Christian Media Battle Over Controversial Figure

By Jonathan D. Fitzgerald ("Religion Dispatches," September 30, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/38227/

In the relatively calm seas of the Christian media, a storm has erupted between Christianity Today, arguably the mouthpiece of contemporary American evangelicalism, and the Christian Post, a smaller competitor. At the center of the storm is David Jang, a popular preacher in East Asia but a relatively unknown figure in the United States, who has ties to the late Rev. Moon’s Unification Church and, according to sources in a recent Christianity Today article, may have led his followers to conclude that he is a “Second Coming Christ.”

The story begins, publicly at least, in mid-August when Christianity Today ran a long story co-authored by managing editor Ted Olsen and a blogger and former businessman named Ken Smith. As Olsen tells it, his interest in David Jang dates back several years. He describes a time, over four years ago, when Christianity Today was in talks with the Christian Post about working together in some capacity. Then, Olsen says, one of CT’s partners in the Global Christian Alliance cautioned CT about partnering with the Christian Post because “there were allegations that it had ties to the Unification Church.”

When CT raised this concern with the CP, Olsen recalls, “they denied it vehemently, threatened to sue us if we ever mentioned the allegation, and ended the discussion.”

But it wasn’t until this summer, as the news broke that Olivet University was interested in buying the Glorieta Conference Center from the Southern Baptist Convention’s LifeWay Christian Resources, that Olsen had an actual newspeg around which to investigate and write more about Jang and his various affiliated organizations.

And what he and Ken Smith found has far reaching implications for the world of Christian media and beyond.

The pair investigated claims that members of David Jang’s ministries were encouraged to believe that Jang embodies a “Second Coming Christ,” an act of blasphemy for Christians. In addition to drawing further ties between Jang and Rev. Moon, who famously declared himself the messiah, this recent controversy hits close to home for evangelicals because of Jang’s ties to many parachurch organizations with seemingly orthodox beliefs.

While Olsen and Smith are careful to cite sources who both confirm and deny that members are led to believe that Jang is the second coming of Christ, the article leaves the reader with the sense that, at least for a time, many of Jang’s followers did believe it.

Additionally, the CT article points out that the connections between Jang and the Unification Church go beyond surface similarities, noting that Jang taught at a UC seminary for 9 years (1989-1998), though in later interviews Jang claimed to be infiltrating the seminary with orthodox theology.

With Jang’s credibility called into question, along with affiliated ministries like Olivet University in San Francisco, the World Evangelical Alliance, and the Christian Post, a number of these affiliates went on the defensive.

No response was more immediate, or more aggressive, than that of the Christian Post.

Different Standards At Work

The day after CT’s article was published online, the Post published a long piece titled, “Sources in ‘Second Coming Christ Controversy’ Face Scrutiny,” followed days later by another with the less subtle headline, “Christianity Today Writer Ken Smith Is Founder of a Company Fined for Deceptive Business Practices; With Child Porn Ties.”

The main thrust of the first of the two Post pieces was to disprove the allegations that Jang’s followers considered him a new messiah by calling into question the legitimacy of the CT sources who made these claims.

But the attacks in this first response seem mild compared to the piece that followed alleging that Olsen’s co-writer Ken Smith was somehow connected to child pornography. Penned by the Post’s Katherine T. Phan, it highlights Smith’s work as the founder of the now defunct software company, Zango (which web-savvy readers may remember for their intrusive advertising in web browsers).

Smith acknowledged that Zango “partnered with some people that we should never have partnered with” in a 2009 post on his blog—which the CP article cites—titled “What Zango Got Wrong.”

When I asked if he was aware of Smith’s history with Zango, Olsen told me that “The child porn thing really came out of the blue. It wasn’t an issue that was on my radar until CP ran the article.” He continued, “That headline was really shocking. Did he distribute child porn? was the question in the headline. If you read the article the answer is no. Zango is not a child porn company and never was.”

What the article did indicate to Olsen was that, “there are different standards of journalism at work. Their article struck me more as an effort to smear and discredit the writer than to actually address what was in the article.”

Tim Dalrymple, who’s been watching and writing about the controversy, observed that “the response from the Christian Post was so over-the-top defensive of David Jang, and so massively pejorative toward anyone who questioned him, that the Christian Post (at least in that instance) essentially abandoned the pretense of journalism and became Jang’s defense attorney.”

Ted Olsen told me, “I was aware of almost everything in the [Post] article...There wasn’t anything that, even if it was true—which I have questions about—would have negated anything in our [CT] article.”

This shouldn’t come as a surprise since a meeting was held between the two prior to CT’s publication of the original article in which the Post attempted to present evidence that contradicts CT’s findings. According to Olsen, who noted that his understanding was that the meeting was off the record until the Post made it public, representatives of the Post and Olivet University wanted “to try to get CT to postpone publication.”

“The reasons for that were multi-fold,” he says, “but they were not compelling... not reasons that would have led us to postpone or kill the story.”

Repeated requests for comment from the Christian Post went unanswered, though I was eventually informed that the Post’s editor, Michelle Vu, who authored the August 17 response, had “politely decline[d]” my request.

Instead, I was provided with a brief statement: “Christianity Today wrote an article that implicated the Christian Post. CP responded with our own fact-finding article about the sources used. CP had already told CT and sent documents to the publication regarding the questionable integrity of its sources. Nothing should come as a surprise to CT.”

Round Two

On September 12, nearly a month after the original Christianity Today article, Olsen and Smith published a second piece. Emboldened by their initial reporting, former followers of Jang have come forward, including a couple identified as Edmond and Susan Chua, who are among the first to speak on the record about their experiences.

Until recently, the Chuas ran the Singaporean edition of the Christian Post—Susan worked on the business side while Edmond served as editor. The couple’s testimony revealed the level of connection between Jang and his affiliated ministries, telling of weekly chat room sessions in which Jang would set the agenda, at times even indicating which articles the Post should feature.

According to CT, a source for its original article, who wrote for the Singapore Post, was subsequently scrubbed from that publication’s website. The CT follow-up also reports that Christian Post leaders debated whether or not to include the publication’s history as part of its employee handbook, including an email noting that, “PD [Pastor David] doesn’t want the history in written, audio or video form to fall into a non-members’ hands.”

The Chuas were married on Jang’s birthday, October 30, 2006, along with 69 other couples, according to CT, an echo of the Unification Church’s practice of arranged, mass marriages; the piece also indicates that, like many of the others married on that day, their marriage was arranged for them.

This detail and several others from the second CT piece have been disputed by Jonathan Park, director of the Olivet College of Journalism (and a former Post correspondent himself) in an article cross-posted on Olivet’s website and on christianpost.com. According to Park, the event described was not a wedding, but a “service for couples who desire to dedicate their family to God in front of other believers before marriage.” Park also contends that couples are not arranged, but “apply to participate after a period of courtship.”

Park goes on to point out that after the initial CT article, Chua wrote one piece for the Singapore edition of the Post defending Jang’s orthodoxy, only to follow it up with another that contradicts his previous statements. (The second article by Chua has been removed from the Singapore Post site, while the first in defense of Jang remains.)

Park goes on to suggest that Chua’s second article, along with emails to Christianity Today, were fabricated by another person or written under coercion. He refers to comments made by Dr. Donald Tinder, dean of Olivet Theological College and Seminary, who says he found the original article “helpful,” but he thought, “a later email and article were either fabricated, or that Chua was somehow pressured into writing them.”

Park refers to Christianity Today’s article as containing distortions and exaggerations; one of his sources, Hokuto Ide, a reporter for Christian Today—a Jang-affiliated publication in Japan not to be confused with Christianity Today—describes CT’s articles as “predatory efforts by those with commercial interests,” and suggests they’re motivated by “trying to break Olivet’s deal to purchase [the] Glorieta [Conference Center].”

I asked Jonathan Park via email why he thought Christianity Today put so much time and effort—not to mention pages—into reporting this story; he replied, “As a director of a journalism program, I can say that the length of the CT articles doesn’t necessarily reflect the import nor the accuracy of their conclusions on a complex situation involving many individuals.” He notes that he can’t speak to CT’s motivations, but said that he shares their “interest in confirming orthodoxy and uplifting the household of faith.”

While Park continues to believe that CT arrived at the wrong conclusions about Jang, he is “encouraged that many other individuals, including a number of qualified and respected theologians, have similarly vetted related entities and materials, all arriving at different conclusions from those reported in CT,” and he remains confident, he writes, that “truth will be revealed.”

Park concludes his article with a paragraph attempting to minimize the “controversy,” referring to it as an issue limited to “a few voices in Asia, rather than many around the world.”

It may be too late, however, to downplay the effects of CT’s investigation as the fallout appears to be impacting the news that brought the issue to light in the first place. A recent article in the Tennessean notes that the potential sale of LifeWay’s Glorieta Conference Center to Olivet University may fall through in the wake of the scandal.

“The theology is no longer an issue,” Bill Wagner, Olivet’s president explained, “The Southern Baptists are saying, ‘We don’t want to be part of the controversy.’”

Ross Douthat Talks About the State of American Christianity

By John Williams ("The New York Times," April 26, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37182/

USA - In his new book “Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics,” Ross Douthat, an Op-Ed columnist for The Times, writes about how Christianity lost its central place in American life through a variety of factors, among them the religion’s failed attempts to accommodate secular trends; a strong identification of the church with strictly conservative politics; a lack of great religious-inspired art; and the appeal to a “God within” that tailors spirituality to the citizens of a self-help age. I recently spoke with Mr. Douthat about the book via e-mail. Below are excerpts of the conversation.

Q.

Does the book presume that a widespread, mainstream Christianity is necessary to have a thriving United States?

A.

It depends what you mean by “thriving.” I’m not arguing that if we don’t all repent our sins tomorrow, we’re going to be conquered by the Chinese or collapse into a Balkans-style civil war. I’m quite confident that America will remain rich, powerful and relatively stable even if the religious trends I’m describing continue apace. But I do think that institutional Christianity has offered something important to our nation — sometimes a moral critique of our excesses, sometimes a kind of invisible mortar for our common life — that today’s heresies are unlikely to provide.

Q.

What do you mean by the words “heretics” and “heresy” in the book?

A.

I mean expressions of religious belief that are no longer traditionally Christian, but remain deeply influenced by Christianity — and fascinated, in particular, by the figure of Jesus of Nazareth — in ways that are hard to describe as post-Christian or non-Christian or secular. It’s a loaded word, obviously, but I think it’s the best way to describe the religious landscape in America today: Diverse, fragmented, polarized, and yet Christ-haunted all the same.

Q.

Evangelicals and Catholics united with each other “in the cause of culture war.” You argue that culture war is not the best use of Christianity, but is it the strongest glue left to it?

A.

Sometimes it seems to be. In an era of weakened religious affiliation and intensified partisanship, the zeal that’s associated with political combat can supply believers with the feeling of cohesion and common purpose that the institutional churches aren’t always able to supply. The danger here is obvious: If American Christianity is just one expression of the identity politics of conservative America, then it isn’t really much of a Christianity at all. But at the same time, it isn’t enough to say that believers should just stay away from politics entirely. Like all Americans, Christians have an obligation be engaged citizens, and to bring their beliefs to bear on the great debates in our society. If they shirked that duty, you wouldn’t just lose Jerry Falwell or Al Sharpton – you’d lose Reinhold Niebuhr and Martin Luther King.

Q.

You write about current religious popular art feeling “middlebrow, garish and naïve” or “ingenuous and tacky.” How might that change, and how important is it that it does?

A.

One of the striking things about the post-1960s era is how unimportant sacred art and architecture have become in our culture. Obviously some of that reflects the secular biases of our artists and intellectuals. But some of it reflects the straightforward failures of believers to write the novels and make the films and build the cathedrals that would testify, more eloquently than any polemic, to the Christian view of God and man. The critic Alan Jacobs observed to me once that much of what remains of highbrow Christian culture in the West is sustained not by theologians or bishops or pastors, but by poets and novelists and memoirists — C.S. Lewis and Thomas Merton and W.H. Auden and Flannery O’Connor and so on. He’s right, and we need more like them.

Q.

There are a lot of serious thinkers cited throughout the book, people like Niebuhr, Jacques Maritain and John Courtney Murray. But your argument seems intended for a broad audience, and how many Americans — encompassing believers and non-believers — bring that level of deep thought to religion these days? Is that part of the problem as you see it?

A.

Well, I like to think that there’s still a broad audience for serious thought! But there’s no question that a lot of writers from what I suggest was the last golden age of Christian thought — the mid-century revival that produced the Niebuhrs and Maritains, as well as many of the more literary figures I’ve just mentioned — thrived in that era precisely because the culture as a whole was less fragmented, more unified, and less fiercely sensationalistic than it is today.

Q.

You distinguish between messianism, which you consider the crutch of the liberal Christian, and apocalyptism, the conservative Christian’s crutch. But isn’t messianism now at least as much a conservative, or neoconservative, idea or temptation?

A.

This is part of what’s interesting, and troubling, about our current moment: Both political factions seem to be tempted by both forms of the heresy of nationalism — by messianism when they’re in power, and apocalypticism when they’re out. So the presidency of George W. Bush represented, in certain ways, a kind of conservative messianism — free-spending at home and crusading overseas, much like Woodrow Wilson a century earlier. But then the utopianism of Bushism gave way to the paranoia of Glenn Beck as soon as the Republicans lost their hold on power. Likewise, the American left spent much of the Bush era wallowing in its own form of apocalyptic paranoia (“Fahrenheit 9/11” is as hysterical as any of Beck’s monologues), only to suddenly shift to a “yes we can/hope and change/the oceans will stop their rise” messianism as soon as Barack Obama appeared as a potential savior figure.

Q.

Isn’t determining what is genuinely Christian a big part of the problem when dealing with politics? You say yourself that Christianity contains many paradoxes. How do we get around that problem of interpretation?

A.

You can never get around it completely. But I do think one way to identify a genuinely Christian public figure is to look for people whose faith seems to trump their partisanship on some high-profile issue. Maybe that means a very liberal Democrat who is nonetheless pro-life. Maybe it means a conservative Republican who opposes waterboarding. A certain amount of partisanship is inevitable in politics, but there should be some visible Christian difference, some sign that the figure regards the teachings of his faith as more important than the commandments of his party.

Caste First, Christ Second, for Some Indian Christians

By Megan Sweas ("Religion Dispatches," July 9, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37689/

John Yesunatha Das describes himself as buffalo color. His dark skin makes him recognizable as a Dalit, or untouchable, in India, and it’s caused the Pentecostal pastor trouble over the years.

His seminary, for instance, didn’t consider him for positions upon graduation, even though, as he says, “I was one of the brilliant students” and would be in leadership right now if it weren’t for his caste.

The lights shut off intermittently in Das’ rented home in Fatehpur Beri, a village that has been overtaken by Delhi. Upper-caste pastors in the city could expect a “good church... enough funds, and… their own houses,” he says. His Hindu neighbors, meanwhile, look down upon him and other Christians, 70 percent of whom come from the untouchable caste—a social group traditionally considered so low that its denizens actually fell outside the four central categories of Indian society: priest, warrior, merchant, laborer.

Particularly disconcerting to Das, the people he thought were his friends turned their backs on him when he married a poor girl from the Brahmin caste 25 years ago. He and his wife, Grace, have five children today. The fact that Indian Christians, even those who are sympathetic to the plight of poor Dalits, won’t have an intimate relationship across caste lines is telling, he says.

Religion-Based Discrimination?

Many Westerners assume that in a modern, economically powerful India, caste is no longer an issue—and the 2.8 million Indians living in the United States often dismiss it as a relic of the past.

And yes, untouchability was outlawed in the Indian constitution in 1950. But the constitution also set up a reservation system that holds spots for “scheduled castes” (the legal term for Dalits) in government posts, schools, and political bodies. It’s like a constitutionalized form of affirmative action, aimed at correcting thousands of years of discrimination. Like affirmative action, it has its critics, but the reservation system has been credited with raising the status of Dalits so that they are now a strong political force.

What Das and other Christian leaders want is for the government of India to admit that caste is an issue in Christian churches. In 1950, a presidential order determined that only Hindus could be members of the scheduled caste and qualify for the reservation system. Buddhist and Sikh Dalits were later added, even though both traditions reject caste. Many Christian and Muslim Indians (2.3 and 13.4 percent of the population respectively) hope the Supreme Court will rule that the presidential order is unconstitutional, thereby giving access to scheduled caste benefits to all Dalits, regardless of religion.

“To my mind [it’s] a very, very clear issue of discrimination on the basis of religion,” says Prashant Bhushan, the high-profile public interest litigation lawyer who took on the Supreme Court case pro bono on behalf of Christian Dalits. He had no idea that caste existed within Christianity before preparing for the case.

“It may affect the way people look at religion,” he says.

“Caste is First, Christ is Second”

Franklin Caesar Thomas of the National Council of Dalit Christians doesn’t need the reservation system. A fourth-generation Catholic and son of a teacher, he was educated as an engineer and lawyer.

But when he was working in recruiting at Indian Railways, he noticed a pattern. “With my own eyes, I saw how Dalit Christian applications were rejected, whereas our Hindu Dalit brothers, their sons and daughters, they came through the reservation,” he says.

Thomas gathered the evidence necessary for the Supreme Court case and convinced Bhushan to argue it. His strategy intentionally skipped over the church. “The church will not … fulfill our needs. They don’t have the mindset,” he says. “We are not in the power structure, so it’s wise to get the privilege from the government.”

But both the Catholic Bishops’ Conference of India and the National Council of Churches in India, a Protestant organizing body, have backed Thomas. In doing so, church leaders have had to admit that Christianity in India is tainted by caste—a strange argument for American Christians, especially evangelicals, who pour millions of dollars into missionary work in India.

Is religion, and Christianity in particular, as Das and Bhushan view it, linked to social structures? Or is it simply a matter of personal belief. “The operating definition of religion that Americans often have, which is in terms of individual belief, is a pretty inadequate definition,” says Leora Batnitzky, a Princeton University religion professor studying the case. “That’s a largely Protestant view of what religion is.”

“For Indian Christians, caste is first, Christ is second,” says Father G. Cosmon Arokiaraj, a rare Dalit priest and executive secretary for the CBCI Office of Scheduled Castes and Backward Classes. Attitudes in the church won’t change until the government helps raise Dalit Christians’ social standing through reservation, he says. “Mere preaching won’t do.”

But other Dalit Christians disagree with Arokiaraj. “He is the Church,” Ram Bharati says of the priest. “Church has a lot of power, resources. Why is he demanding from the government?”

Bharati, an Anglican Dalit, and R.L. Francis, a Catholic Dalit, lead the Poor Christian Liberation Movement (PCLM), which wants Indian churches to serve Dalits rather than pass the buck to the government.

The PCLM shares with Hindu nationalists concerns about conversion of the poor to Christianity. The message that all are equal as children of God appeals to Dalits who convert, but many doubt the sincerity of upper-caste Christians and their American partners. “It’s a total money-making program of the church from U.S., European countries,” Francis says. The more people they convert, the more money they raise—and little of that reaches those who need it, critics say. Opening scheduled caste benefits to Christian Dalits would further incentivize conversion.

Caste as a Way of Life

But fundamentally, the difference between those supporting the Supreme Court case—which would allow Christian Dalits the same civic benefits as Hindu, Muslim, or Buddhist Dalits—and a group like PCLM is in how they see the relationship between religion and caste. Francis, president of PCLM, uses “poor Christian” instead of “Dalit Christian” in his organization’s name because he truly believes caste is not a part of Christianity.

“We converted to Christianity in the hopes that we would get self-respect, dignity, and equality,” Francis says. “Why are they calling us Dalit, Dalit, Dalit? We are Christian only.”

Becoming part of the scheduled caste may earn the community benefits, but it also would codify the communal designation of Christian Dalit. “They want to fix the stigma of Dalit on our forehead,” Francis says.

Like Francis, most Hindus judge Christianity on its ideals, not its practices. “Since there was no socially sanctioned discrimination in Christianity or Islam, therefore, it was felt that there was no need to make this special provision for those who opted out of the system to begin with,” says Chandan Mitra, a minister of parliament for the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). “I think that remains the case today.”

Arguing in favor of the religious distinction also requires acknowledging that “caste is a reality of Hindu life,” Mitra says, though he adds that reform movements have made efforts to decrease discrimination based on caste. “There’s no way we can run away from it.”

In an effort to appeal to Christian and Muslim voters, the BJP’s minority wing has found a way around the idea that caste is Hindu only. The group passed a resolution in November 2011 supporting the Supreme Court case, giving Thomas and Arokiaraj hope that it will be resolved soon. These Hindus also look at religion as practice, rather than belief, distancing Hinduism from religion in the Western sense of the word. “Hindutva is a way of life, which does not exclude religious minorities like Muslims and Christians,” the resolution reads. Caste is a part of that way of life.

Pastor Das sways between blaming Indian Christianity for carrying “the old baggage of Hindu caste-ism” and lauding the “social liberation” of the Christian message. One of his heroes is Martin Luther King Jr. He would like The King Center to open a Research and Development Center in Delhi to explore the problem of Christian Dalits.

It’s a valid connection, Batnitzky says. King railed not only against discrimination in society but also in the church. “For most of the world’s religious people, religion is…fundamentally social and political in nature,” Batnitzky says. “We tend to separate the belief and the individual from the social structure… Nobody says, at least in public, that racism is part of the c=Church.”

It may seem foreign, but the case of the Christian Dalits challenges Americans to reevaluate the relationship between individual belief and society. As Batnitsky says, it gets to a fundamental question about who we are as Americans: “Are we only individualists?” she asks. “Or are we also part of some kind of larger community?”

Islam's ability to empower is a magnet to black British youths

Abdul Haqq Baker ("The Guardian," August 19, 2013)

A seminar was hosted last month by Christians Together in England to consider ways to "stem the flight of black British youths to Islam and radicalisation". In an unprecedented move, Muslims were invited to attend – and they did. Together, both faith groups discussed the reasons why a growing number of young black people are choosing Islam in preference to Christianity. According to this morning's BBC Radio 4's Today programme, one in nine black Christian men are converting to Islam.

Following in my father's footsteps, I was raised as a Roman Catholic and attended Sunday mass regularly as a child. I also attended a Roman Catholic secondary school – initially a cultural shock as I found myself the only black student among a predominantly white class. The religious focus of the school was, however, a refreshing contrast to my urban, street background. Teachers and students were more serious about God than at my previous schools. A student was not considered "nerdy" or "odd" due to their religiosity. I was therefore able to excel in religious studies and was successful in my final O-level exam.

During these lessons, the more we learned about religion, the more we questioned and challenged particular concepts, particularly relating to Christianity. Questions about the concept of the trinity – the Godhead being three in one – caused many debates as some of us; myself and others did not find this logical or feasible. Our religious studies teacher became exasperated by persistent questions on this topic, and arranged for the local priest to attend and address the question. His explanations did little to remove our doubts in this very fundamental and important area of faith.

I recall one particular lesson where we were doing Bible studies and I queried why we, as Christians, failed to prostrate in the same manner that Jesus had in the garden of Gethsemane prior to his arrest. I was unable to identify any relationship between Jesus's prayer and ours as his Christian followers. However, the Muslim prayer most closely resembled Jesus's.

After leaving school, I lost contact with most of my school friends. I also abandoned many aspects of Christianity and instead submerged myself into the urban street culture of my local friends and community – we would make our own religion based on the ethics and beliefs that made sense to us.

The passivity that Christianity promotes is perceived as alien and disconnected to black youths growing up in often violent and challenging urban environments in Britain today. "Turning the other cheek" invites potential ridicule and abuse whereas resilience, strength and self-dignity evokes respect and, in some cases, fear from unwanted attention.

I converted to Islam after learning about the religion's monotheistic foundation; there being only one God – Allah who does not share his divinity with anything. This made sense and was easy to comprehend. My conversion was further strengthened by learning that Islam recognised and revered the prophets mentioned in Judaism and Christianity. My new faith was, as its holy book the Qur'an declares, a natural and final progression of these earlier religions. Additionally, with my newfound faith, there existed religious guidelines that provided spiritual and behavioural codes of conduct. Role models such as Malcolm X only helped to reinforce the perception that Islam enabled the empowerment of one's masculinity coupled with righteous and virtuous conduct as a strength, not a weakness.

My personal experiences are supported by academic research on the same topic: Richard Reddie, who is himself a Christian, conducted research on black British converts to Islam. My own studies revealed that the majority of young people I interviewed converted from Christianity to Islam for similar reasons to me.

Islam's way of life and sense of brotherhood were attractive to 50% of interviewees, whereas another 30% and 10% respectively converted because of the religion's monotheistic foundations and the fact that, holistically, the religion "made sense" and there were "no contradictions".

My research examined whether such converts were more susceptible to violent radicalisation or more effective at countering it. The overwhelming conclusion points to the latter – provided there are avenues to channel these individuals' newly discovered sense of empowerment and identity towards constructive participation in society, as opposed to a destructive insularity which can be exploited by extremists.

Many Muslim converts – not just black British ones – will confirm the sense of empowerment Islam provides, both spiritually and mentally. It also provides a context within which such individuals are able to rise above the social, cultural and often economic challenges that tend to thwart their progress in today's society. Turning the other cheek therefore is never an option.

Christianity faces a Middle Eastern exodus

By Darryl Levings ("The Kansas City Star," August 31, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37986/

The final outcome of the Arab Spring will not be known for years, perhaps decades, but in the meantime Christian communities across the Middle East continue to wither.

The latest to face a possible exodus are Syrian Christians, many of whom are on the wrong side of the deepening civil war there.

The birthplace of Christianity has held populations of denominations that predate Islam: Maronite, Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholic, Armenian Orthodox, Armenian Catholic, Coptic Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Roman Catholic, Chaldean and Assyrian Christian.

But theses churches have never stopped shrinking, in early times because of conversions to Islam to escape discrimination or worse, and more recently from emigration, low birth rates compared to their Muslim neighbors and violence by extremists among them.

A century ago, Christians made up perhaps 1 in 5 of Middle East peoples. Today it’s not even 1 in 20.

Though criticized for their human-rights records, some authoritarian and secular regimes, such Syria’s Assads, ironhandedly crushed most religious strife.

But the toppling of Saddam Hussein of Iraq and Hosni Mubarak of Egypt exposed a tragic result: resurgent Muslim radicals making life harder on the Christians of those lands.

Iraq is the most extreme example; two-thirds of its original 1.5 million Christians have fled homes and churches since U.S. forces invaded nine years ago. In Tunisia, a mob in June beheaded a convert to Christianity. A recent news story reported: “Dozens of Gaza Christians staged a rare public protest … claiming two congregants were forcibly converted to Islam and were being held against their will.”

The Syrian Christians may regret allying with President Bashar Assad against the majority Sunni Muslims. Assad belongs to the ruling Alawite minority, a sect out of mainstream Islam seen by fundamentalist Sunnis as heretical. Alawites make up about 12 percent of the Syrian population, same as Christians.

Some Christians have refused to take sides or have already fled to Lebanon. In Wadi al-Nasara, or the Valley of the Christians, west of Homs, some are fighting beside Alawite loyalists.

“Many Christians in Syria believe that there’s no alternative to the Bashar Assad regime,” Jesuit Father Paulo Dall’Oglio told the Wall Street Journal after being expelled by the government in June. Retribution is expected from the rebel groups supported by radical Wahhabist Muslims in Saudi Arabia.

“We have been leading a life that has been the envy of many,” said Isadore Battikha, who until 2010 served as the Melkite Greek Catholic archbishop of Homs, Hama and Yabroud. “But today fear is a reality.”

A shift in Egypt

Cairo’s once-crowded Coptic quarter is now home to fewer than 50 of their families.

“We know many Christians have left,” said Mounir Ramsis, speaking not only about his quarter but about all of Egypt. “But we love this country and will stay until death.”

An estimated 8 million Christians live among more than 70 million Muslims, but not easily.

Under Mubarak, special presidential permission was needed for churches to be built. That kind of discrimination led Christians to demonstrate alongside Muslims.

The first free elections handed power not to moderates, however, but to Muslim Brotherhood and radical Salafi candidates, who won nearly 70 percent of seats in the parliament and left near-panic in ancient Christian communities.

“If people try to rule the country with the Qur’an, with Shariah law, that means they look to us as second-class people,” said Mina Bouls, a Copt who has fled to America.

The Muslim Brotherhood, which seeks a nation run on Qur’anic law, has said Egypt would respect the rights of religious minorities. The Salafis, Muslim fundamentalists who want a complete application of Shariah law — seen as generally denying equal rights to women and minorities, also assure Copts of their safety.

Coptic Church Bishop Pachomius criticized President Mohammed Mursi, who had pledged to include Copts but swore in a Cabinet with only one. The bishop characterized that woman’s portfolio, scientific research, as a “semi-ministry.”

“In the past, there were fewer ministries,” he said, “and there were two or three Christian ministers.”

He also accused security forces of “standing with their arms crossed” while Muslims attacked Christians outside Cairo. Last year, when Copts protested the failure to investigate the fatal New Year’s Day bombing of an Alexandria church, security forces ran down the Cairo demonstrators with military vehicles, killing 17 more, Human Rights Watch said.

Dwindling numbers

About 13 million Christians account for 4 percent of the people of the Middle East and North Africa, the smallest share of its population that is Christian of any other major geographic region, according to the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life.

Ancient communities face extinction even in Israel, where Christians make up only 2 percent of the population. Nor can the most famous Holy Land towns escape being squeezed and drained by ongoing tension between Israelis and Palestinians. Jerusalem is now 1.5 percent churchgoers, leading some to foresee what would amount to an empty Christian theme park for Western visitors.

The birthplace of Christianity, Bethlehem, is often cited as a parable. Followers of Jesus once made up 90 percent of its people; now it’s 14 percent. The Israeli security wall and checkpoints isolate the city from Christian sites in Jerusalem, just seven miles away. At the same time, the Palestinian Authority has been accused of stealing West Bank land from Christians.

Only in Lebanon, where Christians were once dominant, do they retain considerable political power. After a civil war from 1975-89 largely along religious lines, relations amid the patchwork of religious communities remain delicate. The constitution dictates that the president is always Christian, the prime minister Sunni Muslim and the parliamentary speaker Shia Muslim.

In Jordan, nine of the 110 parliamentary seats are reserved for Christians, who have slipped to just 3 percent of the population.

History unearthed

A hundred yards or so from taxiing airliners, Iraqi archaeologist Ali al-Fatli shows a visitor around the delicately carved remains of a Christian church that may date back 1,700 years.

The church, a monastery and other ruins emerging from the sand with the expansion of the Najaf airport has excited scholars who think it may be Hira, a legendary Arab Christian center.

“This is the oldest sign of Christianity in Iraq,” said al-Fatli, pointing to the ancient tablets with designs of grapes that litter the sand next to intricately carved monastery walls. The site’s stone crosses and larger artifacts have been moved to the National Museum in Baghdad.

Legend traces Christianity in Iraq to Thomas, one of the Twelve Apostles who fanned out to spread Christ’s word after the crucifixion.

Historians believe Hira was founded around A.D. 270. It grew into a major force in Mesopotamia centuries before the advent of Islam, and it reputedly was a cradle of Arabic script.

A professor of early Christianity at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, Erica Hunter, spoke of evidence that by the early third century, the faith was well established in what is now southern Iraq by the Lakhmid dynasty, an Arab kingdom whose final ruler converted to Christianity.

For centuries Hira was an important center of the Church of the East, sometimes known as the Nestorian church, whose modern offshoot is the Assyrian Church of the East.

It’s clear that Christianity at Hira continued to thrive alongside Islam until at least the 11th century. “In fact, Muslim historians talk of 40 monasteries in the vicinity,” Hunter said.

Eventually the region’s Muslim rulers began persecuting the Christians, and Hira’s churches were abandoned.

History seems to be repeating itself. Many of the people now struggling in Iraq’s Kurdish north came in the wake of a 2010 suicide attack at Our Lady of Salvation Church. That atrocity left 50 worshipers and two priests dead and turned the church into a graveyard of scorched pews and shattered stained glass.

Christian families in Baghdad grabbed clothing, cash and a few other provisions and headed north for the Christian communities along the Nineveh plain and Kurdistan’s three provinces. They joined tens of thousands of other Christians from the capital, Mosul and other cities who traced similar arcs after earlier attacks and assassination campaigns.

“They traded everything for security,” said the Rev. Gabriel Tooma, who leads the Monastery of the Virgin Mary in the Christian town of Qosh, which took in dozens of families.

“We were in the worst of times,” says Younadam Kanna, a Christian in Iraq’s parliament. To him, the discoveries at Hira provide some hope.

“It shows we can live together in peace with Muslims — because we did for centuries before,” he says. “When Islam first came to Iraq, the Christians here welcomed them.”

This article was compiled from a Religion News Service story by Oren Dorell and Sarah Lynch of USA Today; the Wall Street Journal; the Associated Press and other news services.

A region’s 2,000 years of turmoil

Syria was an important backdrop to the development of the region’s once deep Christianity, long before Mohammed’s followers emerged from the deserts of Arabia. Some highlights and low points:

• Antioch, then considered part of Syria, was the scene of early conversions, some by Peter himself, and where the term “Christians” was first tried out.

• The vast Roman Empire was bureaucratically divided between east and west in 285, reunited by Emperor Constantine in 314, then divided again in 395 by Theodosius I. Power shifted from Rome to the wealthier, Greek-oriented Constantinople; Eastern Christians began to grow away from the Roman Church.

• The lands ruled by the Byzantines included those Jesus walked. It was Constantine who restored the name Jerusalem to the Roman town Aelia Capitolina, built atop the ruins of David’s temple. Constantine’s mother, Helena, arrived in 326 to find the “True Cross” and pull down the temples to the old pagan gods. With this kind of royal Eastern Orthodox attention, the town prospered, although not so much the generally mistreated Jews.

Egypt, where Joseph and Mary took Jesus to escape Herod, was regarded as the second Holy Land by the Byzantines. St. Anthony, believed to be the first monk, resided on the Red Sea. Other early monasteries were built where the Holy Family touched down, including St. Mary in Maadi (now a Cairo suburb), where baby Jesus boarded a boat on the Nile.

• The largest church in Lebanon is the Maronite Catholic, traced back to a fourth-century Syrian hermit monk, St. Maron. Another ascetic saint from near Aleppo, Syria, was Simeon Stylites, who lived atop a pillar for 37 years.

• The fellow we know as Santa Claus, that is, fourth-century Saint Nikolaos, built his reputation by leaving gold coins in shoes in Myra (on today’s south coast of Turkey). Beloved by children, sailors and prostitutes, the bishop was credited with many miracles, including resurrecting three children who had fallen afoul of a cannibalistic butcher.

• Constantinople’s crown jewel, the Sofia Hagia cathedral, was finished by Emperor Justinian soon before Rome’s fourth sacking, by the Ostrogoths, in 546.

• By 634, things began to go sour for the Byzantines. Having won a draining war against the Persians, a weakened Emperor Heraclius lost a crucial battle to Arabs south of Damascus. Withdrawing to Antioch, he noted: “Peace be with you Syria. What a beautiful land you will be for our enemies.” It wasn’t long before Jerusalem also fell.

• A small Arab army attacked the Byzantines in Egypt, and by 641, their general reported back to Medina: “We have conquered Alexandria. In this city there are 4,000 palaces, 400 places of entertainment and untold wealth.” The Coptic Church began its long decline.

• In Damascus was a Christian basilica (recycled from a temple to Jupiter) dedicated to John the Baptist and said to still contain the saint’s head. Once Damascus became the seat of a caliphate that ruled from India to Spain, the structure was converted again, to the current Umayyad Mosque. Its tallest tower is the Minaret of Jesus, said by Muslims to be where he will descend to battle the Antichrist in the End Days.

• Although the Byzantine Empire recovered somewhat and held sway in the Balkans over the next centuries, it never retook Asia Minor from the Seljuk armies.

• In 1052 came the Great Schism of Christianity. Rome, restored as the power center of the Catholic world, tried to impose Latin rites on Greek churches in southern Italy; Latin churches in Constantinople were shuttered in retaliation; Pope Leo IX excommunicated Michael Cerularius, patriarch of Constantinople, who in turn did the same to Leo.

• Christian armies, exhorted by Pope Urban II, arrived with the First Crusade and in 1098 captured Antioch. (During this siege, Crusaders discovered the sweet reeds known to Arabs as sukkar (sugar). The next year, the Europeans breached the walls of Jerusalem, herded Jews into a synagogue and set it on fire.

• By 1187, the gains of the first Crusades were largely wiped out by the great Kurdish commander Saladin, who entered Jerusalem on the anniversary of Mohammed’s ascent to heaven. Five years later, he would foil Richard the Lionheart’s Third Crusade to retake the Holy City. (Saladin died soon after and was buried in a Umayyad Mosque garden.)

• In 1204, the French of the Fourth Crusade, assigned to recapture Egypt, pillaged Constantinople instead, a disaster from which the city never recovered. Antioch was ruled by Christians until 1268.

• Constantinople finally fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1453, and Justinian’s great church, the Hagia Sophia, was converted to a mosque.

• The Ottoman Empire lasted until it chose the wrong side in WWI. While it allowed freedom of religion, Christians had second-class status. Whole communities, such as those of the Assyrian Church in southeast Turkey and Maronites in Lebanon, were subjected to massacres in the 1800s.

• During World War I, the Turks tried to exterminate Armenian Christians; one notorious death camp was at Deir el-Zour in the Syrian desert, once famous for its Christian monasteries.

Iran says new Gospel to cause Christianity collapse

By ("RT," May 25, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/37351/

Tehran, Iran - Tehran says a religious text containing verses attributed to Jesus Christ, proves Islam is the righteous religion and will cause the downfall of Christianity. The Christian world denies the existence of such a gospel and calls it a fake.

The book thought by some to date from the fifth or sixth century was confiscated in Turkey in 2000. It was seized during a crackdown on a gang charged with smuggling antiquities, illegal excavations and the possession of explosives, the Daily Mail reports.

Turkish authorities believe it could be an authentic version of the Gospel by Jesus's disciple Barnabas, known for his travels with the apostle Paul.

It took Turkey 12 years to present the find to the world.

Iran has called the text written on animal hide in golden letters a Barnabas Gospel. Tehran insists the text proves Jesus was never crucified, was not the Son of God and in fact predicted the coming of the Prophet Mohammed and the religion of Islam, Iran’s Basij Press says.

According to Basij Press, the text even predicts the coming of the last Islamic messiah – a passage that highly inspires the report’s authors.

“The discovery of the original Barnabas Bible will now undermine the Christian Church and its authority and will revolutionize the religion in the world,” the Basij report says.

No media outlet has published a facsimile of the verses. The released photo of the front cover shows only inscriptions in Aramaic and a drawing of a cross.

Turkey plans to put the book on public display, which is likely to spark fierce debate as many scientists believe the text is a fake.

The Assyrian International News Agency (AINA) says the inscription on the photo can easily be read by an ordinary Assyrian. The Assyrians have traditionally lived all over what is now Iraq, northeast Syria, northwest Iran, and southeastern Turkey.

The translation of the bottom inscription, which is the most clearly visible says: “In the name of our Lord, this book is written on the hands of the monks of the high monastery in Nineveh, in the 1,500th year of our Lord.”

Nineveh is the ancient Assyrian capital, located in present-day northern Iraq.

The agency says the text contains spelling errors and moreover, the writing is in Modern Assyrian, which was standardized in the 1840s.

It says both the data from the inscription and the language prove the text couldn’t have been written in the 5th century, as Iran claims.

The authenticity of the book has yet to be proved.

Some experts say Iran is highlighting the book because it sees Christianity as a threat.

Erick Stakelbeck, a TV host and a close observer of Iranian affairs, told WND.com: “In promoting the so-called Barnabas Bible – which was likely written sometime in the 16th century and is not accepted by any mainstream Christian denomination – the regime is once again attempting to discredit the Christian faith.”

Many experts say mullahs see Christianity as a growing threat to their authority, as record numbers of young Iranians are leaving Islam and embracing Christ.

Last year, Iranian authorities confiscated and burned some 6,500 Bibles under the order of Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. The mullah said the Bible is not a holy book, and its burning is morally acceptable.

As Iran sees tough times following trade and financial sanctions imposed by the West, its religious leaders seem to be bracing for a confrontation with Christianity.

My Take: Five women in religion to watch

By Sarah Sentilles ("CNN," March 5, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/36975/

USA - The year 2012 has only just begun and already women are revolutionizing what it looks like to be religious, to study religion and to engage in social change. Here are five women to watch in 2012:

Kecia Ali

Kecia Ali, a feminist scholar who focuses on Islamic jurisprudence and women in early and modern Islam, is one of the organizers of “Muslim Women and the Challenge of Authority,” a conference that will be held at Boston University in March. Participants will be asking crucial questions about who has the right to speak for or about Muslim women, important work at a time when the image of the “veiled Muslim woman” is still being used to prove the supposed inferiority of Muslim cultures and to justify Islamophobia. Ali is the author of "Sexual Ethics and Islam" and, most recently, "Imam Shafi’i: Scholar and Saint" (2011). Her current research focuses on biographies of Mohammed. She is an sssociate professor of religion at Boston University.

CNN’s Belief Blog: The faith angles behind the biggest stories

Nadia Bolz-Weber

Nadia Bolz-Weber is changing what church looks like — and she’s changing what ministers look like while she’s at it. The tattooed founding pastor of House for All Sinners and Saints is a leading voice in the emerging church movement, what people like Diana Butler Bass are calling a new Reformation. Bolz-Weber is committed to the belief that the Bible still matters, that you shouldn’t have to leave parts of yourself behind when you show up at church and that the Lutheran tradition can be revolutionary. The House for All Sinners and Saints is social justice oriented, queer inclusive, incarnational, contemplative, irreverent and progressive. You can even buy a church T-shirt with the slogan “Radical Protestants: Nailing sh*t to the church door since 1517” emblazoned on the back. Bolz-Weber is the author of "Salvation on the Small Screen? 24 Hours of Christian Television." More of her writing can be found in The Christian Century and her own blog, the Sarcastic Lutheran.

Anthea Butler

Anthea Butler models what engaged scholarship looks like in the 21st century. Butler, an associate professor of religious studies and graduate chair in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, brings a scholar’s eye to contemporary politics and decodes the work religion is doing in the public square. She’s a regular contributor to Religion Dispatches and a prolific tweeter. Whether she’s discussing politics, popular culture, Pentecostalism or the history of African-American women’s religious lives, Butler demonstrates an unceasing commitment to telling the truth and holding people accountable. Her newest book, "The Gospel According to Sarah: How Sarah Palin's Tea Party Angels are Galvanizing the Religious Right," will be published this summer by the New Press. It explores Palin’s Pentecostal roots and the fervent Christianity of her followers, revealing what Jeff Sharlet calls “a new kind of piety—a ‘supersized’ folk religion that’s part Pentecostalism, part evangelicalism, part Catholicism, and part high heels.” In the meantime, Butler will be tweeting about the presidential election and the pedophilia scandal in the Philadelphia Archdiocese (she tweets as @AntheaButler).

Esther Fleece

The assistant to the president for millennial relations at Focus on the Family, Esther Fleece was hired to bring the so-called “millennials” back to the conservative Christian movement. She has her work cut out for her. Fleece says she has friends who voted for Obama and she also has friends who are gay. Fleece tweets (you can find her @EstherFleece) and blogs about a variety of topics ranging from Tim Tebow’s Christianity (in a recent post at On Faith she compared Tebow to John the Baptist) to why women shouldn’t live with their boyfriends but should rather make them “put a ring on it.” She’s working to redefine what it means to be young and evangelical at a time when conservative Republicans are looking for that particular demographic’s vote. It will be interesting to see just who ends up influencing whom.

Karen King

Karen King is the first woman appointed as the Hollis Professor of Divinity at Harvard Divinity School, the oldest endowed chair in the United States, and she is at work on a book about “martyrdom and its discontents” that rethinks the role of violence in the formation of Christianity. She writes against polarized opinions about religion and violence often heard today — either religion is essentially intolerant and thus naturally given to violence, or religion is essentially peaceful. As a way out of this impasse, King focuses on controversies among early Christians themselves over how to understand and respond to the violence aimed against them. (Full disclosure: King was my professor at Harvard Divinity School and in 2010 we co-convened a Radcliffe seminar, “Christianity and Torture.”) In her books and her lectures, King makes Christianity’s ancient history relevant and revolutionary as she investigates what is at stake and for whom. She is the author of "The Secret Revelation of John; and Revelation of the Unknowable God."

Daystar, TBN ready for Messiah in Jerusalem

By Edmund Sanders ("Los Angeles Times," October 1, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/38268/

Jerusalem, Israel - If the Messiah descends from the Mount of Olives as foretold in the Bible, America's two biggest Christian broadcasters are well-positioned to cover it live thanks to recent acquisitions of adjacent Jerusalem studios on a hill overlooking the Old City.

Texas-based Daystar Television Network already beams a 24-hour-a-day live webcam from its terrace. Not to be outdone, Costa Mesa-based Trinity Broadcasting Network last month bought the building next door.

The dueling studios are part of an aggressive push by U.S. evangelical broadcasters seeking to gain a stronger foothold in the holy city. Their presence not only offers boasting rights with American viewers and contributors, but also — and more controversially — a platform for spreading the gospel of Jesus Christ to Jews in Israel.

In addition to its new multistory building, TBN is negotiating with Israel's Yes satellite television provider to secure a full-time home for its evangelical Shalom TV channel.

Daystar already airs its English-language programming in Israel with dedicated channels on both Yes and cable provider HOT Telecommunications Systems, claiming to be the first Christian evangelical broadcaster to transmit a gospel message to Israeli television sets 24 hours a day.

"The main thing we want to do is help sponsor what we call Messianic Jews, or Jews that have received Jesus Christ as their Messiah," said TBN co-founder Paul Crouch, who recently wrapped up a tour of Israel with 1,800 TBN supporters, most of them from America. "We want to do some Hebrew language programs to reach out to Jews and entice them to read the word of God and become what we call a completed Jew."

Such proselytizing angers Orthodox Jewish groups who say it threatens the character of a nation that was created as a home for Jewish refugees of the Holocaust. Christian proselytizing is legal in Israel, though the government has at times restricted and discouraged the practice; members of the Jewish faith do not seek to convert those of other faiths.

"One of the things I find offensive is that they are bragging about their missionary work," said Ellen Horowitz, research director at Jewish Israel, a grass-roots group created in 2008 to track and counteract Christian missionaries in Israel. "They're actually very in-your-face about it."

Horowitz said proselytizing is a touchy subject in Israel. "Our people have been through the wringer already with either persecution or assimilation," she said. "Now people finally get to a Jewish nation and someone pushes a copy of the New Testament in Hebrew at them. A sensitive line is being crossed."

When Daystar debuted in Israel in 2006, it created such a public uproar that the channel was temporarily suspended from the HOT network. It was restored after a court challenge.

Since then, Christian evangelical groups have quietly and steadily expanded their footprint in Jerusalem.

Last spring, evangelist organizer Mike Evans began soliciting donations from U.S. supporters for his $10-million purchase of a prime commercial building in Jerusalem's city center, where he plans to open a facility devoted to Christian evangelism.

In July, American missionary Rick Ridings, a nephew of Paul Crouch who operates a walk-in prayer center near Mt. Zion, hosted several hundred Israeli youths at a three-day gospel music and prayer festival in Tel Aviv.

Crouch said TBN, whose recently purchased building houses the Los Angeles Times Jerusalem bureau, is striving to promote Christianity in Israel, where the faith is sometimes overshadowed by the struggle between Judaism and Islam. Trinity Broadcasting already is one of the world's largest religious broadcasters, with 18 networks in seven languages.

"Christianity is not represented in Israel as well as it could," he said. "We hope to equalize that and give Christianity a better platform."

The latest inroads by evangelical Christians have not triggered the backlash that occurred in 2006 when Daystar went on the air. In fact, Crouch said TBN's biggest obstacle in Jerusalem so far is rival Daystar, which he said tried to block TBN's Shalom Channel from airing on Yes satellite.

"They raised a stink," Crouch said. "I guess some of our Christian brothers don't want the competition."

A Yes spokeswoman said negotiations with TBN are ongoing and a final deal has not been reached. Daystar officials declined to comment, but said in a statement that the company "loves and appreciates Israel."

Some Israelis are welcoming members of the American evangelical community as strategic partners, both politically and economically.

In addition to becoming the fastest-growing segment of Israel's tourism market, U.S. evangelicals tend to be staunchly pro-Israel, lobbying in Washington on the Israeli government's behalf on such matters as the Palestinian conflict or West Bank settlement construction.

Christian broadcasters have donated tens of millions of dollars in recent years to build Israeli schools, community centers, hospital wards and even synagogues. Part of the support is based upon their belief that the return of the Jewish people to Israel will usher in the second coming of Jesus.

Christian groups have forged close ties with Russian-born lawmakers in the parliament, or Knesset, and recently helped push through a law that extended property tax exemptions once available only to Jewish religious institutions to those owned by Christian congregations.

"They are much more sophisticated and calculated than they were before," Horowitz said. "With all the millions of dollars they are giving, it's harder for the government to say no."

Her group said the number of evangelical Christian congregations in Israel has grown to 150 with as many as 20,000 followers, up from an estimated 3,000 in 1987, based on estimates from the congregations.

Christian broadcasters boast to their viewers that they are seeing a record number of Jews convert to Christianity. "The harvest is coming in so fast," Crouch said.

Much of the growth is coming from the 1 million Russian immigrants who arrived in Israel during the 1990s. Many of the immigrants were never considered Jewish by Orthodox rabbis or had practiced Christianity in Russia.

"They see Russians as a way to get a foothold in Israel and create a Christian revival here," Horowitz said. "We don't have anything against Christians. But the Jewish people have to watch their backside to make sure this evangelical embrace does not become a hold that we can't get out of."

Low-caste Hindus adopt new faith

By ("BBC News," October 14, 2006)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/23035/?&place=asia-pacific&section=hinduism

New Delhi, India - Thousands of people have been attending mass ceremonies in India at which hundreds of low-caste Hindus (Dalits) converted to Buddhism and Christianity.

The events in the central city of Nagpur are part of a protest against the injustices of India's caste system.

By converting, Dalits - once known as Untouchables - can escape the prejudice and discrimination they normally face.

The ceremonies mark the 50th anniversary of the adoption of Buddhism by the scholar Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar.

He was the first prominent Dalit to urge low-caste Indians to embrace Buddhism.

As the chief architect of India's constitution, he wrote anti-discrimination provisions and quota systems into the country's law.

But four-fifths of India's Dalits live in often isolated rural areas, and traditional prejudice has persisted in spite of official laws.

'Cry for dignity'

The Dalits arrived by the truckload at a public park in Nagpur for ceremonies, which began with religious leaders giving fiery speeches against the treatment of lower castes.

Reuters reported that dozens of riot policemen had turned out at the sprawling park.

Udit Raj, a Dalit leader, told the BBC that around 2,500 people converted to Christianity and Buddhism.

Joseph D'Souza, the president of the Dalit Freedom Network and a Christian convert, described the conversions as a "celebratory occasion".

"I think it's important to understand that this is a cry for human dignity, it's a cry for human worth," he told the BBC.

He said that Dalits could seek dignity by converting to Christianity, Jainism or Sikhism as well as Buddhism.

Buddhist convert Dhammachari Manidhamma told the BBC that social equality was impossible within Hinduism.

"Buddha's teaching was for the humanity, and Buddha believed in equality.

"And Hindu religion, Hindu teaching is nothing but inequality.

Laws against conversion

Similar mass conversions are taking place this month in many other parts of India.

Several states governed by the Hindu nationalist party, the BJP, have introduced laws to make such conversions more difficult.

The states of Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Tamil Nadu have all passed laws restricting conversions.

Gujarat has reclassified Buddhism and Jainism as branches of the Hindu religion, in an attempt to prevent conversions away from Hinduism eroding the BJP's bedrock support.

Hinduism teaches that most humans were created from parts of the body of the divinity Purusha.

According to which body parts they were created from, humans fall into four basic castes which define their social standing, who they can marry, and what jobs they can do.

But Dalits fall outside this system and are traditionally prevented from doing all but the most menial jobs or even drinking from the same water sources as other castes.

DALIT FACTS

167m people, 16.2% of India's population

Nearly 60% live in Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Bihar, Andhra Pradesh, and Tamil Nadu states

The lowest rank in Hindu society, beneath the traditional caste system

Expected to perform the most menial jobs, particularly handling cadavers and human and animal waste

Physical contact with a Dalit was traditionally considered ritually polluting for other castes

Even converts to Christianity and Islam have encountered discrimination from higher-caste converts

John the Baptist, Mary, Jesus, and Paul

Dr. Rey,

Who is more important in the Christian religion from a religious studies point of view?
John the Baptist, Mother Mary, Jesus, or Paul?
From an academic perspective, who changed history?

Thank you for your time


-Anonymous


Anonymous,


Thank you for such an exhilaratingly interesting question! I would have to say that, while each of these characters (John the Baptist, Mary, Jesus, and Paul) played a vital role in the shaping of Christianity, Paul outshines all other figures in the development and history of Christianity. To put it quite simply, Paul acted as one of the best promoters of all time in order to spread his personal interpretation of the messages supposedly conveyed by Jesus to his followers. The time in which Jesus was supposedly preaching to his followers seems to be the relatively short stretch of time between the death of John the Baptist and his own death. As I tell many of my students, it’s always best to look at Christianity as if it were a popular West End show: consider John the Baptist to be the playwright, Mary as the female lead, Jesus as the protagonist (or antagonist, depending purely upon your personal feelings towards Christianity as a belief system) and Paul as the critic who wrote a shining review of the performance. While that kind of an approach might seem somewhat glib, it often explains a very good point – playwrights and critics tend to be the most important and least recognized contributors to a performance while the actresses and actors executing a performance tend to get more attention than any clear thinking person ever believes is appropriate. Now, to understand how Paul changed history, it’s extremely important to remember that the oldest Christian writings that we have available to us were, in every likelihood, composed by Paul; as is the case in most belief systems, the first contributor to the canon is the best remembered and the most obeyed. Not at all surprising is the fact that the opinions and interpretations of Paul are the very things that constitute the greater proportion of what might be described as Christian morality today.
I’ll finish by writing that this is an inordinately complex sort of topic that I hope to discuss again in the future!

Reinforcing the church-state wall

By Jim Burkee ("Los Angeles Times," March 1, 2012)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/36957/

USA - American conservatives are deeply divided about Thomas Jefferson. His Democratic-Republican Party embraced many bedrock conservative principles, favoring states' rights, opposing attempts by the Federalists to strengthen the federal government and generally promoting individual liberty and freedom. And for those things he remains a hero and a paragon to the modern Republican Party's fiscally conservative, libertarian and tea party wing.

But many religious conservatives are less comfortable with Jefferson. America's third president was a deist, at best, who authored his own interpretation of the New Testament, removing all references to Jesus' divinity. More significantly, he penned the phrase many social conservatives have in recent decades denounced, advocating a steadfast "wall of separation between church and state."

Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum revived the debate about separating church and state this week when he talked about a 1960 campaign trail speech given by the nation's 35th president, John F. Kennedy.

Kennedy gave the speech to address fears that he, as a Roman Catholic, would answer to the pope rather than the U.S. Constitution. In it, he said that he believed in "an America where the separation of church and state is absolute; where no Catholic prelate would tell the president (should he be Catholic) how to act, and no Protestant minister would tell his parishioners for whom to vote; where no church or church school is granted any public funds or political preference; and where no man is denied public office merely because his religion differs from the president who might appoint him or the people who might elect him."

That was a sentiment, Santorum said, "that makes me throw up." He excoriated Kennedy, saying that he had "for the first time articulated the vision saying, 'No. Faith is not allowed in the public square.'"

Santorum was off historically by more than 150 years in his assertion that Kennedy was the first American president to advocate a wall between church and state. And his clear misreading of Kennedy's statement also exposes a deeper misunderstanding by social conservatives of the exceptionalism of American church-state relations.

Keeping government and religion separate in no way has meant that America is not a religious nation. Among advanced Western nations, only the United States continues to experience steady rates of church attendance. Each week, roughly 40 percent of Americans attend religious services, according to most recent surveys.

In Western Europe, by contrast, Christianity is moribund. In Nordic Europe, 3 percent to 5 percent of the population goes to church regularly. In Britain, 1 in 10 attend. In France, 12 percent go to church. And in Germany, home to Martin Luther, 13 percent attend.

Yet in European countries there is a long history of intertwining church and state. In the 19th century, Lutherans came to the United States to escape the arm of state-supported churches. While some European states are now officially secular, to this day the British monarch must be a Protestant, and Norway and Denmark remain officially Lutheran.

The American experience has, at least since the Revolution, been markedly different. The steady strength of America's Christian denominations is their existence in a religious marketplace where, as religious scholar Martin Marty argues, they have consistently had to adapt to a changing cultural and spiritual marketplace or die. The same creative destruction that shapes corporate America also guides American Christianity: Those most responsive to the changing needs of Americans survive and grow, while those who fail to adapt quickly fade.

Christianity does well when the state stays out of its business and allows this marketplace of ideas to thrive. Historically, it has thrived in the face of benign or even oppositional states, from Imperial Rome to modern China. And it's strange that so many conservative Christians - people who typically defend a free marketplace and oppose government overreach - don't get this.

When the state and religion become intertwined, religion suffers. Across America this year, attorneys for America's largest Christian denominations will be warning their pastors to avoid talking politics from the pulpit. Why? Because most churches accept the federal government's 501(c)(3) nonprofit status, allowing the state to place restrictions on what their pastors and priests can say. Christian colleges that accept federal aid subject themselves to similar restrictions. If you take state money, you risk federal involvement. It's one reason some conservative colleges are now refusing all federal aid, and some of America's best religious-based charities and missions do the same.

Both major political parties are plagued by deep inconsistencies. Democrats who advocate for a strong, regulatory state are often social and cultural libertarians, while free-market, laissez-faire Republicans too often support robust state intervention on social issues.

Conservatives would do well to remember that although Jefferson was inconsistently liberal (he enslaved fellow human beings, after all), he was consistent in his belief that for government to be small anywhere, it has to be small everywhere.

Conservatives should reinforce that wall separating church from state. It is one of the primary reasons American Christianity remains so vibrant.

Religion finds fallow fields in Japan today

By Julia Duin ("The Washington Times," December 27, 2002)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/12213/

While former nightclub musician Marre Ishii, 37, whaled away at the piano, a backup six-piece band belted out ear-splitting tunes and about 50 Japanese young people dressed in a variety of punk-style costumes lifted their hands and clapped.

They were at Committed Japan, a youth-oriented church that uses rock music, evangelizes through a nearby cafe and sells its conferences, CDs and books using standard marketing methods.

Unhappy with traditional Japanese churches that average only 35 worshippers per Sunday, Mr. Ishii began his own church in September 1995 with four persons in an apartment. Now Committed Japan oversees a network of small churches and Bible-study groups numbering 170 persons.

"Japanese people are seeking hope," said Mr. Ishii, lounging in the church-owned Kick Back Cafe in a western Tokyo suburb. Those who fail to attain it, he added, may wind up throwing themselves in the path of a commuter train.

His church has an ingredient that is rare in Japan today: religious conviction. Although Japanese marry with native Shinto ceremonies, mourn their dead in Buddhist rites, and some worship as Christians, Muslims or other religions, public discourse is hardly influenced by theocentric concerns.

Mark Mullins, who teaches comparative religion at Sophia University in downtown Tokyo, says most Japanese avoid religion.

"Since the Aum incident, there's been a huge fallout," he said, referring to the March 1995 sarin-gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by adherents of Aum Shinrikyo — an apocalyptic group of Shiva worshippers founded by "Venerated Master Shoko Asahara" (born Chizuo Matsumoto in 1955) — that killed 12 persons and sickened more than 5,000.

"Now religion is connected with violence and considered dangerous. Before the Aum incident, you'd see religious groups handing out materials at the train stations. That has disappeared. There's not a lot of interest in religion, period."

Nobutaka Inoue, a professor of Japanese culture at Kokugakuin University in Tokyo, also faults the Aum incident for dampening interest.

"For the younger generation, religion is a little bit dangerous," he said. "They may believe in God or spiritual beings, but belonging to an actual group is another matter. Young people see religious people as overly concerned with money or involved with scandal."

This is not to say that the Japanese aren't spiritual: Memorials to aborted fetuses at Buddhist temples such as Hase-Kannon temple in Kamakura, dedicated to the goddess of mercy, and Zojo-ji in Tokyo testify that this is a people who believe strongly in the soul and some form of life after death.

"People will drop by the Meiji Shrine on New Year's," said Mr. Mullins, referring to the country's best-known Shinto sanctuary, "but they don't go anywhere where people will know them. You have a growth of anonymous religious behavior in Japan. Japan has always had an eccentric religious environment."

Shinto ("the way of the gods"), the Japan's indigenous religion, dates to prehistoric times and has no founder or scripture. It concerns harvest and fertility, emperor worship and birth ceremonies. State Shinto, a mixture of religion and patriotism, was the force that propelled many to sacrifice their lives for the emperor during World War II.

Confucianism, the next-oldest religion, has been in Japan since 404 A.D. Most followers of this religion took up Buddhism, which came via Korea sometime around 600 A.D.

Christianity was brought to Japan in 1549 by Francis Xavier, founder of the Roman Catholic Society of Jesus (Jesuits). Rivalry with other Catholic missionary groups, and later with Dutch Protestants, for Japanese converts and influence led to restrictions on Christianity in 1612 and a nationwide ban two years later. Japanese Christians were persecuted under the rule of the Tokugawa shoguns and went underground until 1873, when religious sanctions were withdrawn under the Meiji imperial government.

Some 75 percent of Japanese have Buddhist or Shinto altars in their homes and almost 90 percent pay visits to ancestral graves on religious festivals. Two percent or fewer of Japan's 127 million people consider themselves to be Christians.

However, Japanese like to sample Western Christian customs, such as church weddings and black gospel music. According to a 1999 study published by Kokugakuin University, Japanese associate Christmas with the following in descending order: Santa Claus, Christmas trees, presents, cake, parties, Jesus Christ, church ceremonies and Christmas cards.

But Japanese Christian churches are competing head-to-head with Shinto shrines as a place for wedding ceremonies as more people select Western-style weddings.

"This is a big debate in the Christian community," said Mr. Mullins. "Some say the bride and groom should be Christian. Others say this is the first time the Japanese have asked [Christians] for anything. Usually, we have to go out to them."

So do some of the Buddhist variants, such as Soka Gokkai, Mr. Inoue said. "They preach aggressively to strangers," he said. "The proselytizing attitude is quite problematic to the Japanese. They're even more aggressive than the Mormons."

Islam, which is growing in many other countries, Mr. Inoue added, has no more than 2,000 adherents in Japan, where all religions are trying to maintain a connection to the past while adapting to the future.

"Nothing is growing in Japan," he said. Church membership and attendance are "lessening here, but the interest in spirituality is growing."

"People are looking for something for mental healing, to ease the stress here."

If anything, he added, Japanese are more interested in phenomena such as space aliens, UFOs, exorcism and psychic phenomena. "Uri Geller," he said of the self-described psychic, "is popular here."

The Japanese have been vastly affected by globalization, in which "the religious culture has gotten mixed up," the scholar explained. "Japanese culture is changing because of so many foreign elements in it. People are still asking: 'Who am I?'

"Less and less people eat rice in the morning. More drink coffee and eat bread. Our culture is changing, and so is our religious culture. No religion here has a proper attitude toward this situation."

Michael Wenger, dean of Buddhist studies at the San Francisco Zen Center, said religion has to engage the culture to be effective. Buddhism is growing in the United States, he suggested, because of its allure among Americans as a sophisticated religion that encompasses faith and doubt.

"But in Japan, a lot of people think of Buddhism as 'old hat,'" he said. "They think of it as ancestor worship."

Masamaro Ohazaki, spokesman for Tsukiji Hongwanji, a venerable Tokyo temple belonging to the 10 million-member Jodo Shinshu sect of Buddhism, said attendance there is decreasing.

"People today tend to be attracted by prosperity and commercial benefits," he said. "New religions or cults offer that. Buddhism doesn't offer such profits. It focuses more on life after death."

Youth are more attracted to the "new religions," he went on — everything from Scientology and the Jehovah's Witnesses to several hundred variants on Shinto and Buddhism that sprang up in Japan starting in the 19th century.

"Because the new religions have no baggage or history, they can do whatever they want," he said. "Buddhism with its dark, old image has a hard time adopting new measures."

The Japanese brand of Buddhism is almost Hindu-like in its acceptance of multiple gods, said Shoshin Ichishima, a Buddhist professor at Taisho University in Tokyo.

"Even Christianity's God we'll accept," he said. "But the Japanese like the oriental way of thinking. We are more into nature worship. In Japanese, the word 'kami,' for God, means an impersonal force."

That is a major problem faced by Christians, for whom God is addressed as Father. Christian missionaries say that one would never use in prayer among Japanese the casual terms that Westerners use.

"In this culture, you'd never address God on familiar terms, because that is presupposing you are on equal terms with that person," said Marty Shaw, who works in Tokyo for Conservative Baptist International (CBI).

Moreover, historically in Japan, the mother is seen as nurturing, he said, while the father is stern and unapproachable — an image that only began to fade after World War II.

"Even Japanese believers have a difficult time worshipping [the Christian] God, because the expressions are not their own," said Ken Taylor, a missionary with CBI. "Everything in a typical Japanese church — from the music to the architecture — is imported.

"There are high percentages of Japanese converting to Christianity outside the country, but when they come back, they can't find a church like the one they left."

"A lot of Japanese churches are set in a Confucian system, where the elders rule," said Gary Fujino, a Southern Baptist missionary in Tokyo. "These churches are not going to change. Some say the Japanese church is too indigenized."

Observed Mr. Shaw of CBI: "When you enter a traditional church in Japan, it's a time warp. You are walking into a 1940s, 1950s kind of place. The church is irrelevant.

"Christianity attracts here through its weddings and black gospel music, but that is all surface. Missions organizations are quite discouraged. But when the Holy Spirit decides to move, He'll move."