ST. HELENS, Ore. (RNS)—It’s been 23 years since Diane Bach left the Tony Alamo Christian Ministries compound in Arkansas, but she still struggles to make decisions for herself.

As a waitress hands Bach a menu, she swallows hard. Her hands begin to tremble; she shifts uncomfortably in her chair. Soon, she’s sweating, and red blotches pool on her chest like spilled wine.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I have a lot of trouble ordering from a simple menu because, to this day, I have trouble making my own choices.”

Alamo’s critics, including hundreds of former members, call his ministry a cult that brainwashes its members with punishments including withholding food, beatings and being booted from the church. Those leaving the church were told they would die, go insane or turn into homosexuals.

Some former members were physically abused as children at the compound. Others, like Bach, lived there mainly as adults. Surviving in mainstream society has been difficult for them all.

Alamo, 74, was arrested in Arizona last month on suspicion of transporting minors across state lines for sexual purposes. Days earlier, the FBI raided the Arkansas compound as part of a child pornography investigation and removed six girls.

Unlike many of the adults and children who say they lived under Alamo’s control, Bach, 54—who lived at the compound from age 17 to 31—says she never was physically or sexually abused.

Instead, every aspect of her life was controlled, including whom she married. She wasn’t allowed to decide anything for herself, she says, and was brainwashed into believing Alamo had the power to send her to hell if she didn’t work in his businesses for free.

What Bach lost, she says, is her faith—in herself and in God. She was thrown out of the compound when her former husband ran afoul of Tony Alamo.

“Having spirituality in my life is very important,” said Bach, who now operates a hotel with her second husband, Jim. “Having a belief, something solid, something concrete, was something I needed. I’d rather be physically raped than spiritually raped, because now I don’t know what to believe.”

Whether perpetrated by Catholic priests or charismatic cult leaders, abuse by religious figures can be more harmful than other forms of maltreatment: A building block of recovery for some people—belief in God—is exactly what’s been stripped away.

Diane Bach, who spent her early adulthood at a compound run by controversial evangelist Tony Alamo, still struggles to make decisions on her own. Her second husband, Jim, whom she married after leaving the sect, provides support. (RNS photo/Olivia Bucks/The Oregonian)

“Virtually every abuse victim feels alone,” said David Clohessy, national director of St. Louis-based Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests.

“But I believe that no victim feels more alone than somebody abused by a religious figure or in a religious setting. The most universal source of comfort and solace in painful times is God. But if God is perceived to be an integral part of one’s abuse and cover-up, victims are left with virtually nowhere to turn.”

Among members of his organization, comprising people who’ve been sexually abused by priests, “many—not most, but many—victims have found their way back to some kind of spirituality. But almost never without first enduring a long, painful period of alienation and uncertainty around even the existence of God.”

For Elishah Franckiewicz, the first child born in Alamo’s compound, recovery is about building her own system of beliefs, something she was denied as a child.

Franckiewicz, now a 37-year-old college instructor in the Portland area, escaped when she was 15. When she left, she said, she had no reference point for what was right and wrong, true or untrue.

Franckiewicz and other compound children were told that if they prayed hard enough, Alamo’s wife, Susan, who died from cancer after the compound moved to Arkansas, would rise from the dead. Each day she did not awaken, the children were beaten.

With the help and love of her husband, who rescued her from the compound in a dramatic escape, she slowly rebuilt her life by facing her fears and investigating the world. But she lost her faith in God.

“I believe in my family,” she says. “And I believe in me.”

Bach was 17 and living alone in Los Angeles when she first met Tony Alamo’s followers. She says she visited the couple’s church in Hollywood “mostly out of curiosity.”

Bach didn’t have a religious upbringing, but she thirsted for spiritual guidance.

While attending one of the Alamos’ church services, Bach says, she had a “very real born-again experience.” She threw her last $3 in the collection plate and accepted an invitation to join the compound, which then was in Saugus, Calif.

Very quickly, she said, she was stripped of her identity. Followers worked for businesses owned by the Alamos or on nearby farms and lived in sex-segregated dormitories. They were told what to wear, what to say and what to think. All meals were served in a cafeteria with no choices. She said anyone could be publicly rebuked without warning, and most of the followers “lived in constant fear.”

“I couldn’t talk about this for years. It was so traumatic for me that I couldn’t talk about it.”

Seven years ago, she became “plagued with panic attacks.” A therapist diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder, and told Bach she’d been stuffing down her feelings so long that, like too many books on a shelf, everything just collapsed.

She wanted to rebuild, but she was missing something crucial—her faith.

“I feel like I was spiritually raped.”

Bach continues to struggle. “It’s day by day,” she says.

“I long to believe, but I just can’t.”

"Ghost!” a 5-year-old screeched as he stood in the pew and clutched his mother’s neck. “Mama, the preacher said there’s a ghost in here!” Although most Baptists in the sanctuary laughed at the outburst, likely at least a few also wondered: Who or what is the Holy Ghost—the Holy Spirit? And what difference does the Holy Spirit make in today’s world?

Baptists profess to believe God manifests attributes and character through the Trinity, three distinct persons—the Father as Creator, the Son as Savior and the Holy Spirit as Comforter.

But through history, some Baptist branches—including those of the Southern tradition—have leaned toward a form of Unitarianism, sometimes centered on the Creator and often focused on Jesus.

Doug Weaver, associate professor and director of undergraduate studies in Baylor University’s religion department, believes Baptist biblicism—the way Baptists understand the Bible—explains the tendency to focus on Jesus.

“Passages about God and the Holy Spirit are surely there (in the Bible), but we will quote Jesus’ ‘I am the way’ from John and Paul’s ‘we preach Christ crucified’ before we quote anything else,” Weaver explained.

The New Testament leads Baptists to a Trinitarian position, said Dallas Roark, a former professor at Wayland Baptist and Kansas State universities. For example, “John 1:1-18 (and) the words of Jesus in John 14-17 indicate the identity with the Father and the Holy Spirit,” he said.

And, Roark believes, the New Testament leads to the Savior.

“The emphasis on Jesus is so strong because he is the mystery of God now revealed in history. … The central fact of God’s revelation is in Christ, not the Holy Spirit,” Roark added. “Jesus indicated that the Spirit would testify to him, not about the Spirit’s self.”

Baptists focus on the person of Jesus because they recognize him as central to personal salvation and Christian experience.

“Baptists are a conversionist movement; testifying to the personal experience of salvation made possible through Christ and signified by believer’s baptism has always been the basis for our concept of ‘believer’s church,’” Weaver added.

Affect of the Enlightenment 

The Enlightenment—the social and cultural age that emphasized reason and intellect—also affected Baptist understanding of the Trinity, Baylor professor Rosalie Beck believes. Beck is an assistant professor at Baylor, specializing in Christian history and missions and in women’s studies.

“We are heirs to the Enlightenment and accept a growing emphasis on mentally describing and understanding everything,” she said. “Other cultures have a more creative understanding of their world and explain it in terms that we have rejected because of our intellectual tradition.”

Human form lends concreteness to the person of Jesus, while the Holy Spirit remains abstract. “When one reads through the New Testament, particularly the Gospels, the personality of Jesus shines through and we are given an image of a person who is one with us,” Roark explained.

“We don’t have the same details about the Holy Spirit. The embodiment of the Logos gives us concrete details that we don’t have about the Holy Spirit.”

But that concreteness should not detract from the Holy Spirit’s role, he added. The Spirit’s presence is the constant reminder of what Jesus did for humankind. The Spirit penetrates “in a way that it is not conceivable in the seeming limited spatial body of Jesus,” Roark said.

The Spirit and "holiness" 

Sometimes Baptists have shied from emphasizing the Holy Spirit to distance themselves from the practices of other groups. A few Baptists participated in the holiness movement in the late 19th century, Weaver explained. “Holiness” Baptists adopted an understanding of sanctification that paralleled the Pentecostal approach.

“More recently, Baptists, like other Protestants and Catholics, have been influenced by what I call the ‘pentecostalization of American religion,’” Weaver added.

“As the charismatic movement developed in the 1960s—and the electronic church—a few Baptists began to affirm the ‘gifts of the Spirit,’ though most Baptists—especially in the South—opposed the movement,” he said.

Some Baptist groups, such as the Southern tradition, include the Spirit “through the back door, because Baptists emphasize the inspired aspect of the Bible.” said David May, professor of New Testa-ment at Central Baptist Theological Seminary in Shawnee, Kan.

But other Baptist groups express more open connection to the Holy Spirit, May pointed out, particularly in African-American Baptist traditions.

“I wonder if those who have felt marginalized have sensed the Spirit because the Spirit is kind of marginalized,” he speculated. “Mainline churches have monopolized Jesus. The Spirit doesn’t have a cultural look.”

Hymns sung in most Baptist churches historically have been “More About Jesus” than about either God the Father or the Holy Spirit, several church music experts agree.

“From a Baptist perspective, I don’t think the hymnody has ever been Trinitarian,” said Clell Wright, director of choral activities and Logsdon professor of church music at Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene.

Baptist worship has been shaped to a large degree by the revivalist movements of the 19th and early 20th centuries, he noted.

“By nature, the focus is on Jesus and his redeeming work,” Wright said.

Consequently, when it comes to Baptist understanding of the Godhead as reflected in congregational song, “Our Trinity is more two-point-something rather than three,” said Terry York, associate professor of Christian ministry and church music at Baylor University’s School of Music and Truett Theological Seminary in Waco.

“One way to gauge that is by looking at the index in the back of the hymnal under ‘Holy

Spirit.’ Looking at the 1991 Baptist Hymnal, for instance, there’s not much there. And I was on the committee that put that one together, for crying out loud.”

A quick glance at the recently released 2008 Baptist Hymnal reveals similar results, noted Lee Hinson, coordinator of church music studies at Oklahoma Baptist University in Shawnee, Okla.

“It has not changed much,” Hinson said. “We struggle with singing Trinitarian doctrine. There are several categories of things we free-churchers don’t do well in worship. … Dealing with the doctrine of the Holy Spirit is one of them.”

York agreed, noting lack of emphasis on the Holy Spirit may reveal—in part—lack of clarity among Baptists about the Spirit’s role and about the doctrine of the Trinity in general.

“Baptist churches divide themselves in worship according to which Person of the Trinity gets the most emphasis,” he noted. Baptists who say they want to “worship the Father in the beauty of holiness” generally favor more formal, liturgical worship. Baptist who want to “praise Jesus for who he is and what he has done” may tend toward a more revivalist and evangelistic worship style. Baptists who say they want “the Spirit to come down and bless us” often follow a less structured worship format.

“Generally, we are less than balanced,” York commented. “Few churches stand in the middle.”

Observers differ about whether the rising popularity of praise and worship music translates into increased attention directed toward the Holy Spirit.

Wright sees a shift toward greater “recognition of the work of the Holy Spirit” in praise music.

“So much of it in the last 15 to 20 years seems very pietistic, with a strong emphasis on personal worship,” he noted.

That emphasis represents a departure from the evangelistic and revivalist tradition that has marked Baptist worship, he noted.

“Our Baptist heritage of music in the gospel tradition has defined who we are for a couple of hundred years,” Wright noted.

Hinson sees a greater emphasis on the work of the Holy Spirit in Baptist worship, but he believes it is restricted to the youngest worship leaders.

“Millennials (roughly defined as the generation born in the 1980s and 1990s) want their worship to be free,” he said. Lyrics that stress the Holy Spirit exist, “but they’re not sung where the Boomers are in charge. They’re in the Wednesday night services where students lead worship.”

York, on the other hand, sees praise and worship lyrics focused primarily on Jesus, but worship leaders stressing the role of the Holy Spirit in leading them.

“They attribute being caught up in worship to the work of the Holy Spirit, who helps lead in the worship of Jesus,” he said.

HIXSON, Tenn. (ABP)—Suffering from burnout after a decade as pastor of Central Baptist Church, a Southern Baptist congregation in suburban Chattanooga, Tenn., Ron Phillips wrote his resignation letter on a portable computer on the way to a meeting at Glorieta Baptist Conference Center in 1989. He never submitted it.

That night as he slept, he heard a voice calling his name. He went to the door, but no one was there. It happened again, and then a third time. He described the event in his 1999 book, Awakened By the Spirit.

“As I was awakened a third time, my room was filled with God’s presence. It was the voice of my dear Savior. I wept as the glory filled the room, and I cried out, ‘Lord, where have you been?’

“He said to me, ‘I’ve been waiting for you.’

“I asked, ‘Lord, where have you been waiting?’

“He replied, ‘Read your Scripture for today.’“

Phillips read Psalm 92:10, “I have been anointed with fresh oil.”

Soon, what he called a “baptism of power” came over him. He wept, sang, laughed, shouted and shook. He did not receive a private prayer language until three years later, but the moment changed his ministry forever.

Phillips’ congregation, which today goes by the name Abba’s House, describes itself as a “Spirit-filled Southern Baptist church.”

On occasion, the church has experienced manifestations like trembling, crying, leaping, jumping and “falling out” in the Spirit. While not seeking such events, Phillips welcomes them as evidence God is moving among them.

As a well-connected leader in the Southern Baptist Convention in the late 1970s, Phillips would have identified himself as a “cessationist”—a Christian who believes miracles occurred in Bible times but were not valid gifts for today.

As an officer for eight years with the North American Mission Board, he also became familiar with countless churches that were declining and dying that he now believes could have been growing in the power of the Holy Spirit.

Today, Phillips says he finds scant biblical support for the cessationist view. Instead, he believes the Bible suggests gifts will remain until the Second Coming of Christ.

Phillips thinks many SBC churches are more interested in appearing mainstream and acceptable to the intelligentsia than in being true to Baptists’ free-church tradition.

Historical accounts of frontier revivals described loud worship, wild cries, falling out and other things embarrassing to the modern church. Rather than embracing their “brush arbor” roots, Phillips says most Baptists today seem to be more comfortable with the Reformed tradition that persecuted their Anabaptist forebears.

“Could it be that Baptists who believe in the gifts and manifestations of the Spirit are more true to Scripture in their beliefs than some of those who are more comfortable with the formality of the reformation?” Phillips wrote in an article for the May 2008 Theology for Ministry, a journal published twice a year by Mid-America Baptist Theological Seminary in Cordova, Tenn.

Abba’s House recently was host for the 10th annual “Fresh Oil, New Wine” conference. Pastor Ron Phillips counts more than 500 Southern Baptist churches in the network that open themselves to spiritual gifts.

Abba’s House recently was host for the 10th annual “Fresh Oil, New Wine” conference. Phillips counts more than 500 Southern Baptist churches in the network that open themselves to spiritual gifts.

A study last year by LifeWay Christian Resources found half of Southern Baptist pastors believe the Holy Spirit gives some people a “private prayer language,” but those who practice it find themselves increasingly marginalized in convention life.

In 2005, the International Mission Board forbade missionaries to pray in tongues, even though the agency’s CEO, Jerry Rankin, has acknowledged using a private prayer language in his own devotional life.

In 2006, Dwight McKissic, a trustee at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, prompted controversy by saying in a chapel service that he also used a private prayer language. He eventually resigned from the board under pressure.

Phillips contends Southern Baptists have nothing to fear from those who embrace spiritual gifts but rather should embrace them. “In doing so, Baptists welcome the Third Person of the Godhead, the Holy Spirit,” he wrote.

“The fact remains that charismatic Southern Baptists exist, albeit a small minority. They are committed to historic Baptist identity and doctrine, but make room for the supernatural working of the Holy Spirit within God’s people for ministry and proclamation.

“The question remains: Will the issue of charismatic gifts be a test of fellowship and cooperation? The process of making it a litmus test has already begun; let’s pray and hope that brotherly love and toleration for differences on this issue may begin to prevail.”

DEERFIELD, Ill. (ABP)—There’s a tempest brewing among evangelical theologians about the triune nature of God, with potential to spill beyond academic halls into relationships between males and females in the church and home.

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School sponsored a two-hour debate, broadcast live on the Internet, about whether relationships of submission and authority exist eternally between the persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit within the Trinity.

For nontheologians, the discussion may sound similar to, “How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?” But the stakes grow higher when groups like the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, based on the campus of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., use it to buttress their claim that God built gender roles into the created order before the Fall.

Critics say that instead of allowing the Bible to inform their beliefs on wifely submission, the “complementarians” are trying to establish theirs as the only acceptable view for orthodox Christians, while labeling those who promote equality of the sexes as heretics on par with people who deny the Trinity.

In a June sermon at Denton Bible Church, Bruce Ware, professor of Christian theology at Southern Semi-nary, included an argument for “eternal submission” of Christ in a list of 10 reasons “why we should affirm that God designed there to be male headship” in the family.

“If it’s true that in the Trinity itself—in the eternal relationships of Father, Son and Spirit, there is authority and submission, and the Son eternally submits to the will of the Father,” Ware said in the sermon. “If that’s true, then this follows: It is as Godlike to submit to rightful authority with joy and gladness as it is Godlike to exert wise and beneficial rightful authority.”

At another point, Ware also said one reason men abuse their wives is because women rebel against their husband’s God-given authority.

At the Trinity debate, Ware, incoming president of the Evangelical Theological Society, said the three persons of the Trinity possess the same divine essence or nature but are different in role.

All about "submission" 

“The Father is the Father eternally, the Son is the Son eternally, and among the differences is authority and submission in relational structure between those two members of the Trinity,” he said.

Wayne Grudem, Ware’s partner in presenting the submission side of the debate, said the very names Father and Son imply a hierarchy of authority and submission. Former president of the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood and now a professor at Phoenix Seminary in Arizona, Grudem added that by sending the Son, the Father revealed his headship in the relationship.

Both sides agree Jesus submitted himself to the Father’s will while on earth, but Grudem noted that after his ascension, Jesus is described as “high priest,” an intermediary between God and man, and as sitting at the “right hand” of the Father, a place of second-in-command.

All this worries theology professor Curtis Freeman, director of the House of Baptist Studies at Duke University Divinity School. Freeman believes Baptists have neglected the Trinity to the point they have become functional Unitarians—elevating faith in Jesus alone to near exclusion of the Father and Spirit, or on occasion elevating the Father with subordinate roles for Son and Spirit.

While welcoming renewed attention to the Trinity, Free-man said he fears the current complementarian crowd is using it as “an end to justify” their views on the family.

Charges of Arianism 

In an e-mail posted on pastor Wade Burleson’s blog, Freeman labeled eternal subordination of the Son a “semi-Arian” doctrine not thoroughly examined and tested by the entire church.

Arianism is named after a cleric who taught in 4th century Alexandria, Egypt. Noting the Bible describes Jesus as “begotten” of the Father, Arius posited there must have been a time when the Son of God did not exist. Jesus, therefore, was not “one” with the Father, but rather subordinate and less than fully divine.

The controversy became so intense that in 325, the Emperor Constantine assembled bishops in present-day Turkey for the First Council of Nicea. It was the first of seven ecumenical councils that over time developed the historic creeds of the Catholic Church.

Church leaders at Nicea declared Arius a heretic and responded with The Nicene Creed, describing Jesus Christ as, “Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father by whom all things were made.”

While the whole argument may sound strange to modern ears, the late Southern Baptist theologian Dale Moody wrote in his 1981 book, The Word of Truth, that Arius’ view was not far different from statements in the 19th century by J.R. Graves, founder of a movement called Southern Baptist Landmarkism.

Eternal submission of the Son advocates deny charges that they are tinkering with the Trinity. They counter that the ones guilty of innovation are rather feminist theologians who argue for egalitarian relationships between men and women based on evidence of mutual submission among the Persons of the Trinity they find in Scripture.

The nature of Christ 

Opposing Grudem and Ware at the Trinity debate, Keith Yandell, professor of philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, acknowledged the New Testament talks about Christ submitting to the Father’s will, like in the Garden of Gethsemane, but they say submission resulted from and was in effect only during the Incarnation.

Other passages, like Philippians 2:5-11, portray the pre-existent Christ as fully equal to God, humbling himself voluntarily to die on the cross, and afterward exalted to the name “above every name.”

Tom McCall, professor of biblical and systematic theology at Trinity, said verses like Mark’s description of the Spirit “driving” Jesus into the wilderness for 40 days of temptation suggest mutual submission.

McCall said “it’s not entirely clear what motivates” his opponents’ claim.

“What might motivate this claim?” Ware offered in his rebuttal. “Only the entirety of biblical revelation from God about himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit.”

NEW YORK (RNS)—A Christian, a Jew, a Muslim, a Buddhist and an atheist walk into a prayer meeting.

Any number of punch lines could follow. But the members of Faith House Manhattan have serious business in mind. They want to create an unconventional spiritual community for people from any—or no—religious tradition.

The fledgling group of about three-dozen regular participants is overseen by Samir Selmanovic, a Seventh-day Adventist pastor for whom interfaith ideals come naturally: He describes himself as a former “atheist Muslim” who converted to Christianity during his military service in the former Yugoslavia.

“I wanted to build a church where Christians are not in charge,” he explained after a Saturday afternoon gathering of Jewish prayers and Beatles music.

“We wanted to include all the people who have a right to belong and be partners in the discussion, not as outsiders that need to be converted, but as insiders that we need to be interdependent with.”

Similar interfaith centers are on the rise across the country, according to the Pluralism Project at Harvard University, which reported a surge in the years after the 9/11 terrorist attacks. There are now more than 550 such groups in America, with the largest numbers in New York, California, Massachusetts and Illinois.

In addition to easing religious tensions and encouraging joint philanthropic and community activities, Pluralism Project spokeswoman Kathryn Lohre said, these groups create new roles for women, which has been the case for Faith House.

“Interfaith organizations provide opportunities for women’s leadership in a way that oftentimes the religious traditions themselves do not, simply because those positions do not need to be sanctioned by any religious head or body,” she explained.

At Faith House, all three “co-leaders” of the Jewish, Christian and Muslim programs are women. That’s a coincidence, Selmanovic said, but one he is happy about, even if it prompts traditionalists to underestimate their efforts for the time being.

At a recent gathering, co-leader Jill Minkoff, a rabbinical student at the Academy for Jewish Religion, recited the Kaddish mourner’s prayer for her father, explaining its meaning to the Christians, Muslims and other non-Jews in attendance.

For regulars like Mujadid Shah, a Muslim, the desire to learn more about other faiths motivates them to attend Faith House meetings, in addition to their own worship services.

“This is knowledge that I might not learn otherwise,” Shah said. “I pursue educating myself on a spiritual path.”

With the exception of Selmanovic’s daughters—ages 10 and 13—most Faith House participants are between 30 and 50. About half come from Protestant traditions; about one-third do not attend other services during the week.

At the end of gatherings, the group shares a table piled with cheese, fruit and desserts, continuing discussions of the week’s theme or catching up on current events.

The absence of a collection plate or donation box is conspicuous, given the generous spread and the $1,200 cost of renting space in a former synagogue for the Saturday meeting. So far, the group’s expenses have been paid by private donations; Selmanovic said he is working with a grant writer to solicit more funds.

Faith House’s e-mail newsletter has hundreds of subscribers, and he hopes word-of-mouth will bring about more attendance and event sponsors.

As the group grows, Selmanovic believes it will play a key role in bringing New York City’s diverse religious communities closer together.

“We have to see that we are sojourners instead of competitors,” he said.

White literalists less likely to vote for minority candidates. More than eight in 10 white American Protestants would vote for a racial minority candidate for president, but fewer whites who interpret the Bible literally or who worship in an all-white congregation would do the same, according to a recent survey by Baylor University’s Institute for Studies of Religion. Researchers found 84 percent of non-Hispanic white Americans said they would vote for a racial minority candidate if he or she were the nominee of their party. But only 75 percent of respondents who said the Bible should be taken literally, and 69 percent of those who attend an all-white congregation, would vote that way. Researchers found nine out of 10 whites with no religious affiliation would vote for a racial minority candidate. The findings from a sample of 1,325 non-Hispanic whites were part of the 2008 Baylor Religion Survey. The study has a margin of error of plus or minus 4 percentage points.

Schuller and son part ways at Crystal Cathedral TV ministry. On upcoming broadcasts of the Hour of Power from the glistening Crystal Cathedral in Southern California, the featured preacher no longer will be Robert A. Schuller, son of founder Robert H. Schuller. “He’s still senior pastor of Crystal Cathedral, the local congregation,” church spokesman John Charles said of the younger Schuller. “He’s just no longer the single pastor on the Hour of Power.” The elder Schuller, 82, announced that differences about the future of the ministry have led to a decision to expand the platform of the broadcast.

ORU settles suit with whistleblowing professors. Oral Roberts University has settled a lawsuit with two former professors who claimed their actions as whistleblowers cost them their jobs. In a suit filed one year ago, former professors Tim and Paulita Brooker alleged lavish, unchecked spending and illegal activity by then-ORU President Richard Roberts and his family. The son of university founder and evangelist Oral Roberts resigned last November amid the allegations. He had succeeded his father in 1993. School officials announced the suit involving the Brookers was resolved through mediation, and terms of the settlement were confidential.

Study finds more Orthodox converts than expected. A new study of Orthodox Christians in America has found a larger-than-expected number of converts, mostly from Roman Catholic and evangelical Protestant backgrounds. The report, released by the Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute, surveyed 1,000 members of Greek Orthodox or Orthodox Church in America congregations—about 60 percent of America’s estimated 1.2 million Orthodox Christians. Although Orthodox churches historically were immigrant communities, the study found nine out of 10 parishioners now are American-born. Thousands of members had converted to the faith as adults: 29 percent of Greek Orthodox are converts, as are 51 percent of the Orthodox Church in America.

WASHINGTON (ABP)—The forbidden idea of churches and other tax-exempt organizations endorsing political parties or candidates has started to sound like a good one, in recent decades, to many conservative evangelicals in the United States.

In fact, a group of pastors from around the country, aided by a conservative legal group, recently decided to test the constitutionality of the tax law that prevents such endorsements.

But constitutional rights aside, is church endorsement of political candidates a good idea from either a civic or theological perspective? Does it profit or harm either the body politic or the Body of Christ for the latter to jump into the former with both feet?

“Historically, churches have emphatically, and with great passion, spoken scriptural truth from the pulpit about government and culture,” begins a statement on the Alliance Defense Fund’s website. The group is an association of conservative Christian lawyers who volunteer to take on cases about church-state issues and other causes important to the Religious Right.

The statement continues: “All that changed in 1954 with the passage of the Johnson amendment, which restricted the right of churches and pastors to speak scriptural truth about candidates for office. The Johnson amendment was proposed by then-Sen. Lyndon Johnson, and it changed the Internal Revenue Code to prohibit churches and other non-profit organizations from supporting or opposing a candidate for office. After the Johnson amendment passed, churches faced a choice of either continuing their tradition of speaking out or silencing themselves in order to retain their church’s tax exemption.”

On Sept. 28, 33 pastors across the country endorsed candidates or parties from the pulpit, setting up potential direct challenges to the Johnson Amendment. ADF advised and encouraged the pastors, hoping to create test cases that could go, ultimately, to the Supreme Court. They contend the Johnson Amendment violates the Constitution by suppressing churches’ freedom of religion.

But many religious groups and thinkers opposed the effort.

“As an old-timey Baptist, I think that pastors, churches—black and white and Latino—have every right to endorse candidates publicly,” said Bill Leonard, a Baptist historian and dean of Wake Forest University Divinity School.

“What they don’t have is the right to tax exemption for expressing their conscience. That is patently wrong, regardless of their color, because you can’t have it both ways. You can’t speak out of conscience and expect to be privileged at the same time.”

The ban on tax-exempt groups like churches endorsing candidates “simply means you can’t— this is my historian side—you can’t bow the knee to Constantine and to Jesus; you have to choose,” Leonard continued. “So, endorse a candidate and give up tax exemption. It’s an easy choice.”

Applies to all nonprofits 

Bob Tuttle, a First Amendment expert at George Washington University Law School, noted the electioneering ban doesn’t single out churches or houses of worship but applies to all nonprofits organized under Section 501(c)(3) of the tax code.

“It’s not targeted at churches; it’s not targeted at religion,” he said. “It deals with all organizations that have this one feature—that is, donations made to them are deductible against the donors’ taxes. This is not primarily about the tax-exempt institutions. … It’s about donations and what kinds of things the government effectively wants to subsidize.”

Even though political campaigns and political- action committees are not-for-profit ventures under the federal tax code, they are governed by a different set of laws. They don’t enjoy the advantage that churches and other charitable organizations do by being not only tax-free, but being able to receive tax-deductible donations. Yet houses of worship, educational institutions and charities receive the same level of fire and police protection and infrastructure support as organizations that pay taxes.

In terms of how lifting the ban on church electioneering would affect U.S. politics overall, Tuttle said, “from the civil side, I think people make a big mistake when they say that this is just some quirky artifact of the 1950s.”

Money and power have 'exploded'

That’s because, he said, the amount of money that churches and other nonprofits take in—and the sheer numbers of nonprofits—has exploded since 1954.

“The power I’m talking about is the ability to command the kinds of benefits that churches and other 501(c)(3) organizations get and to use those benefits to project a particular (political) message,” Tuttle said.

“We’re talking about real money now, you know. If you were forced to do what some have said, which is to stop limiting the ability of churches to participate … you force the IRS to make some very difficult decisions about what it means to be a church—because you could have somebody set up a mechanism that would fork over a considerable amount of its assets to campaign activities.”

Tuttle, who holds a Ph.D. in religious ethics and a Lutheran seminary degree, worries about upending the Johnson amendment from another perspective, though—a theological one.

“From a more Protestant perspective, we tend to believe that justification comes by faith—not by conformity with a particular political agenda,” Tuttle said.

“We recognize that political agendas are not matters about which the faith is going to stand or fall, and to draw lines in a strong way starts to draw lines within the body (of Christ) about matters that really should not divide people … in the place of worship.”

Jeffrey Haggray, executive director of the District of Columbia Baptist Convention, said risking congregational or denominational unity is a danger when churches dive into partisan politics.

“There will always be differences within congregations over candidates. When the pulpit takes it upon itself to choose a candidate for the entire congregation, it threatens to undermine the freedom it cherishes,” he wrote, in a recent piece published by the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

“Sacred space where people are free to decide according to conscience gets turned into secular space that becomes suspect as to its judgment, integrity and motives. Over time, the prophetic influence of the church diminishes because its political preferences obscure its concerns for justice, equality and fairness for all people.”

Prophetic role endangered 

Stan Hastey of the Washington-based Alliance of Baptists said compromising unity and the church’s prophetic role are among several dangers associated with church political endorsements.

“For me, the key questions pastors who are tempted to endorse candidates should ask themselves are these: Will my endorsing a candidate enhance or compromise my vocation as a pastor? Will it enhance or compromise the church’s witness? Will it divide the people I am called to serve?” he said.

“Will it embarrass and demean the church’s witness to Christ when politicians fail, as they invariably do? Is hitching my star to any politician worth the risk to my credibility as a preacher and teacher of the good news of God?”

Tuttle—who serves as legal counsel to the Washington synod of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America—also said he worries that pastors entering politics are prone to the same corruptions as anybody else.

“This may just come from having spent a lot of time having done internal church discipline stuff, but I tend to think of pastors not being better than anybody else—you know, they get seduced,” he said. “I’m deeply worried about corruptibility of the office.”

For IRS guidelines on election activities that are prohibited in churches, visit www.irs.gov/newsroom/.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—As a Christian philosopher, author and political activist, Francis Schaeffer urged conservative Christians to battle abortion and engage the secular culture. But he would have recoiled from the “snide” comments and jeering at this summer’s Republican National Convention, his son Frank claims.

Francis Schaeffer, who died in 1984, provided the philosophical foundation for the Religious Right.

“My father would have been embarrassed to be in that room—absolutely horrified,” said Schaeffer, who once rallied conservative Christians in public arenas alongside his father.

Considered by many an architect of what became the Religious Right, Francis Schaeffer’s Christian moral philosophy has been perverted into a purely political movement that is “essentially the heart and soul of the Republican party,” said Frank Schaeffer, author of the 2007 memoir, Crazy for God: How I Grew Up as One of the Elect, Helped Found the Religious Right, and Lived to Take All (or Almost All) of it Back.

Schaeffer, 56, takes a lot of it back in the book, which was just released in paperback by De Capo Press. He reveals new details about his famous but troubled family, and takes sharp jabs at a religious political movement for which he feels partly responsible.

“Crazy for God was a way of exorcising my own demons, and a sense of guilt at having helped unleash something that grew beyond all recognition from where it started,” the younger Schaeffer said in an interview.

Schaeffer's son, Frank, says his father would be embarassed by the modern religious-conservative movement. (RNS photos/courtesy Frank Schaeffer)

He does so with a bluntness that has drawn positive reviews and sharp criticism, particularly of his often-unflattering depiction of his father and his mother, Edith. Describing his upbringing at L’Abri, his parents’ religious community in Switzerland, he portrays a literate household visited frequently by hippies and celebrities, as well as a marriage marred by Francis’ jealousy and abuse of Edith.

In Books & Culture, author Os Guinness, a close family friend, called it a “scurrilous caricature” of the parents as con artists. “No critic or enemy of Francis Schaeffer has done more damage to his life’s work than his son, Frank,” Guinness wrote.

Frank Schaeffer insists he admires his father, who died in 1984 at age 72, but says he “certainly wasn’t flawless.” He credits his father with opening a door to art, music and literature to a generation of evangelicals.

“I’ve been criticized for a tell-all book on the Schaeffers,” he said from his home near Boston. “It’s the opposite. I’m trying to rescue my dad’s reputation from a very narrow group of people who have very much misused him.”

Crazy for God castigates evangelical icons such as the late Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and James Dobson, with whom father and son once worked. They were “anti-American religious revolutionaries,” he writes, who “would later use their power in ways that would have made my father throw up.”

“It began to dawn on me that bad news was good news to these guys,” Schaeffer said in the interview. “The worse it gets, the sooner Jesus will come back … and the more (they’re) proved right.”

Schaeffer also writes of his association with Billy Zeoli of the Michigan-based Gospel Communi-cations International, and longtime Gospel chairman Rich DeVos. Gospel distributed a film version of Francis Schaeffer’s classic work, How Should We Then Live? Frank Schaeffer directed and produced the film.

A seminar tour based on the video helped shoot Francis Schaeffer to evangelical stardom. Although describing Zeoli as “slick and worldly” and DeVos as the “far-right founder-capitalist-guru” of Amway, Schaeffer doesn’t fault them for what he regards as a wrong turn in his and his father’s ministry.

“The mistake was trying to get Christians to vote along theological lines instead of what’s good for the country,” Schaeffer said.

Schaeffer has left the Republican Party—he considers himself an independent and is supporting Sen. Barack Obama for president—and the evangelical movement. He finds the Greek Orthodox Church more suitable to his spirituality than being a “professional Christian.”

“If you’re an evangelist, you’ve got to be a special person not to lose your grip on what you believe,” he said. “I lost my grip. I had to get out for the salvation of my soul.”

Charles Honey writes for The Grand Rapids Press in Grand Rapids, Mich.

American Christians may pledge loyalty to the U.S. Constitution. But behind the closed curtain of the polling booth, many violate the spirit of the constitutional prohibition on any religious test for public office. And several church-state experts insist that’s not altogether bad—up to a point.

Article Six of the U.S. Constitution ends with the clause: “… no religious test shall ever be required as a qualification to any office or public trust under the United States.” But imposing religious tests as a matter of law differs from voters imposing them in practice, some authorities on church and state issues noted.

American voters “impose an unofficial religious test that vets candidates based on their religious views,” and it’s entirely legal and appropriate, said Derek Davis, dean at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor and former director of Baylor University’s J.M. Dawson Institute of Church-State Studies.

“This unofficial test does not serve to disqualify anyone from running for office; it only serves to allow voters the freedom to consider the religious views of candidates for whom they might vote,” Davis said.

A candidate’s religious affiliation remains “the litmus test most people won’t admit to, but that they carry around with them” into the voting booth, said Charles Haynes, senior scholar at the First Amendment Center.

“As responsible citizens, religious affiliation should have no bearing whatsoever on selecting someone for public office,” Haynes insisted. But he draws a sharp distinction between religious affiliation and religious commitment.

“Their religious commitment in terms of its influence on the lives that they live, on the values they hold and on their worldview—those all go into character,” he said. “It’s fair for voters to know the source of a person’s values and how that person makes decisions.”

As a practical matter, “voters can and do take religion into account,” said Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty.

Voters should bring their religious values to the public square. They have every right to consider a candidate’s religious faith as one factor out of many in making an informed decision about whether that person would be a good public servant, Walker said.

“When candidates talk about their faith, it helps us know who they are, learn what makes them tick, and examine their moral core. The free and fluid discussion of candidates’ faith carries the promise of improving the electorate’s ability to make an informed decision in the voting booth,” he said.

Valuable insights 

In fact, public interest in the private religious faith of candidates signals a healthy level of respect for religion’s role in society, said Suzii Paynter, director of the Christian Life Commission, the public policy and moral concerns arm of the Baptist General Convention of Texas. Questions about religious convictions can reveal valuable insights into a candidate’s character and values, she noted.

“The alternative would be a prohibition against talking about religion, and that would just be terrible,” she said. “It would deny the electorate a window into who the candidates are.”

While voters should consider a candidate’s religious commitment as one factor out of many, it never should become the single decisive test to determine an individual’s suitability for public office, said James Dunn, resident professor of Christianity and public policy at the Wake Forest University School of Divinity.

“Religion ought to be a factor, but not a prohibitive factor,” said Dunn, former executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee.

To the extent that a person’s religious views shape his or her moral character, those views can be weighed. And a candidate’s adherence to some beliefs also may reveal something about the individual’s discernment and ability to make rational decisions, he added.

“We insist in Western democracies that our public leaders should not believe absurdities, because those who believe absurdities are capable of atrocities,” he said, paraphrasing Voltaire.

Looking back on their heritage as a persecuted minority religion, Baptists should resist “the de facto political anointing of particular religious perspectives,” recognizing the danger that presents both to religion and government, Dunn added.

Positive signs of change 

In practical terms, voters historically often have excluded from office people who do not follow the religion practiced by the majority, Paynter acknowledged. But she sees positive signs of change.

“I’m hesitant to use the term ‘religious test’ because of its specific meaning and because a test does not change. But the electorate’s tolerance (of religious minorities) changes,” she said.

Discussion of personal religious convictions can be helpful, but it should not be seen as mandatory, Walker stressed. He suggested an important backstop to keep questions of faith from devolving into religious bigotry.

“Ask the follow-up question, ‘So what?’ he recommended. “What difference will a candidate’s religion make on his or her performance in office? What impact will it have on public policy? How does it affect his or her leadership style?”

Matters of personal religious conviction become fair game when related to policy decisions and a candidate’s ability to lead. But adherence to the spirit of the no-religious-test principle demands that linkage be made, Walker said.

“It is not only not very helpful, but also terribly invasive to have a theological inquiry isolated from policy and matters of governance,” he said.

Character of candidates 

Nonetheless, when appropriately framed in terms of how convictions make an impact on decisions, questions of religious commitment can provide valuable insights into the character of candidates, Paynter observed.

When people reach a certain level—whether in politics, business or any other powerful enterprise—there’s always a temptation to see themselves as above the rules that apply to others, she noted.

“It’s important to know the grounding people have for their public ethic,” she said. “Public ethics come from private ethics. They don’t go the other way.”

In selecting a president, Davis added, voters also rightly may consider the office’s ceremonial role, which has an almost pastoral dimension in times of national catastrophe “when Americans need their national leader to share their grief and soothe their hearts and somehow offer some spiritual comfort.”

But, he cautioned, the president must respect the institutional separation of church and state. Davis also prescribed a good dose of humility, saying voters should take care to elect leaders who recognize the danger in equating their policies with God’s will.

“The ability of any world leader to know precisely the will of God is foreign to the Bible. The Bible speaks of an inscrutable God who often has brought down powerful nations in their prime due to their pride,” he said.

“The temptation to act religiously based on our own fallible interpretations of domestic and world events is among the reasons our constitution wisely mandates a degree of separation between church and state, thus preventing too close an alliance between the interests of religion and government that might harm our great nation.”

Human experience and biblical revelation both point to the need for humility, Dunn added. He quoted Romans 11:34: “Who has known the mind of the Lord? Who has been his counselor?”

“True believers understand we do not know the mind of God,” he said. And he strongly suggested steering clear of those who claim they do.

WASHINGTON (ABP)—A large study of religious Americans suggests white evangelicals’ views on gay rights may be shifting to the left.

The survey, which includes one of the largest samples of younger voters’ political and religious views ever taken, indicates gay rights quickly are gaining ground among even the most religious of Americans—especially among the youngest voters.

It also suggests contentious issues such as abortion and homosexuality will not be nearly as important in voting decisions this year as they were in the last presidential election.

But it concludes the Democratic presidential nominee, Illinois Sen. Barack Obama, has made little headway in wooing white evangelical voters compared to his predecessor from 2004, Massachusetts Sen. John Kerry.

“Younger Americans, including younger Americans of faith, are not the culture-war generation,” said Robert Jones, head of the firm that conducted the poll. “On issues from gay and lesbian rights to the role of government at home and around the world, young Catholics, mainline Protestants and evangelicals are bridging the divides that entrenched their elders and (are) ushering in an era of consensus in which the common good trumps the clash of ideologies.”

Jones is president of Public Religion Research, which was commissioned by the left-leaning policy group Faith in Public Life to conduct the study. It included a sample of 2,000 voting-age Americans, with an oversample of 974 respondents age 18-34.

Echoing the results from a similar—but smaller—poll released one week earlier, the survey found younger white evangelicals oppose abortion rights in numbers comparable to their elders.

However, they also are far more supportive of legal recognition for same-sex relationships—whether through marriage rights or “civil unions” with rights and responsibilities virtually identical to marriage.

A slim majority—52 percent—of white evangelical respondents aged 34 and under favor same-sex marriage or civil unions, compared to only 37 percent of all white evangelicals. Both figures are significantly higher than in 2004.

The generation gap particularly is striking on the issue of full same-sex marriage rights. Younger evangelicals are nearly 2 1/2 times more likely (24 percent to 10 percent) than the overall white evangelical population to support legalizing gay marriage.

That may be due, in part, to higher exposure among younger evangelicals to openly gay people. While just 16 percent of older evangelicals say they have a close friend or family member who is gay or lesbian, 37 percent of their younger counterparts do. That figure is very similar to the 38 percent of all 18-to-34-year-old respondents who say they have a close relationship with an open homosexual.

Younger white evangelicals also are far less likely than their elders to consider themselves “conservative.” Just under half identify themselves that way, compared to nearly two-thirds of older evangelicals.

Nonetheless, support for Arizona Sen. John McCain, the GOP nominee, seems to be only slightly lower among younger white evangelicals than their elders. The survey showed 68 percent of older white evangelicals support McCain to Obama’s 25 percent. For younger evangelicals, the figures were 65 percent for McCain and 29 percent for Obama.

Both figures are similar to the support that President Bush garnered among white evangelicals as the GOP nominee in 2004.

McCain also enjoys a significant advantage over Obama among all voters who attend worship services weekly or more often. That lead is similar to the one Bush held over Kerry in 2004.

Shift in casual church attenders 

But a significant shift has occurred in casual church attenders—religious voters who attend religious services once or twice a month. Those voters narrowly preferred Bush over Kerry in 2004, but now 60 percent favor Obama.

Younger evangelicals also show far more openness to religious pluralism than their older counterparts. While only 30 percent of evangelicals over 34 say a person can be moral without believing in God, 44 percent of younger evangelicals agree with that statement. 

Culture-war issues that were at the top of many conservative voters’ agendas in 2004 also take a backseat in the latest survey.

Economic issues far outrank concerns over abortion and same-sex marriage as chief concerns in the election. That holds true even for white evangelicals, who did not rank abortion or gay marriage among the top five most important issues.

Younger voters 

The survey also shows younger voters across religious groups are far more supportive of diplomatic efforts over military efforts than their elders. Younger voters—and especially younger Catholics—also are more open to government solutions to social problems.

“Younger believers—including Catholics and white evangelicals—are significantly more supportive of bigger government and expanding diplomatic efforts abroad,” said Rice University sociology professor Michael Lindsay, a Baptist.

“It’s not surprising, therefore, that they are supporting some of the ideas put forward by the Democrats in 2008. It may very well be that in this election, the conventional wisdom about the ‘values voters’—who they are and what they want—gets turned on its head.”

The survey was conducted between Aug. 28 and Sept. 19. It had a margin of error of plus or minus 2.5 percent for the overall sample, and 3 percent for the oversample of younger voters.

The poll’s sponsors said it may be more accurate than many other surveys because it included mobile-phone numbers, which younger voters rely on as their main residential number in percentages disproportionate to their elders.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Americans spent nearly twice as much on first-day sales of the video game “Grand Theft Auto IV” as the Southern Baptist Convention and its International Mission Board would need to share the gospel with all the world’s unreached people groups by 2010, according to a new report on church giving.

The annual report, by the Illinois-based group empty tomb inc., found a general downward trend in church member giving through 2006, which led authors to propose a “global triage to treat what ails the church.”

They said focusing on reaching new “people groups” and preventing child deaths around the world would help U.S. churches “sort out their priorities” to use what funds they do have more efficiently.

“It’s difficult to avoid the label of ‘lukewarm’ when analyzing the church’s level of response to Jesus’ Great Commandment and Great Commission,” said John Ronsvalle, who co-authored the study with his wife, Sylvia.

Even Southern Baptists, a group highlighted as a “denomination that takes this religious task seriously,” have not launched an aggressive campaign to fund the estimated additional 2,800 missionaries needed to “engage” unreached groups by 2010.

Empty tomb estimated it would cost about $11 per Southern Baptist to fund those extra missionaries. Instead, the denomination’s 2008 goal of $170 million to support existing missionaries is the equivalent of asking each Southern Baptist to donate just 31 cents more than last year.

By contrast, Americans spent $310 million in first-day sales for “Grand Theft Auto IV.”

“The total portion of per capita income given to churches in 2006 was lower (in 2006) than in the worst year of the Great Depression,” the authors found.

The report estimates that for only $26 a year per evangelical, U.S. evangelicals as a whole could fund $544 million in efforts through evangelical-affiliated denominations and other missions agencies.

The report estimated it would cost each U.S. church member just 8 cents a day to help reach the U.N.’s Millennium Development Goal of cutting infant mortality by two-thirds by 2015.