The Culture Beat

Consider this paradox: The government of Germany supports religion, but clergy there are not allowed to perform official weddings. Couples must be wed by state authorities. For a church ceremony, the couple takes an extra step, and they often do, even a year after their official marriage.

In the U.S., however, where church and state are officially separate, clergy are allowed to perform state-approved ceremonies.

The irony is apparent to Scott Bartchy, professor of Christian origins and the history of religion at UCLA, who taught in Germany during the 1970s.

“Early on (in the U.S) we empowered ministers and rabbis to marry people,” said Bartchy, who graduated from Milligan College (where I teach), earned advanced Harvard degrees, and once taught at Emmanuel School of Religion in Johnson City. “We hear it when they say, ‘by the authority vested in me by the state of Tennessee.’ What in the world is the ministry doing administering the laws of Tennessee?”

The complex relationship between marriage, the state and religion crashed the headlines again last week when the California Supreme Court ruled that same-sex couples have the right to marry in that state.

The ruling was close, 4-3, and it may be overturned if voters decide in November to amend the state constitution to define marriage as only between a man and woman. (In 2000, Californians passed a proposition saying as much, with a 61 percent majority, but that does not carry constitutional weight.)

Except for California and Massachusetts, which approved same-sex marriage in 2003, American laws recognize marriage only between a man and a woman. Several states, including California, already have domestic partnership provisions, which give same-sex couples some legal rights but are not considered equal with marriage.

But more than legalities are involved. There are cultural and economic dimensions – and religious ones, of course. People get married in church buildings, synagogues and mosques for a reason.

Faith traditions teach theological ideas about the meaning of marriage and family. For Christians and Jews, Genesis 2 portrays the relationship between man and woman as a reflection of God’s own nature. Popular notions of romance – “when two egos enter a relationship to maximize their own benefits,” as Bartchy put it – doesn’t play a big role. The biblical ideal of being “of one flesh” means more than being in one bed.

There was a time when such ideas were generally accepted, and common religious teachings coincided with the state’s interest in maintaining stable households. Church and state found it easy to meet at the wedding altar.

That cooperation was part of another legacy – the tangled and often troubled relationships between governments and churches dating back at least to 313, when the Roman emperor Constantine legalized Christianity and favored it with his patronage.

Before then, distinctions were clear between Christians and the society at large ad especially the government. Constantine’s edict made life easier for Christians, but it also smudged the borders between church, state and society.

The current disputes over marriage show just how long-lasting and messy that legacy has been. Here’s a question: If a minister believes – for theological reasons – that marriage is only between a man and a woman, but performs a wedding in Massachusetts or California, is he or she compromising a matter of faith by sanctifying that state’s broader definition of marriage? Or anywhere – what if a minister who believes Jesus’ words about divorce (Matthew 19:3-9) performs a marriage between two legally divorced people?

The state is interested in stability, but not necessarily in how or why people live together, other than a vague notion of “an individual’s capacity to establish a loving and long-term committed relationship with another person and responsibly to care for and raise children,” as California Chief Justice Ronald M. George wrote in last week’s majority opinion.

It may be time for church and state to separate at the altar, according to Bartchy.

“I think we would clean up our act a whole lot if the state alone issued marriage licenses,” he said. “Whatever form the majority thinks that should take ought to be case, since this is a democracy. Then whatever Christian or other religious groups do, that’s for them to decide.”

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 24 May 2008.

Some time ago I was behind a car plastered with three bumper stickers: “No Jesus, No Peace. Know Jesus, Know Peace … One Nation Under God … The Power of Pride,” the last one decorated with an American flag.

It took a minute for the mixed message of cheek-turning Christianity, proud nationalism and support for the war on terrorism to sink in, partly because that blend is a common sight around here.

Not so in other parts of the world, not even where the Christian faith used to dominate, according to Dr. Brian Stanley, a church historian and missions specialist at England’s Cambridge University.

“There has been a massive shift since the Second World War,” he said, one that has moved the global weight of Christianity to the south and east – to Africa and Asia – and away from the “old heartlands of Christianity” in Europe and North America.

Almost two-thirds of the world’s Christians – about 65 percent – live in Africa and Asia now. A hundred years ago, at most 10 percent of the world’s Christians lived in those regions.

But since 1945, migration, improved mass communications and waves of independence movements that freed colonies from old European powers helped to alter the world’s religious landscape.

At the same time, Christianity began declining in Europe and in parts of North America. If this is a typical weekend in Western Europe, less than 10 percent of adults will darken the door of a Christian or Jewish place of worship, a percentage closely mirrored in many urban areas on this side of the Atlantic.

The growth of Christianity in Asia and Africa “surprised a lot of people,” said Stanley, who directs the Henry Martyn Centre, an academic institute specializing in the study of Christianity around the world. In the 1950s and ’60s, experts predicted that Christian religion would evaporate after Western colonists pulled out. Just the opposite happened.

“What was once Christian in the North – or West, if you prefer – is not Christian anymore,” Stanley said. Gone are the old distinctions between so-called Christian and heathen nations. No one can easily draw a religion’s territory on a map anymore.

If the geography of Christianity has changed, so has the environment in which it operates. It is a minority religion in most cultures, just one among many faiths.

“What is emerging in the South (hemisphere) is a very different form of Christianity,” said Stanley, who lectured at Emmanuel School of Religion in Johnson City, Tenn., in 2004. “Very few nation-states have governments that are explicitly Christian. The majority are Islamic or secular, such as India because it is so religiously diverse.”

That kind of atmosphere is “cutting away at a lot of deadwood,” Stanley said. “People are Christians because they choose to be, sometimes at considerable cost.”

In Iraq, for example, Paulos Faraj Rahho, the Chaldean archbishop of Mosul, was kidnapped and killed in March, but his high-profile death came after a series of abductions, murders and church bombings aimed at Iraq’s Christian communities.

In most places, Christianity is starting to resemble the church in its earliest days, according to Stanley, when “people were more at the margins of power rather than at the center of power, and often challenging the powers that be.”

This global shift will test Christians in the United States and other Western nations, even in the so-called Bible belt. Bumper-sticker slogans won’t work well.

“Christian identity and Western or American identity are going to pull further and further apart,” Stanley said. “More and more Christians will not be in free, democratic societies. That will challenge our view of Christianity in its connection with our national identity.”

In other words, Western Christians should expect to wrestle with political and economic policies that pressure fellow believers in other countries. Christians in Palestine, for example, are baffled and angry at the strong support that American church leaders such as John Hagee give to Israeli policies, even when Palestinian church communities are destroyed as a result.

American Christians are entering unfamiliar territory, where national interests collide with spiritual kinships.

“That will challenge Christians,” says Stanley. “Where is your ultimate loyalty?”

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 3 May 2008.

Last fall Sen. Charles Grassley, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, started poking his Iowan nose into the finances of six media-based ministries. Citing allegations of possible abuses – extravagant housing allowances, excessive compensation, personal use of assets such as private jets, lax board governance, unreported income – he wanted an accounting, literally, of how much money these ministries receive and how it gets used.

The targeted ministry leaders cried foul at first, saying the Senate was tearing down the wall separating church and state, but four of them have since started cooperating. Only Kenneth Copeland and Creflo Dollar continue to resist. Life may get complicated for them.

Grassley said he simply wants to protect donors.

“Tax-exempt organizations rely on the generosity and good will of their contributors to help fill food pantries, clothe the needy and serve the underprivileged,” he stated. “Donors of modest means pinch pennies and make sacrifices so others less fortunate may benefit from their collective contributions. … Considering tax-exempt media-based ministries today are a billion-dollar industry with minimal transparency, it would be irresponsible not to examine this tax-exempt part of our economy.”

The Senate committee action might be necessary, but it’s unfortunate. Government intervention wouldn’t be necessary if donors were doing their job, which involves more than writing a check. They should also be asking questions.

“Ministries are responsive to donor enquiries,” according to Kenneth Behr, president of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability, a voluntary accreditation agency for Christian nonprofit organizations. “Donors should understand they have a long-term relationship (with ministries). Healthy dialogues are always good. Self-regulation is better than government oversight.”

His organization, like a Christian Better Business Bureau, offers suggestions for wise giving (“know your charity … understand what your gift will accomplish … focus on the mission”). The bottom line: Donors should be both generous and informed. The Internet, Behr points out, makes active, educated giving easier than ever.

Concerns about mixing money and ministry are as old as the church itself — not surprising, considering the Bible’s general skepticism about wealth. Jesus said it is “easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God” (Mark 10:25), a verse not quoted much by the Rev. Dollar. Jesus sent his followers out to preach with necessities, not with some first-century equivalent of a Rolls Royce.

The apostle Paul wrote that “workers deserve their wages,” and that good teachers and leaders should be treated generously. But a few lines later, he warned that “those who desire to be rich fall into temptation, into a snare, into many senseless and hurtful desires that plunge men into ruin and destruction, for the love of money is the root of all evils” (1 Timothy 6: 9, 10).

Money itself is not evil, but perhaps dollar bills should be printed with warning labels: “Money can be hazardous to spiritual health.”

By the early second century, just a generation after Paul, church leaders were concerned enough about potential financial abuses that a Christian instruction manual, “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles” (known in Greek as the Didache), addressed the issue.

“Let every apostle (messenger) who comes to you be received as the Lord,” the Didache instructed. “But he shall not remain more than one day; or two days, if there’s a need. But if he remains three days, he is a false prophet. And when the apostle goes away, let him take nothing but bread until he lodges. If he asks for money, he is a false prophet. … Not every one who speaks in the Spirit is a prophet; but only if he holds the ways of the Lord.”

It’s impossible to say for sure what early Christians would think of a TV preacher who cries for cash and promises riches in return, but it’s obvious that their tests were more practical than mystical: If some teacher outstayed his welcome or scrounged for wealth, then he wasn’t to be trusted.

With 1,900-year-old wisdom like that, maybe Sen. Grassley wouldn’t need to protect donors from dodgy televangelists or, for that matter, from themselves.

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 26 April 2008. This was the second of two columns on financial accountability; the first appeared on April 5.
Image from www.biblepicturegallery.com.

Balancing democratic values with religious conviction is tricky business, which the delightfully persistent presidential candidate Mike Huckabee knows better than most people.

Critics harrumphed, for example, when the former Arkansas governor and ordained Southern Baptist minister (above) salted his “Super Tuesday” primary victory speech with biblical allusions (which likely didn’t register with most Americans).

His speech, they said, was yet more evidence that a President Huckabee would transform the U.S. into a bigoted theocracy.

Overreaction? Scare talk? Certainly. On the other hand, Huckabee himself can pour fuel on such fires.

“I have opponents in this race who do not want to change the Constitution,” he told a crowd before last month’s Michigan primary. “But I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do – to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.”

While the Constitution guarantees the right for Americans to practice, teach and encourage what they believe to be “God’s standards,” it was not written to enforce those beliefs. I’m not sure what Huckabee meant; maybe he was simply stating a benign personal preference. But I imagine his words could sound ominous to an atheist or agnostic, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist or even another type of Christian.

Incidentally, empowering the government with religious oversight seems odd for a candidate who pledges to “put the IRS out of business.” Does he trust the government more with citizens’ spiritual lives than with their money?

Making room for personal faith in the public square isn’t only an American dilemma. England got a fresh taste of the difficulty this week.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams (pictured here), the leading cleric in the Church of England and in the worldwide Anglican Communion, found himself under fire after remarks he made about the Muslim legal code, Sharia, and its place in British society.

“It seems unavoidable and indeed as a matter of fact certain provisions of Sharia are already recognized in our society and under our law,” he told a BBC interviewer. “So it’s not as if we’re bringing in an alien and rival system.”

Alarmed reports interpreted Williams’ words as an endorsement of – or surrender to – Islamic law, or as accepting a system that would allow Britain’s Muslims to live under a separate code. Not incidentally, the European Court of Human Rights has deemed Sharia as incompatible with modern democratic values, largely because of reports of extreme interpretations and atrocities from Middle Eastern nations, such as the execution of rape victims on charges of fornication.

It’s small wonder that the archbishop’s words stunned Britain. But reading the entire interview reveals a more sensible message. Naming the atrocities as the horrors they are, Williams said other aspects of Sharia would be acceptable.

“We already have in this country a number of situations in which the law – the internal law of religious communities – is recognized by the law of the land as justifying conscientious objections in certain circumstances,” Williams told the interviewer. “It’s not something that’s absolutely peculiar to Islam. We have orthodox Jewish courts operating in this country … not to mention the questions about how the consciences of Catholics, Anglicans and others who have difficulty about issues like abortion are accommodated within the law. So the whole idea that there are perfectly proper ways in which the law of the land pays respect to custom and community – that’s already there.”

For citizens to live under one law is “an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy,” Williams said, but people also have “other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society, and the law needs to take some account of that.”

In short, Williams thinks British law gives Muslims the same latitude to practice as other faiths, including Christianity – a notion not far from the First Amendment in the U.S. Constitution.

Considering early American history – how many people fled to the New World in search of religious freedom, often from the Church of England – it’s paradoxical that the archbishop of Canterbury may have a better grasp of what that freedom means than a presidential candidate does.

First published in the Johnson City (Tenn.) Press, 16 Feb 08.