When I left college I was at a religious crossroads. I had grown up as a moderate Episcopalian. That was now comfort food that I didn’t want to eat every Sunday. My college had been extremely liberal, and the religion there had been wispy and uninteresting. I was in the Bible Belt, and the evangelicals around me had too many pat answers and not enough intellectual underpinnings.

I found my middle way in John Shelby Spong’s autobiography Here I Stand. Spong insisted that I could keep my modern principles and still be a Christian. Spong’s higher criticism and philosophy gave his progressive Christianity more heft than the new-agey mix I had found in college, and it was wedded to the political liberalism that was a non-negotiable part of my worldview. I read everything he wrote that I could get my hands on.

Years later I was listening to Spong being interviewed on a public radio call-in show. After 30 minutes of him explaining his latest book they took a call from a woman in tears. She was a traditional Christian and she was horrified at what this man – a priest! – was saying. Spong was rejecting the divinity of Christ and she demanded how he justified that against a passage in John.

Spong waved her away. “I don’t want to argue with people who believe the world is flat.”

I understood his meaning, and I also recognized that this radio show was not the proper format for a debate. But I still felt that he had blown an opportunity to reach out to a more conservative audience and explain the principles of liberal Christianity.

Having read more of Spong, plus people like Don Cupitt and Karen Armstrong, I wonder now if he didn’t feel that the “theological realism” expressed by the caller was on the way out. Why bicker over something that is headed for the dustbin of history? I don’t agree with that view, and even if I did it was still a wasted opportunity and a tactless response.

I bring all this up to explain my reaction to posts like Tenzan Eaghll’s A Brief Letter to Richard Dawkins Regarding “Religion”. This is the epitome of what we call the Courtier’s reply. Whether that makes it invalid or not is up to the reader. But one section got under my skin:

Now, just to be clear, let me state that I, and most of the thinkers in my field, are in agreement with the general aim of The Richard Dawkins Foundation. We too want to challenge the false claims of fundamentalists and are opposed to unscientific narratives such as creationism, the belief in the soul, and any sort of cultural relativism that pretends scripture and science are equivalent.

Wonderful. And what are you doing about it?

Understand, from our perspective fundamentalism is causing real harm. It’s not just a case of the information haves vs. the information have nots. Fundamentalism underwrites some of the most abusive structures in our society: patriarchy, homophobia, racism, and so on. Take a spin on such sites as Love, Joy, Feminism or No Longer Quivering to get a taste of what fundamentalism does with patriachal gender roles, and realize that this is just the start.

When I look for people who are putting real social and political pressure on fundamentalists, I see two groups. The first is the ex-fundamentalists who are mostly still conservative-to-moderate Christians. That’s people like Wartburg Watch and Jeri Massi. The others are atheists like Dawkins, Harris, et. al.

There seems to be a role for liberal Christianity and the students of religious philosophy. Somewhere between the sweeping denunciations of the atheists and the narrow focus of the ex-fundies. There are plenty of individual progressives evangelicals who are doing great work, like Matthew Paul Turneron the pop culture side, James McGrath on the academic side and Fred Clark on the political side. But they don’t seem to add up to much of a social force. They lack the inside angle of the ex-fundies or the volume and conviction of the atheists.

Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I’m stuck with the impression that Spong left with me. But my impression is still that most progressive Christians and religious academics can’t be bothered to confront fundamentalists, and would much rather kibitz the atheists with whom they seem to have more in common. Eaghil “can not simply standby and watch [Dawkins] propagate an unnecessary binary between religion and science,” but he can apparently sit by while fundamentalists and conservatives wreck science.

I’d really like to be proven wrong. I’d love to see Karen Armstrong walk into a megachurch and explain to the congregation what they’re doing wrong. I’d love to see the religious studies professors hold shows on Christian radio, write books for the average pewsitter and generally try to talk fundamentalists down from their authoritarian ledge. I’d love to see more outreach from the cultured admirers of religion.

But I don’t expect to see that in my lifetime. I suspect that I will continue to see more religious intellectuals expend their energies telling atheists what they’re doing wrong, while fundies never encounter a proponent of the more honest and humane approach to religion.

Tired of ACLU suits against prayer in schools and before government meetings, a number of Republican Senators in North Carolina have put forth a bill that cuts to the chase. From the @NCCapitol blog:

A bill filed by Republican lawmakers would allow North Carolina to declare an official religion, in violation of the Establishment Clause of the U.S. Bill of Rights, and seeks to nullify any federal ruling against Christian prayer by public bodies statewide.

The bill grew out of a federal lawsuit filed last month by the American Civil Liberties Union against the Rowan County Board of Commissioners. In the lawsuit, the ACLU says the board has opened 97 percent of its meetings since 2007 with explicitly Christian prayers.

The full bill is up at Scribd. The heart is in the following two sections:

SECTION 1. The North Carolina General Assembly asserts that the Constitution of the United States of America does not prohibit states or their subsidiaries from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

Fair enough, the First Amendment applies to the Federal Government and not the states. Many states maintained established churches after the Constitution was ratified. However, the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment has been interpreted as providing the Federal government with the authority to protect individual rights, even against the state governments. Which brings us to section 2 of the bill …

SECTION 2. The North Carolina General Assembly does not recognize federal court rulings which prohibit and otherwise regulate the State of North Carolina, its public schools or any political subdivisions of the State from making laws respecting an establishment of religion.

In other words, “Nyaaaaah!”

The Bill justifies itself with the following:

“The Constitution of the United States does not grant the federal government and does not grant the federal courts the power to determine what is or is not constitutional; therefore, by virtue of the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, the power to determine constitutionality and the proper interpretation and proper application of the Constitution is reserved to the states and to the people,” the bill states. “Each state in the union is sovereign and may independently determine how that state may make laws respecting an establishment of religion.”

This is nullification, the idea that the States can basically veto Federal action over their jurisdiction. It’s a political idea that dates back to the founding and was employed by the slaves states. It has been repeatedly shot down, so this bill is going nowhere, but it’s interesting to see Republicans going back to the classics.

I don’t think you can argue that the fourteenth amendment wasn’t intended to give the Federal government the power to trump the states on the matter of individual rights. I think it’s also true that in extending Federal power, the Amendment finally created the system that James Madison wanted to begin with.

It’s true that the courts flinched back from enforcing the Amendment for decades, and the full power of the Amendment had to wait until the 1940′s to be applied, but that power is now established and accepted. Fighting against it without some fresh arguments is a doomed battle.

Hemant is reporting that Melissa Rogers has been appointed as the new director for the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. This is apparently popular among secularist groups since Rogers has a history of being pro-separation.

I also see that she’s an academic director at Wake Forest, so I went looking for papers that might and give us a hint of what to expect. The first thing I came across was in the journal for the Canadian International Council from 2004. As it happens, she mentions Bush’s “faith-based initiative” and notes that it allows the government to directly fund houses of worship. She then suggests that this is a threat to religious freedom:

I am troubled by claims that our constitutional prohibition on government promotion of religion reflects hostility to religion. These claims are often transparent attempts to de-legitimate some church-state rules in order to privilege some faiths over others and use the machinery of government to pressure people to embrace religion. But these traditional church-state rules have produced robust religious freedom in our country and an incredibly vital religious landscape. If the prohibition on government-endorsed religion were abandoned, government could endorse Christianity and thereby sacrifice precious rights of conscience, corrupt religion, create bitter divisions, and weaken our country as a whole.

Religious freedom also is threatened when we normalize government funding for and close regulation of the activities of houses of worship. Let me be clear: it is quite appropriate for the government to regulate what it funds. It is especially important for the government to ensure that direct public aid is not used for religious activities. Under our system, these are duties the government owes the taxpayer. These duties suggest, however, that the government should not direct funds to houses of worship. I believe that religion in the United States is vital in large part because it is independent from government, and that religious freedom is strong in part because citizens have a high degree of confidence that their taxes won’t be used to subsidize religion. In other words, American religion traditionally has been largely self-supporting and self-regulating, and I believe it should stay that way.[International Journal, Vol. 59, No. 4 (Autumn, 2004), pp. 905-906]

I’m extremely happy with that. Of course, the questions now becomes what exactly what she’s going to do with her overpowered office.