Culture Briefs

Liberalizing church

“The Presbyterian Church in the United States (PCUSA) is about to release a report which denounces Israel as a ’racist’ nation which has absolutely no historical, covenantal, or theological right to the Holy Land. The report calls for the United States to withhold financial and military aid to Israel and for boycotts and sanctions against Israel. Thats not all. The report also endorses a Palestinian ’right of return’ and ’apologizes to Palestinians for even conceding that Israel has a right to exist.’ According to the press release, it also states that Israels history begins only with the Holocaust and that Israel is ’a nation mistakenly created by Western powers at the expense of the Palestinian people to solve the “Jewish problem” ’ …

“In 2004, this Church became the first mainline Protestant denomination in America to ’approve a policy of divestment from Israel.’ This was rescinded, but in 2008 the Church ’created a committee dominated by seven activists holding strong anti-Israel beliefs. The lone member sympathetic to Israel, quit in protest when he saw their radical agenda.’

“The Simon Wiesenthal Center notes that 46 members of the US Congress and Senate are Presbyterians and fears potentially ’significant repercussions in the political domain’ as well as a negative ’impact on interfaith relations.’ ”

- Phyllis Chesler, writing on “Presbyterians Usher in the Jewish Holiday of Purim” on Feb. 24 at her Pajamas Media blog the Chesler Chronicles

Liberalizing religion

“I was surprised to see that the Huffington Post - a flagship ultra-liberal political news and opinion portal - is launching a religion section. After all, the Huffington Post makes a sickeningly-predictable habit of lambasting, lampooning and [villainizing] organized religion (particularly Christianity, and within that, the Catholic faith) at every turn. …

“You see, it isn’t even true that believers and non-believers are welcome. Visit the religion section, and look at the list of contributors. The most ’orthodox’ contributor out of dozens is Sister Joan Chittister(!), the last relic of the worst sort of syncretism that came out of the 60’s and 70’s Catholic Church in America. She spends her column lecturing the Church about how to be relevant in the 21st century. Seriously. …

“And unfortunately, the Huffington Post has chosen to cherry-pick this sort of myopic time-warp evaluation of issues that previously has only managed to survive on the crumbling pages of the National Catholic Reporter.”

- Thomas Peters, writing on “New HuffPo Religion welcomes all well, some” on March 3 at Catholic Vote Action

Liberalizing conscience

“Fifty years ago this fall, in September 1960, Sen. John F. Kennedy, the Democratic candidate for president, spoke to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association … his speech left a lasting mark on American politics. It was sincere, compelling, articulate - and wrong … wrong about American history and very wrong about the role of religious faith in our nation’s life.

“And he wasn’t merely ’wrong.’ His Houston remarks profoundly undermined the place not just of Catholics, but of all religious believers, in America’s public life and political conversation. Today, half a century later, we’re paying for the damage. …

“For his audience of Protestant ministers, Kennedy’s stress on personal conscience may have sounded familiar and reassuring. But what Kennedy actually did, according to Jesuit scholar Mark Massa, was something quite alien and new. He ’secularize* the American presidency in order to win it.’ In other words, ’[P]recisely because Kennedy was not an adherent of that mainstream Protestant religiosity that had created and buttressed the “plausibility structures” of [American] political culture at least since Lincoln, he had to “privatize” presidential religious belief - including and especially his own - in order to win.’ ”

- Archbishop Charles Chaput of Denver, in “The Vocation of Christians in American Public Life,” a March 1 speech at Houston Baptist University