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.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—A 19th century copy of the U.S. Constitution in Yiddish and Hebrew. A 15th century Hebrew book from Italy open to a page of passages that had been censored by the Catholic Church during the Inquisition. A 20th century Curious George children’s book translated into Yiddish.

Spanning across the centuries and the globe, they’re all part of a new exhibit at the Library of Congress, “Words Like Sapphires,” which celebrates 100 years of Hebraica.

The exhibit features about 60 objects, religious and lighter fare, drawn from the Library of Congress’ more than 200,000-piece Hebraica collection. The collection includes works in Hebrew, Yiddish, Ladino (or Judeo-Spanish), Judeo-Persian, Judeo-Arabic, Aramaic, Syriac and Amharic.

The collection was established in 1912 with a gift from New York financier and philanthropist Jacob Schiff. His initial donation of nearly 10,000 books and pamphlets put the Library of Congress on par with national libraries in Europe, according to Peggy Pearlstein, head of the library’s Hebraic section.

As a result of the gift, scholars no longer had “to travel to Europe to study about the foundational works about Judaism and Jewish civilization,” she said.

At the time, the library already had Russian and Japanese collections. The Hebraica addition fit in with then-Librarian of Congress Herbert Putman’s vision to amass “a universal collection of knowledge,” Pearlstein said.

“By creating an Hebraica/ Judaica collection, the Library of Congress was granting recognition to America’s Jewish community,” which at the time was growing rapidly, “and likewise highlighting the importance of Jewish civilization in the shaping of our world,” said Jonathan Sarna of Brandeis University, the dean of American Jewish historians.

Coinciding with the establishment of other significant Jewish library collections in the United States—including at the Jewish Theological Seminary, New York Public Library and the Hebrew Union College—“it helped facilitate the transfer of Jewish culture and civilization from the old world to the new,” Sarna said.

The new exhibit title uses the word “sapphire” in tribute to the image that rabbis and poets used “in the Medieval period to talk about clarity and brilliance of the written word,” Pearlstein said.

In creating the centennial exhibit, which runs through March 16, Pearlstein looked for objects with far-flung origins, then placed them among seven themes, including “People of the Book,” the “Holy Land Tongue” and the “Power of the Tongue.” The earliest work is a 7th century clay incantation bowl from Mesopotamia with writing in Aramaic, a Semitic language that uses Hebrew letters.

A Dutch-English Torah Scroll with embroidered fabric cover from the late 17th to early 18th centuries is part of a Library of Congress exhibit celebrating one of the world's largest collections of Jewish artifacts. (RNS PHOTO/Courtesy Library of Congress )

Within “People of the Book,” there’s a miniature Bible not more than 4 inches high and dating to the 17th or 19th century. There’s also the first complete Hebrew Bible printed in the United States, in 1814 in Philadelphia. Several members of Congress, including Reps. Sander Levin, D-Mich., Debbie Wasserman Schultz, D-Fla., and Brad Sherman, D-Calif., have used that Bible for their ceremonial swearing-in.

Among Pearlstein’s selections in “Holy Land Tongue” is the first printed book published in the Holy Land, a commentary on the Book of Esther. Eliezer ben Isaac Ashkenazi of Prague published the book in 1577 in Sfat, near the Galilee.

Several scrolls of Esther, which tell the story of the Jewish queen of Persia who saved her people from genocide, figure prominently in the exhibit and were chosen for their colorful illuminations. One is among the most recent items, created in 2010 in Jerusalem, at just four inches high. Another, The Washington Megillah, probably dates to early 18th century Italy and takes its name from the place it resides.

In “Power of the Tongue,” Pearlstein includes Dickdook Leshon Gnebreet, the first Hebrew grammar book published in America in 1735. Judah Monis, the Harvard College Hebrew instructor who wrote the book, had to convert to Christianity to be eligible to teach at the school.

This section also features a book published in 1891 with Yiddish and Hebrew translations of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. In his preface, J.D. Eisenstein wrote his aim was “to Americanize Jewish residents of the lower part of the city of New York and of which the writer of these lines is a member.”

Among the exhibit’s lighter fare is not only the Curious George book, but also a Winnie the Pooh book in Yiddish transliteration—Vini-der-Pu—and playing cards by cartoonist and manuscript illuminator Arthur Szyk using biblical figures for each of the deck’s 12 kings, queens and jacks. King David, for instance, clasps a harp as the king of clubs, while the prophet and judge Deborah holds the scales of justice as the queen of diamonds.

“It’s a very interesting way of bringing Arthur Szyk into your home and bringing the Bible into your home,” Pearlstein said.

WASHINGTON (RNS)—Breaking a longstanding personal pledge, Southern Baptist agency leader Richard Land endorsed GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney, saying the upcoming election is the most important since Abraham Lincoln's win in 1860.

“America is at a fork in the road and must choose between a President Barack Obama who wants to remake America in the model of a European welfare state and a Governor Mitt Romney who wants to restore a more economically vibrant and traditionally moral America,” Land wrote in a column in the Christian Post.

Richard Land

Land, executive editor of the independent Christian Post and the top public policy spokesman for the Southern Baptist Convention, said the “stark and revealing” differences between the Republicans and Democrats on abortion rights and same-sex marriage guided his decision.

“For Christians of traditional religious faith, there cannot be more fundamental issues than the protection of the sanctity of all human life from conception to natural death and the defense of marriage as a divinely ordained institution between one man and one woman,” he wrote.

While Land has been deeply involved in Republican politics for years, he always vowed never to endorse a particular candidate. In July 2011, when it was reported that he was actively backing Texas Gov. Rick Perry’s primary bid for the GOP nomination, Land issued a statement declaring, “I do not endorse candidates, and I have not and will not endorse Gov. Perry or any other candidate for that matter.”

Later in 2011, as Land increasingly was linked to Romney’s candidacy, the Southern Baptist leader reiterated, “As a matter of policy, I have not endorsed, do not endorse and will not endorse candidates.”

Land’s reversal comes as conservative Christians are making a strong last-minute push on Romney’s behalf. But his endorsement—which he said he was making as a private citizen—also comes with significant baggage.

This summer Land announced that he would retire in 2013 as head of the SBC’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission—an influential public policy post he has held for 25 years —following a series of controversies and ethical missteps.

They included racially-charged comments that Land made on his radio show about the Trayvon Martin shooting case, as well as evidence that he was lifting some of his program scripts from other sources without attribution. The controversies resulted in an official reprimand and the loss of his radio talk show, and they led to the announcement of his retirement.

But Land also pledged he would not retire from the culture war, which he called “a titanic spiritual struggle for our nation’s soul.”

BETHESDA, Md. (RNS)—With voters focused intently on pocketbook issues, both Mitt Romney and President Barack Obama are framing their faith-outreach efforts around the economy as the presidential campaign enters its final days.

That marks a shift from previous election cycles, campaign advisers say.

Mark DeMoss, adviser to the Mitt Romney presidential campaign, speaks on a panel about faith outreach by both campaigns during the Religion Newswriters Conference in Bethesda, Md.

"That's a major difference between this election and the last. The economy is the single issue that transcends every demographic, every coalition, every interest group," said Mark DeMoss, an evangelical who has led Romney's efforts to rally conservative Christians—a key Republican voting bloc—around the GOP nominee, who is a Mormon.

"Evangelicals are no less interested in the unemployment rate and the cost of living than non-evangelicals," DeMoss added.

Those concerns are reflected in voter outreach efforts by religious conservatives, who often are associated almost exclusively with hot-button social issues related to sexual morality.

For example, the Faith and Freedom Coalition, led by longtime evangelical activist Ralph Reed, has a voter guide that lists tax cuts and a balanced budget amendment ahead of same-sex marriage and abortion.

Reed's group, a successor to his Christian Coalition, planned to distribute 40 million voter guides, knock on a million doors and make 15 million get-out-the-vote phone calls. The Faith and Freedom Coalition also is building a database of more than 17 million conservative religious voters.

On the Demo-cratic side, the top issues listed on Obama's faith platform are "economic recovery," followed by "tax fairness" and "Wall Street reform."

Citing the Apostle Paul, the platform states, "President Obama's belief that we are all connected—that, as Corinthians says, 'if one part suffers, every part suffers with it'—has anchored him as he has worked tirelessly to lead with values." The platform then lists "basic economic security for everyone who is willing and able to work," as well as retirement security and affordable health care.

In mid-September, the campaign launched People of Faith for Obama, which includes a three-minute video of the president framing key decisions in his first term, including the bailout of auto companies and revamping the health care system, as driven by moral concerns.

"I'm standing on the side of human dignity," Obama says in the video, "and a belief in the inherent worth of all human beings."

Couching the economic message in faith terms makes sense, experts say. Surveys consistently have shown the economy, jobs, the budget deficit and other issues easily outstrip abortion and other social issues as voter priorities.

"Some of the usual issues may not be percolating in this election," Michael Wear, the Obama campaign's national faith vote coordinator, told journalists at the annual Religion Newswriters Association conference.

"We are seeing a broadening of issues that are related to faith," said Wear, who was joined on the panel by DeMoss as well as Broderick Johnson, head of Obama's Catholic outreach campaign.

LOS ANGELES (RNS)—On Oct. 7, some 1,400 American pastors planned to break the law.

And they're likely to get away with it.

As part of "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," religious leaders across the country endorsed political candidates—an act that flies in the face of Internal Revenue Service rules about what tax-exempt organizations, such as churches, can and cannot do.

Jim Garlow, senior pastor at Skyline Wesleyan Church in La Mesa, Calif., says the IRS prohibition has caused religious leaders to shy away from speaking about what they see as theological truth, such as the belief that homosexuality is biblically unacceptable. (RNS PHOTO/Courtesy Skyline Church)

The IRS says tax-exempt organizations, or what they refer to as a 501(c)(3), are prohibited from participating in partisan campaigning for or against political candidates. Yet, despite what's in the rules, the agency continues to struggle to do anything about those who defy the law.

Although the regulation has been in place since 1954, in 2009, the U.S. District Court of Minnesota ruled the IRS no longer had the appropriate staff to investigate places of worship after a reorganization changed who in the agency had the authority to launch investigations.

New procedures for conducting church audits have been pending since 2009, which has left the IRS virtually impotent in conducting any kind of new investigations. The IRS did not respond to questions seeking comment.

Despite the lack of manpower, organizations such as Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian legal ministry that first launched "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" in 2008, say they take the IRS restriction seriously—even as they disagree with it.

"Every pastor and every church has the right to decide what their pastor preaches from the pulpit and to not have that dictated to them by the IRS," said Erik Stanley, senior legal counsel for the Arizona-based Alliance Defending Freedom, formerly the Alliance Defense Fund.

Jim Garlow, senior pastor at Skyline Wesleyan Church in La Mesa, Calif., asserted the prohibition has caused religious leaders to shy away from speaking about what they see as theological truth, such as the belief that homosexuality is biblically unacceptable.

"The line is being slid so fast, so far, that people no longer recognize authentic biblical preaching, and they're calling it political," he said.

Today's parishioners, he said, are starving for religious leaders to act as "the moral compass of society." Garlow said he's witnessed pastors who boldly speak on political issues receive standing ovations.

But Susan Russell, an associate pastor at All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, Calif., which the IRS investigated several years ago over a 2004 antiwar sermon it claimed was illegal, said churches should dedicate themselves to being robustly political without being partisan.

All Saints, for example, always has taken a stance on social justice issues such as war or the death penalty, but they do so, Russell said, without endorsing specific candidates.

Russell insisted pastors who participate in "Pulpit Freedom Sunday" may claim the movement is about freedom of religion and freedom of speech, but it's really an excuse to "jam theocracy down throats."

In response, the IRS has taken action in recent years, albeit sporadically.

In 1995, it revoked the tax-exempt status of the Church at Pierce Creek in New York, which had bought full-page newspaper ads opposing then-Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton.

In 2004, the IRS created the Political Activities Compliance Initiative, which investigated dozens of churches during the 2004, 2006 and 2008 election cycles.

According to recent surveys, most of the public—even most clergy—agree churches are not the place for politics.

A survey conducted last summer by the Pew Research Center found two in three Americans said churches and other houses of worship should not endorse one candidate over another; 27 percent said they should.

And nearly 90 percent of Protestant pastors believe they should not endorse candidates for public office from the pulpit, according to a recent survey conducted by Southern Baptist-affiliated LifeWay Research.

Nina Crimm and Laurence Winer, authors of the 2011 book Politics, Taxes, and the Pulpit, say most clergy don't know where the rule came from in the first place.

Lyndon B. Johnson, who was running for a U.S. Senate seat in Texas in 1954, introduced the rule as an attempt to silence nonprofit groups who opposed him; churches had nothing to do with it but were caught up with other tax-exempt groups.

One solution, Crimm and Winer say, is to make a slight accommodation to the existing rule, so that pastors are free to communicate any political idea internally with congregants but prohibited from broadcasting that message publicly, say on television.

For now, pastors participating in "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," some of whom sent their taped sermons to the IRS, know they are unlikely to get what they want—a reaction from the agency that leads to a lawsuit and a court ruling that the restriction is unconstitutional.

Either way, Stanley, of the Alliance Defending Freedom, says his side will win. Even if there is no lawsuit, the message is clear.

"There should be a separation between church and state," he said. "The government does not control what happens inside a church."

HOUSTON—East Texas Baptist University and Houston Baptist University have filed a lawsuit challenging the preventative services mandate in the Affordable Care Act.

The two Texas Baptist schools filed suit Oct. 9 in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas. Defendants named in the suit are the secretaries of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, U.S. Department of Labor and U.S. Department of the Treasury.

East Texas Baptist University President Dub Oliver testified before the Oversight and Government Reform Committee in Washington, D.C., in February.

It marks the 32nd legal challenge to the Health and Human Services mandate of the Affordable Care Act , popularly known as “Obamacare.”

At issue is a mandate that would require the faith-based universities to provide female employees all Food and Drug Administration-approved preventative birth-control methods—including “emergency contraception drugs” such as levonorgestral, known as  “Plan B” or the “morning-after pill,” and ulipristal, sometimes called “Ella” or the “week-after pill.”

Some medical experts differ regarding whether the FDA-approved drugs prevent fertilized eggs from implanting in the womb, or whether they simply delay ovulation. But the suit filed by ETBU and HBU takes the position the pills are “abortion-causing drugs” they cannot offer in good conscience.

“The mandate requires that the universities provide coverage or access to coverage for abortion-causing drugs and related education and counseling against their consciences in a manner that is contrary to law,” the lawsuit states.

The legal challenge asserts the Health and Human Services mandate violates the universities’ freedom of religion as secured in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993, and it also violates their First Amendment rights to free speech.

The suit maintains the government mandate unconstitutionally coerces the universities to violate deeply held religious beliefs under threat of heavy fines and penalty—reportedly more than $10 million per year per school if they fail to comply.

“Having to pay a fine to the taxing authorities for the privilege of practicing one’s religion or controlling one’s own speech is un-American, unprecedented and flagrantly unconstitutional,” the lawsuit states.

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty is representing ETBU and HBU in the suit.

“Baptists in America, by virtue of their history, are particularly sensitive to coercive government actions that infringe on religious liberty. America’s first Baptist leader, Roger Williams, had to flee Massachusetts and found a colony in Providence, Rhode Island, because his religious beliefs were not tolerated by the laws of Massachusetts. We shouldn’t have to fight for that same right today,” said Eric Rassbach, deputy general counsel for the Becket Fund in a public statement.

ETBU President Dub Oliver, who testified against the Health and Human Services mandate before the U.S. House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform in February, insisted the lawsuit seeks to preserve religious liberty and the freedom of faith-based schools to carry out their mission free from coercion.

“Baptists have always advocated religious liberty, and religious liberty is what is at stake in this situation,” Oliver said. “As the famous Baptist preacher George W. Truett once remarked, ‘A Baptist would rise at midnight to plead for absolute religious liberty for his Catholic neighbor, and for his Jewish neighbor and for everybody else.’ We are rising today to ensure that religious liberty, the first freedom guaranteed in the First Amendment of the United States Constitution, is protected and preserved.”

Robert Sloan, president of Houston Baptist University, echoed the sentiment.

“While we are always reluctant to enter into lawsuits, the government has given us no choice,” Sloan said. “Either we violate our conscience or give in to the administration’s heavy-handed attack on our religious freedom. We will not comply with this unconstitutional mandate, and we plead with our government to respect the liberties given by God and enunciated in the Bill of Rights.”

Hollyn Hollman, general counsel for the Baptist Joint Committee for Religious Liberty , noted the ETBU and HBU suit is “one of many” legal challenges brought by groups opposed to the Affordable Care Act—some of which already have been dismissed.  

“The issues presented in these cases are the subject of ongoing rule-making,” she added.