I envy the power the President has in his 30-minute state-of-the-union address. Dressed in patriotic attire - navy blue suit, white shirt, red tie - he looks in our eyes, enters the intimacy of our living room and proclaims the tenor of the union from his perspective.
I envy it, I guess, because from my perspective a different picture inevitably unfolds. So, oblige me please, as I start off this morning with a look at the state of the union from a different perspective.
Imagine that you are sitting with 2,300 elementary students in pews. In front of you is a middle aged guy - Ken Ham - who is using dinosaur puppets and cartoons - primarily to train all of you to reject much of geology, paleontology, and evolutionary biology, because these sciences are "lies" as he says.
He belts off to the crowd, "Boys and girls, if a teacher so much as mentions evolution, or the Big Bang, or an era when dinosaurs ruled the earth, you put your hand up and say, 'Excuse me, were you there? Can you remember that?'"
Beside you, children hoot and clap.
He continues, "Sometimes people will answer, 'No, but you weren't there either.' So then you say, "No I wasn't, but I know someone who was, and I have his book about the history of the world." Ham is now waving his bible high in the air. "Who's the only one who's always been there?"
"God!" shout the kids next to you.
"Who's the only one who knows everything?"
"God" they shout again.
"So who should you always trust, God or the scientists?"
A raucous response jolts you from your seat - "God!" the kids reply.
(Adapted from -Their Own Version of a Big Bang by Stephanie Simon- Times staff writer)
Stephanie Simon of the New York Times, recently interviewed Ham. This evangelical preacher she notes is a former high school biology teacher who travels around the country teaching children as young as five to challenge science orthodoxy. He avoids the political and legal arguments and instead puts his time and energy into a more subtle strategy. As Simon says: "He aims to give people who trust the biblical account of creation the confidence to defend their views - aggressively. He urges students to offer creationist critiques of their textbooks, parents to take on science museum docents, professionals to raise the subject with colleagues. Ham's mantra "We're going to arm you with Christian Patriot missiles." He insists the Bible should be taken literally, that God created the universe and all its creatures in six 24-hour days, roughly 6,000 years ago.
As Simon notes, " Ham encourages his followers (which numbered 6,000 in just one of the two-day workshops he offered in New Jersey last month) to further their research with the dozens of books and DVDs sold by his ministry. Because they give answers to every question a critic might ask: How did Noah fit dinosaurs on the ark? -- He took babies. Why didn't a tyrannosaurus eat Eve? -- All creatures were vegetarians until Adam's sin brought death into the world."
All right, I admit, I think this guy is loopy. So I wondered, how prevalent, how far reaching is his message? Well, he hosts daily broadcasts on more than 1,000 radio stations worldwide. He's building a $25M Creation Museum in Cincinnati, and his speaking tours, which attract a couple thousand attendees a day, are so popular he is booked three years in advance, and with a team of four other full time evangelists doing the same work.
But perhaps this is nothing to worry about.
Another state of the union find.
What does it take to make it onto the New York Times Best seller list? - Well, I checked out a few of my favorite books which had sold about 130,000 copies. Here's one - a non-fiction book that influences and helps articulate current cultural ethos if you are of a more liberal persuasion - The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. Most booksellers will tell you that when you reach into the two to three-hundred-thousand range of sales, you're reaching the uncommon level. We've all heard about the popularity, of course, of Harry Potter, a juvenile book series. But what about adult fiction, what tops the list, for most books sold? I think you'd be surprised. I was. What tops the list are books by Tim LaHaye, a preacher who has co-authored books on the rapture, the tribulation and the road to Armageddon that since have sold some 60 million copies. TV Evangelist, Jerry Falwell, has called the books the most influential religious publishing event since the bible. (Time - 2/14/05) Wow! Isn't that amazing - as influential as the bible - Falwell is saying. Why?
LaHaye's best selling series not only sold a lot of books, but analysts are guessing they reached 15 to 20 million voters. OK, so a lot of the religious right who vote - read - big deal. Let me put it another way. Perhaps Kevin Phillips, the GOP's former advocate and insider, now turned Cassandra, gets at this best in his book, American Theocracy. He explains LaHaye's books, some authored ten years ago, are part of a series called - Left Behind. The plot of this series strangely mirrors our own involvement and call to war with the Iraqis. His protagonist jeered the United Nations, harped on the evil regime in Baghdad, and pretended that democracy, not oil, was the motive for going to war.
Phillips comments: "Twenty years ago, the NY Times would not have considered LaHaye for the bestseller list, and my scenario of his writings influencing the White House could only have been spoof. Not so today...No leading world power in modern memory has (sic) dismissed modern knowledge and science (like this one). The last parallel was in the early 17th century, when the papacy . . .disciplined the astronomer Galileo for saying that the sun, not the earth, was the center of our solar system."
Wow - that's quite a statement. The last time was 373 years ago! And how many copies are sold of this book again - 60 million. I just tried something with the books I've read - books that help inform and shape public policy or views of contemporary culture if you're a religious liberal or a progressive secularist. Books like Jimmy Carter's Our Endangered Values; Thomas Friedman's The World is Flat; Barbara Ehrenrich's Nickel and Dimed; Ehrman's Misquoting Jesus. OK, so these help form our public opinions about the world. Let's say all of these added up, giving them the benefit of the doubt that they made it to the NY Times best seller list, which some of them didn't, at 130,000 sold apiece. Here are how many books were published with our liberal religious values being reflected; heck, our secular values being reflected. These add up to the same readership of the LaHaye's series - that's a 463-1 ratio.
But perhaps this is nothing to worry about.
Another state of the union find:
Academics have now moved the United States into the spotlight, along with India, Israel and many Islamic countries for their growing resurgence of religious fundamentalism. (Phillips)
But perhaps this is nothing to worry about.
Another state of the union find:
Moderate Republicans are balking at what is happening on the hill. Episcopal minister and former Republican Senator, John Danforth, commented, "By a series of recent initiatives, Republicans have transformed our party into the political arm of conservative Christians. The elements of this transformation have included a constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage, opposition to stem cell research involving both frozen embryos and human cells in petri dishes, and the extraordinary efforts to keep Terri Schiavo hooked up to feeding tubes."
Former EPA Director and Republican Governor of New Jersey, Christi Todd-Whitman, recently started a web site - "It's My Party Too" - whose vision includes a need to get the Republican party back to its basic tenets of fiscal responsibility and personal freedom, calling forth diverse opinions on social issues by its members.
Hmmm, a small minority of Republicans who are speaking out while simultaneously being ostracized by their party for standing up to the religious right?
But perhaps this is nothing to worry about too.
I could give you more, but I'll stop. All week I've contemplated whether or not this is something to worry about. Perhaps we all knew how far reaching and critical this has become. Perhaps we aren't worried about it-this co-mingling of conservative religious views regarding public policy and legislation.
I admit I started out the week by assuring myself that the creationist threat isn't that big anymore. But then I got a better handle on the opposition. How well-funded, marketable, and far-reaching they really are. I wasn't worried earlier because evolution has won some high-profile victories. If you'll remember a federal judge ruled in December that the school board in Dover, Pa could not require teachers to discuss intelligent design. (The concept that some life is so complex, it could not have evolved by random chance.) And in Cobb County, GA, a federal judge ruled that disclaimers pasted onto science textbooks were illegal. (The stickers, removed last year, called evolution "theory, not a fact.") (Simon)
But in the article about Ham's evangelical ministry - it was noted that those who teach and promote evolution say the challenges are multiplying, not diminishing. "Several Imax theaters in the South - including a few in science museums - have refused to show movies that mention evolution or the earth's age. Bills that would allow or require science teachers to mention alternatives to evolution have been introduced in five states. State boards of education in Kansas and Ohio adopted guidelines that single out evolution for critique. The governor of Kentucky used his state-of-the-commonwealth address to encourage public schools to teach alternative theories of man's origins...and a national conference for science teachers this spring will focus on helping teachers respond to creationists' challenges, because when these science teachers were surveyed, a third of them said they felt pressured to play down evolution."
I'm changing my mind, I think it is something to worry about.
Because it doesn't stop with creationism does it? The conservative Christian theology is affecting science across the board whether with modern medical advancements, reproductive health or public safety.
Stem cell research, global warming, HIV treatment, abstinence only education, abortion, contraception -
You name it - the religious rights' hands are making a mark. As former Republican Senator, John Danforth, of Missouri commented, "The only explanation for legislators comparing cells in a petri dish to babies in a womb is the extension of religious doctrine into statutory law."
Meanwhile my friend's science in the US isn't being funded. The large influential premier research universities are losing their edge. Susan Hockfied, the president of MIT said, "We're falling behind. We're not keeping up with other countries. The science and math scores for our high school graduates are disastrous. We're under funding research in the physical sciences and lagging seriously on publications in these sciences." The kicker for me was a recent international study that ranked young Americans last-last-behind Bulgaria and Slovenia - in knowledge of the basic facts of evolution." -Kevin Phillips
I'm worried, and frankly I think it is time for all of us to be worried as well.
Worried about this growing theocracy in our national administration, but frankly all over our great land. Worried that we on the left are silent in the face of such intermingling of conservative religious views. We don't want to breach that revered wall between separation of church and state. Further, because our values are often quite close to our secular liberal or moderate friends, we are reticent to upset some of our allies by espousing our religious values in the public forum.
In Jim Wallis's book, God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get it, he makes a bold statement. "Secular fundamentalists attack all political figures who dare to speak from the religious convictions. From the Anti-Defamation League, to Americans United for the Separation of Church and State, to the ACLU and some of the political left's most religion-fearing publications," Wallis writes, "a cry of alarm has gone up in response to anyone who has the audacity to be religious in public. These secular skeptics," Wallis continues, "often display an amazing lapse of historical memory when they suggest that religious language in politics is contrary to the 'American ideal.' The truth is just the opposite."
Secular fundamentalists, according to Wallis, "make a fundamental mistake. They believe that the separation of church and state ought to mean the separation of faith from public life." But Wallis believes there is a big difference between the fundamentalist move towards theocracy and the responsibility to connect religious values with the common good.
Our role, as religious liberals, has often confused me in regard to church and state, until I read something very intriguing this week by my colleague, Rev. Roberta Finkelstein. She attended a lecture by a Methodist scholar and preacher. This scholar had found buried in Thomas Jefferson's writing a footnote, language about the wall of separation of church and state being made of glass.
She writes: "This metaphor of the glass wall is useful. Church and state, in other words, need to be able to see each other, hear each other, and affect each other."
We often think of the separation of church and state as being an opaque wall, not a transparent wall. If the wall is made of glass, which indeed makes sense, then both sides affect each other; there should be mutual exchange between the two. Indeed if you turn to history, all the great social movements of our time, often had undergirdings in religious belief, the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, the suffragette movement, the anti-war movement, to name just a few. Which in turn, affected public policy.
What I like about the glass wall is, it gives us a great visual image to assess the relationship of church and state currently, and our relationship to that wall. The reality of the wall right now is clear. Instead of being an unscathed wall of glass, the Christian fundamentalist has thrown some penetrating fastballs through the glass, leaving holes. Then they have crawled through those little holes in the glass, moving from the secular-religious side of the glass, and have successfully infiltrated their beliefs with the state side of the glass. They have moved from a mutual exchange, to a co-mingling, and infiltration of ideas and theology. But the glass wall still remains intact, even though it is becoming riddled with holes.
The question is, what is our relationship to that glass wall? If the purpose of the glass wall is to be seen, heard and affected, then we have a responsibility to enter into that dynamic. I believe that our worry, our concern for the state of the union, should motivate us. So often, when you hold our liberal religious views, we are reticent to get too close to the glass. We often just stand on the other side of the room, seeing our own reflection, silently contemplating the nature of things. But because we are so far away, the state side can't hear our voices, they can't and don't see what we are doing, they aren't affected by us, because we are worried about a co-mingling, about infiltration. But remember, this is a glass wall. We don't have to crawl through those holes like the religious right into infiltration. We can engage our views, hopes, and theology, one which is rooted in science, reason, and an individual's right of conscience, by stepping closer to the wall. So we can see what the state side is doing, but most importantly perhaps, so that they can see us, hear us, and be affected by us. For too long we have had a spiritual silence, a perennial laryngitis. Let our worry and our acknowledgement of those holes edge us forward, past our own reflection, so we can see through the glass, and delve into a mutual exchange.
So may it be,
Amen.
The references for this sermon are:God's Politics: Why the Right Gets It Wrong and the Left Doesn't Get It by Jim Wallis
American Theocracy by Kevin Phillips
"Their Own Version of a Big Bang" by Stephanie Simon, Times Staff Writer
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