Last week we looked at the Indian half of the Dalai Lama’s claim that China had a lot to learn about religious harmony from its neighbor to the southwest. Try to find stories about recent events in China similar to India’s Gujarat massacre, India’s burnings of Christian churches, India’s Muslim bombings, India’s continuing religious warfare in Kashmir, India’s heavy-handed Puritanism of Hindu Taliban thugs. You won’t find much. In a country of 1.3 billion people there is a little bit of almost everything, but “infinitesimal” would be a good word to describe the level of religious violence in today’s China.

The 20^th century revolutionary movement in China started at about the same time it did in India, but against a historical backdrop of theocratic violence that young intellectuals were determined not to repeat. In the 1850s, a lunatic Christian named Hong Xiuquan persuaded followers that he too was the son of God, sent to save the East as his brother Jesus had saved the West. The tale of what became known as the “Heavenly Kingdom of Taiping” is far stranger than fiction; Hong conquered most of southern China, ruled as its emperor in the old imperial palace at Nanjing for many years, and was ultimately overthrown only at the cost of some 20 million lives. That’s a lot of bodies, even for China.

On top of that, the communists saw that their rival, Chiang Kai-shek, had converted to Christianity, and that the corruption of his government and his perceived sellout to Western interests were inextricably entangled with foreign efforts to Christianize and colonize China. If there was one thing the often-bickering Chinese communists agreed on, it was that religion was not going to undermine their campaign to modernize the nation.

That never meant banning religion per se. It did mean bringing religion under firm control of the state, so that it could not pose a political threat. The approach is quite different from that of India and America, where religion is respected as a power in its own sphere equal to that of the civil government. China has five government-approved religions: Buddhism, Catholicism, Islam, Protestantism, and Taoism. Anyone can worship in any of these faiths to his heart’s content. Catholics, for example, are free to believe in Purgatory, indulgences, and the magic power of relics; free to attend Mass whenever they want, sing their hymns, and receive all seven sacraments. So why do the Vatican and its American Christian allies complain about China all the time?
Read the rest of this entry &raquo

Update: Yesterday CFI issued an updated statement affirming support for religious freedom and stating “CFI’s unequivocal support for the legal right of Muslims to place a community center near Ground Zero does not imply that CFI views the new center as an event to be celebrated…On balance, CFI does not consider houses of worship to be beneficial to humanity, whether they are built at Ground Zero or elsewhere. ” However, the statement makes it clear that CFI believes that there should be no prohibition against building the Cordoba House or any other religious building closer to Ground Zero, and it no longer features the language of the previous statement suggesting that it would be better if the vicinity of Ground Zero was a faith-free zone.

The original post follows:

Should lower Manhatan be a faith-free zone?

The Center For Inquiry thinks so. In a statement released today, the Center for Inquiry (CFI) affirmed its support for freedom of religion but nevertheless called for a moratorium on new faith-based institutional buildings to be constructed in the vicinity of Ground Zero:

The Center for Inquiry is troubled by the rhetoric of some of those protesting the proposed Islamic religious center and mosque near Ground Zero, and it especially deplores the growing politicization of the dispute. CFI also holds that the focus of the protests is too narrow; it would be inappropriate to build any new house of worship in the area immediately around Ground Zero, not just mosques. “The 9/11 attacks were an example of faith-based terrorism, and any institution that privileges faith above reason is an affront to those who were killed and injured in those attacks,” observes Ronald A. Lindsay, president and CEO of CFI.

I suppose that CFI thinks that this is a nuanced position on this contentious issue, but let’s get one thing straight: this is an issue that leaves little room for nuance. You either support free exercise for all religions, or you don’t. It is true that CFI affirms multiple times in the statement that they support the First Amendment and see no legitimate legal mechanism for preventing the construction of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque (actually, it’s an Islamic community center that will be two blocks away from Ground Zero), but it is still utter nonsense to declare that the area close to where the World Trade Center towers once stood should be somehow sacred or should be some kind of faith-free zone.

First, let’s make it clear that this statement is still singling out Islam above all other religions. How can that be? After all, they do state that no new religious buildings should be constructed around Ground Zero, not just Islamic religious buildings. But this is a moot point, because the only project under consideration right now, and the only one that is at the center of a contentious national debate, is the Cordoba House. Period. Therefore, any discussion of any other religion is a red herring. Sure, we could all agree that, as long as we’re opposing the Cordoba House, then we’re also opposing building a Mormon temple, or a house of Scientology, or even a Catholic Church. But all of that is meaningless, because right now no one is proposing to build any of those houses of worship close to Ground Zero. So let’s leave aside the idea that CFI’s statement is doing anything different than singling out Islam, which is what all the other organizations who oppose the project (organizations whose rhetoric CFI finds troubling) are doing.

But to the extent that CFI does try to make all of religion their target in this statement, it is unreasonable to portray all people of faith as kindred spirits to the 19 fanatics who attacked the United States and murdered thousands of people on September 11, 2001. One of the most common talking points against the Cordoba House project is that all Muslims bear some sort of special responsibility for the actions of the few murderous fanatics who claimed to commit their crimes in the name if Islam; while CFI seems to condemn painting Muslims with such a broad brush, nevertheless by condemning the construction of any house of worship in the vicinity of Ground Zero, they seem to only be making the brush even wider by pointing the finger at all people of faith. The vast majority of believers in this world hold no truck with fanatics who would use murder to advance their cause. Why should they all be punished by a sudden declaration of “no-faith zone” for lower Manhattan?

Frankly, the idea of banning all religious construction around Ground Zero doesn’t even make sense. The Cordoba House is proposed for the site of an old Burlington Coat Factory two blocks from Ground Zero. How wide, exactly, would CFI like the no-faith zone to be? How many blocks are enough to show sufficient deference to the families of the victims of 9/11, many of whom are people of faith themselves? Do we condemn them too if they make faith a part of their lives, because faith may have played a part in motivating the 9/11 hijackers? Where does this end?

Religious freedom, like any freedom, is not absolute, but neither can it be restrained in mere symbolic gestures. Declaring lower Manhattan to be some sort of faith-free zone is a non sequitur; if people of faith aren’t collectively responsibile for 9/11, why should they bear responsibility for keeping their religious institutions away from Ground Zero? And if we are meant to believe that all people of faith indeed do have a collective responsibility for the actions of terrorists, then how can we even have a meaningful discussion on religious fanaticism? How can we address the problems caused by religion without making a distinction between most people of faith and the people who are actually causing the problems? We’d be redefining the enemy to be bigger and bigger.

We live in a world of religious people and non-religious people. By all means let those of us who stand outside of organized religion make criticisms and work to counter its harmful influence when necessary. Let us advocate for our own different visions for the future of the world. But to do this most effectively we need to employ the scalpel more and the hatchet less. The 19 people (and the many more who supported them) who attacked the United States on 9/11 received a lot of their motivation from hatred and religious ideology, but they were not acting on behalf of all Muslims, and they certainly were not representing all people of faith in their actions. Making lower Manhattan into some kind of faith-free zone would be an affront to religious liberty and would make no sense in the face of the challenges that we do face today regarding religious extremism.

As a secular humanist, I dispute that ground can be declared sacred, and lower Manhattan is no exception. Cordoba House should be built right where its sponsors have the legal right to build it.

Yesterday both opponents and supporters of the Park51 Islamic community center project in lower Manhattan gathered for competing rallies. The New York Times was there and reported on some ugliness that took place:

Around noon on Sunday, Michael Rose, a medical student from Brooklyn, approached some of the hundreds of protesters who had gathered near ground zero to rally against a mosque and Islamic center planned for the neighborhood.

Mr. Rose, 27, carried a handwritten sign in favor of the mosque — “Religious tolerance is what makes America great,” it read — and his presence caused a stir. An argument broke out, punctuated by angry fingers pointed in the student’s face.

The police eventually removed Mr. Rose for his own safety.

Salon.com commentator Glenn Greenwald points to a video of another confrontation that took place at the same anti-Park51 rally. An African-American man wearing a cap that fit tightly over his head walked through, and members of the crowd quickly decided that he must be a Muslim and started shouting anti-Islamic slogans at him. If you watch the video at YouTube (warning: strong language, poor sound quality), you can see the hostile tone of the demonstration. The man who is singled out seems to be simultaneously angry and baffled. For what it’s worth, he denies he’s even a Muslim, but also expresses bewilderment that the crowd singled him out without knowing his opinion on the subject. But his very presence activates the deep hostility of the crowd in a way that looks downright frightening in the video.

In light of all this ugliness, it disappoints me to see that Mother Jones is reporting this morning that several commissioners from the United States Commission on International Religious Freedom have come out strongly against the Park51 project. The USCIRF is federally funded and was created by Congress in 1998 to monitor religious freedom around the world and advise the president on the issue. But apparently many of its commissioners lose sight of this mission when it comes to addressing religious freedom at home. According to the Mother Jones report:

In a recent piece for National Review Online, Nina Shea, one of USCIRF’s nine commissioners (who are selected by the president and congressional leaders), wrote that instead of “a cultural center for all New Yorkers,” the “mosque” project could be “a potential tool for Islamists”—suggesting it would be a hotbed of jihadism that, among other things, spreads the literature and ideas of Islamic extremism. She compared the leaders of the Cordoba House project to convicted terrorist Omar Abdel Rahman (the “blind Sheikh”) and accused Fort Hood and Christmas Day bombing coordinator Anwar al-Awlaki. (Shea’s piece, as of Monday, was no longer showing up on the NRO site.)

Mother Jones goes on to point out that at least two of the other eight commissioners also have spoken out against the project, including Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, who compared the project to a hypothetical Shinto Shrine at Pearl Harbor and believes it should be moved several more blocks away from Ground Zero.

Never mind that Imam Rauf, the religious leader behind the project, indubitably holds moderate religious and political views. Never mind that the First Amendment to the Constitution is not conditional based on which religion is asking for free exercise. Never mind that one of the lead opponents to Park51 has unabashedly and repeatedly lied about the project. Nina Shea and Richard Land are here to tell you that religious freedom doesn’t exist in lower Manhattan…or that it shouldn’t.

But while many opponents of the Park51 project claim it’s a matter of the land around Ground Zero being somehow sacred, it is nevertheless evident that—as one of the project backers, Daisy Khan, stated yesterday—the opposition has to do with hatred of Muslims more than anything else. As the Washington Post reported today, Mosque construction is facing tough opposition all over the nation, including in Murfreesboro, TN, where opponents to a local Islamic center’s expansion plans carried signs that said “Keep Tennessee Terror Free.”

It is the height of bigotry to blame an entire population for the actions of a few. Mosque opponents are acting as though Islam itself (and therefore all Muslims) attacked America on 9/11, rather than a small band of violent and hateful fanatics. When they say that building the Park51 project is “insensitive” to the 9/11 victim’s families, they are acting as though the very existence of Muslims is what’s offensive.

The conflict over Park51 points to a larger battle over our country’s future. Will the USA be a nation that respects the First Amendment, that is tolerant (and even accepting) of religious minorities, that truly practices the ideal that people should be free to practice their respective religions without interference? Or will xenophobia triumph, fanned by the flames of polarizing political and media figures, leaving the nation as a sort of exclusive zone for the one chosen Christian religion?

It’s a battle we cannot afford to lose. The Park51 project must be allowed to proceed, unhindered. Now is the time for concerned citizens to speak out in favor of the universal principle of religious freedom, which benefits all of us, no matter how we may individually feel about different organized religions. Or will secular humanists one day be saying our own version of Pastor Niemöller’s famous statement? They came first for the Muslims…

The Dalai Lama was sounding off again a few days ago, this time recommending that China should learn about religious harmony from India. “When I see conflicts in various parts of world I try to tell them that people belonging to different races and following different religion can live in harmony.” He boasted that India was known all over the world for non-violence and religious harmony, adding that “People in China very much need to know this.”

What on earth is he talking about?

Is he talking about the Gujarat riots of 2002, where Hindus enraged over what turned out to be an accidental train fire killed an estimated 2,000 Muslims and drove another 100,000+ from their homes, with the connivance of the local government? Only 11 people have been punished for this so far – they must have been awfully industrious. That’s fewer than the 14 people handed life sentences for the slaughter of another thousand Muslims at Bhagalpur in 1989, but that process took 17 years to complete.

Is he talking about the mass violence directed against Christians in Orissa at Christmas in 2007? Read the rest of this entry &raquo

Two candidates for “Man Bites Dog” headline of the year surfaced last week.

“Town Protects Tavern from Church.” No, this is not a typo. In Hampshire, Illinois, just west of Chicago, the Faithway Baptist Church sought permission from the village board to open a youth center. Normally, that would be a no-brainer, but in this case the youth center would have been across the street from The Kave, a comfortable neighborhood watering hole offering karaoke, shufflebowl, and Cubs baseball. Illinois law prohibits issuing a liquor license to any establishment operating within 100 feet of a church. Although it doesn’t prohibit a church from opening near a tavern, the village board realized that if The Kave were to change ownership in the future, it would be unlawful to grant the new owner a license, so The Kave would be gone. In a stunning display of common sense, the Board decided that would be unfair, and told Faithway Baptist to look elsewhere.

That decision probably violated federal law, as we’ll see in a minute. But first the other headline: “Strippers Protest Church.” The Foxhole is a business establishment in Warsaw, Ohio, offering entertainment a little edgier than karaoke and shufflebowl. For the past four years, though, Pastor Bill Dunfee of the New Beginnings Ministries Church – which is not across the street, but four miles away – has led a campaign of harassment against The Foxhole, its employees, and its customers. Dunfee and his congregation would show up outside The Foxhole, sometimes with bullhorns, snapping photos of customers and their license plates to violate their privacy online, and berating them for being evil as they entered and left the premises. Dunfee has also been pursuing legal remedies, including zoning laws, to throw The Foxhole employees out of work. “You can’t share territory with the Devil” growls Pastor Dunfee, who says he is intent on glorifying Jesus. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

The night Obama was elected, my roommates and I huddled around our beaten and battered television amidst term papers and study guides to watch a rare, if not once-in-a-lifetime event occur: history catching up to our own ideals.  Obama appealed not only to the “bleeding-heart liberals,” but the youth who needed to believe that change was possible. A clichéd concept, but to a generation watching their parents lose their jobs, their grandparents lose their houses, and their peers die in Afghanistan, change was salvation.  Obama was our savior.  So put that in your pipe and smoke it, Sharron Angle.

His speech was moving, carrying all the themes and meaning we expected from a man of such deep intelligence and passion. I doubted we’d be disappointed, but a simple statement left us stunned:

Its the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

“Oh my gawd!” my roommate shrieked, “did he just shout out to the gays??”

He did, and understandably so.  A large portion of the LGBT community threw all their weight behind his campaign, thrilled to root on a man who had no apparent moral objections to homosexuality (a claim that couldn’t be made for the McCain/Palin Bible camp).  It was assumed Obama would, with the magical flick of his wrist, give gays their rights.  All of them.  Stat.

What some members of the LGBT community failed to remember was that Obama’s agenda wasn’t driven by the 10 percent of the population who smacked his campaign logo next to their rainbow bumper stickers.  He never claimed (once running for President) to be a proponent for gay marriage.  He still needed to take into consideration the moderates and conservatives of the country who couldn’t sit through an episode of Will and Grace without squirming.  And they were out there.  The country was reminded of this when news quickly broke of the Proposition 8 victory in California.  An initiative Obama opposed.  See how this works?

Obama has managed to theoretically support the LGBT community without completely ruffling the feathers of the Christian right.

“Yes, the Defense of Marriage Act is wrong.”

“No, marriage is between a man and a woman.”

”Yes, Prop 8 is divisive.”

“No, give them civil unions.”

“Don’t Ask Don’t Tell is wrong.”

“Now hold that thought.”

Obama is not an advocate, but an ally of the LGBT community, and a meek ally at that. Wednesday’s enormous Prop-8 smack-down victory (hopefully the first of more to come) gave gay rights advocates a reason to celebrate, but left the more critical thinkers to contemplate Obama’s impending moment of truth.  As gay marriage rises from the shadows of the states and begins to enter federal territory, how will Obama respond?

Maybe two years ago, when the country was crawling out of its George W. hole, a vague nudge of support from the president would have been briefly sufficient.  Some bread, water, and a charismatic nod were more than the Bush administration had ever bothered to give.  But in the months to follow, as a flood of hostile bigots came barring down on local street corners and assembly halls, and the Christian right’s disgusted disapproval began to border on abusive rage, bread and water were no longer enough.  The scraps being fed in the form of partner benefits and a glacially-paced repeal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell only served as a reminder of what was truly deserved: equal rights.  All of them.

Much has changed within the country since the Obama campaign. Hope has sunken with his approval rating, and many have thrown their hands in the air, branding him a failure and a disappointment. Though I’ve not given up on Obama, this country certainly isn’t where I envisioned it to be on that inspiring night in November.  It has warped, mutated, and blistered into a nervous “before” picture of a crumbling empire.  That’s changed its citizens.  It’s changed me.

And yet, somewhere deep down, I’m still that liberal arts college student who waited five hours in a line to hear Obama speak about “hope” and “change” and the possibility of me and my friends becoming adults in a world that wouldn’t tell us, “No.  Who you are is not good enough.”

In these times deprived of Martin Luther Kings and Harvey Milks, my fellow students and I believed that Obama was supposed to fill the void.  He was supposed to save the world.  He was supposed to be everything to everyone.  But as it turns out, he isn’t a super hero or a miracle worker; he’s simply a person.  Just like the gays and lesbians who want to get married to the people they love. We’ll accept that you’re only human, Obama, if you acknowledge that we’re all human, too.

The reaction of the Catholic Church to last week’s court decision striking down California’s anti-gay marriage Proposition 8 was swift and to the point. Speaking for the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, Cardinal Francis George mourned that “It is tragic that a federal judge would overturn the clear and expressed will of the people in their support for the institution of marriage.” On the Protestant side, Focus on the Family chimed in that “Judge Walker’s ruling raises a shocking notion that a single federal judge can nullify the votes of more than 7 million California voters.”

This sudden Christian solicitude for the will of the people should make anyone familiar with the history of Christianity gag.

Democracy was invented by the Pagan Greeks; there is some reason to believe that Pagan Germanic tribes practiced a rough form of democracy as well. It certainly isn’t found anywhere in the Bible; when 250 “men of renown” complained to Moses that he was being overly autocratic, God obligingly opened a pit in the earth to swallow them up.

After Christianity seized control of the Roman Empire, democracy vanished from Europe altogether; Middle Ages society was founded on Augustine’s iron notion of rule by God, not by man. The Middle Ages Church did all it could (and that was quite a bit) to snuff out any glimmer of democracy before it could take hold. When the Emperor Frederick II published his “Constitution of Melfi” in 1231, it provided among other things for a representative assembly, with each town sending two delegates to inform the Emperor about local needs. A livid Pope Gregory IX excommunicated Frederick and called him the Antichrist. That should not have been surprising, for only a few years earlier Pope Innocent III had declared England’s Magna Carta, the first written expression of the English people’s rights, null and void because it purported to rein in the power of a divinely ordained monarch and vassal of the Pope.

The Protestant Reformation did nothing to advance the cause of democracy; neither Luther nor Calvin had the slightest intention of giving the common people any more power than the Pope had. By the 1640s, when the English Civil War broke out, the rebels were a curious mix of proto-democrats, heavily influenced by John Lilburne, and radical Calvinists, led by Oliver Cromwell. Lilburne’s goal was simple: he wanted all adult males to be able to elect Parliament, rather than just a small handful of the propertied class. Cromwell’s goal was equally simple: rule by the God experts, to impose morality on a sinful island. Cooperation between the two camps was easy when both were simply warring against the status quo, but once the king was defeated the incompatibility of their goals quickly surfaced. Cromwell ordered Lilburne’s arrest for treason, but after a dramatic trial before a jury Lilburne was acquitted. Didn’t matter; Cromwell threw him back in jail anyway, without bothering to file charges. Cromwell proceeded to expel the elected members of Parliament who voted against him – so much for democracy. Read the rest of this entry &raquo

The Utah Supreme Court this week reversed the conviction of Warren Jeffs for his role in the statutory rape of a fourteen-year-old girl. Viewing the facts of the case through the prism of Utah’s religious history reveals an ugly picture indeed.

Warren Jeffs helped run a small Mormon sect called the “Fundamentalist” LDS that is not a part of Utah’s dominant Mormon establishment, the LDS. Elissa Wall spent her entire childhood being brainwashed by this sect; recordings of Jeffs’ teachings were broadcast throughout her home on a speaker system. When Elissa was twelve, she discovered what happens to people who defy the FLDS prophet: her father’s disobedience was punished by having his family stripped from him and sent to another city, where her mother was “married” to an FLDS leader who already had several other wives.

When Elissa was fourteen, Jeffs ordered her to marry her nineteen-year-old first cousin, Allen Steed. According to the opinion, Elissa was aghast, and flatly refused to go forward with the wedding. Even her older sisters, who were already married to the reigning FLDS prophet, tried to plead her cause, but to no avail. At the time of the wedding, a devastated Elissa refused to say “I do” – but Jeffs pushed and pushed, until she finally mumbled “Okay, I do.” Jeffs then proclaimed “Now go forth and multiply and replenish the earth with good priesthood children,” at which point Elissa ran off and locked herself in the bathroom.

When Elissa resisted her husband’s sexual advances over the following weeks, Jeffs gravely informed her that she had to “repent” and be “submissive” – she “needed to go home and give [her]self to [Steed], who was [her] priesthood head and husband, mind, body, and soul and obey without any question.” Allen proceeded to rape Elissa repeatedly over the next two years.

Jeffs was charged as an accomplice to rape, which is defined as any sexual intercourse where the victim “expresses lack of consent through words or conduct,” or where the victim is younger than eighteen and a perpetrator who is more than three years older “entices or coerces the victim to submit.” It makes no difference whether the parties are married – though that’s irrelevant here, because no marriage license was ever issued. The accomplice liability statute is equally blunt: “Every person … who solicits, requests, commands, encourages, or intentionally aids another person to engage in conduct which constitutes an offense shall be criminally liable as a party for such conduct.”

I have now read the court’s opinion several times, and I must confess that I simply can’t follow the logic. Maybe you can. It seems to say that Jeffs lacked the “mental state” to cause a nineteen-year-old to have sex with a fourteen-year-old, even though that’s exactly what he ordered them to do, over the girl’s most strenuous objections. My purpose here is not to debate the legal reasoning, but to paint the religious background that I believe contributed to a bizarre result.
Read the rest of this entry &raquo