Free Republic

Does the seizure of the Labour leadership north and south of the border by Presbyterian progeny signal the revival of religion in British public life? Both Gordon Brown and Wendy Alexander are self-consciously "children of the manse": happy, we are told, to bring their Protestant sensibility to bear upon public policy. Whether it is opposing supercasinos, or rolling back cannabis liberalisation, or calling for a "coalition of conscience" against the atrocities in Darfur, the Presbyterian ethos of "giving witness in life" has returned to the higher echelons of government. But this is eyewash: the Protestant mindset has rarely played less...

In an act of jaw-dropping hubris, Pope Benedict Joseph Ratzinger recently declared Protestantism's churches "not true churches." In an effort to underscore the wisdom of such a position at this time, he then had his "document" signed by none other than Cardinal William Levada, a pro-gay, pro-pedophile, pro-molestation cleric hailing recently from San Francisco and Portland. Apparently hypocrisy is in abundant supply in the Vatican larder. Levada is one of the papal appointments that causes either great puzzlement about (or gives great insight into) this Pope's orientation. Fresh off of scandals in his previous appointments, Levada received one of the...

Pope Benedict XVI declared yesterday that Christian denominations other than his own were not true churches and their holy orders have no value. Protestant leaders immediately responded by saying the claims were offensive and would hurt efforts to promote ecumenism. Roman Catholic- Anglican relations are already strained over the Church of England's plans to ordain homosexuals and women as bishops. The claims came in a document, from a Vatican watchdog which was approved by the Pope. It said the branches of Christianity formed after the split with Rome at the Reformation could not be called churches "in the proper sense"...

My lucubrations for today’s webposting would like to argue just this one single point: Doctrinal clarity is lost when Catholics call Protestant heretics. To be sure, that habit of unthinkingly hurling accusations of heresy at Protestants pretty much died out after the Second Vatican Council, when talk of “separated brethren” became all the rage. But a random spot-check of some Catholic blogsites of a conservative bent–where heresy is often used as the term of choice when these bloggers are in their Colonel Blimp harumphing mood–tells me it’s time for some clarity here. Which prompts the following reflections. First of all,...

Seventeen-year-old Stephanie Sanchez had been impregnated for the third time by Adrian Estrada, her youth pastor, when she was strangled and stabbed, prosecutor Scott Simpson told jurors Tuesday in Estrada's capital murder trial. Estrada had held Bible studies and ministered to Sanchez in his role as youth pastor at El Sendero Assembly of God church, Simpson said in opening statements. And in December 2004, when she was 16 and he was 21, he took her to abort her first pregnancy. By the time she was killed a year later, Simpson said, Estrada was interested in another young girl. "Rather than...

Canada's Christians have been trounced and their venture into the sacrosanct precinct of secular politics has proved a singular failure, brayed the heathen last week, after the House of Commons endorsed gay marriage by a much bigger majority than when it approved of it last year. The heathen in this case was a senior columnist in the super-secularist Globe and Mail, who wrote in undisguised exaltation: "Thoughtful evangelical Christians must [now] ask themselves some hard questions, such as: 'Isn't it about time we admit we've failed? That, both here and in the United States, our efforts to influence the political...

A watchdog committee at Westminster has said the Goverment isn`t tackling the underperformance of Protestant pupils urgently enough. The committee has sent the Department of Education an end of term report. It grades the department on what it has done to lift exam results in loyalist areas. The verdict: could do a lot better. GCSE Maths: Appalling performance; literacy and numeracy: progress manifestly unsatisfactory. In fact the latter criticism applies across Northern Ireland. The Public Accounts Committe reports that one in five pupils leaves school here without being able to read and write properly. But though concerned with the broad...

My great-great-great-grandfather was named Moses. My cousins have names like Sarah, Deborah, Jeremy, Judith, Esther, Raphael, and Samuel.... Yet I do not (as far as I know) have a single drop of Jewish blood in my veins. Neither did I, nor any member of my family, convert to Judaism. But philo-Semitism, which often includes an emotional identification with the Jewish people, is part of the heritage of the community I was raised in: The French Huguenots, or Protestants.... But perhaps the most moving example of Protestant efforts on behalf of French Jewry occurred in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, a small, all-Protestant town...

The Church of England has broken with tradition dogma by calling for doctors to be allowed to let sick newborn babies die. Christians have long argued that life should preserved at all costs - but a bishop representing the national church has now sparked controversy by arguing that there are occasions when it is compassionate to leave a severely disabled child to die. And the Bishop of Southwark, Tom Butler, who is the vice chair of the Church of England's Mission and Public Affairs Council, has also argued that the high financial cost of keeping desperately ill babies alive should...

The Church of England believes doctors should be given the right to withhold treatment from some seriously disabled newborn babies in exceptional circumstances, The Observer reported. The view comes in a submission from the church to a British medical ethics committee looking at the implications of keeping severely premature babies alive through technological advances, the weekly newspaper said. The Bishop of Southwark, Tom Butler, was said to have written that "it may in some circumstances be right to choose to withhold or withdraw treatment, knowing it will possibly, probably, or even certainly result in death". Last week, Britain's Royal College...

Pity the poor values voter. She's all dressed up, but does she have anywhere to go? In 2004, she was the darling of the election. Now she feels like a wallflower, taken for granted by the Republicans and mocked by the Democrats. "Values voter" is, of course, a euphemism for evangelicals and conservative Catholics. It is more politically correct to use the euphemism than to acknowledge that one's religious faith actually influences their decision in the voting booth. After all, one must take care not to run afoul of the radical notion of separation of church and state promoted by...

Some have joked that Presbyterians are "denser" in Pittsburgh than anywhere else. All over Allegheny County, you can find Presbyterian churches within a stone's throw of each other, and despite population losses, Western Pennsylvania continues to have more Presbyterians than any other region of the nation. There's a strong historical reason for that. It is connected to a group of immigrants who were a bedrock of the region's early settlement, but whose role in American history is virtually unknown to many people. They are the Scots-Irish, although it's not a term they originally would have applied to themselves, according to...

When it comes to salaries among some church leaders, the policy seems to be "don't ask, don't tell," even though tithes from parishioners pay those salaries. While Catholic and Greek Orthodox churches have no qualms about revealing pastors' salaries, many local Protestant churches do not reveal salaries to nonmembers. Salaries of pastors at Protestant churches tend to be set by overarching religious associations or by a church board or both. The figure is often based on the church's location and parish size. Salaries tend to fall within the lower to upper middle-class range. A general rule among Protestant churches may...

Terry Villaire, 69, has a neatly trimmed black goatee, pudgy expressive hands and penetrating dark eyes that are hard to avoid, even from the back pew.During a recent Mass at Holy Angels Parish in Fort Lauderdale, Villaire seemed more like a party host than a presiding bishop as he circulated, distributing kisses on ready lips and cheeks. Just as effortlessly, he slipped into the solemnity of a centuries-old ritual, singing over a wine chalice and wafers.''Our motto is love without judgment, and that's piqued some curiosity,'' said Villaire, a former Roman Catholic priest who's now a bishop in an independent...

Has anyone noticed the almost complete disappearance of Protestants from our nation? "What!" I can hear my readers exclaim, "Storck has really gone off his rocker this time. Why, just down the street there's an Assembly of God church and two or three Baptist churches and the Methodists and so on. My cousin just left the Catholic Church to become a Protestant and my niece just married one. Moreover, evangelical Protestants have many media outlets of their own and they have great influence in the Bush Administration. They're everywhere." All this, of course, is true. Except that for some...

Reformation Day October 31, 1517 It was a Wednesday. It was a Wednesday, October 31, 1517. It was not really all that much different from the thousands of other Wednesdays that had come before. It was fall, of course, and the air had cooled down and the leaves were putting on a wonderful show of color along the River Elbe on the hillside. It was nice time to be a German. It was a nice time to live in rural Germany. The harvest had been plentiful. That is, it had been as plentiful as the white sand fields surrounding the...

Elaine Pagels, the famous historian of early Christianity, once told a revealing story about the social world behind the scenes of high-powered biblical scholarship. As a young up-and-coming professor at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, she was invited to a closed-door, after-hours smoker. The men there (Pagels was the only woman) were all prominent Bible scholars. Many of them didn't even believe in God, and those who still called themselves Christian were anything but orthodox. The liquor flowed freely, and as these men got in their cups, they began to sing old gospel songs. To her...

The surprising origins of "We Gather Together," a Thanksgiving standard. Its mention of God makes it verboten in schools today. But not too many years ago this was the season when teachers would lead their students in the great ecumenical Thanksgiving hymn, "We Gather Together to Ask the Lord's Blessing." It's a singable melody, and the stirring lyrics speak directly of the Pilgrims' experience in overcoming religious persecution.

'Megachurches' draw big U.S. crowds By Joyce Kelly and Michael Conlon CHICAGO (Reuters) - On a recent Sunday at Willow Creek Community Church, a Christian rock band joined by dancing children powered up in the cavernous main hall, their images ablaze on several gigantic screens. Thousands of worshipers from the main floor to the balcony and mezzanine levels were on their feet rocking to a powerful sound system. Outside cars filled a parking lot fit for a shopping mall. Inside some people drifted into small Bible study groups or a bookstore and Internet cafe for lattes, cappuccinos and seats by...

It is not often that I commend the writings of a liberation theologian. And I'm not about to do so now, at least not in totality. But Native American liberationist Vive Deloria's thirtieth anniversary edition of God Is Red: A Native View of Religion has some important insights about the state of mainline Protestantism. Deloria, in the midst of the typical revisionist proposals for Christian theology, offers the idea that Hugh Hefner should be pronounced "Protestant saint of the century." This is because, he suggests, of the ways in which the mainline bureaucracies have embraced "almost every kind of sexual...