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This is great news, and I'm thrilled that Jonah, the OCA metropolitan, is a signatory:

Citing the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s call to civil disobedience, 145 evangelical, Roman Catholic and Orthodox Christian leaders have signed a declaration saying they will not cooperate with laws that they say could be used to compel their institutions to participate in abortions, or to bless or in any way recognize same-sex couples.

"We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence," it says.

The manifesto, to be released on Friday at the National Press Club in Washington, is an effort to rejuvenate the political alliance of conservative Catholics and evangelicals that dominated the religious debate during the administration of President George W. Bush. The signers include nine Roman Catholic archbishops and the primate of the Orthodox Church in America.

Good for them. This ecumenism of the trenches is a great thing. More of that, please, and less of this, from the Roman Catholic Diocese of San Jose, California, which starts: "Secretly, San Jose is the most gay-friendly diocese in the nation. And now, one parish wants the world to know." My Catholic friend Irene Groot once wrote an essay about her San Jose diocese parish, which removed the crucifix and replaced it with a Jung-inspired "birth canal cross," i.e., a cross with a hole in it where Jesus once was. Which says a lot. Which says everything important about what's going on in that parish, and perhaps in that diocese.

The culture war isn't only between churches and the world, but also between churches that refuse to conform to the world, and those who cannot conform fast enough. I am encouraged and thrilled to know which side of the divide my bishop (who is also my metropolitan) is on. Choose today whom ye will serve...

I encourage you to read Hanna Rosin's cover story in the current issue of The Atlantic, citing the role the spread of the prosperity gospel -- the idea that God wants you to be rich, and to have nice things -- to the economic crash. The title is "Did Christianity Cause the Crash?", which is an unfortunate headline, because what she really means to ask is: Did this faddish but counterfeit form of Christianity play a role in provoking the economic crisis?

It's impossible to quantify the degree to which it may have done, of course, but Rosin makes a good case that the utter insanity of the prosperity gospel -- coupled with the flat-out greed of bankers willing to make loans to gullible and greedy Jesus followers -- did harm. She writes, "Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities--the exurban middle class and the urban poor." As a Christian, reading about these crackpot preachers and their followers really burns me up. Here's the philosophical and historical gist of her piece:

Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America's middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture--a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth.

In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his "success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan." The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man--a "speculative confidence man," Lears calls him, who prefers "risky ventures in real estate," and a more "fluid, mobile democracy." The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with "grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God." The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: "The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I've done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me--that I'll be the one."

To be sure, this is not a drive-by trashing on prosperity preaching. Rosin really does try to understand its appeal. I found myself most affected by the way this stuff is taking off among minorities. Excerpt:

More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned:

Narratives of how "God blessed me with my first house despite my credit" were common ... Sermons declaring "It's your season of overflow" supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about "what God can do," little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one's home equity as an ATM.

In 2004, Walton was researching a book about black televangelists. "I would hear consistent testimonies about how 'once I was renting and now God let me own my own home,' or 'I was afraid of the loan officer, but God directed him to ignore my bad credit and blessed me with my first home,'" he says. "This trope was so common in these churches that I just became immune to it. Only later did I connect it to this disaster."

See? And here's a bit about how it appeals to Latino immigrants (who disproportionately took out subprime mortgages). Excerpt:

Among Latinos the prosperity gospel has been spreading rapidly. In a recent Pew survey, 73 percent of all religious Latinos in the United States agreed with the statement: "God will grant financial success to all believers who have enough faith." For a generation of poor and striving Latino immigrants, the gospel seems to offer a road map to affluence and modern living. Garay's church is comprised mostly of first-generation immigrants. More than others I've visited, it echoes back a highly distilled, unself-conscious version of the current thinking on what it means to live the American dream.

And:

While it sounds absurd, this kind of message can have a positive influence, according to Tony Tian-Ren Lin, a researcher at the University of Virginia who has made a close study of Latino prosperity gospel congregations over the years. These churches typically take in people who had "been basically dropped into the world from pretty primitive settings"--small towns in Latin America with no electricity or running water and very little educational opportunity. In their new congregation, their pastor slowly walks them through life in the U.S., both inside and outside of church, until they become more confident. "In Mexico, nobody ever told them they could do anything," says Lin, who was himself raised in Argentina. He finds the message at prosperity churches to be quintessentially American. "They are taught they can do absolutely anything, and it's God's will. They become part of the elect, the chosen. They get swept up in the manifest destiny, this idea that God has lifted Americans above everyone else."

It says something that the most vibrant form of religion in America used to be the old Protestant kind that said if you worked hard and disciplined yourself and lived right, you would prosper. It was in some ways a myth, of course, but there were real truths about human nature embedded in it, and the kind of society built out of that ethic was likely to be a healthy one. But now the most vibrant form of religion might well be this corrupt casino Christianity. That says something too about our country, and its future.

These prosperity gospel jackals are the enemy of the Gospel. But I have to admit that I have never been poor, so I don't know what it's like to be tempted by this kind of pseudo-spirituality.

My friend Tara McKelvey has published her Templeton-Cambridge research. It's about how Christian ideology has corrupted psychiatric care for some emotionally traumatized American veterans. Excerpt:

In a 2004 study of approximately 1,400 Vietnam veterans, almost 90 percent Christian, researchers at Yale found that nearly one-third said the war had shaken their faith in God and that their religion no longer provided comfort for them. The Yale study found that these soldiers were more likely than others to seek mental health treatment through the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) when they came home. It was not that these veterans had unusually high confidence in government or especially good information about services at VA hospitals. Instead, they had fallen into a spiritual abyss and were desperate to find a way out. The trauma of war seems to be especially acute for men and women whose faith in a benevolent God is challenged by the carnage they have witnessed.

More:

The story of the mistreatment of returning veterans from Iraq is well known and shocking. But the role of religious ideology in that mistreatment--how, inside the government, it was a potent tool in the betrayal of an overwhelmingly Christian Army--is much less known.

"I couldn't stand to hear that phrase any longer--'God was watching over me,'" Benimoff wrote.

He wasn't watching over the good men I knew in Iraq. Faith was the center of my life yet it failed to explain why I came home and those soldiers did not. The phrase was a Christian nicety, a cliché that when put to the test didn't fit reality.

Somehow, American pop Christianity has little or nothing of value to say to the kind of evil soldiers returning from war have seen and lived. A story like this makes me angry, because it makes psychological suffering seem like a spiritual or moral matter, i.e., "You're in pain, soldier, because you lack faith." That's not only wrong, it's cruel.

It occurs to me that there's a good discussion to be had around this question, but let me say in no uncertain terms that I'm going to unpublish any comments that are abusive, vitriolic or significantly off-topic.

So, why don't gay Catholics leave the Catholic Church? It could be that they are part of a parish that, in violation of Catholic teaching, affirms that their homosexuality is a moral good -- in other words, they don't feel at the local level any significant pressure from Catholicism's prohibitions against homosexual behavior. (This is, I think, why so many conservative Episcopalians remain Episcopalian). It's fairly easy to live as a Catholic without having one's homosexuality (or sex life at all) come up in parish life. In all my time as a Catholic, the only time I ever heard homosexuality addressed from the pulpit was two or three times at my Fort Lauderdale parish, in which the priest attacked "homophobia."

I could be wrong, but I very much doubt Andrew Sullivan ever has to hear a word spoken against homosexuality at his parish in Washington, DC. If he did, it's not hard to find parishes that don't hassle him about it, and to live one's life as an openly gay Catholic without having any kind of in-your-face conflict. In most ways dealing with the church's hard teachings (hard for our culture to take, I mean), most American Catholic parishes are functionally AWOL. It's Moralistic Therapeutic Deism all the way down. And not just in Catholic churches, I hasten to say! The idea that poor, put-upon gay Catholics are having to sit there every week and hear priests denounce their affections from the pulpit is simply nonsense, as is the hoary pop-culture cliche that priests are obsessed with sex and harp on it in sermons. For better or for worse, that just doesn't happen.

But the Church's principled stance against homosexuality bothers him a great deal -- and it should bother him, given what he believes is true about homosexuality. In a case like the gay marriage referendum in Maine, in which the state's Catholic bishops lobbied against same-sex marriage, it makes perfect sense for gay Catholics who believe the Church is deeply wrong about homosexuality to be offended, inasmuch as the Catholic bishops, in fighting for what the Catholic Church teaches is true, contributed to a public policy outcome detrimental to the same-sex marriage cause. For gay Catholics, that's not nothing.

So why do they stay in a church that condemns homosexuality [Clarification: that condemns homosexual acts, but not homosexual persons, a distinction many gays insist is one without a difference -- RD], and that's not going to change on the subject, when many (at least in big cities) have plenty of other options for worshiping as Christians in churches that fully affirm their sexuality? What is the reason for staying in a Church whose teaching on sexuality you definitively reject (as distinct from wrestling with in good faith), and in so doing implicitly reject the Church's binding authority in matters of faith and morals? I'm not asking as a rhetorical question; I'd really like to hear what you readers -- gay and straight, Catholic and non-Catholic -- think. One non-Catholic reader wrote to me this morning about his own wrestling with ordination in his Protestant denomination, and how his experience arguing with church folks who doubted his motives for seeking ordination under his particular set of conditions taught him something about why gay Catholics stay:

Over the years, I have come to realize there was probably no small measure of passive-aggressiveness in my stubbornness. I still believe the call to ministry was and is there, but I still can see some measure of seeking affirmation, even if it meant causing a stir along the way. What I have come to realize about gay ordination as a result, even though I am not a supporter, is that what those pursuing it desire above all else is to force the Church, not only to acknowledge them, but also to affirm them. Thus, they act in this passive-aggressive manner and then proceed on to outright aggressiveness. They can't move on because to do so is to admit defeat in their quest for affirmation. Yes, they certainly could gain that elsewhere, but that's not what they want. They want everyone's hearts and minds, not just the like-minded. And to gain that, there is no measure of resistance they will not endure.

This, by the way, is why I have no faith at all that the orthodox churches, synagogues and religious institutions will be left alone once gay rights advocates have the fullest constitutional protection. Tolerance will quickly be insufficient; affirmation will be the minimal standard -- or else.

That's my view. I welcome yours -- but again, be as sharp and as pointed as you like, but vitriol, abuse, name-calling and the like will be deleted.

Gather ye around the robust religious argument on the Front Porch. It all started when Jason Peters, who is an Orthodox convert, had vivid and unkind words to say about Evangelical megachurches. A commenter jumped in and told Peters he ought to be more charitable toward those he derides as "grocery story Christians":

So I would suggest that you don't let these "grocery store" Christians bother you. Some of them are from broken homes and broken hearts. Their children are oft raised by their mothers. Most of them are without benefit of a college education, many are hillwilliams, poor blacks, drug addicts and alcoholics and wouldn't fit in the company of more affluent folks, at least some affluent folks. I know this because these people are friends of mine. They are people that every once in a while, I've been privileged to help and people who have taught me more about being a Christian than any priest, preacher, or theologian. They may roll in the aisle, they may (God forbid) raise their hand in praise of the Almighty, they may shout "Praise Jesus", but please remember that every one of them truly believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God, the Word, and the Savior of mankind. Not too bad for "grocery store" Christians!

Caleb Stegall jumped in to affirm this sentiment, then said the phenomenon Peters criticizes would be more accurately analyzed through class than theology. But that didn't happen ... and despite the fistfight that broke out, some interesting things got said anyway. Check it out. For the record, I think Caleb is onto something about class, but it's not a complete truth that megachurchers are all middles and upper-middles. Class is no longer defined exclusively by income, but sometimes by taste. Paul Fussell had this all figured out years ago, when he observed the emergence of Category X. You will find lots of Fussellian Christian Xers among intellectual Catholics, Orthodox converts, and certain mainline Protestant congregations. Basically, the Touchstone Magazine coalition. Not quite sure how many of them turn up in suburban megachurches ... which rub against their class grain, no matter how much money they make.