Will Christopher Hitchens Go to Heaven?

Reading "American Grace, How Religion Unites Us and Divides Us" by Robert Putnam of "Bowling Alone" fame and David Campbell.  In one section  they cite a poll showing that most people think most people will go to heaven: that is, most Catholics believe Protestants can go to heaven, believe Jews can go to heaven, etc. So Americans mostly are tolerant and don't hold strictly to theological teachings. At least, that's what Putnam and Campbell say.  But I note the survey didn't think to ask whether atheists and agnostics, like maybe Christopher Hitchens or Albert Einstein, could go to heaven.  I wonder what such a survey question would reveal: is entry to heaven based on the life one led or the beliefs one has? I also wonder who will get into the heaven which features 76 virgins?  Is heaven segregated by belief?

In America Mosques Become (Protestant) Churches

One point made in American Grace (a book I've just started reading) is that, in the U.S. the original template in religion is the Protestant congregation(al) church.  That template is very different from the pattern of religion in many other countries.  The evolution of religion in the U.S. has been for other denominations/religions to become more like the Protestant congregational  church. It may be  this is because the U.S. has a competitive religious marketplace, so every religion has had to complete with the original template.  It's the old tale: competing organizations tend to imitate each other

The Decline of the WASP Establishment

Charles Blow has a piece on religion and representation in Congress in the Times today. I'm mainly interested in the graphic accompanying the piece showing changes in representation from 1961-2 to now. Catholic, "Other Protestant" and Jewish have all risen (maybe 50 percent or more based on eyeballing), while Episcopal, Methodist, Presbyterian, and Congregationalist have all fallen at roughly the same rate.  Baptists and Lutherans remained relatively steady. In other words, the 2nd, 3rd, 4th and 6th ranking denominations in 1961 fell drastically.

Render Unto Caesar

A friend argues we should not have any marriages recognized by the civil authorities; everyone should use civil unions and leave marriages to the churches. That almost feels like Matt Yglesias on Christmas: let's have a universal secular festival on the solstice and leave Christmas and Hanukkah to their respective religions.

How Far We've Progressed

A conjunction of two articles in today's NYTimes: one describing Nixon's views of Jews, and different ethnicities, the other describing a video used to raise money for the American Jewish World Service:

The film they commissioned, by the director Judd Apatow and the writer Jordan Rubin, is different from the standard nonprofit propaganda, different enough to have been watched nearly a million times since it made its debut a month and a half ago.
Mr. Apatow’s short film features a medley of Hollywood stars, Jew and gentile, making light of Jewish stereotypes, suggesting that donors “send a self-addressed stamped matzoh,” and generally having more fun at a religious group’s expense than their grandparents might think proper.

Burning the Pope in Effigy

Some of my ancestors came from Ulster, where lives the Orange Order.  One of the tenets of the Orange Order was an unremitting fight against Popery. So this post in Religion in American History, recalling a little-known order of General Washington, condemning the burning of the Pope in effigy, was interesting to me. (The context: early in the Revolution its leaders hoped to get Canada, i.e., Quebec, to join the rebellion.)

Props to GW Again

Seems every 6 months or so something comes up where I have to recognize our former President and his accomplishments.  This time it's his approach to Islam after 9/11.  See this Politico piece by Ben Smith and Maggie Haberman on the way the GOP is abandoning his stand and, as titled, GOP takes harsher stand on Islam.

2 Blocks Bad; 12 Blocks Good?

In Animal Farm, the mantra was: "4 legs good, 2 legs bad".

According to this NYTimes piece on the proposed Cordoba community center/mosque, there's currently a mosque 12 blocks away from the World Trade center site.

But using Google maps it seems there's a limited facility .2 miles away.  When I say "limited", I mean this is included on their site:

Bathroom access is limited. Please make wudu before coming to the Masjid.

 Sorry for the incovenience.
Jazaka Allahu Khyera.

Driving While Burqaed (in France)

Dirk Beauregarde has a long post on the arrest of a woman for wearing a burqa while driving.  Seems the French have a law saying the driver's ability to drive must be unimpeded.  But was that really the issue?

The Blessing of the Phones

Michael Nielson includes a link on a British canon who blessed the cell phones:

On this day, the first Monday after Twelfth Night, farm labourers would bring a plough to the door of the church to be blessed… Men and women coming to [the modern] church no longer used ploughs; their tools were their laptops, their iPhones and their BlackBerries. So he wrote a blessing and [delivered] it before a congregation of 80, the white heat of technology shining from his every pronouncement. “I invite you to have your mobile phone out … though I would like you to put it on silent,” he said.

Some Christians Are a Little Strange

From TPM (though this is quite likely a hoax, thought the right didn't like the teabag label):

"Our small tea bag group here in Waycross, we got our vigil together and took Dr. Coburn's instructions and prayed real hard that Sen. Byrd would either die or couldn't show up at the vote the other night," the caller said.
"How hard did you pray because I see one of our members was missing this morning. Did it backfire on us? One of our members died? How hard did you pray senator? Did you pray hard enough?" he continued, his voice breaking. [I think this is a take-off from Sen. Coburn's advice to pray that Dems would not show up.]

From NYTimes:

I asked Steve Bercu, BookPeople’s owner, what the most frequently stolen title was.
“The Bible,” he said, without pausing.
Apparently the thieves have not yet read the “Thou shalt not steal” part — or maybe they believe that Bibles don’t need to be paid for.

A Question of Priorities

The major is quoted as having said: "I'm a Muslim first and an American second".  My first reaction is, of course, if you're truly religious you have to believe your immortal soul is invaluable, so religious faith comes first.  Would we raise an eyebrow if any public figure said "I'm a Christian first and an American second"? 

But then, thinking about JFK and his famous address in Houston, I start to wonder.  Basically in 1960 the idea among Protestants was that JFK was a Catholic first and an American second and, because Catholics owed allegiance to the Pope (that's a vanished concept) he could not be trusted as a President.  JFK's speech said his priority as President was America, not his faith.

But on the other hand, we respect Quakers and Amish who claim the right of conscientious objection, which seems in part to be a claim that religion takes priority over patriotism.

Bottomline:  I don't know--I suspect there may be a position I'd agree with, but it probably requires lots of consideration of the situation.  But that would require more thinking than I have patience for right now (ever again?).  So, here as elsewhere I opt for tolerating positions without trying for consistency.

France Is a Different Country (L'Ancien Regime Still Mourned by Some)

We got rid of our Loyalists to Canada, but not so in France--an excerpt from Dirk Beauregard's post on religion:

In very traditional, and unflinching, intégriste, or fundamentalist Catholic circles, there is still a lot of nostalgia for the Ancien Régime. The 1789 Revolution is viewed very much as a cataclysm and a rupture with God and the natural order. However, the vast majority of Catholics are quite happy living within the republican scheme of things.

NYTimes on Muslims

The Times does a piece on a Gallup poll of American Muslims.

“We discovered how diverse Muslim Americans are,” said Dalia Mogahed, executive director and senior analyst of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, which financed the poll. “Ethnically, politically and economically, they are in every way a cross-section of the nation. They are the only religious community without a majority race.”

I was struck by the fact the plurality of Muslim Americans are Africans. Otherwise, the results are about what one might expect--Muslim Americans are more satisfied than their counterparts in most other countries, but less so than other religious groups.

Oaths of Office [Revised]

In helping my cousin with a bit of research, I stumbled on a long paper outlining the evolution of the oath of office taken by British MP's. Then onto this wikipedia article, which covers oaths in a number of countries. And of course Mr. Newdow is suing over the oath of office for Obama.

Because the oath touches on a number of issues: religion, loyalty, nationalism, history, it's an interesting subject:

• in Britain the oath for MPs has a long history, going from short to long to short. At different times Quakers, Moravians, Jews, and atheists who were elected had problems with the existing oath, which normally led to a modification to accommodate the problems each had. But because the oath is still one of allegiance to the sovereign, some Ulster MPs still refuse to take the oath. So the live issue in Britain seems to be which functions of an MP require the oath, and which don't.
  
• by comparison to the Brits, the writers of the Constitution look pretty good. They prescribed the oath for the President in the Constitution, permitted affirmations and didn't include: "so help me God". And they kept it short.
  
• I barely remember the oath I had to swear when I became a bureaurcrat, but here it is: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter. So help me God". It would be nice for Mr. Newdow to try to shorten that oath.
  
• As a side issue, oaths used to be big for the Reformed Presbyterians. And in the first part of the 19th century they'd refuse to take the oath because the government was not covenanted with God. (That's part of my family history.)
  
• skimming the wikipedia article is fascinating--consider the differences in oaths between the President of Pakistan, which combines religion and government, and the President of India, which is secular.
  

Closing Prayer

Religion in America comments on and posts the closing prayer of the Dem's convention--the new evangelism.

Map of Religions

Here's an interesting map of the US, showing the leading churches by county. I knew the Mennonite/Amish community was spreading, but not to Kansas. (The Presbyterianism of my father's side is a minority faith everywhere, even in its western PA heartland.) Hat tip to Religion in America.

Putnam and Immigration

Robert Putnam, of "Bowling Alone" fame, ponders immigration in this interview. Here's a quote:

"In the successful cases [of societies integrating immigrants] – like the United States, like Canada, and to some extent Australia – the first step is that the immigrant groups often form organizations on their own: the sons of Ireland or the sons of Norway. Now those may look initially to the receiving society like, “Oh, they don’t want to join us, they want to have their own separate group.”

But what’s going on is that these people are in a new place and they’re trying to find some group with which they have something in common and can begin to form friendships –any of us would do that in a new setting. Those organizations historically prove to be steps toward becoming involved in America."

One thing he misses, I think, is the way we (the natives/earlier immigrants) and they (the later immigrants) start the process. It's true now, and I'm pretty sure it's been true since the beginning, that people in the "old country" were identified more by the sections/provinces they came from. The Irish and the Scots and the Scots-Irish all had county, clan, or religious affiliation. The "Germans" were Hessians, Bavarians, Saxons, or whatever. Once they arrive here, their national identity becomes the major factor, the regionalisms are subordinated. So too today, natives of Indian states become at least "Indians", if not South Asians (along with Pakistanis, Bangladeshis, and Ceylonese) or even "Asians", as in an "Asian-American society.

This leads naturally to a blending of identities--when I was growing up you had the WASP's, the Irish and Italian Catholics, and the Eastern European Catholics. Now we're mostly just "whites".

I Find the Nation's Ehrenreich To Be Nutty

To undermine my liberal credentials, I find this Nation article by Barbara Ehrenreich to be deeply nutty--to wit, Hillary Clinton is part of a secretive conservative "Family" of religious people, almost a "cult" that has been and continues to be fascinated by Adolf Hitler. Ehrenbach ends:

" Obama has given a beautiful speech on race and his affiliation with the Trinity United Church of Christ. Now it's up to Clinton to explain--or, better yet, renounce--her long-standing connection with the fascist-leaning Family."

I hasten to admit that I've no facts with which to counter the article. It sounds similar to the conspiracy theories woven around Opus Dei. Call me naive, but I believe in no conspiracies, of either right or left.

First Sermon I've Listened to in Decades

Rev. Jeremiah Wright's "Audacity to Hope" (Part I on YouTube) or the transcript