The New Evangelical Agenda

Jim Wallis              Sojourners            17 Nov. 2012

The day after the election, Southern Baptist Seminary President Albert Mohler said, "I think this was an evangelical disaster."  Not really. But it was a disaster for the religious right, which had again tied its faith to the partisan political agenda of the Republican Party -- which did lose the election. But Nov. 6 was an even deeper disaster for the religious right's leaders, because they will no longer be able to control or easily co-opt the meaning of the term "evangelical."   Just as the 2012 electoral results finally revealed the demographic transformation of America .  It also dramatically demonstrated how the meaning of the word "evangelical" is being transformed.  Evangelical can no longer be accurately used to mean "white evangelical."

Of the 71 percent (Pew, CNN) of America's Hispanics who voted for President Barack Obama, the vast majority are either Catholic or evangelical/Pentecostal. Obama lost the white Catholic vote, but he won "the Catholic vote" because of Hispanic Catholics. Similarly, Obama lost the white evangelical vote, but he won the majority of Hispanics who call themselves evangelical or Pentecostal. Likewise, Obama won 93 percent of the African-American vote, the majority of whom are members of black churches whose theology is quite evangelical. And 75 percent of the Asian-American vote, whose churchgoing members are also mostly evangelical, went for Obama.

So what does all that tell us? Very simply, the majority of the white evangelicals went for Gov. Romney, and the majority of the non-white evangelicals voted for President Obama. Obama also won 60 percent of younger voters (ages 18-29).  If demographics changed this election, they have also changed the meaning of the term "evangelical."

Religious right leaders like Franklin Graham did everything they could to turn evangelicals to Romney, especially in the final run-up to the election. Their efforts to turn concerns about abortion and gay marriage into partisan arguments for a Republican victory -- and to threaten dangerous consequences of a Democratic win -- were, by their own estimates, the most extensive ever. But they failed and didn't change the outcome of the election.

While most evangelicals are still "pro-life," abortion is not their only concern. Not all are convinced that Republicans have the best answers to all the life issues. While most evangelicals are strongly committed to strengthening family life, not all think equal rights for gay and lesbian people are a threat to the family. Poverty reduction, immigration reform, a consistent life ethic, the creation care of environmental protection, a less militaristic foreign policy, and a deep commitment to racial and economic justice are all issues of concern.

It's time to tell the media to change its terminology, and take account of all the "evangelicals." And it's time to describe the broader list of "moral" and "biblical" issues that evangelicals care about. This is a new, diverse coalition for a new America -- and a changing evangelical demographic is a central part of that. The narrow conservatism of the religious right's white evangelicals is simply not a faith to and for that new evangelical world.

Evangelical is a theological commitment, not a political one. It's about the centrality of Christ and the authority of the Bible. It's following Jesus and our obedience to the Scriptures that leads us to defend the poor, protect the most vulnerable, welcome the stranger, seek racial reconciliation and justice, and be good stewards of the environment and peacemakers in a world of war.  Those commitments will always challenge politics, but they should never be partisan. Democrats should not make the same mistake that Republicans did in believing they have any permanent voting bloc. The policies and priorities of political parties and leaders should be and will be examined by the faith agenda of the community we call the body of Christ.         [Abridged]

Jim Wallis is CEO of Sojourners

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jim-wallis/the-new-evangelical-agend_b_2137388.html

Chance and Mystery

by Ian Harris                          Otago Daily Times                             Nov. 9, 2012 

If you were ever able to stand on another planet and reflect on your life from that perspective, you could hardly escape two quite contradictory conclusions. One would be a sobering realisation of your total insignificance in the universe. The other, how amazing it is that you are here at all – and therefore how unimaginably significant you are. That’s because each of us is the highly improbable result of 3.5 billion years of evolving life on Earth, and 200,000 years of the existence of homo sapiens. Behind you lie aeons of the human struggle to survive – by hunting and gathering, migration and settlement, the endless flow of people across continents. 

Our ancestors survived hunger, danger, disease, and disaster to bear offspring. Who they mated with through thousands of generations depended on who was around at the time, the social structure they were part of, and whom they encountered in forays into the surrounding regions to hunt, barter or wage war. Latterly, many crossed oceans to settle in places such as faraway New Zealand, and married others who had done the same. That’s how most of us come to be here today. Chance, chance and chance. 

But that’s not the half of it. In the normal pattern your mother, who was born with her whole life’s quota of 300 to 400 ova already present in her body, released one egg each month from her early teens till menopause, probably in her forties. It took only one spermatozoon from your father to fertilise one of those eggs – but he was capable of releasing 100 million or more spermatozoa in every millilitre of fluid. Of that total at least 75 million would still have been alive, with 25 million vigorous enough to have a good chance of fertilising the egg. 

The process has been likened to “a marathon run in a maze filled with mucus followed by an obstacle course” (the extra spurt required to penetrate the ovum wall). Be that as it may, any one of the spare 24,999,999 sperm could have produced someone who was not you. 

One spermatozoon did make the breakthrough, however, and you are here because of it. In all likelihood, there would have been similar sperm tsunamis in previous months that led nowhere. Mood, stress, timing, drugs, diet could all have made a difference. Chance – and mystery, the mystery that is you. So it is not inevitable that you exist. It is rather one of those everyday miracles built into the working of the natural world. You owe your being to a biological flick in time. It could so easily have turned out otherwise. 

Still there is more. As a child growing up, you owe your language, diet, schooling, religious attitudes and social opportunities to the happenstance of family, geography, culture and the era you were born. Change any one of those, and you would not be the person you are today. Chance again, and mystery. 

Now place those personal particularities within the grander sweep of space and time. Then you might register that for 13.7 billion years after the Big Bang you were not, and for 4.6 billion years of Earth’s existence you were not, and for 3.5 billion years of life on Earth you were not, and for 2.5 million years of hominid development you were not, and for 200,000 years during which homo sapiens emerged you were not. But today, for the briefest flicker of time in the story of the universe, you are. 

As a secular Christian, I find genuine mystery in all this, along with awe, wonder, and awareness of the responsibility that comes with the gift of life and consciousness. A person suffering from an incurable disease might wonder: Why me? Anyone who calculates the odds of existing at all might ask the same question: Why me? Here is mystery anchored in the midst of ordinary life. It assumes no supernatural reality, yet reflecting on it opens a window on to the vastness, the unity and the interconnectedness of all that has been, is, and will be. 

Many people, religious and irreligious alike, have experiences of heightened awareness and sensitivity they might describe as mystery. Such moments bring a sense of enhanced being, a welling-up of peace, trust, hope, gratitude, love, and affirmation of life. Yet this quickening of the imagination occurs within the framework of our very secular human minds and bodies. These have always been the crucible of mystery, and always will be.

As US states Legalize Marijuana, Is This the End of the War on Drugs?

by Eugene Jarecki                  Guardian/UK                 November 11, 2012

Last week was a momentous week, the beginning of the end, perhaps, of a national depravity – the "war on drugs". The voters of Colorado and Washington passed measures to legalize marijuana. We shouldn't delude ourselves that the country will be transformed overnight, but the public thinking, the public spirit is being transformed. Finally, there is a growing realization that this "war" has produced nothing but a legacy of failure.

Not in question is the ravaging impact drugs can have on individuals. But we need to see addiction for what it is – not a criminal matter but a public health issue, and a huge social issue, especially for the young. In fact, instead of a "war on drugs", better to call it a war on children. In many parts of our country, a child strays a little at 14; tries a drug, can't think of any way to pay for it, and then sinks into the underground economy. Before long, he has a strike on his record, a strike that will be with him for the rest of his life. So you have a cycle of degradation, starting at 13, 14, and he never gets out of it.

There is a new consensus on drugs. What's happening is complicated – economic calculations meeting up with humanitarian concerns.. All see a failed approach. When I set off to make my film, I wanted to speak to people all over the country touched by drugs. The users and dealers and family members; but also judges and police and wardens. I expected to be a sort of court reporter, capturing an argument between these two camps.

In fact, everybody sounded like a victim. The people who work in the penal system want those jobs like they want a hole in the head; they are doing work they take no pride in. Ultimately, there are very few people who want to work in a system whose success relies on a churn of your fellow humans to lock up. And, of course – in class terms – there's far more commonality. Prison guards would tell me that they had relatives in prison, high school friends. And, hauntingly, everyone had a story about how broken the system was.

But there's a shocking fatalism in play. What I found was lots of people saying: "Eugene, I know the system is broken and I wish you well. But dream on, it is so vast and has so much bureaucratic thrust you're deluding yourself if you think it can be fixed." But these wardens would then say: "But until you do, I have to do my job, and by God, I'm an American and I'm going to do it better than the next guy."

Admirable in one sense, but it greases the wheels for the continuing operation of the machine. So a judge will quite sincerely tell you how he has no choice but to imprison a non-violent person for 20 years because of mandatory sentencing – and he's right – but then, over lunch, he'll tell you how much he regrets doing so. For a country founded in revolution, we have become spectacularly unmoored from the notion of revolutionary behavior. Instead, we keep the bodies moving through the system.

I'm not going to pretend that the collapse of the "war on drugs" would transform life chances overnight for those born poorest in America. But, if you were to stop kneecapping many communities, you would free them to at least get their feet on the ground in normal ways. You could also save such a tremendous amount of money. What could I do in the neighborhoods that would actually foster the values that built civilization and would help young people find pathways other than those that end up in addiction?

What will bring about change is public demand. The public has to boo and hiss politicians who pander in this way – who say they are being tough on crime when they are destroying communities. We need to tell them that we won't let them vilify our neighbor to keep the penal system running. We will do that if we recognize that drug-mongering is no more substantial than WMD-mongering. And we know how that turned out. Americans have been an impressionable lot, but we're becoming less so. Bit by bit, we're realizing that the "war on drugs" makes no sense. And, if we let politicians know this, they have no choice but to become smarter and answer our demands.

Eugene Jarecki's The House I Live In, won the grand jury prize at the 2012 Sundance film festival.
[Abridged]

http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/11-4

The Real Scandal: Crimes of War, Not Passion

by Randall Amster               Common Dreams              November 13, 2012

The media blitz is fully engaged around the latest Washington sex scandals, and with it come nascent cheers from some anti-war sectors over the public unraveling of the top brass who have helped to orchestrate the longest war in U.S. history. On email threads and in the blogosphere, one is likely to view celebratory remarks laced with words like “comeuppance,” “karma,” and “justice.” Yet while it may be true that there’s a certain element of ironic remuneration in all of this, it’s also the case that such episodes can serve to draw our focus toward the wrong issues and the wrong scandals.The real transgressions here are not crimes of passion, but crimes of war.

It isn’t the sexual dalliances of the power elite that merit our critical gaze, but rather the sadistic destruction of their everyday actions as architects of institutionalized, taxpayer-funded brutality. The real transgressions here are not crimes of passion, but crimes of war: massive civilian casualties, destruction of nations, bankrupting the domestic economy, torture and rendition, drones raining extrajudicial death from above. These are the reasons to bring down a demagogue; doing so under other pretenses threatens to cloud the issues, while a successor is hastily named to continue the war effort. It would be a worse scandal if we allow this to happen.

Only in America could such rabid sexual Puritanism combine with uncritical genocidal complicity. We seem to have a unique capacity to condemn more mundane forms of human lust even as we thoroughly exercise our collective bloodlust without much reflection or remorse. Does it really matter much if a general has a love affair or betrays his family, when the war policies he has helped to design and implement have destroyed countless families and fractured the bonds of love among people half a world away? Maybe we should care a bit less about who they’re screwing than how we’re all being screwed all the time.

In this light, we can surmise that politics surely plays a role in all of this. Perhaps this signals an effort to slowly downsize the military and hasten an end to the war without end. Maybe it’s part of a larger foreign policy shakeup that will become evident in the near future. Possibly there’s a strategic shift afoot to deemphasize hardware and prioritize software in the next generation of conflict. It could also be the case that such revelations are a way of reducing in rank those whose policies have failed to produce the promised results. But we should be having those substantive discussions rather than merely the salacious ones.

Granted, there’s a certain degree of delightful irony in all of this, as “war on terror” stalwarts get bitten by the very same post-9/11 surveillance apparatuses that were imposed on all of us under the pretext of catching terrorists. The ease by which electronic communications of all sorts are delivered to law enforcement by internet providers should give us great pause in a free society. Progressives and civil libertarians have long complained about the intrusiveness of such practices, and how they broach the leading edge of punishing people for “thought crimes” right out of authoritarian dystopias. In a perverse twist, we might even consider whether we should be defending the defrocked generals’ right to privacy.

In fact, by arguing against the Patriot Act and its progeny, at least we would move the dialogue closer to the actual issues at hand. The entire post-9/11 paradigm -- preemptive action, perpetual warfare, unilateralism, secrecy and surveillance, unbridled executive authority, manipulation of fear -- should be under close scrutiny more so than the titillating details of anyone’s personal indiscretions. Perhaps we could argue that the two are related, i.e., as concrete expressions of cavalier hubris and moral turpitude. But if so, that point needs to be put forth more incisively than is taking place in the gossip mill right now.

I don’t want to put a damper on the chortles of an anti-war contingent in desperate need of even a small victory after more than a decade (longer, really) under the dark clouds of escalating militarism. I get why a story like this resonates and even appears as a form of rough justice to many. Still, it seems to me that larger issues yet pervade, and that we would do well not to lose sight of them -- lest we find ourselves winning the battle but losing the war.

Randall Amster, JD, PhD, teaches Peace Studies and chairs the Master’s program in Humanities at Prescott College in Arizona. He is the Executive Director of the Peace & Justice Studies Association.
 
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2012/11/13-9

The Gulf protection racket is corrupt and dangerous folly

Seumas Milne                       Guardian/UK                           6 November 2012

On the nauseating political doublespeak scale, David Cameron's claim to "support the Arab spring" on a trip to sell weapons to Gulf dictators this week hit a new low. No stern demands for free elections from the autocrats of Arabia – or calls for respect for human rights routinely dished out even to major powers like Russia and China.

As the kings and emirs crack down on democratic protest, the prime minister assured them of his "respect and friendship". Different countries, he explained soothingly in Abu Dhabi, needed "different paths, different timetables" on the road to reform: countries that were western allies, spent billions on British arms and sat on some of the world's largest oil reserves in particular, he might have added by way of explanation.

Cameron went to the Gulf as a salesman for BAE Systems – the private arms corporation that makes Typhoon jets – drumming up business from the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia and Oman, as well as smoothing ruffled feathers over British and European parliamentary criticism of their human rights records on behalf of BP and other companies. No wonder the prime minister restricted media coverage of the jaunt. But, following hard on the heels of a similar trip by the French president, the western message to the monarchies was clear enough: Arab revolution or not, it's business as usual with Gulf despots.

But popular unrest has now reached the shores of the Gulf. In Kuwait, tens of thousands of demonstrators, including Islamists, liberals and nationalists, have faced barrages of teargas and stun grenades as they protest against a rigged election law. After 18 months of violent suppression of the opposition in Bahrain, armed by Britain and America, the regime has outlawed all anti-government demonstrations. In western-embraced Saudi Arabia, protests have been brutally repressed, as thousands are held without charge or proper trial.

Meanwhile, scores have been jailed in the UAE for campaigning for democratic reform, and in Britain's favourite Arab police state of Jordan, protests have mushroomed against a Kuwaiti-style electoral stitchup. London, Paris and Washington all express concern – but arm and back the autocrats.

This is effectively a mafia-style protection racket, in which Gulf regimes use oil wealth their families have commandeered to buy equipment from western firms they will never use. The companies pay huge kickbacks to the relevant princelings, while a revolving door of political corruption provides lucrative employment for former defence ministers, officials and generals with the arms corporations they secured contracts for in office.

Naturally, western leaders and Arab autocrats claim the Gulf states are threatened by Iran. In reality, that would only be a risk if the US or Israel attacked Iran – and in that case, it would be the US and its allies, not the regimes' forces, that would be defending them. Hypocrisy doesn't begin to describe this relationship, which has long embedded corruption in a web of political, commercial and intelli gence links at the heart of British public life.

The danger now is of escalating military buildup against Iran and intervention in the popular upheavals that have been unleashed across the region. Both the US and Britain have sent troops to Jordan in recent months to bolster the tottering regime and increase leverage in the Syrian civil war. Cameron held talks with emirates leaders this week about setting up a permanent British military airbase in the UAE.

The prime minister defended arms sales to dictators on the basis of 300,000 jobs in Britain's "defence industries". Those numbers are inflated and in any case heavily reliant on government subsidy. But there's also no doubt that British manufacturing is over-dependent on the arms industry and some of that support could usefully be diverted to, say, renewable technologies.

Sooner or later, these autocrats will fall.  Without western support, they would have certainly been toppled already. When that happens, the western world risks a new backlash from its leaders' corrupt folly.   [Abridged]

Twitter: @SeumasMilne     http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/06/ulf-protection-racket-corrupt-dangerous-folly