Stuff you should be reading this morning:

1. Iraq: another article on the gradual upswing in attacks, and the largely unabated violence in one of the last bastion’s of the insurgency, Diyala Province.

2. Congressional watchdogs lament the lack of transparency and oversight regarding the handout of TARP funds. Economist Joseph Stiglitz condemn’s the Obama administration’s approach to the crisis on Wall Street, characterizing it as “ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses.” Paul Krugman’s saying the same, of course.

3. In a surprise move, AG Holder dismiss the Stevens indictment and says there will be no new trial. The Stevens conviction has fallen apart in the face of allegations of prosecutorial misconduct.

4. The World Health Organization warns of an impending “explosion” in cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis.

5. Michael Gerson at the Washington Post says Obama is losing Catholics over the issue of abortion, but unsurprisingly fails to note that American Catholics are as divided on the issue of abortion as non-catholics. As is typical among media pundits (especially those of the conservative ilk) an entire group is said to be represented by it’s conservative members.

6. ADP, a payroll processor, reports that 724,000 jobs were lost in March.

7. The Economist opens it’s new theme park, Econoland (h/t Josh Berthume.) All the horror of the modern world, only funnier.

8. In honor of the day, the top 10 greatest April Fools pranks in modern history.

9. The tabletop wargame Battletech celebrates it’s 25th anniversary. Not that that’s anything special to us, ahem.

Andrew Sullivan and Damon Linker both have excellent posts on Rod Dreher and Christian opposition to gay marriage, and homosexuality in general. I recommend reading both in full. I only have on minor point to add, and it’s in regards to this statement that Dreher makes:

Sex, especially homosexuality, is a big deal because how one comes down on those related questions has a lot to do with how you view the authority of Scripture and Tradition. There’s a reason why the churches today are breaking apart over homosexuality, and it has to do with the plain fact that there can be no compromise on this issue, as it goes to the heart of how believers understand ourselves, our relationship to God, and to the nature of truth. This stuff matters. It matters a lot.

Linker deals with Dreher’s retreat to Biblical literalism (in sum: why do Christians retreat to the Bible only when it suits their argument?) but Dreher misses something else. The struggle for gay rights is frequently paralleled to the African-American struggle for civil rights, for obvious reasons. But the civil rights movement, starting before even the Civil War, also had the effect of dividing American churches against themselves. Just like today, church-goers of all denominations in the 19th and 20th centuries believed that there could be “no compromise” on the issue of slavery and civil rights. Southern church-goers frequently cited to the Bible as a defense of slavery. But how many arguments between denominations do we hear about the correctness of civil rights, or slavery now? Not only was there eventually compromise on these issues, the anti-slavery and pro-civil rights forces won. There is simply no argument about these issues in mainstream churches anymore, and that despite the fact that at one point in time, a substantial number of Christians in America believed that the Bible offered literal support for racist slavery. 

Rod Dreher is right that the issue of homosexuality divides churches because of intense feelings on both sides. But Dreher’s citing to the divison of churches over the issue of homosexuality is not the compelling evidence of the importance of the issue that he thinks it is.  And he’s wrong to say that no compromise is possible. In fact, it’s quite easy to predict that the gay rights movement will track the civil rights movement in this manner too. It’s just not that likely that, one hundred years from now, Christians of all denominations will be arguing over what the Bible thinks of homosexuality. And that’s what I think people like Dreher fear the most.

Two quick thoughts about this article by Benjamin Plotinsky about Christian allegory in science fiction (via Cliff Pickover’s Twitter.) One, Plotinsky is mostly talking about science fiction on screen, not science fiction as a genre of literature. I would hardly consider myself a scholar of science fiction cinema, but as a genre, most of its products are either entirely derivative of sci-fi literature, or not derivative at all in that they are merely more or less thoughtful action movies set in the future or using technology in a manner that’s particular appropriate to works on the big screen (for bigger explosions, CGI robots, sweeping space vistas, etc., etc.) For that reason, one can hardly consider sci-fi cinmea to be representative of science fiction in particular, let a lone a stand alone genre, so to write an article that talks about both but at the outset fails to distinguish between them is in my opinion a gross error.

Second, while Plotinsky’s article is even-handed it’s clear he welcomes Christian influences in sci-fi films in general. But the movie he references are hardly evidence that this trend has done anything to improve sci-fi films. The Matrix trilogy was widely panned for it’s completely unoriginal deneoument, where the hero Neo sacrifices himself in an Christ-like manner for the good of those he is trying to save. The new Star Wars films also suffer for Christian influence; the reference to Anakin’s “virgin birth” is criticized as being illogical and inconsistent with prior explanations of “the force” in earlier films. And while I’m not sure how much this opinion is shared by fans of the show, I believe that the recent incarnation of Battlestar Galactica suffered greatly from its overtly religious overtones, which were frequently ham-handed and over the top.

Without a doubt there’s room for Christianity in science fiction. Try reading someone like Gene Wolfe if you don’t believe me. And religion in general has been deeply mined by science fiction authors like Frank Herbert. But science fiction filmmakers have, for reasons that I believe are largely related to the medium itself, failed to handle Christianity or religion in general nearly as thoughtfully or convincingly. It would seem to me that sci-fi films are largely in need of a break from ham-handed Christian allegory.

Interesting (via Cliff Pickover):

In June, the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life published a controversial survey in which 70 percent of Americans said that they believed religions other than theirs could lead to eternal life.

This threw evangelicals into a tizzy. After all, the Bible makes it clear that heaven is a velvet-roped V.I.P. area reserved for Christians. Jesus said so: “I am the way, the truth and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.” But the survey suggested that Americans just weren’t buying that.

The evangelicals complained that people must not have understood the question. The respondents couldn’t actually believe what they were saying, could they?

So in August, Pew asked the question again. (They released the results last week.) Sixty-five percent of respondents said — again — that other religions could lead to eternal life. But this time, to clear up any confusion, Pew asked them to specify which religions. The respondents essentially said all of them.

And they didn’t stop there. Nearly half also thought that atheists could go to heaven — dragged there kicking and screaming, no doubt — and most thought that people with no religious faith also could go.

My childhood faith in God began to erode when I was told by someone I had great respect for, quite bluntly, that non-Christians cannot get into heaven. That in fact, no matter how decent and good they were, they would be condemned to hell for the accident of having been born in of a different faith. Even as a child that struck me as being so grossly unfair that it could not possibly be true, and if it wasn’t true, then what else about Christianity wasn’t true? As I grew up, I eventually rejected the idea of God in general, and Christianity in particular.

In recent years though, I’ve acquired a more nuanced view towards religion and Christianity. I am glad to hear that much of the country has done the same, if from a different direction. 

Given that Christmas music these days can get a little repetitive, I’ve taken the opportunity the last few Christmases to become more familiar with Christmas music of the late middle ages and the renaissance. In that vein, here’s an enjoyable version of the Castellian Villancico “Riu Riu Chiu” from the 16th century. An English translation of the lyrics can be found here. 

Another group of people unhappy with Rick Warren is other evangelical Christians:

The pastor chosen by President-elect Barack Obama to give the inaugural invocation backed Proposition 8, which banned gay marriage in his home state of California. But he did so belatedly, with none of the enthusiasm he brings to fighting AIDS and illiteracy.

When other conservative Christians held stadium rallies and raised tens of millions of dollars for the ballot effort, there was no sign of Warren. Neither he nor his wife, Kay, donated any of their considerable fortune to the campaign, according to public records and the Warrens’ spokesman.

In fact, his endorsement seemed calculated for minimal impact. It was announced late on a Friday, just 10 days before Election Day, on a Web site geared for members of his Saddleback Community Church, not the general public.

He has spoken out against the use of torture to combat terrorism. He has joined the fight against global warming and, encouraged by his wife, has put his prestige and money behind helping people with AIDS. The Warrens have done so at a time when a notable number of conservative Christians still consider the virus a punishment from God.

“If you want to save a life, I don’t care what your background is and I don’t care what your political party is,” Warren said in a recent interview with The Associated Press. “I think some of these humanitarian issues transcend politics, or ethnic or religious beliefs.”

While many religious conservatives openly condemn Islam as inherently evil, Warren reaches out to the American Muslim community. This past Saturday, he gave the keynote address at the convention of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, based in Los Angeles.

“His social consciousness is somewhat left of center, but his theological, ethical stance is right of center,” said the Rev. William Leonard, a critic of the Southern Baptist Convention and dean of Wake Forest Divinity School in North Carolina. “That’s the thing that makes him potentially a bridge person.”

Warren’s outlook has come at a price. Many from the Christian right don’t trust him.

The fact that the true homophobes, bigots and authoritarians on the religious right don’t trust him definitely raises his standing my eyes.

A minor affair no doubt, but given the magnitude of Obama’s victory on Nov. 4th, is it really necessary to reach out even to the not-so-crazy evangelicals? I’m with Klein: our nation is filled with any number of progressive Christian religious leaders, all whom would probably be more appropriate than Rick Warren.

Earlier this month we learned of the plans by conservative Episcoplians to establish a new province in America. Rev. Phillip Cato, a retired priest of the Washington diocese, thinks that such an idea isn’t likely to survive for long:

In this province, as proposed, we find strident Evangelicals, Charismatics, Anglo-Catholics, those who allow for the ordination of women to the priesthood and those who regard this as a metaphysical and theological and Biblical impossibility, those who were ordained and consecrated in the canonical ways of national churches in the Anglican Communion and those who have received express consecration in total disregard of any canons, those who are conflicted over the theological issue of Baptismal regeneration, those who have flirted with Rome and those who are of a radical Protestant bent, and a notorious collection of massive egos, unlikely to concede much in the way of theological, ecclesiastical, or Biblical views. All have shown complete disregard for their ordination vows and canonical obligations, and lay claim to property they do not own.

In your most generous imagination, can you conceive of such a coalition surviving? I cannot.

As I’ve learned the rejection of the ordination of gays as priests or bishops in the church is not the only motivation for a new province (though of course a new province would never have been proposed absent that development) and this loose alliance consist of groups that left the Episcopal church long ago over matters having nothing to do with who is or isn’t ordained. Can a group that appears united mostly in their desire to not be mainstream Episcopalians survive for long? I suppose we’ll find out.

Fred Clark at Slacktivist is an amazingly good blogger who doesn’t get as much attention as he deserves. In addition to all the other writing he does, he’s spent years analyzing and critiquing in painstaking detail the Left Behind books from a liberal Christian perspective. Having finished that epic project, he’s turned his sights on the movie adaptations, and in this post he theorizes that the star Kirk Cameron’s adoption of the sort of Christianity espoused in the books is exactly what has made him such a poor actor in those movies. That sounds silly, but it’s actually a very thoughtful post and I think he makes a good argument. That being said, there’s one passage Clark writes that really caught my attention where he discusses how Cameron pulled away from his fellow actors on the show Growing Pains after his conversion to evangelical Christianity:

Cameron became more concerned with being a role model than he was with his role because he had found a spiritual home in a branch of Christianity that had an almost entirely negative concept of virtue. According to this form of religion, being good means not doing certain things — not doing a lot of things, actually. And being really good, I suppose, means doing almost nothing.

According to this view, being morally good doesn’t take any work. It’s not something you have to learn, or study, or practice. It comes by fiat, through God’s intervening grace. We saw this idea of moral goodness in the book Left Behind: say the magic words and God will transform you into a good person.

Clark goes onto to explain how this belief led Cameron to think that was no need to work to improve his acting skills, but there’s another point to be made here. As Cameron explains in his own words, he became concerned with the idea of being a good role model. But as his colleagues on the show explain, he withdrew from them. Cameron wanted to be a positive role model, but he passed up a chance to be a role model to the very people he worked around and knew the best. Instead, he seemed to want little to do with them, presumably because he felt he wasn’t like them anymore.

Now, this is a phenomenon that I’ve personally witnessed. To be fair, I understand the motivation to pull away, at least in some sense. As anyone who has ever tried to turn their life around can tell you, sometimes you have to get away from the people who are part of that old life and who would-intentionally or unintentionally-drag you back into that life if you gave them a chance. But that’s not always the convert’s motivation (and here, we can be referring to a recent convert of any religion or particularly strong belief system.) To one degree or another, that convert is willing to dismiss their friends and family who don’t convert with them from their lives. Maybe they’re afraid of being given a hard time about their beliefs, maybe they’re afraid of a weakening of their beliefs after having their beliefs challenged. Maybe they’re no longer interested in people who don’t believe what they do, or share their strong feelings of joy. Maybe they think it’s wrong to associate with “sinful” people. Maybe they think they’re better than those people now. But whatever the reason, people who follow this route make a deliberate decision to exclude those who don’t believe what they do, no matter how long or how well they know them, and embrace only those who do. This is another iteration of this “negative concept of virtue” that Clark discusses, an exclusion of those to one degree or another who don’t share the same strong beliefs. Instead of desiring to share their beliefs, or live comfortably in their beliefs around those who don’t share them, this particular type of convert runs away to the comfort of those who think like he or she does.

In this sense also then, being good doesn’t require any work. Or at least, not as much work as it might to continue being a good colleague, good friend, or good family member. And it sends a terrible message to those who knew this person; that Christianity is exclusionary, that Christians are not open to others, that Christians are fearful of the larger world and prefer to retreat from it than attempt to change it personally in their lives, that Christians value the words of those they’ve only recently met over the words of those who have known them and cared for them the longest. Which, one would think, is pretty much the exact opposite of the message the evangelical Christian hopes to send to the unconverted.

Now obviously, most Christians are not like this. And after an initial conversion, an evangelical Christian may return to the social circles he or she once roamed in, more comfortable in his or her beliefs or more willing to attempt to bring others on board with his or her words and deeds. I’ve experienced that outcome personally as well. But it was years in the making.

I hardly know enough about theology to make some argument about what being a “good” Christian does or doesn’t entail. But I do know those who are most likely to make a positive impact, those who are most likely to change the world, are those who are not afraid the world and the people in it who aren’t like them. And I would imagine that no beliefs are stronger than those that have been put to the test and survived. It’s unfortunate that many who believe strongly that they have a positive message to share with the world, don’t feel the same.

Conservative American Episcopalians, no longer content to put themselves under the authority of African and South American bishops so as to avoid having to tolerate gays and women as priests and bishops, now intend to found a rival denomination to the American Anglican church:

Conservatives alienated from the Episcopal Church announced on Wednesday that they were founding their own rival denomination, the biggest challenge yet to the authority of the Episcopal Church since it ordained an openly gay bishop five years ago.

The move threatens the fragile unity of the Anglican Communion, the world’s third-largest Christian body, made up of 38 provinces around the world that trace their roots to the Church of England and its spiritual leader, the Archbishop of Canterbury.

The conservatives intend to seek the approval of leaders in the global Anglican Communion for the province they plan to form. If they should receive broad approval, their effort could lead to new defections from the Episcopal Church, the American branch of Anglicanism.

In the last few years, Episcopalians who wanted to leave the church but remain in the Anglican Communion put themselves under the authority of bishops in Africa and Latin America. A new American province would give them a homegrown alternative.

And almost certainly lead to more diocese and churches breaking from the “official” Anglican Communion, as they would no longer have to take the extreme step of putting themselves under the authority of bishops on other continents with whom they share an ideological viewpoint but otherwise not much else.

Conservative leaders in North America say they expect to win approval for their new province from at least seven like-minded primates, who lead provinces primarily in Africa, Australia, Latin America and Asia.

These are the same primates who met in Jerusalem over the summer at the Global Anglican Future Conference and signed a declaration heralding a new era for the Anglican Communion. Most of these primates a few weeks later boycotted the Lambeth Conference, the international gathering of Anglican bishops in England held once every 10 years.

Bishop Duncan and other conservative leaders in North America say they may not seek approval for their new province from the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Most Rev. Rowan Williams, or from the Anglican Consultative Council, the leadership group of bishops, clergy and laity that until now was largely responsible for blessing new jurisdictions.

Bishop Martyn Minns, a leading figure in the formation of the new province, said of the Archbishop of Canterbury: “It’s desirable that he get behind this. It’s something that would bring a little more coherence to the life of the Communion. But if he doesn’t, so be it.”

As this article makes clear in more detail, the conservatives intend to found a new province of the Episcopal church that would remain under the authority of the Anglican Communion. How what would work if the Anglican Communion doesn’t approve of the new province is beyond me, and I assume that dioceses that join this new province will no longer be under the authority of provinces in South America and Africa but will elect their own leadership instead.

I find it remarkable that members of the Episcopal church, long one of the most progressive Christian denominations in America, are willing to tear the church asunder over the issue of women and gays in leadership positions in the church. Yes, I know that when asked the conservatives will say that they prefer what they consider orthodox Christian practices and beliefs, but no one was revolting until an openly gay man and a woman were made bishops of the church.