Archive for Religion

On God and Politics

Posted by: Jason | July 30th, 2008 · 7:02 PM

(image: rondicianni.com)

Politics has been awash with themes of Christmas this year, undoubtedly those primary candidates vying for the largest base of celebrating Christians in places like Iowa and New Hampshire. We have Mike Huckabee’s “floating cross” ad, though he claims it’s only a bookshelf, and others less worthy of praise like Rudy Giuliani’s “fruitcake ad”, where he warmly presents us with a laundry list of policy issues. Nothing says Christmas like strict constructionist judges eh?

The question of “where religion belongs in politics” has been especially relevant this holiday season. I was having a conversation with a family member, centered around a television interview of the popular Christian evangelist Joel Osteen. Osteen’s brand of politics is non-existent, in that he constantly warns us of avoiding the pitfalls of asking whether God is Republican or Democrat. But a short discussion, or really, a snippy exchange, took place after a particular question was asked of Osteen by Fox New Sunday’s Chris Wallace.

Wallace asks of Osteen whether Mormonism was a true Christian faith, paying homage to the current media-driven “holy war” within the Republican primary between Mitt Romney, a Mormon former governor of Massachusetts, and Mike Huckabee, governor of Arkansas and former Baptist minister, both running for president.

Both of us taking offense to Wallace’s question for different reasons (not even Fox News is independent of the media’s sensationalizing a non-existent debate over faith within the Republican Party), the age-old disagreement over “separation of church and state” came afterwards. It occurred to me, albeit briefly due to my intention of shelving the touchy subject on a weekend where politics didn’t belong, that the axis of faith and politics, or lack-there-of depending on how you view its current state these days, continues to be one of confusion on the part of those who tend to oppose it.

For the sake of simplification, we should remember the origin of the term “separation of church and state”. While the idea of secular government has been alive since the writing of the constitution, the actual term originates in a letter written by Thomas Jefferson to the Danbury Baptist Association of Connecticut in 1802 during his first term as president.

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On Visionary Leadership

Posted by: Jason | · 2:13 AM

(image: harrisonburg)

“Let us have faith that right makes might, and in that faith, let us, to the end, dare to do our duty as we understand it.”

Abraham Lincoln, Cooper Institute Address, February 27, 1860.

After Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address of 1863, dark days loomed over the fractured union. We tend to forget that conflict had lasted a while longer, as a warm spirit began to lift the nation ever so slowly towards peace. Spawned undoubtedly by those powerful words uttered by Lincoln at Gettysburg, we had passed an inevitable destiny in our life as a nation, only to become reborn.

In so many ways, beyond the men who gave their lives, the munitions spent, or the tactful positioning of troops, the right of God in the affairs of man should receive the glory for our nation’s healing after the Civil War. Further, that God uses man in His plan for the human race. Perhaps this nation, and a people with a long heritage of belief in divine intervention, believe that Abraham Lincoln was one child of God, instrumental in His plan for us.

The very words of the Gettysburg Address, words which many argue to have calmed the nation, and allowed us the opportunity for a broad and lasting unity, themselves the work of God’s vision through man. For the cause of the United States of America, as Thomas Paine once said, indeed is in a great measure the cause of all mankind.

Too often than not today, we as Americans live in a state of fear over loosing our self-interests, an inability to sacrifice for the greater good. That statement isn’t a call on my part for a national moratorium on our individually held principles, but a correct recognition of a reality I see that’s dividing this country. For too long, we’ve embraced the notion that those running for office must clone our specific structure of thinking on all parts, for anything short of entire allegiance is not only unacceptable, but somehow a mythical threat to the future of our parties, God forbid they cease to exist.

In the fog of this ridiculous way of considering our choices for public office, we tend to forget what has always made America great. What kind of men made this nation what it was. It wasn’t the meek or the conservative, and it wasn’t the calculated choice. It was picking a mediocre general who would later become father to our young nation. It was an orator, a mere lawyer from Illinois and former two-year congressman, who emancipated not only an entire race of enslaved men, but a nation held captive by those who feared compromise and a sacrifice of their own self-interests.

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The Fall of Europe and the Contest for Africa

Posted by: Ion | July 27th, 2008 · 3:44 PM

As we’ve previously discussed here on PP, we believe the 21st century will be conditioned by two major economic, political and military events which would have sounded preposterous only twenty years ago (and which still do to many today). The first is the Steynian atrophy and demographic collapse of (coherent) European power, through a lethally toxic combination of mass immigration and low domestic birth rates. Although we won’t live to see a “Eurabia” those forces will destabilize and damage European prospects for effective competition on the world stage to a vast degree in this still young century.

The second and even more unexpected event, will be the rise of Christian sub-Saharan Africa as an economic, military and political power of substantial consequence. While most people in the West focus on Africa’s manifest problems with disease, poverty and unstable autocratic governments, these problems have never looked more like pre-war Asia than they do today.

Africa is changing and changing rapidly. Despite the horror stories you hear, Sub-Saharan African economic growth routinely doubles or triples Western European rates, unlike Europe its population is still growing prodigiously, its governments there are increasingly transforming into more stable market-states and the population is consolidating under a new faith: In 1900 Africa’s Christian population was 8%, today it’s 45% and still expanding. It is already roughly equal to the Muslim population of North Africa and is poised to leave it far behind.

But those events are a long way away. At present, the contest for Africa has a different locus. As with Asia in the 20th Century, resources and labor needs are driving the great powers into Africa. In the 21st century “great powers” means the United States and China.

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The Naked Evil of Stalinism

Posted by: Ion | · 12:24 AM

Russia has never had an enemy so inhuman as Stalin. Mankind has never suffered an evil more barbarous than the ideology of communism which empowered him. A quick glimpse back into the darkness:

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Productivity & Christianity in Africa

Posted by: Ion | July 24th, 2008 · 9:16 PM

We’ve often written about how radically the introduction and spread of Christianity is changing sub-Saharan Africa, culturally, politically and economically (for the better, in our opinion). Something that is almost totally ignored by Western media. But too often we tend to focus on the Protestant side of this effect. It should be said that Catholic evangelists are also pushing at these trends with often equal vigor.

Archbishop James Odongo supplies a representative example of this sort of thing in Uganda. Here he was speaking at the Martyrs Cathedral near Tororo, on Catholic Youth Day:

Archbishop Emeritus James Odongo has cautioned the youth against engaging in homosexuality, lesbianism and using vulgar language. He said such behaviour was unacceptable not only in the Christian teachings, but also in the African culture.

He urged the youth to work hard instead of spending time in social gatherings and being influenced by philosophies that state that ‘when something is done, it must, therefore be right.’

Odongo told the youth to preserve the integrity of their faith and be responsible for their actions and thoughts.
(AllAfrica)

Apart from extremely self-confident social conservatism, one of the most striking things one encounters when reading Christian African sermons, is how strenuously they focus on work ethics and increasing worker productivity through strengthened moral resolve.

Sub-Saharan Africa remains the lowest man on the global totem-pole in terms of worker productivity, but is gaining faster than other regions. It should be observed too, that the only region of the world where worker productivity is actually falling is in the Muslim Middle East (excluding Israel).

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Scriptural Literalism as a Cause for Islamic Terrorism: A Short Dissent

Posted by: Ion | · 8:43 PM

Ordinarily, citing one of Karen Armstrong’s devotional and haphazard apologias for Islamic Fundamentalism in your introduction, is not a good way to win me over to your essay. However Mahmood Sanglay did manage to keep my interest in his fine editorial for The Brunei Times.

The Armstrong argument selected by Sanglay, is her view that a propensity toward a literalist reading of religious texts is the locus of all violent religious extremism. It doesn’t take much contemplation of the world’s religious texts to recognize that this is fundamentally unsound as a universalist precept.

For a common example, reading the The Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount found in the Gospel of Matthew as written, is not going to persuade you to become a suicide bomber. When Jesus says “Blessed are the merciful, For they shall obtain mercy” that can only be read to advocate things such as euthanasia of the weak or murder to liberate the soul from heresy, when reading it as metaphor, not literally. Or if you prefer, a literal reading the Pancasila of the Buddha (not Sukarno’s), is unlikely to produce the monastic warriors of the Shaolin. A more liberal interpretation certainly can though.

Thus exactly the opposite of what Armstrong and Sanglay separately propose cannot produce violent extremism, clearly does and has. Indeed in many if not most religions, a literal reading of scriptures is likely to be far more pacific than one that is open to more casual and ambiguous interpretation. “Choose what you wish and make of it what you will” is rarely a recipe for judicious outcomes in the broader practice of moral and religious codes.

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The Southern Bulwark

Posted by: Ion | · 8:20 PM

I didn’t see this report on CNN, but wish I had:

Therefore, when recently the CNN Inside Africa crew went to chat with them on the streets of Cairo, their views were expected as all the respondents rejected the notion of being Africans in the first place. It must be emphasized that this same view is shared by all North Africans from Cairo to Casablanca.
(Friends of Ethiopia)

As a matter of physical and ethnic geography this is roughly equivalent to Colombians claiming they are not South Americans. As a matter of national and political identity, it’s quite close to the truth. Above the Sahel is Empire Arabia, the domain of Islam conjoined at the heart to Mecca and the customs and convulsions of the Arab world, through unified religion and language. Wherever Islam goes in Africa, African identity is riven apart from the land. Such is Islam’s marriage to maps.

One of the interesting things to consider, is whether the modern efforts of Arab leaders in Sudan, Libya and elsewhere to expand the zone of Arabization south into the continental interior –efforts which have met with so much failure– would have proven more successful had the rise of Christianity in the 20th century not been so rapid and expansive beneath the Sahara. For force of effect, here’s a compelling little table illustrating how significant this change has been:

(Christian History Institute)

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Are Republicans Shunning Evangelicals?

Posted by: Jason | December 19th, 2007 · 2:24 PM

(image: oxfordstudent)

While not a major part of the discussion, Governor Huckabee raised an interesting point on the Today Show this morning (the interview is below). For all these years, evangelical Christians have played a major role in electing Republicans into office. Since Ronald Reagan, no Republican candidate for president can say he was nominated without the help of this critical base.

We can certainly find economic conservatives making their way through the nomination process, military conservatives alike. But as Huckabee implies this morning, what does it really say about the party when the minute an evangelical Christian comes along, someone who represents 1/3 of the Republican party’s so-called base, that those such as Rich Lowry and others from Rockefeller territory start to trash them as unworthy?. Where the minute evangelicals would like an opportunity to speak at the table, as economic and military conservatives have for decades, that this is somehow taboo or unworthy of their time.

Republicans shouldn’t forget the massive amounts of evangelical Christians who have propelled them to power for years. And this phobia and insistence on trashing someone for being a preacher before he was a governor for 10.5 years is mighty disturbing, considering the fact that Governor Huckabee has more executive experience than all the other candidates, and has shown no record whatsoever of his Christian faith interfering with his time in public office.

That type of smearing should be expected by the media and the Democrats in a general election, but such a scenario would present us with an opportunity to unite behind the candidate and defend him. But when our own party members are trashing people over their faith, overemphasizing hype that just simply isn’t there outside some media creation (there is no Mormon bashing going on despite the wishes of Chris Matthews), it sends a message that evangelicals are no longer wanted. I find that dangerous to the future of our party.

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