Yes to CRM; No to similarly effective protection of 'giving units' from predators

The Baptist General Convention of Texas is spending $2.14 million on database-driven Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for the purpose of maintaining donor relationships with current giving units (essentially, Texas Baptists), and no doubt to develop relationships with new giving units.

This is the same BGCT which under different top leadership spent some $1.3 million on the Valleygate church planting which produced some still-undetermined, small percent of the new churches originally reported. Investment in management software does appear to make some sense for them. Although they had to tap an emergency reserve fund to finish paying for the system.

Christa Brown thoughtfully observes that while building their CRM system, they're creating a database for tracking the "giving records" of Texas Baptists who make donations (essentially, "giving units"). While the Southern Baptist Convention will not create a database to track Baptist clergy who are sexual predators. Despite the very large number of currently active Southern Baptist clerical predators. From whom the "giving units" should be protected.

The BGCT has a limited-effect anti-predator file called Broken Trust. Not at all like the CRM system.

Churches may report if they elect to, but according to the ethics expert who helped BGCT set up the system, “churches don’t have to report abuse cases to the registry and aren’t likely to.” The result is not a functional predator-tracking database. As of this writing, it's an online list of 10 names and the claim that "In addition to the names listed above, in keeping with the mission of the BGCT and as a public service, the Convention endeavors to maintain records relating to confirmed* cases of sexual abuse or sexual improprieties by members of the clergy in BGCT-affiliated churches."

So for the SBC and to a slightly lesser degree the BGCT, it's still pass the offering plate please. And hush. We must keep our priorities straight.

No comments = no future [updated]

SBC Today is a Southern Baptist niche blog which has called attention to itself by exiting the blogoshphere.

Specifically, it has no blogroll, it doesn't accept linkbacks and has announced that they will no longer accept comments on its posts (it was that last action which marked their exit from the blogosphere).

Wikipedia accurately describes the blogosphere:

The collective community of all blogs is known as the blogosphere. Since all blogs are on the internet by definition, they may be seen as interconnected and socially networked, through blogrolls, comments, linkbacks (refbacks, trackbacks or pingbacks) and backlinks.

Clearly, little remains for SBC Today to remove itself from even the possibility of participation in the worldwide online conversation that drives the blogosphere, except perhaps to take itself offline altogether.

We don't agree with those who say SBC Today is no longer a blog. Its entries are hyperlinked, printed in reverse chronological order and make some use of hyperlinks to outside resources. Its publication platform is blog software. So in a truly minimalist sense, and you may quarrel with us about this, even with comments off, SBC Today remains a blog.

Just not a blog which respects its readers enough to accept comments.

Too bad.

The wages of disrespect for one's readers is typically death.

Addendum

Wade Burleson wrote Saturday in a blog about his differences with the Baptist Identity movement, that "the premier Baptist Identity blog, SBC Today, has chosen to terminate all comments. . . . Shame on them. . . . ."

Burleson finished by quoting one of his frequent commenters, Jim Champion, who nailed the key online issue, writing: "If I want editorials I'll go to print media."

Say again: How many Southern Baptists?

Usually with a straight face, various news services reported this week that in 2006-2007, according to the latest edition of the Yearbook of American and Canadian Churches, the number of Southern Baptists declined 0.24% to 16.2 million members.

Annual % change in SBC membership

Surely no one thinks those numbers refer to real, active members? Not for a denomination with a "50 year trend" of declining growth that has become real decline.

Real membership begins with baptism. Southern Baptist decline in baptisms is old news. USA Today reported last March:

Baptisms last year [2007] dropped nearly 5.5 percent to 345,941, compared with 364,826 in 2006, according to an annual report released Wednesday by LifeWay . . . . baptisms peaked in 1972 at 445,725 . . . .

As for active members, their comparatively small number is older news. In 2000, Ernest C. Reisinger and D. Matthew Allen wrote:

The Wall Street Journal reported in 1990 that, of the 14.9 million members of Southern Baptist churches (according to an official count), over 4.4 million are "non-resident members." This means they are members with whom the church has lost touch. Another 3 million hadn't attended church or donated to a church in the past year. That left about 7.4 million "active" members. However, according to Sunday School consultant Glenn Smith, even this is misleading, because included in this "active" figure are those members who only attended once a year at Easter or Christmas.

For those with time to spare, Adherents.com has a mind-numbing list of somewhat contradictory claims.

Writing about the "16-million-member Southern Baptist Convention" is somewhat like publishing the transcript of an interview with Bigfoot. Thus defined, with grossly inflated numbers which imply Christian solders in the field, it apparently doesn't exist.

Bishop Williamson the unrepetant radical rightist

Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson's disingenuous apology was well-rejected by the Vatican. It is unclear whether the Society of St Pius X can withstand careful scrutiny today, but Williamson is a creature of the radical, racist right. The London Times' Damian Thompson writes:

Trawling through Williamson's sermons is a sad experience. There's an intense piety there, powerful faith, but it's poisoned by anger, hatred and an all-consuming paranoia. This troubled man has links to the political Far Right, and has written about Hitler "liberating" Germany from the control of Jewish money.

Even more bizarre than his frequently expressed view that the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were not carried out by terrorists, all of those assertions were in public view well before his excommunication was lifted.

We need not play that reprehensible game, "Kick the Pope," to wonder where this is going and exactly why Pope Benedict XVI put matters on this path, making the radical right more bold and the Catholic Church's position of moral authority less powerful.

Bumper-mounted idolatry

American license-plate worship has recently broken out like the hives, nowhere as intensely as in South Carolina. There, only a temporary federal injunction prevents state sale of cross & stained-glass illustrated "I believe" license plates.

Robert Marsden (Monty) Knight, pastor of First Christian Church in Charleston, S.C. and is one of four clergy plaintiffs in the lawsuit challenging his state’s proposed “I Believe” license plates. He told DisciplesWorld:

It’s just politicians trotting out a shallow veneer of Christian piety to court the Christians here in South Carolina. [The governor didn’t endorse it] He said, in essence, if your faith is no deeper than a license plate, it’s pretty shallow. There are other special plates…but this one came straight from the legislature- it was a violation of the First Amendment from the get-go.

Faith as deep as a license plate, as wide as chrome door trim? Faith politically demeaned by legislators.

Church-blogging ain't beanbag

Aggressively blog a church's policies and governance, and the deacons may adopt a resolution directed at you and see it approved in a vote by the congregation [video].

Some approve of the action at First Baptist Church of Jacksonville, Fla.

Some do not and defend the anonymously penned FBC Jax Watchdog blog, which is the target of the resolution.

FBC Jacksonville attracted considerable attention by sponsoring blog posts calling Catholicism a cult [eventually removed from the site]. Although the grievances of Watchdog certainly neither began nor ended there.

The bylaws governing resolution of grievances within that church appear to be heavily loaded against dissent.

Whatever the merits of any particular issue there, that repressive approach tends to drive debate underground -- often into anonymous blogs -- not eliminate it.

Addendum

William Thornton notes that FBC Jacksonville conducted a "public flogging of a former member" without, of course, "naming names." He goes on to say the disciplinary process sounds "less Biblical than it does medieval." [Amen to that.]

Williamson apologizes but does not recant

Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson apologized today, after being booted out of Argentina, where on Feb. 9 he was dismissed as director of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) seminary in La Reja.

"I can truthfully say that I regret having made such remarks, and that if I had known beforehand the full harm and hurt to which they would give rise, especially to the Church, but also to survivors and relatives of victims of injustice under the Third Reich, I would not have made them," Williamson said, according to the website of Zenit, a Catholic news agency. . . .
"To all souls that took honest scandal from what I said, before God I apologise," he said. . . .
He did not say in his apology whether he had changed his views.

His failure to recant earned him the immediate rejection of some Jewish groups. This is a case in which half a measure should not be good enough for anyone.

Lest anyone be confused about where we stand: "Never again."

'Who ya gonna call' for a 'Hush Rush' smush?

Ghostbuster Republican Sen. Jim DeMint's amendment passed, exorcising the phantom of Fairness Doctrine revival.

To perserve the possibility that the Federal Communications Commission could actually still do part of its job in nonfairness areas, Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin introduced and won party-line approval for a counter-amendment. While fairness itself remains a refugee child of a less blindly polarized era.

Thus ample red meat is left on the legislative butcher block for appeals to put a stake through the heart the non-existent revived Fairness Doctrine which still doesn't stalk the halls of Congress. Or the White House. The right to distract otherwise beleaguered religious broadcasters and their audiences is secure.

There is another goal, however -- tidying up unfinished Reagan administration business by clearing the way for monopoly control of broadcast and other media markets. Hence the endless arm-waving and chanting over the unliving dead corpse of the Fairness Doctrine.

Clear-eyed about OFANP

Melissa Rogers, director of the Center for Religion and Public Affairs at Wake Forest University School of Divinity, was a signal addition to the advisory board of Obama's Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.

Her interview with the Greensboro News and Record this week revealed why. There are two key comments.

First, on hiring and firing at groups which receive grants:

When a group receives a government grant, it should not be able to discriminate based on religion for government-funded jobs. If there are jobs that the group is funding itself with its own money, then they should be free to hire and fire on the basis of religion. If the jobs are funded with government grant funds, then all the taxpayers that contributed to that funding should be able to compete for those jobs.

Second, on reforms at OFANP. We've boldfaced part of her comment because those views are a marked separation from the Bush administration's use of faith-based funds for political purposes, and the Obama administration's human services goals:

It's very important for the administration to continue to welcome religious and neighborhood groups to partner with government. There's a need to increase funding for programs that help people of low income - and there is a need to bring the partnerships in line with certain constitutional principles and to be careful about guarding against cronyism and religious bias in the peer review grants process.

Clear-eyed policy guidance is her job as a member of the OFANP advisory board, and she's one of the best.

Now, if we can persuade her to start blogging again.

Montana church's speech rights violated by treatment as a political committee

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Wednesday that Montana election law was unconstitutionally applied to an East Helena church which supported a 2004 ballot initiative to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman.

Howard M. Friedman explains that Canyon Ferry Road Baptist Church "advertised and hosted a one-time screening of a video in support of the amendment and made petitions available in its foyer for signing."

Reversing a lower court decision, 9th Circuit ruled that "disclosure and reporting requirements are unconstitutional as applied to the Church’s de minimis activities," violating the church's right to freedom of speech under the First Amendment.

Circuit Judge John T. Noonan, in a concurring opinion, argued that the matter should have been decided on freedom of religion grounds:

“What has happened here is that a small congregation has been put to trouble and expense in order to exercise its right to speak on an issue seen by it to be of vital religious significance. One lesson of history is that small incursions on freedom are to be resisted lest they grow greater,” Noonan wrote.

This is an Alliance Defense Fund case and, because it tends to erode a previously defined boundary, a signal that the already contentious issue of religion in politics is destined to become more so.

Baptist bloggers object to the question: Was Jesus was a racist?

Miguel De La Torre ignited a Southern Baptist blog firestorm Monday with an iconoclastic reading of Matthew 15:21-28. That passage has Jesus responding to a Canaanite woman's plea that He heal her child. In the key phrase Jesus says:

I was sent only to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. It is not good to take the bread of the children and throw it to the dogs.

Jesus' comparison of the woman of color to "dogs" strikes De La Torre and many before him [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] as an arguably racist remark.

His conclusion in the Associated Baptist Press (ABP) opinion piece, not a new one to the world of progressive Christianity, strikes the fundamentalist bloggers as saying that Jesus committed a sin: racism. Yet Jesus is God incarnate, argues J. Thomas White of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary. Perfect. Sinless. Some therefore suggest that De La Torre is heretical when he writes:

To deny this woman a healing and call her a dog reveals the racism his culture taught him. But Jesus, unlike so many within the dominant social structure of today, was willing to hear the words of this woman of color, and learn from her.

Passions run high. They call the piece "tripe," "heretical trash" and so on. Some swear off the ABP for presuming to publish a "false teaching." They wonder at the competence of the ABP editors and want the piece deleted. Only a couple gently defended open debate.

Quietly reasoned explanation of the text, the sort of explanation which might be heard by skeptics and others whom our angry ministers would regard as unsaved, was rare.

Should we wonder whether there is a relationship between this occasional Baptist blogger preference for heated expostulation and the report in this year's National Council of Churches' Yearbook of American & Canadian Churches that Southern Baptists are declining in number?

Child died of parents' Tennessee faith healing

Jessica Crank of Loudon County, Tenn., died of bone cancer at 15 after her mother and "spiritual father" substituted prayer for medical care, very much like 11-year-old Kara Neumann's Wausau, Wis., parents.

An emergency appeal has been filed on behalf of Jessica's "spiritual father," Ariel Ben Sherman. who alleges that the governing law is legally flawed and should be struck down. It doesn't tell parents when to stop praying over children who have been variously expressing their agony (Jessica had a 17-pound tumor), and call the doctor.

Or as one of Sherman's attorneys, Gregory P. Isaacs, explains:

Tennessee's Child Abuse and Neglect statutes are unconstitutionally overbroad and vague in that they fail to identify and provide fair notice of the point at which a person's reliance on his or her religious beliefs for spiritual treatment becomes criminal conduct, if ever.

Tennessee's 1994 "faith healing" law does appear to be intended to permit parents to substitute prayer for medical care. If somehow Sherman's attorneys prevail in their appeal, that does not end the case.

Jamie Satterfield of the Knoxville News writes:

Loudon County authorities have alleged that even if the faith-healing loophole were valid, it only applies to practitioners of a "recognized church or religious denomination." Sherman has been accused of being a cult leader whose Universal Life Church was cover for a commune with no ties to any legitimate religion.

The underlying principle here is long-established and well-understood:

The 1944 U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Prince v. Massachusetts, which concerned a Jehovah's Witness convicted of violating state child labor laws after insisting that her religious beliefs required her child to distribute Witness literature at night, that "the right to practice religion freely does not include liberty to expose the community or child to communicable disease, or the latter to ill health or death... Parents may be free to become martyrs themselves. But it does not follow they are free, in identical circumstances, to make martyrs of their children.

Shaking his fist, Williamson leaves Argentina

Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson left Argentina today rather than be expelled.

The un-excommunicated arch conservative priest's exit was not a graceful one. Bill Faries of Bloomberg Press wrote:

Williamson, wearing a black baseball cap and sunglasses, stopped to wave his fist in the face of a reporter for the Todo Noticias news channel at Buenos Aires’s international airport. The reporter was then held back by two unidentified men accompanying the cleric.

Largest Arkansas Presbyterian(USA) church elects homosexual deacon

Amid denomination-wide constitutional transition, Little Rock's Second Presbyterian Church, which has 1,700 members, elected a slate of a dozen adult deacons, including openly gay member Michael Upson.

One day earlier, the Presbytery of Arkansas voted to remove restrictions on homosexual ordination from the national church's Book of Order.

An amendment to change the constitution of the 2.3-million-member denomination to remove a bar to homosexual deacons is under consideration, but not yet approved.

Will same-sex civil unions float in Hawaii?

Hawaii is surfing toward becoming the fifth state to legalize same-sex civil unions (not quite gay marriage). The the Democrat-dominated Legislature and Republican governor must merely approve the measure, which passed by the state House this month. It faces Senate committee vote today (loss there may be circumvented).

Protesters and supporters are making themselves as visible as possible. They all know that Senate supporters may be able to muster the supermajority required to overcome a governor's veto, should there be one.

The SBC need not single out homosexuality

Lyn Robbins of Broadway Baptist Church in Fort Worth, Texas, blogs a careful assessment of the homosexuality issues for which his church has been brought to the brink of expulsion (disfellowship) from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). And offers a solution which would serve both his church and the SBC well.

Action was delayed last week and additional information sought by the SBC Executive Committee to which the matter was referred by the SBC annual meeting last June.

Speaking for himself, not in his role as the church's attorney, Robbins argues that the SBC Executive Committee should find there is no compelling reason to expell Broadway Baptist from the denomination. The church's acceptance of homosexuals as members, who serve on church committees, is not sufficient reason. He explains:

According to the most recent amendment to the Southern Baptist Convention constitution, a church is not in friendly cooperation with the SBC if it acts to affirm, approve, or endorse homosexual behavior. I do not believe Broadway has so acted. Such actions would include things like open statements of affirmation of homosexual behavior or publications of such statements. Such acts could include things like performance of a marriage or marriage-like ceremony between persons of the same gender. Such acts could arguably include ordination of homosexuals. Broadway has done none of those things.

His argument is careful and of necessity therefore complex.

Buried in its core like a diamond deep in a vein of lesser rock, however, is one clear, final argument: If the SBC boots out churches which allow homosexuals to become members and serve on committees, must it not do the same for with regard to other sins?

As he puts it:

How can church pick this one issue as the touchstone for withdrawing membership? Are we next going to excommunicate the gossips, the mean, the greedy, the abusive, the lazy, the gluttonous? I know many who do not believe that tithing is required; I know others who believe that failure to tithe is a sin. Is one side of that debate going to disfellowship the other?

There he may have found the path back up out of the inquisitorial pit which threatens to see the SBC booting out one church after another for welcoming into its midst people who are known to be (in SBC terms) sinners, not to lead the faithful, but to pursue the faith.

If you are seriously concerned about SBC issues, the entire argument deserves your attention here.

Update

Texas Blogger Ken Coffee, a retired Baptist minister, makes a similar point. At his blog "Strong Coffee" he writes:

If I had been a member at Broadway I would have told the SBC that we will dismiss all homosexuals from our church as soon as you dismiss all adulterers from yours.”

When you get rid of all the adulterers, you can start on getting rid of all liars. When the liars are all gone, start getting rid of the gossipers. And on and on.

Now, I sincerely believe homosexuality is a sin in the eyes of God, as is any lust of the flesh. But isn’t that what a church is for—to bring sinners under the gospel?

Christa Brown at "Stop Baptist Predators" asks:

If congregational autonomy doesn’t preclude the SBC from investigating a church with gay members, why does congregational autonomy preclude the SBC from investigating a church with a reported clergy child molester in the pulpit?

The author of "Deep in the heart ..." agrees with Christa, asking:

If Broadway is under investigation, then why are these other churches, especially those where the abusers continue to serve, not under investigation also? All it would require, apparently, is a motion from the floor of a convention.

The Oscar for gay rights

Hearing impassioned pleas for gay rights during Oscars, Mark Silk saw no hope for last week's well-propose compromise:

Well meaning as it is, the proposal advanced by David Blankenhorn and Jonathan Rauch in a NYT op-ed yesterday seems to me a half-way house that will have trouble standing. But the cry of distress from Rod Dreher about the "fast erosion of religious liberty in America" paints with far too broad a brush. It's not religious liberty that is fast eroding, but one big social norm.

Passionately felt social norms die unquiet deaths, as Silk suggests. Indeed, when their change is mirrored in shifting legal rights, they are fought out in public debate, through the halls of legislatures and in the courts. On this issue Silk predicts, and we agree, a future of pitched civil and legal battles.

Economic trouble has come to churches & their congregations

A rapidly growing percent of churches may be sliding into economic difficulty, judging from the results of a February survey by the National Association of Church Business Administration (NACBA).

Church mission activity cutbacks have more than doubled in the past six months, keeping pace with other economy-related financial difficulties, found the NACBA survey of 800 churches in the U.S. and Canada.

The percent curtailing mission activities more than doubled from 10% in August, 2008, to 24% in February, 2009. So did the percent who said "their church was definitely having economy-related financial difficulties," which more than doubled from 14% in August to 32% in February.

Fully 47% said staff benefits had been frozen or cut at their church, which was more than double the 18% reported in August.

Similarly, "20 percent said they had staff layoffs, and 26 percent reported postponing a major capital project."

Despite those cautionary numbers, most churches are apparently still is good shape. In response to questions on the same survey, 63 percent "said their church saw giving stay the same or climb in 2008 over the previous year. "

“I think we are starting to see more pain felt -- although nothing like in the private sector,” NACBA deputy chief executive and a veteran Baptist church administrator Phil Martin told the Associated Baptist Press. He noted that regional economic differences are having an impact on how churches fare from region to region.

The Cooperative Baptist Fellowship announced last week that starting March 1, it would cut spending by 20 percent, cut partner funding by 30 percent, cut staff salaries by one percent and implement other cutbacks in anticipation of "worst-case" economic outcomes.

In Sioux City, Iowa, the economy forced 120-year-old Our Savior's Lutheran Church to close its doors. The church held its final service Sunday, with a special luncheon afterward.

Sundaythe Rev. Deb Kociban's at First United Methodist Church in McKeesport, Penn., prayed, "We are anxious, Lord. Help us to set aside the things that are bothering us."

The Pittsburg Tribune-Review wrote:

One by one, congregants raised their hands when she asked if they knew someone in need of individual prayer because of illness, family struggles, lost jobs or other difficulties.

Tony Cartledge found in it all, as faithful men often do, hope:

Successful dieters rejoice when they can tighten their belts and exercise longer. Perhaps some serious revisiting of vision and resources can lead churches and organizations to develop leaner, broader based, and more effective ministries.

Perhaps those of us who survive will do so personally as well.

Cometary beauty sings across tonight's sky

Comet Lulin "should be a sweet binocular sight" during this once-in-a-million-years visit.

Detailed viewing information is available from Sky and Telescope.

The Pope's salary

The salary and/or other remuneration of the Southern Baptist Convention president has been subject to some debate. His salary is reported to be nothing, although the SBC files no detailed, public financial reports.

As was made clear in the New York Times several years ago after a moment of confusion about the matter, the Pope in Rome has a salary of nothing.

The Vatican spokesman, Joaquín Navarro-Valls, ended speculation about the Pope's salary, saying, ''The Pope does not and has never received a salary.'' An ambiguous statement by Cardinal Sergio Sebastiani had suggested that the Pope did receive a salary. [07/20/2001]

The Holy See makes the details public:

The pope has the resources of the Holy See at his disposal. He can take out as much as he needs to carry out his mission and his duties. All the recent popes, on the occasion of their deaths, have left everything they personally owned to the Holy See, with the exception of some little gifts that Pope Paul VI left to his personal secretary and to some of his close relatives. The Holy See annually publishes a complete financial report which includes the expenses of the Pontifical Household. Gifts that come to the pope from heads of state around the world and similar gifts go to the Vatican Museums, where they are often on display for the public to view.

Vatican financial disclosures are available to the press. They are sometimes the subject of news stories, which of course are not always flattering. The British Guardian wrote last year:

The Vatican has blamed the weak dollar for pushing it into its first loss in four years.
Annual accounts published yesterday showed that the Holy See dipped into the red last year, recording a loss of €9.1m (£7.25m). It said this was "due mainly to sharp and very pronounced trend reversal in fluctuation of exchange rates, particularly the US dollar".

Disclosure helps charitable institutions of all kinds earn and sustain the trust of their contributors.

Out of (not just) our heads

Alva Noe in his book "Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness" argues:

Our culture is obsessed with the brain—how it perceives; how it remembers; how it determines our intelligence, our morality, our likes and our dislikes. It’s widely believed that consciousness itself, that Holy Grail of science and philosophy, will soon be given a neural explanation. And yet, after decades of research, only one proposition about how the brain makes us conscious—how it gives rise to sensation, feeling, and subjectivity—has emerged unchallenged: We don’t have a clue.

His complex, unparadoxical argument is [oversimplification warning] that consciousness is our acts as we perform, perceive and indeed merge into them with every sensible aspect of ourselves, unfolding through time.

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Civil unions + religious-conscience protection = acceptable end 2 same-sex-marriage war?

A New York Times op-ed today offers an "innovative compromise" on same-sex marriage. In a single bill:

Congress would bestow the status of federal civil unions on same-sex marriages and civil unions granted at the state level, thereby conferring upon them most or all of the federal benefits and rights of marriage. But there would be a condition: Washington would recognize only those unions licensed in states with robust religious-conscience exceptions, which provide that religious organizations need not recognize same-sex unions against their will. The federal government would also enact religious-conscience protections of its own.

Convincing argument is given that the compromise the authors propose can be implemented and would, properly explained, be widely acceptable.

The damage being done our civil society by uncompromising conflict, as in California over Proposition 8, makes for them the case for compromise itself.

An 'ill-informed' blogger's retort

Who are the unnamed, unnumbered ill-informed bloggers referred to amid the Mark Driscoll kerfuffle?

Peter Lumpkins identifies himself as "presumably" one. Then takes down by name and hyperlink several Southern Baptist bloggers who "have stepped into the batter's box" for Driscoll. And who have done so while arguing that they aren't quite on Driscoll's team, because they are "by no means endorsing all he does or believes." Thus it follows:

. . . had those of us who chose to disagree had left the content of the diagreeables innocous, as do the defenders, we'd all just be one, big happy family!

Catholic judges and the requirements of the church

In what may have been a radical break, the pope instructed judges as well as legislators when he spoke to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, warns Douglas Kmiec, chair and professor of constitutional law at Pepperdine University.

Writing in Time magazine, he said:

As written, the Pope's statement has the potential, at least theoretically, to empty the U.S. Supreme Court of all five of its Catholic jurists and perhaps all other Catholics who sit on the bench in the lower federal and state courts.

It is of course possible someone in the Vatican was careless in preparing the statement. If so, its sweeping inclusivity may have been unintentional.

But the statement about the pope's meeting with Pelosi nonetheless said:

His Holiness took the opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law and the church's consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death which enjoin all Catholics, and especially legislators, jurists and those responsible for the common good of society, to work in cooperation with all men and women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of protecting human life at all stages of its development.

Note the word "jurists," and bear in mind how in that context it can be seen as a moral instruction that judges must use their offices to undo the law's protection for abortion.

Then you can see the core of Kmiec's disturbing scholarly analysis. The pope's plain words may be seen as having put the requirements of faith in conflict with those of the oath taken by federal judges to uphold U.S. law.

'Muscular Christianity' takedown

Critical reservations about our positive reviews of Muscular Christianity came to us by way of this Saturday Night Live Hans & Franz lampoon.

Dogs, elephants and Southern Baptist intolerance

Oklahoma Baptist bloggers aren't all about metaphoric animal-friends stories. Or once upon a time when the denomination was still larger, they weren't. Though by then he had left the ranks of Southern Baptists, pastor David Flick met it all head-on with a sweeping historic summation in a Nov. 7, 2007 which included:

This week, Southern Baptist intolerance has raised its ugly head yet again. The International Mission Board could not tolerate trustee, Wade Burleson's, principled dissent on several issues of little consequence. In the scheme of things, Burleson's dissent amounts to little more than a hill of beans. Yet the IMB, led by chairman John Floyd and former chairman, Jerry Corbaley, censured him. In a wildly slanderous and lengthy report, Cobaley accused Burleson of slander and sin. Burleson's censure says a lot about the credibility of the IMB. on a scale of 1-10, the IMB's credibility is minus-6. It says a lot about Burleson's credibility as well. On the same scale, Burleson's credibility is a strong-9.

More than intolerance is involved, Flick argues in a document here which deserves to be revisited while others attempt to arrest the well-foreseen inquisitorial process which has been grinding down the SBC.

Now Burleson is late to the game, John Pierce of Baptists Today observed in reviewing Burleson's new book, Hardball Religion.

Hardball indeed and played for decades now -- not zoo animal stories.

James Madison on where the 'wall of separation' applies to faith-based initiatives

Today is the anniversary of President James Madison 1811 veto of "An act incorporating the Protestant Episcopal Church in the town of Alexandria, in the District of Columbia."

Rob Boston reminds us of Madison's words:

“[T]he bill,” he wrote, “exceeds the rightful authority to which governments are limited by the essential distinction between civil and religious functions, and violates in particular the article of the Constitution of the United States which declares that ‘Congress shall make no law respecting a religious establishment.’”
. . .
“[T]he bill vests in the said incorporated church an authority to provide for the support of the poor and the education of poor children of the same, an authority which, being altogether superfluous if the provision is to be the result of pious charity, would be a precedent for giving to religious societies as such a legal agency in carrying into effect a public and civil duty.”

Boston argues that Madison would have similarly resisted the Obama administration's current blurring of church/state lines in the faith-based initiatives.

The Anti-Defamation League is similarly concerned.

Mark Silk writes, "The [ADL] letter goes beyond the hiring issue to make it clear that additional safeguards are needed, including separation of religious and secular functions, oversight, and the assurance of secular alternatives to faith-based service provision."

Right on target, and this is the right day to remember it.

Nurse Ratched didn't have modern, psychotropic drugs

Charged with using psychotropic drugs to achieve the goals of Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, three former top managers of a Kern County, Calif., were arrested. The Los Angeles Times reported:

"The state attorney general's office contended in a criminal complaint that more than 20 residents at a skilled nursing center run by the Kern Valley Healthcare District were drugged 'for staff convenience.' Many of them experienced side effects that included dramatic weight loss, slurred speech, tremors, loss of cognition and even psychosis, according to the complaint."
. . .
"These people maliciously violated the trust of their patients by holding them down and forcibly administering psychotropic medications if they dared to question their care," state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown said.

"Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me."

You can read the entire complaint from California Attorney General Jerry Brown's office here.

Holocaust-denying bishop ordered out of Argentina

Unrepentant Holocaust-denying Bishop Richard Williamson is being booted out of Argentina, where on Feb. 9 he was dismissed as director of the Society of St. Pius X (SSPX) seminary in La Reja. He has 10 days to leave.

Legally, Williamson failed to declare his true job as director of a seminary on immigration forms interior ministry, but Argentine officials make it clear that his Holocaust-denials "profoundly insulted Argentine society, the Jewish community and all of humanity by denying the historic truth."

Argentina's Jewish population, one of the world's largest, praised the decision.

Ordered by Pope Benedict XVI to recant, Williamson has not done so, claiming he needed time to research the issue so that he can act with sincerity. The head of Williamson's Swiss-based society, Monsignor Bernard Fellay, said in an interview published Monday that Williamson should be given time to reconsider his denials.

There is pressure on the pope to further repudiate Williamson's views, and time appears to be running out, now in more than one regard.

Hardball Religion: Feeling the Fury of Fundamentalism

The book Hardball Religion by Wade Burleson gets an almost play-by-play punches-unpulled review from John Pierce, executive editor of Baptists Today.

Key snippet:

Burleson’s courage to stand toe-to-toe with abusive power-brokers, to expose the misuse of denominational authority and resources, and to defend those harmed by heavy-handed tactics is commendable.

Yet, for so many of us, his recent “discovery” of fundamentalism in the Southern Baptist Convention is not breaking news. It shows just how late Burleson is getting to the game.

He writes: “I began to realize in 2005, to my horror, that the issue causing such pain in the Southern Baptist Convention was not a battle for a belief in the inspired, inerrant word of God.”

Burleson is right. It is about something else — something very destructive.

Read the entire review here.

Freedom of Choice UnAct, the uncampaign and key story

Amid the uproar over the still-unintroduced Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA), one news story occasions almost as much refutation as the Time magazine article describing a fear-provoking, Catholic-led campaign against nonexistent legislation. That story had been largely ignored since its publication on Jan. 26, until cited by Time

At Catholics in Alliance for the Good, the story says [their summary]:

Internet rumors to the contrary, no Catholic hospital in the United States is in danger of closing because of the Freedom of Choice Act. As a matter of fact, the Freedom of Choice Act died with the 110th Congress and, a week after the inauguration of President Barack Obama, has not been reintroduced. But that hasn't kept misleading e-mails from flying around the Internet, warning of the dire consequences if Obama signs FOCA into law and promoting a "FOCA novena" in the days leading up to Inauguration Day. Sister Carol Keehan, a Daughter of Charity who is CHA president and CEO, was equally sure that FOCA poses no threat to Catholic hospitals or to the conscience rights of those who work there.

Time's Amy Sullivan didn't write a perfect article, but the current campaign is still against legislation which has not been introduced, is unlikely to pass if introduced and may do far less harm to opponents' interests than they suggest.

Perhaps the purpose of current efforts is to cut a firebreak. That's a part of ordinary American political life, charges and counter-charges and all.

On abortion rights issues like this one, with a pro-choice president in office, expect more intensity. Not less.

Fundamental consideration

In Ethics Daily Baptist pastor Jim Evans wrote of Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.:

Mohler would likely argue that it's impossible to believe in Jesus without first believing in the Bible. The problem here is the simple fact that for the first 1,000 years of the history of the church, the Bible was hardly available to believers. Jesus was experienced in preaching, in fellowship and in the ordinances of the church. It's only been since the invention of moveable type that the printed word became the primary source of revelation.

Is Evans not saying that American Fundamentalism and Inerrancy are too new, historically, to support some species of sweeping claims? His entire piece is here.

Stress stretched

Tony Cartledge is a journalist, photographer, associate professor of Old Testament at Campbell University Divinity School, contributing editor to Baptists Today and blogger.

Stretched a little thin and lately blogging about [yes] Living with stress.

[Photo copyright Tony Cartledge.]

Change Arkansas' Constitution?

Don Byrd blogging for The Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty reports:

Believe it or not, a few states still have constitutional provisions disallowing atheists from holding office, completely - of course, at odds with the US Constitution's guarantee that there can be no religious test. An effort is under way in Arkansas to do something about it.

'Abortion reduction' isn't a compromise

Abortion reduction didn't spring full-blown from the heads of the authors of Come Let Us Reason Together: A Governing Agenda to End the Culture Wars (CLURT).

Not a compromise. A strategy for recriminalization.

Lutherans move toward full celebration of same-gender relationships

Rather than embrace self-destructive hypocrisy, a task force of the 4.7-million-member Evangelical Lutheran Church in America has proposed to celebrate same-gender relationships and allow homosexuals in committed relationships to serve as clergy.

They propose to avoid the Southern Baptist spectacle of serial inquisition by respecting the decisions of congregations and synods whose understanding of scripture leads them to disagree [download the .pdf statement].

A four-step process is recommended for dealing with the recommendation at the Churchwide Assembly in Minneapolis in August.

1. If the assembly rejects the first measure recognizing monogamous gay unions, the remaining three will die.
2. If the assembly approves, members will be asked if they want to permit clergy in committed same-gender relationships to work in churches that invite them to serve.
3. That done, the assembly will be asked to approve respecting the bound conscience of those who disagree.
4. Finally, the assembly would be asked to approve a policy incorporating flexibility in the decision-making process that allows gay clergy in relationships to serve as clergy.

Inevitably, more later about this most recent reformation among Protestants.

Update

Only a few years ago, the Evangelical Lutheran Church was still disciplining and firing gay and lesbian clergy.

Stimulus act anti-Religious in its impact on institutions of higher education?

Red meat for the religious right, that claim came recently from former Arkansas Gov. and Southern Baptist pastor Mike Huckabee.

Tobin Grant of Southern Illinois University — Carbondale, writes:

In the final version of the stimulus bill, funds for higher education are included as part of the block grants to states. Not only does the bill state that these funds may be used to renovate facilities at private institutions, it also states that governors may not consider "the type or mission" of a college or university. The states must consider religious institutions along with public and other private colleges and universities.

The funds may not be used for facilities where admission is charged and the buildings must be religiously neutral in purpose. Thus neither football stadia nor chapels my be renovated using stimulus funds. No one should plan to renovate a department of divinity with them. Yet college and university student religious life is unaffected, as it has been in the half century that current law, as included in the stimulus bill, has been applied.

The restriction is on individual facilities, however. Funds may go to support religiously neutral structures at religiously affiliated colleges and universities.

Grant, who is coauthor of Expression vs. Equality: The Politics of Campaign Finance Reform and dozens of academic articles on politics and religion, explains in Christianity Today:

In the nearly four decades since [the 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court decision] Tilton v. Richardson, the constitutionality of federal funding for projects and programs at religious institutions has been upheld in the courts and supported by Congress. In the last Supreme Court case to consider public funds and religion at colleges, Rosenberger v. University of Virginia in 1995, the court found that as long as the purpose of a facility is religiously neutral, students have the right to use that facility for religious purposes, even at public universities. If a college allows students to use a conference room for any social function, it must allow them to use it even as a place to pray and study the Bible together.

Thus inclusion in the stimulus bill of the language over which Huckabee and others made such a fuss, ensured that there is no adverse impact on religion.

The entire uproar over that language was a canard.

Westboro B*ptist hits a solid British wall

Westboro B*ptist Church's plan to picket (a favorite target) a production of The Laramie Project at Basingstoke, Hampshire, has been cripped at the British border.

"Homophobic American cleric" Fred Phelps, who heads Westboro Baptist Church, and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper, had announced plans to lead protests against the play and have been banned from doing so by Britain's home secretary, Jacqui Smith. Other members of the family may be banned as well.

The UK Border Agency applied the British "exclusions policy," targeted at "all those who seek to stir up tension and provoke others to violence regardless of their origins and beliefs." They said, "Both these individuals have engaged in unacceptable behavior by inciting hatred against a number of communities."

No mention was made of Phelps' companion website God Hates the World, which this week stated: "God hates England. Your Queen is a whore. You're going to hell."

Are Driscoll and Fatica renewals or further decline?

Joseph Laycock of Boston University brings a broader, more balanced perspective to the issues of the Mark Driscoll controversy which recently rolled through the Southern Baptist blog world. Driscoll and Justin Fatica, founder of the Catholic ministry group Hard as Nails, are in a sense both cultural heirs to the Victorian English tradition of "Muscular Christianity."

He writes in the current Martin Marty Center Sightings:

"Muscular Christianity," which emphasized an ideal of vigorous masculinity, first appeared in Victorian England. The term was coined to describe the writings of Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes, who felt that sports and athleticism would produce Christians who were more fit for civic duty. Hughes and Kingsley also shared a concern over the changes of industrialism and worried whether traditional morality would be able to adapt.

There is something more, however, and it is disturbing:

While Fatica encourages women to join the Hard as Nails ministry, Driscoll reminds his congregation that women must submit to their husbands and are forbidden from taking preaching roles. On his blog, Driscoll implied that Ted Haggard's wife contributed to his downfall: "A wife who lets herself go is not sexually available to her husband in the ways that the Song of Songs is so frank about is not responsible for her husband's sin, but she may not be helping him either." These comments beg the question:
Is this hyper-muscular Christianity really a radical, transgressive approach to ministry? Or is it actually the death-throes of an outmoded patriarchy?

We hope the former emerges from their still-unfinished work, and recommend the entire, blissfully brief and coherent piece to you here.

[Thanks to @rebeccawoods for bringing this to our attention.]

Westboro B*ptist hits the British wall

Westboro B*ptist Church's plan to picket (a favorite target) a production of The Laramie Project at Basingstoke, Hampshire, has been cripped at the British border.

"Homophobic American cleric" Fred Phelps, who heads Westboro Baptist Church, and his daughter Shirley Phelps-Roper, had announced plans to lead protests against the play and have been banned from doing so by Britain's home secretary, Jacqui Smith. Other members of the family may be banned as well.

The UK Border Agency applied the British "exclusions policy," targeted at "all those who seek to stir up tension and provoke others to violence regardless of their origins and beliefs." They said, "Both these individuals have engaged in unacceptable behavior by inciting hatred against a number of communities."

No mention was made of Phelps' companion website God Hates the World, which this week stated: "God hates England. Your Queen is a whore. You're going to hell."

Bible Beltless

Bible Belt is an often satirically intended term for the geographical concentration of Americans who tell pollsters religion is relatively important in their daily lives.

Unresolved competition among some 15 urban centers for "buckle" not withstanding, you might not want to wear this one for the same reasons that socially responsible habitation here is a problem-solving process.

Leading in poverty, AIDS infection rate, divorce rate, obesity, illiteracy, poverty, infant mortality, death penalty executions and some other unfortunate indexes of social wellbeing, the region calls those who can, and have a conscience. to help the others. Materially and toward the acquisition of revenue-generating skills.

Seen in worldwide perspective, the moniker takes on a different shading. USA Today reported, using Gallup data:

Baptists in Tuscaloosa and Muslims in Tehran might not seem to have much in common, but Alabama and Iran do agree on one thing: the importance of religion.

Nearly identical percentages of people in both locations — 82% of Alabamians and 83% of Iranians — say religion is an important part of their daily lives.

Yet no Bible Belt state matches the fervor of the most religious countries — those with 98% or more answering that religion is an important part of their daily lives: Egypt, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Congo.

Even the commonplace assumption that most of those questioned are fundamentalist Bible thumbers who echo the politics of Southern Baptist Convention Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission chief Richard Land are upon close examination false, assuming the recorded denominational diversity is real.

Bible Belt was always and remains a false generalization for a complex phenomenon, one too often used to mislead and manipulate us.

Westboro B*ptist Church takes its act to the British

Westboro B*ptist Church's plan to picket (a favorite target) a production of The Laramie Project at Basingstoke, Hampshire, seems to bemuse the British.

Tongue in cheek, upper lip stiff, The Telegraph published "the full text" of their correspondence with hyperhomophobic Westboro over their "threatened" demonstration. It's all deadpan questions, and the [ahem] answers.

Andrew Mueller of the Guardian reviews with scathing humor Westboro's logic and behavior, concluding:

Fortunately, this is one of those rare, glorious situations in which the right and smart tactic is also the easy, lazy one: let them come, and let them speak. Our common sense, our liberal tradition, our language – and our rich lexicon of dismissive hand gestures – equip us amply to respond.

Will a new Southern Baptist sexual tolerance start in Texas?

Broadway Baptist Church's views on homosexuality have brought it to be brink of expulsion from the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC). Homosexuals have not been excluded, you see. Same-sex couples in the church directory. Yet homosexuality is not endorsed, Broadway argues.

Short shrift has not been made. Clarification has been asked by the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee to which the matter was referred by the SBC annual meeting last June. Action on the historic Fort Worth, Texas church's case, delayed.

Hope is seen in this. Lyn Robbins, a Broadway member and the church's general counsel, said after the vote:

We believe that we are in friendly cooperation with the Southern Baptist Convention. Our purpose here today was to express that and also to share who Broadway is and what we are about.

The president of the Baptist General Convention of Texas, who journeyed to Nasheville to stand with Broadway Baptist, wrote:

At the end of the day work still needs to be done before there will be resolution, but this was a good day in Baptist life. I believe we took some of the stones from the walls we have used to divide us to build bridges across which we can work together for the cause of the Great Commission and the Kingdom of God.

Will this be the beginning of the end of a key division, or further diminishment of the SBC through Cathist inflexibility?

Addendum

Christa Brown notes how the possibility that a church has acted in ways which “affirm, approve or endorse homosexual behavior” is seen here to merit SBC Executive Committee attention. Yet clergy sexual abuse is not given similar attention, because “Every Southern Baptist church is autonomous.”

The burden falls upon the Southern Baptist Convention messengers who at their annual meeting in June referred this debate over homosexual members at this one church to the executive committee.

Yet famously rejected the creation of a pedophilia database. And although abusers were found on an official church web site, took no other action to protect church members from sexually predatory clergy.

Brown's comment is here.

Papal diplomacy resurrected

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi met Pope Benedict XVI at the Vatican Wednesday morning.

No journalists or other impartial observers were present.

Perhaps they were on parallel, nonintersecting timelines.

After the 15-minute audience the Vatican reported:

His Holiness took the opportunity to speak of the requirements of the natural moral law and the Church’s consistent teaching on the dignity of human life from conception to natural death which enjoin all Catholics, and especially legislators, jurists and those responsible for the common good of society, to work in cooperation with all men and women of good will in creating a just system of laws capable of protecting human life at all stages of its development.”

Speaker Pelosi's office reported:

It is with great joy that my husband, Paul, and I met with his Holiness, Pope Benedict XVI today. In our conversation, I had the opportunity to praise the Church's leadership in fighting poverty, hunger and global warming, as well as the Holy Father's dedication to religious freedom and his upcoming trip and message to Israel. I was proud to show his Holiness a photograph of my family's papal visit in the 1950s, as well as a recent picture of our children and grandchildren.

In neither account did the pontiff remind Speaker Polisi, who supports abortion rights, that he has said that those who don't oppose abortion shouldn't take communion.

Or perhaps His Holiness is feeling more diplomatic of late, after jarring collisions over un-excommunications and an Austrian now-withdrawn appointment. That may displease our acquaintances on the Catholic right. And forecast calmer seas for Catholicism at large.

Non?

Questions of Vatican competence

Exploring today Pope Benedict XVI issues we have visited, the New York Times raises one question most strongly.

It comes from several directions, but most directly from a scholar interviewed for the piece:

The Vatican expert George Weigel, in a recent essay in First Things, an American religion journal, criticized the Vatican for its “chaos, confusion and incompetence.”

Regarding a Vatican examination of the Legionaries of Christ in light of recent revelations about its founder, the Rev. Marcial Maciel Degollado, and questions raised about his closest associates, Weigel is more pointed still:

In his criticism of the Vatican hierarchy, known as the curia, Mr. Weigel said a curia that allowed the Bishop Williamson controversy to explode was not “a curia capable of conducting an investigation that can command public credibility.”

Will joins BP in hornets' nest kicking

George Will joined Baptist Press in kicking hornets' nests this week. Indeed, Will's choice of nests recalled the BP response to Southern Baptist Environment and Climate Initiative (SBECI), as chronicled by Jonathan Merritt. For Will turned his acid intellectual pen to defending the pseudo science of "global cooling," which was given some friendly treatment by BP (just as global warming got a Southern Baptist cold shoulder) while Merritt struggled vainly in 2008 to get corrective messages through to a BP editor.

Messages to Will are public, however. Neither he nor his staff need answer phone or email for compelling correctives to be filed.

Nate Silver gave Will his comeuppance over what may yet be called "Will's Law," as a jape.

As Ezra Klein puts it:

In other words, comparing apples to apples, the scientific community didn't believe in global cooling and does believe in global warming. Sadly, our political pundits have outsourced their scientific research to an intern charged with a superficial skim of Newsweek covers.

Sound stewardship of facts, or climate, anyone?

Maciel facts out (please); Holy See intervention in?

A letter seeking forgiveness and healing is "circulating among the 800 priests and 2500 seminarians of the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ, and also among the 65,000 lay members of the Regnum Christi apostolate."

That letter is from the superior general of the congregation, Fr. Alvaro Corcueradoes. And it does not say:

Fr. Maciel had a daughter, a young woman now just over the age of twenty living in Spain, born from a relationship that was not sporadic, but regular, between the priest and a lover he had.

Sandro Magister concludes:

In part for reasons of personal conduct, therefore, the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ no longer seems to be capable of managing its own recovery.

Current materials generate growing clouds of satiric heat and deadly serious debate.

Meanwhile, First Things points out the necessity of complementary Catholic press "repentance and change." He argues in persuasive bullet-point detail that there is a great deal of truth yet to be told to set things more right.

Maciel facts out (please); Holy See intervention in …

A letter seeking forgiveness and healing is "circulating among the 800 priests and 2500 seminarians of the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ, and also among the 65,000 lay members of the Regnum Christi apostolate."

That letter is from the superior general of the congregation, Fr. Alvaro Corcueradoes. And it does not say:

Fr. Maciel had a daughter, a young woman now just over the age of twenty living in Spain, born from a relationship that was not sporadic, but regular, between the priest and a lover he had.

Sandro Magister concludes:

In part for reasons of personal conduct, therefore, the congregation of the Legionaries of Christ no longer seems to be capable of managing its own recovery.

Meanwhile, First Things points out the necessity of complementary Catholic press "repentance and change." For, as he demonstrates in detail, there is a great deal of truth yet to be discovered and told. And it should be.

Swat valley regression vs. Saudi reform

Schools for women are being destroyed in the Swat valley of Pakistan and a woman has been named Saudi Arabia's deputy education minister in charge of a new department for female students.

Both are revolutionary and involve complex application of political power:

1. Military action by the Taliban is seeing schools demolished and Sharia law imposed as part of a peace settlement in the Swat valley.
2. Consensus building among the religious elite and ruling family by King Abdullah in Saudi Arabia have led to a shift away from ultra-conservative rule.

Saudi Arabia's changes are the most important, for it has the world's largest known reserves of oil, has that region's dominant economy and controls the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

King Abdullah's reforms promise to be sweeping, as the London Financial Times reports:

King Abdullah has not just shaken up his government. He has seized control of the Saudi justice and education systems from the most reactionary elements of the clerical establishment and placed them in the hands of reformers.

His changes to the 21-man Council of Religious Scholars are illustrative of the change in religious/theological balance. King Abdullah ended the monopoly of an austere Islamic school of thought identified with the kingdom's dominant Wahhabi clerics. He brought in representatives from three more moderate Sunni groups. He named none from the Shi'ite minority.

In that context of shift in the balance of religious power, King Abdullah fired powerful, individual enemies of reform. He replaced the chief of the Saudi religious police, Sheikh Ibrahim, who runs the commission for the promotion of virtue and the prevention of vice, known as the mutawa, which enforces bans on alcohol and drugs, has gained a reputation for brutality. He replaced the country's most senior judge, Sheikh Salih Ibn al-Luhaydan, who ruled last year that it was permissible to kill owners of satellite television channels broadcasting "immoral" programmes. And several other hardline judges were fired.

Appointment of the nation's first woman minister was certainly important, although his appointment of Prince Faisal bin Abdullah, his son-in-law, as education minister, had at least equal practical effect.

The Financial Times concludes:

All this will be seen as a turning point if it breaks Wahhabi social control. The al-Saud need to curb decisively the corrosive power of the religious establishment and lead the kingdom towards a form of modernity that its religious heritage can sustain. That must eventually mean enlisting Islamist progressives – the most potent source of ideas for renewal – who have called for free elections, freedom of expression and association, an independent judiciary, a fairer distribution of wealth, and a foreign policy arrived at through open debate – in short, a constitutional monarchy . . . .

The Taliban-imposed changes in Pakistan are also driven by religion. But unlikely to survive perhaps fundamentally secular U.S. military efforts.

With a net effect, assuming the Saudi monarchy manages well the transitions in power that are in store as a result of the crown prince's terminal illness, of a major theological and social shift toward greater human freedom.