Associated Baptist Press - 3/12/2009

Associated Baptist Press
March 12, 2009 · (09-37)

David Wilkinson, Executive Director
Robert Marus, Managing Editor/Washington Bureau Chief
Bob Allen, Senior Writer

In this issue
Christian comic, former SNL star labels Obama a communist (779 words)
Freeman: For women, proper question not 'ordination' but 'calling' (725 words)
Opinion: The future of American Christianity (834 words)

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Christian comic, former SNL star, labels Obama a communist
By Bob Allen (779 words)

NEW YORK (ABP) -- Former "Saturday Night Live" cast member and conservative Christian comedienne Victoria Jackson said in a Fox News interview March 9 that President Obama is a communist and that what America needs is the Bible.

"My motivation is gone, because [Obama] will punish me if I'm successful," said the 49-year-old entertainer, best known for playing ditzy blonde characters on the hit NBC comedy show from 1986 to 1992, to interviewer Sean Hannity. "That's how you start communism, is just take -- Cuba! Obama wants to be Castro."

Jackson said she would like to see Hannity run the country, along with conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, the failed GOP vice-presidential nominee.

Jackson, a vocal evangelical Christian who has appeared on the Christian Broadcasting Network's "700 Club" and who spoke at a major Southern Baptist gathering in 2004, said she wasn't interested in politics before the last election. Last year, she supported the GOP presidential nominee, Arizona Sen. John McCain, and opposed one of her former "SNL" colleagues, Al Franken, who ran as a Democrat for one of Minnesota's two Senate seats.

"Well, I've never been involved in politics, 'cause it's just 'neh neh neh, neh neh neh,' but all of a sudden it was, it was: 'Oh, Hillary Clinton is a socialist, she wants to socialize medicine. Well, I'll have to vote against her.' And then all of a sudden a communist appears! Out of nowhere! And that's when I started to get involved."

At that point Jackson said she did research and found that "black liberation theology, his church, is Marxist, and his professors are Marxist."

"He says, 'Redistribute the wealth,'" she said.

It isn't the first time Jackson has called Obama a communist. Last year on another Fox News program, "The O'Reilly Factor," she said she was supporting McCain because she thought Obama was a communist.

"My husband said; 'Don't use that word. Say 'radical' or 'Marxist.' But you know, Karl Marx wrote the book The Communist Manifesto, so I don't see why people are afraid to say the word 'communist.'"

She said her research included reading George Orwell's book 1984 -- twice -- and said seeing Obama's picture on the cover of every magazine in an airport bookstore reminded her of "Castro, or the guy in China."

"I think we've already started sliding into socialism," she said. "The liberals are controlling all the TV channels. I mean the only one telling the truth is yours. This is the only one we watch."

Jackson explained in a recent "700 Club" interview why she began speaking out.

"The last couple of months I've been involved in giving political speeches, because I passionately have Christian values that I'm afraid I might lose," she said. "So I started speaking out, and people are now asking me to give political speeches." She then blurted out: "Yeah Sarah Palin!"

"I'm so proud of Sarah Palin," she said. "I was praying, 'God please help our country return to -- I have all our founding fathers' speeches of how they loved Jesus and God."

She said David Barton's Wallbuilders website, for example, "proves our country was founded -- hello! -- on Christianity."

"I was praying, 'God please let us retain our freedom to have Christian radio and not be persecuted like Christians are in other countries. Please God help this election.' And all of a sudden Sarah Palin dropped out of the sky. I'm like, 'You're kidding me! A Christian?' It was a miracle."

Jackson grew up in a conservative Christian home and dropped out of college to head for Hollywood. Eventually she received a theater degree at Palm Beach Atlantic University, a Southern Baptist school in Florida.

In 2004 she spoke at an "Elevate" conference sponsored by the Southern Baptist Convention's North American Mission Board. The event aimed to help college students and young professionals merge faith with daily life.

As time ran out on her most recent Fox interview, Jackson pulled out her Bible and held it aloft. "This is what our country needs, the Bible," she said. "I didn't get time to get to that."

In a March 11 post about Jackson's appearance on the left-leaning blog Crooks and Liars, David Neiwert termed Jackson's ranting "idiocy."

"Back when she was a cast member of 'Saturday Night Live,' I didn't find Victoria Jackson particularly funny. I thought her ditzy-blonde routine was too over the top and demeaning; nobody could really be that idiotic, I thought. Later, I came to realize that it wasn't just a routine," Neiwert wrote.

He concluded, "Is this is the face of the new conservatism? The average, Fox-watching, Limbaugh-loving American? If so: Wow."

Bob Allen is senior writer for Associated Baptist Press. Robert Marus, ABP's managing editor and Washington bureau chief, contributed to this story.

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Freeman: For women, proper question not 'ordination' but 'calling'
By Steve DeVane (725 words)

MOUNT OLIVE, N.C. (ABP) -- Asking whether women should be ordained to the ministry is the wrong question, according to Baptist professor Curtis Freeman.

"The question is, 'Who is being gifted in the church?'" said Freeman, research professor of theology and director of the Baptist House of Studies at Duke Divinity School. "Where are those gifts being displayed?"

Freeman was guest lecturer for the Vivian B. Harrison Memorial Lecture at Mount Olive College in Mount Olive, N.C., March 10. His lecture focused on women's voices in the church. He also preached during the Free Will Baptist school's chapel service that day.

Freeman said ordination doesn't give one the gift of preaching. Ordination is instead the church recognizing that gift, he said.
"The point is, the church doesn't really call people into ministry," he said. Instead, "We help people discern God's call on their life."

The lectures included an overview of four 17th-century Baptist women who wrote about their experiences. They were among nine Baptists and about 300 total prophetesses in England between 1640 and 1660, Freeman said.

The four Baptist women wrote at least 748 pages of material -- much of it in pamphlets, which were cheaply reproduced and available to a wide audience.

"The pamphlet was like the 17th-century Internet," Freeman said.
Historical records indicate that the women influenced early English General and Particular Baptists, according to Freeman.

"Through their writings they surely attained an even wider audience," he said. "Yet there was also a tension between the prophetic voices of these women, the gathered churches and the wider society that eventually refused to swallow their prophetic pill."

Freeman said that revolutionary forces in England at the time had destabilized governmental power and other forces that "long had kept women in their place."

"The social spaces that opened up enabled women not just to think freely but to speak their minds freely," he said. "Yet, as the Baptist movement became organized and institutionalized, many of the more egalitarian expressions of the early days dissipated."

These and other women who spoke out were on the fringes of the early Baptist churches, Freeman said.

"Maybe these women standing on the edge see something those of us at the center of the church can't see," he said.

Freeman said women have found a space to share their voices during other periods of social upheaval, such as the American Revolution, the settling of the Western frontier and the social upheaval of the 1960s and '70s. He asked if churches could find a way to create such a space without waiting for the wider culture to create it.

Freeman used the story of the first woman ordained by a Southern Baptist church to suggest three essential elements of discernment used by the church. Addie Davis was ordained by Watts Street Baptist Church in Durham, N.C. on Aug. 9, 1964.

The church was "committed to the practice of calling out the called," Freeman said. Such a call includes both inward discernment and outward confirmation, he said.

"It's not about women in ministry," he said. "It's first about this principle of calling."

The second conviction of the Watts Street church was what Freeman called "openness to more light from the word." For many the issue of women in ministry is settled, one way or the other. But others remain searching and open.

"It's a sense that our understanding is growing," he said.

Freeman said Watts Street was also committed to stand together with others under the rule of Christ. An ordination council from the local association examined Davis.

"Because a local congregation stands under the immediate rule of Christ, it has the power to call its own ministers, celebrate the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper, and administer the keys of church discipline," he said. "Yet no congregation is independent. It is interdependent with those who 'walk by the same rule.'"

Freeman said this is a "hard word," since all Baptists don't agree.
"Sometimes I'd like it to be me and Jesus, but in the end I don't think that's the way it is," he said.

The challenge of standing together will take patience and humility, Freeman said.

"It is the vector of the Baptist vision that suggests that we find our way together," he said. "Ultimately, it is not a matter of gender or ordination, but of spiritual discernment."

Steve DeVane is managing editor of the North Carolina Baptist Biblical Recorder.

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Opinion: The future of American Christianity
By David Gushee(834 words)

(ABP) -- Trinity College's American Religious Identification Survey was released March 9. Its headline finding, as summarized by USA Today: "Faith is shifting, drifting or vanishing outright." The news that "almost all denominations are losing ground" is sobering indeed. It helps to clarify that recent budget cuts in Baptist life and elsewhere are not just about our current Great Economic Meltdown, but instead dovetail with a broader fade of organized American Christianity.

First, let's consider some of the most important numbers, in case you missed them. Since 1990:

--The percentage of Americans who self-identify as Christians has dropped by 11 percent, over half a percentage point per year.

--The percentage who claim no religion has nearly doubled, from 8 percent to 15 percent. The "Don't Know/Refused" group also more than doubled, from 2.3 percent to 5.2 percent.

--Self-identified Baptists have dropped from 19.3 percent to 15.8 percent of the population.

--Mainline Protestants have dropped from 18.7 percent of the population to only 12.9 percent; Methodists went from 8 percent to 5 percent. At that rate, the mainline will die within 40 years.

--The percentage who identify as Wiccans or other new religious movements has increased from 0.8 percent to 1.2 percent, a small but rapidly growing number. Adherents of Eastern religions have also doubled numerically, as has the Muslim population.

--The percentage of Catholics has dropped only slightly, from 26.2 percent to 25.1 percent.

--Those who identify as "followers of Jesus" or some other kind of generic Christian represent 14.2 percent of the population, down a bit from 14.8 percent in 1990 but still representing 32 million people.

We are a nation still populated by a majority of self-identified Christians -- nearly 75 percent claim some relation to Christian faith. But the numbers are dropping quickly; if trends continue, Christians will constitute 64 percent of the population in 2026, and barely half in 2044. The shortfall will be made up primarily by what statisticians of religion are starting to call the "Nones," pure secularists who claim no religious affiliation.

In terms of the culture-war battles that have wracked the nation for a generation, unless wise new leadership emerges in both the Christian and the secularist communities, vicious battles will continue over all manner of symbolic and substantive issues -- from monuments on courthouse grounds to abortion, gay rights and the use of religion in the armed forces. It also seems likely that the volleys between aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins and those seeking to counter them will only intensify.

There will continue to be sharp regional differences, as secularist numbers spike in the West and Northeast (Vermont led the nation with a 34 percent None population) and grow more slowly in the Bible Belt. Increasingly, secularists and their children and grandchildren will have no exposure to the Bible and Christian traditions, and therefore little interest in or understanding of the residual cultural overlay of religiosity still apparent in our national life.

What does all of this mean for Christian mission and our witness in culture and politics?

I think we will witness (are already witnessing) a winnowing process in which weak, ineffective, or maladaptive churches and religious organizations are simply going to die. Congregations will close, parachurch organizations and schools will shut down, and entire denominations will fold or merge with others. Creative efforts will be required everywhere to forestall this fate.

It is likely that surviving denominations, including the Baptist bodies, will have to consolidate their operations. It is hard to imagine there being six surviving Southern Baptist Convention seminaries a generation from now, or over a dozen Cooperative Baptist Fellowship-related seminaries and divinity schools. It could be (ironically enough) a Darwinian moment, as only the strongest and most adaptive survive.

Many congregations and parachurch groups will drop denominational labels in order to ensure their greatest chance of success and not be damaged by denominational-brand baggage. This will continue to deeply challenge the ongoing significance of, for example, Baptist identity.

Christian colleges will have to decide how serious they are about their faith identification. Those that deliver excellent education in a context of robust spiritual vitality will do better than those that provide only one of the above -- or neither. The weakest of these colleges will also merge or die.

Christians who bring faith-based moral convictions into the public square will win less and less. Some will respond by just shouting more loudly, thus turning more people away from Christ. Others will shift to a paradigm of faithful witness rather than cultural victory.

Broad-based coalitions across religious and ideological lines will be a necessity.

The era in which cultural Christianity delivered bodies and dollars to churches and sustained thousands of often marginally effective Christian organizations is ending. The era in which Christians could afford to spend their time and money fighting with each other in the pews or the annual conventions or the newspapers is ending.

We will either deliver to people vital, meaningful, life-changing, Christ-following Christianity, or we will die of our own irrelevance.

David Gushee is distinguished university professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University.