CLARKSVILLE, Tenn. (RNS)—Walter Slonopas insists he quit his job in order to save his soul.

Slonopas, 52, resigned as a maintenance worker at Contech Casting LLC in Clarksville after his W-2 tax form was stamped with the number 666.

Walter Slonopas resigned as a maintenance worker at his company in Clarksville, Tenn., after his W-2 tax form was stamped with the number 666.The New Testament book of Revelation calls 666 the “mark of the beast,” and some Christians associate it with the Antichrist in End Times prophecy. Slonopas said after getting the W-2, he could either go to work or go to hell.

“If you accept that number, you sell your soul to the devil,” he said.

Bob LaCourciere, vice president of sales and marketing for Revstone Corp., which owns Contech Casting, said that Slonopas’ W-2 was labeled with 666 by the company that handles Contech’s payroll. It refers to the order in which the forms were mailed out, he said.

This isn’t the first time the satanic number has caused Slonopas trouble at work.

During his first day on the job in April 2011, Slonopas was supposed to be assigned the number 668 to use when he clocked in. But the human resources department gave him the wrong number—666— instead.

Slonopas, who said he became a born-again Christian about 10 years ago, complained and was given a new number.

Trailed by an evil number

In July 2011, the company changed time clock systems, and once again Slonopas got 666. This time he quit. The company apologized, and he returned to work a few days later.

This latest incident with the W-2 baffled company spokesman LaCourciere. He could not believe it had happened again.

“I am completely at a loss for words,” he said.

The number 666 first appears in Revelation 13, which describes a satanic figure called the beast—identified by some Christians as the Antichrist—who takes over the world and stamps everyone with a mark bearing the number 666. According to Revelation, no one will be able to buy or sell anything without that number stamped on them.

Taking Revelation seriously

That’s caused people to fear any time that number pops up, said Jay Phelan, senior professor of theological studies at North Park University in Chicago. “It’s seen as a very dangerous number,” he said.

For believers such as Slonopas, who take the book of Revelation literally, any tie to 666 is a betrayal of their faith. Phelan said he understands why Slonopas quit.

“It’s a desire to be loyal to his faith and to not be identified with the Antichrist,” he said. “The company ought to find a way to cut him some slack.”

Amy-Jill Levine, professor of New Testament and Jewish studies at Vanderbilt University Divinity School, said the writer of Revelation was using a technique called “gematria”—in which letters have numerical values—to refer to a Roman emperor as the beast.

Over the past 2,000 years, readers of Revelation have tried to use 666 to figure out who the Antichrist is, she noted. Among the candidates were political figures such as Hitler, Ronald Reagan, and Barack Obama and corporations such as Procter & Gamble and IBM.

The number has caused problems for at least one other worker in the past. In 2011, a factory worker from Georgia named Billy Hyatt sued his former employer after he was fired for refusing to wear a sticker with 666 on it. The sticker referred to the number of accident-free days he’d had on the job.

Just wants a new number

Slonopas, though, said he has no interest in suing anyone. All he wants is for his former employer to give him a new W-2 without a satanic number on it. Otherwise, he said, he can’t file his taxes.

He shakes his head when asked if he’d go back to work for Contech, even if the company gives him a new W-2. That would send the message that he sold out his faith for money.

“God is worth more than money,” he said.

LaCourciere said the firm planned to mail out a new W-2, in a plain envelope. The company also wants to rehire him.

“We’d love to have him back,” he said.

(RNS) The decision by Boy Scouts of America to postpone any change in policy about gay membership was fueled by an “outpouring of feedback.” Much of that reaction came from a sector with strength in numbers: the religious groups that comprise the majority of the Scouts’ chartered organizations.

On Feb. 4, two days before the BSA’s announcement, the Religious Relationships Task Force met for a regularly scheduled meeting with an unexpected topic on its agenda: a possible drop of the Scouts’ ban on gay members and leaders.

Larry Coppock, the United Methodist Church’s national director of Scouting ministries. (RNS photo courtesy United Methodist Church’s General Commission on United Methodist Men.)

Larry Coppock, the United Methodist Church’s national director of Scouting ministries, said the group — including Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Buddhist representatives — unanimously requested that Scouting executives give them more time to consider the possibility.

“There’s a lot of passion around this,” he said. “There’s a lot of differences of opinion.’’

They got what they asked for, Coppock said Wednesday, though he couldn’t say how much influence their particular petition made. John Halloran, chairman of the National Catholic Committee on Scouting, said he believed the task force’s action was “a contributing factor.”

There is simply no denying the influence of religion in the Boy Scouts, a group that includes “my duty to God’’ in its oath. According to the BSA, religious organizations comprise 70 percent of its sponsoring organizations. Mormons, United Methodists and Catholics — the three largest groups — sponsored more than 1 million of the current 2.6 million Scouts in 2011.

As in other denominations, Mormon officials are “following this proposed policy change very closely. We believe the BSA has acted wisely in delaying its decision until all voices can be heard on this important moral issue,” said Michael Purdy, a spokesman for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Beyond specific denominations, religious liberty advocates and conservative Christian supporters of traditional families voiced concern about the Scouts’ proposed policy change.

“The legal and religious liberty implications of a bad decision would have been huge,” said Kelly Shackelford, president of Liberty Institute, which sent a letter from conservative legal groups to the BSA warning that the absence of a national ban on gays could result in “crippling” lawsuits against local groups that retain a ban. “We are hopeful the Board will make a good decision protecting this great organization.”

More than 40 conservative organizations took out an ad in USA Today urging the BSA to “stand firm for timeless values.”

Jonathan Saenz (center), president of Texas Values, spoke to hundreds of people outside the BSA headquarters in Irving on Feb. 6. (RNS photo courtesy Texas Values)

One of those groups, Texas Values, rallied with hundreds of people outside the BSA headquarters in Irving on Wednesday just as the postponement decision was announced.

“There’s no doubt that the faith communities that have gotten involved in this issue have made a difference,” said Jonathan Saenz, president of Texas Values. “We’re very encouraged to see so many people of religious faith step up and be leaders and do what’s right.”

But not all religious leaders — on both sides of the debate — are satisfied with the postponement.

“It is not enough that they postpone a decision,” said Tony Perkins, president of the Washington-based Family Research Council, which also signed onto the USA Today ad. “Instead, the BSA board should publicly re-affirm their current standards, as they did just last July.’’

The Rev. Susan Russell, a gay rights activist and a priest at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Calif., said the Episcopal Church has been calling on the BSA to be open to gay members and leaders since 2000.

“And now the Boy Scouts ‘need more time’ to send the message to young gay American kids that they are just as loved, valued and important as their straight friends and neighbors?” she asked. “The time is now to end discrimination against our kids.”

The Rev. Mike Schuenemeyer, the United Church of Christ’s executive minister for gay and lesbian concerns, expressed a similar reaction to the BSA delay.

“Their decision today is a failure of leadership to do what is right,” said Schuenemeyer, whose denomination called for a policy change in 2003. “It is time for the Boy Scouts to change their policy.”

Some denominations have alternative programs for boys. The Southern Baptist Convention, which was already retooling its own Royal Ambassadors program when the Scouts’ policy was first floated, wants the Scouts to stick with its current policy.

“We’re pleased that apparently it’s not going to be left in the hands of a few powerful corporate board members but rather they’re going to allow all of the charter organizations to have a vote,” said Roger Oldham, a spokesman for the SBC Executive Committee.

Alvin Townley, an independent national Scouting advocate, said there’s no question that the diverse opinions of faith groups will weigh heavily on the deliberations of Scouting’s leadership.

“Certainly Scouting wants to honor the opinions of our religious charter partners — who actually ‘own’ Scout units — and as you can imagine, those churches, synagogues, and mosques have widely differing views on where Scouting should go,” said Townley, author of Legacy of Honor: The Values and Influence of America’s Eagle Scouts.

“Everyone wants to ensure we make this decision carefully, in consultation with our members and partners.”

WASHINGTON (ABP)—The Obama administration has proposed a broader opt-out for religious organizations that object to mandated coverage of contraceptives in employee health care plans, an effort to alleviate religious-liberty concerns behind a number of lawsuits challenging the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare.

New rules, subject to an open-comment period through April 8, would allow nonprofit religious employers like faith-based hospitals and universities to opt out of the contraceptive mandate as a matter of conscience. Their employees would instead receive a stand-alone private insurance policy to provide contraceptive coverage at no cost.

Brent Walker

The new guidelines would apply only to religious nonprofits and not include for-profit businesses like Hobby Lobby that are subject to federal anti-discrimination laws that don’t apply equally to religious organizations.

“Today, the administration is taking the next step in providing women across the nation with coverage of recommended preventive care at no cost, while respecting religious concerns,” said Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. “We will continue to work with faith-based organizations, women’s organizations, insurers and others to achieve these goals.”

While emphasizing he had not yet read the full 80 pages of new guidelines, Brent Walker of the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty reacted with a favorable first impression.

“The proposed rules signal an ongoing effort by the administration to provide for the preventive health care needs of women employees while seeking to honor the conscience objections of religious employers and their affiliates,” Walker said. “The proposed rules laudably clarify and simplify the definition of religious organizations and affiliated nonprofits and seek to provide an acceptable alternative for self-insured employers.”

Impact on nonprofits

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty said the new proposals do nothing to protect the rights of family businesses like Hobby Lobby, who also find some of the covered birth-control methods immoral and oppose them on religious grounds. The group said it continues to study the proposal’s impact on lawsuits it is handling for nonprofit religious organizations like East Texas Baptist University and Houston Baptist University.

Catholic schools like Ava Maria University and Belmont Abbey College have filed lawsuits because artificial birth control goes against teachings of the Roman Catholic Church. Baptist schools including Louisiana College, meanwhile, don’t oppose contraceptives outright but believe some of the FDA-approved birth-control methods take effect after fertilization, making them in fact a form of abortion, which the Southern Baptist Convention opposes.

The White House has said from the beginning the administration is sensitive to religious-liberty concerns of employers but committed to coverage for preventive care that includes contraceptive coverage with no co-pays as a matter of women’s health.

“We need a both/and solution to these important policy issues,” Walker said. “Women’s health care is promoted; religious liberty is protected.”

Self-insured groups

The administration said it still is working out how to handle self-insured group health plans like those offered by the Southern Baptist Convention’s GuideStone Financial Resources, so that workers receive contraceptive coverage at no cost but eligible organizations don’t have to contract, arrange, pay or refer for such coverage.

The proposal amends rules issued in 2011 that for purposes of exemption defined a religious employer as one that has the inculcation of religious values as its purpose, primarily employs people who share its religious tenets, primarily serves people who share its religious tenets and is a church or an integrated auxiliary, convention or association of churches.

After receiving more than 200,000 comments both for and against, the administration adjusted the criteria to ensure an otherwise exempt employer plan is not disqualified because the employer’s purposes extend beyond the inculcation of religious values, or because the employer serves or hires people of different religious faiths, and to accommodate religious institutions of higher education with religious objections to the contraceptive mandate.

WASHINGTON (ABP)—Georgia’s law banning carrying guns in churches will remain on the books after the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to revive the case of a Baptist minister who claimed it burdens his free exercise of religion.

In addition to a Second Amendment claim, Jonathan Wilkins, pastor of Baptist Tabernacle in Thomaston, Ga., argued the First Amendment’s “free exercise” clause prohibits states from banning activities in churches when such activities generally are permitted elsewhere in the state.

By declining to review the case, the Supreme Court upheld a ruling last July by the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that the First Amendment protects only “sincerely held religious belief” and not “personal preference and secular beliefs.”

Wilkins filed a complaint in 2010 after Georgia law was changed to ban firearms in certain places, including houses of worship, without the owner’s permission. Wilkins, who is licensed to carry a weapon, said he often worked alone in the church building after hours and would like to have church members armed for protection of members attending worship and other events.

“The handgun is the quintessential self-defense weapon in the United States,” the lawsuit stated, citing Americans’ constitutional right to keep and bear arms.

The appellate court said, however, churches are not public places, and the Second Amendment does not give an individual the right to carry a firearm on private property without the owner’s knowledge and permission.

An evangelical preacher withdrew acceptance of his invitation to pray at President Obama’s inauguration after coming under fire when an old sermon denouncing homosexuality circulated on the Internet.

WASHINGTON (ABP)—An evangelical preacher withdrew acceptance of his invitation to pray at President Obama’s inauguration after coming under fire when an old sermon denouncing homosexuality circulated on the Internet.

A day after the White House announced the invitation to Passion Conference founder Louie Giglio, the liberal blog Think Progress linked to one of the Baptist preacher’s archived sermons from the 1990s titled “A Christian Response to Homosexuality.”

“Homosexuality is not an alternate lifestyle,” Giglio is heard saying in the sermon audio. “Homosexuality is not just a sexual preference. Homosexuality is not gay. Homosexuality is sin. It is sin in the eyes of God and it is sin according to the word of God.”

Giglio said the sermon was “not intended to be a homophobic attack on those who are in the homosexual lifestyle that would maybe foster fear or intolerance” but to address “a critical subject for our world.”

He referenced as a current event a Hawaii court ruling that the state’s refusal to grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples is discriminatory, adding that recognizing gay marriage would “run the risk of undermining the whole order of our society.”

Giglio urged compassion for individuals struggling with same-sex attraction but warned about an “aggressive element in the homosexual movement” seeking to normalize homosexuality.

“You’ve got to be able to respond lovingly yet firmly to this aggressive element in the homosexual community,” he said. “And I dare say you’ve got to be willing to be called an intolerant bigot or a homophobe in our society, because you will. I daresay as a result of sharing this talk I will.”

Negative reaction to Giglio’s comments was reminiscent to four years ago when the inaugural committee stood by a similar invitation to Rick Warren, a Southern Baptist mega church pastor criticized for his support of California’s Proposition 8 aimed at prohibiting gay marriage and comparing same-sex marriage to incest or pedophilia in a media interview.

Giglio, 54, grew up attending First Baptist Church in Atlanta and got his M.Div. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary in Fort Worth. In 1985, he began Choice Ministries as a campus-based student ministry at Baylor University in Waco. After 10 years, he and his wife, Shelley, moved to Atlanta, where he organized the first Passion gathering in 1997.

The most recent Passion Conference, Jan. 1-4, drew 60,000 18-to-25 year-olds to the Georgia Dome to listen to Christian rock music and sermons, while raising more than $3 million to fight human trafficking.

He reportedly got on the inaugural committee’s radar for his advocacy against human trafficking.

“We were not aware of Pastor Giglio’s past comments at the time of his selection, and they don’t reflect our desire to celebrate the strength and diversity of our country at this Inaugural,” the Presidential Inaugural Committee said in a statement to media. “As we now work to select someone to deliver the benediction, we will ensure their beliefs reflect this administration’s vision of inclusion and acceptance for all Americans.”

NASHVILLE (ABP)—Former presidential candidate turned talk-show host Mike Huckabee stood by controversial comments blaming the deadly Dec. 14 shootings in Connecticut on the lack of religion in public schools.

The day 27 people, including 20 children, died in a mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., Fox News host Neil Cavuto asked the former Arkansas governor, an ordained Southern Baptist minister and former pastor, to respond to the inevitable question, “How could God let this happen?”

“Well, you know, it’s an interesting thing,” Huckabee said. “We ask why there’s violence in our schools, but we’ve systematically removed God from our schools. Should we be so surprised that schools would become a place of carnage?”

“We’ve made it a place where we don’t want to talk about eternity, life, what responsibility means, accountability; that we’re not just going to have to be accountable to the police if they catch us, but one day we stand before a Holy God in judgment,” said Huckabee, a past president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. “If we don’t believe that, then we don’t fear that.”

Criticized for attributing the mass murder/suicide to the removal of prayer and Bible reading from public schools, Huckabee opened his own Fox News program Dec. 15 with a rejoinder to “the predictable left.”

“It’s far more than just taking prayer or Bible reading out of the schools,” Huckabee said. “It’s the fact that people sue a city so that we aren’t confronted with a manger scene or a Christmas carol, that lawsuits are filed to remove a cross that is a memorial to fallen soldiers, churches and Christian-owned businesses are told to surrender their values under the edict of government orders to provide tax-funded abortion pills.”

“We carefully and intentionally stop saying things are sinful, and we call them disorders,” he continued. “Sometimes we even say they’re normal. And to get to where that we have to abandon bedrock moral truths, then we are asked, well, where was God?

“And I respond, that as I see it, we have escorted him right out of our culture, and we’ve marched him off the public square, and then we express our surprise that a culture without him actually reflects what it’s become.”

Huckabee further addressed the controversy in a monologue that he posted on his website and Facebook.

“I would never say that simply taking prayer and Bible reading from our institutions or silencing Christmas carols is the direct cause of a mass murder,” Huckabee said. “That would be ludicrous and simplistic.”

“But the cause and effect we see in the dramatic changes of what our children are capable of is a part of a cultural shift from a God-centered culture to a self-centered culture,” he continued. “We have glorified uninhibited self-expression and individualism and are shocked that we have a generation of loners.

“We have insisted on a society where everyone gets a trophy and no one loses and act surprised that so many kids lack self-esteem and feel like losers.

“We dismiss the notion of natural law and the notion that there are moral absolutes and seem amazed when some kids make it their own morality to kill innocent children.

“We diminish and even hold in contempt the natural family of a father and mother creating and then responsibly raising the next generation and then express dismay that kids feel no real connection to their families or even the concept of a family.

“We scoff at the need for mothers and fathers to make it their priority to train their children to be strong in spirit and soul and responsible for right and wrong and exalt instead the virtue of having things and providing expensive toys, games, and electronics that substitute for parenting and then don’t understand why our kids would rather have ear buds dangling from their ears, fingers attaching to a smart phone and face attached to a computer screen than to have an extended conversation with their family at dinner.

“And we don’t teach them there is a Creator God who sets immutable rules, a God who is knowable, and to whom we are ultimately responsible. Instead we teach that God was not involved in our origins, that our very lives are biological happenstances and in fact are disposable should they be inconvenient to us, and that any outrageous behaviors are not sin, but disorders for which we should be excused and accommodated.”

WASHINGTON (RNS)—The shooting deaths of 26 children and adults at a Connecticut elementary school has revived religious support for gun control, galvanizing a movement that has struggled to gain traction against the powerful gun lobby.

“We are going to win this and save lives, and faith leaders will not need to be pulled into that,” said Ladd Everitt, spokesman for the Washington-based Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. “They will be at the forefront of that.”

Rank-and-file people of faith have flooded his office’s email and social media accounts, Everitt said, giving donations and offering to volunteer in their communities following the Dec. 14 shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Even though the gun control debate has been relatively dormant in recent years—despite high-profile mass shootings in Arizona, Colorado and elsewhere—religious voices have been a key part of the gun control coalition.

“Any time this movement has made a push, whether you’re looking at the Brady bill, the assault weapons ban or the 1968 Gun Control Act, faith leaders have been at the forefront of that,” said Everitt, whose coalition was started by religious activists. “We can’t win without them. We need them.”

Faiths United to Prevent Gun Violenceworked earlier this year to prevent passage of the National Right to Carry Reciprocity Act, which would have made it easier for people to carry concealed weapons, said Vincent DeMarco, the group’s national coordinator.

In the wake of the Newtown shootings, DeMarco said “the possibilities are much better” to try again to renew a Clinton-era ban on assault weapons that expired in 2004.

“The faith community is committed to doing this and it makes sense and it will happen,” he said, “and this sad tragedy in Connecticut is only going to add to the commitment.”

Guns for sale at a Houston gun show. (Wired Photo: Flickr/M Glasgow, 2007)

His coalition of 39 Christian, Jewish, Muslim and Sikh organizations launched in 2011 after the shooting in Tucson, Ariz., that killed six and injured then-Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. It is affiliated with the Brady Campaign to Prevent Gun Violence.

Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, said religious leaders already are discussing possible next steps after the killings in Connecticut.

“The immensity of the tragedy and the strong religious mandate to protect the innocent and the children clearly have created conversations in the religious communities all across America about, ‘What can we do?’” he said.

Religious groups alone cannot move new legislation forward, said Saperstein, a longtime gun control advocate, but, “If political leaders move, the religious community will galvanize to support it.”

Speaking at an interfaith vigil in Newtown on Sunday, President Obama said “these tragedies must end,” and religious coalitions and denominations quickly urged the White House and Congress to act. For example:

• The African Methodist Episcopal Church urged Congress not to be intimidated by the gun lobby and to reform gun laws. “The times in which we live, and the consequences of reckless gun use, demand courage and determination from our political leaders, the faith community and individual citizens to change them,” the denomination said in a statement.

• PICO National Network, a coalition of faith-based social justice groups, asked its members to petition Obama to send legislation to Congress to renew the assault weapons ban and to require background checks for all gun buyers.

• Episcopal Bishop Mariann Edgar Budde of Washington is teaming up with the Gary Hall, dean of Washington National Cathedral, to “dedicate ourselves to the work of passing national legislation to ban the sale of assault weapons and ammunition in this country,” and asked congregants to join them.

Despite the groundswell, not all religious leaders are convinced that stricter legislation is appropriate.

Joseph Mattera, presiding bishop of the New York-based evangelical group Christ Covenant Coalition, wrote in Charisma News that he doesn’t agree with New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s call for improved background checks and tighter gun laws. Mattera, instead, is concerned about the secularization of U.S. society.

“I also believe blaming guns would be to skirt the deeper issues the humanists don’t want to touch,” he wrote in a Dec. 15 commentary. “Blaming guns for this and other tragedies like Columbine and Virginia Tech massacres would be like blaming automobiles for the thousands of deaths that occur every year due to accidents on highways and streets.”

WASHINGTON  (ABP)—Representatives of the Charitable Giving Coalition , comprised of about 600 nonprofit organizations, descended on Capitol Hill for two days of lobbying Congress. They want to make sure any federal budget deal does not eliminate or change the deductibility of charitable gifts.

{mosimage}The White House wants to end Bush-era tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans. Republicans in Congress propose raising revenues by cutting loopholes and entitlements. Both sides have mentioned a possible middle-ground solution of capping the amount of income that people who itemize their taxes can claim as a deduction for charitable giving.

President Obama has advocated capping the charitable deduction at 28 percent for couples making more than $250,000, people who now may claim deductions as high as 35 percent.

During the campaign, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney offered an alternative approach that would limit all personal deductions to $25,000, including those taken for charity, an idea that has resurfaced as lawmakers return to work on an agreement before the country heads over the so-called “fiscal cliff” Jan. 1.

Nonprofit leaders wrote the president and congressional leaders in November to warn that tampering with the charitable deduction would reduce people’s incentive to give at a time when government cutbacks will force more and more Americans to turn to charities for help.

On Dec. 4-5, hundreds of members of the Charitable Giving Coalition were expected in Washington to bring “a dose of reality” to lawmakers during “D.C. Hill Days” defending the charitable deduction.

“The charitable deduction is different than other itemized deductions in that it encourages individuals to give away a portion of their income to those in need,” coalition leaders wrote in November. “It rewards a selfless act, and it encourages taxpayers to give more to charities than they would otherwise have given.”

Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, issued an action alert Nov. 28 urging constituents to call their Congressman and senators and urge them to oppose any measure that would place additional restrictions on charitable deductions.

“The proposal to further cap charitable deductions in the federal tax code is a threat aimed like a dagger at the heart of America’s charitable nonprofit entities, secular and religious,” Land said. “It will weaken most, kill many, and harm all.”

Robert Parham, head of the Baptist Center for Ethics , wondered in a Nov. 29 editorial what President Obama is thinking. “The nation needs to keep charitable giving as a noble priority—and one that is rewarded with a tax deduction,” Parham wrote for the center’s website EthicsDaily.com .

The Charitable Giving Coalition cites a study claiming that one-third of donors say they would reduce their giving if the tax deduction did not exist. Others say that impact is overblown. Warren Buffett, who gives away billions of dollars a year, said doing away with the deduction “would not change my charitable giving a penny."

Parham acknowledged the tax deduction is not the only reason, or even the major reason, people of faith give to charity.

“But it is an important reason for some folk who give significant gifts,” he wrote. “Charitable giving is fundamental to tens of thousands of houses of faith and their many institutions.”

The White House said Nov. 29 the president would not support a proposed $25,000 annual limit on deductions, including those for charitable giving, because the plan backed by Republicans and the bipartisan Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget would cost charities $10 billion a year and not raise enough revenue without also raising taxes on the top 2 percent of wage earners.

House Republicans sent a counterproposal to Obama’s budget Dec. 3 outlining a $4.6 trillion deficit-reduction proposal without raising tax rates. The White House rejected the proposal, saying the numbers don’t add up.

“There is no mathematically sound way to do it,” said White House Press Secretary Jay Carney. “And making vague promises about achieving revenue through capping deductions or closing loopholes simply doesn’t add up to a serious proposal.”

Carney called the GOP plan “wildly politically unfeasible, because it suggests that we would wipe out charitable deductions or other measures that might add up on paper, but simply aren’t plausible when it comes to getting something through Congress.”

A poll released Dec. 4 by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press said Americans are pessimistic that the president and House Republicans will be able to reach a deal by Jan. 1 to prevent automatic tax increases and spending cuts from taking effect and possibly drag the economy into recession.

If America goes off the “fiscal cliff,” most Americans (53 percent) believe Republicans in Congress will be more to blame than Obama (27 percent), the poll showed.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Corruption has gone too far. The righteous must break away. Hope now rests with a holy remnant that will honor foundational texts.

The message sounds familiar. A church schism? No, mounting calls for secession from the United States.

Since President Obama won re-election, more than 750,000 Americans have petitioned the White House website to let their states secede. Those leading the charge are framing it, observers say, in terms that suggest a deep-seated religious impulse for purity-through-separation is flaring up once again.

But this time, it’s playing out on a political stage.

“Today’s secessionist movements are just the latest example of a long parade of breakaway groups (in American history) seeking to restore some lost ideal,” said Peter J. Thuesen, professor of religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. “The problem is that the ideal is invariably a mirage.”

Seeking purity through separation has marked American religious history since the Puritans sailed from Holland to establish a holy beacon in the New World. It helps explain why Baptists, Presbyterians and others have splintered into countless subgroups over the years, and why the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina disaffiliated from the Episcopal Church this fall.

The pattern commonly involves one group breaking off to re-establish a holy community by living in fresh accord with sacred texts. Religious purists have the Bible to guide their quest; secessionists look to the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. Both insist these centers of authority have suffered neglect and must be restored.

“That’s a persistent line of thought,” said Alan Wolfe, director of the Boisi Center for Religion and American Public Life at Boston College. “There are people who are disappointed with the direction the United States has taken. … It’s primarily political and economic, and then they just find a religious cover for it (as) they tap into pre-existent religious language.”

Dismissing the United States as hopelessly corrupt, secessionists are picking up the breakaway-for-purity motif and running with it. Radio host Alex Jones, whose show airs in 60 markets, alleged that “foreign megabanks have hijacked the government” and have made secession necessary.

“We do not want to secede from the Union to destroy the republic, but to restore it,” Jones said. “Go to the White House website. Do your own petitions to reinstall the Declaration of Independence. … It’s now time to launch the second American Revolution.”

Secessionists, such as Russell Longcore of Marietta, Ga., take inspiration from history. He sees secession as pursuit of God-given liberty, such as when American colonies seceded from Britain in 1776, when Southern states left the Union in the 1860s and when the Soviet Union dissolved into 15 separate states two decades ago.

In his view, petitioning the federal government is “silly” because states don’t need permission to secede, but he regards the petitioners’ goal as nonetheless serious and moral in nature.

“The moral decay comes from the fact that Washington, D.C., has summarily ignored the Constitution,” said Longcore, an insurance claims consultant who blogs at dumpdc.com. He offered the example of unsanctioned wars.

“Article One, Section Eight (of the Constitution) says Congress should have authority to declare war and to prosecute a war,” Longcore said. “There hasn’t been a declared war since World War II, but we’ve been in an awful lot of wars.”

Other narratives help secessionists, as well as religious isolationists, understand their efforts as part of a noble tapestry. Evangelical groups have for years supported Christians in South Sudan, which broke off from Sudan last year after persistent clashes with Muslims in the north. Some now laud how Sudanese Christians separated and hope American Christians would do similarly by withdrawing at least culturally, if not legally.

Those inspired by such examples include Jim Rawles, an evangelical blogger and novelist who teaches survival skills for the coming day when America’s economy collapses. He sees no point in seceding, since the federal government would “hammer” such efforts anyway.

Instead, he’s getting more response these days, he says, to his call for Bible-believing Christians, Orthodox Jews and Messianic Jews to relocate to what he calls the American Redoubt—Montana, Idaho, Wyoming, eastern Washington and eastern Oregon.

One reason he gives on his website for separation: “Even if God has withdrawn his blessings from our nation as a whole, he will continue to provide for and to protect his remnant.”

“It’s time to distance ourselves from the vile corruptness that we see inside the Washington, D.C., Beltway,” said Rawles, who blogs at survivalblog.com. “It is analogous to the Puritan exodus (from Europe). They couldn’t fit in and said, ‘We’re going to move to completely virgin territory and start afresh.’ … In effect, we’re becoming pistol-packing Amish.”

Some scholars still aren’t buying it. As Wolfe sees it, calls for secession and cultural withdrawal are just sour grapes.

“It’s not religious in inspiration at all,” Wolfe says. “It’s like in the Old South, where if you gave (secession) a religious cover, you made it sound better. But it’s just people who basically have difficulty accepting that we have a two-party system. One party wins. One party loses.”

But separatists insist the impulse to flee corruption and live rightly before God is genuine. And if that means clustering in ever more secluded enclaves, then so be it.

“The Bible teaches that the remnant will be small,” Rawles said. “People who recognize that they are of the remnant, that they are God’s elect, will in increasing numbers choose to vote with their feet.”

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (ABP)—Nearly two out of three American adults believe businesses and organizations should be required to provide birth-control coverage in their employee health-care plans, even if it violates the employer’s religious beliefs, according to a recent survey by LifeWay Research.

The research arm of the Southern Baptist Convention publisher said 63 percent of 1,191 adult Americans polled Nov. 14-16 agreed with the portion of the Affordable Care Act, also known as Obamacare, requiring coverage for all FDA-approved birth-control methods.

That includes emergency or “morning after” pills that some people argue permit fertilization but prevent pregnancy by causing a spontaneous abortion.

Twenty-eight percent disagreed and 10 percent selected “Don’t Know.”

Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research, said researchers did not use the term “abortifacient” in their questions, because even in high-profile cases focusing only on those drugs, the issue is widely reported in news media as a contraception issue, and most Americans don’t believe religious organizations should be allowed to opt out.

A majority of Americans surveyed—53 percent—said Catholic schools, hospitals and charities should be required to provide the coverage, even though it conflicts with religious teachings of the Catholic Church.

The survey found women more likely than men to “Strongly Agree” that all three organizational categories—businesses (48 percent vs. 37 percent); nonprofits (37 percent vs. 29 percent); Catholic and religious schools, hospitals and charities (36 percent vs. 26 percent)—should provide the coverage.

Younger Americans were the least likely (less than 10 percent) to “Strongly Disagree” with businesses and organizations being required to follow the mandate.

“The religious freedom that the United States pioneered is not a freedom of belief, but a freedom to practice that faith,” said Stetzer.

“The American public appears unaware or unconcerned that some religious organizations and family businesses indicate fear of losing the freedom to practice their faith under the new health-care regulations.”

WASHINGTON (RNS)—There is a moment in Steven Spielberg’s new movie Lincoln when the 16th president asks the kind of big question usually tackled by religion: Why are we here?

“Do you think we choose the times into which we are born,” Daniel Day-Lewis, as Abraham Lincoln, asks two young workers in the telegraph office. “Or do we fit the times we are born into?”

That’s as close as the film comes to probing the faith of Abraham Lincoln. But the nature of Lincoln’s faith —or the lack thereof—has remained one of the most fascinating aspects of the man who freed the slaves, preserved the Union and carried the wounded nation through its bloodiest war.

Beginning almost immediately after his assassination 147 years ago, hundreds of books, articles and essays have appeared, many claiming Lincoln was—if not in fact, then in sentiment—a Christian, Catholic, Jew, Mormon, psychic, spiritualist, agnostic and atheist.

Their titles range from Lincoln, the Freethinker to Lincoln’s Christianity. Recently, Christian publisher Thomas Nelson released Lincoln’s Battle With God: A President’s Struggle With Faith and What It Meant for America by popular biographer Stephen Mansfield. The Jewish Journal ran a story asking if Lincoln was “‘Jewish’ in his temperament, values and actions.”

Both religious believers and nonbelievers have set up websites or composed blog posts full of Lincoln quotes they believe support their own versions of Lincoln’s God. Sometimes it’s the same quote— illustrating, perhaps, that facet of Lincoln that Freethinkers author Susan Jacoby calls his unique balance “between belief and unbelief.”

“What makes Lincoln a compelling figure to religious believers and nonbelievers alike,” Jacoby writes, “is that his character was suffused with a rare combination of rationalism and prophetic faith in almost perfect equipoise.”

What is the truth about Lincoln’s faith? And what does it say about Americans that we seem to need to pinpoint his beliefs and claim them as our own?

Authors Jennifer Weber & Stephen Mansfield find conflicting evidence about Lincoln’s faith.

“Lincoln, in many ways, is a cipher to us,” said Jennifer Weber, an associate professor of history at the University of Kansas and a Lincoln scholar. “He was not forthcoming at all about his interior life, his emotions, his experiences as a child. So we don’t know what he felt about a lot of things. There are a lot of holes there.”

What do we know about Lincoln’s faith?

• He was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, and he could quote much of the Bible by heart.

• In his youth he wrote an anti-religious pamphlet that his friends burned, and he steadfastly declined to become a member of any church.

• The deaths of two of his sons and the horrors of the Civil War took a huge toll on Lincoln and brought about some kind of spiritual crisis.

• As president, he wrote and delivered speeches that contain the most elegant references to God and American destiny in our history, but he did not mention Jesus in those speeches and only rarely in his private life.

While researching Lincoln’s writings through the 1850s for her book Copperheads: The Rise and Fall of Lincoln’s Opponents in the North, Weber said she did not find a single reference to God or Jesus.

But by the 1860s, something may have changed within the president.

“There are a couple of arguments about what happens to Lincoln when he is president,” she said. “One is that he employs religious language because it is a language that Americans understand and is reassuring to them. The other is that Lincoln himself undergoes a metamorphosis in terms of his own belief while he is president and is facing the enormous crisis of the Civil War and the loss of his second son—his favorite son—to die in childhood. He may well have come to have a belief in a hard, a vengeful God, given the circumstances he was working under.”

That is the general thrust of Mansfield’s new book, although he concludes the president became a God-fearing Christian.

“Though he never joined a church and seldom spoke of Jesus Christ publicly,” Mansfield writes, “he became our most spiritual chief executive, sometimes more prophet than president.”

In his landmark second inaugural address in 1865, Lincoln professed that the Civil War was God’s punishment for the sin of slavery.

“Until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said, ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether,’“ he said.

But don’t look for any of that to stop people of different religious persuasions from trying to claim Lincoln as a fellow traveler. Earlier this year, in an interview with an Indian newspaper, the evolutionary biologist and outspoken atheist Richard Dawkins claimed Lincoln was an atheist.

Weber calls this embrace of the 16th president as a fellow religionist “getting right with Lincoln.”

“If you can claim to have Lincoln on your side, you are golden,” she said. “It gives people an extra sense of legitimacy. It’s sort of like having the Good Housekeeping seal of approval.”

That’s why, she continued, we have Lincoln Savings Bank, the Lincoln Continental, the Lincoln Snacks Company, the Lincoln Mattress Company and Lincoln Electric.

“He was a religious man always, I think,” his widow Mary Todd Lincoln reportedly said after his death, “but he was not a technical Christian.”

OKLAHOMA CITY (ABP)—A federal judge ruled Nov. 19 that the Christian owners of Hobby Lobby cannot be exempted from providing emergency contraceptives in their group health plan on religious grounds.

U.S. District Judge Joe Heaton in Oklahoma City denied an injunction blocking enforcement of the Affordable Care Act, signed into law on March 23, 2010, which requires employers to provide coverage free of cost for preventive services including “morning after” birth-control pills and intra-uterine devices.

Hobby Lobby CEO Steve Green, a Southern Baptist who belongs to Council Road Baptist Church in Bethany, Okla., and other members of the Green family objected to the Health and Human Services mandate to provide coverage for what they view as abortion-inducing drugs as a violation of their religious liberty.

Judge Heaton ruled that the Constitution’s protection of the free exercise of religion applies to individuals and not corporations. While the HHS mandate exempts certain religious organizations, Hobby Lobby is a for-profit, secular corporation that does not meet the law’s definition of a “religious employer” eligible for the safe-harbor provision.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty, which represented the Greens and Hobby Lobby in the lawsuit, pledged to immediately appeal the ruling. “Every American, including family business owners like the Greens, should be free to live and do business according to their religious beliefs,” said Kyle Duncan, general counsel for the Becket Fund.

The judge said the question of whether the Greens as individuals can establish a free-exercise case over requirements imposed on general business corporations is less defined than their right to sue as a corporation, but they did not meet a legal standard requiring “a probability of success” to warrant a preliminary injunction.

If Hobby Lobby, which operates 514 arts and crafts stores in 41 states with 13,240 full-time employees, fails to provide mandated coverage beginning Jan. 1, the company faces fines of up to $1.3 million dollars per day, the lawsuit claims.

The case is one of 40 lawsuits challenging health-care reform commonly known as Obamacare. Some, including East Texas Baptist University, Houston Baptist University and Louisiana College, don’t qualify as religious employers because they hire non-Baptists and serve a purpose larger than the inculcation of religious values.

Tyndale House Publishers won a legal battle Nov. 16, when a judge in the District of Columbia granted an injunction protecting the Christian publishing company in Carol Stream, Ill., from the contraceptive mandate. U.S. District Judge Reggie Walton said the government failed to demonstrate a “compelling interest” for substantially burdening the company’s religious freedom.