not all their bishops or clergy are willing to break with the communion over this issue, Episcopal bishops and experts said.

“This is the most significant meeting in the last three years,” Mr. Radner said. “I’m not saying it will resolve everything, but it will set in motion responses that have been brewing for a long time. It doesn’t matter what happens, there’s going to be response from a whole range of folks in the Anglican Communion that will determine the future of communion.”

    Episcopal Church Faces Deadline on Gay Issues, NYT, 16.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/16/us/16episcopal.html?hp

Teen Bride Describes Her Wedding Day

September 15, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:06 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ST. GEORGE, Utah (AP) -- A former follower of a polygamous-sect leader sobbed on the witness stand Friday as she described the terror and despair she felt on the eve of her wedding at age 14, and said she became intensely depressed after having sex. ''I kept thinking I felt like I was getting ready for death,'' she testified on the second day of the trial of Warren Jeffs, leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

Jeffs is charged with two felony counts of rape as an accomplice. Prosecutors contend he used his religious authority to coerce the ceremonial marriage and pressure the teen bride to have sex with her 19-year-old cousin against her objections.

In her testimony Friday, the woman, now 21, said she was shocked when she learned she had been selected for the marriage by Rulon Jeffs, Warren Jeffs' father, the church prophet at the time who is now dead. The woman said she pleaded with Rulon Jeffs to delay the marriage until she turned 16 or to be given to another man.

Her efforts to avoid the union failed, said the woman, who is not being identified by The Associated Press because she is alleging sexual assault. She testified that Warren Jeffs told her: ''Your heart is in the wrong place; this is what the prophet wants you to do.''

The marriage took place on April 23, 2001, in a motel in Caliente, Nev., owned by FLDS members. Describing her emotions during the wedding ceremony, the woman said: ''Trapped. Extremely overwhelmed. Immense pressure.''

She said she hung her head and cried in despair when pressed by Jeffs to say ''I do'' and had to be coaxed to kiss her new husband.

Jeffs then commanded the new couple to ''go forth and multiply and replenish the Earth with good priesthood children,'' she testified.

In the FLDS community, marriage and motherhood are considered the highest achievements for women, who pray to be prepared to marry and follow a worthy man from a young age. But girls receive no information about their bodies, sexual relations or procreation, the woman testified, and she said she didn't even know sex was the means by which women had babies.

Married for at least a month before they had intercourse, the woman said her husband told her it was ''time for you to be a wife and do your duty.''

''My entire body was shaking. I was so scared,'' she testified. ''He just laid me on the bed and had sex.''

Afterward, she slipped into the bathroom, where she downed two bottles of over-the-counter pain reliever and curled up on the floor, she said.

''The only thing I wanted to do was die. I just wanted to die,'' she said. She did not elaborate, but said she later threw up the medicine.

The woman said she went to Jeffs to tell him she didn't like being touched and pleaded to be released from the marriage. Denied a divorce, the woman said she became extremely depressed.

The woman finally left her marriage and was forced out of the FLDS community in November in 2004 after she became pregnant with another man's child.

Jeffs, 51, has led the FLDS church since 2002. Followers see him as a prophet who communicates with God and holds dominion over their salvation; ex-church members say he reigns with an iron fist, demanding perfect obedience from followers.

Jeffs was a fugitive for nearly two years and was on the FBI's Most Wanted list when he was arrested during a traffic stop outside Las Vegas in August 2006. If convicted, he could spend the rest of his life in prison.

Jeffs is not charged with being a polygamist, and the three-year marriage between the cousins was monogamous. Still, polygamy casts a shadow over the case.

Polygamy advocates have long contended that the freedom to practice plural marriage as part of their religion is a civil rights matter. Members of FLDS, which broke away from the Mormon church, believe polygamy brings exaltation in heaven.

The Mormon church disavowed polygamy in 1890 and excommunicates members found to be practicing plural marriage.

    Teen Bride Describes Her Wedding Day, NYT, 15.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Polygamist-Leader.html

Amish Share Massacre Survivors' Stories

September 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 2:02 p.m. ET
The New York Times

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) -- The most severely wounded survivor of last year's Amish schoolhouse massacre uses a wheelchair and must be fed through a tube, but has shown slow, steady progress since the shootings, according to a statement Wednesday.

As the anniversary of the Oct. 2 massacre nears, the committee formed to handle donations to the community issued a detailed statement on how the Amish have fared since the shootings that left five girls dead and five others injured, saying the community's strength has helped the families cope.

''To the casual observer 'life goes on' in Nickel Mines, with its daily and seasonal demands of work, school, births, family and church, but for the families each day brings with it the pain, grief and questions that remind them of their loss,'' the group wrote.

The group also confirmed that no public memorial events are planned on the anniversary, but the school that was built to replace the scene of the shooting will be closed for the day.

Four of the five injured girls have been in school since December. The fifth, Rosanna King, who was 6 at the time of the shootings at the West Nickel Mines Amish School, suffered a severe head injury and is unable to talk, uses a reclining wheelchair and must be fed by a tube.

Her family said in the statement that she ''smiles a lot, big smiles'' and recognizes family members.

A second severely injured victim recently underwent reconstructive surgery to improve her shoulder and arm. A third girl still suffers vision problems from a head wound.

The committee said that reaching out to others who have endured similar tragedies has also been part of the healing. It disclosed that family members recently traveled to Blacksburg, Va., to meet with Virginia Tech officials and families affected by that deadly school shooting and to deliver a ''comfort quilt.''

The West Nickel Mines Amish School was torn down in the wake of the shootings by gunman Charles C. Roberts IV, who killed himself as police closed in.

Roberts, a 32-year-old father of three who lived about a mile away, tied up the girls and shot them after ordering the boys and adults to leave the school. Investigators found evidence he was haunted by his infant daughter's death in 1997 and by an uncorroborated memory of having molested young female relatives 20 years earlier.

The school building's replacement, New Hope Amish School, was built with added security features in a safer location a mile away.

''The children are reported to be enjoying their classes, but they keenly miss the girls who died,'' the committee said.

    Amish Share Massacre Survivors' Stories, NYT, 12.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Amish-School-Shooting.html

Jury Consulted the Bible, but Death Sentence Stands

September 11, 2007
The New York Times
By ADAM LIPTAK

The federal appeals court in San Francisco yesterday upheld a death sentence from a jury that had consulted the Bible’s teachings on capital punishment.

In a second decision on the role of religion in the criminal justice system, the same court ruled Friday that requiring a former prisoner on parole to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous violated the First Amendment’s ban on government establishment of religion.

In the capital case, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit split 9 to 6 on the question of whether notes including Bible verses prepared by the jury’s foreman and used during sentencing deliberations required reversal of the death sentence imposed on Stevie L. Fields in 1979.

Mr. Fields, on parole after serving time for manslaughter, committed a series of rapes, kidnappings and robberies, and murdered Rosemary Cobbs, a student librarian at the University of Southern California.

After the jury convicted Mr. Fields and while it was deliberating his sentence, the foreman, Rodney White, conducted outside research, consulting several reference works and preparing a list of pros and cons on the death penalty that he shared with fellow jurors. On the pro side, he quoted passages from the Bible, including this one from Exodus: “He that smiteth a man, so that he dies, shall surely be put to death.”

Judge Pamela Ann Rymer, writing for the majority, said there was no need to decide whether there had been juror misconduct, “because even assuming there was, we are persuaded that White’s notes had no substantial and injurious effect or influence.”

In dissent, Judge Marsha S. Berzon said there was “no doubt that White engaged in unconstitutional misconduct by injecting his overnight biblical research into the deliberations.” Judge Ronald M. Gould, also dissenting, said the majority had endorsed “a theocratic jury room” in which jurors consider “the death penalty in light of Scripture.”

In Friday’s decision, a unanimous three-judge panel of the court ruled that a parole officer in Hawaii who ordered a methamphetamine addict on parole to attend meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous/Narcotics Anonymous could be sued by the addict’s estate for violating his constitutional rights.

The case was brought by Ricky K. Inouye, who was released on parole in 2000 after serving time for drug crimes. His parole officer, Mark Nanamori, ordered him to attend A.A. meetings. Mr. Inouye, a Buddhist, refused. Partly as a result, he was returned to prison.

That violated the First Amendment, the panel ruled. “While we in no way denigrate the fine work of A.A./N.A., attendance in their programs may not be coerced by the state,” wrote Judge Berzon, who was also one of the dissenting judges in yesterday’s decision.

Most other courts that have considered the question of whether prisoners and parolees may be compelled to attend A.A. meetings have come to the same conclusion, usually relying on the program’s invocation of a “higher power.”

A member of the staff of Alcoholics Anonymous’s general service office in New York said the organization took no position on the ruling. “We do say in our literature that we are not a religious program, that we’re not religious but spiritual,” the staff member said, declining to give his full name for publication.

Judge Berzon was joined in the decision by Judge David R. Thompson. Judge Richard C. Tallman issued a concurring opinion of his own.

    Jury Consulted the Bible, but Death Sentence Stands, NYT, 11.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/11/us/11alcohol.html

FACTBOX: Five facts about U.S. polygamists

Tue Sep 11, 2007
10:11AM EDT
Reuters

(Reuters) - The self-proclaimed "prophet" of a polygamous clan in an isolated desert enclave at the border of Utah and Arizona goes on trial this week in St. George, Utah, accused of arranging a marriage between an unwilling 14-year-old girl and her cousin.

Warren Jeffs, the self-described "prophet" of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, or FLDS, spent 15 months as a fugitive and on the FBI's Most Wanted list before his arrest in August 2006.

He could face up to life in prison for each of his two felony charges of being an accomplice to rape. He has pleaded not guilty.

Polygamy, the practice of so-called "plural" marriage subscribed to by up to 37,000 in the U.S. intermountain West, is at the center of the trial.

Following are five facts on modern U.S. polygamists and the FLDS, the largest-known U.S. polygamist sect:

* The FLDS is a break-away sect from the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon faith is formally known. The Mormon faith allowed polygamy before the Civil War and then banned it in 1890 when the federal government threatened to deny statehood to Utah.

* In Utah today, polygamy is a third-degree felony punishable by up to five years in prison, but the law is rarely enforced because local authorities say prosecuting "plural" marriages is impractical. Instead, authorities in Utah and Arizona have been targeting sex crimes, welfare and tax fraud and domestic violence within polygamous communities.

* The founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, took at least two dozen wives, say historians. His successor, Brigham Young, had about 20.

* Today, the Mormon church rejects polygamy, despite the practice's inclusion in its early history. Similarly, most non-FLDS polygamists renounce the practice of underage brides and say their "plural" marriages are between consenting adults.

* Members of the FLDS are estimated to number about 7,500 and live in the twin towns of Hildale, Utah and Colorado City, Arizona, an isolated community wary of outsiders. FLDS members believe the highest stages of heaven can be attained only after a man takes three wives, while women are brought up to be subservient. Those who disagree with the prophet are labeled "apostates" and are exiled.

    FACTBOX: Five facts about U.S. polygamists, R, 11.9.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN1036301920070911

Prisons Purging Books on Faith

From Libraries

September 10, 2007
The New York Times
By LAURIE GOODSTEIN

Behind the walls of federal prisons nationwide, chaplains have been quietly carrying out a systematic purge of religious books and materials that were once available to prisoners in chapel libraries.

The chaplains were directed by the Bureau of Prisons to clear the shelves of any books, tapes, CDs and videos that are not on a list of approved resources. In some prisons, the chaplains have recently dismantled libraries that had thousands of texts collected over decades, bought by the prisons, or donated by churches and religious groups.

Some inmates are outraged. Two of them, a Christian and an Orthodox Jew, in a federal prison camp in upstate New York, filed a class-action lawsuit last month claiming the bureau’s actions violate their rights to the free exercise of religion as guaranteed by the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.

Traci Billingsley, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Prisons, said the agency was acting in response to a 2004 report by the Office of the Inspector General in the Justice Department. The report recommended steps that prisons should take, in light of the Sept. 11 attacks, to avoid becoming recruiting grounds for militant Islamic and other religious groups. The bureau, an agency of the Justice Department, defended its effort, which it calls the Standardized Chapel Library Project, as a way of barring access to materials that could, in its words, “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Ms. Billingsley said, “We really wanted consistently available information for all religious groups to assure reliable teachings as determined by reliable subject experts.”

But prison chaplains, and groups that minister to prisoners, say that an administration that put stock in religion-based approaches to social problems has effectively blocked prisoners’ access to religious and spiritual materials — all in the name of preventing terrorism.

“It’s swatting a fly with a sledgehammer,” said Mark Earley, president of Prison Fellowship, a Christian group. “There’s no need to get rid of literally hundreds of thousands of books that are fine simply because you have a problem with an isolated book or piece of literature that presents extremism.”

The Bureau of Prisons said it relied on experts to produce lists of up to 150 book titles and 150 multimedia resources for each of 20 religions or religious categories — everything from Bahaism to Yoruba. The lists will be expanded in October, and there will be occasional updates, Ms. Billingsley said. Prayer books and other worship materials are not affected by this process.

The lists are broad, but reveal eccentricities and omissions. There are nine titles by C. S. Lewis, for example, and none from the theologians Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Barth and Cardinal Avery Dulles, and the influential pastor Robert H. Schuller.

The identities of the bureau’s experts have not been made public, Ms. Billingsley said, but they include chaplains and scholars in seminaries and at the American Academy of Religion. Academy staff members said their organization had met with prison chaplains in the past but was not consulted on this effort, though it is possible that scholars who are academy members were involved.

The bureau has not provided additional money to prisons to buy the books on the lists, so in some prisons, after the shelves were cleared of books not on the lists, few remained.

A chaplain who has worked more than 15 years in the prison system, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he is a bureau employee, said: “At some of the penitentiaries, guys have been studying and reading for 20 years, and now they are told that this material doesn’t meet some kind of criteria. It doesn’t make sense to them. They’re asking, ‘Why are our tapes being taken, why our books being taken?’ ”

Of the lists, he said, “Many of the chaplains I’ve spoken to say these are not the things they would have picked.”

The effort is unnecessary, the chaplain said, because chaplains routinely reject any materials that incite violence or disparage, and donated materials already had to be approved by prison officials. Prisoners can buy religious books, he added, but few have much money to spend.

Religious groups that work with prisoners have privately been writing letters about their concerns to bureau officials. Would it not be simpler, they asked the bureau, to produce a list of forbidden titles? But the bureau did that last year, when it instructed the prisons to remove all materials by nine publishers — some Muslim, some Christian.

The plan to standardize the libraries first became public in May when several inmates, including a Muslim convert, at the Federal Prison Camp in Otisville, N.Y., about 75 miles northwest of Manhattan, filed a lawsuit acting as their own lawyers. Later, lawyers at the New York firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison took on the case pro bono. They refiled it on Aug. 21 in the Federal District Court for the Southern District of New York.

“Otisville had a very extensive library of Jewish religious books, many of them donated,” said David Zwiebel, executive vice president for government and public affairs for Agudath Israel of America, an Orthodox Jewish group. “It was decimated. Three-quarters of the Jewish books were taken off the shelves.”

Mr. Zwiebel asked, “Since when does the government, even with the assistance of chaplains, decide which are the most basic books in terms of religious study and practice?”

The lawsuit raises serious First Amendment concerns, said Douglas Laycock, a professor of law at the University of Michigan Law School, but he added that it was not a slam-dunk case.

“Government does have a legitimate interest to screen out things that tend to incite violence in prisons,” Mr. Laycock said. “But once they say, ‘We’re going to pick 150 good books for your religion, and that’s all you get,’ the criteria has become more than just inciting violence. They’re picking out what is accessible religious teaching for prisoners, and the government can’t do that without a compelling justification. Here the justification is, the government is too busy to look at all the books, so they’re going to make their own preferred list to save a little time, a little money.”

The lists have not been made public by the bureau, but were made available to The Times by a critic of the bureau’s project. In some cases, the lists indicate their authors’ preferences. For example, more than 80 of the 120 titles on the list for Judaism are from the same Orthodox publishing house. A Catholic scholar and an evangelical Christian scholar who looked over some of the lists were baffled at the selections.

Timothy Larsen, who holds the Carolyn and Fred McManis Chair of Christian Thought at Wheaton College, an evangelical school, looked over lists for “Other Christian” and “General Spirituality.”

“There are some well-chosen things in here,” Professor Larsen said. “I’m particularly glad that Dietrich Bonhoeffer is there. If I was in prison I would want to read Dietrich Bonhoeffer.” But he continued, “There’s a lot about it that’s weird.” The lists “show a bias toward evangelical popularism and Calvinism,” he said, and lacked materials from early church fathers, liberal theologians and major Protestant denominations.

The Rev. Richard P. McBrien, professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame (who edited “The HarperCollins Encyclopedia of Catholicism,” which did make the list), said the Catholic list had some glaring omissions, few spiritual classics and many authors he had never heard of.

“I would be completely sympathetic with Catholic chaplains in federal prisons if they’re complaining that this list is inhibiting,” he said, “because I know they have useful books that are not on this list.”

    Prisons Purging Books on Faith From Libraries, NYT, 10.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/us/10prison.html?hp

In Polygamy Country, Old Divisions Are Fading

September 10, 2007
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

ST. GEORGE, Utah, Sept. 7 — For generations of rural religious polygamists like those Warren S. Jeffs once led, this was the big town and the citadel of sin all in one.

St. George, founded on the southern route to California in wagon train days, was the place to buy groceries or spend an occasional night out. But it was also the local fortress of mainstream Mormonism, which is vehement in its opposition to polygamy.

The polygamists, in turn, looked down on Mormons as apostates who lost their way more than 100 years ago by denouncing polygamy, and thus the teachings of the church’s founder, Joseph Smith, in a political compromise to achieve statehood for Utah.

Now Mr. Jeffs is being tried on felony charges that he was an accomplice to rape in arranging polygamous marriages between under-age girls and older men, and the jury is being drawn from a pool of St. George residents.

The trial is expected to throw a sharp light on polygamy and on the culture of Mr. Jeffs’s group in particular, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which is estimated to number about 10,000 people throughout the West. Jury selection began Friday, and Mr. Jeffs, 51, could face life in prison if convicted.

The old and bitter history of intra-Mormon relations hangs over everything here. But many people said the divisions were not what they once had been. Even as the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as the Mormon Church is known, has cracked down on polygamy in recent years, an intermingling of cultures has begun to bubble up here, opening hearts and minds in greater understanding, if not quite tolerance.

Economics, not religion, is driving the change.

St. George and Washington County have exploded with growth over the last 10 years, as retirement and tourism melded with the draw of Las Vegas, about two hours away. For years, the county has ranked near the top of the nation in its rate of expansion.

In the polygamist communities of Hildale, Utah, and Colorado City, Ariz., which Mr. Jeffs presided over as a prophet of God, according to his followers, family-based construction companies dominate business. St. George, about 35 miles away, grew and changed, drawing more non-Mormons than ever before, and polygamist builders were often the ones framing rows of new homes and pouring concrete foundations.

And so the two sides got to know each other better. Some people here said that they hated what they had read about Mr. Jeffs, but that they had come to like some of the polygamists they had met.

“Awesome workers,” said Aaron Svedin, who works in quality control in a vitamin manufacturing plant in St. George where three young men from polygamist families have recently been hired. The first started as a mechanic, and Mr. Svedin, a member of the Mormon Church, said the other two were hired because the first man worked out so well.

Mr. Svedin, 38, said he thought he could be fair in judging Mr. Jeffs if he had been called as a juror, partly because he had gained a broader sense of the people in Mr. Jeffs’s world.

“I hope Warren Jeffs gets a fair shot,” Mr. Svedin said.

Few people in fundamentalist polygamy communities will talk to a reporter, let alone be interviewed. In Centennial Park, Ariz., about an hour southeast of St. George, one construction-business owner agreed to speak on the condition of anonymity. He said that he had done jobs in St. George and that the town was a different place now.

“St. George had to grow up,” the man said. “They needed the help as they grew, and capitalism takes over very fast.”

Thousands of newcomers to St. George, Mormon or not, have also diluted the community’s opposition to polygamy in ways that could potentially affect the jury, residents said.

Amber Clark, 28, an Army veteran who moved here from California about two months ago and who described herself as an active Mormon, said she thought polygamists should be left alone, so long as no one was under age or coerced into marriage.

“I’m liberal in that respect,” Ms. Clark said. “If it’s legal in some states for people of the same sex to get married, why is it not legal to marry more than one wife?”

Some polygamist communities are responding to the new environment as well.

Earlier this year, for example, a cafe called the Merry Wives opened in Hildale, acknowledging plural marriage, something that probably would not have happened as recently as a year or two ago, said the manager, Charise Dutson.

A mural on the restaurant wall depicts three women working together in an idyllic, sun-drenched garden. Waitresses in long skirts serve breakfast. Most of the business comes from curious travelers on the highway, said Ms. Dutson, 35, but locals have increasingly warmed to the idea that it is acceptable not to fear outsiders so much.

“We are who we are,” Ms. Dutson said. “We’re proud of our heritage.”

The increasing contact is also building confidence that life after Mr. Jeffs, no matter what happens at the trial, will be different.

Paul Hanson, who lives in a fundamentalist community about an hour from St. George and works for a building products company, said he had come to understand that the Mormon splinter groups and the Mormon Church, based in Salt Lake City, shared the same flaw: they want their members to think a certain way.

“The reason I haven’t joined any of the groups, even the Mormon Church, is that there’s not enough freedom,” Mr. Hanson said. “You can’t express your own opinions.”

    In Polygamy Country, Old Divisions Are Fading, NYT, 10.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/10/us/10jeffs.html

Boys Cast Out by Polygamists Find Help

September 9, 2007
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

ST. GEORGE, Utah — Woodrow Johnson was 15, and by the rules of the polygamous sect in which his family lived, he had a vice that could condemn them to hell: He liked to watch movies.

When his parents discovered his secret stash of DVDs, including the “Die Hard” series and comedies, they burned them and gave him an ultimatum. Stop watching movies, they said, or leave the family and church for good.

With television and the Internet also banned as wicked, along with short-sleeve shirts — a sign of immodesty — and staring at girls, let alone dating them, Woodrow made the wrenching decision to go. And so 10 months ago, with only a seventh-grade education and a suitcase of clothes, he was thrown into an unfamiliar world he had been taught to fear.

Over the last six years, hundreds of teenage boys have been expelled or felt compelled to leave the polygamous settlement that straddles Colorado City, Ariz., and Hildale, Utah.

Disobedience is usually the reason given for expulsion, but former sect members and state legal officials say the exodus of males — the expulsion of girls is rarer — also remedies a huge imbalance in the marriage market. Members of the sect believe that to reach eternal salvation, men are supposed to have at least three wives.

State officials say efforts to help them with shelter, foster care or other services have been frustrated by the boys’ distrust of government and fear of getting their parents into trouble.

But help for the teenagers is improving. In St. George, a nearby city where many of them wind up, two private groups, with state aid, have opened the first residence and center for banished boys. It will offer psychological counseling and advice on things they never learned, like how to write a check or ask a girl out politely, as well as a transitional home for eight who will attend school and work part time.

The polygamous settlement is largely controlled by the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and allies of its jailed prophet, Warren S. Jeffs, who is about to stand trial on charges of sexual exploitation.

Now 16, living with a sympathetic aunt and uncle, Woodrow is one of the luckier boys, though he rarely sees his parents and says, plaintively, “I really miss them.” Some boys end up in unsupervised group rentals they call “butt huts” because of the crowded sleeping, while others live in cars or end up in jail.

Utah officials say they realized the extent of the problem only about four years ago, when they learned that hundreds of boys from the sect were roaming on their own and often in distress. While most have construction skills to help earn a living, few have more than a junior high education.

“The house is a milestone, but it’s just a start,” said Paul Murphy, director of communications and policy for the Utah attorney general’s office who has worked with state and private agencies to muster help. “We’re finally reaching out, but it’s been painfully slow.”

The church settlement is essentially one town crossing the border, a jumble of walled compounds, trailers and farm fields at the base of spectacular red bluffs. Nearly all of the 6,000 residents follow the dictates of Mr. Jeffs, who they believe speaks for God; women wear ankle-length dresses, and children are taught to run away from outsiders.

Mr. Jeffs, 51, is in the Purgatory jail in southern Utah, his trial scheduled to start on Sept. 10 on charges of being an accomplice to rape, for his role in forcing a 14-year-old girl to marry an older cousin. He faces several other sex-related charges in Arizona.

But his allies still control the church, former members say, and teenage boys continue to trickle out of the community, by force or by choice.

“In part it’s an issue of control,” Mr. Murphy said of the harsh rules. But underlying the expulsions, he added, is a mathematical reality. “If you’re going to have plural marriage, you need fewer men,” he said.

Andrew Chatwin, 39, the uncle who took Woodrow in, left the sect 10 years ago. He explained how the expulsions usually happen: “The leaders tell the parents they must stop this kid who is disobeying the faith and Warren Jeffs. So the parents kick him out because otherwise the father could have his wives and whole family taken away.”

The sect, which has smaller outposts in other states, has no ties to the mainstream Mormon church, which outlaws polygamy.

Church leaders refuse to speak to the press, and the mayors of Colorado City and Hildale both declined to comment. Mr. Jeffs’s defense lawyer did not respond to calls or e-mail messages.

With Mr. Jeffs and other polygamists, the authorities in Utah and Arizona have prosecuted sexual crimes, but they have not pursued cases involving the neglect of teenagers, in part, Mr. Murphy said, because the boys invariably refuse to testify.

In April, six banished teenagers who brought what became known as the lost boys suit against church leaders agreed to a settlement in which $250,000 will be used to promote education and emergency support for expelled youths. The money will be raised through selling some of the church’s large property holdings, now in receivership because church officials never appeared in court to defend against this lawsuit and others. The court-appointed agent now controlling the properties also gave each of the plaintiffs three acres of church land.

One plaintiff was Richard Gilbert, now 22. He had to leave Colorado City at 16, he said, when he refused Mr. Jeffs’s order to drop out of the public high school.

“I absolutely believed I was going to hell,” Mr. Gilbert recalled.

For a time, Mr. Gilbert lived in the nearby town of Hurricane, where five boys rented a two-bedroom apartment but had as many as 19 sleeping over. Some boys, he said, had literally been dropped off with nothing but the clothes on their backs.

“A lot of guys go off the deep end,” Mr. Gilbert said. “For me, it meant a ton of alcohol and partying.”

Now he works in construction, has been married for a year and has a child.

Mr. Gilbert estimates that 100 boys from his school class, or 70 percent of them, have been expelled or left on their own accord; there is no way to verify the numbers. “There are a lot of broken-hearted parents, but you question this decision at the risk of your own salvation,” Mr. Gilbert said.

The problem of surplus males worsened in the 1990s when the late prophet Rulon Jeffs, Warren Jeffs’s father, took on dozens of young wives — picking the prettiest, most talented girls, said DeLoy Bateman, a high school teacher who watched it happen.

Warren Jeffs, taking the mantle after his father’s death in 2002, adopted most of his father’s wives and married others, and also began assigning more wives to his trusted church leaders, former members say. Forced departures increased.

Shannon Price, director of the Diversity Foundation, an educational nonprofit group near Salt Lake City, estimates that 500 to 1,000 teenage boys and young men have left Mr. Jeffs’s sect in the last six years, based on the hundreds who have contacted her group and another nonprofit, New Frontiers for Families.

Established by Dan Fischer, a wealthy former sect member, the Diversity Foundation has been a rare source of aid for ejected boys — and girls who have left the sect to avoid polygamy — helping many go to high school and college and raising public awareness about their plight.

The new venture, the eight-bedroom house in St. George, is being run by the two nonprofits with private grants and $95,000 from the Utah Legislature.

The one thing nearly all the boys share is a strong work ethic and experience in construction. But many, moving from total control to total freedom, get in trouble with drugs, alcohol and crime.

“These are kids, and they still need a connection with adults who can nurture them,” said Michelle Benward, clinical director of New Frontiers for Families.

A 21-year-old nicknamed Marc, who is on probation for selling cocaine, has straightened out and now works as a mentor to boys leaving the sect. Marc refused to give his name because he wants to preserve relations with his father, who still believes in Mr. Jeffs despite having been expelled himself. Marc described how abruptly his world shattered in 2004, when he was 17.

“I was a good boy, working 13-hour days,” he said. But he had been raising questions, especially after his father’s four wives were assigned to other husbands. Then Marc got caught driving to a nearby town to watch a movie.

One evening as he was making a chicken sandwich, he recalled, “My two older brothers came and said that because I’d gone to the movies, Warren said I’m out.”

“I went into my bedroom and my mother was already packing my things, and crying,” he said. “That night they drove me to a relative’s home in St. George.”

Boys Cast Out by Polygamists Find Help, NYT, 9.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/09/us/09polygamy.html