President Obama’s declaration that the combat phase of the war in Iraq is officially over brings to a partial close a drama that has engulfed American political culture for nearly a decade. His address to the nation carefully avoided both a declaration of victory and a retroactive resolution of the Iraq war debate. Instead, it looked forward and sought to affirm the democratic hope that American society can be sufficiently unified to bring positive results out of what many regard as a costly and avoidable mistake. His speech implicitly argued that, regardless of what we believed about the justification of the war in the first place, we are now responsible for determining what the legacy of the Iraq war will be in our foreign policy and our domestic affairs.
Religious citizens have particular reason to think hard about their role in determining this legacy. They, or the ideas and traditions they care about, bear a burden of responsibility for both the problems and the hopes as we move forward.
Many of them played a crucial role in encouraging the enthusiasms that led to the Iraq invasion. Conservative American Christians, in particular, actively embraced what Andrew Bacevich calls, in his book The New American Militarism, the “marriage of military metaphysics with eschatological ambition.”
“God is pro-war,” as the Rev. Jerry Falwell famously titled one of his articles in 2004. Falwell, of course, was representative of only a small percentage of American Christians, but his supreme confidence in construing the war in Iraq as a matter of good versus evil, and understanding the humanitarian dimension of the Iraq invasion in relation to the kingdom of God, was an extreme riff on views that were much more widely shared. Indeed, the most powerful Christian political movements in the United States today exhibit both an unwavering commitment to the essential goodness (and seeming omnipotence) of American military power and a strange confidence that their cultural and religious interests are being served by the ongoing war on terrorism. Even many citizens outside these movements (and these particular religious communities) display a determined confidence that the end of America’s quasi-imperial self-assertion in Iraq will be our ongoing role a “leader of the free world.”
Such views are theologically untutored and politically dangerous. In particular, they display a worrisome blindness to the full range of elements that constituted the political act of invading Iraq and that shape its potential long-term consequences. In different ways, they are premised on false or inadequate descriptions of the undertaking.
There were three principal justifications offered for invading Iraq: self-defense, the defense of the international rule of law, and humanitarian concern for the people of Iraq. All three of these—if true—are just causes for war, according to the Christian just war tradition. But a just cause does not a just war make. One requires, in addition, a “right intention.”
The criterion of right intention does not merely demand an examination of what military and political leaders think or say about what they are doing when they initiate a war. “Right intention” points toward the full range of factors that place an action in its moral species. Given everything that we know now—and even what we knew then—about how the Iraq invasion was conceived, can we really just highlight the humanitarian dimension of this undertaking and declare it the essence of the act? The fact that an unjust action has beneficial consequences or reflects some praiseworthy desires does not change the fact that it was an unwise act; it does not render irrelevant the fear-mongering, mendacity, and hubristic overreach that also played a role. The just war criterion of “right intention” requires, among other things, that the conscientious citizen drop down from the level of short-hand “principles” and describe more fully the circumstances, desires, emotions, and beliefs that go into making a complex action what it is.
There was no shortage of just war theorists in the land when the Iraq war emerged on the horizon. Indeed, their writings and public talks insured that the basic criteria of just war ethics (whether in its Christian or secular form) were well known and bandied about by even the unlikeliest of people. The views these thinkers offered, however, were often emaciated and unfit for the task. At their most critical, these theories were publicly impotent. The arguments were too abstract, and the communities whose beliefs they hoped to represent were poorly organized or nonexistent. At their most supportive of the war, the arguments were so theoretical that they merely served to justify actions that were justified on quite other grounds by the people who actually undertook them. They were exercises in placing an abstract set of ethical principles on a complex set of facts and circumstances to which they were largely alien. Too much of the picture fell away, or was rendered invisible, once the theoretical justification was put in place. What people need is a justification of war that gives a full, clear, and powerful account of the many reasons they have to be critical and worried even in the best of circumstances.
This fact invites a change in the characteristic genre of contemporary just war reflection. It may very well require that just war theorists, most of whom are employed in university philosophy or religious studies departments, learn to abandon the stilted forms of academic ethics and acquire new habits of “thick description.” The formal reasoning of the just war criteria must be put in the service of richer descriptions of the actual beliefs, practices, and circumstances that shape complex political actions. The criteria can then perform both an expressive role (by making ethical commitments that are implicit in the nation’s undertakings explicit and available for critical scrutiny) and a constructive role (by proposing important ethical considerations governing certain actions). Michael Walzer’s book Just and Unjust Wars remains a classic example of this approach and is too infrequently imitated.
As Americans now endeavor to “turn the page” (in President Obama’s phrase), we must determine whether the irrevocable past will endure like a nightmare in our efforts at world leadership or whether we will be capable of the repentance, reformation, and simple good-neighborliness that will be necessary to restore those nonmilitary aspects of our power. It is ultimately a question of the democratic freedom to remake ourselves in the light of our highest ideals. It is also a question of imagination. At the present moment, there are few reasons to be sanguine about the probable success of this effort.
Religious citizens have particular reason to contribute to public debates about the road forward. Despite the popularity among many of them of imperialistic theologies and distorted pieties, such citizens are heirs to longstanding traditions of moral and political insight, and thus have the capacity to help this society imagine new ways of employing its power and resources. Furthermore, these citizens—unlike, say, your average analytic philosopher—inherit traditions and employ arguments that are deeply embedded in the practices of actually existing communities. Ideally, religious citizens will be able to organize themselves into communities of conversation and study, so as to become communities of democratic accountability.
Howard Rhodes is currently a member of the adjunct faculty at the University of Iowa College of Law.
In his sober address to the nation, President Obama announced the combat mission in Iraq is at an end.
As a theological ethicist who subscribes to all the criteria of the just war tradition—the version Mennonite pacifist John Howard Yoder said has “teeth”—I was critical from the outset of the US-led war in Iraq. In the seven years since Operation Iraqi Freedom began, I have regretted that perhaps just war ethicists, including myself, did not do enough to oppose it, especially if we really regarded it as an unjust war.
What does it mean now to say the war is at an end? “End” can mean “stopped” or “concluded,” but it is important that Christians and others, for whom just war continues to be a valid moral approach to dealing with serious threats to innocent human lives, recover another understanding of what “end” means. The end, understood in the just war sense of “purpose” or “goal,” should be, as St. Augustine taught, tranquillitas ordinis or “tranquil order”—a just and lasting peace, a genuine peace that is more than merely the absence of war.
Such a peace should be restorative for all affected by the war. President Obama observed that around the world today “old adversaries are at peace,” and I suspect he had in mind US friendships with Germany, Italy, and Japan. He said our combat mission is ending, but “our commitment to Iraq’s future is not,” and he emphasized at the same that we are now also trying to build for our nation “a future of lasting peace.” That involves refocusing attention on the US economy, and it will include providing health care, education, and employment for returning US military personnel. All of this is congruent with a just war meaning of “the end.” Much of it, however, should have been in our sights from the very outset of the war.
The president referred to “lessons learned.” One lesson those who subscribe to the just war criteria should have learned is that just war categories need to be longitudinally extended to include postwar justice. Even if the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were just, more needs to be done to guide us to put in motion the ingredients for a just and lasting peace. On the flip side, if a war is unjust because the criteria for going to war and for conduct during war were not satisfied, then the duty to establish postwar justice is all the more imperative, even though that won’t retroactively make it a just war.
One postwar criterion would be the principle of restoration, including restoration of public services such as the police: before embarking on war, make sure appropriate plans, equipment, and personnel are ready and in place to restore law and order on the streets and in the communities of the defeated nation. In his speech President Obama mentioned that US troops “shifted tactics to protect the Iraqi people [and] trained Iraqi Security Forces.” Such a shift would not have been necessary had the Bush White House not denied in June 2003 the Department of Justice’s recommendations for an International Criminal Investigative Training Assistance Program, which called for the deployment of over 6,600 international police advisers, consisting of trainers for police academies, plus armed international constabulary units with 2,500 more personnel to help coalition military forces restore stability in Iraq (see “The Police in War: Fighting Insurgency, Terrorism, and Violent Crime” [Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2010] by David H. Bayley and Robert M. Perito). Meanwhile, there were looters raiding homes, businesses, and museums; Iraqis were killing Iraqis; government buildings were ransacked and burned. Many scholars in other fields—including security policy experts such as Graham Day and Rama Mani—highlight the crucial role police (as well as courts and prisons) play in the transition from war to a just peace. Oftentimes the police of the defeated country disband during the war or are corrupt or implicated in the evils that led to war, so a transitional police force, accompanied by trainers, is necessary until a new force consisting of vetted, well-trained, and human-rights-respecting police is in place.
I am hopeful that progress in this connection is now underway in Iraq and Afghanistan. But in the meantime too many persons suffered—Iraqis, Afghans, and also US military personnel—from a lack of the kind of efforts that postwar justice would require for any war to be considered just.
Tobias Winright is associate professor of theological ethics at Saint Louis University, a former law enforcement officer, and coauthor with Mark Allman of “After the Smoke Clears: The Just War Tradition and Post War Justice” (Orbis Books, 2010).
President Obama’s speech might have been far more effective—and honest—if he had admitted the most elemental truth about the war in Iraq: that the surge of troops ordered by George W. Bush actually worked to defeat the terrorist insurgency that threatened to derail the whole experiment in liberty and freedom in Iraq.
Obama opposed this troop surge and was, indeed, on the vanguard of the defeatist antiwar left. Had his view prevailed, Iraq would have been reconquered by al-Qaeda and Baathist extremists whose victory over a weak United States would have been the most potent recruiting tool imaginable for America’s enemies for generations to come.
Obama made the political move of declaring the war to be over, but it is not. Fifty thousand American troops remain, and they are combat-ready, and American military presence will always be necessary in Iraq in order to maintain the fragile equilibrium there. The president’s proclivity to announce American withdrawal strategies publicly, not only in Iraq but also in Afghanistan, will only embolden those who wish to derail the most exciting experiment in democracy in the Arab world.
Obama said in a pre-speech press release that he was not going to offer a “victory lap.” Well, why not? That is what US armed forces are entitled to because of their blood, sweat, and tears on behalf of Iraq. Because of their efforts, the insurgency was dealt mortal blows, and now the Iraqi people have an opportunity to make a free and decent democracy in an area that has been characterized by the bloodiest sort of despotism. It was warming that Obama expressed such heartfelt admiration and awe for the troops, but he needed to provide a more affirmative vision of successes in Iraq—a vision that casts it as a victory over totalitarianism, which has always been a central aspect of America’s civilizing mission. It is precisely the renunciation of that mission and Obama’s willingness to appease the new wave of authoritarian leaders around the world that signify the evisceration of a Democratic Party once proud to stand for democratization and human rights in foreign policy.
The speech was disappointing as well in its craven attempt to link the economic crisis of the middle class to the expenditures on the war. Politicizing the war by trying to get the middle class to see its present quandaries as a result of it will not fool the average American, who understands that Obama’s failed economic policies and his drive to increase taxation and social entitlements are, at base, what is making their existence miserable. Obama has been president for nearly two years, and he continues to lay the blame for the economic crisis on his predecessor. He still has not learned the lesson that Americans were only willing to go along with that game for a short time. They elected a president to lead them, not to be a recriminator-in-chief.
It is highly doubtful Obama’s speech will convince the middle classes that the war is the principle reason for their crisis. Such rhetoric appeals to the anti-war left and fulfills a central campaign promise, but that constituency is now a small part of Obama’s political retinue. The November elections will decidedly show that the voters are no longer interested in voting on referenda on the Bush administration and that they expect the president to lead.
Thomas Cushman is professor of sociology at Wellesley College and coeditor of “The Religious in Responses to Mass Atrocity” (Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Washington, DC religious leaders spoke against rising anti-Muslim rhetoric at an August 30 press conference, and some of them also shared their thoughts about the recent rally on the National Mall organized by conservative commentator Glenn Beck. Watch Rev. John Wimberly of Western Presbyterian Church, Rev. Timothy Boggs of the National Cathedral, Salam al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, and Rabbi Jonathan Roos of Temple Sinai.
News of a Florida church’s plans to burn Qurans on the anniversary of 9/11 has provoked outrage across the Islamic world. The Organization of the Islamic Conference has issued a special alert among its 57 member nations. The Dove World Outreach Center, an independent nondenominational church in Gainesville, has proclaimed September 11 “International Burn a Quran Day.” Several American faith groups, including the National Association of Evangelicals, have urged the church to cancel its event. Christian minorities in predominantly Muslim countries are also speaking out, asserting that the plan could further endanger their already-vulnerable communities. Watch the reaction of Rev. Soritua Nababan, a leader of the Protestant Christian Batak Church in Indonesia and one of the top Asian representatives at the World Council of Churches.
KIM LAWTON, correspondent: About 20 minutes outside New Orleans, worshippers gather at First Baptist Church in Chalmette, the largest city in St. Bernard Parish. It’s a pretty typical Southern Baptist Sunday morning service.
REV JOHN DEE JEFFRIES (Preaching at First Baptist Church, Chalmette, Louisiana): Lord, what’s going on? Lord, why?
LAWTON: But that belies the incredible journey this congregation has made since Hurricane Katrina. More than half of the churches in St. Bernard Parish still haven’t come back, and most of them probably never will. First Baptist is not only back, but reinventing itself to help a community still struggling to recover.
REV. JOHN DEE JEFFRIES (First Baptist Church, Chalmette, LA): The church is up. She’s not yet standing on her own two feet, if I can say it that way, but the church is here, and the church now has a hope and a future.
LAWTON: Hours before Katrina hit, Pastor John Dee Jeffries and his wife, Genny, evacuated to their daughter’s home near Baton Rouge. They expected to be gone a couple of days.
JEFFRIES: The hurricane had passed through, all seemed to be well—the initial reports, and then suddenly everything turned topsy-turvy.
LAWTON: The levees were breached, and within a half-hour St. Bernard Parish was inundated with water. The damage was incomprehensible, and First Baptist Church didn’t escape the destruction.
JEFFRIES: The church—the church was a heartbreak. It was as if everything that had substance, value, meaning, purpose, the things that form the backdrop of your life suddenly ripped apart, shredded before your very eyes.
LAWTON: The Jeffries’ home was also among the thousands destroyed.
GENNY JEFFRIES: That’s when I cried. I only cried one time, and that was when I saw my home.
LAWTON: They ended up living in a FEMA trailer near their daughter, 85 miles away from Chalmette. Jeffries started thinking about rebuilding.
GENNY JEFFRIES: Wasn’t a real long time before he decided he was going to come back.
LAWTON: Did you think he was crazy?
GENNY JEFFRIES: Mm-hmm. I mean, the church was devastated. We were devastated. Every house, everything in Chalmette was destroyed. Everything.
JEFFRIES: I certainly have no negative feelings about ministers who felt that they could not come back. But there was something inside of me that could not accept that as my future.
LAWTON: And slowly a plan started coming into focus. Then Jeffries connected with a faith-based ministry called Builders for Christ.
JEFFRIES: And the sound of them, their leaders standing and saying, “We have decided to build your church.” I can still feel that in here.
LAWTON: It was a huge project that still isn’t completely finished. More than 3,000 volunteers from 34 states and the District of Columbia helped out. Flags at the back of their new sanctuary serve as a constant reminder.
JEFFRIES: Every denomination imaginable including Jewish people have come and worked on our project—Assembly of God, Baptists, Presbyterian, Methodists, Catholics. They’ve all been here.
LAWTON: The outpouring was a huge inspiration to longtime members like Michael “Slim” Gillette, who’s the chairman of the deacons.
MICHAEL GILLETTE: The more the church was built, the more healing took place for me.
LAWTON: They held their first service in the new church in September 2009, four years after Katrina hit. Before the storm, about 400 people attended on a regular basis. Now they’re averaging about 150, but the numbers are steadily rising, with more than 90 new baptisms in the past year. Ninety-seven percent of the people who came to First Baptist prior to Katrina haven’t returned. There’s a new cultural diversity, with growing numbers of African Americans and Hispanics attending, and many of the new people didn’t previously attend church at all.
GILLETTE: We don’t have a church congregation now like we used to have. They don’t know the hymns. They don’t know the difference between Mass and worship service. We’re learning together what their needs are, and they’re learning what we have to give.
LAWTON: One of the new members is Leola Thomas, who, like most people here, lost everything in Katrina.
LEOLA THOMAS: When I came in and saw and heard, you know, how he teaches about Jesus and his love, and the love they showed to me, I said this is the place that I want to be in.
JEFFRIES: There’s something happening inside of the hearts and minds of people that has brought us all together, and it’s strange to see how God is making us the one body of Christ. There are challenges in that, but it’s happening.
LAWTON: And it’s happening in a community that still hasn’t fully recovered from Katrina. This neighborhood used to be a pretty typical middle-class subdivision with lots of houses close together. Now there are a lot of empty lots where houses have been torn down. Some homeowners have returned, but a lot of houses are still standing unrepaired and empty.
The financial stresses of Katrina, along with the recession and now the Gulf oil spill, have generated a severe economic crisis across St. Bernard Parish. About 40 percent of the First Baptist congregation is unemployed. First Baptist partnered with the nonprofit group Second Harvest to create a food pantry which distributes almost 20,000 pounds of food every month.
JEFFRIES: I’m absolutely astounded at how powerful this ministry is with so few people manning it.
LAWTON: First Baptist has set up a daycare center and after-school program to help working parents, and there’s also a Christian addiction recovery ministry, which is close to the heart of Tina Rivera. After Katrina, she, like so many, sought to numb the pain.
TINA RIVERA: A lot of people, we just started drinking, doing drugs. The pain was just too overwhelming, and for me, I got in a car accident, a head-on collision, and two people got killed.
LAWTON: She ended up in jail and rehab and turned her life around. Now she’s helping First Baptist organize ministries for other troubled women.
RIVERA: I talked to my church family and said, look, these are mothers and aunts and grandmas that are in our community, come from good families, and we just have to stay on top of them. We’ve got to get them back to where they were before the storm.
LAWTON: Another goal of First Baptist is to help repair the sense of community that was broken by the storm. A women’s group called the “Domino Divas” meets every week for lunch, Bible study, and yes, some aggressive domino playing. These women were all displaced from their homes, and not all of them have been able to rebuild. They talked to me about the storm with a touch of humor.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Katrina wasn’t totally bad, because she moved us and we didn’t have to pack. We didn’t have to pack a thing. We just threw it out of the window.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: I told my kids they ought to be thankful for the storm, and they said, “Mom, are you crazy?” I said, “Well, now when I die you don’t have all that junk to go through.”
LAWTON: But they’re all too aware of the pain that still lingers.
UNIDENTIFIED WOMAN: Your house is gone, you didn’t get money for your life, all your stuff is gone, all your people are gone. It’s hard.
LAWTON: Genny Jeffries, who is a family therapist, says the emotional and spiritual trauma from the storm is deep-seated.
GENNY JEFFRIES: Katrina will always be in the back of our hearts, but we’re getting a little bit past it. But still there’s a lot of people, and a lot of circumstances that are there that really cannot, we can’t put it away, just can’t put it away yet.
LAWTON: First Baptist is doing what it can, but there is a shortage of established members who can lead the ministries, and because of the economic situation there’s also a shortage of tithes and offerings.
JEFFRIES: In the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the great challenge was to survive. We have survived. The church is here and will continue to be here. Five years later, the great challenge is to sustain ourselves.
LAWTON: The Jeffries have had personal stresses as well. Their home also had to be rebuilt through donations and volunteers, and shortly after Katrina, Genny suffered a brain aneurysm and then a post-surgical stroke.
JEFFRIES: God and I had some rather serious conversations about that. It seemed that in the midst of losing everything else I pleaded with the Lord. I pleaded for him to spare my wife.
LAWTON: Genny did recover, but Jeffries admits he wasn’t always as strong as he wanted to be in the midst of the crisis.
JEFFRIES: I also know what it’s like to lay in a dark FEMA trailer, hugging your pillow, your wife next to you, terribly ill, recovering from traumatic surgery, not knowing if she’s going to fully recover, and just ask those questions of God that have no answer: Why? Why? Why?
LAWTON: He may not have received answers, but he says he did receive assurances about his belief that God is there no matter what.
JEFFRIES: The real focus has been that the things that I’ve preached and that I’ve taught all of those years are true. You can count on it.
LAWTON: He says he’ll keep counting on it as First Baptist faces all the challenges still ahead.
I’m Kim Lawton in Chalmette, Louisiana.
BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: When Joseph Reyes, Catholic, and Rebecca Shapiro, Jewish, got married in 2004 they did not think their different religious beliefs would be a problem. They were leaning toward Judaism. The wedding ceremony was Jewish and later Joseph converted. But by this past April they were divorced, with religion playing a major role. Their daughter, Ela, now 4, was at the heart of the dispute.
JOSEPH REYES: Well, the decision was made that we would expose her to each of our respective faiths, and our daughter, Ela, would make her decisions based on what she saw.
ROLLIN: But once you had converted, then wouldn’t you be educating your child as a Jew?
REYES: The whole conversion ceremony was fairly suspect because I was just handed a bunch of books and said, “Read these—or not.”
ROLLIN: So you converted, but you didn’t really mean it.
REYES: Again, it was a cosmetic fix. My then-wife set this whole thing up and all I really did was show up.
ROLLIN: It was clear that Joseph’s conversion had little weight when he had his daughter baptized—secretly. The priest was unaware of the situation.
ROLLIN: Steven Lake is Rebecca’s attorney.
STEVEN LAKE: Mrs. Reyes, Rebecca, is Jewish, always has been. Mr. Reyes converted to Judaism. They got married in a Jewish ceremony. Their little girl was being raised Jewish, and suddenly in the middle of the divorce case on what supposedly was just a normal visitation, he took and had his daughter baptized without any discussion with his wife. She found out by email.
REYES: Being Christian and having grown up the way I had and experiencing the things I had experienced, certainly I wanted to share many of those things with my daughter.
ROLLIN: Joseph blames the entire conflict, even his insincere conversion, on his in-laws.
REYES: Her parents made it clear early on that they had an issue with my being a non-Jew, and that was something that I think plagued and burdened the duration of the marriage.
LAKE: It was only in the context of the divorce case where he blamed this all on her parents. That he did it because of the pressure of the parents. The parents of course, denied it, Rebecca denied and said nobody pressured him into anything.
ROLLIN: Although when Ela visits Joseph the court has given him the right to take her to church, the court has given Rebecca permission to raise her daughter as a Jew.
LAKE: As custodial parent, the law is that she has the right to raise her little girl in the Jewish faith. Having said that, again it’s a question of is there going to be a little exposure to Catholicism, or is it going to be each a tug of war pulling on a little girl trying to get her to follow one religion or the other?
ROLLIN: A greater tolerance of interfaith marriages has led to more of them. They now comprise 25 percent of American households. But according to the American Religious Identification Survey, interfaith marriers are three times more likely to become divorced or separated than people who marry in the same religion.
ROLLIN: Professor Katheryn Dutenhaver runs DePaul University’s interfaith mediation program in Chicago, which deals solely with religious conflict with regard to children after divorce. Clergy are always included.
PROFESSOR KATHERYN DUTENHAVER (Interfaith Family Mediation Project): When the couple come in to a mediation and they are with the clergy of their own faith and they see the clergy talking with each other and they see the clergy talking with the other parent, it becomes a different conversation than in the courtroom where you are trying to prove one is better than the other. I think the fear that people have is that if my child is raised in the other parent’s religion, then the child will grow closer to the other parent and closer to the other grandparents.
REVEREND THOMAS DORE: Very often they don’t know enough about their own religion, let alone the other person’s religion to understand what are the implications if my daughter is going to be Jewish or our daughter is going to be Catholic? What does that mean?
ROLLIN: All the mediators agree that the best solution for children is to be raised in one religion.
RABBI GARY GERSON: If there is a divorce and even if there isn’t a divorce, the child is put in the middle between the two parents, and the question becomes one of if I go to this faith, then am I estranging myself from the other parent or vice versa. Parents are the ones who need to make the decisions, set the boundaries and the rules for the family. Otherwise the child is caught in the middle, and beyond that it’s a lack of clarity for the child. To have a little bit of each is end up having nothing.
ROLLIN: Bridget Jeffries, an evangelical, and Paul Meyers, a Mormon, have a different view. They are raising their daughter, Harley, in both faiths. Their marriage is intact now but they were separated for awhile and they have struggled with the issue of how to religiously raise Harley. Their religious practices have much in common, but theologically there are major differences.
BRIDGET JEFFRIES: The idea of my daughter saying that she has faith in Joseph Smith as well as Jesus and the Trinity, the Godhead to Mormons, that was very difficult for me to process, to think about her going through. I mean I love my husband, I know that he believes in all that, but I really wanted my daughter to just have my own faith, without Joseph Smith and the baptismal confession. So that was a big deal to me.
PAUL MEYERS: I still want her to be Mormon since I believe that Mormon is more right than evangelical, but then again anyone who believes one thing has to assume that it’s more right than the others.
ROLLIN: They are certainly tolerant of each other’s religion, but like so many interfaith marriers didn’t understand their deep feelings about their own religion until they had children.
JEFFRIES: I don’t think that I realized how badly I was going to want my daughter to grow up in my faith when I had her.
ROLLIN: What bothers Paul the most is that Harley might opt out of religion altogether.
MEYERS: She might become apathetic towards just religion in general. Mommy and daddy can’t agree, so.… The idea of believing in something is much more acceptable to me then the idea of believing in nothing.
ROLLIN: Meanwhile, Paul brings Harley to his church one Sunday and Bridget brings her to her church the next Sunday. In addition, they go to both churches as a family and observe both traditions at home.
JEFFRIES: We celebrate the Protestant liturgical calendar, but when we do readings from it, we often do readings from both the Bible and the Book of Mormon.
ROLLIN: Does she show any signs of confusion or do you worry that she will?
MEYERS: She shows no signs of confusion whatsoever.
JEFFRIES: Not so far.
JEFFRIES: This has been very difficult and it’s been very hard. We’ve made a lot of compromises and sacrifices to make it work. So both of our religions say to get married within the faith and we think that’s a very strong counsel that people should follow. We just didn’t.
ROLLIN: And the Jeffries-Meyers family is not alone. According to the National Study of Youth and Religion, fewer than one-fourth of 18-to-23-year-olds think it’s important to marry someone in the same faith. And even the clergy has accepted that in America today interfaith marriages are an increasing reality.
REVEREND DORE: The days are gone when you go to school with only a Jewish community, only a Catholic community. To say you can’t talk to this one, you can’t see this one, you can’t get involved in this one—that isn’t real. It just isn’t a reality at all in their life.
ROLLIN: What Bridget and Paul have in their favor is that they are deeply aware of the problems they are facing and will continue to face, and of the joys.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Betty Rollin in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.
A federal judge this week dealt a setback to President Obama’s policy on embryonic stem cell research. The judge said that the current policy violates a law prohibiting federal money for research in which human embryos are destroyed. Several conservative evangelicals applauded the decision and a representative for the US Catholic bishops called it “a victory for common sense and sound medical ethics.” Some liberal religious groups argue the latest ruling will hinder what scientists call one of the most promising areas of medical research.
The proposed Islamic center two blocks from Ground Zero continues to stir emotions and generate headlines. Declaring their support for religious freedom, a group called September Eleventh Families for Peaceful Tomorrows were among those who came out in favor of the project. That followed dueling rallies last weekend. Opponents say the location is insensitive to the memory and families of those who died. They also allege that the imam behind the center has made anti-American statements. For his part, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, who has long served as a goodwill ambassador for the US government, was on one such visit to the Middle East. Speaking in Bahrain, Rauf criticized the media for perpetuating violent stereotypes about Muslims:
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf: “Muslims do not appear in the Western media to act in a way that let them believe Islam is a religion of peace.”
A new Pew Center poll shows Americans have deeply conflicted—and increasingly negative—views of Islam. By a 38 to 30 percent margin, the survey found Americans had unfavorable views about the Muslim religion—a direct reversal from a similar poll five years ago. The survey also found 51 percent of respondents opposed the location of the Islamic cultural center, compared to 34 percent who said it should be permitted.
Amid the so-called “mosque” furor, supporters and members of the Saint Nicholas Greek Orthodox congregation sought to bring attention to the impasse over rebuilding the tiny church, which was destroyed in the 9/11 terrorist attack. Former New York governor George Pataki accused the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey of failing to “reach out and engage” with the church even as it clears the way for the Islamic center. Port Authority officials say they fully support the rebuilding but say negotiations have broken down over the precise siting, size, and financing for a new church building.
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Former President Jimmy Carter successfully negotiated the release of an American Christian activist imprisoned in North Korea since January. The man, Aijalon Gomes, was sentenced to 8 years of hard labor for entering North Korea illegally. Gomes was turned over to Jimmy Carter on Friday (August 27), and they returned to the United States.
A federal appeals court has ruled that a Christian aid organization has the right to hire or fire employees based on their religion. Three former employees of the group World Vision sued the organization after being terminated for not sharing the group’s Christian beliefs. The appeals court said that as a faith-based organization World Vision is allowed, under civil rights law, to discriminate based on religion.
The United Nations said that aid workers will remain in Pakistan despite Taliban threats to target foreign groups administering to flood victims. Meanwhile, concerns are growing over water-borne diseases, and although international aid has increased, more than 8 million people remain in need of emergency assistance. Many are located in areas so isolated by flood waters that they are accessible only by air. The UN estimates that one-fifth of the country is still under water in what the secretary-general has called “a slow-moving tsunami.”
There were celebrations this week for what would have been the 100th birthday of Mother Teresa. Crowds gathered in India at a Mass to honor the late nun who cared for the country’s destitute. Mother Teresa died in 1997. The Roman Catholic Church is in the process of declaring her a saint.
As major combat operations come to an end and the US completes a troop drawdown in Iraq, revisit interviews with ethicists, philosophers, scholars, and religious leaders about just war and the moral issues raised by Iraq. Edited by Fabio Lomelino.
Listen to more of our 2007 interview with jazz great Terence Blanchard about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath, and watch him and his quintet in performance at Blues Alley in Washington, DC playing a piece from their Grammy award-winning CD, “A Tale of God’s Will (A Requiem for Katrina).”
Originally broadcast August 31, 2007
Jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard spoke August 17th with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly about his recent CD, A TALE OF GOD’S WILL: A REQUIEM FOR KATRINA, when he was playing in Washington at Blues Alley:
TERENCE BLANCHARD: In the aftermath of Katrina, when you’re faced with that level of devastation, you know, and you’re frustrated beyond belief, you’re hurt beyond anything you can imagine, I mean it causes you to dig deep and try to find some answers.
And after I went through the whole thing of blaming man for his neglect in servicing the levees, and blaming man for their neglect in rescuing and helping people, you know, I had to look at the bigger picture.
And people were asking me immediately in all of my interviews, you know, are you going to write music, you know, based on the hurricane? And I kept telling them, I said man, this thing is so vast it’s hard to kind of assimilate everything, and I don’t hear anything right now.
I stood in front of my mother’s house, and it was amazing, because the only thing I heard was silence. I mean–and it was very bizarre–I didn’t hear any insects, no birds, no dogs barking, nobody cutting the grass, no cars moving, nobody moving around. Nothing. Only air. Only the wind.
In the Christian faith, you know, we have a saying, you know: God acts in strange ways. So for me, I think this is a way for God to get our attention, basically. You know, we haven’t been paying attention to a lot of things, you know. And we’ve been letting a lot of things slide. So maybe this is a way for us to kind of stop and take a hard look at what we’re doing as a community.
When I saw the large numbers of people who were struggling to survive in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane–that broke my heart. Then it also broke my heart to see how vast numbers of Americans came together to support and try to help people in need, you know, and that goes to the core of what I believe about human compassion.
With this album, you know, I mean, a lot of people have been talking to me and they’ve been saying the music has a lot of deep spiritual roots and it does. I mean, I grew up in a church. And that music has never–it’s always been a part of me, always, you know, and this album gave me a chance to kind of dig deep in that direction, you know. It gave me a chance to kind of not shy away from those issues but deal with them directly and just express how I feel based on my beliefs.
Recording it in a church–the thing I kept thinking about was, you know, I have to let my feelings go. I have to be honest. I’m not making an album for a certain demographic, you know what I mean? This is a project about human tragedy and the endurance of the human spirit, and I have to be true to that.
When we were listening to the playbacks, the thing that I kept thinking about with this music is that not only is it hopeful music but it embodies a number of other emotions: hopelessness, helplessness, anger, and frustration. You know, the piece itself, “Levees”–the strings represent the water that’s just everywhere, and the trumpet represents the cries for help that just went unheard.
What I hope for in New Orleans is the same thing I hope for the country, really. I mean, I really hope that, you know, as a society we really just ought to become more active, and I’m seeing it in New Orleans. The beautiful thing about being in New Orleans right now is that, despite all of the lack of support, you know, from the federal government there are a lot of people who are moving home, and a lot of people, a lot are doing it on their own. And granted we still have a very, very long way to go. There’s decades of work to be done to rebuild the city. But it’s really beautiful to see that pioneering spirit that we’ve always equated with being truly American.
Read more of the August 17, 2007 R & E interview with jazz trumpeter Terence Blanchard about A TALE OF GOD’S WILL: A REQUIEM FOR KATRINA:
In the aftermath of Katrina, when you’re faced with that level of devastation, you know, and you’re frustrated beyond belief, you’re hurt beyond anything you can imagine, I mean it causes you to dig deep and try to find some answers. I mean, you know, because just as humans we always want to know the answers to anything. And after I went through the whole thing of blaming man for his neglect in servicing the levees, and blaming man for their neglect in rescuing and helping people, you know, I had to look at the bigger picture. And I talked to some other friends of mine who are also Christians and believers and, you know, we all just started talking about it, saying, well, there has to be a bigger picture here, there has to be a bigger story. There has to be something for us to learn from this. So when it came time for me to do this album, I wanted to come up with a title that would not give the wrong idea about what had happened in New Orleans. I didn’t want people to think that everything was fine, but I wanted people to start searching for deeper meanings, and “a tale of God’s will” seemed to set the tone for that debate. In making this CD, I want to create debate about the topic. I don’t want people to think that New Orleans is fine and that, you know, we’re moving on to another issue. No, New Orleans is not fine, and the thing about it is, for me, New Orleans is just a symptom of a bigger issue. And, you know, this debate shouldn’t just be about New Orleans. It should be about what’s been going on in our country for a few decades now, in terms of how we’ve been turning a blind eye to a lot of things that are happening right in front of our face. And as citizens, you know, we always wait for someone else to correct things, but I mean I think it’s time for us to take the bull by the horns and make some serious change in this country.
I know a lot of people who are saying how could something so terrible be God’s will? Well, I think if you’re a Christian or if you’re a believer of any faith or sect, you would have to think, you know–in the Christian faith, you know, we have a saying: God acts in strange ways. You know, so for me, I think this is a way for God to get our attention, basically. You know, we haven’t been paying attention to a lot of things and we’ve been letting a lot of things slide. So maybe this is a way for us to kind of stop and take a hard look at what we’re doing as a community.
A lot of people have been talking to me and they’ve been saying the music has a lot of deep spiritual roots, and it does. I mean I grew up in a church, you know, I played in church every Sunday [at] Central Congregational Church [in New Orleans]. As a matter of fact, Andrew Young was a member of the church, and there were a lot of other local dignitaries who were part of that church. It is an amazing church. And growing up in that church, you know, my father used to tell me all the time, he says “I don’t care what time you get in from your gig, playing a gig Saturday night, you’ve got to get up and go to church and play on Sunday morning.” And so that was a big part of my upbringing, you know, and that music has never–it’s always been a part of me, always. This album gave me a chance to kind of dig deep in that direction, you know. It gave me a chance to kind of not shy away from those issues but deal with them directly and just express how I feel based on my beliefs.
What the entire event of Katrina has done for me, it’s made me realize that, you know, the country, it’s not a collection of sound bites we see on the news. The country is not the articles or interview that we read and see in the periodicals. It’s really the everyday people, you know, because when I saw the large numbers of people who were struggling to survive in New Orleans in the aftermath of the hurricane that broke my heart. Then it also broke my heart to see how vast numbers of Americans came together to support and try to help people in need, and that goes to the core of what I believe about human compassion. And it frustrated me to see people politicize that, and it still does. I get very angry at that because you are attacking the very core of what a lot of people live their lives by, and you’re trying to manipulate that for personal gain. I think that’s the true travesty in all of this, and I think that’s what I’ve woken up to with this event. Because you have the war prior to this and a lot of other things that were going on, but when you see people who were not in the military, people who didn’t have a vested interest in Iraq or the oil business suffering, trying to survive, stuck on roofs, dealing with extreme heat, dealing with dehydration, and they weren’t being cared for for 4 or 5 days? You know, that speaks to such a level of arrogance, you know, and—well, arrogance is the only word I can think of right now, because those very people who were in charge of that are the very people who will say “In God We Trust.” And, you know, the thing that I keep thinking about is how can a person like that use that phrase, on the one hand, and then look at themselves in the mirror, on the other hand. You know, for me it wasn’t about politics. It wasn’t about jurisdiction. It wasn’t about who’s going to take credit for the rescue. It was simply about saving lives, and I think a lot of people dropped the ball and exposed themselves for who they really are.
The interesting thing about making this CD, the irony of it is that, you know, we went to Seattle to do it, and Seattle has a beautiful church there that they actually use for a lot of their orchestral recordings. So while we were in this church recording this music, I kept thinking to myself, I was saying wow, what a fitting place to be doing this particular project, you know, given its title. Plus the people there, the orchestra, they were amazing, very lovely people who are also very committed to this project. I think a lot of people you know, that worked on this project, when they found out what it was about and they found out what we were trying to say, everybody was really eager to do 110 percent to make it come together.
I still have this reverence for the church. When I walk into any religious building or church, I still remember that feeling I had when I was a kid. It’s like, you know, there’s no place to hide. You’re there alone with your soul and your God, and you have to honor that and you have to be respectful of that. And I think, you know, in making this music and recording the music, you know, recording it in a church, the thing I kept thinking about was, you know, I have to let my feelings go, I have to be honest. I’m not making an album for a certain demographic, you know what I mean? This is a project about human tragedy and the endurance of the human spirit, and I have to be true to that.
When we were listening to the playbacks, the thing that I kept thinking about with this music is that not only is it hopeful music but it embodies a number of other emotions: hopelessness, helplessness, anger, and frustration. You know, the piece itself, “Levees”–it’s all about how, you know, there was water everywhere. You know, during [Hurricane] Betsy, I was a little kid when Betsy hit, and I was living in the Lower Ninth Ward at the time, and I remember being picked up from my porch and put in a boat, and looking around and seeing nothing but water, and the water was only maybe about 2 or 3 feet high but it was still a devastating thing for kids. So I kept thinking, if I was affected like that in Betsy, what’s going on with these kids and these people who were on the tops of roofs with 12 feet of water all around them? So “Levees” is all about that. The strings represent the water that’s just everywhere, and the trumpet represents the cries for help that just went unheard.
I had one friend tell me a story, he was rescued off a house in the middle of the night by some rescuers in a boat, and he told me, he said man, the rescuers said when we get to this section we need you to keep the kids quiet, and they cut off the engines and they let the boat drift, they said, because we can’t have the other people know that we’re here because they’re going to start crying for help, and we have to wait to come back to get them. They got to another section and the rescuers said we need you to cover the kids’ eyes because there are dead bodies all over this area. That’s in the city of New Orleans. It’s not in a war zone; it’s in downtown New Orleans that that happened. I’m still not satisfied, because I want to know what really happened. Who’s responsible? Don’t just give me a report. There’s somebody who’s responsible for not making the decision to really service the levees and maintain those levees the way they should’ve been maintained.
My uncle, the Reverend Andrew Douglas, he’s been a great inspiration for me for a long time. I mean he’s come into my aunt’s life; this is her second marriage. But having him around, it’s one of those things, it’s one of those sources of inspiration where you look and you see evidence of a strong African American male who’s not a basketball player, who’s not a pop star, who’s not a big political leader but who’s a person of conviction, you know, and a person of high integrity. I look at him as an example of what the everyday person can aspire to be, you know, so he’s been a great influence on my life in that regard, and he’s been great for my mom since my dad has passed, because my mom and her sister, my aunt, they’re very close. Before the hurricane, you know, I tried to get them to leave the city early. They wouldn’t leave. They left a little late, and then they got stuck in Mississippi, and I couldn’t find them for a little bit, but the three of them were together, that was the most important thing. They were sleeping on the floor of a church in Jackson, Mississippi. I was worried about it, but for them it was like an adventure, you know. They were laughing, saying it was very funny to watch each one of them get up off that floor each morning and to see who would struggle the most trying to get themselves upright. And then after the hurricane, my wife and myself, we owned a small house that my wife used to use as an office. We cleared it out and my uncle, my aunt and my mom, they stayed in that house for a little over a year while his house was being repaired, and now they’re over at his property.
When I think about my uncle I think about his devotion to his flock. I mean, the first thing he wanted to do was to get back into the city. The church had put together a trailer for him that was across the street from the church, so they stayed there for a little bit prior to moving into the house. But it’s been probably one of the most untold stories of this whole saga, about how faith-based groups have been coming to New Orleans and repairing homes, lifting spirits, working with people, worshipping with people, you know. I’ve seen groups out in the Lower Ninth Ward just out there praying. Again, it goes back to my whole issue in this country right now with where does the truth really lie? When you see people who are doing things from the bottom of their hearts, it’s not really reported the way it should be, because to me there are a lot of people around this country who believe and live their lives in the exact same manner, but people of similar beliefs, they’re not brought together in a way that some of these issues are brought together, as I should say, in the media’s eye.
A lot of people have been asking me how have I written pretty music for something that was so ugly, and the thing that I’ve been telling them is that for me it goes back to the documentary ["When the Levees Broke" by Spike Lee]. That’s where it starts. Well, let me back up. Even before then, when we went to my mom’s house, and after all of the cameras had left and everybody was gone, I stood in front of my mother’s house, and it was amazing, because the only thing I heard was silence. I mean, and it was very bizarre. I didn’t hear any insects, no birds, no dogs barking, nobody cutting the grass, no cars moving, nobody moving around. Nothing. Only air. Only the wind. And people were asking me immediately in all of my interviews, you know, are you going to write music, you know, based on the hurricane? And I kept telling them, I said man, this thing is so vast it’s hard to kind of assimilate anything, and I don’t hear anything right now. So when I was hired to do the music for the documentary, I was a little nervous, to be honest, because how do you write something, how do you write music for something that’s so tragic, so horrible, and still have the music service the story? Well, when Spike put together the first two hours of the documentary, the first thing I realized was it’s all about the story. You know, when you listen to those interviews, when you listen to those who were actually in the aftermath of the hurricane tell their stories of survival and struggle, the first thing that I thought was the music doesn’t need to be traditionally New Orleans music. It doesn’t need to be angry music because their anger is very prevalent in their stories. The music just needs to be the glue to kind of bring all these elements together and not get in the way of any of those stories. So that was my thought process in terms of creating the score for “Levees.” And then I just took those themes and just expanded the arrangements for those with band and orchestra.
I grew up in a church and I grew up with an interesting spiritual background, because my father went to a traditionally Congregationalist church and my mother was Baptist. So their thing was, you know, when the kid is born the gender is going to decide, you know, which church the kid would go to. So I started going to church with my father, but I would also go to church with my mom on occasion, so I got a chance to hear a lot of different styles of spiritual music, because at my father’s church they sing a lot of classically based spiritual music. In my mom’s church it was mostly gospel, and that music had a heavy effect on me. I mean, it had a profound effect on me, because at the core of that music is honesty, you know. It’s truth. You can sit down and you can break it down into its technical elements, chord progressions and all that stuff, but it’s really about the intent of what that music is trying to say. And that’s what stuck with me, you know, and that’s what I still have, and when it came time to record the music for this album that’s what I drew upon. You know, so it’s interesting that people make that correlation about spiritually based music hearing it in this album, because it’s not something I’d intentionally tried to do, but it’s always been a source of inspiration, you know, in my playing, and apparently it must be coming through in some of the things people are listening to.
What I hope for in New Orleans is the same thing I hope for for the country, really. I mean I really hope that, you know, as a society we really just ought to become more active, and I’m seeing it in New Orleans. The beautiful thing about being in New Orleans right now is that despite all of the lack of support, you know, from the federal government there are a lot of people who are moving home and a lot of people doing it on their own. And granted we still have a very, very long way to go. There’s decades of work to be done to rebuild the city. But it’s really beautiful to see that pioneering spirit that we’ve always equated with being truly American. You see it in New Orleans right now because there are people who are coming back. They don’t know what’s going to happen with the city. We hear all types of stories all the time, good and bad, you know, but despite all of that, you know, there’s’ a pioneering spirit amongst the people who are there, you know, and they are fighting tooth and nail to bring their communities back.
Since 1999, several predominantly Muslim countries have campaigned for the United Nations to adopt an international ban on defaming religion. The United States has consistently opposed such a ban, arguing that it would violate freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion. From August 9-13, 2010, the Media Project sponsored a conference in Jakarta, Indonesia for journalists from around the world to discuss regional perspectives on banning defamation of religion and how such measures could affect freedom of the press. Watch a video report produced by Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton and presented at the conference.
How does the defamation debate affect members of the news media in the US? Read an excerpt from Kim Lawton’s conference paper:
“It is nearly impossible to be a journalist and not insult someone,” says Debra Mason, director of the Center on Religion & the Professions at the Missouri School of Journalism. “Whether or not we insult someone should not be the factor that determines whether or not we cover a story or how we cover a story.”
Mason asserts that journalism is a profession which must be guided by a code of ethics and shared values of fairness, accuracy, and balance.
“When it comes to certain ‘fault lines’, including religion, journalists must take extra care and make sure they are not making fun or mocking or insulting someone based on their beliefs,” she says. “That doesn’t mean we ignore scandals or abuses by prominent religious leaders, but it does mean we don’t intentionally do something that is anathema to a particular group if it’s not essential to our reporting.”
In the case of the Danish cartoons, American news media outlets wrestled intensely over whether showing the cartoons was essential in reporting about the controversy. Most major American newspapers, including the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the Los Angeles Times decided not to print the cartoons. The Associated Press wire service also chose not to distribute them. Most major television news broadcasts followed suit, with the exception of ABC and CNN, which only ran a disguised version of one cartoon.
Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly also reported on the protests without running the cartoons. We do broadcast images of Muhammad from classical art, but we don’t have a specific rule of thumb for what crosses the line. The decision not to run the controversial cartoons came after much internal debate.
“Because the cartoons were the cause of so much tension and potential violence, I felt we should not unnecessarily inflame or add to that,” says Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly executive producer Arnold Labaton. “It was troublesome not showing them, but it wasn’t that they weren’t available elsewhere, such as on the Internet.”
Says Labaton, “We have to consider the bounds of responsible behavior. That probably was a capitulation, but it was a capitulation I could live with.”
The decision of so many news outlets against running the cartoons came under strong criticism, including a stinging editorial in the Washington Post co-written by conservative analyst William Bennett and liberal attorney Alan Dershowitz.
“To put it simply,” they wrote, “radical Islamists have won a war of intimidation. They have cowed the major news media from showing these cartoons.”
The two went on to complain of a double standard, noting that the same media outlets didn’t hesitate to publish a controversial art exhibit depicting the Virgin Mary covered in dung.
But Mason of the Missouri School of Journalism argues there was a difference in the situations.
“No one was rioting or dying in regard to the art exhibit,” she says. “Journalists must use judgment whenever violence or mayhem is involved.”
Kevin Eckstrom, editor of Religion News Service, a news organization that exclusively covers issues of religion, acknowledges that this beat “tends to be more radioactive than others.” But, he says, “That doesn’t mean we should shirk our duties as story-tellers and truth-tellers. Reporters should be respectful of the beliefs of religious groups, be aware of the problems that can go with that, and be ready to defend their decisions.”
There may not be easy answers, but many Americans believe it’s vital to continue the discussion.
“The price of denying free speech is too high,” says Labaton.
Nina Shea, director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Washington, DC-based Hudson Institute, agrees. She says America must never forsake its interwoven tradition of freedom of the press, free speech, and freedom of religion.
“The great genius of America is that we’re a very pluralistic society, and we’re all able to get along,” she says. “The key to that harmony—and we do have contentious debate—is freedom of speech and freedom of religion.”
by Paul Dafydd Jones and Charles Mathewes
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 gave many people—Republicans, Democrats, and Independents alike—the hope that America was entering a new phase in its history. Just maybe the nation was about to do something remarkable: embrace a style of politics defined less by old arguments about race, religion, gender, sexuality, and culture and more by new visions of the common good.
Few would have predicted what’s happening now. A growing number of Americans believe, mistakenly, that the president is a Muslim, and most of them cite the media as the source of their information.
Suspicion about Obama has been a problem since he first appeared on the national stage. But recently the rise of a politicized brand of journalism has blurred the boundary between fact and fiction in ways that would make even the most ardent postmodernist blush.
What’s new, too, is the failure of Obama and his team to handle this story effectively. Given that millions more people think Obama is a Muslim now than 18 months ago, we’re seeing a serious failure to communicate.
We don’t think that, in principle, a Muslim president is at all problematic. Indeed, it’s profoundly worrying that the mere idea of a Muslim president is met with moral outrage. Beyond the not-so-subtle racism at work, the “secret Muslim” claim is empirically false and politically toxic, and it marks a refusal to heed the high ideals upon which this nation was founded.
But how should Obama respond? Here’s our suggestion: the White House should discontinue its purely reactive approach to claims about Obama’s beliefs and undertake a sustained effort to have him tell his own story as a Christian believer.
In other words, Obama should talk publicly about what he believes and how he believes it. He needn’t do it all the time. He needn’t do it all that often. But when he does do it, he should do it simply, plainly, frankly, and deliberately.
So far, the president has made occasional remarks about his beliefs, but they’ve been just that—occasional and largely an afterthought to his public persona. His administration has proved astonishingly “unmusical” when it comes to religion. No one in Obama’s inner circle seems to understand how religious issues and themes are implicated in his presidency and how religion factors into domestic and international politics.
But isn’t Obama’s Christianity a private matter? Isn’t it peripheral to the real issues at hand? Not right now. The culture is desperate for adult guidance when it comes to religion. While citizens stand under no obligation to talk about their religious convictions, people expect more of the president, and this political moment requires more from this president, lest discussions about religion become still more coarse and vicious, and our political culture even more degraded.
We’re not suggesting Obama should talk about his faith for purely pragmatic reasons, although God knows—and Rahm Emanuel does, too—there are likely to be political advantages. He should recognize by now that if he won’t talk about his beliefs, his opponents happily will; politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. There are sound civic reasons for doing this as well. The office of the presidency has a representative function. It is not just about the day-to-day running of the government. It’s about shaping public conversation on a variety of matters of common concern, religion included.
Nor are we asking Obama to be the believer-in-chief of American civil religion. We’re simply saying he should offer himself as one example in America today of what it means to believe. He should render his religious persona public, for the good of the republic as a whole.
A president willing to talk about his own faith could do some powerful civic good. Obama’s biography suggests he has much to offer. He has spoken movingly of his mother as someone who did not believe in God, but who epitomized a life well lived. He has intimate knowledge of Islam and other religious traditions and appreciates their richness in a way that have not hindered his Christianity—a serious believer who is seriously alert to the power of other beliefs.
He’s clearly given serious thought to religion as a reality in the world. In a speech he gave in 2006, he described politics as the art of what’s possible and religion as the art of the impossible—a thought-provoking idea, to say the least. Religiously, he embodies where the nation itself is headed, as American Christianity undergoes a period of dramatic transformation and the categories we typically use to talk about belief become less and less sufficient for describing the real dividing lines, generational changes, and demographic shifts we are experiencing.
What we are proposing, then, is for President Obama to tell us about his religious identity, and to do so in ways that befit his office. Despite the degraded condition of our public debate about religion, he has the opportunity to give voice to our collective desire to speak more openly, and more honestly, about the faiths that make us who we are—and thus to make out of those many faiths one nation.
Paul Dafydd Jones and Charles Mathewes teach religious studies at the University of Virginia.
There is much heat, and not a lot of light, in the discussion about the Park51 Community Center.
No, it is not the “Ground Zero mosque.” In the crowded landscape of
Manhattan, two blocks away from Ground Zero is a significant distance.
No, it is not a mosque. It is a community center with interfaith spaces, wedding halls, reading rooms, and yes, a place for prayer.
So what if it is a mosque? We have churches and synagogues close to Ground Zero. To say that having a mosque presents a problem is to suggest that Islam and Muslims somehow are held collectively responsible for the crimes of 19 terrorists. Those crimes are their own and cannot be used to label 1.3 billion members of humanity. Collective punishment runs against the very foundation of our legal system, in which each individual is responsible for his or her own actions.
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has been a leading voice in the interfaith community of New York. The mere fact that the establishment of this community center has been viewed as promoting jihadism baffles the mind and would be laughable if the charges were not so serious. Are the critics aware that this community center would include a swimming pool? This is hardly the version of Islam the Taliban or Wahhabis would like to see established in America.
Most importantly, this controversy is not ultimately about Muslims or Islam or the place of Muslims in the mosaic of America. It is about competing and contentious visions of America. It is about what kind of a society we wish to be and to become.
We do have a culture war in this country, and on one side we have people who see us as being made richer through our existing diversity, and on the other side we have people who are displaying xenophobic anxieties about the increasing religious, ethnic, and sexual diversity of America.
Omid Safi is professor of religious studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the author, most recently, of “Memories of Muhammad: Why the Prophet Matters” (HarperOne, 2009).
A new poll this week by the Pew Research Center reports that a growing number of Americans believe—incorrectly—that President Obama is a Muslim. That figure has increased over the past year from 11 percent of the population to 18 percent, with a majority saying they got that information from the media. Meanwhile, the number of people who say they know he is Christian has fallen to only 34 percent. The largest percentage of those polled—43 percent—say they didn’t know the president’s religion, a number which has also risen from last year. Researchers say these changes can be traced back to attacks by opponents and to the fact that Obama is not as visibly religious as his predecessors. The White House responded, saying the president is a Christian and he prays every day.
As controversy continues to surround plans for an Islamic community center in Lower Manhattan, several prominent Republicans have condemned President Obama’s recent comments at a White House Ramadan event. The president affirmed that Muslims have a right to build the Islamic center, although he later refused to say whether he supported the center being built near Ground Zero. At a news conference this week, several prominent Muslim advocates joined Christian and Jewish representatives to express their support for the project moving forward and to condemn what they called “the politics” surrounding the issue. Meanwhile, New York City’s top Roman Catholic leader, Archbishop Timothy Dolan, has offered to meet with the project’s supporters and opponents to help work out a compromise.
A cross you occasionally see on the side of the road may mean different things to different people. The Utah Highway Patrol Association, a private group, planted 12 white crosses alongside public highways in the state. The association said the crosses were to commemorate fallen colleagues who died nearby in the line of duty. They said a cross conveys a message of death, remembrance, honor, gratitude, sacrifice. But a federal appeals court in Denver ruled Wednesday (August 18) the cross also conveys an impermissible endorsement of Christianity by the state, and the crosses must go. An appeal to the Supreme Court seems likely.
Supporters of California’s ban on gay marriage applauded this week’s decision to suspend gay marriages in the state. A federal judge had ruled that gay marriages could begin again, but a three-judge appeals court stayed that decision until further review. The appeals court will take up the case December 6. Meanwhile, several conservative religious leaders gathered in front of the US Capitol this week to express their support for traditional marriage.
LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: Ray Kurzweil may not be a household name, but the blind know who he is. He invented the first reading machine and then reduced its size to a hand-held gadget. Kurzweil will be remembered more as a man on a mission to tell the world what life will be like in the age of technology. Microsoft billionaire Bill Gates said he is the best in the world at predicting the future, and what a world he predicts.
RAY KURZWEIL: This is a design of a robotic red blood cell. We are going to put these technologies inside us, blood-cell-size devices that will augment our immune system, make us a lot healthier, destroy disease and dramatically push back human longevity, go inside our brains and actually enable us to remember things better, solve problems more effectively. We are going to become a hybrid of machine and our biological heritage. In my mind, we are not going to be transcending our humanity. We are going to be transcending our biology.
SEVERSON: Kurzweil has written several books. One of the most recent, called “The Singularity Is Near,” predicts that by the year 2050 nonbiological artificial intelligence will surpass human intelligence, creating a hybrid of man and technology.
KURZWEIL: What I am predicting is that we will have machines—we are going to need a different word because these are not like the machines we are used to. These are going to be machines that will seem as human, as real, as conscious, as any actual human being.
SEVERSON: Even if nonbiological or artificial intelligence created in places like MIT is not as close to “singularity” or matching human intelligence, as Kurzweil believes, it’s close enough that scientists and ethicists are now saying we need to take a serious look at its ramifications. Professor Christian Brugger is a bioethicist at Saint John Vianney Theological Seminary in Denver. Brugger disagrees with Kurzweil that humans can ever come close to perfection with technology.
PROFESSOR CHRISTIAN BRUGGER (Saint. John Vianney Theological Seminary): I don’t think that the technology is the problem. What I have concerns about is the philosophy that stands behind it, the idea that somehow we are going to be able to overcome human limitation or we’re going to overcome death.
SEVERSON: What troubles Brugger the most is the notion that technology will one day replace God.
BRUGGER: If we start to think about technology as a kind of savior, is it going to overcome our misguided ambitions? Is it going to overcome those kinds of prejudices that cause us to hate our neighbor? To many of us who follow a religion, we’d say that God would help us to overcome those things.
SEVERSON: Kurzweil argues that it’s human nature for mankind to utilize technology to overcome human limitations.
KURZWEIL: We are the species that does change ourselves. We didn’t stay on the ground. We didn’t stay on the planet. We didn’t stay with the limits of our biology. If you want to speak in religious terms you can say that’s what God intended us to do.
SEVERSON: Kurzweil bases his predictions on what he calls the exponential growth of artificial intelligence in the fields of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics.
KURZWEIL: Informational technology is growing exponentially, not linearly. Our intuition says it grows like this: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5—thirty steps later you’re at 30. The reality is that it grows 2, 4, 8, 16, and 30 steps later you are at billion.
(giving a speech): When I was a student at MIT, I went there because it was so advanced at that time it actually had a computer, and it costs tens of millions of dollars. It took up half a building. The computer that I carry around and that we all carry around is a million times less expensive. It’s a thousand times more powerful.
SEVERSON: John Donoghue is a professor of neuroscience and engineering and director of the Brown University Institute for Brain Science. He says his work has not progressed exponentially. But in only 10 years he’s been able to implant sensors in the brains of paralyzed patients enabling them to operate a computer, type, run a robotic limb simply by thinking, sending out brain signals.
PROFESSOR JOHN DONOGHUE: The value of the technology is first for people who are severely paralyzed. The first step is to give them any control at all. They can’t do anything without help from someone else. People want and feel some sense of pride in taking care of themselves so anything we can restore is a great step.
SEVERSON: Neuroscience has yielded other life altering advances. For instance, there are now over 75,000 Parkinson patients worldwide who’ve had tiny electrodes implanted in their brains. Doctors say the operation significantly reduces tremors and allows patients to rely less on medications.
KURZWEIL: By the way, nobody is picketing, protesting, oh, people putting computers in their brains—that that is somehow unnatural or defies the way things should be.
SEVERSON: Bioethicist Brugger worries that science will soon cross the line to where brain implants will not simply heal patients, but enhance their ability to think and compete.
BRUGGER: If we move in this direction of radical human enhancement, are we going to develop those who are and those who aren’t? The enhanced and the unenhanced? I mean, Lord, we can’t even find the money to get everyone braces who needs braces.
KURZWEIL: When the technologies are only affordable by the rich they actually don’t work very well. Consider mobile phones. Fifteen years ago somebody took out a mobile phone in the movie. That was a signal this person is very powerful and wealthy, and they didn’t work very well. Now 5 billion people out of 6 billion have mobile phones, and they actually work pretty well.
COLIN ANGLE (CEO of iRobot): A lot of people worry about one day there will be a knock on the door, and there will be a robot, and you would say where did that come from? And I will tell you that the future is going to be much stranger.
SEVERSON: Colin Angle is the cofounder and CEO of iRobot, better known as the creator of the Roomba, the floor cleaning robot or the PackBot robot used to disarm roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, and soon to be released—robots that can keep track of grandma and remind her when it’s time to take her meds.
ANGLE: We call it a physical avatar, and so that these robots would allow a doctor to visit a patient in their own home without ever having to leave his doctor office. These robots are meant to be surrogates for people, so the personality of the doctor will be the personality of the robot.
BRUGGER: I think that iRobots are wonderful, if they can do the vacuuming for me so I can read a good book. I’m happy with that. But iRobots are not my wife, and they are not my children. They are not even an animal.
SEVERSON: Angle doesn’t believe robots will ever replace humans, but he says notwithstanding the science fiction stories of robots run amok, society needs them.
ANGLE: Throughout history there are many different situations where technology exists and can be used for good or evil, and I think that as robots become more capable we need to be careful about using robots to help society.
DONOGHUE: The classic scary story is “The Matrix,” of course, where you plug in and you live in this other reality.
SEVERSON: The reality where computers take over the world:
(from the movie “The Matrix”): “We marveled at our own magnificence as we gave birth to AI.” “AI? You mean artificial intelligence?” “A singular consciousness that spawned an entire race of machines. We don’t know who struck first, us or them.”
SEVERSON: Kurzweil himself worries about technology falling into the wrong hands.
KURZWEIL: The same technologies that are being used to reprogram biology away from heart disease and cancer, presumably good things, could be deployed by a bioterrorist to reprogram a biological virus to be more destructive, and that’s actually a specter that exists right now.
SEVERSON: He says he’s working with the military to develop a system to detect rogue viruses, something like the virus protection found in today’s computer software. But he sees the good society can gain from artificial intelligence far outweighing the bad.
KURZWEIL: That was the family religion. It was personalized: You, Ray, can find the ideas that will change the world.
SEVERSON: Kurzweil has patented over two dozen inventions, including the first music synthesizer, which he sold to Stevie Wonder. President Clinton awarded him the National Medal of Technology, and few have more faith in technology than Ray Kurzweil.
KURZWEIL: Computers are already better than humans at logical thinking. It is our emotional intelligence, the ability to be funny, to get the joke—that is the cutting edge of human intelligence. That’s the most sophisticated, complicated thing we do, and that’s exactly the heart of my prediction that these computers will match us in emotional intelligence, which includes our whole moral system.
BRUGGER: I don’t think that will ever be reached because now we are dealing in the realm of the spirit. If the entire realm of the spirit that has been spoken about in the history of poetry and literature and philosophy and theology is reducible to electrical synapse, then we can reproduce it eventually in a machine, because electricity is at the basis of the machine. I deny that premise. I think that there is more to human beings than reducible to measurable stimuli, and in that regard I don’t think that machines are ever going to be able to be human.
SEVERSON: Undaunted by his critics and skeptics, Kurzweil is so convinced that artificial intelligence will one day enable man to live forever he is doing everything he can to be around when it happens.
SONYA KURZWEIL (making a toast): Well, here’s to living forever. That’s not just a salutation in our family.
KURZWEIL: I want to live indefinitely, and actually I think we all do. People say, oh, I don’t want to live forever, 100 would be great. When they get to 100, they don’t want to die tomorrow.
SEVERSON: Kurzweil is so determined to live “indefinitely.” He takes as many as 200 supplements each day, says this regimen made it possible to reverse both his diabetes and his age. His most recent full-blown checkup results show he has the body and mind of a 40-year-old. Kurzweil is 62 and striving for immortality.
For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, I’m Lucky Severson in Boston.
Biological and technological evolution “is a spiritual process,” says this leading futurist. “Entities become more godlike, never reaching that ideal but moving in that direction exponentially.” Watch more excerpts from our interview with Ray Kurzweil.
Purposefulness and self-sacrifice in human life “can never be reduced to a machine,” according to this bioethicist. Watch more of our interview with Professor Christian Brugger.