Rights and freedoms and religion

By Aaron Wherry - Tuesday, October 4, 2011 at 9:45 AM - 37 Comments

The CBC considers the government’s new office of religious freedom.

Other scholars are more blunt in their assessment that with its announcement the Canadian government is essentially entering an international policy minefield. Arvind Sharma teaches religious studies at McGill University who has just completed a book called Problematizing Religious Freedom. Sharma argues that the very concept of religious freedom has become an excuse used by proselytizing religions, particularly Christianity, to convert people. He says that was the clear goal of the U.S. model from the start.

“My concern is that this office will be used… by missionary religions, especially by Christian missions, will be interpreted by them as giving them the right to proselytize,” Sharma says. “I agree that the right to change one’s religion is a part of religious freedom but I don’t agree that my right to change … my religion is symmetrical with somebody else’s right to ask me to change my religion.”

Below, the text of John Baird’s speech on the opening of consultations. Continue…

The Church and the Commons

By Aaron Wherry - Monday, October 3, 2011 at 10:52 AM - 20 Comments

Paul Dewar discusses the impact of his faith on his politics.

Dewar’s background is as a teacher, but his call to politics was heavily influenced by the religious beliefs passed on to him by his activist parents, Ken and Marion Dewar, and by the Ottawa church the family attended for decades, St. Basil’s Roman Catholic.

“Faith and politics are congruent and we have no option but to be political if we are going to live the gospel,” Dewar is quoted as saying in the forthcoming book Pulpit and Politics: Competing Religious Ideologies in Canadian Public Life by Ottawa author and former NDP MP Dennis Gruending. “We have to constantly question what the Christian message is and we can never stop trying to change the way things are in society.”

REVIEW: Sex, Mom, and God: How the Bible’s Strange Take on Sex Led to Crazy Politics—and How I Learned to Love Women (and Jesus) Anyway

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, September 21, 2011 at 6:55 AM - 3 Comments

Former evangelist Frank Schaeffer may have quit the business and turned his back on what he now calls “our dreadful, vengeful little God,” but the man clearly still has a knack for sermon titles. And Sex, Mom, and God is nothing if not a righteous, furious, cringe-inducing and surprisingly nuanced sermon delivered in book form against Schaeffer’s heavenly demons. Schaeffer knows the evangelical world well; his father Francis Schaeffer was also a father to America’s evangelical right who oversaw its post-Roe vs. Wade politicization. Frank followed in his father’s footsteps—he helped produce Ronald Reagan’s 1984 anti-abortion book—before an abrupt, late ’80s volte-face that, in many respects, he’s still trying to explain.

Sex details Schaeffer’s upbringing at L’Abri, his parent’s Swiss commune and base for their evangelical publishing empire. He was an obsessively horny teenager damned by the Good Book; Schaeffer argues that he was warped by the Bible’s violence and distinct anti-female tracts. (His frequent citing of Leviticus is a reminder how, when it comes to brutal misogyny, hard-core rap could take a few lessons from the Old Testament.)

Saving him from all of this is Edith, Frank’s beloved mother, at once a lingerie-wearing, Bob Dylan-quoting free spirit and an unalloyed proselytizer of her husband’s fire and brimstone—“a much nicer person than her God,” as Schaeffer writes. Schaeffer loves his mother too much to call her a hypocrite, but it is difficult to otherwise imagine this ebullient mother who loved life and high fashion in practically equal measure was also responsible for such subservient tracts as The Hidden Art of Homemaking. (Like her son, Edith had second thoughts.) Schaeffer’s contention that most, if not all, of organized religion’s shortcomings stem from hang-ups over sex is nothing new. What’s compelling about Sex is Schaeffer himself, who bashes away at what he held dear for so long.

Epiphany in Air Canada seat 23D

By Barbara Amiel - Tuesday, August 16, 2011 at 12:00 PM - 3 Comments

Andrew H. Walker/Getty Images

There’s a bit of a Mormon moment right now. Think me crazy, but I rather like the sound of a life in which men address each other as “elder” and the womenfolk call each other “sister”—or, when circumstances warrant, “sisterwives.” There’s a respect lost when complete strangers who obtain your credit card take to addressing you by your first name. When the HBO series Big Love brought Mormons into our living rooms, I also rather warmed to the idea of receiving testimony. Though Big Love never quite made the notion clear, I think receiving testimony is a moment when what you want to do gets heavenly sanction.

This line of thought accelerated last week on seeing The Book of Mormon, the most sought-after ticket on Broadway. The plot line is an account set to song and dance of some Mormon missionaries taking their message to Uganda. Doesn’t take a high IQ to predict whose side the writers (credits include the animated series South Park) and audience are on. Let’s just say it isn’t God’s. The play is a musical with superb performances, bad music and largely adolescent lyrics. It’s guiltily watchable, rather like the sloth of reading a bad book at the beach on a hot day. Given the sky-high prices of the tickets (don’t ask, but scalpers are getting nearly four-digit prices for back-of-theatre seats), you’d think the audience would be a tad more finicky over the song Hasa Diga Eebowai, loosely translated as “F–k you God,” rather than screaming with joy over the endless repetition of that banal scatology.

Making fun of Mormons is easy stuff. Mainstream Christians and Jews have the mists of time to cushion any inspection of their peculiar stories.We’ve got accustomed to the Red Sea parting, Lazarus rising. It was all so long ago. The patina of antiquity, backed up by great religious institutions reaching back a thousand years or more, bequeaths respectability. Christian congregations don’t sneer when their minister reads, “Behold there was a great earthquake: for the angel of the Lord descended from heaven, and came and rolled back the stone from the door, and sat upon it.” That’s the Gospel according to Matthew. But when your prophet is not named Matthew but Joseph Smith and his revelation takes place in the upstate New York of 1823 during a visit from the angel Moroni, who tells him of religious writings buried on gold plates along with two stones called the Urim and the Thummim, the message sounds rather Lord of the Rings.

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‘The lodestar is human dignity’

By Aaron Wherry - Wednesday, July 13, 2011 at 4:32 PM - 2 Comments

Jason Kenney talks about faith and politics with the National Catholic Register.

I guess the big question is how your religious faith and your politics relate. Is there a connection?

Well, I believe in a pluralistic, liberal democracy. Everyone comes into the public square with certain core convictions, a certain worldview that’s informed by most deeply held convictions about the ultimate questions. For me, that view is partly formed by my Catholic faith. I think it’s important in a liberal democracy that people of faith not be excluded from participating in democratic debate, but it’s also important they not impose a kind of narrow, sectarian agenda, but rather to advance the common good in a way that brings others along.

For me, the lodestar is human dignity, the inviolable nature of human dignity. This is a principle which obviously is deeply grounded in Catholic social thought, but it is also one that has universal social application.

Living With Lions recalls album, returns FACTOR grant

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, May 24, 2011 at 5:18 PM - 2 Comments

Vancouver punk band Living With Lions is recalling their latest album, the controversially-titled Holy Sh-t, after the band was criticized for taking a government grant to record it. The band will not only pull the album off store shelves, but will also return the $13,248 grant they received from FACTOR, the government-funded Foundation To Assist Canadian Talent On Records, which came under fire from federal Heritage Minister James Moore last week. At issue is the band’s depiction of Jesus as a turd, among other creative uses of Christian imagery. A statement by the band’s label, Black Box Music, said “the album will be re-released as a non-FACTOR supported project in the coming weeks.”

Chartattack

Punk band draws federal government's ire

By macleans.ca - Thursday, May 19, 2011 at 2:08 PM - 16 Comments

The Vancouver punk band Living With Lions has drawn the ire of Canadian Heritage Minister James Moore, due to the band’s controversial new album entitled Holy Sh-t, which was funded in part by the Canadian government. The album is packaged in the likeness of the Bible and compares religious imagery to excrement. The liner notes acknowledge the government’s support through FACTOR (Foundation Assisting Canadian Talent on Recordings), which approved $13,248 in funding to the band’s label, Black Box Recordings Inc. “The content of this CD is offensive and the fact that that it is clearly designed to offend a group of Canadians based on their faith is simply wrong,” Moore’s spokesman, James Maunder, told the Vancouver Sun. “The Minister has called Duncan McKie, president and CEO of FACTOR to express his profound disappointment with this content.” Black Box Recordings co-owner Ian Stanger responded by saying the album title and content should be interpreted with a sense of humour, saying, “I think there’s a tongue-in-cheek element of this recording people may be missing.

The Vancouver Sun

A nation divisible

By Erica Alini - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 1:00 PM - 91 Comments

The Vancouver Sun publishes some of the demographic findings of an election day poll conducted by Ipsos Reid.

Attended church/temple at least weekly
Conservative 50% 
NDP 24%
Liberal 18%

Attended church/temple monthly or less
NDP 37%
Conservative 35%
Liberal 16% 

Where it's God's way or the highway

By Colby Cosh - Tuesday, May 17, 2011 at 9:25 AM - 21 Comments

The town of Morinville, Alta., population 6,775, cannot offer Donna Hunter’s children the secular, non-denominational education most Canadian parents expect as a matter of course. She is leaving for nearby north Edmonton and taking her three young children. And her sister. And her sister’s two kids. And her retired parents. Mrs. Hunter led the family’s march to Morinville in 1999; not yet a mother, she didn’t realize that all of the town’s public schools are, because of an anomaly in Alberta’s constitutional development, formally Catholic. The school board’s stated mission: “ensuring that Catholic values permeate all school activities.”

Morinville belongs to the Greater St. Albert “Catholic Public” school district—a historically French-Canadian area that declared itself Catholic for education purposes under territorial law in 1884. For generations, non-Catholic parents accepted the status quo, but Morinville schools have grown more strident about their identity even as the town becomes more diverse. Hunter leads a group of Morinville parents demanding a non-religious option, but the Catholic board will not provide one, and apparently can’t be forced to despite its officially public status. The province’s education minister acknowledges the problem but, say critics, has been slow to address it.

As Hunter leaves Morinville, her group is enjoying some progress. The Catholic board is surveying town residents to test the appetite for secular education, perhaps provided within Morinville under the auspices of a neighbouring district. “But the survey won’t count people who already left because of the Catholic monopoly, or those who never move here,” notes Hunter. “Every year that passes while we await a solution, more Morinville parents will face my choice. Stay? Leave? Wait? How long?”

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Good news, bad news: May 5-12, 2011

By macleans.ca - Friday, May 13, 2011 at 11:10 AM - 0 Comments

Good news

Frederick Breedon/Getty Images

Some justice at last

It’s been over three years since Robert Dziekanski died at the Vancouver airport after RCMP used Tasers to subdue him. Now B.C.’s attorney general has laid perjury charges against the four officers involved for allegedly giving misleading testimony during the exhaustive Braidwood inquiry. While some, including Dziekanski’s mother, Zofia Cisowski, are disappointed the charges don’t relate to the tasering itself, Cisowski still applauded the move. The wheels of the law may be slow, but they do keep moving, and in this sad case the charges offer at least some measure of justice.

Harnessing hot air

Energy sources such as wind and solar could provide 80 per cent of the world’s power supply within four decades if governments provide the cash and policies to make it happen. That is the landmark conclusion of a UN panel that says it’s not too late to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to a “safe” level. In the meantime, farmers are enjoying the heat. According to separate research, Canadian crops have been largely spared from the scourge of climate change—and our historically hard-luck farmers are profiting from increased demand.

Prize catch

When the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded this year’s Peace Prize to imprisoned Chinese dissident Liu Xiaobo, it was a blow to China’s human rights record. But the big winner may be Scottish fish farmers. In a fit of pique, China has stopped buying salmon from Norway—its biggest supplier—and signed a deal with Scotland. Perhaps that contributed to the unprecedented majority won by Alex Salmond’s Scottish National Party in the May 5 elections. Good news for nationalist politicians, not so much for fish.

It’s all relative

A NASA study has confirmed two of the “most profound predictions” about Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity: that space and time are both warped and pulled by Earth’s gravity. Astrophysicists say the results, based on data measured by an orbiting space probe, will have implications “beyond our planet.” In other physics news: engineers have developed a golf ball that won’t slice. Now there’s a breakthrough we can relate to.

Bad news

Parivartan Sharma/Reuters

Revolution relapse

In the post-Mubarak era, Egypt is transitioning, but to what? Christians and Muslims clashed in Cairo, leaving 12 dead and two churches in smoldering ruins, amid signs Islamist hard-liners are asserting their power. At the same time, Syria continued its crackdown against anti-government protesters, killing scores of people and injuring hundreds, while in Libya, forces loyal to Moammar Gadhafi hammered rebels. Clearly the fight is far from over for the pro-democracy movement across the Middle East.

Retirement blues

Tens of thousands more baby boomers will face retirement without a company pension plan, Statistics Canada reported this week. Since the recession, membership in private sector plans has fallen below that of the public sector for the first time ever. Which is why Canadians should be cheering the Canada Pension Plan’s tripling of its 2009 investment in Internet-calling-company Skype, recently purchased by Microsoft for US$8.5 billion. Unless you work for the civil service or at a university, the CPP may be all the help you will get.

Red carded

Lord Triesman, the chair of England’s failed bid for the 2018 World Cup of soccer, is alleging at least four FIFA members demanded bribes for their votes, including a knighthood for Paraguay’s representative. Trinidad’s football head wanted $2.5 million cash for an “educational centre.” London’s Sunday Times reports two West African delegates were paid $1.5 million to support Qatar’s winning bid. And in France, the national team is embroiled in scandal after it emerged officials considered quotas to limit the number of African and Arab-born players on their development squads. The ugly side to the beautiful game.

Unholy bonds

A good marriage isn’t necessarily built on love or even physical attraction, suggests new research in the Journal of Politics. Among the strongest shared traits between U.S. spouses is their political attitudes, the study found. The political bond forms early in marriages, but it’s not always enough to keep them together. Just ask political power-couple Arnold Schwarzenegger and Maria Shriver, who separated this week.

Is the Pope Catholic?

By Brian Bethune - Monday, April 18, 2011 at 9:10 AM - 36 Comments

Franco Origlia/Getty Images

It wasn’t supposed to be this way, not according to confounded Vatican watchers. Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was already 78 years old when he became Pope Benedict XVI in 2005. He was widely seen as the arch-conservative doctrinal enforcer, the sharp spear point wielded by his charismatic rock star predecessor—Joshua to Pope John Paul II’s Moses, in the words of one Jewish scholar. The consensus opinion was that Benedict would provide a quiet, business-as-usual continuance of John Paul’s 27-year reign and, given his age, a brief pontificate that would allow the 1.1 billion-strong Roman Catholic Church time to catch its breath and consider its future options.

No one, it seems, asked Benedict what he thought of the caretaker idea.

From inflaming the Islamic world by quoting medieval anti-Muhammad remarks to welcoming disaffected Anglicans into the Roman fold, becoming personally embroiled in the clerical sex-abuse scandal, endorsing the (sometimes) use of condoms, writing a passage in his newest book exonerating Jews from the charge of killing Christ, and a host of less headline-grabbing initiatives (including a casual acceptance of the theory of evolution), Benedict—as he celebrates his 84th birthday and sixth anniversary as Pope (April 16 and 19, respectively)—continues to be far more active, innovative, and outright newsworthy than expected.

Continue…

The Rise And Fall Of The Bible: The Unexpected History Of An Accidental Book

By Brian Bethune - Wednesday, March 30, 2011 at 6:57 PM - 0 Comments

It’s nothing new to point out that Scriptural passages can be used to argue for or against slavery, for the equality of men and women or for patriarchal supremacy, for pacifism or for war. Likewise, others have argued before Beal, with equal passion if often less eloquence, that it is precisely the Bible’s tensions—the arguments between its individual books—that make it so spiritually potent for Christians. What is new, and intriguing, about Beal’s work is the way it explores the Bible’s status as a cultural icon in America, and how the unblinking worship of it as God’s book of unambiguous answers to all questions coexists with ignorance of its contents.

Half of Americans tell pollsters they believe the Bible is the literal word of God. Strange then, that far fewer than that number can name its first book (Genesis); two-thirds of Americans—including some of their most prominent champions — can’t name at least five of the Ten Commandments. (Asked on The Colbert Report to recite them, Georgia Rep. Lynn Westmoreland, co-sponsor of a bill to display the Ten Commandments in the chambers of Congress, could only remember three.) And even while Bible literacy plummets, Bible sales boom: in 2008, American sales reached $823 million. Small wonder the most common visual image of the Bible in the U.S. is a closed black book.

How could this come to be, Beal asks. Two centuries of American Protestantism’s emphasis on Scripture as the key to everything from keeping husbands sober to saving souls has made it too sacred to question, Beal writes. Many Christians believe there is a single right way of understanding the Bible’s manifold contradictions, and are loath to look into it for fear of getting it wrong. It can’t last, Beal argues; the end of print culture will be the end of this book’s iconic status too, recreating the fluid Scriptures of Christianity’s first centuries.

The people's preacher

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, March 17, 2011 at 10:25 AM - 0 Comments

Dick Darrell/Toronto Star

Even before his political career began, Tommy Douglas—who immigrated to Canada from Scotland as a child, and came from hardscrabble roots—understood that, “at the end of the day, politics needed to be about practical things,” says Vincent Lam, an emergency room doctor and Giller Prize-winning author, whose latest book, part of Penguin’s Extraordinary Canadians series, profiles the father of universal health care in Canada (in stores March 8).

During the Depression, Douglas—then a small-town preacher in Weyburn, Sask.—was deeply affected by the poverty and inequality that surrounded him, Lam writes, and worked tirelessly to address the problems. “For him, being a preacher was completely practical,” Lam says, “because it meant you would deal with people.” This was Douglas’s guiding philosophy in those years, as well as through to his stint as Saskatchewan premier, and, finally, as the first leader of the federal New Democratic Party. Douglas “wasn’t someone who came to socialism from a rarefied academic perspective,” Lam says. “His thinking came from the ground up.”

As premier, Douglas presided over North America’s first socialist government, from 1944 to 1961. Yet he proved to be a unifying figure, admired by those on both sides of the political spectrum. “Some of the most creative thinking in policy and government doesn’t bow to those easy ideas of left and right,” Lam says. The health care system, he adds, “is part of the idea that societies should be constructed primarily to take care of people, and for people to help each other.”

EXCLUSIVE EXCERPT

While those investors who had become rich in the soaring equity markets of the 1920s lost their shirts in the Depression, many workers and farmers lost their pants, socks, and underwear. As Tommy and Irma, a young couple who looked more like teenagers than a pastor and his wife, settled in Weyburn, Sask., the price of grain collapsed, local businesses were shuttered, loans were called in, and family farms were foreclosed. Children did not attend school in the winter for lack of shoes to wear. The streets of Weyburn were lined with young men who had nothing to do. Saskatchewan was economically devastated.

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Pope says Jews aren't to blame for death of Christ

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at 3:35 PM - 30 Comments

Pope Benedict XVI has personally exonerated Jews in the death of Christ in a new book. Though the Vatican has for decades taught Jews were not responsible for killing Jesus, certain Bible passages have long been thought to lay the blame on Jewish people as a whole. “St Matthew attributes the request for the crucifixion of Jesus to ‘all the people’. But he cannot be stating a historical fact: how could the entire Jewish people have been present at this moment to call for the death of Jesus?” Benedict writes in Jesus of Nazareth. “The historical reality appears in St John and St Mark. The true accusers were those circulating in the temple at the time (the priestly hierarchy).”

The Telegraph

Saguenay mayor won't ban prayer from council meeting

By macleans.ca - Thursday, February 17, 2011 at 3:54 PM - 34 Comments

Saguenay Mayor Jean Tremblay says he has no intention of abiding by a Quebec Human Rights Tribunal ruling ordering an end to the city council’s pre-meeting prayer and the removal of a crucifix and a two-foot-high statue of the Sacred Heart from its chambers. “I am the first mayor in the history of the world to be punished for reciting a prayer,” he told The Globe and Mail, adding he would challenge the decision in court. (Tremblay is asking for donations to pay for the appeal rather than using public funds.) Last Friday’s ruling came as a result of a resident’s complaint the prayer violated his freedom of conscience. He awarded him $30,000 in damages.

The Globe and Mail

Catholic bishops in Quebec want government help

By macleans.ca - Tuesday, February 8, 2011 at 5:18 PM - 124 Comments

Quebec’s Catholic bishops are asking the provincial government to help their struggling parishes make ends meet. The group’s proposals include a request the province start covering the day-to-day operating costs of churches. The Assembly of Bishops says that, barring government help, catholic churches in province are liable to be sold to developers, who’ll transform them into condominiums or music venues.

Le Soleil

Jesus historians get an earful from Maurice Casey

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, December 23, 2010 at 2:00 PM - 57 Comments

The faithful may delight in Casey’s disdain for the revisionist theory that the virgin birth was cooked up to hide Jesus’s illegitimacy | Christian Heeb/laif/Redux; Sebastian Scheiner/AP

Maurice Casey is fed up. The emeritus professor of New Testament language and literature at Britain’s University of Nottingham—a scholar, that is, of the only sources we have for the life and times of Jesus Christ—knows that history is not done in his field like it is in any other. The stakes, and the passions, are simply too high, when those who study the central figure in Western history place him along a spectrum that ranges from God incarnate to mythic creation. What truly disturbs Casey, however, is the way the once vast middle ground in historical Jesus studies is being squeezed, just as it is in many aspects of the increasingly intense faceoff between religion and secularism in modern society.

A resurgence of conservative scholarship on one side, including historians (like Paul Johnson) who accept what Casey considers unbelievable miracles detailed in untrustworthy sources, and revisionism that stretches to outright denial of Jesus’s existence on the other, have led him to pen his own take, Jesus of Nazareth: An Independent Historian’s Account of His Life and Teaching. It’s less a full-blown biography than a vigorous defence of historical methodology—of the moral necessity of applying the same historical standards to the study of Jesus as we apply to, say, Julius Caesar. Casey’s magnum opus offers, for those who accept his reasoning, an impressive array of facts about Jesus Christ, and a slashing attack on almost everyone to the left or right of him.

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Quebec bans religion from public daycares

By macleans.ca - Friday, December 17, 2010 at 11:35 AM - 82 Comments

Beginning next June, Quebec will no longer tolerate expressions of religion in government-subsidized daycares. Under the new rules, daycare administrators will no longer be permitted to make children recite prayers, though they will be able to recite their own, and religious leaders like rabbis, priests and imams will no longer be allowed to visit the centres. The province has in the past allowed religious organizations to run public daycares and government documents show about 20 subsidized daycares currently feature religious instruction as part of their programs.

CBC News

Contraception champions

By Erica Alini - Thursday, December 9, 2010 at 1:00 PM - 0 Comments

Leon Farrell/Photocall Ireland

When Pope Benedict XVI departed from previous Church doctrine two weeks ago by saying condoms are acceptable in certain cases, Catholic-dominated Ireland was so distracted by news it might need an economic bailout that it barely noticed. There was a time, though, when a Vatican softening on the contraception veto would have made the top headline in Irish newspapers. A time when, in Ireland, things like condoms, pills and diaphragms were not just taboo, but outright illegal, according to a 1935 law forbidding the import and sale of contraceptives. In the 1970s, Irish feminists would challenge their government’s anti-birth control policies by staging protests like massive condom-buying expeditions to Northern Ireland, where contraception devices were legal. But this was still an Ireland where taking on the Catholic Church was socially daring and politically suicidal.

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Exorcists wanted, and fast

By Scott Feschuk - Wednesday, November 24, 2010 at 4:00 PM - 102 Comments

Everett Collection; Getty Images; iStock; Illustration by Taylor Shute

Looking for work? Seeking a new challenge? Now may be the perfect time to consider a career in the exciting field of demon exorcism.

The U.S. Roman Catholic Church is in dire need of dedicated professionals with the courage and theatrical overacting required to cast out evil spirits from the bodies of the faithful. American bishops even held a conference last weekend in Baltimore to train clergy on the tactical points of coaxing a demon from its human host. That’s one souvenir conference tote bag we’d all like to have: Exorcism 2010—The power of Christ compels you . . . to support our sponsors!

The New York Times summed up the Church’s predicament: “There are only a handful of priests in the country trained as exorcists, but they say they are overwhelmed with requests from people who fear they are possessed by the Devil.”

You can imagine the mishaps that ensue. When a newbie exorcist is pressed into action before he’s ready, it’s easy to panic and grab the wrong magical weapon. Note to rookies: a silver bullet kills a werewolf, garlic wards off vampires and a Big Mac lures Kirstie Alley down from a tree. You want the crucifix, the holy water and, if Hollywood has taught us anything about exorcisms, a few Wet-Naps to clean yourself up afterwards.

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When God and politics collide

By Martin Patriquin - Friday, November 19, 2010 at 12:20 PM - 16 Comments

Photograph by Christinne Muschi

So Tony Blair, former prime minister of the Queen’s England, home of the shoe bomber and the London subway terror bombings, a country riven by tension over a growing Muslim population, walks into a Quebec hall to talk about reasonable accommodation.

Fish-out-of-water daydream? Set-up to a tasteless joke? No. The former British prime minister actually did as much in Montreal last week. Blair, at once a devout Catholic and ex-prime minister of notably secular Britain, has spent much of the last three years promoting the Tony Blair Faith Foundation, which aims to show how “faith is a powerful force for good in the modern world.”

“I became Middle East envoy for Israel and Palestine, so that’s been quite challenging. And then I decided to try and bring religious faiths of the world together and create an understanding, so that’s been quite a challenge, too,” Blair, sitting in an ornate red leather chair, said to a crowd of about 400 gathered in a downtown ballroom. “And then I decided to do some work on climate change, so this is probably an indication of Napoleonic delusion.”

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Born in the U.S.A.

By Brian Bethune - Thursday, October 28, 2010 at 9:20 AM - 0 Comments

Keystone Press/ Bob Falcetti/Getty Images

Half a century ago, when religion entered the political arena in the U.S., it was as a matter of tensions between denominations, the kind of flare-up in tribal loyalties sparked by Catholic John F. Kennedy’s 1960 run for the presidency. With a full 30 per cent of respondents telling pollsters that they would never vote for any Catholic, Kennedy had to repeatedly assure voters he didn’t take marching orders from the pope.

But religion itself was quiescent—certainly in comparison to other times in American history, including the present—primarily because both religious and secular Americans held the same conservative views on sexual morality. It’s an era that now seem almost as far in the past as the Inquisition: by 2004, when Catholic John Kerry ran against George W. Bush, the religious tribes had almost vanished and Kerry’s denomination was of little interest to Protestant voters. What counted was how devout he was, and how his religiosity, or lack thereof, affected his policies on the hot-button moral issues of American politics.

How American religion lost its interior animosities (mostly, that is—Mormons and Muslims are still largely outside the tent), while becoming a much more militant side of a deep religious-secular divide, is the key question for Robert Putnam and David Campbell in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. To find the answer and to see if current trends seem likely to hold up, the co-authors comb through the two most comprehensive surveys ever done on religion and public life in the U.S., specially commissioned for their book. Campbell and Putnam, the latter a political scientist who rose to fame in 2000 with Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital, get where they’re going all right, and they turn up a lot of fascinating information about America’s ever-evolving religious life along the way.

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TV and Religion

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, October 8, 2010 at 2:26 PM - 0 Comments

Apart from being Coma Week on Glee, this was Religion Week on U.S. broadcast TV. At least three shows, including two of the biggest hits, had stories revolving around issues of religion and spirituality: first Glee, then Modern Family, finally Community (which has another religion plot coming, according to episode descriptions). When three shows deal with religion in three days — on three different networks, yet — something has to be in the air, particularly when you factor in the rampant religious overtones on many science-fiction/fantasy shows. It’s like religion episodes ae to 2010 television what Soviet defector episodes were to 1980.

Nearly all TV episodes about religion wind up offering the same message: “Everybody has to believe in something.” It’s done in different ways on different shows, of course: on Glee, it was presented sort of seriously (people need something “sacred” in their lives even if it’s not God); on Community, which is a genuine comedy, it was comic (everybody is entitled to their insane beliefs). But it usually comes down in the same area; even if the creator is an atheist or a believer in a specific religion, the episode will end up telling us that a) Everyone believes in something more or less spiritual and b) It’s all good.

Part of this is, of course, the middle-of-the-road tendency of all Hollywood entertainment, the need to be fair to both sides and all sides. The “everybody believes in something” message on religion is of a piece with the message of most TV episodes about politics, which is that all the political parties are essentially the same and it doesn’t really matter who you vote for — but you should still vote. It’s hard to use an expensive, collaborative, advertiser-supported television episode for advocacy, even if this were desirable, and I’m certainly not saying it is.

But I think this genuinely reflects the thinking of many people in Hollywood. Hollywood, remember, is a place where a large number of people do believe in a generic “something.” It’s not a very religious town, but the number of outright non-believers is still pretty low; non-traditional religious beliefs run rampant, and people who don’t believe in religion may take up some vague form of spirituality. The idea that you have to have some form of faith may not just be a truism, but what Hollywood writers frequently believe themselves. Part of the point of that Community episode was that you have to live and work with people even if they believe in nutty, cultish things; that’s undoubtedly something you have to accept to work in Hollywood (or anywhere, really, but especially Hollywood, where your co-worker’s beliefs may be known to the entire world).

And, secondly, Hollywood is a place where a lot of people really do consider themselves middle-of-the-road, centrist, open to all views. That seems like a strange thing to say, I know. But because it’s their job to please the masses, Hollywood people can become convinced that they do in fact represent the midpoint between the extremes. Jon Stewart isn’t “Hollywood” geographically, but his “Restore Sanity” rally is a perfect example of what I’m talking about: there are people out there on the left and right who are equally bad, and here I am, the voice of centrist sanity. Given that many show business people think of themselves this way, it’s not surprising that their views on religion, as expressed in their work, tend to be very vague.

This kind of thing has a long history in Hollywood, of course. After the power of the Catholic Legion of Decency was broken in Hollywood — meaning that writers and producers no longer had to be on the side of Christianity at all times for fear of risking a boycott — anti-religious views became more common than they are now, but pretty rare unless they were balanced out in some way. By the end of the ’70s, with the rise of generic spirituality (celebrated most famously in Star Wars, the ultimate “you have to believe in something really vague” movies), we were moving toward the modern status quo where devout religious belief and convinced disbelief were rare on TV.

So for example, in this episode from 1980, the year of Russian Defectors, there’s only one character who doesn’t seem to have at least a bit of religion. And her lack of belief his soft-pedaled by having her say that she believes in some non-religious, humanist conception of God.

Outright TV atheists still continued to exist into the ’80s (Maddie on Moonlighting came out as one), but there was almost some kind of spiritual belief attributed to them. What’s rare on TV is the opinion expressed by Dwight MacDonald in response to Ingmar Bergman’s religious angst: “I don’t believe in God and am not much interested in whether I am right.”

Newsmakers

By macleans.ca - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 8:00 AM - 0 Comments

Her future’s so bright
Carrying not one but two glasses of bubbly, Beth Ditto trotted the catwalk for Jean Paul Gauthier at Paris Fashion Week. Ahead of the show, the U.K.’s size-28 singer discussed her weight with a British TV host: “One of the most tiring parts of being fat and being proud of it is you do a lot of proving yourself.”

Or an old-fashioned prorogue
Former Conservative cabinet minister Michael Fortier has a novel idea to eliminate the constant threat of a referendum in Quebec: make the province hold one every 15 years, with no option to hold another in the intervening years. “As a federalist, I’d prefer that we didn’t hold them anymore,” he said. “But I’m a realist.” Unfortunately for Fortier, novel ideas aren’t necessarily good ones. Federalist politicians across the country were quick to pan the proposal. “I’m sure there are better things to schedule every 15 years,” said PMO spokesman Dimitri Soudas, “like a high school reunion.”

Because the camera doesn’t lie
He’s as sharp on TV as he was on the stump, but Eliot Spitzer is still fighting the creep factor in his new role as co-host of the new CNN talk show, Parker Spitzer. “Crossfire meets Moonlighting” is how the New York Times television writer Alessandra Stanley described the show, noting an ill-advised air of flirtatiousness between the former New York governor and fellow host Kathleen Parker, a Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist with conservative leanings. Seated cheek to cheek behind a round table strewn with newspapers, the pair traded smiles and interrupted each other like second-marriage newlyweds, as they chewed over political news of the day with guests. Clearly, we’re supposed to forget the call-girl scandal that chased Spitzer from office. But his tight smile and darting eyes make it hard to suspend disbelief.

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