Faith

Following up on Christianism, Andrew Sullivan responds to a readers email here. An excerpt:

I'm not arguing that faith should have no role in political discourse. Someone's faith will affect her politics. My faith informs my own positions on torture, the death penalty, gay dignity, the Iraq war, and so on. But in the political sphere, mere recourse to religious authority is insufficient, because, by definition, it cannot persuade those of a different faith or no faith at all. And so religious doctrines need to be translated into moral arguments, applicable to any citizen with good will and an open mind. When Tom DeLay, at a Republican gathering, invokes Christ as his ally; or when the Catholic hierarchy comes close to barring votes for Democrats; or when Jesse Jackson uses the pulpit to garner Democratic votes, they have crossed an important line. It's important to defend that line - for the sake of politics, and for the sake of faith.

The way I say it is that I'm glad that I live in a secular society rather than a theocracy because I'm free to pursue the faith that I choose in a secular society while a theocracy might try to enforce on me a faith that I don't share. Sullivan has also responded to some responses here Following up on corporate America backing gay rights, here's a Fortune/CNNMoney article by Marc Gunther with more detail about ExxonMobil:

For the most part, ExxonMobil has set an unfriendly tone when it comes to gays. When Exxon merged with Mobil in 1999, the merged company rescinded Mobil's anti-discrimination policy, which referred to sexual orientation, and chose not to extend Mobil's domestic partner benefits to new employees. (Former Mobil workers continue to get domestic partner benefits.) Its actions have put ExxonMobil is out of step with the biggest public companies. All but two companies in the FORTUNE 100- Plains All American Pipeline, an energy firm based in Houston, is the other exception-prohibit discrimination against gays. So do at least 16 states and the District of Columbia. Meanwhile, 78 of the Fortune 100 offer health and other benefits to the same-sex partners of their employees. Among them are oil companies BP America, Chevron and Shell... An ExxonMobil spokesman declined, via e-mail, to discuss the issue. Exxon says in its proxy statement that the company "has zero-tolerance discrimination and harassment policies that are comprehensive in nature, rigorously enforced, and applicable to all employees." It goes on to say that those policies prohibit "discrimination or harassment for any reason, including sexual orientation." You've got to wonder. If ExxonMobil will tell its shareholders that it opposes discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, why won't it put that into its employment policy to tell its workers the same thing?

From an AP article on MSNBC.com:

America may be the world's superpower, but its survival rate for newborn babies ranks near the bottom among modern nations, better only than Latvia. Among 33 industrialized nations, the United States is tied with Hungary, Malta, Poland and Slovakia with a death rate of nearly 5 per 1,000 babies, according to a new report. Latvia's rate is 6 per 1,000. "We are the wealthiest country in the world, but there are still pockets of our population who are not getting the health care they need," said Mary Beth Powers, a reproductive health adviser for the U.S.-based Save the Children, which compiled the rankings based on health data from countries and agencies worldwide. The U.S. ranking is driven partly by racial and income health care disparities. Among U.S. blacks, there are 9 deaths per 1,000 live births, closer to rates in developing nations than to those in the industrialized world... In the analysis of global infant mortality, Japan had the lowest newborn death rate, 1.8 per 1,000 and four countries tied for second place with 2 per 1,000 - the Czech Republic, Finland, Iceland and Norway. Still, it's the impoverished nations that feel the full brunt of infant mortality, since they account for 99 percent of the 4 million annual deaths of babies in their first month. Only about 16,000 of those are in the United States, according to Save the Children. The highest rates globally were in Africa and South Asia. With a newborn death rate of 65 out of 1,000 live births, Liberia ranked the worst.

The Daily Kos asks the provocative question: Do "Christian Nations" Let Their Newborns Die?:

Somehow I sense this issue will not get the traction the overheated fetus debate gets with the fundamentalist crowd. There's just something not quite as alluring about discussing health care provisions for pregnant moms and their offspring compared with telling your neighbor what to do with her womb... So are we to expect Falwell, Robertson and Dobson to froth up the political waters on behalf of single-payer health insurance and longer paid leaves from the workplace? I'm not holding my breath. The well-being of mothers fares poorly as well, according to the report, with the U.S. tied for last place among industrial nations on indicators such as "mortality risks and contraception use." Perhaps it's time for Mullah Dobson to live up to his organization's name and focus on the family - which as he endlessly wants to remind us, means state intervention in the mother-child reproduction wars. It's hard to see the logic in how a soul that's stainless when it's enwombed does not deserve the best resources of a wealthy nation to make sure the physical body that accompanies it into life is healthy.

Right on.

Andrew Sullivan's essay on "Christianism" is getting quite a bit of mileage, as it should. I think it's a good one. He highlights a variety of perspectives that are likely uncomfortable with the "religious right" and draws a parallel between Muslim/Islamist and Christian/Christianist. A few excerpts:

The number of Christians misrepresented by the Christian right is many. There are evangelical Protestants who believe strongly that Christianity should not get too close to the corrupting allure of government power. There are lay Catholics who, while personally devout, are socially liberal on issues like contraception, gay rights, women's equality and a multi-faith society. There are very orthodox believers who nonetheless respect the freedom and conscience of others as part of their core understanding of what being a Christian is. They have no problem living next to an atheist or a gay couple or a single mother or people whose views on the meaning of life are utterly alien to them--and respecting their neighbors' choices. That doesn't threaten their faith. Sometimes the contrast helps them understand their own faith better. And there are those who simply believe that, by definition, God is unknowable to our limited, fallible human minds and souls. If God is ultimately unknowable, then how can we be so certain of what God's real position is on, say, the fate of Terri Schiavo? Or the morality of contraception? Or the role of women? Or the love of a gay couple? Also, faith for many of us is interwoven with doubt, a doubt that can strengthen faith and give it perspective and shadow. That doubt means having great humility in the face of God and an enormous reluctance to impose one's beliefs, through civil law, on anyone else... What to do about it? The worst response, I think, would be to construct something called the religious left. Many of us who are Christians and not supportive of the religious right are not on the left either. In fact, we are opposed to any politicization of the Gospels by any party, Democratic or Republican, by partisan black churches or partisan white ones. "My kingdom is not of this world," Jesus insisted. What part of that do we not understand?... I mean merely by the term Christianist the view that religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda. It is the belief that religion dictates politics and that politics should dictate the laws for everyone, Christian and non-Christian alike. That's what I dissent from, and I dissent from it as a Christian. I dissent from the political pollution of sincere, personal faith. I dissent most strongly from the attempt to argue that one party represents God and that the other doesn't. I dissent from having my faith co-opted and wielded by people whose politics I do not share and whose intolerance I abhor. The word Christian belongs to no political party. It's time the quiet majority of believers took it back.

Sullivan's viewpoint is complementary to that of Gary Wills (see earlier blog entry here), though Sullivan's is, I think, more satisfying as it seems to come from a sincere believer while Wills' has more of a taste of a professor's academic smugness. There's a follow-up to the Christianist essay here. And Hugh Hewitt takes offense here.

From a cnet article of the same name by Greg Sandoval:

Companies such as Sony, Panasonic, Avid and Hitachi are helping churches spread the gospel as part of an effort to cash in on an exploding market known as "house of worship technology." In recent years, members of the clergy have begun competing with MTV, video games and the Internet by jazzing up sermons with image magnification systems and large-screen video displays, a la Apple Computer's Steve Jobs at a product launch. The trend has evolved, and churches now are Webcasting to distant parishioners with sophisticated multicamera operations and pumping up the volume inside worship areas with state-of-the-art sound systems... Perhaps America's best example of the tech-savvy house of worship is the Houston-based Lakewood Church, which last year recorded a weekly attendance of 30,000. Pastor Joel Osteen needed the Compaq Center, a former basketball arena that was once home of the National Basketball Association's Houston Rockets, to serve as his chapel. Osteen employs three massive video-display screens to project his image to people sitting in the nosebleed seats. Illuminating the walls and the giant globe spinning behind Osteen's pulpit are Altman Micro Strips, strip lights that use a range of tungsten halogen lamps to create different lighting effects. Lakewood is also planning a migration to HDTV and recently bought eight high-definition cameras from Sony. The dollar value on Lakewood's video and production facilities is about $4 million, according to CIOinsight.com. At Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Ill., the technology budget is $1 million a year out of a total annual budget of $27 million, CIOinsight.com reported.

Via dvorak.org: In the spirit of understanding how some folks view Christianity, here's a short satirical film in the style of Tarantino (profanity warning):

You can see their point. If you imagine some average Joe demanding worship, it seems quite silly since no average Joe would be worthy. Of course, Christians don't worship any old average Joe.