c. 2004 Religion News Service
Top Lutheran Bishop Chides Bush, Kerry on Negative Campaigns
(RNS) In a stern rebuke to both the Bush and Kerry campaigns, the nation’s top Lutheran bishop said both candidates had become bogged down in negativity and have ignored the most crucial issues facing the global community.
The Rev. Mark Hanson, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, told both candidates in an open letter that terrorism is not the only issue that confronts Americans or their role in the world.
“Yes, terrorism haunts our times, but so do hunger and poverty, corrupt and brutal political systems, harsh discrimination and social inequalities, civil wars, environmental degradation and epidemic diseases,” Hanson said.
Hanson’s mince-no-words letter was a rare _ and bipartisan _ rebuke from a major religious leader during an election year. He chided both campaigns for focusing on 30-year-old war records and casting all issues through the lens of terrorism.
“It is time for the tone and the content of your campaigns to change,” he said in his Monday (Sept. 27) letter. “The world is watching this election closely. The challenges facing this country and the magnitude of the issues confronting the world are too grave and complex for negativity.”
As president of the Geneva-based Lutheran World Federation, Hanson also brings global credentials to his position. In a phone interview from Texas, Hanson said he shared frustration with colleagues in Central America and Europe that both campaigns have not addressed central questions about America’s role in the world beyond terrorism.
“It just seems like we can’t get on track with what I think are the central, substantive issues facing the world of which we are such a central part,” he said.
Michael Meehan, a spokesman for the Kerry campaign, said the campaign appreciated Hanson’s “wise words. John Kerry and John Edwards share the same values as people of faith and know that we, as a nation, must do a better job addressing poverty and hunger. They also understand that American influence must be used to make this world a safer and more peaceful place for all of God’s creations to co-exist.”
Sharon Castillo, a spokeswoman for the Bush-Cheney campaign, was unavailable for immediate comment.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Religious Groups Say Attack on Gallup is Attack on Faith
(RNS) Some religious groups are crying foul over a liberal advocacy group’s attempt to make an issue about the faith of pollster George Gallup Jr.
MoveOn.org went after Gallup in a full-page advertisement in the New York Times Tuesday (Sept. 28) in which it criticized the pollster’s methodology in surveys that showed President Bush leading Democratic challenger John Kerry.
The ad ended with a reference to Gallup’s faith.
“Gallup, who is a devout evangelical Christian, has been quoted as calling his polling a `kind of ministry,’ ” the ad said. “And a few months ago, he said `the most profound purpose of polls is to see how people are responding to God.’
“We thought the purpose is to faithfully and factually report public opinion.”
Gallup, 74, and recently retired from the Gallup Organization, made some of those comments in a Religion News Service article.
Abraham Foxman, director of the Anti-Defamation League, decried MoveOn.org’s approach.
“It’s one thing to challenge methodology and credibility,” said Foxman in an interview with The New York Sun. “It’s another thing to say that the methodology and credibility are motivated by faith. … What if the poll was headed by a devout Jew. How would we have felt.?”
The New York City-based Catholic League for Civil and Religious Rights was also offended.
“The implication is that if you take your religion seriously, you can’t be objective,” said Catholic League president William Donohue. “To bring in a man’s religion and basically suppose, `It’s those Christians again, misleading the public.”
He later added, “I thought it was despicable.”
Raymond Flynn, former Democratic mayor of Boston, said he sees the ad as part of a dangerous trend.
“There’s really a growing, blatant, anti-religious sentiment in the United States,” said Flynn, national director of Catholic Citizenship, a voter registration organization. “I think it makes it dangerous because then we can dismiss somebody on the basis of their religion for having a narrow, uneducated point of view.”
Officials at MoveOn.org did not respond to a request from Religion News Service for an interview.
Gallup retired from polling in May of this year and remains active in the organization’s outreach efforts. Prior to his retirement, he spent five decades writing survey questions on a range of topics, including private religious beliefs and political attitudes.
In an interview with The New York Sun, Gallup shrugged off the criticism.
“I wasn’t angered,” Gallup said. “I’ve been polling for 50 years. Particularly at election time, people get very uptight and start throwing brickbats.”
He dismissed the idea that he would skew a poll.
“One, it’s dishonest,” said Gallup. “Two, that would be absurd. It would make you look terrible, for the company and everything. That’s off the wall, totally off the wall.”
Anti-Defamation League Warns of Neo-Nazi Marketing to Teens
(RNS) The Anti-Defamation League is warning school officials nationwide about a fall marketing campaign by neo-Nazi groups planning to distribute about 100,000 free CD music samplers containing anti-Semitic and racist songs.
The target audience is expected to be middle school and high school students, said the league, based in New York City.
“This is the first broad-scale distribution that we’re aware of,” said Daniel Alter, the Anti-Defamation League’s national director for civil rights.
The CD will include obscure bands playing songs with titles such as, “White Supremacy,” “The Nationalist,” “White Kids,” “Teutonic Uprise” and “Hate Train Rolling.”
The ADL said the marketing campaign is called “Operation Schoolyard USA,” with key organizers including Panzerfaust Records, a music company based in Newport, Minn. A company spokesman did not respond to a request for comment.
Thousands of Christians Come to Israel for Feast
JERUSALEM (RNS) More than 4,000 evangelical Christians from 80 nations were in Israel to celebrate the 25th annual Feast of the Tabernacles and give a struggling economy a multi-million dollar boost.
Organized by the Jerusalem-based International Christian Embassy, the festival, which began Wednesday (Sept. 29) continued through the eight-day Jewish holiday of Sukkot.
During the past quarter century, the Christian Embassy, an international Christian Zionist organization, has brought more than 100,000 pro-Israel Christians to the Holy Land. As in previous years, the feast’s participants will have the opportunity to visit Jewish settlers, Israeli soldiers at army bases and victims of Palestinian terror attacks, and to tour Christian sites around the country.
_ Michele Chabin
Episcopalians Likely to Consider Israeli Divestment
(RNS) Two top officials of the Episcopal Church said an investments panel will recommend a 12-month study of whether the denomination should divest from companies operating in Israel, following a similar move by the Presbyterian Church (USA).
The Presbyterians’ decision to explore divestment has angered Jewish groups who say the action is unfair. A high-level summit last week in New York (Sept. 28) failed to find common ground between the two faiths.
Episcopal Bishop Christopher Epting, the church’s ecumenical director, and the Rev. Brian Grieves, director of its peace and justice division, said recommendations on pulling church investments are expected in November from the church’s Socially Responsible Investment Committee.
The panel will recommend a 12-month investigation into what investments are “appropriate with companies that contribute to the ongoing (Israeli) Occupation (of Palestinian territories), especially in the areas of home demolitions, settlement building and the separation wall,” Epting and Grieves said Friday (Oct. 1) in a joint statement.
The panel met Sept. 24-25 to consider the issue after a delegation from the Anglican Peace and Justice Network said it would urge divestment by the Anglican Communion next June. The Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion.
Ultimately, each of the 38 provinces in the Anglican Communion would set its own policy. In the Episcopal Church, decisions would be made by the church’s Executive Council “and/or” its General Convention legislative gathering, which next meets in 2006.
Epting and Grieves said the church will “welcome input” from other churches and Jewish groups. They also hinted that divestment could be adopted by dioceses and parishes “that may be interested in this effort.”
Jewish leaders say divestment from Israel does not threaten similar sanctions against Palestinians and puts Israeli security at risk. They are also concerned that divestment could spread to other churches.
David Elcott, interfaith director for the American Jewish Committee, plans to meet with Episcopal Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold on the matter next week and said he is confident that the Episcopalians will not follow suit.
“The Presbyterians voted with no conversation (with Jews) and were surprised by the response they got,” Elcott said. “The Episcopalians are not making that type of error.”
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Evangelist Billy Graham Plans Final New York-Area Crusade
(RNS) Evangelist Billy Graham plans to hold his final New York-area crusade in Madison Square Garden next June.
But officials who work with the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association said there is no indication the evangelist plans that to be his last crusade ever.
“I think he’s holding to his statement in the past that he is not going to retire,” said Art Bailey, who will direct the New York crusade, in an interview with Religion News Service. “As long as he is physically able to continue, he’s going to continue.”
A. Larry Ross, Graham’s spokesman, said plans depend on the evangelist’s health and the invitations he receives from local churches.
“I think Mr. Graham, as he’s done in the past, is going to defer any decisions about crusades beyond New York until after the crusades this fall, just to see how he’s feeling, … how much gas he has in the tank,” Ross said in an interview.
Graham is scheduled to preach the week of June 20 at Madison Square Garden for a crusade that will involve churches from New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.
More immediately, he will lead crusades Oct. 7-10 at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, Mo., and Nov. 18-21 in the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, Calif. Both were postponed due to surgeries he had earlier this year after suffering two serious falls.
_ Adelle M. Banks
Tutu Takes the Stage to Put Spotlight on Guantanamo Bay
NEW YORK (RNS) To a resume already gilded with honors and accomplishments, including the Nobel Peace Prize, Archbishop Desmond Tutu can now add the job title of actor.
Off-Broadway actor, to be exact.
The South African Anglican prelate made two appearances over the weekend as a British magistrate in the play “Guantanamo: Honor Bound to Defend Freedom.” He appeared in a performance at the Culture Project, a small theater in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
Tutu, the onetime anti-apartheid activist and more recently outspoken critic of the Bush administration’s post-Sept. 11 foreign policy, portrayed Lord Justice Steyn, a judge who raises objections to detainments at the U.S. military detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
Tutu, 72, confided to a New York Times reporter prior to his first appearance Saturday evening (Oct. 2) that he had a bit of a case of stage fright. “I have butterflies,” Tutu told the Times, adding, “I’m not used to playing someone else. Why did I get myself into this?”
However, by all accounts Tutu overcame his stage fright for the brief role, helped perhaps by the standing ovation that greeted his initial appearance on stage Saturday evening. He repeated the performance in a matinee the following day.
“He was incredible,” Alyssa Seiden, the manager of the Culture Project company told the BBC. “He moved the crowd.”
The play, originally produced in London, examines the legal and moral questions posed by the detention system at Guantanamo and is based on the actual experiences of British residents who have been detained at the U.S. facility.
_ Chris Herlinger
Americans’ Perceptions of Muslims Mixed, Poll Shows
(RNS) One in four Americans agrees with at least one anti-Muslim statement like “Muslims teach their children to hate unbelievers” and “Muslims value life less than other people,” a new survey has found.
But the poll also reported that 64 percent of respondents agreed with the statement, “The people who use Islam to justify violence are misinterpreting its teachings.”
The poll, “Islam and Muslims: A Poll of American Public Opinion,” was released Oct. 4 and based on 1,000 telephone interviews the California-based market research firm Genesis Research Associates conducted in late June and early July. The respondents were evenly divided by gender, and the margin of error for the study was plus-or-minus 3.1 percentage points.
Researchers found that the survey revealed significant segments of the population on both the positive and negative ends of the attitude spectrum.
“There’s a pretty consistent 25 (percent)-to-30 percent of people who have negative attitudes,” said Jeni Sall, who was the principal investigator on the survey and the president of Genesis. “About half of the people have generally neutral or positive attitudes,” she said.
When asked in an open-ended question to say what came to mind when they heard the word “Muslim,” about one out of three respondents had something negative to say, from “war, hatred, violence” to “terrorists, enemies, Osama bin Laden,” the survey reported.
Further, 51 percent of those surveyed agreed either somewhat or strongly with the statement, “Islam encourages oppression of women.”
At the same time, favorable attitudes emerged in the survey.
Half of those surveyed agreed with one or more favorable attitudes about Islam, such as “Muslims have family-oriented values.”
_ Holly Lebowitz Rossi
St. Louis Archbishop Says No Issue Trumps Abortion
(RNS) Archbishop Raymond Burke of St. Louis, who has led an effort to deny Communion to Sen. John Kerry because of his support of abortion rights, said no other issue, “no matter how good,” can trump a candidate’s position on five key issues, including abortion and gay marriage.
In a 13-page pastoral letter issued on Friday (Oct. 1), Burke expanded the list of policy issues that Roman Catholic voters must consider before casting a vote to include abortion, gay marriage, cloning, stem-cell research and euthanasia. It was his most detailed teaching on the subject to date.
Burke had been criticized for saying Catholics who vote for politicians supporting abortion rights must go to confession before seeking Communion. In his letter, Burke seemed to create more room for voters to support such candidates in specific situations.
“If a candidate supports abortion in a limited number of cases, but is opposed to it otherwise, Catholics may vote for this candidate,” he said. “This is not a question of choosing a lesser evil but of limiting the evil.”
Burke said there is “a certain order of priority” in policy positions, with abortion topping the list. Burke said a candidate’s other positions on war, the death penalty, poverty or education are secondary.
“The sum total of all social conditions … depends on the protection of human life,” he said in a brief question-and-answer supplement to the letter. “Without this fundamental protection, it makes no sense to consider other social conditions.”
Burke said there is “no element of the common good, no morally good practice, that a candidate may promote and to which a voter may be dedicated” that would justify a vote for a politician who supports any of the five issues.
“These elements are so fundamental to the common good that they cannot be subordinated to any other cause, no matter how good,” he said.
The five priorities laid out by Burke are the same five “non-negotiables” highlighted in a voting guide for “serious Catholics” prepared by Catholic Answers, an apologetics group. Burke has allowed the voters guide to be distributed in his archdiocese, while other bishops have banned them.
_ Kevin Eckstrom
Religious Filmmakers Say Hollywood Still Doesn’t Get It
WEST HOLLYWOOD, Calif. (RNS) With Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” creating strong DVD sales that add to his record-breaking box office profits, religious conservatives gathered at a film festival questioned why Hollywood continues to keep its distance from religious movies.
“If there has ever been a sure-fire box office formula, it’s the religious epic. How can this mighty engine of popular culture that flourishes beyond these walls ignore that?” said film critic and conservative radio talk show host Michael Medved, who spoke at the Oct. 1-3 Liberty Film Festival, held at West Hollywood’s Pacific Design Center.
The festival’s slate of conservative and new religious movies included the screening of a rare print of Cecile B. DeMille’s 1959 blockbuster “The Ten Commandments.”
The film showcase added to a trend over the past five years of religious conservatives producing their own films such as the end-times “Omega Code” movies and films made by, about and for Mormons. The event’s 19 feature-length and short films included three much-discussed documentaries chastising filmmaker Michael Moore and a short comedy called, “Greg Wolfe: Republican Jew.”
Asian-American filmmaker and former atheist Tim Chey, who converted to Christianity four years ago, said his “Impact” film, about how lives were changed after “Passion” viewings, was seen in late September by Gibson, who was, “delighted,” by it.
Govindini (SIC) Murty, a Hindu immigrant from India and one of the festival’s co-directors, said a festival theme was to show film characters answering to, “a power higher than the state.” Her own festival film was “Terminal Island,” which Murty called, “a politically incorrect” comedy in which she portrays a woman being chased by Islamic terrorists.
Cheryl Rhoads, a Roman Catholic acting coach, said she volunteered to work at the festival because she got, “very frustrated,” with the dominant Catholic circles in Hollywood, which tend to be left-of-center. “It’s so important for true intellectual diversity,” she said.
_ David Finnigan
Quote of the week: Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens
“It was almost as if I was watching myself in a Hollywood B-movie. The problem was no one ever told me what the lines were, let alone the script.”
_ Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as Cat Stevens, on the episode last month in which he was spotted on a Department of Homeland Security “no-fly” list, prompting U.S. officials to divert his United Airlines flight.
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