religion

By TERRY MATTINGLY
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, June 06, 2007

When it comes to covering religion news, the mainstream American press is a vast right-wing conspiracy that consistently commits sins of omission against religious liberals.

No, wait, honest.

By TERRY MATTINGLY
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, May 30, 2007

When it comes to who fills the pews, every Sunday is Mother's Day in most mainstream American churches.

And what about Father's Day? That can be a touchy subject for pastors in an era in which men who religiously avoid church outnumber active churchmen roughly three to one.

By TERRY MATTINGLY
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, May 16, 2007

The atmosphere was tense as the handsome presidential candidate from Massachusetts rose to address an audience packed with Protestant conservatives that he knew had serious doubts about the state of his soul.

We're not talking about Mitt Romney's recent trip to Virginia Beach to deliver the commencement address at Regent University. For political insiders, the only controversy in that speech was when he said, "I want to offer my sincere thanks to Dr. Pat Robertson for extending me the honor of addressing you today."

No, the daring campaign address that politicos are still discussing was the one John F. Kennedy delivered in 1960 to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association, the speech in which he erected a high wall of separation between his public political life and his private Catholic faith.

"I believe in an America," said Kennedy, "that is officially neither Catholic, Protestant nor Jewish -- where no public official either requests or accepts instructions on public policy from the pope, the National Council of Churches or any other ecclesiastical source -- where no religious body seeks to impose its will directly or indirectly upon the general populace or the public acts of its officials -- and where religious liberty is so indivisible that an act against one church is treated as an act against all.

"For, while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew -- or a Quaker -- or a Unitarian -- or a Baptist."

Or a Mormon? That's the question facing legions of evangelicals as they gird their loins for battle in the Bible Belt political primaries. They are waiting to see if Romney will publicly address their concerns about his deep Mormon faith.

That didn't happen at Regent, where the candidate stuck to marriage, parenting, public service and positive thinking. There was one clear religious reference, when he referred to the April 16 shootings at Virginia Tech.

"We're shocked by the evil of the Virginia Tech shooting," said Romney. "I opened my Bible shortly after I heard of the tragedy. Only a few verses, it seems, after the Fall, we read that Adam and Eve's oldest son killed his younger brother. From the beginning, there has been evil in the world."

Regent was a signpost in Romney's quest to calm evangelical fears, in part because the campus contains the headquarters of Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network -- which addresses Mormonism in its "How Do I Recognize a Cult?" Web-site page. It states, for example, that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a "prosperous, growing organization that has produced many people of exemplary character. But when it comes to spiritual matters, the Mormons are far from the truth."

That passage is mild compared to the incendiary language common among many Christian conservatives. Bill Keller of LivePrayer.com, for example, bluntly states that the teachings of the "Mormon cult are doctrinally and theologically in complete opposition to the Absolute Truth of God's Word. There is no common ground. If Mormonism is true, then the Christian faith is a complete lie."

Mormons do believe that the Old and New Testaments -- as read by traditional Christians -- are packed with errors and that Mormonism is the one true faith. Mormons believe that their president is a living prophet and that faithful mortals, in the next life, can achieve godhood. Thus, Mormons reject or redefine the Trinity, teaching that this world's Father God has both a literal body and a literal wife.

These are not the issues that obsess typical voters, but they are important to many Christian leaders who yield great influence in the public square. The Vatican, for example, refuses to recognize the validity of Mormon baptisms.

"There are valid questions that Romney will have to answer," said veteran religion writer Richard Ostling, co-author of "Mormon America: The Power and the Promise."

"People need to know, 'Is this man going to take orders from Salt Lake City? Are there elements of Mormon theology that will affect public policy?' ... But before he gets to those questions, Romney may have to say, 'We have different doctrines. We have different scriptures. ... We even have different concepts of God.' He has to know that he can't just say, 'We all have the same faith.' That is not going to work."

(Terry Mattingly (www.tmatt.net) is senior fellow for journalism at the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.)

By DAVID YOUNT
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, May 09, 2007

When social commentator Rachel Johnson announced that her daughter was her best friend, the 12-year-old snapped back, "No you're not, you're my mother."

Still, the 41-year old mother persists in acting like her daughter's pal. "I love dancing around the kitchen when I'm cooking," she confesses. I love screeching like a castrato along to her Mika album. I love chatting to her amusing boys/girlfriends. I love watching television with her."

All of which "bring her out in goose bumps," prompting the outburst: "I'm warning you. If you ever, ever do that in front of any of my friends, I swear I. Will. Kill. You. Face it, Mum, you're sad."

With some resignation, Rachel Johnson acknowledges of the mother-daughter relationship that "She is a girl, I am a woman. She is a chick, I am the hen." And the mother wonders, "Why is it that fathers never claim they are best friends with their sons?"Rachel theorizes that "The current generation of parents is full of (1) aging baby boomers and (2) single mothers, and both these sorts of parents are predisposed to treat themselves like the children they should themselves be preparing for adulthood."

Single mother Sarah Ferguson, Duchess of York, actually socializes in public with her daughters as if they were sisters on the prowl for boyfriends.

Then there are mothers who demand not friendship but dependency of their daughters. The novelist A.M. Holmes, abandoned in infancy by her mother, was adopted by strangers and became obsessed with fantasies about her birth mother. "In my dreams," Holmes reveals, "my birth mother is a goddess, the queen of queens, movie-star beautiful. Incredibly competent, she can take of anyone and anything."

Reality intervened 31 years later when a woman named Ellen tracked down Holmes through the lawyer who had handled her adoption. Out of the blue, Ellen, Holmes's birth mother, phoned her daughter. "Your cover is blown," she announced. "I know who you are and I know where you live. I'm reading your books."

Thus began a classic shake-down on the part of an unmarried, neurotically needy and financially insecure woman who, after all these years of anonymity and separation, demanded that her daughter take responsibility for her.

"You take better care of your dog than you take of me," her mother complained. "You should adopt me _ and take care of me."

The mother stalked her daughter until her death in 1998, revealing the identity of Holmes's father, who was married when she was conceived. Holmes finally met her birth father, Norman, who revealed that he and his wife had offered to adopt her at birth, an offer her mother refused in favor of anonymous adoption.

Despite these exceptions, we honor the vast majority of mothers, who demand neither friendship nor dependency from their children, but simply love and cherish them. Happy Mother's Day.

(David Yount's 10th book, "How the Quakers Invented America," will appear this summer. He answers readers at P.O. Box 2758, Woodbridge, VA 22195 and dyount(at)erols.com)

By TERRY MATTINGLY
Scripps Howard News Service
Wednesday, May 09, 2007

Connoisseurs of ecclesiastical humor can answer this question: "How many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb?" The most popular answers sound something like this: "Ten. One to change the bulb and nine to start a newsletter about the irreplaceability of the original bulb."

Episcopalians do love their traditions, a trait that they share with everyone else in the Anglican Communion. Nevertheless, the reason the world's 77 million Anglicans fight so much is that many cherish some traditions more than others or sincerely believe that, in changing times, some traditions trump others.

Consider, for example, the recent letter from Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to Nigerian Archbishop Peter J. Akinola, urging him not to visit the United States to lead rites installing a bishop here to minister to those who believe the Episcopal Church has veered into heresy.

"First, such action would violate the ancient customs of the church which limits the episcopal activity of a bishop to only the jurisdiction to which the bishop has been entrusted, unless canonical permission has been given," wrote Jefferts Schori, in an epistle that Akinola didn't receive because he was already in the United States.

"Second, such action would not help the efforts of reconciliation that are taking place in the Episcopal Church and in the Anglican Communion as a whole. Third, such action would display to the world division and disunity that are not part of the mind of Christ, which we must strive to display to all."

This "ancient customs" defense is more than ironic, stressed a key conservative strategist. After all, the issue driving this Anglican conflict is the Episcopal Church's insistence that it has a right to modernize traditions about sexuality, salvation, biblical authority and some other hot-button doctrines.

Early church teachings that marriage is between a man and a woman or that sex outside of marriage is sin didn't prevent the Episcopal Church from ordaining a non-celibate gay priest, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire, as the bishop of New Hampshire in 2003.

"The hypocrisy is rather obvious," said the Rev. Kendall S. Harmon, canon theologian of the Diocese of South Carolina. "When church traditions serve their purposes, these people love to quote them. But when a church tradition gets in the way, they feel free to toss it out."

Thus, in his response to Jefferts Schori, Akinola argued that the 18.5 million-member Church of Nigeria _ Anglicanism's largest province _ created its Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA) to provide shelter for those defending the "faith once for all delivered to the saints."

The Nigerian archbishop wrote: "You speak in your letter of centuries old custom regarding diocesan boundaries. You are, of course, aware that the particular historical situation to which you make reference was intended to protect the church from false teaching not to prevent those who hold to the traditional teaching of the church from receiving faithful episcopal care. ... I also find it curious that you are appealing to the ancient customs of the church when it is your own Province's deliberate rejection of the biblical and historic teaching of the Church that has prompted our current crisis."

This argument makes sense for traditionalists. But for mainstream Episcopalians, it sounds like a mere rationalization to allow a foreigner to invade _ setting up a non-traditional throne for the newly installed Bishop Martyn Minns of Truro Church in Fairfax, Va. At this point, one-third of CANA's 34 parishes are ethnically Nigerian, one-third are in northern Virginia and the rest are elsewhere in the United States.

In other words, Archbishop Akinola is "staking a claim on the soil of The Episcopal Church, putting his chair there and welcoming someone (Bishop Minns) to sit there," said the Rev. Mark Harris of Delaware, a member of the executive council of the Episcopal Church.

But the archbishop's new throne isn't real, wrote Harris, at his "Preludium" website. Akinola's new "diocese-like thing" is not an Anglican province. Instead, it's a kind of ecclesiastical joke.

"There is no remedy except to get rid of the chair. And since it is a mostly a symbolic chair the way to rid ourselves of it is to laugh it out of its power," he said. Thus, the best strategy for Episcopal leaders is to "hold the chair in derision. ... The chair, like the cigar, is sometimes only a chair."

Terry Mattingly (www.tmatt.net) directs the Washington Journalism Center at the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities.