Another Voice

According to the Pew Research Center, the Christian share of the US population is still declining, while the number of US adults, who do not identify with any organized religion, is growing. These changes are taking place across the religious landscape, affecting all regions of the country and many demographic groups.

The drop in Christian affiliation is particularly pronounced among young adults, but it is occurring among Americans of all ages. The same trends are seen among whites, blacks, and Latinos. Among both college graduates and adults with only a high school education. Among women as well as men.
The falloff in traditional religious beliefs and practices coincides with changes in the religious composition of the US public. A growing share of Americans are religiously unaffiliated, including some who self-identify as atheists or agnostics as well as many who describe their religion as “nothing in particular.” Altogether, the religiously unaffiliated (also called the “nones”) now make up 23% of the adult population.
The drop in the Christian share of the population has been driven mainly by declines among mainline Protestants and Catholics. Each of these large religious traditions has shrunk by approximately three percentage points since 2007. The evangelical Protestant share of the US population also has dipped; but at a slower rate, falling by about one percentage point since 2007.
Even as their numbers decline, American Christians – like the U.S. population as a whole – are becoming more racially and ethnically diverse. Non-Latino whites now account for smaller shares of evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants and Catholics than they did seven years earlier, while Latinos have grown as a share of all three religious groups. Racial and ethnic minorities now make up 41% of Catholics, 24% of evangelical Protestants, and 14% of mainline Protestants.
While many US religious groups are aging, the unaffiliated are comparatively young – and getting younger, on average, over time. There is a rising cohort of highly unaffiliated Millennials reaching adulthood. They will have a major impact on religion in America over the next twenty years.
In 2007, there were an estimated 41 million mainline Protestant adults in the United States. Today the number of mainline Protestants has fallen by well over 7 million. Like mainline Protestants, Catholics appear to be declining both as a percentage of the population and in absolute numbers, with a decline of well over 3 million since 2007. For every one Catholic convert, more than six Catholics leave the church. Taken a step further, Catholicism loses more members than it gains at a higher rate than any other denomination, with nearly 13 percent of all Americans describing themselves as “former Catholics.” So far Pope Francis does not appear to have an impact on slowing-down the Catholic exodus. Perhaps the US Catholic bishops still have more impact than Francis? Perhaps the “Francs effect” is not what some observes so optimistically anticipated? Something for future historians to ponder and examine…….
The number of religiously unaffiliated adults in the United States has increased by roughly 19 million since 2007. There are now approximately 56 million religiously unaffiliated adults in the States and this group – sometimes called the religious “nones” – is more numerous than either Catholics or mainline Protestants, according to recent surveys.
One of the most important factors in the growth of the “nones” is the Millennial generational change. As the Millennial generation enters adulthood, its members display much less connection with Christian churches, than the older generations. And the Millennial generation is big. It’s bigger than the Baby Boomers: there are nearly 78 million Millennials, as opposed to just 76 million Boomers. By 2020, the Millennials will represent almost 40% of all American voters.
So what are the Millennial values?
Spirituality is a key value for Millennials but not the institutional church. Certainly the Millennials hold less traditional or orthodox religious beliefs. Perhaps they are intent on redefining what religion means for themselves, just like everything else in life. A great many Millennials see the Bible not as the Word of God but as a record of peoples’ religious beliefs over the centuries, and more about creative theological imagery than strict historic fact. Millennials strongly support issues such as marriage equality, climate change, and reproductive rights, while many traditional religious institutions still reject these ideas. Millennials are strongly supportive of Christian values but find the churches too judgmental, too linked with conservative politics, and more concerned about protecting and promoting the institutional church — often with little humility and little transparency — than witnessing to authentic Christian values. They see Christian leaders often creating more polarization than promoting dialogue, collaboration, and mutual respect.
Changing the conversation?
As Christians, and Christian leaders, we need to shift our focus from speaking about the operational administration of the church, fidelity to institutional doctrine, and a morality overly-focused on pelvic concerns to speaking about and listening to the life concerns of contemporary people, and therefore more truly representing Christ. Rather than judging people and disciplining them, Christians and Christian leaders should be ministering, mentoring, and spirituality guiding.
Yes we live in a time of great change. Rather than denying, bemoaning, or condemning the religious shifts and changes, perhaps we should refocus and become more observant about God’s Spirit still at work in the people and events around us. We need more productive conversations that engage people, stimulate their minds, and touch their hearts. More constructive conversations about real and contemporary human issues.
The renewal of hearts and minds. A ministry that reaches out to people rather than pushing them aside. This is what Christian life and ministry should be about.
Next week some further reflections about changing the conversation. Your own reflections are always warmly welcomed.
  

“Faith seeking understanding” is a good definition of belief. Faith is our experience of God and belief is our attempt to express that experience in word and symbol.

When we attempt to describe our experiences of God, we necessarily express ourselves in the symbols, words, and rituals that are products of our culture. In fact, all of our concepts and all of our experiential interpretations are shaped and influenced to a great extent by the culture and the language out of which they emerge.

There is no belief without culture; but there can be a culture without belief. This of course is the situation in which many people find themselves today: in a belief desert. This happens when expressions of belief no longer resonate with contemporary life experience.

It happens as well when people substitute fidelity to doctrinal statements for openness to the Divine presence in all of life. I was there and did that once upon a time. One day, however, I moved from considering God as an article of belief to appreciating God as an element of my experiences. My eyes were opened…. Those experiences convinced me that “God” is real. Now I continue my own belief journey: pondering what I experience, determining how to express that in contemporary language, and connecting my experiences and belief with the experiences of other believers and with Christian scripture and tradition.

We need to find more effective ways to articulate the human experience of the Divine that reduces it neither to the extreme secularity of the “post-theistic” thinkers nor to the unthinking and closed-minded certitude of the “hyper-theistic,” whose god is mostly the creation of their own fantasies.

We need to find ways to understand the Divine presence, not “up there” or “out there” but “here and now” at the heart of all Reality, because that is where we live, love, and think.

Animated by the life, message, and spirit of Jesus, we need to set off on our own spiritual journey.

So……A good project for the New Year. It is best done with a group of friends.

Some spiritual direction for along the way:

(1) A healthy spiritual journey moves forwards not backwards. Nostalgia is fun for a while, but we really cannot turn-back the clock. To become a religious child again would mean to abandon the adult capacity to think and make one’s own judgments on the basis of critical principles. That is why the upsurge of fundamentalism today is so offensive. It is a closed vision and fundamentally faulty.

(2) Pondering our belief today we need to feel and experience the “call” of the Sacred (the Faith experience) by interpreting and thereby re-creating the meaning and power of religious language. The truly contemporary believer must have one foot anchored in the present and the other in the tradition of the past. There must be a dynamic tension between contemporary religious consciousness and historical critical consciousness.

(3) When we explore our belief – when we reflect in depth about our Faith experiences – we necessarily express ourselves in the symbols, words and rituals which are products of our culture. We also look for the resonance and dialogue with tradition: with the theological expressions of earlier cultures.

(4) Truly authentic Christian belief can never be simply the expression of one’s individual and subjective experience. We need each other. Expressions of belief are the result of deep reflection about my Faith experience AND your Faith experience AND the Faith experience of the community. As I told one of my bishop friends: we need you but you also need us!

(5) Belief relies on culture but can never become locked within a particular culture. Nor can it unthinkingly venerate any particular culture. Some Roman Catholic Church leaders, for instance, are locked in a late medieval culture and still dress and think that way. Nevertheless, when belief becomes so locked within a particular culture that it is hardly distinguishable from it, we are on the road to idolatry.

(6) All cultures perceive reality through their own particular lenses; and these lenses are shaped and adjusted by shared human events and great movements in human history. Change is part of life.

(7) Christian belief, because its focus is what lies within and yet beyond culture in all of its historical manifestations, is continually engaged in critical reflection and critique of the contemporary and previous cultures.

Happy New Year!

Epiphany still happens.
I look forward to traveling with you in 2016.
  

(Sorry for the old picture but it seemed to fit….)

One week from Christmas 2015 it us time for me to post my final reflection for this year. A big thank you to all who have stayed with Another Voice for these past twelve months. Right now I plan to resume after Epiphany. If I find I really have nothing worthwhile to say, I will pull the plug on my computer. 
My original inspiration came from T. S. Eliot: “For last year’s words belong to last year’s language. And next year’s words await another voice.”
Too many church people (like many presidential candidates) spent far too much time regurgitating last year’s language. We learn from the past but we don’t live there. And……wanting to live in the past is a very contemporary problem.
More reflections, I hope, in 2016.
For today a final reflection, once again, from my favorite poet T. S. Eliot and his “Journey of the Magi.”
The journey of the magi, you see, is not just a pious legend from the past. It is your story and mine…..
Merry Christmas and every good wish for the New Year!
Jack

……………….
“A  cold coming we had of it,

Just the worst time of the year

For a journey, and such a long journey:

The was deep and the weather sharp,

The very dead of winter.”

And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,

Lying down in the melting snow.

There were times we regretted

The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,

And the silken girls bringing sherbet.

Then the camel men cursing and grumbling

And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,

And the night-fires gong out, and the lack of shelters,

And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly

And the villages dirty, and charging high prices.:

A hard time we had of it.

At the end we preferred to travel all night,

Sleeping in snatches,

With the voices singing in our ears, saying

That this was all folly.
Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,

Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation;

With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,

And three trees on the low sky,

And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.

Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,

Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,

And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.

But there was no information, and so we continued

And arrived at evening, not a moment too soon

Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.
All this was a long time ago, I remember,

And I would do it again, but set down

This set down

This: were we lead all that way for

Birth or Death? There was a Birth, certainly,

We had evidence and no doubt. I have seen birth and death,

But had thought they were different; this Birth was

Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.

We returned to our places, these Kingdoms,

But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,

With an alien people clutching their gods.

I should be glad of another death.
  

The Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World is one of the four “constitutions” resulting from the Roman Catholic Church’s Second Vatican Council (1962 – 1965). It is commonly known by its Latin name Gaudium et spes – “Joy and Hope.”

The document was officially promulgated on December 7, 1965. It gives an overview of the church’s teachings about humanity’s relationship to society: to economics, poverty, social justice, culture, science, technology, and ecumenism.

For fifty years, this document, drafted by some of my long-gone professors, has inspired and motivated me as a believer, a theologian, and a teacher. It still challenges me and gives me hope for today and for tomorrow.

I find it still has a very contemporary ring, echoed in its opening lines. A good reflection for all Christians on this third weekend of Advent 2015. A brief and appropriate Christian response to today’s anxieties:

The joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the people of our time, especially of those who are poor or afflicted, are the joys and hopes, the grief and anguish of the followers of Christ as well. Indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts. For theirs is a community composed of men and women. United in Christ, they are led by the Holy Spirit in their journey to the Kingdom of their Father and they have welcomed the news of salvation which is meant for all people. That is why this community realizes that it is truly linked with humankind and its history by the deepest of bonds….

To carry out such a task, the church has always had the duty of scrutinizing the signs of the times and of interpreting them in the light of the Gospel. Thus, in language intelligible to each generation, it can respond to the perennial questions which people ask about this present life and the life to come, and about the relationship of the one to the other. We must therefore recognize and understand the world in which we live, its explanations, its longings, and its often dramatic characteristics.

A brief citation. A contemporary challenge. A clear statement of Christian mission…..

(Posted December 8, 2015)

In the original Star Wars film, the Jedi Master Obi-Wan Kenobi painfully announced the destruction of Alderaan: “I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror….”

The Force was understood as an energy field created by all living things, that surrounds and penetrates living beings and binds them together. Were Obi-Wan with us today, and not just a fictional character, I suspect he would proclaim, with sad seriousness, that we are experiencing indeed “a great disturbance in the Force.”

That great disturbance is marked by increasingly high levels of terrorist violence, gross aberrations and distortions of religious belief, and political polarization that seems to thrive on ignorance, deception, xenophobia, and falsehood-packaged-as-truth.

The what of contemporary terrorism is rather easy to define. Electronic and print media are filled with terrorist images and terrorists each day: Paris, Beirut, Colorado Springs, San Bernardino, London, and many, many other places and countries. The why of terrorism is much more complex and takes us into the world of socio-cultural change, economic disparity in our world, and aberrational religion.

My focus today is on distorted religion and what Christians can do about it.

Aberrational religious people (often called fundamentalists) have a kind of narrow tunnel vision. They take one element of reality and proclaim it as the total view of reality. In their distorted perspective, they are convinced they alone have the truth. In their worldview facts are only facts when they fit and reinforce their worldview. They pick and choose scriptural citations, often taken out of context, to reinforce their prejudices. In reality they produce the “thugs and killers” about whom President Obama spoke on Sunday night, December 6.

Anyone who disagrees with this distorted religious worldview is an “enemy” of God. In praise of Allah, Muslim fundamentalists terrorize and murder in places around the world, while Christian fundamentalists terrorize and murder in the name of Christ.

Jerry Falwell, Jr., the president of Lynchburg Virginia’s Liberty University, put his own aberrational religion on display, on Friday night, December 4. He urged Liberty students during the school’s convocation to get their permits to carry concealed weapons on campus following Wednesday’s mass shooting in San Bernardino, California. “If more good people had concealed carry permits,” he said, “then we could end those Muslims before they walked in.” The message is clear: we are the good guys and Muslims are the bad guys.

The New York Times reports that yesterday Donald Trump called for the United States to bar all Muslims from entering the country until the nation’s leaders can “figure out what is going on,” an extraordinary escalation of his harsh rhetoric aimed at members of the Islamic faith.

A few days ago, Representative Alan Harper, who represents Tuscaloosa and Pickens counties in the Alabama House, said in a Facebook post that travelers should try to “shop and purchase gas and other items at American owned stores.” “The C stores/tobacco outlets, etc. with the lights around the windows and doors,” he said “are not owned by God fearing Christians.”

Other fundamentalist Christians in America take extreme social action against LGBT people and same-sex marriage, advocating that LGBT people wear distinctive clothing, be registered, or be confined to prison. Some American Christian extremists want them executed. Other aberrational Christians in their distorted “right to life” morality, argue that physical assaults on doctors and personnel at Planned Parenthood offices and abortion clinics are justified, even when resulting in murder.

Sexism is a form of fundamentalist aberration as well. Cutting and pasting from the New Testament, the senior senior pastor of the Ridgeway Baptist Church in Memphis, told his congregation on Sunday that women need to submit to their husbands in all things, and that the “feminist rebellion” was responsible for many of the problems the country was facing. Cutting from Timothy, he reminded his congregation that “I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man, but to be in silence.”

These kinds of aberrational religious fundamentalism excuse people from honest self-examination and reinforce their ignorance and anti-intellectualism, and support their prejudices, zealotry, intolerance, and hatefulness.

Yes there is a great disturbance in the force……

Our challenge is to confront ignorance and ignorant beliefs:

(1) Muslim terrorists are anchored in a distorted understanding of Islam. They need education. Christians need education about Islam.

(2) Christian terrorists are anchored in a distorted understanding of Christianity. They need education about their own tradition.

(3) No religion has all the truth. We are all on a journey toward the truth. We need to listen to and learn from each other. God is much greater than any one religious tradition.

(4) People in every religious tradition need help to understand that all scriptural literature and all statements of religious doctrine should be understood in an historical critical perspective. Historical situations change; and truth is expressed in a variety of languages, cultural understandings, and literary forms.

(5) We all need ongoing education to grow in our own understanding of our religious tradition and the religious traditions of others. Ongoing learning is part of ongoing life. Why not offer classes in Christianity as well as Islam in our parochial schools and parishes? Why not offer them as part of “social studies” in our public schools? As evening adult classes at our community colleges?

(6) Why not set up centers for the study of Islam and Muslim history and culture in our universities? Centers for inter-religious dialogue….

(7) In all of our educational endeavors, we need to stress the importance of conveying accurate information. There is a tremendous amount of just plain ignorance out there in our world. Education, of course, is more than passing on information. We need to educate people – again at all levels – in the skills and importance of critical thinking. Asking questions is a healthy way to think and live.

There is a great disturbance in the Force and it is moving toward a critical mass. We have no Obi-Wan. We are our only hope.

Thanksgiving in the United States has been observed on various dates throughout history. The date for Thanksgiving varied from state to state. Thanksgiving was first celebrated on the same date by all states in 1863 by a presidential proclamation of Abraham Lincoln. 

          President Lincoln proclaimed the date to be the final Thursday in November in an attempt to build American unity between the Northern and Southern states. Due, however, to the Civil War (1861-1865) a nationwide Thanksgiving date was not realized until Reconstruction in the 1870s.

          In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt changed Thanksgiving Day from the last Thursday in November to the fourth Thursday. 

          Thanksgiving, as a national holiday, is indeed a day to “give thanks” for the blessings family, food, and freedom. 

          Perhaps most importantly, for all of us today, Thanksgiving is day to overlook our festering religious and political polarization, forget our differences, and truly realize that e pluribus unum is not an historic ideal but a contemporary life necessity. Giving thanks is building bridges. 

          We need a lot of bridges in 2015. Not just in our United States but across the globe. And we are all gifted and called to be bridge-builders.

Happy Thanksgiving! 

As we say in the great Christian thanksgiving prayer, the Eucharist, “Let us give thanks to the Lord, our God…..”

The bombing of a Russian passenger jet, suicide bombers in Beirut, and terrorist attacks in Paris. The Islamic State pretends to be a new caliphate, aimed at uniting Sunni Muslims throughout the world. In fact, it is a radical fundamentalist death cult – an extremist mis-interpretation of Islam — attracting young volunteers who long for a glorious martyrdom, as they commit acts of savagery. The group has strayed from the path of true Islam, and its actions do not reflect the religion’s true teachings or virtues.

How do we solve a problem like the Islamic State?

It certainly cannot be solved by any one country — least of all the United States whose credibility in the Arab world has never been lower. Solving this problem will require long-term international and inter-religious collaboration.

Short term satisfaction with long term results? Instant military responses, after terrorist attacks, are always very tempting. No political leader can survive if he or she does not immediately respond to the aroused fears and anxieties of his or her people.

Nevertheless, as long as the primary response to fanaticism is to keep throwing bombs on people and responding with our own violence to the phenomenon, we will not solve the problem. Bombs always boomerang. As Mahatma Gandhi said, if people follow the law of “an eye for an eye” long enough, everyone will become a one-eyed person! Military action can only be one part of a broader strategy that will have to be pursued over many years.

And so my own reflections about a strategy for understanding and solving the problem:

(1) Powerful Muslim nations, notably Saudi Arabia, simply have to stop paying for and politically enabling the mosques, imams and paramilitary groups that fuel extremists and their violent perversions of Islam.

(2) Difficult to understand, as it may be, many people sitting at Boko Haram and the Islamic State really consider us as the enemy. They are convinced we in the West are no good. They are convinced that Westerners are trying to marginalize Muslims, humiliate and belittle them, and give them no justice and no rightful position in the world.

(3) Thousands of non-fanatic Muslims across the world repudiate and condemn the actions of fanatic jihadists. We need to support them, dialogue with them, and collaborate with them.

(4) In place of providing weapons to Arab countries, we must begin providing humanitarian aid: rebuilding countries, building schools, offering financial aid, stimulating and supporting local agriculture and industry, providing housing, health care, etc.

(5) We need to study, and collaborate with Muslim scholars and political and religious leaders to understand and address the very real socio-cultural issues that promote fundamentalism and attract fanatics. Far too often when a Muslim arrives at the border of a country, he or she is picked out and humiliated. Thousands of Muslim refugees are now moving – or trying to move — across Europe from Syria and Iraq. Their humiliation feeds their view of history. What is our best humanitarian response?

(6) In parishes and synagogues and mosques, we need to set up continuing education programs: better educating people about the traditions and beliefs of people in all three Abrahamic religions.

(7) We need to establish international and inter-religious institutes – like the International Centre for Counter-Terrorism in the Hague – to study and better understand what promotes and feeds terrorists and to develop strategies for dealing with their anger, objectives, and goals.

None of these strategies requires or should lead to demolishing the values at the heart of democratic societies, including the free flow of people and information. Certainly banning all refugees, as some in America and Europe are demanding, would be an ineffective and tragic capitulation to fear.

Around 420 BCE, the prophet Malachi – recognized in all three Abrahamic religions – spoke these words: “Have we not all one Father? Has not God created us all? Why then are we faithless to one another, profaning the covenant of our Father?” Good questions for sure ……. For everyone.

A day before the Paris attacks that left at least 120 dead and the country in lockdown, suicide bombings in Beirut left 43 dead and 239 wounded. The attack was reportedly carried out by an ISIS cell sent to Lebanon from the group’s stronghold in Syria. 

The Delhi-based, Indian blogger, Karuna Ezara Parikh has written a poem that has gone viral since the Paris attacks. “It’s not Paris we should pray for,” she wrote. “It is the world. It is a world in which Beirut, reeling from bombings … is not covered in the press.”

Today I am still reflecting on Karuna Ezara Parikh’s poem, which has now been reproduced on the Internet thousands of times.

She explained why she wrote the poem: “I woke this morning deeply disturbed by the news from Paris, but more amazed by the attention it received on social media. I understand Paris is a beloved and familiar space for a lot of people, but it troubled me that Beirut, a city my father grew up in, had received so little attention after the horrific bombings two days earlier. 

“It also troubled me that Baghdad, a place I have absolutely no connection with, received even less attention after the senseless bombing that took place there last week.

“Worst of all, I found the understanding of the refugee crisis skewed and simplistic. If you’ve been following the journeys of the people leaving their homes around the world right now, perhaps you’ll understand why the words SyrianRefugeeCrisis are just as devastating as PrayForParis. It’s time to pray for humanity. It is time to make all places beloved. It’s time to pray for the world.”

Next week end — following my university lcture on that subjct this coming week — some reflections about ISIS: what and why……..and what to do.

A few days ago an old friend in Ohio told me how happy he was that (unlike me) he still lives in the USA. I told him I am happy he is happy. “Unlike you, over there in Europe,” he said, “we don’t have to worry about Muslim fanatics.” I told him I didn’t worry about them either but that if I were living in the States right now, especially with the selection of presidential candidates in full swing, I would be more concerned about Christian fanatics. Well that launched a heated discussion that I don’t care to narrate here…. (But we remain good friends.)

          Case in point: The National Religious Liberties Conference, organized by conservative Christian radio pastor Kevin Swanson, was held this past week in Des Moines, Iowa. An array of far right activists were present, like representatives from Christian Patriarchy and Christian Reconstructionism.  

          Swanson strongly supports the hardline Christian Reconstructionist position that the death penalty for gay people is just. He said it’s ok to attend a gay couple’s wedding, only if one carries a sign telling them they should be put to death. Strange observations. Swanson gave an emotional cry about the United States, insisting “America needs to hear the message. We are messed up.” His examples: the Girl Scouts are dangerous, because their cookies “promote lesbianism.” Flooding and fires in Colorado were the result of “decadent homosexual activity” and women wearing pants; and of course hurricanes Sandy and Katrina were divine punishments of “pro-homosexual” cities. Referring to transgender people, and citing Deuteronomy 22:5, he called men wearing women’s clothing “an abomination.” Pastor Swanson also stressed that cannibalism and vampirism are increasingly acceptable. Was he speaking about contemporary America or his own Halloween fantasies?

          Nevertheless, three GOP candidates – Ted Cruz, Bobby Jindal, and Mike Huckabee – saw this National Religious Liberties Conference as a key opportunity to put their faith on display. (Other Republican candidates were invited but declined to attend.) “Christians are under physical assault all over the world and Christian values are under assault right here at home,” warned Bobby Jindal. “Four more years of these radical left policies, we won’t even recognize our country anymore.” Stressing that a U.S. President must fear God, Ted Cruz stressed “Any president who doesn’t begin everyday on his knees isn’t fit to be commander-in-chief.” Ok fine. Mike Huckabee, an ordained Southern Baptist minister noted for his evangelical views, told the just under two thousand conference participants that, thanks to President Obama, “Our religious liberties are under assault.”

          These three presidential hopefuls (whose chances of making it to the White House, I think, rather slim) jumped at the chance to speak at Swanson’s two-day conference. Do they really resonate with many of Swanson’s extreme ideas and those of other conference speakers?

 A selection — of other positions expressed at the conference: 

                The Rose Bowl parade would be much better with a float where gay people get stoned to death.

                 Natural disasters in Colorado were likely caused by gay people and women in pants.

                 The movie Frozen makes kids gay.

                 Gay people deserve the death penalty.

                 Gay people are like serial killers.

                  American Christian fundamentalist fanatics are scary people. So much of their rhetoric resonates with the National Socialism of the 1930s and 1940s over here in Europe. Televangelist Pat Robertson said last week that gay people in the United States should be forced to wear specially-colored clothing so that, in his words, “regular people would know that the person wearing the said color is a deviant sodomite and that they need to stay away from them at all cost, as well as keep their children away from their reach.” 
Right now I think Christian fanatics are more of a threat to the USA than the Muslim variety….. 

NB: Please note. I am not condemning conservative Christians. I am speaking-out against those who claim the name Christian but have absolutely no understanding of the gospel of Jesus Christ! 

To be an apostle, has always meant being a special messenger. Today, November 1, twelve Irish Roman Catholic priests have issued their courageous message, calling for equality for women in the Roman Catholic Church. It is a message that should be posted and promoted in every diocese and every parish throughout the world.

There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus. (Gal. 3, 28)

In the Catholic Church women, despite being equal to men by virtue of their Baptism, are excluded from all positions of decision making, and from ordained ministry. In 1994 Pope John Paul II declared that the exclusion of women from priesthood could not even be discussed in the Church. Pope Benedict reaffirmed, and even strengthened this teaching by insisting that it was definitive and that all Catholics were required to give assent to this view. Pope Francis has said that Pope John Paul II had reflected at length on this matter, had declared that women could never be priests and that, therefore, no further discussion on the ordination of women to ministry is possible. In reality, Pope John Paul II did not encourage or facilitate debate on the ordination of women to priesthood or diaconate before he made his decision. Furthermore, there was virtually no discussion on the complex cultural factors which excluded women from leadership roles in many societies until recently.

We, the undersigned, believe that this situation is very damaging, that it alienates both women and men from the church because they are scandalized by the unwillingness of Church leaders to open the debate on the role of women in our church. This alienation will continue and accelerate.

We are aware that there are many women who are deeply hurt and saddened by this teaching. We also believe that the example given by the Church in discriminating against women encourages and reinforces abuse and violence against women in many cultures and societies. It is also necessary to remember that women form the bulk of the congregation at Sunday Mass and have been more active in the life of the local churches than many men, mirroring the fidelity of the women who followed Jesus to the end, to his death on Calvary. The command of Jesus “Go, teach all nations” was addressed to all his followers, and by failing to accept the full equality of women, the church is not fulfilling this commission.

The strict prohibition on discussing the question has failed to silence the majority of the Catholic faithful. Survey after survey indicates that a great many people are in favor of full equality for women in the Church. But it has managed to silence priests and bishops, because the sanctions being imposed on those who dare to raise the question are swift and severe.

We believe that we can no longer remain silent because to do so colludes with the systemic oppression of women within the Catholic Church. So, in the spirit of Pope Francis constant encouragement of dialogue, we are calling for free and open discussion concerning the full equality of women in all facets of Church life, including all forms of ministry. If this were to happen, the credibility of the Catholic Church would gain strength, especially when it addresses women’s issues.

FOR BACKGROUND SEE:
http://www.tonyflannery.com/statement-from-twelve-priests-on-womens-equality-in-church/