Ike foreshadowed

President Eisenhower's notorious reference to the desirability of "a deeply felt religious faith and I don't care what it is" supposedly appeared in the New York Times of 23 December 1952, but I am too cheap to check. This reductio ad absurdum of Protestantism has a longer pedigree than I had imagined. The following comes from A.T. Andreas's History of Chicago, volume 2, page 439, about the First Unitarian Church founded in 1857. BTW, this was no fringe outfit; one of it stalwarts was early railroad executive William M. Larrabee:

"Early in its history this Church attempted to formulate a creed, but found its belief too inclusive, and so abandoned the attempt. The only article of faith upon which all could unite was, that each member might entertain his own belief."

If natural selection was God's tool, what does that imply?

Noah Millman makes an interesting point (h/t Ross Douthat):

science does have implications for the persuasiveness of specific religious doctrines, simply as a psychological matter. And I think evolution through natural selection is extremely uncongenial to the central Christian story about the nature of sin and evil in the world. Why? Because the Christian story has the entry of strife into the world come about as the result of human sin, whereas the core idea behind evolution by natural selection is that our existence – and the consciousness and ability to sin that comes with it – is a product of strife. Put bluntly: natural selection is not the mechanism that the Christian deity would use to create man in His image. Or, if it is, I’d like to see the explanation. I think that natural selection poses similar but less-acute problems for Judaism and Islam; it poses the fewest problems, I suspect, for Hinduism. Again: I’m not speaking of science refuting religion. I’m speaking of scientific results making certain core religious claims less persuasive.

Perhaps needless to say, there's more where this came from.

16th century Protestantism still matters

Luther's reformation wasn't about freedom, let alone freedom to interpret the Bible, argues historian James Simpson (Burning to Read) at History News Network, and he chastises religious liberals for thinking otherwise:

we should abandon the following rock-hard persuasions of the liberal tradition: that Luther believed that readers should interpret the Bible freely, making up their own minds about the truth of Scripture; that Luther placed the liberating text of Scripture above the institution of the Church; and that Lutheran theology is more “democratic.”

Instead, we would be well advised to reread Luther and his vigorous English followers, especially William Tyndale (c. 1494-1536). There we discover that the Lutheran moment was the source of fundamentalism, and the source of different kinds of persecutory violence. ... Luther detested what he called “private interpretation.” He promoted, instead, a movement that repudiated interpretation itself. A recurrent theme in Lutheran theology is that Scripture interprets itself. Scripture is not, and cannot be subject to the messy negotiations of history in which all other texts are immersed. It does its own interpreting (i.e. Scripture interprets itself, but my interpretation is right).

The idea that anything interprets itself seems like a kind of intellectual cancer. I had no idea that its roots might be this deep or this reputable.

Where you stand depends on where you sit

Kim Bobo of Interfaith Worker Justice reviews new books by Jim Wallis (The Great Awakening) and E. J. Dionne (Souled Out) in In These Times, but I'm most interested in her own experience:

Evangelical and Pentecostal traditions have a long history of supporting working class struggles. And the best indicator of whether a church will do so is based on where the workers attend services.

When coalmining members of Four Square Gospel churches in Appalachia go on strike, those churches get involved. When janitors who are members of Pentecostal storefront churches seek a contract, that church gets involved. When an unethical employer cheats members of a mega-church out of their wages, leaders of the church are likely to join a delegation to visit the employer, praying on the employer’s home doorstep until wages are paid.

Though such congregations are often written off as “conservative,” many are willing to advocate for workers if their members are affected. On the flip side, a wealthy congregation may be liberal on cultural issues but less likely to engage on worker justice issues. In other words, class matters—often more than theology.

BTW, I see Wallis will be at Seminary Co-op in Chicago, 5757 S. University, Monday noon.

Mixing god and politics: toxic cocktail?

Kevin Coe, a doctoral student in speech communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has just coauthored with David Scott Domke The God Strategy: How Religion Became a Political Weapon in America. I haven't read it but I'm skittish about newly discovered watersheds, like their claim that things changed profoundly in 1980. Meanwhile he has some interesting thoughts on it here:

"What the omnipresence of the God strategy has created is a de facto religious test. ...We've created an environment that essentially excludes those who feel that faith is a deeply private matter, those who believe that religion can be practiced without being preached, those who observe a faith other than Christianity, and those who choose not to believe in a higher power. That environment is not good for democracy, nor is it good for religion."

A religious test for high elective office

Sam Smith actually offers more than a dozen, in the form of rhetorical questions; this (#8) is one I can get behind:

Does faith primarily influence the candidate by providing positive
values or by supplying wildly unsupportable information posing as truth?

Of course, don't forget the possibility that faith may influence the candidate to believe that husbands have the right and duty to lord it over their wives, and that the wives should shut up and take it. More on this immoral and monarchical doctrine here. (H/t to Sam and Daily Kos)