Happiness found in church, not shopping mall. Protestant and Catholic women in the United States have grown unhappier since stores have stayed open on Sundays, according to a study by economists from Israel’s Ben-Gurion University of the Negev and Chicago’s DePaul University. The study found the repeal of “blue law” restrictions on Sunday shopping has corresponded with lower church attendance for white women. Meanwhile, the probability of women becoming unhappy increased by 17 percent. The study concludes that “an important part of the decline in women’s happiness during the last three decades can be explained by decline in religious participation,” said Danny Cohen-Zada, an economics scholar at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. The researchers analyzed churchgoing habits of women from the National Opinion Research Center’s General Social Survey, which has collected information about American characteristics and attitudes from 1972 to 2008. They also looked at data from states that have repealed “blue laws” restricting Sunday commerce—Indiana, Minnesota, North Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Vermont—compared to others with no change.

Western Wall partition may offer one-way viewing. Jewish authorities at Jerusalem’s Western Wall hope to replace the existing opaque partition that separates the men’s and women’s prayer areas with one that will enable female worshippers to see into the men’s section but not vice-versa. The move follows years of complaints by female worshippers who have been unable to see into the men’s section, even during family bar mitzvahs. Currently, female relatives who want to see a bar mitzvah from the women’s section must stand on plastic chairs and peer over the top of the tall barrier, called a mechitza. Mechitzas exist in all Orthodox synagogues because Jewish law prohibits men and women from praying together, and it prohibits men from seeing women during prayer.

World Vision wins employment dispute. World Vision, the Christian humanitarian organization, can fire employees who disagree with its theological tenets, a federal appeals court ruled. In a 2-1 decision, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said World Vision is a religious corporation and therefore exempt from a federal law that bars faith-based discrimination. Three employees, including two who had worked at World Vision 10 years, were fired in 2006 because they did not believe in the divinity of Jesus or the doctrine of the Trinity. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 bars religious discrimination, but it carves out an exemption for companies engaged in a religious purpose, the court ruled.

As students return to classes at historically Baptist colleges and universities this fall, the institution of Baptist higher education is in a state of flux.

Challenges that include finances, changing demographics and fragmentation of Baptist denominations are prompting insiders to reassess what it means to be a distinctively “Baptist” institution of higher learning.

While many Baptist schools have students and/or professors who are non-Baptist, Baylor University—which has endeavored publicly for years with how to maintain its Texas Baptist identity while moving toward a higher tier of academic prestige—surprised everyone in February when the school’s board of regents tapped former Whitewater prosecutor Kenneth Starr as president.

Starr, whose religious background is the Church of Christ and whose membership was in a nondenominational church, agreed to join a local Baptist church. When he assumed the presidency, he joined Columbus Avenue Baptist Church in Waco.

Baylor isn’t alone in grappling with trends like waning loyalty to denominations, more religiously diverse student bodies and controversies that give the Baptist label a negative image or at least create confusion about what it means to a Baptist at all.

Recently, Baptist schools—which have relied for decades on a cohesive Baptist subculture to bring up prospective students eager to study in a faith-based environment—find built-in loyalties fading away.

Due in large part to the megachurch phenomenon, many large congregations are finding it convenient to remove Baptist from their name, and many Baptists today find themselves just as comfortable worshipping at a community church where they like the music and preacher.

Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn., witnessed rapid growth in enrollment in the 1990s, but fewer and fewer came from Baptist traditions. By 2006, the student body was 75 percent non-Baptist, and the board of trustees changed the school’s charter to allow non-Baptists to serve as trustees.

The Tennessee Baptist Convention sued to regain control of the university, and Belmont agreed to an $11 million settlement, ending a 56-year-old relationship between the two. After the settlement, Belmont’s trustee chair pledged the university would “continue to be a student-focused Christian community of learning and service with a rich Baptist heritage that we intend to foster and nurture through our ongoing relationships with local Baptist churches.”

After negotiating an amicable parting with the Kentucky Baptist Convention in 2005, Georgetown College remained intentionally Baptist but broadened the definition beyond Kentucky Southern Baptists by adding partnerships with 15 Baptist organizations and institutions—black and white—in the United States and abroad. The partnership also extends to local churches both within and beyond Kentucky.

“We are trying to maintain a Baptist identity but broadening what that means,” said H.L. Kingkade, Georgetown’s director of religious life. “We treasure our Baptist heritage very much.”

“There are many who wear the Baptist name,” Kingkade continued. “We seek to be an institution of higher education for all Baptists and other denominations as well.”

In a 2007 lecture to the International Association of Baptist Colleges and Universities, David Gushee, an ethics professor at Mercer University, noted many schools formerly affiliated with mainline denominations drifted toward secularization or only a nominal Christian presence after breaking those ties. In order to avoid the trend, Gushee said, historically Baptist schools must adopt one of two models.

Borrowing terms from Roanoke College professor Robert Benne, Gushee said some intentionally Christian schools will function as “orthodox” universities, recruiting a large percentage of faculty and students from within the Christian faith—especially the faith of the sponsoring denomination. In those schools, he said, all instruction will be influenced by a shared Christian perspective.

“Critical-mass” schools, on the other hand, do not seek 100 percent sponsoring-tradition domination in every aspect of university life. They are Baptist schools willing to hire committed Catholics, Lutherans or Eastern Orthodox to teach—maybe even in the religion department. Gushee said such schools would need a “critical mass” of both Baptist students and trustees to retain their religious nature.

Over the last 30 years, Gushee said, much of the debate over Baptist schools has been between those who fear that Baptist colleges will devolve into completely secular institutions and others who fear they will become fundamentalist schools like Bob Jones University. Instead of thinking about what they fear, Gushee said, Baptist schools should ponder what they desire—to produce graduates who demonstrate elements of what it means to be a Baptist Christian.

“Some will emphasize Baptist distinctives, while others will sound more broadly evangelical or Christian,” he said.

TORONTO (RNS)—Religion may provide a “buffer” allowing the devout to feel less anxiety when they make mistakes, compared with nonbelievers, according to new scientific research.

Researchers at the University of Toronto measured “error-related negativity” —people’s defensive response to errors— and compared it to religious belief. Their findings were published in the journal Psychological Science. (Download the article as a pdf file)

In the experiments, participants had electrodes measuring their brain activity as they performed cognitive tests. One test of 40 students involved making a grammatically correct sentence out of jumbled words; some of the sentences contained words with religious connotations, like “sacred” or “divine.”

Another experiment required participants to identify the color of words that flashed on a screen. Some words were depicted in their correct color while others were not.

They were then asked to quantify their belief in God on a scale of zero to seven.

The study found participants who were religious or claimed belief in God “showed low levels of distress-related neural activity” when they learned of their test errors, compared with nonbelievers.

By contrast, atheists demonstrated a “heightened neural response” and reacted more defensively when they learned of their errors, wrote the study’s lead author, Michael Inzlicht, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

Inzlicht and co-author Alexa Tullett added, “Thinking about one’s religion, consciously or otherwise, acts as a bulwark against defensive reactions to errors; it muffles the cortical alarm bell. …

“If thinking about religion leads people to react to their errors with less distress and defensiveness … in the long run, this effect may translate to religious people living their lives with greater equanimity than nonreligious people, being better able to cope with the pressures of living in a sometimes-hostile world.”

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP)—Baptist higher education stands on the shoulders of a long tradition in Christianity linking knowledge to faith. The Apostle Paul, many of the early church fathers and important theologians like Augustine were respected for knowledge, both in religious and secular realms.

Most early colleges founded in America began as denominational schools intended to meet the need for an educated clergy and at the same time provide an educated lay leadership for church and denomination.

Baptists were significant players in the movement. The first Baptist institution of higher learning in America, Rhode Island College, was founded in 1764. It was renamed Brown University in 1804.

From its origin in the Northeast, the Baptist movement spread into the mid-Atlantic and Southern regions. A group of Baptists including Luther Rice, a prime mover for Baptist home and foreign missions in the early 19th century, decided in 1819 to establish a school in the nation’s capital called Columbian College. The venture proved to be financially unsustainable. The federal government bailed it out, and by an act of Congress in 1904, it became George Washington University, severing all ties with Baptists.

Inspired in part by a desire for an educated clergy, Furman University in Greenville, S.C., was founded in 1826. The school was named after Richard Furman, a clergyman and pioneer denominational statesman in Southern Baptist life.

As pioneers moved westward, religious schools popped up along the way. Many were small academies to teach children the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic—and the Bible. They flourished in the hundreds until the beginning of the public school movement in the early 20th century.

Baptists in the West tended to be more suspicious of higher learning, based on their opinion of clergy of other faiths they viewed as intellectually elite but spiritually dead. In the end, however, the desire for qualified church leaders and to improve the social status of Baptists in general prevailed.

Georgetown College in Kentucky lays claim to being the oldest Baptist college, dating its founding to an academy started in 1787 by a Baptist pastor named Elijah Craig, but it wasn’t chartered by the state until 1829.

Other early Baptist colleges included Union University in Tennessee, founded in 1823; the University of Richmond, established in 1832 by the Virginia Baptist Education Society; Mercer University, founded by Georgia Baptists in 1833; and Wake Forest University, chartered by North Carolina Baptists in 1833.

Judson College, an all-female school in Marion, Ala., began in 1838. Samford University began in Marion as an all-male school in 1841 but relocated to Birmingham in 1877.

The Republic of Texas chartered Baylor University in 1845.

Baptists started Missouri’s William Jewell in 1849, Mississippi College in 1850 and other schools in places including Tennessee, Florida, Arkansas and North Carolina.

By the time the Southern Baptist Convention was organized in 1845, there were 11 existing institutions of higher learning associated with Baptists in the South.

Significantly, the SBC chose not to venture into establishing colleges and universities, concentrating the denomination’s efforts on preparing ministers in seminaries at the graduate level, entrusting undergraduate education to Baptist state conventions.

That collegiality lasted for nearly 150 years, until the moderate/conservative controversy of the last two decades of the 20th century prompted seminaries to add baccalaureate programs while several colleges and universities opened seminaries or divinity schools.

The number of Baptist institutions of higher learning continued to grow, as Baptist state conventions included developing a college as part of their ministry plan and destitute schools turned to Baptists to rescue them from financial straits.

In 1915, the Southern Baptist Convention established an Education Commission to give centralized planning and coordination of numerous colleges and universities sponsored by state Baptist conventions. The commission was abolished in denominational reorganization in 1995, but an Association of Southern Baptist Colleges and Schools that had worked with the agency determined to carry on its essential functions as an independent voluntary association owned and governed by members.

With adoption of the Cooperative Program unified giving plan, Southern Bap-tists provided a higher level of financial support for their colleges and universities than most de-nominations. That helped them retain a loyal religious constituency, while most northern schools started as religious institutions gradually lost or diminished their denominational identity.

While denominational support remains comparatively generous, the budgets of colleges and universities grew much larger than those of sponsoring bodies, forcing presidents to concentrate on fund raising and decreasing the percentage of their funds coming from Baptist organizations. As schools became less dependent on state conventions for funding, those groups exercised less influence on teaching and governance.

Beginning in the 1980s, the SBC controversy prompted several proudly Baptist institutions to sever ties with state conventions, viewing theological politics as a threat to their educational tradition.

In the mid-1970s, 71 Baptist universities, seminaries and schools identified with the Association of Southern Baptist Colleges and Schools. By 2008, the number dropped to 51.

In 2006, members of the association voted to rename the organization the International Association of Baptist Colleges and Universities. Leaders said the intent wasn’t to distance the schools from their heritage as Southern Baptist state convention-supported institutions, but rather to expand the group’s focus to a global scale.

“Baptist higher education has served Baptists well over the years, and it is our role at IABCU to continue promoting and celebrating our member institutions,” said Michael Arrington, the group’s executive director.

God makes rain fall on the just and the unjust, Jesus said. Similarly, recession makes market prices fall, affecting endowments of Christian higher education and secular universities alike.

United States and Canadian schools suffered an average 23 percent drop in the market value of their endowments from the 2008 to 2009 fiscal years, according to the National Association of College and University Business Officers and Commonfund Institute. While some schools report recent improvement, recovery has been slow.

Ivy League schools suffered. Harvard University’s endowment fell 29.8 percent, Yale’s dropped 28.6 percent and Stanford’s declined 26.7 percent from 2008 to 2009.

State universities felt the recession’s impact. The University of Texas System sustained a 24.8 percent drop in endowment value, and the value of the Texas A&M University System and Foundation’s endowment fell 23.7 percent.

Likewise, Christian colleges and universities in general—and Baptist schools in particular—did not escape losses. Baylor University’s endowment declined 17.7 percent, Mercer University’s dropped 22.9 percent and Ouachita Baptist University’s fell 15.2 percent.

“It’s been a rollercoaster ride for university endowments,” said Lanny Hall, president of Hardin-Simmons University in Abilene. He noted his school’s endowment dropped 22.4 percent in the fiscal year ending May 31, 2009.

Even so, some schools weathered the storm well.

“Despite the de-crease in the overall value of our endowment, it still left us with the second-best performance in the nation for endowments over $500 million,” said Lori Fogle-man, director of media communications at Baylor Uni-versity. “However, market conditions have strengthened re-cently and stabilized Baylor’s endowment.”

Paul Armes, president of Wayland Baptist University in Plainview, noted his school also experienced some gains recently. “We are fortunate in that our endowment is diversified enough that we don’t typically experience huge pendulum swings of income. For example, mineral and farm income has actually increased recently,” he said.

While the recession hurt university endowments, enrollment figures have varied. Baylor University’s undergraduate enrollment in fall 2007 totaled 11,792; by fall 2009, it had increased to 12,046.

In contrast, Howard Payne University’s undergraduate enrollment declined slightly during that same period—from 1,165 in fall 2007 to 1,049 in fall 2009. But that may be improving, noted Brad Johnson, senior vice president for institutional advancement at Howard Payne in Brownwood.

“Our new student enrollment, while down last year, appears to be the best we have had in 10 years,” Johnson said.

With unemployment up and workers retooling for a changing job market, some schools have seen increased enrollment—particularly in specialized programs.

“The economy has actually contributed to higher enrollments for Mercer,” said Larry Brumley, senior vice president and chief of staff at Mercer University. “We have a number of graduate and professional programs that have benefited from students returning to school to upgrade their credentials. As for traditional undergraduates, we had our largest freshman class last fall in four years.”

Rather than seeing students drop out due to financial hardship, some schools have experienced improved retention rates during the recession.

“Counter-intuitively, (Mercer’s) freshman-to-sophomore retention rate last year—85 percent—was the highest in the university’s history,” Brumley said.

In the last couple of years, Hardin-Simmons University reported its second-highest retention rate in the school’s history, at 71 percent, Hall noted.

But Baylor saw “a slight decrease in retention last year, which we believe was the result of the economy,” Fogleman reported.

Armes at Wayland Baptist University agreed. “Retention has been more of a challenge over the last couple of years because of the recession,” he said. “While we have not lost many students in the middle of a semester, more are contemplating staying home for a semester or two to save money.”

Many schools insist market losses in endowment value have not compromised their ability to offer scholarship assistance.

“Although we reduced our endowment distribution payout in 2009, we made a conscious decision to allocate additional institutional budget dollars to student scholarships to make up for the reduction in endowment distributions,” said Steve Theodore, chief operating officer at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Belton.

Institutional scholarships Hardin-Simmons University awarded increased from about $10.4 million in the 2008-2009 fiscal year to almost $13 million in the fiscal year that ended May 31, Hall reported.

Baylor University increased its scholarships to students over the last several years—including a 15.9 percent increase this year to support merit and need-based scholarships, Fogleman noted.

But some universities report losses in endowment value have hampered their ability to offer scholarships to students.

“It has definitely had an impact,” Johnson said concerning Howard Payne University. “In many cases, we are simply not able to offer as much, or we have had to offer the aid to fewer students.”

Ouachita Baptist University, which had in recent years drawn 5 percent from its endowment, decided to use only interest and dividends in the last fiscal year—essentially cutting in half the amount available, said Brett Powell, vice president for administrative services.

“A significant part of that goes to student scholarship. So, we have had to cut scholarships some,” he said.

While Baptist schools generally have increased tu-ition in recent years, many insist they have kept those in-creases as small as possible to help struggling families.

For instance, estimated total annual cost for full-time students at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in-creased less than $1,650 from 2007-2008 to 2009-2010.

“Although we have increased our tuition over the last couple of years, UMHB has done so in a conservative and disciplined manner,” Theodore said. “Our goal was to continue to meet our growing needs while at the same time to minimize the impact to our students and their families.”

Some schools acted to help students and their parents long before the recession hit. Hardin-Simmons University implemented a guaranteed tuition rate 19 years ago, promising each entering class that its tuition rate will not increase as long as the student remains enrolled full-time in consecutive fall and spring semesters and makes satisfactory progress toward a degree.

While tight family budgets may lead some students—and their parents—to choose a state university or community college over a private Christian school, some Baptist university administrators urge a close examination of total costs, not just tuition.

“If your compare our costs with the major public institutions in the state, a student will often, after all is said and done, spend less to attend one of our institutions than they would have if they had chosen a public institution,” Johnson of Howard Payne said.

“Students and families often see the tuition differential and forget about the higher fees and room-and-board costs required when attending a public institution. In addition to the added value that comes from a Christian higher education experience, students and families should consider if they are looking at an ‘apples-to-apples’ comparison of the educational costs.”

THE PLAINS, Va. (RNS)—Amid the rolling hills of Northern Virginia, actor Robert Duvall lives in a rural hamlet not unlike the on-screen settings where he has immersed himself in Southern culture.

It is, his wife says, “the last station before heaven,” even if Duvall’s cast of fallen characters might never make it all the way.

Actor Robert Duvall plays Tennessee hermit Felix Bush in the new film, Get Low. (RNS PHOTO/Courtesy Sony Pictures Classics)

His characters often are touched by faith, from washed-up country singer Mac Sledge in Tender Mercies to a hermit in his summer release, Get Low.

And then there was Euliss “Sonny” Dewey, a Texas preacher on the run from the law and his own foibles in the The Apostle, which Duvall wrote and directed.

“You don’t have to agree with everything that these people believe in, but you want to try to portray them as accurately as possible … without dictating or putting judgments on it,” Duvall said in an interview on the farm where he’s lived for 15 years.

Down an unpaved road and surrounded by a silo, a barn and vast farmland, Duvall is almost as secluded as Felix Bush, the mysterious man he plays in Get Low. Bush, a Tennessee recluse, seeks the help of ministers to speak at a “funeral party” where he plans to reveal a deeply held secret before he dies.

“I guess maybe he needed that reinforcement of someone who was kind of an ally or believed him, kind of like soul brothers in a way,” Duvall said.

The 79-year-old actor said characters like Bush, as well as Sledge and Dewey, deserve time on the movie screen—with all their flaws and complexities—to reflect the rich spiritual and cultural stew of Southern culture.

“They should be shown, should be seen, should be portrayed but … with contradictions,” he said, noting that even peace-loving Jesus chased moneychangers out of the temple with a whip.

It’s the kind of portrayal that isn’t often seen in Hollywood, said Craig Detweiler, director of the Center for Entertainment, Media and Culture at Pepperdine University in Malibu, Calif.

“By dignifying seemingly common people, he’s also elevating and humanizing Christian faith in profound ways,” said Detweiler. “Hollywood producers may ignore the flyover district between Los Angeles and New York, but Duvall is very rooted or drawn to that kind of land and place.”

Already known for his roles in classic films like The Godfather and To Kill a Mockingbird, Duvall became a researcher as he developed plans for The Apostle, the 1997 film that earned him a best-actor nomination. He already had taken home an Oscar for his portrayal of Sledge, in 1984.

He fondly recalls spending more than a dozen years traversing the country, visiting churches, picking up the signature cadences of black preachers and recruiting non-actors for the film. The spark of the project, he said, was a visit to a church in Hughes, Ark., the real-life home of a fictional character he was portraying in an off-Broadway play.

“I said, ‘Wow, I’ve never seen this,’” he said of the little white clapboard Pentecostal church with a woman in the pulpit and a man on the guitar. “Someday, I want to put this on film.”

When he couldn’t get funders for the movie, Duvall ponied up $5 million of his own. In his tour of churches, he was moved—a “wonderful feeling,” he said—by the choir of New York’s Abyssinian Baptist Church, and recruited extras for Dewey’s One Way Road to Heaven Holiness Temple at a meeting of the Church of God in Christ.

“You don’t have to totally believe in what you see, but you can’t patronize it,” he said. “I put real people—the real preachers, real people from the congregations, in my movie to give it a sense of truth. That was a truth gauge.”

William Blizek, founding editor of the Journal of Religion and Film, said Duvall’s use of real religious people and actual words from preachers showed the actor’s interest in accuracy without turning them into “saintly characters that could do no wrong.”

“In The Apostle, it was of special concern to him to try to get this right,” said Blizek.

“He thought other movies had sort of mocked this kind of fundamentalist evangelical, what he calls the Holiness Church,” he said.

Like Bush in Get Low, the characters he played in The Apostle and Tender Mercies sought redemption or forgiveness. But Duvall said the greatest crime of the runaway preacher in The Apostle was one of passion, not premeditation.

“He killed a man out of the moment, he didn’t premeditate it, like King David did in the Psalms,” Duvall said. “Am I right? Every time I read the Psalms—which are beautiful—I think of that. … Yeah, what Sonny did wasn’t as bad as that.”

Duvall, who spent so much time delving into the faiths of the men he played on screen, is more reticent about his own.

“My own faith is a very personal thing,” he said. “So, I just don’t talk about it.”

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Companies in the Bible Belt are less likely to be sued for accounting fraud or to practice aggressive financial reporting, a study indicates.

Research by Mays Business School at Texas A&M University found companies headquartered in counties with high levels of churchgoing tend to use religion as a self-regulating mechanism in the absence of more formal external monitoring.

The study is not the first to examine fraud in the context of religion, but the A&M researchers are the first to use Gallup data in their analysis.

Gallup surveys show the top Bible Belt states where residents indicated religion is important in their daily lives are Mississippi (86 percent), Alabama (84 percent) and Tennessee (79 percent). Texas came in 13th with 72 percent.

The financial study examined shareholder lawsuits related to accounting malfeasance and other crimes. Overall, the study found a 49 percent decrease in the odds that a firm headquartered in a “religious” county will be sued for wrongful accounting.

The study is a measure of an overall accounting approach among firms of various sizes in the Bible Belt, not a means for predicting mega-frauds such as those at Enron Corp., which was based in Texas.

“We would view them more as anomalies,” researcher Nathan Sharp said. “What we focused on was smaller, systemic aggressive accounting occurring as almost a part of doing business.”

The study focused on how companies in areas of high levels of religion approached accounting.

“On average, when you hold everything constant, accounting practices are less aggressive in areas with high religiosity,” he said.

Sharp noted he is not sure to what degree investors will use the study’s findings when it comes to deciding where to risk their money.

The study also found Bible Belt firms scored lower on measures of corporate social responsibility, including support for the community and diversity initiatives.

But researchers believe corporate leaders in religious counties likely feel that role is best filled by religious groups and support those efforts through a church or organization rather than through the company.

Jordan too polluted for baptisms? Concerns about pollution and water quality have prompted an environmental advocacy group to call for banning baptisms in the lower Jordan River, where the Bible says Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist. Israeli authorities insist tests done on the water of the lower Jordan River show the popular site for baptismal ceremonies at Qasr el Yahud on the West Bank meets health ministry standards. But Gidon Bromberg, the Israeli director of EcoPeace/Friends of the Earth Middle East, said the ceremonies should not take place until pollutants are removed from the water. His group says the river suffers from “severe mismanagement,” including diversion of 98 percent of its fresh water to Israel, Syria and Jordan, as well as discharge of untreated sewage and agricultural run-off.

Want quality health care? Check into a church-run hospital. Church-run health care systems in the United States are more efficient and provide higher quality care than their secular counterparts, according to a new Thomson Reuters study. The study looked at 255 health care systems and found that church-owned systems are “significantly more likely to provide higher quality care and efficiency” than both investor-owned and secular nonprofit health systems. “Our data suggest that the leadership teams … of health systems owned by churches may be the most active in aligning quality goals and monitoring achievement across the system,” the report stated. The performance measures included mortality rates, the number of medical complications, readmission rates, lengths of stay, profitability and other factors.

Prayer binds black couples. The adage “couples who pray together stay together” may be true, especially for African-Americans, a new study shows. The survey of religion, race and relationships found African-Americans attend church more as couples compared to members of other racial and ethnic groups. Four in 10 African-American respondents said they attended services regularly as a couple, according to a study published in the August issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family. In comparison, 31 percent of Mexicans or Mexican-Americans, and 29 percent of whites, said they regularly shared a pew. In addition to worshipping together, African-Americans were found to be more likely than non-Hispanic whites to participate in prayer and Scripture studies at home. “Without prayer, black couples would be doing significantly worse than white couples,” said W. Bradford Wilcox, a co-author of the study and the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia. “The vitality of African-Americans’ religious lives gives them an advantage over other Americans when it comes to relationships.” The study, based on responses to the 2006 National Survey of Religion and Family Life, does have limitations, scholars cautioned. For example, the responses to the survey came from one partner’s report on the quality of their relationship and the extent of their religious involvement.

Compiled from Religion News Service

WASHINGTON (RNS)—What started as a local zoning debate about an Islamic center near Ground Zero morphed into a fight over religious expression, and now it has turned into an election-year political brawl.

Caught in the middle of the rancorous partisan fight are American Muslims, whose own voices have been drowned out by politicians on both the left and the right.

“In a fundamental sense, this is not a conversation about Muslims,” said Omid Safi, professor of Islamic studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “This is a conversation in which the Muslims are being used as the football with which to play the game of competing visions of America.”

President Obama waded into the debate Aug. 13 when he hailed America’s “unshakeable” commitment to religious freedom during a White House dinner to mark the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

“As a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as everyone else in this country,” Obama said. “And that includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan, in accordance with local laws and ordinances.”

Perhaps sensing the political storm clouds gathering, Obama said the following day he would not “comment on the wisdom” of whether to build near Ground Zero, which the night before he had called “hallowed ground.”

Republicans pounced. Sen. John Cornyn, the Texas Republican responsible for adding GOP Senate seats in the November elections, said Obama “seems to be disconnected from the mainstream of America” and called his remarks “unwise.” The top Republican in the House, Minority Leader John Boehner, called them “deeply troubling.”

Rep. Jerrold Nadler, the New York Democrat whose district includes the site of the proposed Cordoba House in lower Manhattan, fired back on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“It is only insensitive if you regard Islam as the culprit as opposed to al-Qaida as the culprit,” Nadler said Sunday. “We were not attacked by all Muslims.”

GOP luminaries like former vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich have already promised to make the issue one for the voting booths in November, with Gingrich telling The New York Times that Obama was “pandering to radical Islam.”

According to a recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll, 54 percent of Democrats and 82 percent of Republicans oppose the New York mosque project. The Christian Broadcasting Network’s David Brody predicted the issue will have legs in 2010 and beyond.

“This situation all by itself has the potential to make President Obama a one-term president,” he wrote on his “Brody File” blog. “This latest mosque move may be the fatal blow.”

Shahed Amanullah, founder of altmuslim.com, a popular Muslim website, agreed the fight could influence some voters this fall—“people are still going to be drunk on this issue,” he said—but probably not beyond that.

“We’re definitely far enough from 2012 where the dust will have settled,” Amanullah predicted.

Lost in the debate, Amanullah said, is the interfaith bridge-building the Cordoba House once hoped to foster, in part because of anti-Muslim vitriol that he said is worse than immediately after 9/11.

“The people that are being ostracized, I think, right now are the people that are in the middle, who feel that Muslims belong in America but have misgivings” about the center, he said. “Those people are … caught in the crossfire because the opposition is being led by people who, in my personal opinion, really don’t believe that Muslims belong in America.”

Also forgotten, Safi said, is the fact that the proposed building near Ground Zero is not just a mosque, but a community center that would include a swimming pool and a wedding hall in addition to a place for prayer.

“It’s as American as megachurches,” he said. “It’s as American as Jewish community centers.”

Melissa Rogers, an expert on church-state relations who has praised New York officials for supporting “a linchpin of the American tradition of religious liberty,” said the overall debate could send the wrong message to Muslims, both at home and abroad.

A planned protest at a Florida church to burn copies of the Quran on the 9/11 anniversary can only make things worse, she said.

“I do think that there’s a real danger that Muslims receive the message that they are second-class citizens and that their rights have an asterisk beside them, if you will,” said Rogers, director of Wake Forest University Divinity School’s Center for Religion and Public Affairs.

Rogers hopes grassroots Americans, including religious leaders, can help lead the discussion above the political fray.

“Americans have an important role in this debate,” she said. “It goes to our core values, and we should talk about it, and we should definitely try to bring more light than heat to the issue, no matter what the politicians are doing.”

WASHINGTON (ABP) — One thing is settled in the controversy over building an Islamic cultural center near the former World Trade Center site in New York: There is no legal impediment to the facility rising there.

But, say experts in law, religious liberty and Islam, the strong emotions and rhetoric nonetheless surrounding the project suggest Islam’s role in the United States may be the latest battle front in an increasingly diverse society’s culture wars.

“This discussion masks a kind of ugly and angry reaction or backlash against Muslims in America and Muslim institutions, and I don’t think enough attention is given to that, in my view,” said Charles Haynes, director of the Religious Freedom Education Project at the Newseum in Washington. “The real issue is … are we as a country going to ensure that everyone is going to be protected to go out and practice their faith freely not only without governmental interference, but also without fear of intimidation by people who are attacking their faith?”

Makings of a media firestorm

Several political leaders — most notably potential 2012 Republican presidential candidates Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin — have repeatedly attacked attempts to build a 13-story Islamic cultural center called Park51 about two blocks from the edge of the former World Trade Center site near the southern tip of Manhattan.

Gingrich has roundly attacked the center as an affront to American values. In a July 21 statement, he said:  “There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New York so long as there are no churches or synagogues in Saudi Arabia. The time for double standards that allow Islamists to behave aggressively toward us while they demand our weakness and submission is over.”

Opposition first surfaced from a group of relatives 9/11 victims. Other groups for 9/11 victims and survivors have publicly supported the initiative. But Park51’s sponsors — a nonprofit, called the Cordoba Initiative with a stated goal to promote “understanding across minds and borders” — had the unequivocal backing of a broad group of New York political and religious leaders, chief among them Mayor Michael Boomberg (R).

The project gained all the necessary approvals from local authorities and strong support from representative bodies of local residents. Polls show a majority of Manhattan residents approve of the project.

Still, national polls show around two-thirds of Americans are opposed to the idea. Ongoing media attention to the controversy compelled President Obama to defend the center’s constitutional right to exist in remarks at an Aug. 13 White House dinner marking the  beginning of the Islamic holy month of Ramadan.

A question of religious freedom?

But some religious and political leaders have questioned that right — including Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission.,

Richard Land

“I respectfully disagree with the president,” Land said in Aug. 14 remarks on his radio show, “Richard Land Live.”

Land cited a 1997 Supreme Court decision, City of Boerne v. Flores, that upheld the ability of city officials in Boerne, Texas, to block a Catholic church from expanding its building because of historic-preservation laws.

“The people of America have a right to say that this place, Ground Zero, has been made sacred by the enormity of the sacrifice of the 3,000 people who died there, such that we have to treat it differently than we would anyplace else," he said.

But Land’s organization opposed the Boerne ruling at the time as too restrictive of religious freedom. In fact Land, in 1998 congressional testimony for a bill to remedy some of the decision’s effects, called it “one of the worst decisions rendered by the Supreme Court in its long history.”

Chip Lupu

Chip Lupu, a church-state expert and professor at George Washington University Law School, said Land’s citation of the Boerne decision in the Park51 case is misguided, at best.

“Nobody has the freedom to open a church or a synagogue or a mosque wherever you feel like,” he said. “But you say if this is a place where a religious center, a house of worship can go, then you absolutely cannot discriminate between faiths.”

Several churches already exist even closer to Ground Zero than the Park51 location. And the neighborhood has been home to another mosque, Masjid Manhattan, for 40 years.

Other motivations for opposition

Lupu said Land’s opposition is likely based not on legal principle but political expediency.

“He’s just being phony, and he knows it. He has a political constituency — a religious-political constituency — that’s conservative Christian, that has some anti-Muslim feelings and he’s just playing it,” he said.

The Newseum’s Haynes said he was annoyed by Land’s position.

“It bothers me when religious leaders are splitting hairs about court decisions when they should be simply saying religious freedom is a right for everyone and there’s no question about it,” he said. “For Land to at one time condemn the Supreme Court [on Boerne] … and when it involves Muslims to suddenly say the court got it right, or that Muslims in New York don’t have the full free-exercise right to build where they want, is very disappointing.”

Haynes said the Park51 case is just the most publicized and symbolic example of a growing national debate over Islam.

He noted other recent protests over building mosques and Islamic centers in cities across the country — such as in Temecula, Calif.; and Murfreesboro, Tenn.

“If we listen to what is actually being said at these meetings and read the signs that are being waved, I think that’s the real question here," he said.  "The real problem here is that the debate about the mosque near Ground Zero has, to me, uncovered a growing Islamophobia around the country.”

Growing anti-Islam rhetoric

Ibrahim Hooper

Ibrahim Hooper, communications director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he’s seen a definite spike in anti-Islam rhetoric in the United States in recent months.

“You really cannot turn on a radio anywhere in America today to talk radio and not hear within an hour the most vicious kind of anti-Muslim polemic I have ever heard,” he said. “You’d think that Islam made people into just subhuman animals, that we’re engaged in cannibalism. There really is no limit now to the vilification of Islam.”

Hooper noted that there had been recent violent incidents against two mosques — an attempted bombing in Florida and an arson attack in Texas — that weren’t widely reported in the national media.

“The ones who are opposed to this center are the hard-core Islamophobes who are exploiting the legitimate emotions generated by the 9/11 terrorist attacks to promote their own agenda,” he said.

The story of pluralism in America

Lupu contended that, on one level, opposition to mosques being constructed is a story that’s as old — and common — as religious pluralism in the United States.

A sign at a July protest against a mosque expansion project in Murfreesboro, Tenn.

“From one slant they were [due to] Islamophobia,” He said. “From another slant they’re something that’s very typical about American land-use problems and minority religion — that is to say, you don’t have to look very far to find people who don’t want Mormon temples in their community.”

The difference, according to Haynes, is that the nexus between Americans’ general ignorance about Islam and the feelings of fear inspired by acts of terrorism committed in the name of Islam inspires widespread doubts about the goodwill of Muslims and Islamic institutions.

“If we’d only been able to take religion more seriously in our public schools, we could help many Americans at least to have a better understating of Islam and therefore not be so easily swept up in the anti-Islam rhetoric and the distortions that are being spread about Islam itself,” he said.

“Many Americans don’t know much about Islam, and so they are very easily persuaded that Islam is a threat to the United States — just as many Americans were persuaded that Catholicism was a threat to our liberty and freedoms in the 19th century.”

Haynes, Hooper and Lupu all agreed that this being a particularly contentious election year probably throws fuel on the rhetorical fire.

Haynes noted that many of the anti-mosque flare-ups around the country in recent months have been associated with Tea Party movements and leaders. “I think in a political season, there are those who are using this controversy to whip up emotion and to win elections,” he said. “But I think the fallout from this is going to be very serious and I think … for the long term in the United States, we are increasingly challenged by the question of how are we going to live up to our commitment to religious freedom, and do we really mean it? And I think the growth of Islam in America is going to be a true test for whether we meet it or not.

“And right now, I think, in many places in the United States, we’re failing the test. So, we need people with moral courage to stand up when it’s unpopular.”

–Robert Marus is managing editor and Washington bureau chief for Associated Baptist Press.

Previous ABP stories:

Southern Baptist leader says Obama wrong about Ground Zero mosque (8/16/2010)

Ground Zero controversy part of rise in anti-Islamic sentiment, experts say (8/4/2010)

Tenn. city latest flashpoint in culture wars (7/15/2010)

WASHINGTON (RNS)—When conservative broadcaster Glenn Beck warned church-goers to “run as fast as you can” if their pastors preach about “social justice,” was he also encouraging them to run from the Bible?

That’s what some progressive Christian leaders are arguing as battle lines are drawn for the 2010 mid-term elections. They claim Beck and his Tea Party followers are, in a word, unbiblical.

Not so fast, say Tea Party activists, who claim biblical grounds for a libertarian-minded Jesus who called on his followers to donate from the heart—to be charitable personally, not expecting the government to care for the needy.

Waving a “Don’t Tread on Me” flag, Mike Fannon of Kenner, La., gathers with hundreds of others at a Tea Party rally in Metairie, La. Some Christians are active in the movement, but others question whether the Tea Party’s anti-government philosophy is anti-biblical. (RNS FILE PHOTO/Chris Granger/The Times-Picayune)

The insurgent Tea Party movement threatens to usurp the political prominence of religious conservatives, whose focus on hot-button social issues has been overshadowed by the Tea Party’s fight against big government.

“I think that the general ideology of the Tea party is not a Christian one,” said David Gushee, professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University and co-founder of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, a faith-based nonprofit.

“This kind of small government libertarianism, small taxes, leave-me-alone-to-live-my-life ideology has more in common with Ayn Rand than it does with the Bible.”

Gushee described the Tea Party as “an uneasy marriage between the libertarian conservative strand and the Christian right strand” of American politics. In this “uneasy alliance,” however, he said the Christian side has taken a backseat to the movement’s libertarian impulses.

According to a recent Bloomberg poll, 44 percent of Tea Party activists are self-identified “born-again” Christians, a group that generally takes close to heart Jesus’ instructions to feed the hungry and clothe the naked.

Tea Party activists say the question is not whether to follow Jesus’ words, but how. “Jesus was not for socialism,” said Lloyd Marcus of Deltona, Fla., a born-again, nondenominational Christian and a spokesman for the Tea Party Express.

“Yes, the Bible advocates giving, but out of the goodness of our own hearts, not out of government confiscation of wealth or redistribution of wealth,” he said.

Joseph Farah, founder and CEO of the website WorldNetDaily and author of the new Tea Party Manifesto, agreed.

“When Jesus talks about clothing the naked, feeding the hungry, he’s talking to us as individuals,” Farah said. The Bible does not “suggest that government is the institution that he designed to help the poor.”

Government social welfare programs are akin to “coercively taking money from people and redistributing to other people, which, at the end of the day, is legalized stealing,” he said. “And the Bible is pretty firm on stealing.”

But the Bible, and particularly the Hebrew prophets, also speaks firmly about the need to protect the vulnerable, which sometimes requires government action, said Simon Greer, president and CEO of the Jewish Funds for Justice, which helped fuel a progressive backlash against Beck.

The New York-based group is founded on “the fundamental religious call to care for others,” which in turn is based “on the belief that we’re all made in the image of the divine,” Greer said.

“The only sensible conclusion is that we need mechanisms like effective government … to solve the pressing problems that our country faces,” he said.

Jim Wallis, founder of the Washington-based social justice group Sojourners, is even blunter in his assessment of the Tea Party’s approach to giving.

“The libertarian enshrinement of individual choice is not the pre-eminent Christian virtue,” he wrote on his blog, God’s Politics. “Emphasizing individual rights at the expense of others violates the common good, a central Christian teaching and tradition.”

Gushee frames his vision of government as “the community acting collectively,” with religious groups playing a key role. Religious groups have been active supporters of government programs to fight disease, poverty and HIV/AIDS in the developing world—programs that would not exist without the wherewithal of the federal government.

Tea Party supporter Farah says he puts his faith in the generosity of the American people and supports church-based welfare over government-run programs.

The data, however, tell a different story. According to Illinois-based Empty Tomb, Inc., which tracks charitable giving, American church-goers gave only about 2.5 percent of disposable income to churches in 2007. Of that, only about 0.37 percent—roughly $100 per member—went to charities beyond the church. Those figures are down by about half since 1968.

Michael Lindsay, a sociologist at Rice University and author of Faith in the Halls of Power, doesn’t have much hope for individual charity.

“I would like to think that Christians are generous,” Lindsay, an evangelical Christian and Baylor University graduate, said in an interview. “But sadly, the truth of the matter is that their rhetoric is much stronger than their action.”

A new study says the population of North American Amish has increased nearly 10 percent in the past two years, causing many communities to turn westward in search of new land. Conducted by the Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies at Elizabethtown College in Elizabethtown, Pa., the study found the American Amish population has more than doubled in the past 10 years, bringing the current total to about 250,000. The current annual increase hovers at about 5 percent, meaning the population doubles approximately every 16 years. With a rise in population, however, comes a need for fertile farmland to sustain the Amish in their simple lifestyle, and land can be expensive. In Pennsylvania’s Lancaster County, known as the unofficial Amish heartland, costs can reach $15,000 an acre. Elsewhere in the nation, however, that price can drop to $2,000 or $3,000. This push for land has encouraged Amish communities to look as far west as Colorado and South Dakota.

Anti-Jewish incidents continue. A Jewish group that tracks anti-Semitism has published its annual report of more than 1,200 incidents of assaults, vandalism and harassment against Jews in 2009, saying the level of incidents remained “sustained and troubling.” In total, the New York-based Anti-Defamation League reported 29 incidents of physical assaults on Jewish individuals, 760 cases of anti-Semitic harassments and threats, and 422 reports of anti-Semitic vandalism in 2009. Most of the cases took place in states with large Jewish populations. The top four states included California (23 percent of total cases), New York (17 percent), New Jersey (10 percent) and Florida (7 percent). The 2009 audit employed new methodology and evaluation criteria, the first makeover ADL has made in more than three decades of reporting on the topic. When analyzed using the old criteria, the 2009 numbers represent an approximate 10 percent increase in incidents from 2008.

Priest in doghouse after canine Communion. The Anglican Church in Canada is dealing with fallout following a published report that a priest gave Communion to a dog. One congregant quit St. Peter’s Anglican Church in downtown Toronto—and filed a complaint with the Anglican Diocese of Toronto—in protest over the June 27 incident, in which interim priest Marguerite Rea gave Communion to a man and his dog. The Toronto Star reports that according to people in attendance, it was a spontaneous gesture intended to make both the dog and its owner—a first-timer at the church—feel welcome. Peggy Needham, a lay official who was sitting near the altar, said she doesn’t recall the man asking for the sacrament for his dog. Instead, she said the priest leaned over and placed the wafer on the canine’s wagging tongue. No wine was offered to the dog. Bishop Patrick Yu said he wrote to the parishioner who protested: “It is not the policy of the Anglican Church to give Communion to animals. I can see why people would be offended. It is a strange and shocking thing, and I have never heard of it happening before. I think the reverend was overcome by what I consider a misguided gesture of welcoming.”