Associate pastor barred from church pending resolution of sexual misconduct charges

Emerald Baptist Church Associate Pastor and Minister of Music Norman Henley Keesee has been barred from church activities and the church grounds pending resolution of charges of sexual misconduct and lewd acts.

Keesee, a Southern Baptist, was arrested by Greenwood, S.C., police after "the mother of a 13 year old girl and attendee of Emerald Baptist Church met with authorities to alert them to allegations made by her daughter."

According to GWD Today:

The victim stated that during private keyboard lessons conducted in the victims bedroom, Keesee would touch areas of her body that were not conducive with the lesson. The victim said that she would pull away from Keesee but that he would continue his actions during the lesson. According to the mother, Keesee had given her daughter keyboard lessons from February to July of this year. The victim had told her mother at the end of July that she no longer wanted to play the keyboard, which according to the mother was very strange at the time. The victim also gave a second child's name with which Keesee had given keyboard lessons.

Associated Baptist Press reports that Pastor Curtis Eidson said:

As the pastor of the church, I am not here tonight to defend anyone's innocence nor to declare anyone's guilt. It's not my place. I am here to say tonight, though, that with all that is going on Norman is still my brother in the Lord and the victim is still my sister in the Lord. Nothing, absolutely nothing, will change that.

North Carolina youth minister arrested

Thomas L. Elliott, who is a youth minister at Autryville Baptist Church in North Carolina, was arrested in an undercover internet sex sting by the Guilford County Sheriff’s Office Thursday evening, the Sampson Independent reported.

Elliot was a volunteer youth minister at Evergreen Baptist Church before being hired at Autryville Baptist.

[Cross posted at BaptistPlanet.wordpress.com]

Scottish Catholics asked to come up with the cash, fast

Scottish Catholics asked to dig deep this weekend, apparently in part because Pope Benedict XVI attracted 30,000 fewer pilgrims than anticipated. They're being asked to come up with another £800,000 ($1.1 million). That's on the heels of £1.7 million they were asked to come up with prior to the visit.

There is a price in Baptistland for defending those sexually abused by clergy

The passion of religious faith transmuted into meanness, explains Christa Brown:

I never imagined a world of so much meanness until I stepped onto the terrain of Baptistland with pleas for clergy accountability and for care of abuse survivors.

Worst of all . . . it’s a malignant meanness that masks itself as religion.

What N.C. Southern Baptist fundamentalists want in an editor?

About the abrupt resignation of North Carolina Biblical Recorder Editor Norman Jameson John D. Pierce of Baptists Today writes

In 2000, Herb Hollinger retired from the helm of Baptist Press — the Southern Baptist Executive Committee public relations arm that masquerades as a legitimate news service. In a meeting shortly afterward, longtime editor of Louisiana's Baptist Message, Lynn Clayton, asked then-SBC Executive Committee President Morris Chapman what kind of person would be chosen to lead BP.

Without hesitation, Chapman responded: “Someone loyal to me and the conservative cause.” While he expanded on that response, there was no mention of competence or experience, just loyalty to those looking for help in carrying out their Fundamentalist agenda. Chapman found such a person in Will Hall. North Carolina will find one too.

The Anglican Communion's women bishops

The 28 women bishops in the Anglican Communion, reviewed by Ruthie Glendhill, religion correspondent for The Times of London.

None in England.

After the review, Glendhill interviews Christina Rees, who has campaigned for the ordination of women in the Anglican Church and is now the Chairperson of WATCH (Women and the Church), about "the prospects for women bishops in the Church of England after initial analysis of the General Synod election results from 2010" indicated a shift against them:

Texas Baptist 'Valleygate' lawsuit settled

The Valleygate lawsuit filed by the Rev. Otto Arango alleging libel and slander by the Baptist General Convention of Texas and others has been settled in mediation and without an admission of fault to or by Arago, according to confidential sources and documents we were provided.

The overall terms of the settlement "are confidential."

The burden of the settlement with Arango is shared, we were informed, by the Baptist General Convention of Texas (BGCT), the Dallas-based Texas Baptist Standard, Calvary Baptist Church of Mineral Wells, Texas, and the other defendants, through their insurance carriers.

Terms were apparently agreed to in mediation last month.

It was Cavalry Baptist Church Pastor David Montoya, through his blogging as the Spiritual Samurai, who first called attention to the issues involved.

Asked to comment on the matter today, Montoya told us, "I understand that the insurance company for my church has settled on my behalf as well as the church. The amount is confidential. I never had any malice toward Pastor Arango. I was upset with the people in charge of Church Planting at the BGCT back at that time for their complete lack of oversight as found by the investigators in their 2006 report, that was to whom my blogging was directed."

As Sam Hodges of the Dallas Morning News explained in August, 2008, when the original action was filed:

The Rev. Otto Arango claims he was defamed by the Dallas-based BGCT as it dealt with allegations of "phantom churches" and misspent money in a scandal that came to be known in Baptist circles as "Valleygate."

In an independent investigation commissioned by the BGCT noted that Dr. Arango and two other pastors sponsored a reported 258 new churches, which together received more than $1.3 million in BGCT funds.

But many of those new churches failed, others were mere "extension units" of existing churches, and some never existed at all, the investigators found in a report sharply critical of the BGCT for lax oversight.

Although the investigators' report referred to a "troubling deposits of checks into Dr. Arango's personal bank account," no criminal charges were filed. The BGCT chose not to pursue recovery of any of the more than $1.3 million in BGCT funds involved, arguing that civil action was “neither practical nor would it represent good stewardship of churches’ resources.”

Arango's subsequent suit was filed in Hidalgo County (TX) District Court and sought damages for both lost earnings and "past and future mental anguish." Arango's attorney said in 2008 that the matter had made it hard for Arango to continue working with churches in Texas and across Latin America.

[This item is cross-posted on WordPress.]

Caner hangs out his 'Islam Expert for Hire' shingle

Ditched amid uproar as dean of Liberty Baptist Theological Seminary but (huh?) retained as a professor, Ergun Caner visited Bristol, Va., Friday to dismiss it all:

We saw it (controversy) coming. My brothers and I have been dealing with it for years. This just happened to bounce big, and I paid no attention. News means little to me, and the Web is — well, bloggers for the most part — are just frustrated people in their basements.

Also still for hire is Crying Wind, the not-an-Indian whose profitable history of pretending to an American Indian life story is detailed by Phil Johnson in Evangelical Bunco Artists. There is a long list, to which Johnson sadly appends Caner.

Caveat emptor.

U.S. Air Force Academy & damage from the Christian conservative religious push into the military

How did the U.S. Air Force Academy come to be so "overrun with Christian conservative fanatics" that a coalition of civil rights and interfaith groups was driven to send a letter Tuesday to the Department of Defense.

That letter detailed a startling cadet email and included "testimony from the parents of an academy graduate who believe their daughter was 'methodically brain washed' by a fundamentalist group there, demanding an investigation of the academy and the evangelical academy ministry Cadets For Christ."

It all began with the chaplains, who have as a group become steadily more fundamentalist. As Jeff Sharlet explains:

"It was Vietnam which really turned the tide," writes Anne C. Loveland, author of the only book-length study of the evangelical wave within the armed forces, American Evangelicals and the U.S. Military, 1942-1993. Until the Vietnam War, it was the traditionally moderate mainline Protestant denominations (Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians), together with the Catholic Church, that dominated the religious life of the military. But as leading clergymen in these denominations spoke out against the war, evangelicals who saw the struggle in Vietnam as God's task rushed in. In 1966, Billy Graham used the pulpit of the Presidential Prayer Breakfast to preach a warrior Christ to lead the troops in Vietnam: "I am come to send fire on the earth!" he quoted Christ. "Think not that I am come to send peace but a sword!" Other fundamentalists took from Vietnam the lessons of guerrilla combat, to be applied to the spiritual fight through the tactic of what they called infiltration, filling the ranks of secular institutions with missionaries both bold and subtle. That same year, one Family organizer advised inverting the strategy of the Vietcong, who through one targeted assassination could immobilize thousands. Winning the soul "key men" in the military could mobilize many more for spiritual war"

"Evangelicals looked at the military and said, 'This is a mission field,'" explains Captain MeLinda Morton, a former missile launch commander who until 2005 was a staff chaplain at the Air Force Academy and has since studied the history of the chaplaincy. "They wanted to send their missionaries to the military, and for the military itself to become missionaries to the world."

Sharlet argues that this has been carried out in a way that corrupts the process of officer training in very much the ways described in the coalition letter to the Department of Defense.

Read more of the excerpt from his book, C Street: The Fundamentalist Threat to American Democracy, [here].

A Fair(y) Use Tale

Regarding Bishop Chaput and press bias against religion

Bishop Chaput and others don't want to hear it, and his first comment on this topic included unfortunate language, but Mark Silk is exactly right:

I've spent the better part of two decades studying, writing about, and contributing to news coverage of religion. As in any other field of endeavor, there's the good, the bad, and the ugly. And that means the field can be cherry-picked to make a case for hostility to one or another religious tradition, or to religion in general. But with the exception of certain cult-like groups (the Church of Scientology, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, etc.), across-the-board bias is not to be found--and certainly not against the Catholic Church.

Another military religious intimidation incident

For refusing to attend a Christian band concert soldiers at Fort Eustis were reportedly confined to barracks.

That was in August, not long after the Air Force Academy elected to keep secret its 2010 religious climate survey which apparently indicated the tensions which boiled over this week into allegations of conservative Christian intimidation.

One writer found humor in the apparent decision of a few U.S. Army Transportation Corps soldiers to clean their barracks rather than "attend a concert by Christian 'rock' group Barlow Girl," writing, "Here is Barlow Girl (shudder):"

Still we know, don't we, that what we think of the music is, irrelevant.

Almost everyone remembers, don't they, that any application of military force to promote a religious view makes a mockery of freedom of religion.

Freedom of expression

The Center for Inquiry had a Campaign for Free Expression contest:

The Center for Inquiry is pleased to announce that Gregory Walsh and John Schmid of Maryland are the Grand Prize winners of its Campaign for Free Expression Video Contest, which asked contestants to submit short videos in the form of a public service announcement that addresses the importance of free expression.

They're all about secularizing society, which in the context of this publication space, underlines the message.

YouTube video admonishes Eddie Long to 'tell the truth'

Openly gay and bisexual Rev. Dennis A. Meredith, pastor of Tabernacle Baptist Church in Atlanta, has posted a YouTube video admonishing scandal besieged Lithonia Eddie Long to "tell the truth:"

Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Shelia M. Poole wrote:

The nearly four-minute video was posted on YouTube on Monday, the day after Long made his first public comments about the scandal in which four young men sued the pastor, accusing him of coercing them into sexual relations.

. . .

Meredith said he decided to make the video because he was "saddened and disappointed" that there seemed to be little concern for the four men by Long and members of the 25,000-member church, who were interviewed later by the media. Meredith, who describes himself as openly gay and bisexual, said he called on a film crew, that's also making a documentary about himself and his church, to shoot the video with downtown Atlanta as a backdrop.

Meredith said his congregation is about 85 percent gay, lesbian and bisexual. Meredith said he has lost some members to New Birth because they disagreed of his views about welcoming gays in the church.

U.S. Air Force Academy cadets allege Christian conservative religious intimidation: Addendum

Air Force Academy Chapel

A U.S. Air Force Academy cadet has written in an email to Mikey Weinstein of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation (MRFF) , warning that:

Mr. Weinstein, USAFA is literally overrun with Christian conservative fanatics. And the leadership here either knows this or is ridiculously blind to it. If any of us gave even the slightest indication that we weren’t one of their number, our lives would be even more miserable than they already are due to the fact that we are all living lies here. Despite the Cadet Honor Code we all lie about our lives. We have to. We don’t have a choice. Thus we are all “invisible” to our tormentors.

In the email published by Veterans Today, the cadet says he represents a group of about 100, mostly mainstream Protestant cadets who despair of command intervention.

"The MRFF and allies from a myriad of civil rights and interfaith groups sent a letter Tuesday to the Department of Defense (DoD) detailing the cadet's email and other startling complaints," writes Mike Ludwig of truthout, "including testimony from the parents of an academy graduate who believe their daughter was 'methodically brain washed' by a fundamentalist group there, demanding an investigation of the academy and the evangelical academy ministry Cadets For Christ."

The group also seeks official release of the recent USAFA study of the religious climate at the academy. It was leaked to the press. According to those leaked results, "353 cadets (almost 1 out of every 5 survey participants) reported having been subjected to unwanted religious proselytizing, and 23 cadets (13 of them Christians) reported living 'in fear of their physical safety' because of their religious beliefs."

Truthout further reports:

Mikey Weinstein, a USAFA graduate and MRFF founder, told Truthout that USAFA Superintendent Lt. Gen. Mike Gould was dishonest about the results of the Climate Study, and told the public that everything was fine at the academy without releasing the actual results. He said it's time for a legitimate investigation of the "fundamentalist culture" in the academy.

At Veterans Today Darryl Wimberley wrote of the email which precipitated this controversy:

This cadet’s view, from what I saw in a recent year at USAFA, is truthful. Now, I can imagine a grad from, say ’71, reading the letter penned below with incredulity. The letter was sent to Mikey Weinstein’s MRFF organization to dispute USAFA’s public stand that it’s officially religion-neutral. The details will be hard for many/most to believe who haven’t been plugged into Academy life for a while. So for context here is a bottom-line judgment that I reached after a recent year in Fairchild Hall: USAFA has had a problem distinguishing religious freedom from religious harassment ever since the Frank Dobson center got established at the South Gate. The profile of young folks coming to USAFA has become more narrow with the end of Selective Service; the body is less diverse than during the years where a young man had to worry about the draft.

Addendum

The Air Force Academy decision to keep the climate study secret was protested in August by 50 AFA backers.

A portion of the study obtained by the Colorado Springs Independent's Pam Zubeck revealed problems. Zubeck wrote:

— 141 cadets said they have been subjected to unwanted religious proselytizing sometimes, often or very often. Another 212 said they had been once or twice. Staff numbers were lower.

— 263 cadets said they were less accepting of bisexual men or women, 330 were less accepting of gay men and 268 were less accepting of lesbians since coming to the academy. The numbers were about half for those who had grown more accepting.

— 25 percent of civilian females said women received less favorable treatment in performance evaluations, and 27.5 percent of civilian racial minorities said so. Also, 33.3 percent of racial minorities among the civilian ranks said they received less opportunities for leadership positions; 30 percent of civilian women said this about themselves.

— Although sexual assault numbers were "too small to report," the survey found 43 percent of female active duty personnel at the academy witnessed sexist behaviors and 40 percent of women witnessed crude or offensive behaviors. With men, the ratios were 18 percent and 23 percent.

— 14 male cadets and 47 female cadets reported feeling in fear of their physical safety because of their gender; 23 felt in fear due to religious beliefs (13 of them Christians), and 13 felt in fear due to their race (8 being Caucasian).

— 46 percent of female cadets said they witnessed harassment or discrimination based on gender, and 27 percent of minorities said they had witnessed harassment or discrimination based on race or ethnicity.

— Those who have experienced some for of discrimination or harassment broke down this way: physical assault or injury, 42; terrorized or tormented, 54; threats of violence or stalking, 36; taunted or ridiculed, 235; humiliated, 171; oppressed, 85; persecuted or treated unfairly, 159; insulted or offended, 372; ignored, snubbed or excluded, 281; looked down upon, 304. Permanent staff's reports trended the same by category but at lower numbers/.

Weinstein responded to Zubeck's account, saying, "The data is malodorous. It stinks, and it can't be explained away. It's the tarantula on the wedding cake; it's very hard to tell the bride and groom to just ignore it. And the ramifications are already being seen."

NPR: Church tackles sex abuse by Eddie Long and others

Garland's cross-denominational study

Why predatory clergy flourish

Sexually abusive pastor profile and technique

On NPR, Baylor's Diana Garland, co-author of "How Sexual Misconduct Happens," and Monsignor Stephen Rossetti, clinical associate professor of Pastoral Studies at Catholic University, address how church tackles sex abuse by clergy.

They address both the problem in general and the Eddie Long case.

Garland's study found that the problem cuts across denominational lines.

Christine O’Donnell’s fantasy satanism

Delaware Republican Senate candidate Christine O'Donnell told Bill Maher, "I dabbled into witchcraft," and added a couple of details which suggest that her story was made up for its sensationalistic appeal. Imagine that.

Fred Clark writing at slactivist nails it down to the dubious sources:

That evidence -- her claim to have seen a "Satanic altar" with "a little blood there" -- is cribbed entirely from Mike Warnke, the subject of the second book I'm recommending here: Selling Satan: The Evangelical Media and the Mike Warnke Scandal, by Mike Hertenstein and Jon Trott. Selling Satan is a remarkably thorough piece of investigative journalism by two devout evangelical Christians whose reluctance to cast judgment on a purported fellow believer lends them to document Warnke's lies in devastating detail. (The Cornerstone magazine articles summarizing this investigation can be read online here.)

Watch. You don't have to be Paul Ekman to make a reasonable decision about the veracity of her claims in this case: