Take Jeffrey Dahmer, please (that BTK guy, too)

August 29, 2005 By

tunnel3I was on the road this weekend and, believe it or not, WiFi was a problem at the hotel I visited in New York City. How hard is it to find a Starbucks in that town? Anyway, I wanted to add a quick note about Newsweek’s cover from last week — specifically the poll on what people believe about salvation and heaven.

Now, our friends at Beliefnet have already jumped on this. Click here for the “Who Gets Into Heaven?” package and, more importantly, click here for editor Steven Waldman’s essay, “The Pearly Gates Are Wide Open.”

It seems that more and more Americans are thirsting for religious experience and spiritual depth, of some kind, but they also believe that this has nothing to do with salvation and eternal life. In effect, we are watching the rise of the charismatic universalists.

Here is the crucial information from Waldman’s report.

Traditional Christians will flinch at the word “earn” in the lead, but keep reading.

One of the central tenets of evangelical Christianity is that to be saved — to earn admission into heaven — you must accept Jesus Christ as your savior. Yet 68% of “born again” or “evangelical” Christians say that a “good person who isn’t of your religious faith” can gain salvation, according to a new Newsweek/Beliefnet poll.

This is pretty amazing. Evangelicals are among the most churchgoing and religiously attentive people in the United States, and one of the ideas they’re most likely to hear from the minister at church on a given Sunday is that the path to salvation is through Jesus. Apparently, rank-and-file evangelicals have a different view. . . . Nationally, 79% of those surveyed said the same thing, and the figure is 73% for non-Christians and an astounding 91% among Catholics. The Catholics surveyed seemed more inclined to listen to the Catechism’s precept that those who “seek the truth” may gain salvation — rather than, say, St. Augustine’s view that being “separated from the Church” will damn you to hell “no matter how estimable a life he may imagine he is living.”

It is interesting that American Catholics now appear to be to the theological left, on salvation issues, of the secular public. That’s another story.

The evangelical numbers are actually not all that surprising for those who have followed the career of sociologist James Davision Hunter. Long before he wrote his famous Culture Wars study, he wrote a book titled Evangelicalism: The Coming Generation. He found, in the late 1980s, that a growing number of evangelicals at Christian colleges and universities were drifting away from the traditional Christian belief that salvation is found through Jesus Christ, alone. This fundamental change in the evangelical world is a major story, even if it is a generation old.

All of this made me think of heaven, hell and Dennis Rader of Wichita, Kan., and thinking about what we can and cannot know about the soul of the BTK murderer made me think about Jeffrey Dahmer. There are people who believe that everyone is going to heaven, no matter what. They get nervous thinking about Rader and Dahmer. There are people who get nervous thinking about Rader and Dahmer repenting and going to heaven.

More than a decade ago, I wrote a Scripps Howard News Service column about this and, in the wake of the Rader case, several people have written me asking for copies. The problem is that this column predates my tmatt.net website. I would like to post it here, so that people using Google can find it on their own. I believe the contents are still newsworthy and point to a story linked to the Rader and Newsweek stories. The original title on the column was this: “Take Jeffrey Dahmer, please.”

11/30/94

Most Americans have a good idea who they want to see go to hell — murderers, dictators, drug dealers and, certainly, anyone who tortures and kills children.

So this week’s bloody news from the Columbia Correctional Center in Wisconsin inspired many to utter a plea to the powers of darkness: Take Jeffrey Dahmer, please.

But it’s hard to ponder the fate of this infamous killer without running into a paradox. While most people in this nominally Christian nation say they believe in hell, their actual beliefs clash with both liberal and conservative versions of Christianity.

“Most people wanted Jeffrey Dahmer to fry,” said the Rev. Kendall Harmon, an Episcopal theologian from Summerville, S.C., whose doctoral work at Oxford University covered 20 centuries of teachings about hell. “Now that he’s dead, they’re celebrating and they’re absolutely sure he will burn in hell, because that’s what happens to people like him.”

Dahmer died on Monday after he was attacked while cleaning a prison bathroom. He died while saving the life of another inmate, shielding the body of a man who was under attack. This inmate was critically injured and a third is the prime suspect.

Dahmer was serving 15 consecutive life terms after confessing to killing 17 young males. He also said he dismembered some of his victims, had sex with their corpses and ate parts of their bodies. The blond-haired, blank-faced killer became a national symbol of the demonic. Dahmer confessed his crimes, but no one seemed inclined to forgive him.

Nevertheless, he seemed to find peace through prison Bible studies and, in May, he made a public profession of faith and was baptized. After praying that God would forgive his sins, Dahmer became remarkably calm about his fate — even after an inmate tried to slit his throat during a July chapel service.

Traditional Christians would have to say that Dahmer is heaven bound, if his repentance was sincere.

The problem is that many people seem to believe that there are two kinds of sins, and sinners. First, there are ordinary, good people who commit garden variety sins. They go to heaven, no matter what. Then there are the really bad sinners, especially those whose sins are linked to violence, drugs or sexual perversions. They are doomed to hell, no matter what.

A Gallup poll in 1990 found that 60 percent of Americans believe in hell, while 78 percent believe in heaven. Only 4 percent thought there was any chance that they would go to hell.

This pop theology is “really sad, because all it is is a projection of modern American values onto God,” said Harmon. “You end up with something that in no way resembles Christianity and is actually a vile form of secularism. . . . What most people want is justice, on their terms, or they want mercy, on their terms. What few people acknowledge is that God is in charge and he has set his own terms.”

Ironically, public belief in hell — for really bad people — also can be seen as a rejection of a modern theological trend. Most Christian liberals have embraced one of many forms of “universalism,” the belief that all people are saved, no matter what they believe or what they do. According to universalists, Dahmer had nothing to worry about in the first place.

But it’s hard to escape what the Bible says about eternal judgment. In the Gospel of Matthew, Jesus claims that he will someday put the “righteous people at his right and the others at his left. . . . Then he will say to those on his left, ‘Away from me, you that are under God’s curse! Away to the eternal fire which has been prepared for the Devil and his angels!’”

Harmon is convinced that hell matters. The 20th century has seen more than its share of hellish spectacles, from the Holocaust to Hiroshima, he said. Meanwhile, 19 centuries of Christian doctrine about hell have faded into fuzzy sentiment about a lowest common denominator heaven.

“This should make us pause and think,” he said. “Is this just a coincidence, or have we begun to take evil less seriously?”

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Godbeat, People

The New Yorker glances at Planet Hewitt

August 29, 2005 By

WizardHughThe August 29 New Yorker includes a six-page profile of über-blogger Hugh Hewitt, calling him the “Most Famous Conservative Journalist Whom Liberals Have Never Heard Of.” A color illustration by Eric Palma depicts Hewitt as a smirking colossus, sitting atop a half-black, half-white globe and doing his radio show while fingering his laptop.

Like many other magazines, The New Yorker releases only some of its pages to the Web — and this Web-centric piece is, oddly, not one of them. Hewitt’s blog, however, provides lots of reading material, including his evaluation of the profile, written by veteran journalist Nicholas Lemann, dean of Columbia University’s journalism school.

Hewitt’s Christianity does not appear frequently in Lemann’s piece — which focuses more on Hewitt’s efforts to challenge old-media hegemony — but when it does pop up, the details are informative:

Hewitt’s radio employer, Salem Communications, owns a hundred and four radio stations, covering twenty-four of the country’s twenty-five major markets, and purveys the work of eight talk-show hosts, five of them mainly conservative and three mainly Christian. Salem, whose headquarters are in Camarillo, California, is led by two brothers-in-law who are graduates of Bob Jones University; it is publicly held, and growing swiftly enough to have joined the handful of radio-station groups that are bunched together far behind the two national leaders, Clear Channel and Infinity Broadcasting. . . . Hewitt thinks of himself as the most liberal-friendly of the Salem hosts — he calls his program “National Public Radio for conservatives.”

Much later in the story comes this surprisingly nontheological description of how Hewitt, who grew up Catholic in Warren, Ohio, eventually became a Protestant:

Like many conservative Republicans of his generation, he was increasingly drawn to evangelical Protestantism. And Hewitt had come to dislike the political direction that the Catholic Church had taken. (“They were wrong on the Soviet Union, wrong on nuclear weapons, and wrong on poverty,” he says.)

The profile is fascinating because of Hewitt’s tendency to call out journalists on their cultural and political preferences. Lemann describes Hewitt’s reasons for doing this:

When somebody like [The Washington Post's Dana] Milbank gamely steps up to the plate, Hewitt uses the appearance as an opportunity to pursue one of his cherished goals, what he calls “transparency” in journalism. He has no problem presenting himself as an active, loyal Republican — so why won’t people who work in the mainstream own up to views that surely affect their work?

Lemann mentions early in his piece that Hewitt agreed to speak with him if Lemann would agree to be interviewed for a possible article. Near the conclusion of his article, Lemann explains why he plans to decline any invitation from Hewitt to declare himself:

If Hewitt does write about me, he will surely ask me to reveal whom I voted for in the last Presidential election. I might as well get started with the transparency now. Although I do vote, I’m not going to tell him. Like the house of the Lord, journalism has many mansions, and the one Hewitt inhabits is surely one of them. But in another of the mansions, reportorial journalism, the object is different. One can be curious or not, fair-minded or not, empathetic or not, imprisoned by perspective or not. For a reportorial journalist to announce his voting record is to undermine his work. It dishonors the struggle to do it right.”

About the art: Borgard Blog submitted this witty collage to a vast collection of images (warning: long load time) promoting Hewitt’s Blog: Understanding the Information Reformation That’s Changing Your World, which enjoys almost scriptural authority among conservative bloggers.

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Filed Under: Catholicism, Evangelicals, Journalism, Web/Tech

Update from Indy: About those emails

August 27, 2005 By

I had meant to post a note about this earlier in the week. This is an update on the alleged Indianapolis Star discrimination case from Baptist Press, which is a denominational source on the right, but it contains info that many readers will find interesting. Here is the Gannett side, via Des Moines Register columnist Rekha Basu. Lots and lots of details here, too.

The key news: This may hit the courts in 10 weeks or so. If you read the whole BP thing, it is also clear that the key to the whole affair — check out the Des Moines column — is who saved the best emails. This is a wider issue: What is the legal status of emails inside a corporate office?

Here is a key chunk of the BP story, involving claims by former editorial board members James Patterson and Lisa Coffey that top newsroom managers demonstrated patterns of bias against conservative Christians:

Patterson alleges that Dennis Ryerson, The Star’s executive editor and vice president, told the editorial department he was “repulsed and offended” by an editorial written by Patterson encouraging readers to pray for U.S. troops in Iraq.

Patterson also claims Ryerson stated that “in the future, he would not allow any editorials with any Christian overtones to be published or which could be construed as proselytizing on the editorial pages.”

The editorial in question, written one day after the beginning of the 2003 war with Iraq, urged readers to “pray for safety of our soldiers, comfort of their families, courage for our leaders and the wisdom for all parties to war to find the quickest path to peace.” It also urged prayers for the people of Iraq, “that their suffering be fleeting and that the freedom they deserve soon come to their troubled land.”

The newspaper denies that Ryerson “has ever demonstrated hostility toward Christianity and Christians on The Star’s staff” and that he told anyone he was “repulsed and offended” by the prayer editorial. Any claim that Ryerson harbors hostility toward Christians is “demonstrably false and preposterous,” given the fact that Ryerson wrote an April 6 editorial “describing his own Christian upbringing and respect and appreciation for all religious beliefs,” the newspaper said.

We will, of course, see “he said and she said” vs. “he said” in this case. I am interested in what the two sides wrote in emails and how much of that will come out. It also seems that we could have a heartland showdown between a red-zone faith in Patterson and Coffey and a blue-zone faith coming in with Gannett and Ryerson. Note the word “upbringing” in the editor’s plea and the emphasis on “all religious beliefs.” The implication, of course, is that the fired journalists did not share his broader view of faith. Yes, the “P word” is once again the key.

Will this settle early?

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Memo to Pat Robertson: Please fire yourself

August 25, 2005 By

Ah, where to begin on the continuing story of the Rev. Pat Robertson, regent of Virginia Beach?

I would like to flash back, if I may, to an event at the Ethics & Public Policy Center days after the 2000 election. From time to time, Michael Cromartie puts together high-powered panels of speakers who react to trends in the news. In this case, the goal was to do a quick deconstruction of role that religious faith played in the election — only the election was, of course, still twisting slowly in the wind.

The leaders of this particular discussion (click here to see a transcript) were two veteran election commentators — John Green of the University of Akron and John DiIulio of the University of Pennsylvania. The room was full of experienced reporters, including Michael Barone of Fox News, U.S. News & World Report, The Almanac of American Politics and lots of other places. Afterward, several participants lingered to talk about the election stories that the MSM missed as well as the ones that made it into print and video.

It was Barone who made the most interesting point. One of the most important stories that went untold, he said, was the behind-the-scenes efforts made by Bush campaign insiders to keep the old lions of the Religious Right out of the spotlight. This could not have been easy, seeing as how Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and others crave face time with candidates when cameras are near. But someone had cut them out or convinced them to stand down. In their place, some new faces began to emerge — such as Rick Warren and Kirbyjon Caldwell.

Someone — I honestly don’t remember who — summed up the heart of this untold story this way: “I wonder who managed to get Pat Robertson to shut up?”

Righto. That job would require a miracle worker.

This story rolls on and on, which means that the place to go for all of the links is the Christianity Today blog. You have had people leap to make fun of the Rev. Pat (headline: “God Denies Links to Pat Robertson”). Hip evangelicals have been doing this for years (art from The Wittenburg Door). There have even been a few brave religious conservatives who have asked him which part of those 10 Commandments he fails to grasp.

In the MSM, Baltimore Sun reporter Arthur Hirsch has one of the best stories, focusing on a question of substance rather than straw-man destruction. It is the question that Barone and others were discussing back in 2000. What power does Pat Robertson have, anyway, other than serving as the punching bag that liberals love to prop up as the symbolic religious conservative day after day, week after week, world without end, amen? Has he become the lifestyle left’s best friend?

Tim Simpson, director of religious affairs for a new left-leaning group called the Christian Alliance for Progress, said the impact of Robertson’s remarks broadcast Monday on The 700 Club suggests that he cannot be easily dismissed. “One does that at one’s own peril,” said Simpson. “I take him dead seriously.”

(cough, cough) Here is a more constructive quote about the style and clout of the senator’s son:

“He is actually very, very smart and has an impressive set of credentials,” said Laura R. Olson, associate professor of political science at Clemson University and co-author of Religion and Politics in America. “He’s not just a hick from the mountains who came down and decided to talk about politics.”

She argued that if Robertson has lost much of the clout he wielded in the early 1990s, it’s due in part to his success in establishing Christian conservatism as a broad force in American politics. With so many more Christian conservative organizations active in politics, many of them focused on local organizing and local concerns, she said, it is more difficult for any one figure to dominate the national stage.

“I don’t know if I want to go so far as to say that Robertson is irrelevant,” said Olson. She also could not quite fathom the method behind Robertson’s pattern of making public statements that many consider outrageous.

The key is that Robertson has been playing this role for a long, long time, noted veteran scribe Richard N. Ostling of The Associated Press. For example:

Six years ago, Robertson said the U.S. could send agents to kill Osama bin Laden, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il and Saddam Hussein. “Isn’t it better to do something like that . . . to take out Saddam Hussein, rather than to spend billions of dollars on a war that harms innocent civilians and destroys the infrastructure of a country?”

Ostling then serves up the must-have feature of the day, a kind of “greatest hits” collection from the mouth of the near South. There really isn’t time to cover them all, of course. But who among us God-fearing newspaper readers can forget:

And in launching a 21-day “prayer offensive” in 2003 to pray for three justices to leave the U.S. Supreme Court after it had decriminalized sodomy, Robertson said: “We ask for miracles in regard to the Supreme Court.” One justice was 83 years old and two others had serious ailments, he noted.

And the hits (so to speak) just keep on coming.

It is, of course, impossible to make a wealthy religious broadcaster vanish from the airwaves since he can pay his own bills. The 700 Club also retains a niche audience. Would Pat Robertson have the guts to fire Pat Robertson? Right now, there are more people on the cultural right yearning for that outcome than there are on the left.

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Politics, Radio & TV

Preaching in Billy Graham’s shadow

August 24, 2005 By

TwoGrahamsPeter J. Boyer of The New Yorker has become an indispensable reporter on the Godbeat, and his recent story on Billy and Franklin Graham is another solid achievement. (The article, from the Aug. 22 issue, is not available online, but the magazine atones for that by offering an engaging slideshow of black-and-white photos by Mary Ellen Mark, along with an audio track by Boyer.)

Boyer focuses strongly on the differences between father and son, and those differences defy stereotypes. So often the script for a World War II-era father and his Baby Boomer son would be that the elderly father is a crusty ideologue and the son is more experimental and laissez-faire. Not so here:

Although Franklin’s preaching style is cooler and more conversational than his father’s he is much less willing to smooth the edges of the faith. If Billy’s theme, especially in his later years, was the saving grace of God’s love, Franklin’s is more elemental. “My message is very focussed,” he says. “My message is to call on people to repent their sins.” Franklin believes in a sulfurous Hell, and has no doubt about who is going to be there. “The Bible says every knee under the earth, every knee that’s in Hell, one day is going to bow,” he says. “And every tongue is going to confess Him as Lord one day. Now, either you’re going to do it voluntarily and submit your heart to the Lord Jesus Christ, or you’re going to be forced. And when you’re forced it’s going to be too late then.”

Boyer’s 13-page article is a thorough survey of the highlights in Billy Graham’s long vocation as an itinerant evangelist, and of his role in giving evangelicalism a public face. Boyer is especially strong in explaining Graham’s decisive break from fundamentalism. (This article is a rare case of using that word accurately and without a sneer.)

The article glosses over some of Billy Graham’s harder edges as a younger preacher. Some of Graham’s critics in the 1950s were just as troubled by his remarks on communism as today’s critics would be by Franklin Graham’s remarks on Islam.

Still, the article also mentions that Franklin already has attracted the respect of Richard Holbrooke’s, President Clinton’s former Ambassador to the United Nations:

Holbrooke says that Graham has been “enormously important” in the fight against AIDS abroad. “Samaritan’s Purse created one of the most important new developments in American foreign policy in the last generation — the entry of Christian conservatives into American foreign policy as pro-foreign-aid people.”

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Godbeat

Take a breather, Brother Robertson

August 23, 2005 By

RobertsonOnAirTalk about being in the right place at the right time: At 4:40 p.m. Monday, Media Matters for America posted this item about Pat Robertson’s latest shoot-from-the-hip remarks on The 700 Club.

Not quite 24 hours later, several hundred media outlets have picked up the story — many of them relying on a report by Sue Lindsey of The Associated Press.

Off-kilter remarks from Pat Robertson have an almost lunar cycle about them, so that life would seem out of balance if he didn’t weigh in with some bewildering thoughts on politics, culture wars or other explosive topics. Perhaps this is Robertson’s counterintuitive way of staying in the media spotlight a few times a year. Perhaps it’s just the temptation that comes with starting your own cable network and having the freedom to say pretty much whatever you please.

I have no media criticism to offer here. Reporters recognize a good coffee-spewing remark when they see one, and I will not fault them for jumping on this one.

Media Matters has tried to exploit the moment by calling on ABC Family to drop The 700 Club from its daily broadcast schedule.

A statement from ABC Family confirms what seemed clear enough when The 700 Club survived the satellite channel’s transformations from the Christian Broadcasting Network to Fox Family and then to ABC Family:

ABC Family is contractually obligated to air “The 700 Club” and has no editorial control over views expressed by the hosts or guests. ABC Family strongly rejects the views expressed by Pat Robertson in the August 22 telecast of the program. All comments about “The 700 Club” should be directed to the Christian Broadcast Network through [its] toll-free number or via [its] website at www.cbn.com.

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Radio & TV

Yet another painful Calvary Chapel story

August 21, 2005 By

When I first saw this story, I blanked out and said to myself, “Surely this must be a follow-up story on that San Bernardino Sun item that Ted Olsen at the Christianity Today blog wrote up. It must be strange for the Los Angeles Times to have to chase a story like that.”

Then I noticed that the names were all different, even though some of the facts and themes about the Calvary Chapel world seemed somewhat similar. This is, in fact, a whole new story full of all kinds of painful twists and turns for the charismatic superstar Chuck Smith and the 1,100 or so independent congregations that grew out of his Jesus People revivals so long ago in the late 1960s and early ’70s.

So is there is some kind of virus making the rounds these days in the world of hyper-independent charismatic superchurches in Southern California? What is the bigger story here, something deeper than all the painful human details of “he said,” “they said,” “he denied”?

Here is where reporters Roy Rivenburg (a friend of mine, I should note) and Donna Horowitz begin to focus on a larger question: What kind of oversight exists in all of these independent congregations, which operate from sea to shining sea as one of the most powerful change elements in modern American Protestantism? Who is supposed to come to the aid of Pastor Joe Sabolick and his estranged older brother, Pastor George Sabolick, and all of the sheep who are loyal to one or the other? Who is in charge?

That would seem to be the police, the lawyers and, like it or not, Chuck Smith. Is that the reality woven into this sad tale?

. . . Smith didn’t let his protege entirely off the hook. Sabolick showed “perhaps a carelessness in finances,” Smith said. He cited two examples: In one, Sabolick used a church credit card to buy boots and clothes for a visiting Australian singer whose shoes were held together with duct tape.

In another, while trying to help a young girl, he “gave her things and it was misinterpreted as a romantic gesture. Joe is a very giving person, but you’ve got to keep better records on spending.”

Sabolick’s touchy-feely manner didn’t help, Smith said. When asked if he advised Sabolick to curb displays of physical affection, Smith replied: “Oh my, yes. Billy Graham says don’t touch the money and don’t touch the girls.”

But Smith saw no reason to bar Sabolick from the ministry. In recent weeks, the Calvary patriarch has tried to broker a settlement of the lawsuit. The only sticking point Smith sees is calculating how much the Laguna church owes Sabolick for severance pay and unreturned personal items versus how much Joe owes the church for funds borrowed for “some projects,” Smith said.

But hammering out a compromise might not be so simple, despite Smith’s hopes.

Millions of Americans love their totally independent congregations that form around charismatic leaders who can unleash fire in the pulpit. But if things go wrong, what then? This is the upside-down, mirror-image story to the Roman Catholic scandals, where people are turning up the heat — rightly so — on the bishops. Well, what do you do when you have no bishops?

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Holy profit margins!

August 11, 2005 By

Besides its cover story on evolution and intelligent design, the Aug. 15 issue of Time includes a sympathetic six-page spread on evangelical-owned businesses. The range of businesses includes a youth-gear chain, a beauty salon, a bank and a driving school (with the straightforward, if less than imaginative, name of Christian Faith Driving Schol).

The most interesting business owner profiled here is Steven Skow, CEO of Integrity Bank in Alpharetta, Ga. A photo of Skow shows him holding hands with other executives at Integrity Bank. All have their heads bowed in prayer except for Skow, who gazes skyward with an expression worthy of a Norman Rockwell painting.

What Skow lacks in a camera presence he makes up for with savvy banking incentives:

Skow begins every business day praying with the top officers at his Integrity Bank. At the main branch in Alpharetta, a wood carving of the Prayer of Jabez hangs over the entryway, and Bibles are stacked up in the boardroom. But to attract customers, Integrity doesn’t rely on prayer alone; it offers higher-than-average interest rates on CDs and checking accounts and reimburses atm fees charged by other banks. Some 10% of the bank’s real estate loans are to churches–which don’t get a special deal. Integrity, with $590 million in assets under management, went public in August 2004, its stock shooting up 108% to $24 in late July. “We’ve been blessed with fast growth and profitability,” says Skow, who earned $215,000 last year. “It’s not me — it’s the people and God’s will that have made this thing successful.”

The article, by Lisa Takeuchi Cullen (backed by the usual array of Time‘s worker bees), includes good critical-distance observations by Alan Wolfe of Boston College and James Twitchell, author of Branded Nation: The Marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld. How’s that for a grab-your-collar subtitle?

It’s a fine model of how journalists may cover a trend in an informed, nonpatronizing manner.

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Filed Under: Evangelicals, Godbeat