The Whoppers of 2008

How Obama and McCain have misled voters.


FactCheck.org has a tally of how both McCain and Obama have misled voters.

"Normally we post a 'Whoppers' compilation the week before Election Day. This time we've already seen such a large number of twisted facts, misleading claims and outright falsehoods that we are doing that now.

It's not just Sarah Palin's claim about killing the bridge project that she had supported until it became a national laughingstock and Congress turned against it. That's just the whopper that got the attention of many news orgaizations earlier this month. There have been lots of others.

McCain has made multiple false representations of Obama's tax proposals. Obama has made false claims about McCain's stance on Social Security. Both McCain and Obama have traded some whoppers about their energy policies, about Iraq, and about Iran, and about supporting troops."

See the list here.

Satisfaction in Work

A Christian Perspective on Work, Part 2

I am looking for your help in creating a “Christian perspective on work.” This is different from creating a “Christian ethic in the workplace.” The discussion on “Christian Work” usually starts and ends with ethics. However, while Christians are to be ethical in every aspect of life (exemplifying honesty, integrity, love and excellence as we work but also as we play, as we do our taxes and also as we care for our families, as we interact with people and also as we live in our private lives), we need to look at work in a much more specific manner. What is work? How does it reflect God? How are we to glorify God in work? How are we to understand calling or vocation? These are the deeper issues that I’m trying to deal with here.

In my last post, I stated that God is a worker, and since we are created in the image of God, we too are intrinsically workers. But, contrary to our normal thinking, work is meant to be enjoyable and satisfying! We are meant to find pleasure in our work.

Think for a moment about the character of God. He works, not because he has to, but because he wants to. God works, and finds pleasure in it.

As we read the beautiful poetry of the Creation that opens the book of Genesis, we hear the repeated refrain at the end of each day: "God saw that it was good." And then when he finished, “God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good” (Genesis 1:31). You hear in those words the satisfaction God has in the work he has accomplished. Psalm 104 proclaims, “May the glory of the LORD endure forever; may the LORD rejoice in his works.”

God continues to work in sustaining the whole universe. The Apostle Paul explains that “all things were created by him (Christ) and for him. He is before all things, and in him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16-17). God is not sitting idle, letting things go as they go. H. C. G. Moule wrote, “He keeps the cosmos from becoming a chaos.”

And God’s greatest work is the redemption that comes through Christ. And God takes great pleasure in this work! We read in Ephesians, “In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will— to the praise of his glorious grace… With all wisdom and understanding, he made known to us the mystery of his will according to his good pleasure, which he purposed in Christ, to be put into effect when the times reach their fulfillment—to bring unity to all things in heaven and on earth under Christ" (Ephesians 1:5-6, 8-9).

At the end of a long day of doing lawn work—mowing, weeding, doing the mulch, trimming the hedges, edging the flower gardens, cutting down dead tree branches—I love to sit on my back patio with a cold lemonade and look at the work of my hands. “Ahhhh… This is satisfying!” I am proud of my work. I see all that I’ve done, and it is good.

We are created in the image of this working God – the God who finds satisfaction and pleasure in creating, sustaining and redeeming. When I think about this, it brings a smile to my face. No wonder I like to create (I love to write, to draw, to come up with new ideas for ministry); no wonder I like to sustain (I love to take something somebody already has made and work with it, tweaking it, modifying it, maybe even improving it); no wonder I like to take part in redemption (I am highly motivated to bring about justice and shalom in the world around me, I love to see somebody meet Christ for the first time, I enjoy helping a person begin to realize their God-given potential).

What about you? As an image-bearer of the Triune God, how do you reflect the God who enjoys and finds satisfaction in work?


A Christian Perspective on Work:
Part 1: The Imago Dei and God the Worker
Part 2: Satisfaction in Work
Part 3: God Provides Through Our Work
Part 4: Work in Community for Community

Fearful Politics and Evangelicals

"God gave us a spirit not of fear but of power and love and self-control." (2 Timothy 1:7)

"There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear." (1 John 4:18)

I was reading Fareed Zakaria's new book, The Post-American World. Starting on p. 251, he talks about how FEAR has gripped the nation, and how this is NOT a good thing. This section of the book is an expansion of an article he wrote for NEWSWEEK late last year, entitled "The Fearful Superpower."

"Ever since the [9/11] attacks, the United States has felt threatened and under siege and determined to carve out maximum room to maneuver. But where Americans have seen defensive behavior, the rest of the world has looked on and seen the most powerful nation in human history acting like a caged animal, lashing out at any and every constraint on its actions.

At the heart of this behavior is fear. Americans have become scared of the new world that is emerging around them. As long as this atmosphere of fear envelops U.S. politics, it will surely produce very similar results abroad. Washington's real task, therefore, is to combat such unthinking emotion."

As I read these words, I think of the Christians on the cable news shows wringing their hands in fear and the conversations I've had with fellow evangelicals about the post-9/11 world. Most support the Republicans in this election, believing that they are the strongest on national security issues.

Zakaria continues,

"Republicans are falling over each other to paint an atmosphere of dire threat that requires strong, even brutish action to protect the American people. Democrats, while far less guilty of fearmongering, have been afraid to combat this hysteria."

Are we going to vote based on FEAR?

With the threat of terrorism and with congress deciding this week how to deal with the Wall Street collapse, I think of the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who (if we can remember our history) was elected to lead a generation that faced both the Great Depression and World War II. In his first inaugural address, he said,

"The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

Provocative Questions

Tom Sine’s new book, The New Conspirators: Creating the Future One Mustard Seed at a Time, gives solid practical examples of how Christians are living out a new vision of the Christian life through four new streams: Emerging, Missional, Mosaic (multicultural churches reaching out to new generations), and Monastic.

He asks some intriguing questions for our re-imagining life, faith, church, and mission:

“I find that many older evangelical Christians assume that all the important questions were answered decades ago and that we got all the answers right; now all we need to do is to simply improve our tactics and strategies. But as I look at the contemporary expressions of Christian life, church, and mission, I am not convinced that we have gotten all the answers right.”

Sine asks:

1. Did we get our eschatology wrong?
2. Did we get what it means to be a disciple wrong?
3. Did we get what it means to be a steward wrong?
4. Did we get what it means to be the church wrong?
5. Did we get what it means to do mission wrong?

These are very provocative questions! And I can hear the DA Carsons, Mark Devers, and Al Mohlers getting all upset with this line of questions.

But without asking these hard-hitting questions, we will never be a church “always reforming;” we will rest on our laurels and not be ready for the challenges that face us in the twenty-first century.

The Imago Dei and God the Worker

A Christian Perspective on Work, Part 1

Is God working, or is God resting?

According to Genesis 2:2, God is resting (“By the seventh day God had finished the work he had been doing; so on the seventh day he rested from all his work.”)

However, according to John 5:17, God has continued to work (“Jesus said to them, ‘My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I, too, am working.’”). And Psalm 107:15 exhorts us to “thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wondrous works to the children of men.”

It is clear that God is not the watchmaker God, who wound up the Creation and now passively watches his creatures without doing anything. He is still at work. Our God is a worker.

This must mean that God does not “rest” as in taking time off from work. It must mean something else (which we’ll explore later when we address “Sabbath”). Suffice it to say that after the initial Creation, God entered the “rest” of enjoying his handiwork. He entered into a time of dwelling in and with the work of his hands.

God works.

And God creates humanity in the image of the Triune God that works. On the sixth day, God said, “Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” The job description given to humanity was this: “The LORD God took the man and put him into the garden of Eden to cultivate it and keep it." (Genesis 2:15, NASB). Humanity is to “cultivate” – that is, to create culture out of God’s raw materials.

And notice that God gives Adam a job right way – to “rule over” the creation. In fact, the first thing on Adam’s “To Do List” was to name the animals. God brought the animals “to the man to see what he would name them; and whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name” (Genesis 2:19). This is significant; God gave Adam true responsibility - "whatever the man called each living creature, that was its name" - no questions asked, no stipulations, no second-guessing.

Human beings, as the bearers of the divine image, reflect God in our work. A proper Christian theology of Work must start with the fact that work is intrinsic to what it means to be human!

This brings honor and dignity to all work, and gives the foundation for glorifying God in all that we do.


A Christian Perspective on Work:
Part 1: The Imago Dei and God the Worker
Part 2: Satisfaction in Work
Part 3: God Provides Through Our Work
Part 4: Work in Community for Community

The Postmodern Narrative-Based Election

Oh, how we love story above rational analysis and propositional truth. That is one of the big digs against postmodernism and the emerging church.

I’ve dealt with that criticism several times on this blog, so I’ll spare us another round here.

But this came back into my head as I read the Sept 22 edition of Newsweek. In it, there’s an article by Sharon Begley entitled, “Heard Any Good Stories Lately?”

She writes that “this election have conspired to push people away from the reason- and knowledge-based system of decision-making and more down the competing emotion-based one…

The outsized power of the personal narrative today compared with even a generation ago…reflects something that has become almost a cliché in political analysis—namely, that emotions, more than a dispassionate and rational analysis of candidates' records and positions, determine many voters' choice on election day. The emotion can be hope or fear, pride or disgust. And don't be too quick to pat yourself on the back for thinking you cast your vote based on a logical parsing of a candidate's positions…

When FDR was making radio addresses, "people had the time needed for reflection, to mix emotion with facts and reason," says [neuroscientist Antonio] Damasio [of the University of Southern California]. "But now, with 24-hour cable news and the Web, you have a climate in which you don't have time to reflect. The amount and speed of information, combined with less time to analyze every new development, pushes us toward the emotion-based decision pathway." And not even emotions such as hope. Voters are being driven "by pure like and dislike, comfort or discomfort with a personality," says Damasio. "And voters judge that by a candidate's narrative.

Are we going to vote in this election for the person that has the best answers to the major issues facing our nation, or are we going to buy into the mythic fable-like stories that are being peddled about the candidates? Obama the Savior, McCain the Maverick, Biden the Scranton Boy Done Good, Palin the Small Town Christian Hockey Mom. We are more interested in the narratives than the facts. And the news is NOT about the candidates' stands on the issues, but on how they are coming across to the voting public, and whether or not the latest gaffe will cost votes.

Want to Check if the Candidates are Telling the Truth?

Go to factcheck.org today and often!

Vetting the Candidates on Their Religious World Views

In the past, religion was used by politicians simply to win votes. While that is still the case, both parties are doing their best to understand and to address the concerns of the faith community. They realize that they cannot fool around on this—that if they do not address these concerns directly and actually do something about these issues, they will not gain or keep our support.

In this year's election, the candidates’ religious world views are a part of the public vetting process. Here’s what I’ve come up with so far. What have you found? What is the significance of the religious world view of each of these candidates?

The Presidential Nominees’ Religious Word Views:

Barack Obama was once caricatured as a closet Muslim by radical right wing bloggers and viral e-mails. When it became apparent that he is indeed a Christian, having converted in Jeremiah Wright’s Trinity United Church of Christ, a new can of worms exploded all over the place. Wright’s bombastic sermon style revealed that he believes that America has not been all that godly. He has railed against what he saw as injustice in this country, especially as it pertains to racial justice, and warned that the United States was in danger of damnation from God. This raised the legitimate question: After sitting for 20 years under the Reverend Wright’s teaching and having had this man baptize his children, how much of this world view does Obama embrace as his own? Obama has distanced himself from Wright, but this looks more like a politically expedient move than anything else.

John McCain’s religious views have been more difficult to pin down. He is very cautious about sharing much about his personal faith. In fact, it was not known where he attended church until a year ago when he was pressed on the issue. It was assumed that since he was raised in the Episcopal Church that he was still an Episcopalian. "I'd like to add there's been some talk about my religious persuasion,” McCain explained last September. “I was raised in an Episcopal church and attended high school at a high school called Episcopal High School. I have attended North Phoenix Baptist Church for many years, and the most important thing is that I'm a Christian. And I don't have anything else to say on the issue.” McCain refrains from calling himself “born again” and has not been baptized. The 7,000-member North Phoenix Baptist seems to be a typical Southern Baptist mega-church, with pastor Dan Yeary clearly opposing abortion, though he hasn't taken a position on stem-cell research because he has said it could help his wife's multiple sclerosis. Gays are welcome in this church, while their homosexual lifestyle isn't.

The Vice-Presidential Nominees’ Religious Word Views:

Joe Biden is a Roman Catholic who wrote in his biography, Promises to Keep that Sunday Mass has always been his "time alone" with God. He turned to his faith to overcome the personal tragedy of the deaths of his wife and young daughter in a 1972 traffic accident. Biden says that he attends Mass weekly. However, Biden has not followed his church’s teachings on abortion. For thirty-five years, he has mostly voted pro-choice, though he has also backed a federal ban on late-term abortions and has opposed public funding of abortion. Biden has drawn criticism from Catholic bishops for his stand on abortion. Democrats are hoping Biden will talk about how his faith shapes his political policies, but Biden has never articulated his politics in this manner.

Sarah Palin is a Pentecostal Christian, having been raised in the Assemblies of God. Pentecostals are known for their embracing the gifts of the Holy Spirit, especially the theologically controversial issue of “Baptism in the Holy Spirit.” The AOG statement of “Fundamental Truths” says, “All believers are entitled to and should ardently expect and earnestly seek the promise of the Father, the baptism in the Holy Spirit and fire, according to the command of our Lord Jesus Christ… This experience is distinct from and subsequent to the experience of the new birth … The baptism of believers in the Holy Spirit is witnessed by the initial physical sign of speaking with other tongues as the Spirit of God gives them utterance.” Three months ago, Palin spoke at the Wasilla AOG, where she said, “It was so cool growing up in this church and getting saved here, getting baptized by Pastor Riley.” (Watch the video here). Palin asked the congregation to “pray for our military men and women who are striving to do what is right. Also, for this country, that our leaders, our national leaders, are sending [U.S. soldiers] out on a task that is from God. That's what we have to make sure that we're praying for, that there is a plan and that that plan is God's plan.” She revealed that an associate pastor at the church prayed for her victory in the gubernatorial race. "He was praying over me. He's praying, 'Lord make a way, Lord make a way...' And I'm thinking, this guy's really bold, he doesn't even know what I'm gonna do, he doesn't know what my plans are, and he's praying not, 'Oh Lord, if it be your will may she become governor,' or whatever. No, he just prayed for it. He said, 'Lord, make a way, and let her do this next step.' And that's exactly what happened. So, again, very very powerful coming from this church." Ed Kalnins, the senior pastor of this church for at least 9 years affirmed this as a "prophetic call." As a Pentecostal, he believes in “words of knowledge,” prophetic statements that the Holy Spirit reveals to certain Christians. He believes that God has revealed to him that Alaska will be "one of the Refuge States in the Last Days and hundreds and thousands of people are gonna come to this state to seek refuge and the church has to be ready to minister to them." He also has some interesting takes on politics. During the 2004 race, he praised President Bush's performance during a debate with John Kerry, then said concerning those who would vote for Kerry, “I'm not going tell you who to vote for, but if you vote for this particular person, I question your salvation. I'm sorry.” In response to the media’s criticism of Bush after Hurricane Katrina, Kalnins preached, “I hate criticisms towards the President, because it's like criticisms towards the pastor - it's almost like, it's not going to get you anywhere, you know, except for hell. That's what it'll get you.” How has this messianic warping of the Right Wing’s agenda effected Palin’s worldview? Does she believe that pastors and presidents are above criticism? How do we know that she will be humble about not always knowing God’s direct will? If she were President, would she be looking for a “Word of Knowledge” from prophetic Pentecostals about her important decisions?

Artcile VI of The Constitution states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.” However, as we have seen, the discerning process for this election cycle has included the process of understanding how the candidate’s faith will effect their decisions. The Religious Right is downright giddy about Sarah Palin, and has absolutely skewered Barack Obama’s association with Jeremiah Wright. So, let’s talk about this fairly. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander!

Hypocrisy of Political Pundits

Here's a clip to watch:
The hypocrisy of the political pundits is shown in crystal clarity by The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. Karl Rove and Bill O'Reilly should be ashamed of themselves!!



HT: Joel Daniel Harris for letting me know that this was available on Hulu.

What Happened to the Maverick?

This election offers me something unique: Two candidates for whom I have already voted.

In the 2000 primary, I voted for John McCain for the Republican nomination. I liked his character, his pro-life stand, his ability to reach across the aisle to work with the other party, his willingness to swim against his own party on issues like energy, economic policy, and campaign finance reform.

In this year’s primary, I voted for Barack Obama (Ohio lets you choose your Party affiliation at the time you vote in a primary). I liked his strong stand against the war in Iraq, his economic policies, his ability to communicate higher ideals for the direction of the country, his promise to bring back respectability for the United States in the world, and his not being Hillary Clinton. Hee hee.

So, as I look at the two candidates and try to discern who should get my vote for President, I am deeply troubled by something: I liked the 2000 John McCain much more than the 2008 John McCain.

His 2008 campaign has looked much more like the Rove-era Bush campaigns than the 2000 Straight Talk Express, manipulating the same-old cultural divisiveness that has been the hallmark of Republican politics for the past decade. He is playing the same dirty politics that Bush played on him back in 2000.

As E.J. Dionne writes today in the Washington Post,

"McCain could not change his party, so he changed himself. McCain has pandered to a Republican right wing he once disdained on issue after issue, from oil drilling to immigration to tax cuts for the wealthy. Just as important, he decided that his last chance for the presidency rests on a systematic effort to make the old politics of demonization work one more time."

What happened to the 2000 McCain, who didn’t capitulate to the far right wing of the party? What happened to the 2000 McCain, the guy who had the guts to say this in his run for the President in 2000:

“America is more than the sum of its divided parts, and so our party should be. America is more powerful than its established power centers, and so our party should be. America is greater than the accumulation of wealth, and so our party should be. This is my message to my party and my country…

“…Let me be clear. Evangelical leaders are changing America for the better. Chuck Colson, head of Prison Fellowship, is saving men from a lifetime behind bars by bringing them the good news of redemption. James Dobson, who does not support me, has devoted his life to rebuilding America's families. Others are leading the fight against pornography, cultural decline and for life. I stand with them. I am a pro-life, pro-family fiscal conservative, an advocate of a strong defense.

And yet Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and a few Washington leaders of the pro-life movement call me an unacceptable presidential candidate. They distort my pro-life positions and smear the reputations of my supporters. Why? Because I don't pander to them, because I don't ascribe to their failed philosophy that money is our message. I believe in the cause of conservative reform. I believe that because we are right we will prevail in the battle of ideas, unspoiled by the taint of a corrupt campaign finance scheme that works against the very conservative reform of government that is the object of our labors. The Republican Party will prevail because of our principles, because that's what it's about, my friends: principles, not special-interest money or empire or ego…

“Political intolerance by any political party is neither a Judeo-Christian nor an American value. The political tactics of division and slander are not our values, they are corrupting influences on religion and politics, and those who practice them in the name of religion or in the name of the Republican Party or in the name of America shame our faith, our party and our country. Neither party should be defined by pandering to the outer reaches of American politics and the agents of intolerance, whether they be Louis Farrakhan or Al Sharpton on the left, or Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell on the right.”

Now, THAT’S the guy I voted for!

Kenneth Copeland's Gospel of Prosperity

It'll Get You Rich!!

The Associated Press has written a revealing article on how the Kenneth Copeland financial empire has been built from Copeland's "Prosperity Gospel" (read it here: Televangelist's family prospers from ministry).

Copeland's relatives and friends have definitely prospered: His brother-in-law has a lucrative deal to broker Copeland's television time, his son acquired church-owned land for his ranching business and saw it more than quadruple in value, and the board members include other prosperity preachers who rake in the dough through exorbitant honorariums for speaking at Copeland events.

In our culture, in which we are trained from the time we can craw that we must be consumers and that the goal in life is to achieve material wealth, it is understandable that the "Prosperity Gospel" would become increasingly popular.

The true Gospel of Jesus Christ demands deep sacrifice, to deny ourselves for the sake of others, to not store up for ourselves treasures on earth, to take up the cross in order to follow the suffering servant.

Blogging Hiatus

I'm on a blogging hiatus.

Coming in August:

• Spiritual Formation: How our being made in the imago Dei determines our purpose as Christians
• Christian Political Philosophy: Interactions with Ron Sider's The Scandal of Evangelical Politics
• McCain and Obama: Pros and Cons for Christians in selecting a candidate
• Theology: N.T. Wright's Surprised by Hope - and how understanding the orthodox view of the Christian hope of resurrection changes how we live today
• Emerging Church: Learning from Tom Sines' The New Conspirators

Tim Keller - The Reason for God, Pittsburgh, PA 5/22/08

The CCO's collaborative website, CampusMinistry.com has posted the audio from when Tim Keller spoke at a CCO-sponsored Pittsburgh event while on tour supporting his book “The Reason for God”.

Listen Here.

The Real Problems with the "Separation" of Church and State

The liberals in America are upset with Barack Obama.

On Tuesday, the Democratic nominee announced a plan to expand faith-based government-funded charities. The New York Times reports:

Senator Barack Obama said Tuesday that if elected president he would expand the delivery of social services through churches and other religious organizations, vowing to achieve a goal he said President Bush had fallen short on during his two terms.
“The challenges we face today — from saving our planet to ending poverty — are simply too big for government to solve alone,” Mr. Obama said outside a community center here. “We need an all-hands-on-deck approach.”
Some Democrats have previously backed similar efforts, but Mr. Bush’s version, a centerpiece of his first-term agenda, has been a lightning rod for criticism from those concerned about the separation of church and state and those who argued that Mr. Bush had used it to further a conservative political agenda.
In embracing the same general approach as Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama ran the political risk of alienating those of his supporters who would prefer that government keep its distance from religion.

Obama went on to say,
“I know there are some who bristle at the notion that faith has no place in the public square. But the fact is, leaders in both parties have recognized the value of a partnership between the White House and faith-based groups.”

Keith Olbermann, the liberal flip-side of his rival conservative Bill O’Reilly, started his show on Tuesday saying,

“It is one of the most insidious aspects of the Reagan and Bush presidencies. What was never attempted before, a smudging of the line between church and state with the current president Bush turned faith-based initiatives, becoming a part of the government, making America to some small degree, even a tiny fraction of 1 percent part theocracy.
In our fifth story on the Countdown: Seeing political opportunity and seeing some way of incorporating the faith without the intolerance, Senator Barack Obama today, is trying to offer the compassion without the conservativism, and deliver unto himself some votes.”

We need a little bit of a constitutional lesson here, I think. I am not a constitutional scholar, so maybe I’m getting some of this wrong (that’s why I have you, dear blog commenter, to help me). Here are some things I think we need to understand about the relationship between church and state in the USA.

The First Amendment of the American Constitution brilliantly clarified the relation between church and state. Here’s how it reads:

“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”

The first clause deals with the establishment of religion. It says that, at a federal level at least, there should not be an established church, like the one the founders experienced in mother England. It also implies that no special preferences should be given to any one religious body.

This was genius; it directly dealt with what had caused so many problems in other nations. It not only declared that church and state are two different institutions, but it also declared how the state is to relate to religious bodies. The state would treat all churches equally.

Notice, the First Amendment does not say that the government cannot aid or cooperate with religious bodies. The government cannot stop aiding and cooperating with the institutions in its territory – it doesn’t matter if you’re a club, church, school, business, or whatever, the government will come to your aid if you have a fire or a burglary. When a hurricane hits, the government will cooperate with local religious and civil institutions to help the needy. The laws of the land apply to everyone in the land, no matter if you are a 'secular' institution or if you are a 'religious' institution. The Constitution simply says that the government cannot elevate one religious body above the others. And as our country became more diverse in its religious tapestry, it became obvious that this right extends beyond Christian churches to also include other religious bodies – Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and any other religion.

The First Amendment was an ingenious way to articulate the relationship between church and state. But we could not leave well enough alone. In the 1947 case Everson v. Board of Education, Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black used Thomas Jefferson’s extra-constitutional statement (“the separation of church and state” in an 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptist Association) to muddy the waters. Black also stated that the First Amendment meant that the government could not “pass laws which aid one religion… (or) aid all religions” (emphasis added). This changed everything; the government could not “aid” any religious group, no matter how evenhanded or nondiscriminatory such aid might be.

Paul Marshall, in his must-read book, God and the Constitution: Christianity and American Politics, suggests that this shift in the interpretation of the First Amendment has led to five dangerous trends:

1. Black’s use of the term ‘separation’ did not forward the issue of church-state relations, it actually set it back. “The First Amendment was meant to give a solution to the problem of the relation of the distinct institutions…not merely to state the problem once again. Black’s formulation lost the answer provided by the First Amendment and left the problem open-ended.”
2. This led to further muddying of the water. In Lemon v. Kurtzman (1971), the court stated that one of the tests as to whether something violated the First Amendment is if it entailed an “excessive entanglement” between government and religion. “This was strange indeed. Churches and religions operate within state boundaries and under state laws. They are always deeply entangled: if they were not entangled we would never have had to argue for millennia about respective boundaries…As the First Amendment itself shows, by saying how they should be related, the question is not whether church and state will be ‘entangled’ but how they will be.”
3. “The notion that the state cannot ‘aid’ religion leads to further conundrums…as Michael McConnell has pointed out, ‘The Court has held that religious colleges may receive general purpose government grants, but religious high schools may not; that government may subsidize bus transportation to religious schools but not bus rides for their students on field trips; that government may pay for books but not maps or film projectors; that it may reimburse schools for the cost of state-mandated standardized test but not state-mandated safety maintenance; and that it may pay for diagnostic, but not therapeutic, services to children in religious schools’”
4. Since the modern state has become so encompassing in the lives of Americans, “this invariably means that religion must give way to governmental concern in every aspect of life. When the state gets in, religion is supposed to get out.”
5. The Court has not recognized that religion is not simply about private acts of worship, but about a way of life, a world view that shapes everything for the believer. The court’s restrictions on religion are usually applied only to traditional religious groups. The court has not seen that what is really at stake is an ideological battle, and that secularism and libertarianism are just as “religious’ as any traditional religious view. “The ultimate result is a tendency that the government cannot support ‘religion,’ but can support what it describes, for no clear reason, as ‘secular’ causes… Consequently, in disputes between traditional religion and modern secular ideology, the massive power of the U.S. government was placed in the service of the ideology.”

I write all this not to say that I favor “theocracy.” The point is that Olbermann and the like get all hot and bothered by what they fear to be theocratic ideas. Nobody, including most evangelicals, wants a theocracy. What we want is to have a proper relationship between church and state. In the past couple of decades, the Court has moved away from this strict separation idea, starting with the landmark case, Widmar v. Vincent, (1981), where a Bible study group was allowed to meet at a university since it allowed the same conditions to other groups. Congress passed the Equal Access Protection Act (1984) to ensure religious groups equal access to public school facilities. The court, in Good News Bible Club v. Millford, (2001), allowed a Christian youth group to meet after hours at school since the school allowed other groups to meet then.

The language of “separation” does not get us very far, it only creates new tensions. What we need is to get back to the Constitution, which stresses equality before the law for all religious groups, and does not artificially pretend that the government and religion do not interface.