The Questioning Christian

Episcopal Church statistics don't look good - "Catholic lite" just doesn't sell as well anymore

See this one-page statistical summary at the Episcopal Church Web site, saying among other things that, over the past five years:

• average Sunday attendance (ASA) is down 16%
• active baptized membership is down 10%
• 55% of parishes have seen their ASAs decline by 10% or more
• 18% of parishes have seen their ASAs increase by 10% or more
• the increases in plate-and-pledge contributions have been less than inflation

(Hat tip: Kendall Harmon.)

Why this trend?  Here's my hunch (and that's all it is):  

1. Americans are constantly reminded to be prudent consumers, to critically assess what they're offered. 
2. What TEC has to offer these days is, mainly:  a questionable Catholic-Lite theology that has some obvious holes in it; a puffed-up pride that we continue to use a variation on a monarchical-bishop model of governance; and a risible claim of universality.
3. To modern consumers, TEC's offering doesn't have quite the same appeal as some of the more streamlined church "packages" out there, with minimal theology and high entertainment value. 
4. Recall that "none of the above" is one of the fastest-growing religious choices in America. 

Israeli ‘settlers’ torch Palestinian property in retaliation for being evicted by Israeli troops

When you and your friends and family are implacably convinced that you know God’s will beyond question, you can do some evil things:

On a hilltop, blankets, pots and broken chairs are strewn where the Israeli army tried to demolish an illegal Jewish settlement outpost. In the fields opposite, 70 olive trees are scorched and blackened after the settlers took revenge — not on the army, but on the local Palestinians.

It is a new and effective settler tactic known as the “price tag”: if the Government sends police or soldiers to dismantle an outpost that is being built, the settlers make the Palestinian population pay the price.

“It’s quite simple and smart but evil,” said Michael Sfard, a lawyer with the Israeli human rights group Yesh Din. “They attack Palestinian property, people, and blockade roads every time the Israeli security forces do something they don’t like” — such as demolish outposts.

Many settlers in the West Bank are religious hardliners who believe that they are fulfilling a biblical prophecy by taking over the land that they call Judaea and Samaria.

* * *

“It’s not a war, it’s our right,” he said, brushing aside the issue of what might happen to the Palestinians if his movement succeeds in settling the land.

“It’s not my problem, it’s not something I have to solve. This is a land that was promised by God, that’s all I know,” he added.

Mr Sfard said that there were anywhere between a few dozen and a few hundred settlers using the violent tactic, which was proving to be effective.

“It’s slowing down the security forces and demanding much larger and heavier forces,” he said. “It’s such a big headache that many of the relevant authorities give up without trying.” The outposts are rebuilt quickly by determined settlers once the army leaves.

From James Hider, West Bank settlers use ‘price tag’ tactic to punish Palestinians, The Times [UK], Oct. 15, 2009 (bold-faced emphasis added.)

Karen Armstrong: Itinerant prophet of the Golden Rule

My wife and I enjoyed hearing renowned religious historian Karen Armstrong last night at Houston’s Wortham Center, as part of a Progressive Forum of Houston lecture series. Some observations:

• Armstrong is delightful.  Her lecture style is passable; to me, though, the most enjoyable part was her living-room conversation afterwards, in the style of Inside the Actor's Studio, with Progressive Forum founder Randall Morton, who posed questions previously submitted via the Web.
• Armstrong emphasized the commonality of the Golden Rule in world religions. That resonated with me, of course (see my various postings here on the fundamental importance of the Summary of the Law in human cultural evolution).
• She claimed that it’s only been in the last few hundred years that people took the Bible’s creation accounts lit­erally. She said that those accounts used to be re­garded — correctly, in her view — as mythos, a story setting out a program for action, as opposed to logos, a description of the way things really are. (Doubtless this one-sentence summary fails to do her justice.)
• Armstrong pitched the Charter for Compassion movement that it sounds like she’s spearheading.
• She pronounces her first name CAR-rin.
• The event looked to be sold out – I saw only a handful of empty seats here and there in the Cullen Theater, probably from no-shows. We ended up sitting in the mezzanine, which I think was our first time ever in that section. The seating there is pitched incredibly steeply, more so than any stadium I’ve ever been in.
• It was announced that Armstrong would do a book-signing for her latest, The Case for God, being sold on-site by co-sponsor Brazos Bookstore. I wanted a signed book, but the line was at least 30 minutes long, so we headed home.  I’ll check with the Brazos to see if they have any signed books there.
• I’ve never seen so many Toyota Priuses in one place as there were in the parking garage afterwards; draw your own conclusions about the audience ....
• Armstrong is not without her critics – see that section of her Wikipedia entry.

Tunnel vision is the source of so many of our troubles

David Broder writes that President Obama’s quest for rational, evidence-based public policies is likely to be derailed by the tunnel vision of people acting like heat-seeking missiles, pushing and shoving in their single-minded struggles to get what they want:

… [This highly rational, comprehensive approach fits uncomfortably with the Constitution, which apportions power among so many different players, most of whom are far more concerned with the particulars of policy than its overall coherence.

The energy bill that went into the House was a reasonably coherent set of trade-offs that would reduce carbon emissions and help the atmosphere. When it came out, it was a grab bag of subsidies and payoffs to various industries and groups. Now it is stymied by similar forces in the Senate.

Schambra's essay anticipated exactly what is happening on health care. Obama, budget director Peter Orszag and health czar Nancy-Ann DeParle grasp the intricacies of the health-care system as well as any three humans, and they could write a law to make it far more efficient.

But now it is in the hands of legislators and lobbyists who care much less about the rationality of the system than they do about the way the bill will affect their particular part of it.

Everyone has a parochial agenda.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, for example, wants to be sure a new cancer treatment center in Nevada has favored status.

(Emphasis and extra paragraphing added.)

Of course, at an individual level this tunnel vision makes perfect sense. Harry Reid knows full well that his chances of reelection hinge more on his being able bring home the bacon than on whether he enacts policies good for the country as a whole.  (On a related note, see also this post about a mother whose tunnel vision enabled her to rescue her child from a polar bear.)

The four basic prayers: Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!

From Zev Chafetz, The Right Way to Pray?  NY Times, Sept. 16, 2009:

“… when you come right down to it, there are only four basic prayers. Gimme! Thanks! Oops! and Wow!”

“That’s it?”

“Yep. Wow! are prayers of praise and wonder at the creation. Oops! is asking for forgiveness. Gimme! is a request or a petition. Thanks! is expressing gratitude. That’s the entire Judeo-Christian doxology. That’s what we teach our kids in religious school.”

“What about adults who want to learn to pray?”

“I tell them to start with prayers of Thanks! That’s what Christians call ‘grace.’ Everybody has something to be grateful for.”

“What if the person doesn’t believe in God?”

“Then I tell him to thank who or what seems appropriate,” Gellman said. “Hey, you’ve got to start somewhere. If people say prayer is a crutch, I don’t disagree. Sometimes you need a crutch. But I don’t believe in a God who is a magician and miraculously answers individual prayer. That’s absurd.”

A theologian proclaiming the reliability of the gospel authors is like a lawyer proclaiming that first-century midwives didn’t need to wash their hands

Adapted from a comment I posted in a dialogue with “dwstroudmd,” a commenter at T19:

Setting up the analogy

Suppose that I, having only basic first-aid training, were to insist that it didn’t matter whether first-century Jewish midwives washed their hands before delivering babies. According to me (let’s suppose), the extant religious standards called for all devout Jews to wash regularly.  Surely that would have been enough to guard against infant mortality and death in childbed, right?

You, an experienced modern-day obstetrician, would smile tolerantly, or even laugh.  And rightly so:  If I’d had the benefit of your training, I’d have known that your profession has established (not without controversy) that mother- and baby-killing infections can sneak in via even the cleanest-looking unwashed hands. 

(We can’t mock first-century midwives for not knowing this, though; they lacked the necessary underlying knowledge about infectious microbes and their transmission.)

Ancient storytelling practices weren't necessarily a sufficient guard against distortion, just as ancient sanitary practices weren’t necessarily a sufficient guard against infection

Now let’s reverse the roles.  Certain modern theologians make the claim that it doesn’t matter whether the NT accounts are hearsay, or (if in fact they were eyewitness accounts) whether they were first written down decades after the witnesses’ observations, without the opportunity to dig into what the witnesses actually saw as opposed to what they claimed they saw.

According to these theologians, various first-century storytelling practices — "sanitation" practices, if you will — would have been enough to guard against distortion of the NT tales, even the most extraordinary ones.

It turns out, though, that at least so far as we can tell) these theologians have little or no training in interviewing actual, fallible human witnesses (let alone in cases having real-world consequences).

Our modern theologians apparently know little of the the vicissitudes of human perception and memory, as demonstrated convincingly by modern journalists, police detectives, and lawyers, not to mention by experimental psychologists.

That might give you an idea why I react the way I do when reasserters make such grandiose claims: When you [reasserters] make such confident assertions about first-century storytelling practices, to me it sounds just like a non-physician who claims that first-century midwives didn’t need to wash their hands.

The search for intelligent life elsewhere

From the often-hilarious xkcd.com – I read every strip on Google Reader:

It’d be sacrilege to insist that God has nothing more to say to us

From commenter "NoVAScout" in a discussion at TitusOneNine:

My hope and belief is that those choices [by the church of which writings to include in the scriptural canon] were guided by divine influence.

My opinions or beliefs cannot bind the future actions of God, so I have no view on what He will do to speak to us in the future.

If He speaks to us, I will try to be in a position to listen.

I cannot imagine that any Christian would take an adamantine position that God has nothing more to say to us. That seems tantamount to sacrilege.

Very well said. (Extra paragraphing added.)

Who says Obama wasted the summer?

It's amusing to read and hear the yammering by politicians and editorial columnists that President Obama wasted the summer on health care, that he should have been out there leading the charge, etc., etc.

It occurred to me some time ago that the president might have known exactly what he was doing on that score — patiently biding his time and conserving his political ammo, while letting the crazies on both sides dominate the headlines but eventually wear out their welcome with the broader public.

One of the yammerers, Frank Rich, appears to get this, but he seems to think it's a bad thing:

... it’s a little disingenuous for Obama to claim that he is not distracted by the 24-hour news cycle. What he’s actually doing is gaming it for all it’s worth.

As a mode of campaigning, this tactic was worth a great deal. Obama ... executed a remarkably disci­plined tortoise-vs.-hare battle plan that out­witted and ultimately vanquished the hyper­caffeinated political strategies of Hillary Clinton and John McCain

As a style of governing, however, this repeated cycle of extended above-the-fray passivity followed by last-minute oratorical heroics has now been stretched to the very limit.

If this indeed has been what the president has been doing, and if such tactics help him push through a useful health-care bill — which remains to be seen — then Frank Rich and his fellow philosopher-king wannabes will call him a masterful political craftsman who knows how to get things done in today's hyperpartisan environment.

Sleep-deprived hallucinations and the Resurrection

I’ve been monitoring a heated discussion at TitusOneNine about exhausted New Orleans doctors and nurses supposedly engaging in mercy-killing in the chaos after Hurricane Katrina. Commenter “Clueless,” apparently a physician, noted that after about 72 hours without sleep, people start to have “fairly fixed hallucinations (which are micro intrusions of REM sleep into wakefulness).” 

Hmm — I wonder if that might provide an explanation for the Resurrection appearances after Jesus’ death.

• We know from the Gospel accounts that Jesus’ disciples were already craving sleep on the night before his crucifixion:  They were nodding off in Gethsemane while Jesus was praying for the cup to be removed from him (Mk 14.37-42).  We don’t know why that was; they might have not gotten much sleep on the previous night (Wednesday), or perhaps they had too much wine at the Last Supper, which of course was a Passover dinner.
• After the jarring events of Jesus’ capture that night, it’s hard to imagine the disciples got much sleep the rest of the night — especially Peter, who is recorded as having followed at a distance to the court of the high priest (Mk 14.54).
• It may be that the disciples didn’t sleep much after Jesus’ execution.  Sleeplessness is apparently a very common reaction after the unexpected death of a loved one (I’ve seen that in my own family).  It seems plausible that the disciples, certainly shocked and grief-stricken, and quite likely terrified for their own lives, had trouble sleeping on the Friday- and Saturday night after the crucifixion.

Christian scholars have long dismissively rejected conjectures that the post-Resurrection Jesus sightings were hallucinations, often on grounds that too many people supposedly saw Jesus for that to have been the explanation.

Still, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to imagine that by Sunday morning, the disciples were starting to experience the effects of sleep deprivation, including hallucinations.

And then the stories of Jesus’ “appearances” mutated and became distorted in the retelling, as stories so often do.

Six years ago today ...

... I did the first post on this blog.  These days I don't post as often as I used to; perhaps in time I'll have more to say again.

Liberty as means, not end

This piece by Jim Manzi, "The Paradox of Libertarianism," was thought-provoking:

... One thing that has become clear to me through these dinners is that there are two strands of libertarian thought. In somewhat cartoon terms, one strand takes liberty to be a (or in extreme cases, the) fundamental human good in and of itself; the other takes liberty to be a means to the end of discovery of methods of social organization that create other benefits.

I’ll call the first “liberty-as-goal” libertarianism and the second “liberty-as-means” libertarianism. Obviously, one can hold both of these beliefs simultaneously, and many people do.

But in my observation, when pushed to develop a position on some difficult issue, most self-described libertarians reveal a temperament that leans strongly in one direction or the other.

Again, in cartoon terms, I’d describe the first temperament as idealistic, deductive and theory-based, and the second as practical, inductive and experiment-based.

To lay my cards on the table, I fall squarely into the second camp. [Bold-face emphasis and extra paragraphing added.]

Me too — read it all.

Three premature fertility-treatment sextuplets die - how is this not child abuse?

See this Houston Chronicle story about seriously-premature sextuplets, conceived after fertility treatments. Three of the sextuplets have died since they were born August 4; the surviving three are at serious risk of brain damage and other impairments. The mom is a diabetic and a thyroid-cancer survivor; her first two fertility-treatment pregnancies miscarried, but apparently the third time was a charm, if that's an appropriate expression for such a tragedy.

My sympathy for the parents' heartbreak is largely outweighed by a feeling that they recklessly put innocent newborns in harm's way:

Even with all they've [sic] endured, the Stansels wouldn't do anything differently.

Not the choice to become parents. Not the fertility treatments. Not the choice to proceed with a six-baby pregnancy, rather than reduce to fewer fetuses.

“Not in a heartbeat, we wouldn't have,” Thomas Stansel said. “We'll let God handle that. Not us.” [Emphasis added]

Evidently these parents were unwilling to "let God handle that" when it came to their inability to conceive naturally, even after two failed fertility-treatment pregnancies. (One news report says they're Mormons, which may have had something to do with it.) They were all too willing, though, to let God handle the consequences of their decision, namely exposing six preemies to who-knows-what physical agony, not to mention the likelihood of lifelong handicaps.

God hasn’t given us a Batphone to take his calls on

“Statements like, ‘It is clearly God’s will that we…..’ or ‘God’s Word has settled the issue’ should trigger immediate questioning.  What God wants of us is not to be learned from a morning message on the red telephone, but in the patient waiting on the guidance of the Spirit, which comes through the myriad changes and chances of human existence, both sacred and secular.”

--Canon Simon Mein, Away from my Desk (hat tip: Mark Harris)

Shiites in Iraq have recently been refraining from retaliation against Sunni extremists' provocations

See this NY Times article. Of course, turn-the-other-cheek works only for those who have sufficient staying power to hold on until their attackers have a change of heart — which might be a long time coming.

Would God think less of orthodox Christians for praying with others who didn't share their beliefs?

I seem to be getting some post ideas from an ongoing discussion at TitusOneNine. Here's a thought experiment I posed there in response to a comment from one of that blog's more rigorously-orthodox participants.

THE SETTING: Imagine that:

• A group of Hindus, Jews, Muslims, and doctrinally-orthodox Christians, meet regularly for prayers.
• All are devout, all their beliefs and prayers are sincere.
• When a specifically-Christian prayer is said aloud, the non-Christians mentally ‘translate’ the prayer into their own respective religious idioms. The same is true when a specifically-Hindu prayer is said, etc.

QUESTION 1: In general, does God take a lesser view of, say, Hindus than he does of Christians? How about orthodox Christians versus heretical ones?

QUESTION 2: Does God take a lesser view of Christians when they pray in a theologically-heterogeneous congregation?

QUESTION 3: Do Christians' prayers lose some portion of their effectiveness if they're prayed in a congregation that happens to include non-Christians?

If your answer to any of these is “yes,” then please explain.

Redefining church

Here’s a proposition for debate, inspired by a discussion at TitusOneNine and a posting last week by Nick Knisely:

Resolved, that the members of ‘the church’ are those people — reasserter, reappraiser, Jew, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, etc. — who are willing:

1) to pray ‘next to’ one another, even if the prayer of the person next to you is no more than a grudging acknowledgement that maybe a Creator of some sort might indeed exist;

2) to treat each other's prayers with equal dignity, even when there’s grave disagreement over underlying suppositions; and

3) to collaborate in seeking the best for others as for themselves, even if for no other reason than that this seems to give a species a survival advantage over the long term.

Under this definition of ‘church,’ a given individual’s theological beliefs would be of no particular relevance, except of course to the extent those beliefs influenced the individual’s actions.

I know some would object to such a definition of ‘church’; I’m curious how you’d articulate that objection.

Distortions: News anchors in Sweden aren't called 'cronkiters' after all

An Associated Press story provides us with a very recent example of the fallibility of oral tradition, and the distortions that can be perpetuated by wishful thinking:

Turns out, the anchorman who prided himself on accuracy helped perpetuate an unfounded claim that newscasters in Sweden and Holland had been nicknamed "cronkiters."

Cronkite wasn't alone in this mistaken report. Apparently, the first journalist to publish it was Pulitzer-prize-winning author David Halberstam. In a magazine piece in 1976, Halberstam wrote that Cronkite's international stature was such that, "in Sweden, anchormen came to be known as Cronkiters." It was a tidbit Halberstam repeated in his classic 1979 chronicle of the modern media world, "The Powers That Be." 

[¶¶]

When Cronkite died last month, The Associated Press published it in his obituary.

Turns out, no evidence nor accounts uncovered thus far confirm its truth. Not Cronkiters. Not cronkiters. Not with a "k" instead of a "c." Not in Holland (which was added to the mix along the way) any more than in Sweden.

That's really the way it is.

[¶¶]

But why the myth of "cronkiter" took hold is a no-brainer. Maybe literally.

• The story was not only delightful but seemed plausible enough.
• It served the narrative of Cronkite and the national respect accorded him, especially in tributes appearing at his death.
• Darned important people vouched for it.
• Most of all, it had been around long enough to seem like unassailable fact to those who had already "known" it for years.

(Emphasis and bullets added.)

The 'cronkiter' episode illustrates that this sort of distortion happens regularly, even among people who spend their lives trying to winnow fact from fiction. 

By and large, such distortions are harmless — if, that is, people don't lean on them too heavily in making life bets.

What's not so harmless is when those who fall prey to this kind of distortion insist that their wishful thinking is the only legitimate, the only plausible view.

"We pray together. And that's enough."

Bravo Nick Knisely!

A hand up, not a handout – San Diego’s “Stand Down” for homeless veterans

See this NY Times article about an annual three-day “Stand Down” tent city that San Diego has done for 20 years for homeless veterans, with a ‘chow hall,’ haircuts, medical exams, dental care, counseling, etc. 

Be sure to watch the video, too, about halfway down the left-hand column.  In the video, I was impressed by the vets who were determined that this would be their first and last Stand Down – they were looking for temporary help, not for a recurring handout. But organizers said it sometimes took more than one Stand Down to get someone on the right track.

The article said:

Reveille is sounded at 6 a.m., the hot meals spooned out by volunteers are called chow, and the portable toilets are called latrines.

The olive and khaki tent city strives for a military ambience, organizers said, because many participants have not since felt the pride and success they did while in uniform.

I’ve read before that a lot of homeless vets respond positively to a familiar, boot-camp regimen of reveille, PT, morning formation, working hours, etc.

I suspect this was a big benefit of monasteries: providing a home, a sense of purpose, and a certain status in society, for unattached males who otherwise could be out on the streets.

I wonder if those benefits of monasteries could be replicated somehow in the secular, civilian world — while guarding against the danger that they could turn into private militias, as I’ve read happened during the Arian controversy of the fourth century.

The hidden virtues of a two-party primary system dominated by the passionate faithful

I used to think it was a shame that our political system is so dominated by the party primary system, in which two parties’ passionate faithful exercise such inordinate influence. It seemed a pity we didn’t have a third, centrist party that could attract support from moderate Democrats and Republicans, leaving the left- and right-wing nuts to stew in their own juices.

But the other day I realized our existing two-party system is better:  It separates and contains the nut jobs, while giving them an outlet for their passions, and reducing the odds of their thinking in terms of unpleasant alternatives like the violent overthrow of the system.

Consider how events play out in just about every election year:

• The candidates court the passionate faithful of their parties.  This renews the sense of hope among ‘the base’ that someday they can achieve their societal goals through the political process. 
• On the other hand, if a given party can be successfully portrayed as having fallen too much under the sway of its lunatic fringe, then in November the swing states and swing voters tend to punish that party, metaphorically smacking it upside the head.

Moreover, in our two-party system, candidates must develop a knack for nuance, a talent for choosing their words and positions carefully — they have to motivate their party’s true believers to donate money and organizational efforts, but at the same time they can’t afford to alienate the swing voters who may well decide their fate in the general election. 

If you ask me, that’s not a bad set of skills for elected officials to be made to demonstrate, before handing them the keys for governing a society as diverse and complex as ours.

Robert Wright's The Evolution of God - a must-read

Robert Wright never disappoints. His latest book, The Evolution of God, is an extended look at theology from the perspective of a journalist who understands the fallibilities of human perception and memory, and the natural limitations of scriptures.

Wright doesn't seem to be religious in the conventional sense. He accepts evolution as about as well-proved as anything we know. But he does think the evidence is consistent with the existence of ... Something 'out there.'

The Afterword, a nice summation, is worth the read all by itself. Here's an excerpt from the final paragraph (with extra line breaks added):

Though we can no more conceive of God than we can conceive of an electron, believers can ascribe properties to God, somewhat as physicists ascribe properties to electrons. One of the more plausible such properties is love.

And maybe, in this light, the argument for God is strengthened by love’s organic association with truth — by the fact, indeed, that at times these two properties almost blend into one.

You might say that love and truth are the two primary manifestations of divinity in which we can partake, and that by partaking in them we become truer manifestations of the divine.

Then again, you might not say that.

The point is just that you wouldn’t have to be crazy to say it.

Homeless girl headed for Harvard

All I can say is, wow ….

An illustration of the troubles traditionalists get themselves into by emphasizing doctrinal purity

At TitusOneNine, I read that Robert Duncan has, unusually, has said something with which many moderate- and liberal Episcopalians can agree 100%:

“For those who believe the ordination of women to be a grave error, and for those who believe it scripturally justifiable . . . we should be in mission together until God sorts us out,” said Duncan in last week’s opening address. “It is not perfect, but it is enough.” [Emphasis added.]

Duncan was formerly the bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh; he is now being styled “archbishop” by the new church calling itself the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA).

Duncan was referring specifically to the controversy in his new church over women’s ordination to the priesthood, which some traditionalists steadfastly oppose. In my comment at T19, I said in effect that it was a pity Duncan wouldn’t apply the same standard of mutual tolerance to certain other hotly-contested issues. 

Right on cue (or so it seemed), subsequent commenters promptly provided yet another example of how doctrinal purity so often pushes itself to the forefront of any religious discussion involving traditionalists:

• One commenter, "InChristAlone," wrote that I was failing to distinguish between 'central' issues (presumably including, say, same-sex marriage) and less-important ones like women's ordination:

D.C., you are trying to compare apples and oranges. Women’s ordination is not a central Gospel issue, even those who disagree with W.O. don’t believe that it is, even though it is still an important issue. … [Emphasis added.]

• And then — totally unsurprisingly — another commenter, "stjohnsrector," jumped in to argue just the opposite, namely that women's ordination was indeed a 'central' issue in the church:

I hate to open this can of worms, but many of us Anglicans, and the churches in communion with Rome and Constantinople, believe it is a central issue. …

• A few comments later, "austin" elaborated on why women's ordination was, yes, a central issue:

The ordination of women, for catholics, is of the first order not only because valid sacraments are “generally necessary for salvation,” but also for reasons of authority, tradition, the order of nature, and the reliability of Scripture (in ascending order of importance, perhaps)....

The issue is not going to go away, and it is, in my view, likely to be fatal to the new enterprise if not definitively settled.

[Emphasis added.] 

As it happened, ACNA prudently adopted to a local-option arrangement on the subject of women’s ordination. I stand by my original comment:  What a pity they couldn’t live with the same approach concerning same-sex marriages while they were still in the Episcopal Church. There was no reason we couldn't agree to disagree, and then get back to work, together, to bring more people to God.

Religious people make better citizens, says new study

From The Christian Century:

The scholars say their studies found that religious Americans are three to four times more likely to be involved in their community than nonreligious Americans. They are more apt to work on community projects, belong to voluntary associations, attend public meetings, vote in local elections, attend protest demonstrations and political rallies and donate time and money to causes—including secular ones.

At the same time, Putnam and Campbell say, their data show that religious people are "nicer": they carry packages for people, don't mind folks cutting ahead in lines and give money to panhandlers.

The scholars say the link between religion and civic activism is causal, since they observed that people who hadn't attended church became more engaged after they did. "These are huge effects," Putnam said.

The reason for the increased civic engagement may come as a surprise to religious leaders. It has nothing to do with ideas of divine judgment or with trying to secure a seat in heaven. Rather, it's the relationships that people make in their churches, mosques, synagogues and temples that draw them into community activism.

Putnam calls them "supercharged friends," and the more such friends people have, the more likely they are to participate in civic events, he says. The theory is that if someone from your "moral community" asks you to volunteer for a cause, it's really hard to say no. "Being asked to do something by a member of your congregation is different from being asked to do something by a member of your bowling league," Putnam said.

The effect of these friendships is so strong, the scholars found, that people who attend religious services regularly but don't have any friends there look more like secularists than like fellow believers when it comes to civic participation.

"It's not faith that accounts for this," Putnam said. "It's faith communities."

Daniel Burke, Congregants make better citizens, says new study, The Christian Century, June 16, 2009, p. 16 (bold-faced emphasis added).