Associated Baptist Press - 9/19/2008

Associated Baptist Press
September 19, 2008 · (08-89)

Greg Warner, Executive Editor
Robert Marus, News Editor/Washington Bureau Chief

In this issue
Survey: Megachurches more intimate, believers less gullible than stereotypes
'Red-letter' Christians can transcend partisan politics, Campolo insists
Opinion: Torture: Our first major 21st-century scandal

Survey: Megachurches more intimate, believers less gullible than stereotypes
By Robert Marus

WASHINGTON (ABP) -- A new survey by Baylor University researchers suggests that megachurches are more intimate, believers less gullible and atheism less prevalent than popular stereotypes would suggest.

Results of the 2008 Baylor Religion Survey were released in a Sept. 18 Washington press conference during a meeting of religion reporters. It found some results that might surprise those unfamiliar with the lives and beliefs of deeply religious Americans.

For example: Stereotypes about churches that have an average weekend attendance of more than 1,000 worshipers.

"We all know that megachurches have all sorts of flaws. They're big; they have a wonderful Sunday service because they can afford a symphony orchestra. But they're kind of cold, they have kind of, like, theater audiences," said Baylor sociology professor Rodney Stark, the study's lead researcher, noting common perceptions of megachurches. "All wrong."

The survey found that members of such churches tended to have more friends within their congregations, hold more conservative or evangelical Christian beliefs, share their faith with friends and strangers more often, and be involved in volunteer work more frequently than their counterparts in churches with less than 100 in average attendance.

"How does that make any sense?" Stark asked. "The answer is: That's how they got there. Their friends brought them to church, and then they brought their friends to church, and that's how the congregation was built."

An additional factor suggested by the survey: Megachurches are far more likely than small churches to be conservative evangelical congregations. Meanwhile, smaller churches had a higher rate of affiliation with what the survey called a "liberal Protestant denomination," or with mainline church bodies such as the United Methodist Church and the Episcopal Church.

The survey also found that active religious believers -- and particularly conservative Christians -- were less likely than the general public to believe in the occult and paranormal.

"The Baylor Survey found that traditional Christian religion greatly decreases credulity, as measured by beliefs in such things as dreams, Bigfoot, UFOs, haunted houses and astrology, with education having hardly any effect," the survey's authors said.

For instance, as measured against an index of belief in occult and paranormal beliefs researchers constructed, only 14 percent of respondents who described themselves as "evangelical" rated high on the index. Meanwhile, 30 percent of those who rejected the "evangelical" label scored high on the same index.

Those who described themselves as "theologically liberal" were actually more likely than evangelicals -- and than the public at large -- to believe in such things as the ability to communicate with the dead, the existence of mythical creatures such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster, and alien encounters with Earth.

Stark, asked if it should surprise people that those who hold conservative biblical beliefs would reject beliefs in the paranormal, said no -- but that some in academia and the scientific community hold that stereotype.

"It seems pretty logical that people who are into conventional Christianity are not going to be open to this other stuff," he asserted. "But there's an enormous amount of belief out that they're just suckers for anything -- that they're just credulous people."

The survey, of 1,648 English-speaking American adults, used detailed questionnaires mailed in the fall of 2007. Collected by the Gallup Organization and analyzed by Baylor researchers, it has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percent.

It was funded by the Templeton Foundation, and is the second wave of a three-part survey project. The first set of results was released in 2006. The final set, researchers said, will be released next year.

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'Red-letter' Christians can transcend partisan politics, Campolo insists
By Ken Camp

WACO, Texas (ABP) -- "Red-letter" Christians committed to taking Christ's teachings seriously have the potential to transform society in a way that moves beyond partisan politics, author and educator Tony Campolo told a recent ethics conference at Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary.

"We're looking for a new way of doing politics that transcends partisanship and polarization," Campolo said.

Rather than adopting a liberal or conservative political philosophy, it means conversion to a radical lifestyle of obedience to Christ, he stressed.

"To be a biblical, red-letter Christian is to be counter-cultural," Campolo said.

Conversion means a whole-hearted commitment "to what God is doing in the world at the present time," he explained. "The Kingdom of God is a transformed people at work transforming the world."

Campolo, professor emeritus of sociology at Eastern University and associate pastor of an American Baptist church in West Philadelphia, spoke at the Sept. 16-17 event sponsored by the Christian Ethics Today Foundation.

Old labels that once described Christians who take the Bible seriously no longer apply. Fundamentalism -- which began as the response of Christian orthodoxy to German skepticism -- has become equated with anti-intellectualism, legalism and judgmentalism, Campolo observed.

And the once-popular term "evangelical" -- once equated with Billy Graham -- has been co-opted by political extremists, he added. "Sadly, the word 'evangelical' has become synonymous with the Religious Right."

A secular Jewish country-western radio personality in Nashville, Tenn., first applied the "red-letter Christian" label to social-justice evangelicals during an interview with Jim Wallis, founder of Sojourners. And Campolo, Wallis and others in the movement readily embraced it.

God inspired all Scripture, Campolo stressed. But red-letter Christians believe the rest of the Bible should be read from the perspective of God's perfect revelation in Jesus Christ.

And people who interpret the Bible in light of Jesus' teachings will have special concern for the poor, the oppressed and the marginalized, he emphasized.

"To be a Christian is to manifest a commitment to the poor," Campolo asserted.

Red-letter Christians have the potential to offer solutions to "hot-button" issues -- such as abortion, same-sex marriage and immigration reform -- that defy traditional ideological and political categories, he insisted.

"We can find common ground for the common good," Campolo said.

A comprehensive "seamless garment" sanctity-of-life ethic that not only deals with issues of abortion and euthanasia, but also encompasses torture, war, poverty, prison reform and capital punishment provides a distinctively Christian framework for dealing with tough issues, said David Gushee, Christian ethics professor at Mercer University's McAfee School of Theology.

"In the fabric of humanity that God has made, every thread matters," Gushee, who is also an Associated Baptist Press columnist, said.

Sanctity of life means all human beings -- at every stage of life and without distinction -- are people who possess "equal and immeasurable worth" and "inviolable dignity," he said.

"Therefore, they must be treated with the reverence and respect commensurate with this elevated moral status -- beginning with a commitment to the preservation, protection and flourishing of their lives," he said.

Belief in the sacred worth of all human life flows from biblical faith, Gushee insisted.

"In particular, life is sacred because -- according to Scripture -- God created humans in his image, declared them precious, ascribed to them a unique status in creation, blessed them with unique God-like capacities, made them for eternal life, governs them under his sovereign lordship, commands in his moral law that they be treated with reverence and respect, and forever elevates their dignity by his decision to take human form in Jesus Christ and to give up that human life at the Cross," he said.

"No social order treats people as immeasurably valuable -- but Jesus did."

Baptists and other "baptistified" Christians have distinctive insights they bring to political discussion that spring from two bedrock theological principles -- soul freedom and Christian hope, said James Dunn of Wake Forest Divinity School.

Soul freedom means "everyone and anyone can come to God directly, personally, without formula or filter," said Dunn, former executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty. Baptists "cannot conceive of coerced Christianity, forced faith or required religion," he insisted.

"When we transplant that theological thought to the turf of politics, it helps us to understand why it is hard for us as a nation to force democracy on an unoccupied people -- unwilling and unready to accept an ideology, indeed a theology, not their own," Dunn said.

"Forcing religion on a people only makes hypocrites. Roger Williams got us started off right in that modality. A demanded democracy may not be authentic, serve well or last long."

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Opinion: Torture: Our first major 21st-century scandal
By David Gushee

(ABP) -- The week of Sept. 11, 2008, I had the privilege of hosting a national summit on torture at Mercer University in Atlanta. (To learn more about the program called "Religious Faith, Torture, and Our National Soul," and what happened there, see www.mercer.edu for news summaries.) In this column I want to reflect on what the torture summit meant to me and where our movement will go from here.

The combination of military, legal, national security, and religious speakers have convinced me that the practice of torture by the United States marks the first major American scandal of the 21st century. It is a governmental scandal, necessitating investigations, accountability and policy change for at least the next several years.

But it is also a religious scandal, involving the compromised loyalties of a majority of American evangelicals.

Here is the basic story that was told at the conference:

After 9/11, top officials in the United States government, driven by the vice president, concluded both that long-standing legal and moral constraints on torture needed to be set aside to prosecute the "war on terror," and that the executive branch must be free to pursue this effort with as little congressional and judicial review as possible.

Systematically cutting dissenting voices out of the policy-making process, Dick Cheney and his "war council" crafted a policy that set aside or weakened human-rights protections provided in the Geneva Conventions, in the law and traditions of the U.S. military and in domestic laws explicitly banning torture. A series of secret legal memos were written -- primarily by a small cadre of ideologically driven lawyers in the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel -- that provided the dubious legal permission for the executive branch to pursue these policies.

These memos narrowed the definition of torture so as to permit a number of cruel and inhumane interrogation techniques that aroused extraordinary alarm among senior military and civilian officials within the government once they were discovered. But the die was cast.

These techniques were employed at the U.S. military base at Guantanamo, Cuba, where terrorism suspects captured in Afghanistan and elsewhere were held. They migrated to Iraq and then showed up in Afghanistan.

Worse techniques were employed by nations, such as Egypt and Syria, to whom we outsourced some of our prisoners. We still do not know fully what has happened at the so-called "black sites" and ghost prisons -- clandestine detainment centers run by U.S. intelligence agencies. But it is highly unlikely that treatment was or is better there, given the administration's insistence on the need for "enhanced interrogation techniques" by the CIA even today.

It appears that the weakening of human-rights protections not only permitted cruel techniques that were explicitly authorized, but also created a degraded environment in which unauthorized sadism and cruelty ran rampant. For example, according to original research done by graduate student Michael Peppard and presented at our conference, religious desecration and humiliation of sacred Muslim objects and practices appears to have been widespread at Guantanamo, at least for a time.

Not that this is the bottom line, but it must be noted that these cruel techniques were employed against hundreds or thousands of prisoners who were either innocent of any terrorist activity or had no particularly valuable information to give up. Many of the people we are holding at Guantanamo were sold to us by bounty hunters in places like Afghanistan and Pakistan and never have been charged with any wrongdoing.

Meanwhile, we were reminded at the conference of a number of cases in which detainees tortured in other conflicts from around the globe told their captors anything they could think of that would make the torture end, as most of us would do in the same situation. This yielded worthless information and misdirected our intelligence efforts in pursuing false leads.

When the secrets are all out and the documents are all released, prosecution of government officials who authorized torture will be a real possibility unless foreclosed by pardons. Even then, international criminal prosecutions are possible. In the meantime, we have compromised our values, forfeited our claim to the moral high ground, damaged our most important alliances, implicitly authorized torture by other governments and created or deepened an everlasting hatred toward our nation by those most affected by our actions -- all for a negligible intelligence benefit.

The American human-rights community, including many groups represented at our summit, will continue to press for policy changes to be adopted immediately by the new president and Congress. (See www.campaigntobantorture.org to sign on to the major policy principles we are promoting.)

There is a serious chance that these principles will be accepted, given the general policy stances of Sens. McCain and Obama on torture. But nothing can be taken for granted -- especially in light of the disturbing results of the poll of Southern evangelical Christians that Mercer University and Faith in Public Life released at the conference.

Perhaps the most shocking number is that only 22 percent of white Southern evangelicals say that torture is always wrong. Fifty-seven percent say it is often or sometimes justified. The sliver of good news from the survey is that, when presented with the option of affirming the Golden Rule principle -- we should do nothing to our detainees that we would not want done to our troops if captured -- opposition to torture increased strongly across all demographic groups.

I was shocked to hear that only 28 percent of all those evangelical Christians we polled said that their faith provided the primary source to which they turned when thinking about the morality of torture. Most cited common sense or life experience.

Southern evangelical Christian leaders apparently have failed to communicate an understanding of the Christian faith and its moral demands that would prohibit believers from embracing the torture of their fellow human beings in the name of national security. This emerges from a faith community whose Founder was tortured and murdered by the state, and most of whose original leaders were also tortured and murdered by the state. What an incredible collective amnesia! Who would Jesus, Peter, John and Paul torture?

Not long ago I was in northern Georgia at one of those ubiquitous interstate gas stations. Interspersed among the tacky trinkets and mugs was a T-shirt with the slogan, "Waterboarding is my favorite sport."

I wonder if the creator of that T-shirt goes to church?

We are indeed in a fight for our national soul. That fight begins in the church, whose complicity with torture is far more scandalous than any government wrongdoing.

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-- David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University. http://www.davidpgushee.com/