Entries from February 2008 ↓

Protestants are just about to slip down into minority status, according to this report. “Whereas nearly two thirds of Americans identified themselves as Protestant as recently as the 1980s, only 51 percent identify as Protestant today, the study found.” (For a more in-depth discussion of the survey results, read this.)

The major reason is not a surge in the number of Catholics. That church body is losing members faster than any other, except that large numbers of legal and illegal immigrants, most of whom are Catholics, are keeping the numbers up to pretty much what they have been. The biggest factor is the rise of the fastest-growing religious category: the “unaffiliated,” which now numbers 16%. Evidently, people who once went to churches are abandoning them.

I myself am glad Protestants will soon be another minority group. That will allow Protestants to seize the moral high ground, claim victimhood, get respect, silence critics with shame, and allow for the claiming of a whole bunch of new rights.

But seriously, folks. . .The poll also shows a great deal of people changing from one church or one religion to another.

This graph summarizes the data, including showing the losses from childhood to adulthood in each group. What conclusions can you draw from this information?

Roger Kimball notes that Muslims are waging a traditional jihad, but are finding much greater success with a soft jihad:

That’s the new mantra, you know: “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t give away piggy banks (to say nothing of other “pig related items”) “for fear of offending Muslims.” We don’t draw cartoons of Mohammad “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t publish articles pointing out the demographic disparity between the Muslims of Canada and Europe and other parts of the population “for fear of offending Muslims.” We mustn’t even publish books saying critical things about “Saudis and terrorists” “for fear of offending Muslims.”

It’s all part of the campaign of soft jihad. Traditional jihad is waged with scimitars and their contemporary equivalents, e.g., stolen Boeing 767s, which make handy instruments of mass homicide. Soft jihad is a quieter affair: it uses and abuses the language and the principles of democratic liberalism not to secure the institutions and attitudes that make freedom possible but, on the contrary, to undermine that freedom and pave the way for self-righteous, theocratic intolerance. Soft jihad is patient. It can add and multiply as well as Mark Steyn can (and here). It, too, sees the demographic writing on the wall and is content to wait a few years to occupy the West’s real estate—it’s so much easier, when you come right down to it, than blowing the stuff up and then finding yourself with a massive clean-up and rebuilding bill. Just sit tight and watch the infidels tie themselves into knots making excuses for you while, elsewhere in their lives, they embrace barrenness as an “environmentally friendly” alternative to Genesis 1:28.

Hillary Clinton’s people are circulating a picture of Barack Obama, on a trip to Kenya, wearing African dress, including a turban. (Even though he is wearing a polo and khakis underneath.) The insinuation is that he is a Muslim. That, or she is trying to summon up some kind of weird racist reaction. But Matt Drudge usefully assembles some other pictures of politicians wearing native clothing, including Mrs. Clinton dressed like a Muslim! See this story and the photos below.

Mrs. Clinton has not only dropped all restraint in slamming Mr. Obama, she has adopted John Edward’s class warfare rhetoric in an effort to rally the proletariat to her side. It worked SO WELL for Mr. Edwards.

Doesn’t she see that the more she does this kind of vicious, angry stuff the less voters like her?

This article on changes in the Religious Right is interesting in itself, saying how the old hard-core conservative leaders have either died or are no longer listened to, and how evangelical Christians are now going beyond sex and abortion issues to work also for “compassionate” issues, such as improving the environment and battling AIDS in Africa. The article also raises another issue, though, that Christians are finding that non-Christians’ identifying Christianity with right-wing conservatism, which they hate and fear, has become a major obstacle to evangelism. An excerpt from the article:

Bush’s fall from grace has also highlighted a spiritual reality as evangelicals have begun to sense just how damaging the fusion of Bush and Jesus has been to the perception of our Christian faith.

Beliefnet’s poll revealed that a third of all evangelicals now believe that Christian political activism is “damaging to Christianity.” This isn’t an isolated poll. As Christian pollster David Kinnaman writes, “The number of young people in our culture who now embrace unflattering perspectives about Christians and politics is astounding. Three-quarters of young [non-Christians] and half of young churchgoers describe present-day Christianity as ‘too involved in politics.’ ” Twenty percent of all evangelicals believe that adopting a conservative Christian political agenda has helped destroy the image of Jesus Christ.

For a community of believers such as evangelicals, for whom sharing Jesus’s life-giving message is an essential part of life, this is a shock. It’s evidence of misplaced priorities, of focusing far more on the city of man than on the City of God.

Good point? Or are non-Christians going to hate Christianity no matter what? Should Christians try to be more popular in the name of evangelism? Or is that just more trust in our human efforts at persuasion rather than the power of the Holy Spirit to bring people to faith? One prominent Christian writer has said that Christians should drop anti-abortion activism, since this has become an obstacle to evangelism. How can Christians sort out their spiritual and their earthly missions?

(Hint: Try applying the doctrine of the two kingdoms. How would this work in practice?)

Amy Sullivan is the nation editor for “Time Magazine.” She is a liberal (naturally) and also an evangelical Christian (surprisingly). She has written an op-ed piece, based on a forthcoming book, on being an evangelical liberal in the Democratic party. I was especially struck by her description of just how religiously bigoted the Democratic establishment had become over the last decade, though now the party, tired of losing so often and inspired by Barack Obama’s call for inclusion, is trying to change that:

A few months ago, while participating in an early-morning panel discussion in the heart of Manhattan, I was startled fully awake when a man stood up to declare that Democrats who reached out to religious voters, especially evangelicals, were akin to those who collaborated with the Nazis. I put on a sweet smile of Christian charity and counted to 10.

Comments like that explain why so many of us liberals who also happen to be evangelicals have stayed in the closet for so long. . . .

Democrats weren’t just passive nonactors who stood by helplessly while the GOP claimed Christ for itself. Instead of pushing back against conservatives’ insistence that Democrats aren’t religious, the party beat a hasty retreat, ceding the high ground in the competition for religious Christian voters and discussions of morality. The religious divide in U.S. politics that emerged — call it the God gap — represented as much a failure by Democrats as it did an achievement by Republicans.

The first religious bloc that professional Democrats wrote off was the evangelicals, despite the fact that fully 40 percent of born-again Christians describe themselves as politically moderate. Then party officials started to steer clear of Catholic voters, spooked by their opposition to abortion. Michael Dukakis’s 1988 campaign was the first in Democratic history to turn down all invitations to appear at Catholic venues.

Thus isolated, the professionals who run Democratic campaigns fell into a self-reinforcing spiral of misconceptions about the faithful. As being religious became not just declasse but downright dangerous in Democratic circles, religious Democrats silenced themselves.

Contrary to my usual custom, I really don’t have anything to say about the Academy Awards. I tried to watch some of the show, but I found it insufferable and had to turn away. Which raised another question in my mind: Is it really true lately that movies influence the culture? I think we are seeing the dysfunction evident in the rest of the arts, in which the “high culture” of the artsy elite has become culturally irrelevant, while the “pop culture” of the money-makers simply conforms to whatever trends are out there.

Our nation’s newspaper of record is getting slammed by its own watchdog for publishing without a shred of evidencethat story about John McCain insinuating that he had an illicit affair : Read what the New York Times ombudsman had to say.

Pop-spirituality guru Deeprak Chopra writes an essay entitled Why We Need a New Jesus.  

He says there have been two Jesuses. One the rabbi of history, and the other the divine savior created by organized religion. He says we need a new one, a Jesus of “higher consciousness.”

A prophet of higher consciousness sounds pretty much like Deeprak Chopra. The way I read this essay is that he is volunteering for the job.

But you can bet that the new Jesus he wants or wants to be will not have a Cross.

Serbian mobs over-ran the U.S. embassy in Belgrade and set part of it on fire. See this. This was part of a protest of Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia, which the United States is expected to recognize.

Since embassies are considered sovereign soil of the nation they represent, this means that American territory was attacked and invaded.

This business with John McCain and a pretty lobbyist strikes me as low, low scandal mongering.  I haven’t read any direct allegations of a sexual relationship between them, but that is the insinuation with all the photos of the woman in her glamorous gown.  The concern of McCain’s aides seems to have been that she was one of those evil lobbyists that the Senator usually scorned.  But if association with a lobbyist is scandalous in itself, pretty much all legislators would be guilty, and McCain less than most of them.  

But, I don’t know, maybe there is more to the story than just two left-wing publications, “The New Republic” and “The New York Times,” trying to destroy a Republican. If so, more will come out. But, what do you think about all of this?

Here is the story so far: McCain Denies Aides’Statements About Lobbyist.

John McCain is getting tangled up in the campaign finance rules he himself devised: FEC Warns McCain on Campaign Spending.

Anthony Sacramone reviews another critique of the new atheism, “The Irrational Atheist” by Vox Day.  That author deals with the slur that religion has caused most of the world’s wars by actually counting them:

Day found 123 wars that could validly be claimed to have religion at their heart—a grand total of 6.98 percent of all wars fought. “It’s also interesting to note that more than half of these religious wars, sixty-six in all, were waged by Islamic nations,” Day offers as an aside.