The facts are clear; the moral principles compelling. With the world looking to America as leaders of the genocide prevention movement, why has our government been unwilling to speak the simple truth?

The answer lies in Ankara. Successive U.S. administrations and sessions of Congress effectively granted Turkish leaders a veto on this issue, in the hope that Turkey might someday realize its potential as a modern secular democratic Muslim-majority nation – anchored to the West, incorporated into Europe, and a partner in NATO. Over the course of many decades, presidents deployed euphemisms and evasive terminology to avoid saying “Armenian Genocide” and Congressional leaders derailed resolutions commemorating this crime all in the expectation of some return down the road. This was a massive misguided investment of American moral capital in the U.S.-Turkey relationship.

Sadly, Ankara never reciprocated, and Erdogan turned away from the West. Since the failed coup of 2016, he has followed a markedly anti-American regional trajectory – undermining U.S. interests, antagonizing our allies, and attacking our core American values.  Erdogan’s unjust imprisonment of American Pastor Andrew Brunson stands out as a high-profile example of the offensive actions he has undertaken. Trump’s powerful response to Turkey’s hostage-taking – including his administration’s threats of crippling sanctions – freed Pastor Brunson. The president, ignoring the timid advice of the Washington, D.C. “establishment” to always treat Ankara with kid gloves, played hardball and got results, proving to the world that pressure works. But, sadly, Turkey returned to its bad habits, continuing with its record-breaking jailing of journalists, suppression of political dissent, and repression of religious liberty. Erdogan’s purchase of Russian S-400 missiles, over NATO objections, led to Turkey’s expulsion from the U.S.-lead F-35 program, widening the U.S.-Turkey rift.

In just the past few weeks, we’ve seen Erdogan double down on his anti-American trajectory, launching cross-border attacks on America’s Kurdish and Christian allies and committing atrocities against at-risk Christian civilians in northeast Syria, despite assurances he had given the Trump Administration.  

President Trump and Vice President Pence continue to seek constructive engagement with Ankara, even as Erdogan antagonizes America and our allies. As Erdogan drives the transformation of our bilateral relationship from an actual alliance to a more transactional type of arms-length partnership, we can and should put back on the table the long list of domestic and regional issues that we once set aside out of deference to a friendly nation. At the top of this list is Turkey’s largely unrecognized, entirely unpunished destruction of the Christian nations that had lived for thousands of years in their biblical-era homelands. It may have been politically expedient – if not morally justifiable – to remain silent about these crimes as long as Turkey was a reliable ally, but today, with Turkey clearly unreliable and obviously not an ally, we must make up for lost time, actively confronting Ankara’s lies and assertively seeking to end its obstruction of justice.

The United States should reject Ankara’s gag-rule and speak in the voice of the American people. We can do that by passing H.Res.296 and H.Res.150, bipartisan measures – strongly supported by our partners at the Armenian National Committee of America - that specifically cite the “campaign of genocide against Armenians, Greeks, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Syriacs, Arameans, Maronites, and other Christians.” Adoption of these measures, along with appropriate commemoration from the White House, will send a powerful signal to Erdogan that the United States is done covering up for Ankara’s crimes and will hold Turkey accountable for the crimes across Syria and inside its own borders.

Toufic Baaklini is a Lebanese-American with more than 30 years of business experience in finance and development. Baaklini is the president of In Defense of Christians and has committed years of service to preserving the historic Christian communities of the Middle East.

Reasons for their aquatic activities vary. Some like the art and architecture associated with the ancient faiths. Some like the ceremonial aspects–the liturgies, the veneration of icons, the Eucharist. Some like the history that oozes from Catholicism and Orthodoxy, a history that travels through great saints of yesteryear–through Augustine, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Gregory of Nazianzus–but goes largely forgotten in contemporary evangelicalism.

Church-switching among evangelicals has always been popular. It’s become even more so now that so much of the conservative Protestant world has fled so purposely from symbolic architecture and time-honored aesthetics, and has chosen to worship in big boxy rooms with giant worship screens, all-enveloping sound systems, and Chris Tomlin-wannabes singing from the stage. Catholicism and Orthodoxy certainly offer something different from what goes on in that environment.

But evangelicals interested in “swimming” to a different tradition should consider traversing a body of water much closer to home: the Mississippi River, on which is located St. Louis, Missouri, and the headquarters of the premier conservative Lutheran church body in America, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod.

Evangelicals who value tradition and history may not know that in conservative Lutheranism they will find the same critical elements of Christianity for which the Roman Catholic and Orthodox churches are known. Retaining membership in the true church, celebrating baptism and the Lord’s Supper in all their power, singing the historic liturgy–the very things many evangelicals seek when they turn to the east–are all found in conservative Lutheranism.

First, though, a word about the idea that in adopting the new faith, evangelicals move from an inferior entity to the real thing. Converts to Roman Catholicism frequently cite their desire to return to “original” Christianity, the “mother” church, which they equate with Catholicism. The Church of Rome asserts that if one wishes to most correctly follow Christ’s intention for the church, one joins the Roman Church–this is the form of church Jesus wanted his followers to inhabit. It is and has been the “true” church from the Council of Jerusalem described in Acts 15 to Vatican II, from Peter to Paul VI, and on to the current pope, Francis. Luther and the other Reformers broke away and started their own apostate institutions. That’s the view from the Vatican.

But Jesus does not lay out a proper form for his church. A true church, as limned in the New Testament, is one whose ministers teach the gospel purely and administer baptism and the Lord’s Supper rightly, according to Christ’s institution and mandate. That’s all. If your church does that–and the Missouri Synod hangs its hat on this directive–you belong to the true church.

Martin Luther, a monk in the Catholic Church of the fifteenth century and an official in what was considered the holy, apostolic church, did not break away from that church but renewed it to its previous position. He reversed the heresies of the previous couple of centuries and brought the one holy church back in line. Rome chose not to heed the rediscovery of the biblical gospel.

Also appealing to evangelicals making the move east are the ceremonies of Catholicism and Orthodoxy. Lutheranism is sacramental as well; it narrowed the Catholic seven sacraments to two–the two instituted in Scripture, which are baptism and the Eucharist–but left intact their power to remove sins. Luther did not allow them to be interpreted representationally, as others in the Reform did. Thus, they are termed “means of grace”: spiritual vehicles whereby sins are forgiven. Like Catholics and Orthodox believers, we hold to the real presence in the Lord’s Supper, that Christ is physically present in the elements, and to the sacramental power of this means of grace–our sins are actually forgiven in the eating and drinking.

Other rituals were either retained or abandoned on the basis of Scripture. One such is the historic liturgy. You probably won’t find full-on smells and bells in conservative Lutheran churches, but our pastors wear robes and there’s plenty of stand-up-sit-down in our services. Luther kept the historic liturgy in his renewal of the church, both because it did not run counter to Scripture and because the people were accustomed to it, enriched by it, and comforted by it. It was their vehicle for accessing the gospel.

The hymnals used by conservative Lutheran churches feature this centuries-old historic liturgy, much of which harks back to the biblical witness. They also contain the millennia-old ecumenical creeds, one of which is confessed every Sunday, and the books are organized around the liturgical calendar–from Advent to Pentecost–which rehearses, yearly, the entire history of salvation.

Historically, Lutheranism has contributed significantly to the beautiful and meaningful music that makes up those hymnals. Luther himself wrote dozens of hymns; the most famous Lutheran hymn writer, Paul Gerhardt, is among the all-time great sacred poets. His hymns, as well as the best of Charles Wesley, Isaac Watts, Catherine Winkworth, among many others, highlight our worship. Many of the faith’s most inspirational and meaningful hymns were spawned by the Reformation, which period of church history is not exactly favored by Rome and Constantinople.

From Luther onward, Lutherans have boasted a history of congregational singing. In Roman Catholic churches, the hymnals stay in the pew racks while a cantor at a microphone dominates the sound. Orthodox parishioners chant and sing the liturgy, but don’t sing too many hymns. Congregational singing is such an uplifting part of the faith, and zesty singing by the people is an integral part of Lutheran worship.

When you swim the Tiber, you are not vacating an inadequate, imperfect form of Christianity for the true, historic version instituted by Christ himself. You are not switching teams; you are, at best, merely switching positions on the same team or, at worst, trading a biblical iteration of church for a version that lifts the opinion of human beings above the clear word of Scripture.

Conservative Lutheranism retains the Bible as the sole religious authority. Certainly, the Bible plays a role in Catholicism and Orthodoxy, but it isn’t the supreme authority in doctrine and practice. When the Bible is forced off center stage, bowing to tradition or reason, the door is opened to theological error. The history of the Church of Rome is replete with examples of this.

Conservative Lutherans also believe Scripture to be sufficient for salvation. Simple, clear faith need not be augmented by rituals (fasting, or even attending church) and beliefs (intercession of saints, the immaculate conception of Mary, etc.) not required by the Bible. We also hold that Scripture is clear enough that all Christians can read it and benefit from it; we need not “ask Father” to interpret every little thing.

Before evangelicals jump into the Tiber or the Bosporus in their quest for true Christian faith, they might want to consider swimming the Mississippi. It’s muddy, true, but it’s closer to home, in more ways than one.

At the CNN LGBTQ Town Hall on October 10, among the claims discussed was the supposed incompatibility of religious liberty and LGBTQ equality. As is often the case with this issue, the moderators and candidates focused their attention and indignation on the autonomy of religious institutions. Recent high-profile cases in this area involve religious schools, adoption and foster care agencies, and businesses as they encounter local and state laws that prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI).

Presidential candidates, by necessity, must present arguments in abbreviated form, so they can be forgiven for failing to address every moral, legal, and policy nuance at play here. What was striking, however, was the extent to which the candidates saw no need for nuance at all.

Consider this sample of responses.

When asked about the juxtaposition of religious freedom and LGBTQ rights, Senator Cory Booker said, “I cannot allow, as a leader, that people are going to use religion as a justification of discrimination.”

When asked whether “religious institutions like colleges, churches, and charities” should lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage, Beto O’Rourke responded, “Yes.” He continued, “There can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break for any institution or organization in America that denies the full human rights and full civil rights of every single one of us.”

While O’Rourke’s response has rightly received widespread attention, Mayor Pete Buttigieg’s comments are just as important. He addressed a similar question by saying, “Religious liberty is an important principle in this country and we honor that. But it’s also the case that any freedom we honor in this country has limits when it comes to harming other people.” The relationship between discrimination and harm requires further examination.

All people and institutions discriminate on a regular basis—i.e., they make distinctions based on certain criteria. The moral question is whether those criteria are appropriate in a given case. The legal question is whether one of the criteria implicates a protected class. As one of us wrote in 2012, and then argued at a conference at Harvard Law School in 2014, “It is not ‘discrimination’ that is wrong… it is wrongful discrimination that is wrong.” Mission-driven organizations of all kinds discriminate regularly. Planned Parenthood would not hire a pro-life Muslim as its director. The Sierra Club would not invite a climate-change-denier to serve on its board of directors. No one objects to these acts of discrimination. Similarly, for religious institutions, some acts of discrimination can be properly understood as exercises of careful and constitutionally protected discernment based on their deeply held religious convictions.

For many Muslim, Jewish, and Christian institutions, for example, beliefs about human sexuality and marriage are rooted in Scripture and have been established for millennia. Challenges arise in the context of SOGI nondiscrimination laws when the expressions and conduct associated with the underlying identities are contrary to those religious beliefs and yet are themselves placed within the scope of these laws’ protections. No presidential candidate on stage at the LGBTQ Town Hall made any attempt to address this issue.

The harms to which Mayor Buttigieg alluded are often not imposed by, but instead are imposed on, the religious actor. Consider, for example, a recent case involving Catholic Social Services (CSS) and the City of Philadelphia: the city suspended the placement of foster children through CSS because it would not place children with same-sex couples. While there are other means available to accommodate same-sex couples in Philadelphia, there is no accommodation available for CSS. Compelling CSS either to forsake its religious commitments or terminate its foster care services exacts a form of harm on CSS, and the many needy children the organization serves, for which there is no remedy. If CSS receives no legal relief, it has two alternatives: abandon its religious calling to serve children in need or abandon its religious convictions about the nature of marriage and the best interests of children. Either one imposes an extraordinarily high cost on CSS and the children it serves. Same-sex couples may be offended or hurt by CSS’s policy, but they may seek another provider that enables them to achieve their goal of fostering children.

The legal outcome of this and other cases in this area will depend on applicable law in the relevant jurisdiction and, of course, the fact-pattern of each case. But we must also ask the prior cultural question of why people are filing these cases in the first place. What are the perceptions of harms that lead many to believe that a legal resolution is needed? Recognizing the actual nature and distribution of harms in these cases would be a good start. Religious institutions must not be forced to choose between abandoning their religious calling or abandoning their religious convictions; to compel such a choice constitutes a profound harm.

It would certainly help if the 2020 presidential candidates who recently took the stage would at least take a moment to acknowledge – along with Justice Anthony Kennedy writing for the majority in Obergefell – that many who uphold a traditional understanding of marriage do so on “decent and honorable religious or philosophical premises.”

Richard W. Garnett is the Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Corporation Professor of Law, Concurrent Professor of Political Science, and founding director of Notre Dame Law School’s Program on Church, State, and Society. Garnett teaches and writes about the freedoms of speech, association, and religion and constitutional law more generally.

Nathan A. Berkeley is the Communications Director and Research Coordinator with the Religious Freedom Institute, a non-profit based in Washington, D.C. that is committed to achieving broad acceptance of religious liberty as a fundamental human right, the cornerstone of a successful society, and a source of national and international security.

I was in the foster care system for five and a half years before I aged out of the system, but I was blessed by a church and community that embodied James 1:27. Thanks to them, I'm not explicitly affected by these statistics. There's more work to be done to help those currently or formerly in the foster care system. November is National Adoption Awareness Month, and regardless of whether adoption is the right decision for you or your family, I hope that my story leads you to consider the ways the ministry of adoption can bless you and others.

In my final foster home, my foster mother reflected the love of Christ, took me to church, and answered my persistent questions about religion, Christianity, and God. It was through her ministry and many other circumstances that I came to believe Christ to be Lord over my life.

After I turned eighteen, I moved out of that home. Though I experienced homelessness after emancipating out of the foster care system, someone always provided me with a place to lay my head at night. I slept in basements covered in mold that caused me to have intense allergic reactions, on cold floors snuggled up to borrowed space heaters, and in overcrowded beds I occasionally fell off of, but it was better than sleeping under a cold bridge. 

I tried my best not to complain about my lack of comfortable sleep, but when my church community asked, I told them the truth about my situation. In the meantime, my relationship with my biological mom was distant due to her mental illness and the past abuse I endured, and she became jealous of the closeness I gained with various members of the church. Out of spite, my mom threatened to hurt them and their families if they offered me a place to live. Despite the threats, a graceful woman, Tonya, opened her home to me. For the rest of my senior year of high school, as I finished my academics and track season, I slept in a warm bed and safe house. 

My relationship with Tonya and her family grew and I experienced a sweet belonging. From my biological family, I learned what unhealthy patterns and negative behaviors I wanted to avoid in my own future family. But I only knew what I did not want. I didn,t know what godliness or how to create healthy patterns in relationships. As I lived with Tonya's family, I observed her kind and gentle example as a Christian, wife, and mother. I gained knowledge about what I hoped for in my marriage and family and saw firsthand what it means to be a woman of God.

Though many people in the community told me I would fall into the saddening statistics of foster care, my coach, a father figure in my life, not only helped me get a job, but reassured me that I was not a statistic. He constantly expressed that I was capable of winning the state track meet and attending college on a track scholarship, although I had never been to the state championship individually before. With his constant encouragement and help, I became a five time state champion and attained a full ride scholarship.

I found a loving community who demonstrated the love of Christ, but there are many people like me who still need support. According to the Adoption Network, there are 107,918 foster children waiting to be adopted. We can all agree that children deserve a safe and permanent home with a loving family. I strongly advocate for adoption because of the mental and physical stability it offers vulnerable children, but it is crucial to emphasize that the ministry of adoption is broader than permanent custody. And if we view the ministry of adoption with a wider vision, we can see that God blesses each of us differently through adoption, whether it is through foster care, mentorship, or other means.

I know the idea of becoming a foster parent can seem heartbreaking. The objective of foster care, oftentimes, is to reunify children with their parents. I hear people say all the time, "I just couldn't give them back. I'm scared I will get too attached." 

I try to respond in a gentle tone, "But isn't it scarier that these kids live without the love a family, that they may never experience the example of a healthy family model, and that they might never know or experience the love of Christ? That's so scary to me." As Christians, we should be more concerned about children's salvations and livelihoods than about our broken hearts. That is Christ-like sacrifice. 

But not everyone is called to foster or adopt children, and while some struggle to understand this, it should serve as an opportunity to do good in other, perhaps more meaningful, ways. The people who impacted my life the most never legally adopted me nor did they give me care packages or bags to pack my belongings in. Vulnerable youth need an army of willing people, not material things to make up for the losses they've had. Coaches, moms, dads, wives, husbands, teachers, and business owners in the Church, who educated themselves about the risks of vulnerable youth, discipled me through godly example, and encouraged me by consistently speaking truth into my life. The ministry of adoption and "care for orphans" is broader than legal adoption. 

As The Father adopted each of us to receive His unmerited favor, we can offer a glimpse of His grace and love through committing ourselves to the education of vulnerable youth and offering the services and gifts God has lavished each of us individually, whether it is through permanent custody, temporary care, mentorship, or continuing on in our own lives so that a child who has never seen Christ may catch a glimpse of Him through us. James 1:27 is a ministry we are all called to embody, maybe through legal and permanent adoption, or maybe by some other way that God has for you to show love to those in distress.

Tori Petersen is a wife, mom, and writer residing in Minnesota. Having grown up in the foster care system, she uses her story to inspire and inform others about the foster and adoptive community. You can follow Tori on Instagram at @torihopepetersen or on her blog at TorisStoris.wordpress.com.

Sadly, as Jewish Americans celebrate their most holy days, discrimination is an ever-burning bush, often at the hands of government officials.

On Rosh Hashanah, the U.S. Department of Justice issued a Statement of Interest in a religious discrimination case in upstate New York. The defendant, the Village of Airmont, has a 30-year history of anti-Semitic hostility. The Village’s discriminatory zoning policies blocking Orthodox Jewish residents from worshiping in their own homes have been the subject of civil rights lawsuits spanning five different presidential administrations. One of those lawsuits ended with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit concluding that the impetus to form the Village and implement its zoning code was “not a legitimate nondiscriminatory reason but rather an animosity toward Orthodox Jews as a group.”

This animosity has spread to the local school district, Suffern Central, which still refuses to provide students at a Jewish day school with transportation and special education services despite state policies that require them to do so. The District publicly commented that it did not want to support sectarian schools that believed in the separate education of boys and girls, a central Jewish religious belief.

First Liberty Institute is defending several of Airmont’s Jewish residents in an ongoing federal lawsuit against the Village. We are assisting in another lawsuit against Suffern Central School District.

The U.S. Constitution’s Free Exercise Clause demands that the government be neutral to religious institutions and individuals. The Supreme Court is clear that if the government “is to respect the Constitution’s guarantee of free exercise, [it] cannot impose regulations that are hostile to the religious beliefs of affected citizens and cannot act in a manner that passes judgment upon or presupposes the illegitimacy of religious beliefs and practices.” In fact, “when the government fails to act neutrally toward the free exercise of religion… [it] can prevail only if it satisfies strict scrutiny, showing that its restrictions on religion both serve a compelling interest and are narrowly tailored.” Further, federal law also demands that the government is neutral towards religion in decisions regarding land use, including residences.

It is vital to tame government bigotry because when the government exercises religious animosity, it gives tacit permission to the general population to act accordingly. According to a recent study from the Pew Research Center, from 2007 to 2017 religious restrictions in the United States more than doubled. In tandem, according to the FBI, crimes against Jewish individuals and institutions now constitute 58% of religiously-motivated crimes in this country.

Rabbi Netanel Louie has lived it. He leads the Hebrew Discovery Center, a small Orthodox Jewish synagogue near Los Angeles, California that has endured multiple acts of violence and property damage in recent years. Once, when Rabbi Louie reported the vandalism to the police, one of the accused vandals sued the Rabbi for filing a police report! Adding insult to injury, a California judge ordered the Rabbi to pay more than $6000 to the vandal. First Liberty defended Rabbi Louie, freeing him from the unfair judgment. But the vandalism against his synagogue has continued.

Congregation Toras Chaim (CTC), a small Orthodox Jewish congregation in Dallas, Texas, has been meeting in a home since 2013, much like others who meet in their homes for a Bible study, small group meeting, game night, or book club. For several years, CTC was denied a certificate of occupancy by the city and faced several lawsuits, including demands that it have a specific number of parking spaces – for a congregation that is prohibited from driving on its sabbath. During the process of seeking the permit, the Rabbi faced local hostility, including having a swastika painted on his car by vandals. After an arduous legal battle that lasted nearly six years, Dallas officials relented and now the members of CTC and its families are allowed to freely meet and worship.

During their high holy days, the members of CTC and the other Jewish worshippers across the nation also no doubt celebrated Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year in Judaism. For most Americans, the day likely passed unnoticed, and that’s too bad. Also known as the Day of Atonement, one of its central themes is personal repentance.

Given the hostility toward free religious worship exhibited by local government officials in New York, California, and Texas, perhaps it’s time they do some repenting of their own.

Keisha Russell is Counsel to First Liberty Institute, a non-profit law firm dedicated to defending religious freedom for all. Read more at FirstLiberty.org.

This week, a new report was released from the Interfaith Diversity Experiences and Attitudes Longitudinal Survey (IDEALS) on the effects of interworldview friendships — those made across religious, nonreligious, and spiritual differences — on American college students.

According to the report (Friendships Matter: The Role of Peer Relationships in Interfaith Learning and Development), when it comes to preparing college students for living in our diverse society, interworldview friendships have an effect beyond other impactful college conditions and experiences, such as a welcoming campus climate, support to freely express one’s worldview, and challenging encounters with diverse peers. Close friendships with peers of differing beliefs play an especially important role in enhancing students’ general openness to those who hold worldviews different than their own.

For instance, the findings also revealed that, in some cases, gaining a close interworldview friend doubles the percentage of first-year students who are highly appreciative of the worldview of their new friend. What’s more, researchers discovered an overall effect in which students in interworldview friendships also generally developed positive attitudes toward others of all worldviews, not just the ones held by their friends. For example, making a close Buddhist friend encourages students to become generally more appreciative of other worldviews at the same time, such as Evangelical Christians, atheists, Hindus, Jews, Latter-day Saints, and Muslims.

College seems to be an ideal place to make these diverse, interworldview friendships: 64% of surveyed students who reported having no interworldview friendships when they began college reported making at least one within their first year. In fact, 20% among this group reported making five or more friends across worldview differences in that time. However, it can be easy to unconsciously fall into familiar patterns of making like-minded and religiously-similar friends, a habit that the report recommends intentionally disrupting. 

Eboo Patel, the Founder and President of Interfaith Youth Core, has cited the report as a positive sign of things to come: “Though our nation is becoming more diverse in every possible way, there are too many examples of difference being divisive rather than constructively engaged. A report like this shows that another way is possible – that friendships really matter, that campuses can facilitate positive interactions that lead to lasting relationships, and that all of this can strengthen our diverse democracy.”

While college students consistently making friends across worldviews is by no means as controversial or groundbreaking as, say, befriending Ku Klux Klan members to change their racist ideology, it is a good sign for the future of our society: the building of understanding and empathy across historically-entrenched lines is undeniably progress, and the positive effects are real.

IDEALS followed a cohort of students who attended 122 diverse American colleges and universities between 2015 and 2019, tracking changes in interfaith learning and development—as well as trends in their friendships—over time. The new report, Friendships Matter: The Role of Peer Relationships in Interfaith Learning and Development, reflects 7,194 students who responded to the first two waves of IDEALS at the beginning of their first year in college (2015) and at the conclusion of their first year (2016).

Gordon Maples is a PhD student in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University, where he serves as a Research Associate for IDEALS (@GordonMaples)

Kevin Singer is a PhD student in Educational Leadership, Policy, and Human Development at North Carolina State University, where he serves as a Research Associate for IDEALS (@kevinsinger0)

Alyssa Rockenbach is a Professor of Higher Education at North Carolina State University and Co-Principal Investigator on IDEALS (@ANRockenbach)

Tara Hudson is Assistant Professor of Higher Education Administration at Kent State University (@tarahudsonphd)

Matthew Mayhew is the William Ray and Marie Adamson Flesher Professor of Educational Administration at The Ohio State University and Co-Principal Investigator on IDEALS (@MattJMayhewPhD)

Often “nationalism” is condemned as a growing reactionary force of populism in America and Europe. “Christian nationalism” is commonly attached to religious conservatives supposedly conflating America with Christianity. “National conservatism” was articulated by a recent Washington, D.C., confab where prominent thinkers of the right touted a new politics stressing cultural renewal and national identity over free markets and high immigration.

Responding to this controversy is a conversation we hosted at the National Press Club in Washington, DC on October 8 about “God, America, & Nationalism.” The “we” is Providence: A Journal of Christianity & American Foreign Policy, which helps religious people and others think seriously about America’s identity and global duties. 

“The American people are not a tribe bound by blood, but neither are they simply a group of people who share a common ideology,” noted Wall Street Journal columnist Walter Russell Mead, who keynoted our conference. America is both a creed and a real people, bound together by history and customs, vices and virtues.

And contrary to many Christians and others who only want to apologize for America, it is, in fact, okay to like and even love America, Mead noted. It is the community where God placed us to serve Him. We as the American people have a common destiny, fraught with possibilities, both good and bad, in our fallen and also grace-filled world. 

Our perspective at Providence is Christian Realism, often tied to the great 20th century Protestant thinker Reinhold Niebuhr. He advocated skepticism, infused by hope, stressing humanity is fallen, precluding utopia, but confident in God’s redemptive plans.  

Central to our purpose is understanding that God cares not just for individuals or religious groups but also for nations, including America. Many critics are conflating any claims about spiritual purpose for our country with “Christian nationalism.” No doubt some religious people idolatrously revere America. Some Christians think a true American must be Christian. Fortunately, they are in the minority.

“Christian nationalists” are highlighted as sinister. But most patriotic religious people are not idolaters. They just love their country. Yet they often have not received proper counsel on how to do so within the careful parameters of their faith. 

Getting less publicity is a growing segment of religious people indifferent or disdainful of America. Some conservative Christians think America has become so decadent, especially on sexuality issues, that it no longer merits support. They despondently prefer an inward focus on church and local community. 

Some liberal Christians also believe America is bad and always has been, citing racism, economic inequality, and unjust wars. For them, any kind of patriotism contravenes genuine faith. Christians shouldn’t support the nation, since the church has no borders.

We at Providence reject these extremes. Christians who conflate America with Christianity are mistaken. Central to America’s greatness is that our laws equally regard all persons regardless of faith. And for Christians, the cross stands above the flag.

Christians who have abandoned hope for America are also wrong. Our country is sinful, as all countries are. Conservatives are rightly concerned about moral confusion and hyper individualism. But our nation remains undeservedly blessed, with a resilient capacity to overcome our failures. Christians everywhere are always called to be good citizens and seek the common good, not to despair and retreat.

We at Providence disagree with Christians and others who reject America and nation states. The church, and other faiths, are universal. But Christianity, like other faiths, teaches that God has purposes for nations as communities nurturing the common good. Alternatives to nations are empires or tribes, neither of which offer peace, prosperity, and justice more than nations. America, despite many failures, has offered unprecedented freedom, prosperity, and equality. We should be grateful while always striving to improve.  

Supporters of the new “national conservatism” share our commitment to national improvement. Their voices are diverse. But some among them reject the classical liberalism of the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the wider Anglo-American political tradition traceable to the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Some believe America’s Founders, or many of them, were simply wrong. These critics usually don’t articulate a political alternative for America.

We at Providence affirm the best of America’s political traditions, including our founding charters of liberty. Christian Realism knows there never was a golden era. Humanity, since the Garden of Eden, has always been sinful. But God is mercifully working in the world and among nations, even in America. 

The Declaration’s affirmation that “all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,” comes from the Hebrew prophets and Christian apostles. The Declaration’s affirmation is America’s sacred gift to the world, as Hong Kong’s American flag-waving demonstrators understand. 

Not all of us at Providence agree about “nationalism” as a word or as a comprehensive political philosophy that Christianity can fully embrace. Catholic teaching affirms the “rights of nations” without endorsing nationalism per se. 

Some of us at Providence believe patriotism is an adequate descriptor without the historical baggage of nationalism. Others of us think nationalism is the only adequate available term to describe belief in the utility of nation states in providing for the common good.

Providence hopes our October 8 “God, America, & Nationalism” event, which included Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish thinkers, will help generate a deeper understanding of America’s spiritual self-understanding for the uplift of America and the world. 

If people of faith can’t offer helpful spiritual and moral counsel about how to think about nationalism, then who can?

Mark Tooley is the president of The Institute on Religion and Democracy and the co-editor of Providence Journal.

The case is R. G. and G. R. Harris Funeral Homes, Inc. v. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. If the court rules in the EEOC’s favor, it will change the meaning of the word “sex” that has stood in federal nondiscrimination law since 1964 to include “gender identity.”

 For those unfamiliar with the case, here’s a little background.

In 2007, the funeral home hired a funeral director named Anthony Stephens. As part of the job, Stephens accepted the funeral home’s professional codes of conduct, which included a dress code. Almost six years later, Stephens began to openly identify as transgender, and announced a plan to follow the women’s dress code, including wearing skirts and dresses. When the employer objected, Stephens filed a discrimination complaint, which the Supreme Court will hear tomorrow.

Franciscan University of Steubenville, of which I am the president, has joined a friend of the court (amicus) brief to help the high court understand how a new interpretation of the word “sex” in non-discrimination law will violate religious freedom and put women at risk. Which—make no mistake—it will do. If “sex” is conflated with “gender identity,” universities like Franciscan may no longer be able to maintain sex-specific sleeping facilities, bathrooms, and locker rooms. Our medical facilities could be compelled to provide religiously objectionable medical procedures. And biological men would be in competition with women for athletic roster spots and scholarships.

All this concerns me. Nothing, however, concerns me more than the Supreme Court slapping a label on people that has nothing to do with who they really are.

This whole topic of transgenderism is shrouded in confusion, chaos, and darkness. Franciscan doesn’t want to see anyone treated with anything less than respect and love. At the same time, making a protected class of people who struggle with their biological sex or gender identity isn’t the answer. It just perpetuates the confusion.

Nobody—not you, not me, not anyone—can find peace outside of a relationship with God. That relationship is what defines the human person. That relationship tells us who we are. That’s why the real identity crisis of our day isn’t about sex or gender. It’s about Jesus. So many people have forgotten they are created in God’s image and likeness. If people don’t know this, they struggle with their dignity and worth. They struggle with that most basic question: Who am I?

In Matthew 16, Jesus asks his disciples, “But who do you say I am?” He puts the same question to us today. The answer we give, though, is about more than his identity. It’s about our identity.

To know Jesus as Savior, Lord, Brother, and Friend is also to know that we are his living image, loved eternally by him. And to know that—to know who we are and how we’re loved—changes everything. It changes how we see ourselves. It changes how we see others. And it changes how we see God. It also changes how we live. It reorders our priorities and helps us love others as God loves us.

This is why the great task of the world and the devil has always been to cause an identity crisis. Satan wants us to forget who we are and find our identity elsewhere—in what we do, what we possess, how we look, or who we love. 

So, of course, there is confusion. Of course, people define themselves by who they find attractive or the size of their bank account or the number of followers they have on social media.

This isn’t new, though. It’s been happening since the Garden of Eden. The first thing Adam and Eve did after the Fall was hide from God. They saw who they were, and they didn’t like it, so they ran from the only One who could heal them. Men and women have been doing the same ever since.

Each of us needs to fight this temptation individually, in our own lives. But we also need to fight it corporately, as a community, especially when it’s our government contributing to this identity crisis.

Franciscan University can’t stand by and watch our nation’s highest court sanction this self-destructive human habit. It’s not healthy. It’s not loving. It’s not helpful. Not for our students and employees and not for the men and women struggling with their identity, who need truth and grace, not more confusion. 

As St. Francis of Assisi said, what we are before God is what we are and nothing else. Let us join in prayer that we look to the only One who defines who we are. Let us pray for our court, and pray for all those the court’s ruling will affect. This case is about so much more than bathrooms or religious freedom. It’s about who we are.

Father Dave Pivonka, TOR, serves as president of Franciscan University of Steubenville.

Strongmen—like President Trump— embody traditional masculinity. They also act to spread it among their followers. Evangelicalism has lacked the patriarch it needs to direct the lives of its young men ever since YRR’s most prominent pastor, Mark Driscoll, fell from grace. But then Jordan Peterson came along.

Peterson has found an audience among religious people; this is in spite of the fact that he is not religious. Commentators and outlets such as David Brooks, Christianity Today and the Gospel Coalition have spoken positively of Peterson. Peterson’s ideological similarities to evangelicals might explain this appeal. At the height of his popularity, Driscoll’s stated beliefs and hyper-masculine persona exemplified many cherished values within mainstream evangelicalism, which allowed him to amass a large following of Evangelicals in the mid-2000s to the early 2010s.

Historian Molly Worthen writes that evangelicals are attracted to strongmen as leaders because they are attracted to leaders that provoke their emotions, not their intellect. Since the second Great Awakening, white evangelicals have been drawn to charismatic leaders that have emphasized ecstasy and piety. Driscoll developed a following in Seattle, Washington at his church Mars Hill through both his confrontational preaching style and his promotion of a muscular Christianity. Peterson also fits this strongman archetype. He developed a following through his fatherly YouTube videos, and gained wider fame when he refused to use gender neutral pronouns as required by the University of Toronto, where Peterson taught Psychology. Both of these men promoted the traditional family model, going against the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the liberal cities where they lived. The Gospel Coalition says Peterson “represents a secular revolt against the bastions of secularism [namely universities].” According to white evangelicals, Driscoll and Peterson stand up to the pernicious forces of political correctness and its advocates.

Anthropologist Jessica Johnson explains that Driscoll—and Evangelicals in general—wanted young men to follow traditional masculinity. Strongmen exemplify hyper masculine ideals. Driscoll called modern young men “boys who can shave,” suggesting that they look like adults but behave like children. He also equated these young men to Peter Pan; they don’t want to grow up, start a family, and take responsibility for themselves. Driscoll wanted men to mature and take headship of their households and society. Peterson also tries to teach young men the value of traditional masculinity. According to Peterson, women want a man who can take care of them, because they’re vulnerable when children come along and they want “someone competent to support mother and child when that becomes necessary.” He suggests women want men “who brings to the table something they can’t already provide.” (Emphasis added) Men need to toughen up, so they can live up to Peterson’s secular complementarianism. Evangelicals flock to this message because they view men as the pillars of the family, the Church, and the larger society, so men need to be strong to fulfill these roles.

Evangelicals’ strongman mentality and their hyper masculinity feed into their desire to blame men (yes, it’s usually men) for society’s problems and not social structures, according to sociologist James Hunter. Driscoll embodied this rugged individualism. The pastor stated, “Real men carry their own load,” and they don’t look to others to carry it for them. Peterson claims transferring the blame for one’s problems from oneself to society produced the Soviet Union and causes school shootings. Peterson also claims someone should ask himself if he has “taken full advantage of the opportunities offered” to him before blaming society for his problems. Evangelicals heed this warning. Sociologists like Michael Emerson and Christian Smith show that evangelicals tend to think the way to change someone’s poor circumstances is to change their thoughts and values; telling them to focus on social structures won’t help them–or worse, it will hurt.   

Peterson shows how a secular leader can appeal to Evangelicals despite not being religious. Like Peterson, President Trump isn’t particularly religious, at least not by traditional Evangelical standards, but has developed a following among this religious group. Peterson and Trump are both viewed as friendly to their cause, and Evangelicals view Trump as a defender of their values who rams his head against political correctness. For these reasons, Eric Metaxas, Jerry Falwell Jr., and Robert Jeffress have been loyal supporters of Trump. The President also represents the form of hyper masculinity that evangelicals value. In the age of Driscoll, you had to be religious to capture the Evangelical imagination. Now, it seems Evangelicals will cling to any manly man who will defend their values in the age of Peterson and Trump.

Kenneth E. Frantz is a Religious Studies major at the University of Oklahoma. His work has been featured on Real Clear Religion. Twitter: @KennethEthanFr1

Samuel L. Perry is an assistant professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on the changing dynamics of religion, family, and politics in the United States. Dr. Perry has published for the Washington Post and the Huffington Post. Twitter: @socofthesacred

9/11/2001 was a Tuesday, and by the week’s end I was in Montreal, having traveled there by train. The hotel was close by McGill University, and my room overlooked its football stadium. An Alouettes’ game was about to kickoff, and I was startled when the announcer asked the crowd to join in singing “God Bless America.” It was a big crowd, and not only did they sing, they stood to do so. Every verse.

Tears well up as I write this now; in the hotel that day, I wept.

People tend to underestimate what even small gestures can mean to the grieving. But this wasn’t small, nor merely a gesture. Nearly two decades hence, I still can’t express how precious it was, and is, to me.

It went like that for the week I was there. Virtually every time someone asked where I was from, no sooner were the words “New York City” out of my mouth than the convention of such occasions instantly fell away. Invariably, the person would look into my eyes and, with palpable sincerity, offer a version of “I am so sorry.” Often a hand would reach out in an instinctive contact of compassion.

In those moments, with words unable to pass the knot in my throat, I could do little more than nod with gratitude.

All too quickly, we “recovered” from the grief that, like a balm, softened and soothed our common coarseness, and today we’re more fractious and inflamed than on 9/11 Eve.

“Proud to be an American” has long-seemed a poor way to put what is true for me – and hopefully most: I am grateful to be an American, and one born and raised in New York City to boot.These days I live in Canada – another fact I report not with pride, but thanksgiving.

More than a few Canadians of my acquaintance like talking smack about their Southern Cousin. I prefer to view it as a kind of sport. And yet, I fear that, over time, it could become a habit. And a habit, once ingrained, can be hard to break. Can, in fact, become a hardness in itself.

On this anniversary, I mourn an obscenity that’s proved an ominous turning point. I remember also a candle – burning bright on the altar of my heart – and the Canadians whose kindness lit it.

Tim Kelleher, former New Media Editor for First Things, wrote and directed that journal's first film, "The Creed: What Christians Profess, and Why It Ought to Matter"

Last October, Siobhan O’Connor, former executive assistant to Buffalo’s Bishop Richard Malone, went on “60 Minutes” to reveal a long pattern of sexual abuse by priests and cover-up of the same by Malone. She was absolutely devastating, not only in her immaculate mastery of the damning documentation she released, but also in her transparently selfless and humble desire not to seek glory for herself but to root out corruption in a church she obviously loves. Still, sad to say, her efforts have not been effective as the revelations have continued to unfold over the last eleven months, each one, improbably, worse than the one before.

Since late August, when  I last wrote about the Buffalo scene, things have gotten even worse. Revelations have continued to pour forth about cover-up of not only past but present abuses, and not just in parishes, but also in the diocesan seminary and chancery. Reports are emerging even this month of yet more abuses which the bishop deliberately chose to ignore, preferring instead to hide behind the huge fence he’s built at the lavish new house he found for himself after reluctantly parting with an even larger mansion. We have seen seminarians resign because of this and openly denounce the seminary and bishop. Now we have no less than the bishop’s secretary reporting he was sexually assaulted by a priest while he was a seminarian, and recording the bishop’s reaction to it on tape. But then it has also quickly emerged that this same secretary was himself involved in a relationship with a seminarian who left the seminary because he was being sexually harassed by another priest.

One needs updates every hour to this evolving cast of characters, as well as a chart showing who is connected to whom to keep it all straight. But amidst it all stands one man whom everybody clearly understands must resign, though he still seems not to have grasped the severity of the situation. That man is, of course, Bishop Richard Malone. Like the Soviet leaders in Ukraine and Moscow in 1986 who, as Chernobyl began to melt down, frantically sought to keep the crisis quiet, Malone and the other bishops are standing around as the disaster unfolds, doing nothing–except hoping nobody blames them.

Malone clearly thinks he can count on the old strategy used by almost all bishops everywhere, until recently: just knuckle down and ride this latest storm out. His brother bishops also hope for such an outcome, believing that if they turn a blind eye to their brother’s failings, he will extend them the same courtesy and business can go on as usual. Perhaps the most significant of these people is Malone’s metropolitan (ie., supposed supervisor, albeit in a very weak sense) in New York City, Timothy Cardinal Dolan. Christopher White of Crux has been in contact with Dolan and the papal nuncio in Washington to confirm that neither they nor anybody else is doing anything about Malone.

Thus, we see that the new provisions for such a scenario as this, put into canon law by Pope Francis in May, are useless as no bishop wants to get the ball rolling. Shortly after this legal change came in a document called “Vos Estis” that was approved by Pope Francis, I argued that these new provisions were worthless because they relied on bishops to police each other. So far, unfortunately, my prediction has been proven entirely correct. Perhaps I was too much like Soviet officials in April 1986, speaking softly after initial reports so as to not upset the locals or attract too much attention and create a panic. Perhaps I was (uncharacteristically) too restrained, too polite, or even too unclear last May.

Since then, I have made presentations across the country on my book, “Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power,” and every time I do so I have discovered time and time again that every group of Catholics of every age and in every region is utterly fed up. These findings need now to be broadcast to bishops, including the bishop of Rome, in the most uncomfortably stentorian tones:

Bishops! None of you has any trust left when it comes to handling sex abuse cases.

Bishops! Nobody trusts anything you say about this crisis.

Bishops! Catholics everywhere are convinced that you all have something to hide.

Bishops! Catholics watch your refusal to do anything about Buffalo and elsewhere (West Virginia, etc.) and conclude you are contemptible cowards covering each other’s backs—not watching out for the welfare of the flock. You are wolves, not shepherds.

Bishops! Until and unless you consider doing what your Australian confreres are doing by holding a plenary council devoted to a complete airing of the crisis in the Church today, and to the planning of inescapable and binding reforms, you can expect no recovery of trust or authority.

Bishops! Until and unless you work to reform structures, restoring the type of synodal accountability in each diocese and for the country as a whole as outlined in my book, where bishops are forced to give an annual accounting to their diocese, and where real regional tribunals can indict and try bishops like Malone, you will all be regarded as part of the problem, not the solution.

Bishops! If you do not care about reform, about restoring trust in your people, and about purifying the Body of Christ, can you at least see your way to acting out of self-interested calculation to avoid your own everlasting damnation (cf. Matt. 18:6)?

A.A.J. DeVille, is an associate professor and the Director of Humanities at the University of Saint Francis, the editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies, and the author of Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power (Angelico Press, 2019).

According to the Episcopal News Service, the church had fallen to 1.7 million members (down from 3.4 million in 1992) and Sunday attendance was down 13 percent from 2013 to 2018. Similarly, there were 175 fewer parishes and missions during that period.

Of course, this decline was not a feature just of Episcopalian churches. An ABC/Washington Post poll released in May of last year found that only 36 percent of Americans identified as Protestant, down from 50 percent in 2003.

With this kind of performance, one would think the effected churches would be in a great hurry to acknowledge and fix those things that have led to this decline. One would be wrong. As stated by the Rev. Michael Barlowe, the very man responsible for the release of the parochial report data cited above, “It doesn’t mean we’re doing something wrong.”

Rev. Barlowe’s opinion notwithstanding, many think the Episcopal Church is doing lots of things wrong, and not just in the last few years, either. Indeed, if this church were a publicly traded corporation, the Board would have directed the firing of the whole of the leadership, from the Presiding Bishop to most of the rectors, years ago.

So what explains this state of affairs? Perhaps it’s something akin to Tom Wolfe’s criticism of contemporary art in his book "The Painted Word," wherein he argued that leading artists were not making art for the public, but for art critics. The Episcopal Church, and indeed most of the mainline Protestant denominations, have traded the wants and needs of their parishioners for alignment with the social and political views of what passes in this country for the intelligentsia.

The evidence of their social and political activism, if not their theological tergiversation, can be plainly seen in both the sermons and the official and informal positions of the Episcopal Church.

By votes in their General Convention, the reports and activities of Episcopal committees, and/or the opinions of Episcopal priests and seminarians, the church has now glommed onto such political and social movements as climate change, transgender bathroom use, same-sex marriage in the parishes, the academic doctrine of “intersectionalism,”and the divestiture movement against Israel, commonly called BDS. If they were next to criticize Jesus for his failure to acknowledge his “male privilege,” would anyone be surprised? Furthermore, is there anything more feckless than the many sermons given by Episcopal rectors to their aging parishioners in the language of political correctness?

Who knows what kind of personal deficiencies among the Episcopal leadership are responsible for all of this, but surely it includes hubris, blended with that kind of intellectual shallowness that expresses itself as nonchalance.

One could make rational arguments, whatever their depth, for most or all of the causes listed above just by resort to history and rhetoric. But that’s not the issue here. The issue is whether the Episcopal interest in or adoption of these movements is the driving force behind the abandonment of the church by its parishioners. The view from here is that it is.

Patrick Maines is a recently departed member of the Episcopal Church, and the former president of The Media Institute, one of the country’s leading First Amendment think tanks.

But that is the subject of Al Regnery’s latest book, “Unlikely Pilgrim.” Regnery is a long-time Washington, D.C. denizen more likely to be associated with publishing houses and exclusive dinners with national and international leaders than contemplative travel. Over the course of spending half a century in politics, he has written well-regarded books about the history of conservatism and is associated with presidents and diplomats.

But in his latest book, Regnery sets all that aside for more profound pursuits—reflection, the state of his soul, and, as he describes it, an opportunity for the “unruffled contemplation of God.”

Over 11 summers, Regnery takes several unique trips with his friend and traveling companion, Nick. Perhaps because of Nick’s training in theology, or merely in spite of it, their travels take on far deeper ramifications than simple sight-seeing tours.

Guided by Nick’s deep knowledge of religious history (which spans Anglicanism to Islam), and Regnery’s search for a spiritual home (raised Quaker, he eventually became Catholic), the two visit the oldest surviving Christian church in the world, villages where people still speak Aramaic (the language spoken by Christ), sit overtop of where the Nicene Creed was hammered out to save the Roman Empire by establishing Christianity as the state religion, and view where St. Paul established the first church in Europe, among many other meaningful sites.

In one memorable trip, the two apply for visas to visit the Greek peninsula of Mount Athos, which limits foreign visitors to ten non-Orthodox men a day (up from five, when Regnery visited; women have not been allowed since the 9^th century).

In between the six hours a day that they are in mass, the monks spend time in the 10^th century Greek monastery of Xenophontos. Rengery spoke with Damianos, formerly a doctor in Queens where he was raised, who is now a monk on Mount Athos—which, by the way, means “haven for those who seek salvation.” He describes his job as “hav[ing] no equal. All day, every day, I know that God is watching me, and I try to assure myself that everything I do is for Him.”

The monks of the Holy Mountain in Athos carry on thousand-year-old traditions, finding peace in the face of arduous work and nothing in the way of property. As one abbot has described it, a monk there is “happy because he has nothing, but he has everything.”  

The theme of their first pilgrimage is a thread through those that follow.

In Normandy and Brittany, the two contemplate the demise of Christianity in one of its former strongholds. The opposite is true in their travels through Romania, where they find the monasteries overflowing with monks and nuns—a normal response to the excesses of the formerly Communist state, an abbot tells them.

Their travels through Syria take on a poignant note when the Christian ruins and artwork they visit—and which Regnery describes—become an unintentional memorial. ISIS, and civil war in Syria, has destroyed them all.

There are parallels between Regnery’s book—written as a man in middle-age—and Elizabeth Gilbert’s millennial blockbuster “Eat, Pray, Love,” which she wrote on her own pilgrimage of sorts at the age of 34. But where Gilbert seeks to find herself in a single year dedicated to pleasure and meditation, Regnery’s 11 pilgrimages take on a far more profound and expansive note.

A sense of history, the very real physicality of covering hundreds of miles on foot, and pondering the deep, fundamental questions about what drives us collectively and individually pepper the pages of what is simultaneously a travel memoir and a tribute to the very human search for meaning.

As a millennial who is constantly in search of the deeper things, I admit to reading Regnery book on the beach, in Bermuda (as I went to write this review, sand dropped from between the book’s pages).

It was a welcome respite from Twitter, my news alerts, a backlog of emails, and a stack of breaking news, political “must reads.” In fact, it was a welcome reminder of what Russell Kirk calls “the permanent things” that give life meaning.

Travel once was, and still can be, associated with self-discovery, inevitably more valuable than what is memorialized in an Instagram post. For your next trip, use Al Regnery’s travels as an example. Pack walking shoes, a backpack, and a journal. If Regnery’s example is anything to go by, the benefits will last far longer than a Snapchat story.

Rachel Bovard is the Senior Director of Policy at the Conservative Partnership Institute. Follow her on Twitter at @RachelBovard. 

When Blake Chastain created the Twitter hashtag #exvangelical in 2016, he wanted former evangelicals to be able to lament the racism, sexism, homophobia, and hyper right-wing ideology they perceived as pervasive in their churches. He also wanted to provide support for others considering leaving evangelicalism. In the last three years, the hashtag has turned into the name of both a movement and its members as exvangelicals have started podcasts and blogs. The movement already has a substantial presence. During the peak of its run, Chastain’s podcast Exvangelical received 13 thousand downloads a month. Several exvangelical leaders have respectable followings on Twitter, such as Chrissy Stroop (48 thousand followers) and Emily Joy (13 thousand followers). Exvangelicals have also started more Twitter campaigns that have gained attention from people inside and outside the exvangelical movement.

Perhaps the biggest evidence of exvangelicals’ impact is that mainstream white evangelical thought-leaders haven’t been able to ignore them. These thought leaders have to accommodate exvangelicals’ critiques in order to prevent young evangelicals from opting out of the faith for a more secular alternative. Hashtags like #ChurchToo (a spin on #MeToo) started by poet Emily Joy—have been mainstreamed within evangelicalism. Growing up steeped in evangelical “purity culture,” Joy was sexually abused by someone in her church and felt compelled to speak out about how women are sexually shamed within evangelicalism. Christianity Today published a feature article about sexual abuse in the Southern Baptist church mentioning the hashtag. The Southern Baptist denomination also held a meeting about changing polices concerning how to handle sexual assault cases within their ranks. The bestselling evangelical author, Beth Moore, wrote a blog post detailing her own sexual assault in the Church. #ChurchToo was able to become mainstream among evangelicals because Emily Joy was familiar with their movement. This made #ChurchToo hard to ignore, but if leading evangelicals do dismiss #ChurchToo, younger evangelicals are likely to apostatize do to the mishandling of sexual abuse. 

Yet while evangelicals have mainstreamed some aspects of the exvangelicals’ criticisms, they’ve rejected others. Like other conservative Christians, evangelicals feel that they need to push back against the exvangelicals’ attempt to secularize their young people. Exvangelical leader Chrissy Stroop created the Twitter hashtag #ExposeChristianSchools to make apparent the bigotry she experienced growing up in Christian schools. Fox News featured segments criticizing the hashtag after journalist Dan Levin tried to collect stories for a piece featured in the New York Times. Conservative Catholic pundit Matt Walsh appeared on the news channel and said the hashtag is an example of the left’s bigotry towards Christians. Focus on the Family responded to the hashtag, saying that it ignores the good that Christian schools have accomplished. Yet while conservative Christian thought-leaders have tried to dismiss or invalidate Stroop’s criticisms, the fact that they were collectively forced to engage those criticisms reinforces the effectiveness of her insider critiqueone they couldn’t ignore for fear of allowing secular thinkers to encroach upon their movement.

In recent decades, some younger white evangelicals have left that subculture due to its close connection with reactionary politics and what many perceive as authoritarian, conformist, and exclusionary tendencies. Former evangelical superstars such as Joshua Harris, Michael Gungor, and Hillsong writer Marty Sampson have recently left the religious movement. The exvangelical movement aims to provide these former white evangelicals with a voice and a new (more secular) community of like-minded peers. Exvangelicals refuse to conform to the narrative white evangelicals tell about themselves as victims of the bigoted coastal elites who don’t understand religion; they themselves were once evangelicals and understand their former religious tradition. The exvangelicals’ nonconformity forces white evangelicals to respond to their charges—either through adopting it as their own or pushing back against it.

Kenneth E. Frantz is a Religious Studies major at the University of Oklahoma. Twitter: @KennethEthanFr1

Samuel L. Perry is an assistant professor of sociology and religious studies at the University of Oklahoma. His research focuses on the changing dynamics of religion, family, and politics in the United States. Dr. Perry has written for the Washington Post and the Huffington Post. Twitter: @socofthesacred

However, in the 48-hour news explosion that followed, context — in many re-posts and re-airings — was dropped, making the president’s latest “Trumpism” an instant classic that will be mocked and replayed in Democratic Party attack ads during the 2020 presidential election.

But even within that context, “I am the chosen one” uttered by a mere mortal (even if he is the president) was offensive to my ears and millions of others who are familiar with the biblical meaning of the words.

No matter whether you support President Trump or not, it is important to understand why his uttering the vainglorious phrase even in context — and days later saying, “It was sarcasm” — is a sin for which he should seek forgiveness.

What follows is a brief Bible study encompassing both the Old and New Testaments to explain why I believe the president has sinned against God.

Written hundreds of times in the Bible, the holy moniker “I Am” is who God says He is — later followed by Jesus, who often references Himself in this way: “I Am.”

Case in point: Jesus throughout the Gospel of John declares, “I am the way, the truth, and the life”; “I am the light of the world”; “I am the bread of life”; “I am the resurrection.” These are among His most familiar and beloved passages.

For the record, “I Am” first appears in Genesis, the first book of the Hebrew Bible (Old Testament) as part of “The Lord’s Covenant with Abram” (who was later re-named Abraham).

After this, the word of the Lord came to Abram in a vision:

“Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield your very great reward.” Genesis (15:1)

The last reference is in Revelation, the final book of the New Testament when Jesus says:

“I, Jesus, have sent my angel to give you this testimony for the churches. I am the Root and the Offspring of David, and the bright Morning Star.” Revelation (22:16)

Among the approximately 300 times that “I Am” passages appear between the first and last books of the Bible, I have selected two of the most significant (which also happen to be my personal favorites). The first is from the Old Testament.

While Moses is on the mountain receiving the Ten Commandments, he and God have what I consider the most famous question-and-answer session known to mankind:

Moses said to God, “Suppose I go to the Israelites and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’ and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ Then what shall I tell them?”

God said to Moses, “I am who I am. This is what you are to say to the Israelites:

‘I am has sent me to you.’ ” Exodus (3:13-14)

We can only imagine the look on Moses’ face because nothing tops that answer.

Except, maybe, my next favorite “I Am” passage, which is in the New Testament.

Here is the context:

The Pharisees were influential Jewish leaders in the time of Christ, teaching that all Jews should strictly observe the hundreds of laws as written in the Torah. As a group, the Pharisees were highly suspicious of Jesus — an itinerant Jewish rabbi teaching in the temple court, where this Q&A exchange takes place, according to the Gospel of John:

 ^“Are you greater than our father Abraham? He died, and so did the prophets. Who do you think you are?”

Jesus replied, “If I glorify myself, my glory means nothing. My Father, whom you claim as your God, is the one who glorifies me.  Though you do not know him, I know him. If I said I did not, I would be a liar like you, but I do know him and obey his word.  Your father Abraham rejoiced at the thought of seeing my day; he saw it and was glad.”

 “You are not yet fifty years old,” they said to him, “and you have seen Abraham!”

“Very truly I tell you,” Jesus answered, “before Abraham was born, I am!” 

At this, they picked up stones to stone him, but Jesus hid himself, slipping away from the temple grounds. John (8:53-57)

Note that every Pharisee and Jewish worshiper in the temple court who heard Jesus say “Before Abraham was born, I am!” knew exactly what He meant since God’s name was well established in the Old Testament. (And remember that during the time of Jesus, only the Hebrew Bible had been written.)

Therefore, with these passages in mind, let’s circle back to President Trump’s statement: “I am the chosen one.” Yes, he was referring to his role in China trade negotiations. Yes, he now says, “It was joking” and “sarcasm.” But it is NOT a joke given its biblical meaning while also linking words that are nonsensical and offensive for the following reason:

Combining “I Am” (God/Jesus) with “the chosen one” is illogical because God/Jesus are NOT chosen, but eternal and omnipresent.

My recommendation — both as a loyal longtime Republican who voted for President Trump and as a Jew who believes Jesus is Lord — is for the president to ask forgiveness from The Lord God Jesus Christ, promising never again to describe himself using those words.

And that is no joke.

Editor's note: this piece has been updated since publication to include President Trump's comment on his earlier statement.

Myra Adams is a media producer and writer who served on the McCain Ad Council during the GOP nominee’s 2008 campaign and on the 2004 Bush campaign creative team.

Once a little-known leader in the Church, Bishop Bransfield burst into the spotlight last year. A close associate of the disgraced former cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Bransfield suddenly resigned in a cloud of suspicion. The Vatican ordered an investigation into allegations of abuse and misuse of funds. It found that Bransfield lived like a king, not a bishop – in one of the nation’s poorest dioceses, no less.

Bransfield’s tastes were extravagant and his expenditures obscene. They included $4.6 million on a complete home renovation following a small fire in a bathroom; $2.4 million on travel, including luxury hotels and chartered jets; $1,000 a month on alcohol; and daily flower deliveries totaling $182,000, to name a few examples. Whenever anyone raised objections, Bransfield’s response was simple and usually the same: “I own this.”

Bransfield also doled out $350,000 in gifts to other priests and bishops, in an apparent attempt to curry favor and ward off bad press coverage. The investigation’s final report, in addition to detailing the financial scandal, also included accusations from nine individuals alleging sexual abuse or harassment. It appears that Church money wasn’t the only thing Bishop Bransfield grossly misused.

These findings spurred the Vatican to action. Last month, Rome banned Bransfield from exercising any public ministry. He is also prohibited from living in his former diocese. The new bishop of Wheeling-Charleston, Bishop Mark Brennan retains the right to demand additional penance and amends from his disgraced predecessor, although it remains to be seen if he will do so. 

The Vatican’s actions are a satisfactory conclusion to the Bransfield scandal. Yet some important questions have yet to be answered. Chief among them: How could this have happened in the first place? 

Every Catholic diocese in America has a council – mandated by canon law – that’s supposed to prevent this sort of thing. The so-called “Finance Councils” are composed of lay Catholics (ordinary people who aren’t ordained) with expertise in monetary matters. Usually meeting once a month, these councils pore over the accounts and expenditures of the relevant diocese, faithfully stewarding the Church’s money. Clearly there was a breakdown in Wheeling-Charleston. Finding what went wrong and fixing it essential.

Yet this leads to another question: Are the Finance Councils in other dioceses doing their due diligence, too? Is the Bransfield situation a rarity, or more common than we think?

I ask this as someone who previously served on the Finance Council in the Diocese of Orange. A lawyer and certified public accountant, I have long believed in the necessity of lay involvement and oversight over important Church functions, including finances. Yet my experience also makes me worry that most lay leaders in Finance Councils are not as attentive to the details as they should be.

The members of these Councils have a fiduciary responsibility to the diocese – an obligation to make sure its financial house is in order. Yet as the situation in West Virginia shows, there appears to be too much deference given to priests and bishops. This is a form of clericalism. Undue trust of the hierarchy makes accountability harder, if not impossible.

All members of Finance Councils should remember: Their fiduciary responsibility is to the diocese, not the bishop. More importantly, their faith shouldn’t be in the Church’s leaders, but rather in the Church’s teachings, which they are called to safeguard by preventing financial abuse.

This is true for every Finance Council in America, and not just those at the diocesan level. Individual parishes also have such councils, with the same responsibility. Financial abuse by regular priests also needs to be identified and ended wherever it exists.

Finance Councils at every level need need to renew their focus. If they aren’t meeting regularly – at least once a month – then they need to start doing so. They must retain outside and inside auditors to assure compliance with good governance under current canon law. Each diocese should also make sure it has put the best and most principled people on the Council. They need lay leaders who are both holy and hell-raisers – the kind of people who care about the Church’s health and are willing to fight to keep it healthy.

Finance Councils should also be given additional support through increased transparency. If they published their minutes and discussion topics, other lay Catholics would be able to keep closer tabs on how the Church’s money is being spent. After all, it often used to be their money, given in tithe.

There are surely other ideas that are worth exploring – ideas that could help prevent the Bransfield situation from reappearing anywhere else. As in every other part of Catholic life, lay Catholics are essential to keeping the Church healthy and holy.

We have already seen that lay leadership can help address the Catholic Church’s biggest problems. The lay review boards instituted by the Dallas Charter appear to have nearly eradicated sexual abuse in the Catholic church. The Finance Councils must exert the same kind of influence in the fight against abuse of money. We should strengthen them however we can, because they can strengthen the entire Church. 

Tim Busch is founder of the Napa Institute, a Catholic lay apostolate committed to Church renewal.

This lie has given many men the impression that it’s their right to move quickly with women because they see women primarily as sexual beings, and it has given many women the impression that they should let men have their way. 

This lie is omnipresent and affects both sexes. It crosses normal social bounds. For example, my recognition of the problem happened because I’m a practicing Catholic who views women as equals created by God. But when I talk with feminists who disagree with me on abstinence, abortion, and contraception, we find a lot of agreement on this issue.  

I wish I’d understood this subtle and omnipresent lie before I got hooked on porn for a few years as a teen and in my early twenties.  It caused me great distress as I tried to uphold my Catholic values while still respecting the natural attractiveness of women. Thankfully, I was able to abstain from sex and aim for chastity. This has given my wife and me a wonderfully intimate relationship which combines the complementary and total nature of our bodies that goes well beyond the physicality of sex. 

The fact is that a proper understanding of the human person goes well beyond any ideology or philosophy. We are body and soul, independent and complementary, sexual and non-sexual. But with a culture enmeshed in pornography, women’s magazines, and “Sports Illustrated” swimsuit issues, women are portrayed as having one defining characteristic– their sexuality, especially through the portrayal of their breasts as having only one important characteristic, which is pleasing men.

In a healthy relationship, men can and should view women’s bodies as beautiful, both in terms of sexual pleasure and in being designed to create life. But when sex is treated like a shallow, physical act instead of a total giving of spouses to each other, and where pornography is prevalent, many men view women’s breasts as play-things instead of partners in our species’ survival.

I’ve always been aware of the struggle for chastity. I wasn’t aware of the societal lie about women’s bodies until I saw Joey Salad’s viral video which shows people criticizing a breast-feeding woman at a mall while ignoring or reacting favorably towards a well-endowed woman wearing very little. While one should always be skeptical of edited, agenda-driven “social experiment” videos, it got me thinking.

Since then, I’ve seen significant evidence in society writ large that Americans are simply unaware of how they’ve been dehumanized. Men think it’s normal to “move fast” with women. Women think it’s normal to be moved fast on. Rather than human beings working together in a complementary fashion, many people simply see sex, sex-related activities, and women’s bodies as primarily for pleasure.

It’s not just the main, life-sustaining purpose of breasts which Americans have lost sight of. If it’s one thing we’ve mastered, it is confusing God’s intentions. For example, we see food first as something to be eaten for our enjoyment instead of for sustenance and nutrition. Thus, we are a nation that is full of rapidly growing waistlines.

We see sex similarly as first and foremost something for our enjoyment instead of for procreation and unity, which is why we often have many sexual partners instead of one spouse for life. The confusion I faced over the female body caused me untold stress and many hours of lost sleep leading up to marriage. My scarring from porn seen a decade and more earlier tricked me into thinking that breasts are an important part of sex and foreplay.

But I didn’t want to lust after my then-fiancée. I wanted to respect her body even as we anticipated uniting ourselves through sexual intercourse. Yet, I also knew that I appreciated the God-created creature that is a woman.

How little I knew. In fact, my wife and I care far more about offering our bodies than what our bodies offer. By giving ourselves instead of pursuing the other, we focus on the totality of the relationship, not on specific physical characteristics. We are able to have a great breakfast and eat it, too. 

Some things can only be learned through experience. However, it has to be the right experience. The number of secular women who urged me to “take the car out for a test drive before buying it” numbers in the dozens. (Many of these women self-identified as feminists. Did they intend to compare women to objects?) And a number of men said they were going to convince me to have sex prior to marriage as a way to “help” me. 

Yet, a handful of people of both sexes have quietly told me that they wish they’d waited before having sex. To quote one man from memory, “you don’t know what it’s like to lose a piece of your soul” by giving yourself through sex, only to have that relationship end. 

An unhealthy view of women’s bodies can lead to women feeling disrespected and ignored. One woman told me that she assumed all men saw breasts as toys that were critical to sexual intimacy because that’s how men had always treated her. Men jumped right to her body instead of her. 

For that woman, experience was a bad teacher. For me, sex has been the only teacher that could work because my wife and I give ourselves fully, totally, and unreservedly to each other without having to flash-back to past experiences.  If I’d “taken the car for a test-drive,” I know I’d be comparing past experiences to current ones, instead of just focusing on my wife and our complementary needs and desires. 

The fact is that most women aren’t as thin or curvy as actresses in movies. Pre-pregnancy women definitely won’t look the same while a baby is in the womb, and maybe not ever after pregnancy. And we all age. If sex is all about physicality, and big breasts are a requirement to a happy sexual life, most of us are doomed. Thankfully, Christians can walk arm-in-arm with modern feminists to throw this lie on the trash heap of history. 

And it is through marriage that I can appreciate how feminists have been right about America’s misconception of women’s bodies: we have a culture which gives men the idea that pressuring women into sex or expecting them to want to jump right in is fine and normal, and that women who don’t want that are either werid or prudes.

The breast lie is part of a larger issue in America where some people dismiss male sexual pursuit as “boys will be boys” and where others misinterpret advocating social responsibility as victim-blaming. 

It is with this fine line in mind that I offer the following solution: 

Men, step up in yourself and in your example to other men. Men are more naturally inclined towards the physicality of sex than women, but that doesn’t give us the right to have our way without consent (and without being married first). Men must learn to think and act towards the women in our lives as we would want other men to act towards our sisters and daughters. 

If other men don’t do that, hold them accountable. From recognizing that women are equals created by God to averting our eyes to changing how we view sex itself, there’s a long road ahead. 

Because we live in a fallen world, women must be aware of your actions and how men interpret them. First, don’t give your body to men who haven’t earned your trust, respect, and love. Encourage your female friends to do the same. Doing this will force men to rethink how they view the female body, and it will empower your female friends to think better of themselves.

Second, the little things matter. While men need to take responsibility for their own actions, you should understand that how they view you will be affected by how you dress, act, and see yourself. You can recognize this reality and be part of the solution. Or you can pretend like it doesn’t exist and watch both sexes dehumanize themselves.

It takes two to tango. It also takes both sexes to change society’s perception of women. 

Dustin Siggins is CEO of the publicity firm Proven Media Solutions. 

Yet, according to humanitarianism, we ought only to love our neighbor, with no regard for love of God. Humanitarianism is the subject of Daniel Mahoney’s book “The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity,” which has been remarkably well-received, as I noted here. Mahoney recently appeared on the Patrick Coffin Show where he discussed significant differences between a morality motivated solely by love of Humanity and the saintliness and ultimate deification that comes from Christianity.

Mahoney begins “The Idol of Our Age” with an explanation of Auguste Comte’s so-called “religion of humanity,” and he writes that this 19th century French positivist philosopher has influenced Christians and the church in ways we may not realize. As Mahoney explains, “In his chapter on the ‘Religion of Humanity’ at the end of part I of his System of Positive Polity, Comte announces the superiority of the morality of positive science to the morality of revealed religion, since it has substituted ‘the love of Humanity for the love of God.’” Men, therefore, are to worship the best that is in Humanity, creating false gods in themselves.

“August Comte is an important figure,” Mahoney said in the Coffin interview. “Comte said, in a philosophy of history, we’ve gone from a theological age– a metaphysical age of Christianty and philosophy– to a positive age where science and scientific reason is the only legitimate mode of understanding. But Comte combined this a little later with the religion of humanity because Comte was smart enough to realize that there was this irreducible religious instinct in human beings. But he also thought that authentic reason– positivist reason– had revealed religion to be a chimera, so he wanted to replace the Amor Dei, the love of God, with the love of man, a kind of self-deification.”

Thus, for believers in the religion of humanity like Comte, altruism– a word which he invented– replaces love of God. “Altruism, the sort of love of Humanity, is not the same thing as love of God and love of neighbor,” Mahoney said in the interview. “Theological discussions of divinization should not be confused with secular messianism that says we don’t need God, that we are self-sufficient.”

Mahoney notes in “The Idol of Our Age” that much of Comte’s philosophy seems in line with Christianity as he references charity, love, spirituality, and faith. But “he is blind to the depths of the soul,” Mahoney writes. “Comte’s is the most superficial of anthropologies, since it is ignorant of the drama of good and evil in the human soul… Humanitarianism, the softer, regnant version of the religion of humanity, is thus wholly at odds with the Christian proposition… Woefully ignorant of sin and of the tragic dimensions of the human condition, it reduces religion to a project of this-wordly amelioration.”

How, then, can man love his neighbor without falling into the false religion of humanity? According to Mahoney, by practicing sanctity and heroism while remembering that we can only do so through God. In the interview, he referenced French poet and philosopher Charles Péguy, who argued that heroes and saints stand or fall together. “I like to remind people, there are many rooms in the Father's house, to quote the Gospel of John,” Mahoney said in the interview. “We somehow have a tendency today to identify saintliness with the corporal works of mercy, so reminding ourselves of those who exercise moral and political judgment like Thomas Moore or fought for freedom and the church like Joan of Arc… that's important and they're inspiring, true heroes. Mother Teresa represents an important element of moral virtue, but so does Winston Churchill standing up to Hitler, and so we Catholics have to be attentive not only to moral virtue as it reveals itself in humility, but moral virtue as it reveals itself in a certain greatness or heroism because these are all models of human greatness.”

Mahoney went on to say that there is a legitimate and honorable pride that comes from refusing to submit to evil. “If people do great and wonderful things and forget that all our gifts come from God, that's a problem,” he said. “But we need heroism, and we need saints who act in the world and, if need be, know that we Christians have enemies in the world. So a little bit of spiritedness in defending the truth, I think, is a corrective to fatalism, weakness, and perhaps an undue humility where we confuse humbleness under God with passivity or self self-abnegation.

For Mahoney, sanctity and heroism are “two different species of the same genus,” as Coffin summarized. “They're both manifestations of the soul's virtues that the soul can transcend sordidness, sin, narrow self-absorption, materialism, fear, [and] defensiveness,” Mahoney said. He went on to draw a link between classical ideas of virtue and Christian wisdom. “I think the greatness of our civilization is the coming together of classical Christian wisdom, the cardinal virtues that Cicero and Aristotle talked about: courage, moderation, justice,” he explained. “These are virtues for us Christians, too.”

A follower of the religion of humanity may stop here, but Christians are commanded to love God, not just man. When Christ came, he taught on these virtues which men already naturally knew were good and elevated man in the process. “Christ did not come to do away with the natural world virtues,” Mahoney said. “He became incarnate in the world to remind us of an ordered grace that is capable of elevating and putting man and putting them into a new perspective. Christ didn’t come as an ethical teacher with a whole new ethic. The Ten Commandments [and] the classical moral virtues are true for Christians, and we have to have a little more confidence, with God's encouragement and grace, that we fallen human beings still have to be open to the challenge of heroism and sanctity.”

In loving God, Christians must follow Christ’s commandments to love men. Humanitarianism presents a temptation to love man without regard for God, which, as Mahoney explains in “The Idol of Our Age,” leads to a religion where “free-floating compassion substitutes for charity, and a humanity conscious of its unity (and utter self-sufficiency) puts itself in the place of the visible and invisible Church.” He continues, “this reduction of charity, the greatest theological virtue, to compassion and fellow feeling ignores the fact that genuine love of one’s neighbor is only possible because one discerns in him or her ‘the image of God.’” A love of man that denies both the image of God in him and his fallen nature turns man into a false god. Chrsitians would therefore be wise to watch for and weed out the religion of humanity in their own thinking and churches, and this can start with loving your neighbor the right way.

Although the United States benefits from religious liberty protections, we still experience injustice. While it rarely manifests as physical violence, other avenues of hostility such as social condemnation and oppression of religious expressions have become commonplace. Even without the specter of violence, we should not allow our less-than-dangerous religious environment to breed complacency when it comes to supporting those suffering around the world. There is much for Christians to do.

Refusing to conform to society’s secular definition of culture is a critical start. In recent years, we have watched while business owners who refuse to compromise their biblical views on marriage are met with lawsuits and legal challenges and are unfairly branded as bigots. While many of the legal cases are still underway, the court of public opinion has already found these Christians guilty, along with anyone who dares speak up on their behalf.

Even when courts have ruled in support of these business owners’ right to operate within the confines of their sincerely held beliefs, special interests had already poured colossal amounts of money into smear campaigns with the goal of shifting public opinion towards a secular, non-Christian baseline.

Standing firm in the public square in defense of one’s religious convictions – even if it means financial loss or a ruined reputation – empowers Christians outside the safer borders of the United States.  While decorations on a cake may seem trivial in the face of martyrdom, our shared beliefs, both in Christianity’s religious tenants and the right to freely practice our faith, provide unbreakable solidarity. A meaningful and compassionate defense, rooted in biblical truth, also weakens the cultural narrative that Christian values are archaic and need to be abandoned in order to meld with modern times. 

That is why resisting the desire to relegate religion to one’s private life in order to avoid conflict or attention should be rejected, not just for those overseas placing their lives in jeopardy each time they attend a service or whisper a prayer, but because Christians are called to live boldly. The Bible says, “Have I not commanded you? Be strong and courageous. Do not be frightened, and do not be dismayed, for the Lord your God is with you wherever you go.”

Believers should also invest financially in organizations that work to support and create refuge for our brothers and sisters, both at home and abroad. Due to our cherished freedoms of liberty and prosperity, it is incumbent upon us to support those in need. This isn’t as simple as writing a check to a favorite international charity. Being good stewards of the wealth bestowed on our nation requires careful research, prioritizing organizations with proven track records of aiding the persecuted.

And let us not forget the all-surpassing power of prayer. Secular skeptics are quick to dismiss “thoughts and prayers” during times of national tragedy and mourning. But scripture commands us to pray. It also tells us that God reacts to our mere human prayers. 1 John 5:14 states, “This is the confidence we have in approaching God: that if we ask anything according to his will, he hears us.” There is no human solution or government intervention stronger than the workings of almighty God.

Religious persecution, whether it be socially ostracizing, financially ruinous, or life-threatening, will always be with us. The Apostle Paul once wrote “all who desire to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted.” But while we can’t control the world around us, we can control our response to these tribulations. That means being courageous, speaking up for our Christian values, and financially supporting our persecuted brothers and sisters across the globe.

And when the path ahead seems too difficult – the world too hostile – take spirit in the words of Christ: “If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first.”

Mary Vought is the Executive Director of the Senate Conservatives Fund. You can follow her @MaryVought.

To be fair, after Morsi’s failure to govern in an inclusive manner, one of Sisi’s first actions in office was to stand alongside the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar and the Coptic Orthodox Pope and declare that “[w]e are Egyptians.” He hosted Pope Francis in 2017 and, earlier this year, inaugurated the largest cathedral in the Middle East, the “Church of the Nativity,” where he declared to Egyptians, both Christian and Muslim, that “we are one.” 

However, while Sisi deserves credit for raising the bar for tolerance higher than that of his predecessor, he has yet to address some of the most pressing issues facing the Coptic Community. He has not fully lived up to the weight of his words and has yet to deliver peace, equality, and security for Egypt’s Christians.

Before the passing of Morsi, these last two weeks have witnessed a very different conversation about Egypt. In Minya Governorate, home to the largest concentration of Coptic Christians outside of Cairo, Copts have been struck with yet another wave of hate crimes and intolerance.  The first incident was the arrest of eight Coptic Christians in Samalot, Minya in response to a mob of Muslim Egyptians vandalizing Coptic homes to celebrate the conversion of a Christian woman to Islam.

The second incident occurred in Ishnien Al Nasara, Minya and witnessed the destruction of three Coptic homes out of retaliation to a Facebook post by a Copt that reportedly “insulted religion.” Once more, the Copt was arrested, despite his apologies and statements from the local diocese affirming the young man’s claim that his Facebook account had been hacked and he did not post the message. These two incidents reflect a recurring issue facing Coptic Christians in Minya: when push comes to shove, Sisi’s rhetoric has failed to translate to action

Egyptian Journalist Walid Salah noted in a profile of the problem in Minya that, as of January 2019, 17 incidents of sectarian violence, not including terrorism, had taken place in there. Sara Salama of Coptic Voice also has highlighted in a strong op-ed that “more than 160 incidents have been reported in the Minya governorate alone between 2013 and 2018." Kamal Zakher, a Coptic intellectual, characterized the situation in Minya in Salah’s coverage of the issue as one that is “a reflection of the conflict between the official state and the deep state in which sectarianism prevails.” Salama, quoted in a recent op-ed by Alexander Cureton for the Daily Wire, highlights that Egypt is the second highest recipient of defense aid from the U.S. and that “[i]t's time the United States puts its dollars where its values are.”

Many of these issues are what prompted Rep. French Hill, R-Ar., to introduce H. Res. 49-Supporting Coptic Christians, a bi-partisan bill with over 50 cosponsors, which calls on President Sisi and the Government of Egypt to enact meaningful change when it comes to protecting and ensuring equality for Egypt’s Christian population.

Rep. Hill himself has argued for this resolution’s importance because while “President el-Sisi has set the right tone at the top levels of his government...the streets, sadly, tell a different story.” Today, in many Coptic villages in Minya, the streets are the only places where the children of St. Mark are able to tell their story thanks to mundane bureaucratic procedures which have delayed the state licensing of thousands of Coptic Churches.

However, interestingly enough, Jane Arraf with NPR found that “Christians in Minya don't blame Sisi for the lack of churches. They say it's officials under him who are caving into Muslim extremists in the villages.” This proved to be the case when local Copts in Minya booed local security officials at the November 2018 funeral for the seven Copts who were killed by ISIS on their pilgrimage to the Monastery of Saint Samuel the Confessor in Minya. 

Sisi’s golden opportunity to prove himself lies here. He should apply increased oversight toward (and, if necessary, terminate) local government officials, including Minya Governor Qasem Hussein. On a deeper level, he must enact systemic reform to the application of justice and the security apparatus in Minya. Perpetrators of hate crimes and discrimination should be criminally prosecuted, victims of hate crimes should not be arrested, and the local police force should undergo a personnel review to remove officers who are prejudiced toward Copts and fail to do their job. The level of discrimination and harassment faced by Copts in Minya merits a broader security and policing solution mandated to stand up to mobs and protect victims. 

While these injustices in Minya persist, H. Res. 49 remains an important pressure point on an Egyptian Government saying all the right things, but continuing to fall short.

Steven Howard is currently the National Outreach Director for In Defense of Christians, a nonprofit and nonpartisan advocacy organization for Christians and other religious minorities in the Middle East. He previously served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Morocco from 2015 until 2017.

A Pew Research poll from 2015 found that only 41 percent of millennials believe religion is very important in their lives, as opposed to 72 percent of the Greatest Generation and 59 percent of baby boomers. The same poll found that only 27 percent of millennials attend religious services weekly (boomers claim a rate of 38 percent; their parents, 51 percent).

One of the reasons they don’t go to church seems to be a disaffection with one of the most popular worship styles going now—a style much embraced by their parents and, especially, by their grandparents, the baby boomers.

That style is contemporary worship, as in praise bands and rock musicians, generic auditoriums with fixed theater seating or big boxy rooms with stackable church chairs and worship screens. This worship style is frequently found shallow and trendy, caught up in innovation and cultural conformity. The theology attached to it is often found wanting for the same reasons—it lacks spiritual gravitas, it is grounded in what is new and culturally relevant.

Jonathan Aigner, writing at Patheos a few years ago, sees the eventual decline of this trendy worship form, because, for one thing, the generation that spawned it is getting long in the tooth and will soon shuffle off this mortal coil. Yes, baby boomers are getting old, and when they leave, contemporary worship will lose its most gung-ho supporters.

But the encouraging aspect of Aigner’s piece is that they will not be replaced by millennials. Indeed, he claims millennials are “seeking old ways of doing things.” They are demonstrating “an increasing rejection of the church of the 1990s and 2000s. More emphasis is being placed on liturgy and community, and less on using corporate worship chiefly as a contrived evangelistic tool,” Aigner claims.

Is it too much to suggest that the old ways of doing “church” are the better ways? That a worship style that has prospered for many centuries has something theologically substantial, something religiously solid, to offer a generation that finds itself floundering among the flotsam and jetsam of religious ephemera and trendiness?

Instead of joining trendy churches that reject Christian traditions and theology, millennials should seriously consider seeking out churches that value tradition and that employ the historic liturgy on Sunday mornings.

First off, most liturgical worship takes place in a room specially built for the activity. Since the time of the Roman basilicas, human beings have been building special houses in which to worship their Creator, sometimes sacrificing inordinate quantities of time, treasure, and blood in the effort.

However, the last fifty years or so have seen a trend toward the desacralization of worship space. More and more churches have been built as auditoriums, with permanent semicircular theater seating, or as the sorts of places in which the youth group can sing a choir number from the platform on Sunday morning and clear away the chairs and play volleyball in the “sanctuary” on Sunday afternoon. They’re all-purpose rooms purposely built as anti-churches. Some congregations can’t even bring themselves to call them sanctuaries; they’re “worship centers.”

This trend seems to be playing less and less well with millennials. A Barna survey from 2014 found that millennials were favorably disposed to traditional sanctuaries. Of four options presented to persons aged 18 to 29, a plurality (44 percent) chose a traditional worship space, as opposed to the semicircular megachurch mode or a more straightforward theater-seating mode. Seventy percent preferred an unambiguous Christian chancel arrangement, largely traditional with an altar and a cross/crucifix on the back wall. Commented the researchers on the chancel setting: “These patterns illustrate most Millennials’ overall preference for a straightforward, overtly Christian style of imagery—as long as it doesn’t look too institutional or corporate. Not only do such settings physically direct one’s attention to the divine, they also provide a rich context of church history as the backdrop for worship.”

From the grandest cathedral to the humblest country church, these spaces were designed to house worship of the triune God. What takes place in these rooms is holy; it’s special. It’s not like everything else we do in life. It’s done at a special time in the week, in a designated place.  The instruments that accompany worship are different from what we experience in our weekday lives. The language is formal, prescribed, reverent, and repeated week after week. We cheapen it when we pattern it on what happens the other six days of the week.

The traditionalist argument is that in a week that contains 168 hours, for one of those hours we enter a different place, a holy place, a place where God’s presence is represented by symbolism, where voices are hushed and activities are undertaken—standing up to show respect, singing scripted responses to spoken or sung entreaties—that are foreign to our everyday life. That we enter a place of reverence and holy quiet to hear from the Lord himself through his Word. Where his Word is, there he is. That place is a holy place.

We might even respect this holy place with our attire. We live in a distinctly informal age, where comfort is key and dressing down is frequently considered “dressing up” (see pre-torn jeans). While it may be unrealistic to expect the fashion pendulum to swing all the way back to coats and ties and Sunday dresses at worship services, we can at least hope it travels in its arc away from informality beyond jean shorts and flip-flops.

And we might even address the pastor with formal respect. Although the regnant casualness of our time encourages informality in this area—calling the minister “Pastor Mike,” or simply “Mike”—the pastor is set apart from the crowd by his calling as much as by his function. He is a shepherd of souls as well as a formal officiant. The minister wears robes that hide his individuality and accentuate his office; he is called as an undershepherd for the sheep, under the Shepherd himself. He’s not just “Mike.” His office deserves our formal respect.

In such an environment the music will be different as well. The impetus behind the contemporary Christian music movement is familiarity with cultural musical norms. The whole enterprise is about connecting with popular culture—if we sing songs that ape those of pop music, that feature the rock back beat and the verse-chorus-verse-chorus-bridge-chorus format, with pop-music instrumentation (guitars, drums, keyboard), we will succeed in reaching the young and bringing them into, or back to, the church. That’s the thought behind it.

But popular culture is shallow by definition. It connects to the transitory, the evanescent, the ephemeral; it is a temporary form always awaiting something newer, bigger, better, brighter. We all know what happens to those who marry the Zeitgeist—divorce proceedings follow swiftly thereon.

Traditional hymns have staying power. They can attribute their survival to their beauty, certainly—the poetry is refined, serious, elegant, espousing a vocabulary suitable to the holy place in which it is sung. But moreover, their strength lies in their theological force. Hymns tell the story of faith, of sin and forgiveness. A typical hymn lays the sinner low in his sin and lifts him up with God’s grace. It conveys the salvation story.

Tradition accrues because it works. We do things the same way our forebears did them because those things were effective for our forebears. If tradition wasn’t effective at what it was meant to accomplish, it would not last long enough to be tradition—it would be just another abandoned fad. The reason the historic liturgy is still around, after more than half a millennium, is that it effectively communicates the saving gospel of Jesus Christ.

The pastoral pronouncements from the front of the church, the congregational responses, the confession and absolution, the sung features interspersed throughout the order of service (the Introit, the Gradual, the Venite, the Te Deum Laudamus, the Sanctus, the Agnus Dei)—they tell the story of salvation, and all of it comes straight from the pages of the Bible; indeed, many of these rubrics are verbatim transcriptions of scriptural passages.

Many a bad sermon is saved by the historic liturgy. For if the sermon doesn’t convey the message of salvation or speak to listeners’ hearts or affect them in any meaningful way, there’s the liturgy, with its confession of sins and its declaration of absolution, with its forgiveness reified in the Sacrament, which conveys the saving message. In “nonliturgical” churches, if the sermon is a dud, you walk out with your deep spiritual hunger unfed.

We as humans need ceremony. We are comforted by ritual. Every worship service of every ilk is built on form, on repeated acts. From the glitziest arena church to the little brown church in the dale, a worship service is constructed after a pattern that is repeated, sometimes identically, week in and week out. Everybody does liturgy. Why not return to a ritual that’s been around the spiritual block, that’s been tested by generations of fellow believers, that’s been known and authenticated as an effective transmitter of saving faith, that connects you to generations of Christians, to your grandparents and their grandparents and believers back to Martin Luther and maybe even Thomas Aquinas? You’re going to do liturgy anyway. Why not make it the real thing?

My plea to millennials is this: why not become connected to a church that champions the saving gospel in its weekly ritual, that employs a form of worship that has been used by stalwarts of the faith for centuries, that will not change with the theological seasons, and that will not bend with the trends?

Why not become “spiritual and religious”?

The book, which was published last December, addresses the problem of secular humanitarianism and its effect on the Church’s thinking about divine mercy and Christian charity. “The Idol of Our Age” has been widely reviewed, somewhat–though not entirely–to the author’s surprise. In an interview, Mahoney said the book has resonated with Christians in Catholic, Orthodox, and Evangelical circles who were aware of the problem he diagnoses but hadn’t put a name to it.

“I sensed that there was real discontent in thoughtful Orthodox-minded Christian circles about this increasing conflation of the Christian religion with a humanitarian political agenda, reducing Christianity to simply a project to promote left-wing social justice and pacifism, and, I think, a deeply problematic interpretation of the Gospels,” Mahoney said.

It seems unusual that “The Idol of Our Age” would resonate with Christians of such varying beliefs, but perhaps this speaks to the widespread effects of the religion of humanity. To understand the themes that most resonate with readers, it is helpful to examine the many reviews this book has received. Reviews often emphasize Mahoney’s explanation of love according to humanitarianism versus Christian love and charity, particularly in his critique of Pope Francis.

The humanitarian version of compassion is, Mahoney said, motivated by a desire to be nice to other people and understand their perspectives. While these are admirable goals, this compassion is clearly different from the biblical concept of divine mercy. “Compassion without a rooting in principle and a call to a change in behavior can lead to an abandonment of moral truth, and Christianity can become about ‘cheap grace’ way too easily,” Mahoney explained. “The modern sensibility is to identify forgiving and forgetting without a need for repentance. This also has a political dimension, and identifies Christianity with a kind of softness and relativism.”

In a review of the book, Rémi Brague, a professor of philosophy at the University of Paris and the University of Munich, addresses this substitution of humanitarian compassion for divine mercy in writing, “Christ said: ‘Ye are the salt of the earth, love your enemies.’ The new humanitarian religion says: ‘Ye should be the sugar of the Earth, you have no enemies…’ The new idol is all the more dangerous [in] that it apes Christian charity and tries to replace it.”

One reason the compassion of the religion of humanity is dangerous is because it emphasizes mercy but does not call for repentance, something Mahoney says Pope Francis is guilty of. “I’m not Jonathan Edwards talking about sinners in the hands of an angry God,” Mahoney told me. “I think the God of the Christian tradition is a loving God, but love is not an excuse for irresponsibility. It demands what Plato called a ‘turning of the soul,’ or what the Christian tradition calls ‘repentance.’ If one is satisfied in one’s sin, that’s not the Gospel. It has much more to do with modern hedonism.” Thus, humanitarians in the Church emphasize loving one’s neighbor, but misunderstand what Christian love entails. “Think of the two criminals on the cross with Jesus,” Mahoney said in an interview with First Things podcast. “One repents, and Jesus says, ‘This day you shall be with me in paradise.’ The other doesn’t repent, and Jesus says no such thing to him.”

Jesus says that his kingdom is not of this world, but the religion of humanity is concerned only with what is of this world. When Jesus spoke to a woman caught in adultery, he assured her that he did not condemn her, but he still instructed her to “go, and sin no more.” The religion of humanity would emphasize the lack of condemnation, but ignore the call to change. And yet, this subversion of Jesus’ message is not new, and extends even beyond the philosophers Mahoney engages. He references Pope Benedict XVI’s teachings on the temptations of Jesus. “The Devil promises Christ political power and the amelioration of the ‘social problems’ that plague humanity,” Mahoney writes. “Christianity can never be understood as a merely ‘humanitarian’ project without betraying faith in the promises of God or a true understanding of Jesus’s mission on Earth.”

An impact of the humanitarian influence on Christianity is that it not only distorts Christ’s teaching, but corrupts the authority of churches. “The more [churches] endorse a reductive, secularist religion of humanity and pretend it’s Christianity, the less attractive authentic Christianity will be for ordinary people,”  Mahoney said in the First Things interview. “It’s quite possible the Catholic church could go the way of the Church of England– not die, but become a fundamental irrelevance, and that’s a deep concern of mine, that they literally don’t know what they’re doing.”

Mahoney examines a series of thinkers including Orestes Brownson, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and Vladimir Soloviev, but readers and reviewers of “The Idol of Our Age” have paid particular attention to the chapter titled “Pope Francis’s Humanitarian Version of Catholic Social Teaching.” Mahoney refers to the Pope as “half-humanitarian” and “blind” to how “humanitarian secular religion subverts authentic Christianity.” “Of course I respect his office,” Mahoney said. “As a Catholic, I’m obliged. I think that in decisive respects he is really guilty of confusing Christianity with the religion of social justice.”

In his book, Mahoney writes that Francis has left the Church “divided and vulnerable to an unthinking political correctness,” and critiques his opposition to capital punishment. Though Francis opposes abortion, his understanding of mercy seems to prevent him from speaking out against it when it is difficult to do so, preferring to condemn what is considered evil in leftist circles. In fact, “Pope Francis has recently said that life imprisonment is just as immoral as capital punishment,” Mahoney said. “I think that does not reflect Christian judgement. The Biblical tradition makes clear that it’s possible for human beings to reject God’s love and grace, and Hell is a real possibility, but the humanitarian logic would lead to absolute rejection of punishment.”

Mahoney said that he has received responses ranging from those he calls ultramontanists, who refuse to criticize anything from the Vatican, to people like the writer Maureen Mullarkey. On her blog, she accused Mahoney of being too respectful toward Pope Francis, writing, “When ‘the arts of intelligence’ are applied to the actions of an office holder who distorts his office, it is reasonable–even mandatory–to withhold respect from him.”

Nonetheless, his careful assessment of Francis’s papacy impresses many of the book’s reviewers. In a piece for National Review, David P. Deavel writes, “Among Francis’s negative critics I’ve read, Mahoney takes the pope’s official documents the most seriously, finding in his work continuity with the Catholic tradition and, even in the most controversial documents, important insights.”

“Mahoney is no facile optimist or facile pessimist,” Deavel continues. “He’s a prophet calling us to listen with the heart, avoid the humanitarian siren song, and heed the civilizing memories of some figures, too little remembered.” “The Idol of our Age” diagnoses an important problem not only in Pope Francis’s theology, but in the Church as a whole. It is no wonder that, for those concerned with the perversion of Jesus’s message of love and divine mercy, and the effect that the religion of humanity has on the authenticity and authority of the Church, the book provides an important look, as Brague writes, into the unmasking of of the religion of humanity and “gives us a precious help for how to exorcise it.”

Chandler Lasch is the editor of RealClearReligion.

After the Great Famine, Cardinal Paul Cullen’s devotional movement led a religious revival in Ireland. Cullen’s brand of Catholicism emphasized the evils of the flesh. As American churches became increasingly populated by priests and nuns trained in Ireland, those anti-pleasure values took hold among Irish-American families. While they were grateful for the bountiful food in the United States, Irish American women’s attitude was that though it prevented hunger, they did not look to it with great pleasure. For example, the writer Paul Donoghue recounted his mother’s behavior, writing, "Laughter and enjoyment, let alone sexual pleasure, are not for God-fearing [Catholics]. She gave to every charity but not to herself. She loved flowers but could never buy them for herself."

When remembering his mother, Frank O’Conner recalled that after cooking for her family, she would “bless herself and then add her own peculiar grace: ‘Well, thanks be to God, we’re neither full nor fasting.’” These behaviors were also instilled through the Catholic school system. In a National Conference of Catholic Bishops authorized volume, Dolores Liptak stated, "Both in the classroom and from the pulpit, generations of Catholics learned about sin and guilt or, for example, how salvation was all too easily lost because of sins of the flesh."

These anti-pleasure views impacted Irish American attitudes toward vaudeville. Serving those who had emigrated before Cullen’s religious revival, Ned Harrigan successfully wrote about his experiences in his Mulligan’s Alley series. However, the drinking and bawdiness that these playlets contained contrasted with the sensibilities of the children who had been reared in the Catholic school system. Liptak noted “Neither Harrigan’s theater nor his approach to Irish America were in tune with the changes taking place as the nineteenth century came to a close.”

As Harrigan’s sun set, the comedy team of Thomas Ryan and Mary Ritchfield gave Irish vaudeville a new life. Shirley Staples argued, “[Their] sympathetic, endearing portrait... assured the anxious audience member that his old background and habits were admirable, not something to be ashamed of … but few [other] Irish teams were popular.” The Irish American share of male-female teams in commercial vaudeville declined from 10 percent in the 1880s to 4.5 percent between 1895 and 1904.

Lace-curtain Irish Americans also cast aside Irish acts that maintained unacceptable stereotypes. One such act was the “Irish Servant Girls,” performed by James and John Russell. Immigrant Irish girls had grown up in households that had virtually no kitchen utensils and on a diet of only potatoes. Not surprisingly, when employed, they would make simple mistakes and sometimes get overwhelmed, making matters even worse. This led to a popular stereotype of the Irish servant girls that was exploited by Irish vaudevillians.

Outfitted in proper servant girls’ dresses, the Russell Brothers romped through one disaster after another. Their imbecilic characters drank their employer’s booze, started fires, broke fine china, mangled the English language, and inevitably ended up in a tumble with dresses high overhead. In 1907, the Russell Brothers were appearing in New York City. Under the leadership of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, three hundred Irishmen stormed the theater and pummeled the actors with potatoes and rotten eggs while shouting, “Down with the Russell Brothers. They ridicule the honest, hardworking Irish servant girl.” The remaining shows were cancelled and they were driven out of vaudeville. This Irish-American pressure was so successful that by the time the United States entered World War I, Joseph Curran concluded that “the ‘stage Irishman’ had all but disappeared from American theaters.”

Satires of the rising Paddy, which accounted for about one-third of the comic songs in the 1880s, virtually disappeared after the turn of the century. References to the combination of drinking, fighting, dancing, and singing declined from 26 percent of the songs in the late nineteenth century to an average of 8 percent in the first decades of the new century. Staples concluded, “After 1900 the Irish were no longer ubiquitous in American entertainment, as they had been in the 1880s and early 1890s.”

The waning acceptance of rough Irish working-class characters affected Maggie Cline’s career. Her stardom was based on a Famine Irish persona, portrayed in boisterous songs about Hogan being behind on his rent and McClosky’s epic boxing matches. But as the demands of the Irish audiences changed, Cline accommodated by embracing traditional nostalgia, as in her rendering of “Don’t Let Me Die Till I See Ireland.” Kate Elinore had also gained popularity with a servant-girl routine but because of the changing climate transformed herself into a ballad singer of traditional show tunes. Unfortunately, most Irish performers could not make the transition and lost their careers.

This precipitous drop in Irish vaudevillians is rejected by many Irish historians. Maureen Dezell moved seamlessly from Harrigan’s 1880s Irish worker presentations to mythical Mother Ireland songs produced by 1910s Tin Pan Alley composers to the kindly priest 1930s movies. Timothy Meagher claimed, “This emergence of a newly invented, commercialized Irish American popular culture would flourish for the next fifty years.” James Barrett asserted, “Long after 1900, a strong Celtic presence characterized the vaudeville stage, its audiences, and its entrepreneurs.”

They are able to make these claims because they also reject the notion that the anti-pleasure components of Cullen’s devotional movement had an impact on Irish American attitudes towards commercial vaudeville. Dezell contended that the devotional movement simply promoted immigrant uplift: “Go to Mass, receive the sacraments, send your children to Catholic schools, do as the nuns and priest say, give money, avoid drunkenness and impurity.” Similarly, Meagher noted, “Churches staged self-conscious spectacles of high masses, festivals, and special celebrations that call into question characterizations of Irish ritual as plain and puritan.”

To some degree, their assessments reflected differences in the Irish communities focused upon. My thesis focuses on Irish communities that populated the large urban centers of the East Coast and Chicago. These were the cities that shaped vaudeville and where most vaudevillians were raised. In these cities, Catholic children went to Catholic schools and churches that were dominated by priests and teachers trained in Ireland under Cardinal Cullen’s guidance. By contrast, Dezell has a much more national focus. She highlighted the more liberal Catholic communities like St. Paul and San Francisco where church leaders did not promote an insular Catholicism that stressed sins of the flesh.

The site of Meagher’s research was Worcester, Massachusetts where “16 of its 20 priests …were born in America, and … all the curates in the city’s Irish parishes were American natives.” In addition, the majority of teachers in Catholic schools were also American born and trained. Thus, Worcester’s Catholic personnel did not embrace the anti-pleasure components of Cullen’s devotionalism as other areas where Irish-trained priests and teachers were dominant.

Some writers understate Church censorship efforts, instead emphasizing Protestant efforts to enact government regulations to keep immigrants away from “immoral” entertainment. By contrast, the Church could directly influence their Catholic congregants, forcing local exhibitors to respond to their demands. The owner of Worcester’s Bijou Theater recalled that “we were amongst six Catholic churches in them days and if you played a movie that wasn’t fit to be seen, they could crucify you.” So when Fedeli feared possible clerical criticism, he immediately canceled the offending film and repeated an old one. Similarly, Meagher noted the increasing efforts of the Catholic Church to combat “what they saw in popular songs and dances a tendency to immorality,” including those in “cheap vaudeville houses.” He pointed to the Catholic Messinger successfully exhorting city officials to censure film presentations.

Finally, the Church sponsored vaudeville shows in order to control content. Churches would hold charity events, encouraging Catholic amateur groups to perform. One such example was the vaudeville program at Stanford University during the first decade of the twentieth century. In some locales, these Church-run events were quite numerous. In Union Hill, New Jersey, “Father Laughlin’s flock gave a vaudeville show in the parish hall on the same evening that Father McGinley had scheduled a melodrama a block away at Turn Verin Hall.” Reflecting on the importance of these activities, at the construction of a new Brooklyn school for boys, Bishop McDonnell announced, “[It] will have a theatre which is expected to be one of the finest of its kind.” Thus, in various ways, informed by their devotional beliefs, Church efforts were instrumental in the decline of Irish performers in commercial vaudeville. 

Robert Cherry an economics professor at Brooklyn College and author of "Jewish and Christian Views on Bodily Pleasure" (Wipf & Stock 2018).

If passed, the law will damage not only the priceless American achievement of religious freedom for all, but also its indispensable progeny: pluralism, limited government, and unity. 

The Act, which was introduced in Congress earlier this year and is scheduled for a vote on the House floor Friday, would add sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) to classes protected under the Civil Rights Act, such as race and sex. Proponents assert a faulty analogy between SOGI and race. Race is an immutable characteristic unconnected to distinctive behaviors or expressions. By contrast, behaviors and expressions are part of SOGI identities.

Can the rejection of SOGI behaviors and expressions be tolerated in America? In its decision legalizing same-sex marriage, the Supreme Court said yes. “Many who deem same-sex marriage to be wrong reach that conclusion on decent and honorable religious and philosophical principles,” Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote in his majority opinion.

The Equality Act assumes that those who have reached that conclusion are indecent and dishonorable. 

While the Civil Rights Act was necessary to overcome institutionalized racism, the Equality Act would suppress particular beliefs on sexual expression and behavior, especially religious convictions on sexuality, marriage, human nature, and human dignity. The law would devastate institutions built on those convictions, such as schools, charities, small businesses, hospitals, and houses of worship.

The Act will expose persons or groups holding these beliefs to lawsuits and financial ruin. The law will mark them – like racists – as “hateful” and “bigoted.” The largest financial backer of SOGI laws, Tim Gill, has labeled opponents as “wicked” people who must be “punished.” Gill’s attitude mirrors the Act’s purpose – elimination of dissent from the state-sanctioned view of sexuality and human nature. 

A sampling of likely harms foreshadows an America of increasing government coercion, some of which is already happening. Schools with traditional policies on sex and marriage will lose their tax exemptions and be forced to change or close. Adoption agencies seeking to place children with married mothers and fathers will be forced to shut down. Females will have to compete in sports and share locker rooms with biological males. Small businesses that cannot in good conscience participate in same-sex weddings will be driven out of business. 

Quite apart from legal penalties, the “wickedness” premise of the Act sets up an inexorable logic. Consider how racist attitudes and speech are treated in America. If those who hold traditional beliefs on sexuality are the same as racists, why should they be tolerated? If there is a constitutional right to same-sex marriage, why should bigoted churches not be compelled to perform them? Why should a Muslim or evangelical or Jewish college be permitted to require chastity of its students and faculty? 

The Act recognizes no protection for such views. It eliminates any right of dissenters to challenge a lawsuit based on the free exercise protections of the First Amendment as reaffirmed in the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act.   

Gay, lesbian, and transgender people have suffered grievous discrimination in the past. Today, however, most religiously conservative Americans have adopted a live and let live attitude. Drawing on the same understanding of the human person that undergirds their views of sexuality, marriage, and human nature, they believe that abuse of LGBTQ persons is deeply sinful.

 American politics is based on the revolutionary principle that representative democracy is the best system, but that even democratic governments – controlled by humans who are by their nature beguiled by power – pose a danger to freedom and equality. Given our modern tendency toward fierce disagreements over the right and the good, our system of checks and balances serves us well, especially the First Amendment freedoms of speech, assembly, and religion. 

James Madison suggested religious freedom was America’s first freedom in his Memorial and Remonstrance, not because religious people are superior to others, but because the right to free exercise of religion is necessary for human and political flourishing. None of us can be truly free without the right to seek religious truth and to order our lives accordingly. Our founders understood that religious communities contributed mightily to the common good, and limited the power of government by positing an authority greater than government. These communities provide services for the vulnerable and needy that the state would otherwise have to provide. America’s faith-based civil society is without peer in history. 

The Equality Act will harm American democracy by privileging one view of sexuality and human nature, and silencing another. But our lives together as one nation – “out of many, one” – cannot long survive if one group of Americans employs the force of law to silence others, and to declare their deepest convictions “no longer welcome here.” The Act should be rejected.

 Dr. Thomas F. Farr is the president of the Religious Freedom Institute.

The elegies that have poured out since have mourned the cathedral as a monument. As President Macron put it in an address to his citizens “Notre-Dame is our history, it’s our literature, it’s our imagery…the place where we live our greatest moments, from wars to pandemics to liberations.” What French literary critic Roland Barthes wrote of the Eiffel Tower is perhaps more aptly applied to Notre-Dame: “It is present to the entire world … as a universal symbol of Paris … beyond its strictly Parisian statement, it touches the most general human image-repertoire.” 

To treat Notre-Dame as a monument is to commemorate its past. “What is the advantage to the present individual, then, of the monumental view of the past?” Nietzsche asked. “It is the knowledge that the great which once existed was at least possible once and may well again be possible sometime.” Such a view can inspire greatness in the present. While the fire blazed, President Macron pledged to rebuild the cathedral “more beautifully” and in five years:

“I’m telling you all tonight—we will rebuild this cathedral together. This is probably part of the French destiny.”

Yet, the monumental view risks treating Notre-Dame as something already dead, which may be resurrected only through imitation of past heroic deeds. It risks blotting out the particularity of Notre-Dame: the irreducible fact that it is a particular church, built during a particular stretch of our history, by particular hands, and situated in a particular place, serving to this day as parish for particular Catholics and the seat of a particular archdiocese—Our Lady of Paris. Unlike the Eiffel Tower—that modern spire on the Left Bank’s west side—Notre-Dame is not merely a “major sign of a people and of a place.” It lives as a particular religious place, a site of memory for its parishioners and Parisians generally.

When construction began on the church in the mid-12th century on the Île de la Cité, the center of the old medieval city, Paris was little more than a large town by today’s standards. One might have described it, “at a distance,” as “no more than a church epitomizing the town,” as Marcel Proust said of the fictional Combray. Notre-Dame still acts as a reference point for the city’s geography, soaring above the banks of the Seine, although it no longer dominates the skylines as it must have in the time of Thomas Aquinas. What Proust wrote of Combray’s Saint-Hilaire was—until last Monday night—true of Notre-Dame de Paris, at least in certain quartiers: “The view seemed always to have been composed with reference to [its] steeple, which would loom up here and there among the houses, and was perhaps even more affecting when it appeared thus without the church.”

The bells of Notre-Dame are a familiar sound to residents and tourists alike, its gardens a common meeting place for picnics or lovers, the splendor of its organs the musical setting for the daily mass. Notre-Dame is not simply a monument, nor even a lieu de mémoire, but a treasured house of memory. Recalling his childhood, the narrator of In Search of Lost Time describes the church of Combray: 

“The old porch by which we entered … was worn out of shape and deeply furrowed at the sides (as also was the font to which it led us) just as if the gentle friction of the cloaks of peasant-women coming into church, and of their fingers dipping into the holy water, had managed by age-long repetition to acquire a destructive force… Its memorial stones … were themselves no longer hard and lifeless matter, for time had softened them and made them flow like honey beyond their proper margins … All this made of the church … an edifice occupying, so to speak, a four-dimensional space—the name of the fourth being Time—extending through the centuries its ancient nave, which, bay after bay, chapel after chapel, seemed to stretch across and conquer not merely a few years of soil, but each successive epoch from which it emerged triumphant.” 

There is something monumental in this depiction. Ultimately, though, the significance of Saint-Hilaire, like Notre-Dame, derives not from past heroic deeds so much as from its living connection to the past, etched into its edifice by the repeated movements of countless unremembered churchgoers over the course of time. For Proust, it is the particularity—even physicality—of the church which imbues it with such temporal power. Understood this way, the past is not a collection of facts, heroic or otherwise, but a collective memory—the “memory of a redeemed humanity,” as German literary critic Walter Benjamin put it. 

To insist on the particularity of Notre-Dame is thus not to deprive it of grandeur. On the contrary, it is because of its particularity, not in spite of it, that the cathedral became and continues to be such a symbol—just as the sacred objects contained within its walls (the crown of thorns, the fragment of the true cross) are sacred because of, not in spite of, their particularity. These relics, like the church itself, are physical traces of a particular past that allow us, in part, to transcend the particularity of our present.

More than any monument, it is this collective memory that was nearly lost but may now be regained in the fire at Notre-Dame.

M. Anthony Mills is associate vice president of policy at the R Street Institute and was previously managing editor of RealClear Media. He holds a master's degree in French and lived for a time not far from Notre-Dame.

This must stop.

We need legislation instead of litigation that will provide protections for the LGBTQ community but not at the expense of persons of faith.

Congress can broker agreements, while courts only render decisions for the parties, often on exceedingly narrow grounds. For example, Masterpiece Cakeshop was not a clear win for anyone, even Jack Phillips, who still cannot bake a wedding cake without legal risk.

Our choice is simple: we can continue to litigate endless clashes, or we can write a new script for peacefully coexisting. If we take this path, both Phillips and the couple celebrating their marriage would be treated with dignity.

Culture warriors think that religious freedom and equality cannot be harmonized. They say one must be elevated over the other, that protecting one value diminishes the other. For example, the Chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, in 2016, categorically labeled religious liberty and religious freedom “code words for discrimination.” In response, a group of religious leaders and socially conservative stakeholders penned a letter condemning all laws protecting LGBT people from nondiscrimination, no matter how nuanced, as inherent threats to religious liberty.

This is incorrect.

An inclusive, confident, covenantal pluralism would protect religious freedom while also extending protections to LGBTQ people. Translating this principle into law is a new breed of legislation—Fairness for All laws—which proceed from a simple idea: protections for faith and sexuality are not at odds. Fairness for All is neither a conservative nor liberal idea, and neither a religious nor secular concept. It is an approach to living peacefully despite the fundamental differences between us. This quest is premised on the American ideal that in a diverse society, there is space for everyone to live and act according to what’s most important at work, at home, and in the public sphere.

The problem is simple. In 28 states, gay people can get married on Saturday and fired on Monday. Americans understand this is unjust. Many religious people are at risk, too, just for practicing their beliefs.

In California, students at religious universities feared being denied needed state funding to pay for college until lawmakers stepped in. But the risk extends beyond students. Religious institutions may find their accreditation at risk.

In 9 states, religious foster care and adoption agencies can be forced to close if they cannot, for religious reasons, place children in certain families. In 11 states, gay couples can be turned away from an adoption agency. Both outcomes are wrong and fail the children whose interests are paramount, especially in the face of solutions where families are placed in the driver’s seat, directing themselves and their government funding to the best provider for their family.

At the federal level, proponents push laws that are going nowhere. The First Amendment Defense Act (FADA), which protects religious believers’ view of marriage without considering LGBTQ people, has gained no traction. Similarly, the Equality Act, which protects LGBTQ people with little consideration for religious believers, is expected to pass the House of Representatives but bog down in the Senate.

On the other hand, Fairness for All legislation would, among many protections, provide protections for LGBTQ people in employment, housing and related areas while also allowing religious organization to continue to operate schools and provide social services such as adoption and foster care according to their faith.

As states and Congress have floundered, courts are filling in gaps. Some courts have interpreted sex discrimination to include sexual orientation or gender identity, while others have not. Companies from Boeing to Ford to Whirlpool are navigating a patchwork of differing state and municipal laws. Yet, protecting all people alike is good for business, attracting talent and reducing costs.

"Either/or" answers are not serving us. Piecemeal resolution is not serving us. We need better answers that represent the best of what America is: a pluralistic society.

One example of a lasting peace that Fairness for All legislation can provide is the groundbreaking laws enacted by Utah in 2015, which melded religious liberty and LGBTQ nondiscrimination protections and embodies the concept of Fairness for All.

But to the befuddlement of many, including me, Fairness for All is under fire by some on both the right and left—both say it does too much for the other.

The best way to protect religion is to protect the LGBTQ community from discrimination. And the best way to secure nondiscrimination protections is to ensure that religion is not inadvertently harmed. Common ground lawmaking requires parties to find agreement, not necessarily on every possible matter, but on those core needs each wants met.

While the left and right try to sell one-sided measures like FADA and the Equality Act as the only moral option, those measures do not have the political support to be adopted. They are unsustainable and do not strike the balance called for by the Supreme Court. Fairness for All legislation, however, aims to create long-term solutions, harnessing the political power of Americans tired of the culture war, to create a legislative agreement that is consistent with current Court precedent.

Building on common ground instead of perpetuating divides is the way forward. Fairness for All embraces the rich diversity of America, rather than imposing one-sided victories, and establishes protections for the human dignity of all Americans.

Robin Fretwell Wilson is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law and Director, Family Law and Policy Program, University of Illinois College of Law and the co-editor of the just released book; "Religious Freedom, LGBT Rights and the Prospects for Common Ground" (William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Robin Fretwell Wilson, Cambridge University Press, 2018), which examines through the eyes of the faith, LGBT advocacy, legal, and academic communities - from the Human Rights Campaign and ACLU to the National Association of Evangelicals and Catholic and The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints the culture-war conflicts around faith and sexuality and explore whether communities with such profound differences in belief are able to reach mutually acceptable solutions in order to both live with integrity

2019 already has been a very anti-Semitic year for progressive leaders. Representative Ilhan Omar accused American Jews of dual loyalty and using money to buy Congressional support for Israel. Rep. Rashida Tlaib followed the Instagram page of free.palestine.1948, which traffics in comparisons of Jews to rats and other virulently anti-Semitic material – until she was exposed by the Capital Research Center earlier this month. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez retweeted and responded to a tweet from the executive director of the US Center for Palestinian Rights, an organization that supports the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a State Department-designated terror organization since 1997.

Conservatives have rightly excoriated these progressives for their anti-Semitism. Their criticism advances the conservative movement’s core principles of individual liberty and religious tolerance. Conservatives are well-positioned to address anti-Semitism and advance these principles because they follow in the footsteps of William F. Buckley, Jr.

For decades, Buckley marginalized anti-Semites and excluded them from positions of influence in the modern conservative movement that he founded. In 1990, conservative author and pundit Patrick Buchanan made a series of anti-Semitic statements. Buckley responded with “In Search of Anti-Semitism,” a National Review issue devoted to his essay condemning Buchanan’s anti-Semitism (as well as that of another conservative author, Joseph Sobran, and leftist author Gore Vidal).

As conservatives since Buckley have recognized, their movement must maintain a zero-tolerance policy against anti-Semitism in their ranks. In June 2018, however, this policy missed a beat. Conservatives allowed one of their most prominent institutions, ironically National Review, the magazine that Buckley founded and where he waged his fight, to publish Ed Condon’s “The Spanish Inquisition Was a Moderate Court by the Standard of Its Time.”

As the title suggests, this article attempts to excuse and downplay the horrors of the Spanish Inquisition. In case anyone has forgotten, the Spanish Inquisition was Spain’s multi-century war against Jews. It resulted in the murder of thousands, torture of untold more, expulsion of over 160,000 who refused to become Catholics, and  oppression of Jews for hundreds of years.

Was the Spanish Inquisition less horrendous for Jews than other European anti-Semitic persecutions of the same era? Perhaps. But the conservatives at National Review must know that publishing a sympathetic assessment of the Spanish Inquisition is as counterproductive as publishing material that attempts to downplay and excuse Hitler’s extreme crimes as somehow less evil than those of Stalin or Mao (because the Holocaust killed fewer people than Stalin’s purges or Mao’s Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution).

To be fair, National Review does not shy away from the fight against anti-Semitism. In October 2018, after the Pittsburgh synagogue murders, it published “How to Fight Anti-Semitism,” and in December of that year, it reported on the anti-Semitic leadership of the Women’s March.

Nonetheless, the publication of Condon’s article was a step in the wrong direction. It not only did nothing to advance the conservative movement, individual liberty, or religious tolerance, it helped opponents cast them as tainted by or even infused with anti-Semitism.

And the damage may continue for decades. For example, in 1990, a Washington Post article, Pat Buchanan The Jewish Question, focused on Buchanan’s anti-Semitic statements shortly after he made them. In 1993, a New York Magazine article, “The New Anti-Semitism,” showed that the statements had not been forgotten – and also suggested that Republican National Committee Chairman Rich Bond, former Secretary of State James A. Baker, and Vice-President Dan Quayle had expressed anti-Semitism. And in 2016, over a quarter century after Buchanan made the statements, a Vox article, “Paleoconservatism, the movement that explains Donald Trump, explained,” prominently cited Buchanan for the contention that paleoconservatism (a.k.a. the Old Right) at least in the past “certainly had an anti-Semitism problem.”

The message is simple and clear. Conservatives must follow Buckley’s path and keep their ranks and publications free of anti-Semitism to most effectively advance their movement, individual liberty, and religious tolerance.

David M. Simon is a Chicago lawyer. The views expressed in this article are his own and not those of the law firm with which he is affiliated. For more, please see www.dmswritings.com.

The Innocence Project is a program that has exonerated over 300 people wrongly convicted of serious crimes since 1992. Is it time to set up an “Innocence Project” for Catholic priests wrongly convicted of abuse?

Let’s be clear, it is horrific that clergy have abused children and young seminarians. The crime is even worse when the offender is – or was – part of the Church’s hierarchy. It’s long past time for the Catholic Church to purge these vile sex offenders from the ranks of the clergy, and for civil authorizes to bring them to justice. 

And yet the understandable desire to console abuse victims – coupled with general anti-Catholicism, which appears to have been a factor in Cardinal Pell’s case – risks convicting innocent men of guilt by association simply because they wear a clerical collar.

Australian prosecutors charged Pell with sexually assaulting two choirboys in the Melbourne Cathedral immediately following Sunday Mass in the mid-1990s, but his conviction has all the markings of a wrongful conviction. 

As revealed in a Catholic News Agency investigation, only one of the alleged victims testified to support the prosecution’s case. The other died in 2014. Pell’s attorneys presented a strong defense that the alleged abuse was literally impossible. Witnesses testified that Pell was never alone in the sacristy with altar servers or choir members. The cathedral’s sacristy has large open-plan rooms, each with open arches and halls as well as multiple entrances and exits. It was all but impossible for anything sordid to have gone unnoticed there. The cumbersome and layered liturgical vestments that require help in removing also make a quick, clandestine sexual assault by Pell after Mass highly improbable. Finally, there was overwhelming testimony that Pell was constantly surrounded by priests, other clergy, and guests after Mass – a detail that will surprise no one who has ever attended a Mass celebrated by an archbishop. Their masters of ceremony normally accompany bishops at all times. How, then, could Pell possibly have had time to so egregiously abuse two boys in an ecclesiastical Grand Central Station? 

Unlike cases involving pathological predators, the allegations against Pell are isolated. The alleged incidents in the cathedral, and the highly suspect single incident when Pell was a young seminarian which prosecutors have since abandoned, are the only complaints to emerge, despite years of aggressive investigation by the Australian government. How could someone so cavalier and desperate as to attempt such abuse basically in public not have hundreds of other victims? And, unlike prelates whose “double lives” were notorious, such as the now-defrocked Theodore McCarrick and West Virginia’s former bishop Michael Bransfield, those who know Pell are shocked and disbelieve the allegations.

Immediately after the charges were leveled against him, Pell decided to take leave of his post as head of the Vatican’s Secretariat for the Economy and return to Australia to defend his innocence. He did so knowing that his country is aflame with anti-Catholicism from other Catholic sex scandals – an anti-Catholicism that prosecutors played to at trial, according to the Catholic News Agency.  

It’s worth remembering that earlier this year another high-ranking Australian prelate was convicted on the charge of failing to report clerical sexual abuse. An appellate judge overturned his conviction in early December of last year, noting that hype over the Church's sexual abuse crisis may have been a factor in the erroneous guilty verdict. 

So why did Pell’s prosecutors, after the initial jury deadlocked at 10-2 in favor of his acquittal, feel so emboldened to prosecute a second time? Law professors Paul Marcus (William and Mary) and Vicky Waye (South Australia) have noted numerous differences between America’s "rights-oriented" and Australia’s "official-centered" criminal jurisprudence. This may explain why, rather than stand down, Australian prosecutors forged ahead with the second jury trial that finally found Pell guilty last December.

The Catholic Church certainly needs to address the crisis of sexual abuse and corruption within its ranks. Some important reform steps have already been taken. More have been suggested and not yet implemented. Chief among these are a “zero tolerance” policy against clergy sexual abuse for all priests – including the hierarchy. But “zero tolerance” should not mean that any accusation automatically becomes a credible allegation. It should not mean that the burden of proof to convict a person for sexual misconduct is lower because the accused is a Catholic priest.

If Cardinal Pell’s conviction is not reversed on appeal, we may indeed need a new “Innocence Project.”

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is Legal Advisor for The Catholic Association Foundation.  

This is the Catholic Church’s record, and it has no viable plan to change its criminal culture. It’s time to break up the Church.

Splitting the Catholic Church into several or many separate churches is the best way to sharply reduce church sex crime, corruption, and cover-ups. The separate churches would compete with each other for members and clergy in the same way that non-Catholic churches do. The competition would produce more transparency and better practices that would minimize church crime and corruption. Some of the separate Catholic churches would be scandal-free; others would not. But as with non-Catholic churches, both worshippers and clergy would vote with their feet, move to better-run churches, and thereby impose competitive discipline, financial and otherwise, on poorly run churches.

For at least some of the churches, the better practices adopted would include ending the requirement that priests be celibate. Eliminating the celibacy requirement would be the most effective step to reduce church sex crime.

Why? The celibacy requirement operates like other prohibitions. Prohibitions don’t prevent activities. They produce black markets and crime. For example, the Volstead Act did not end alcohol sales. It instead created a vast black market that facilitated illegal alcohol sales (and financed organized crime). Prohibitions against drugs, gambling, and prostitution have produced similar results. They haven’t ended drug use, gambling, or prostitution; they have caused these activities to flourish illegally.

The clerical celibacy requirement is no different. Prohibiting priests from marrying and having sex leads priests to commit sex crimes to satisfy their powerful, all too human, sexual needs and desires. Ending the celibacy requirement, as the Church of England did in 1549 not long after Henry VIII separated it from the Catholic Church, and allowing priests to marry and have sex will sharply reduce church sex crime, just as the repeal of Prohibition sharply reduced illegal alcohol sales.

Splitting up the Catholic Church would require the pope and the top levels of the Church’s hierarchy to cede much of their power, but separate Catholic churches could adhere to the same theological doctrines, celebrate the same Mass, and continue their educational and charitable good work. They also could theologically diverge and form different denominations, as Anglicans, Lutherans, Methodists, Baptists, and other Protestant denominations have.

The breakup of the Catholic Church could be accomplished in a variety of ways. A “big bang” approach would declare each parish, diocese, or archdiocese an independent church entity and allow the new independent entities to organize into associations, remain standalone churches, or further subdivide. Another approach would call for conventions of Catholics in each nation to organize their churches. Like non-Catholic churches, the resulting separate Catholic churches could end up organized in a myriad of ways. The Orthodox Church has 22 self-governing churches with the same or very similar theology and worship. Protestant churches range from those with a single building to the worldwide Anglican Communion.

Splitting up the Catholic Church, however it is done, would increase competition, produce more transparency and better practices, and accomplish what the existing Catholic Church has proven it cannot: sharply reduce church crime and corruption.

The Catholic Church is not too big to fail. It’s time to break it up. 

David M. Simon is a Chicago lawyer. The views expressed in this article are his own and not those of the law firm with which he is affiliated. For more, please see www.dmswritings.com.

Gone today is any hope that the bishops—any of them—will actually do anything serious. They will talk. They will promise to do certain things, perhaps even intelligent things. But what they will not do is the one thing that is most needed: to reform the structures and offices of the Church, including their own, which have perpetuated and worsened the crisis, and which will only prolong it until and unless those offices and structures are radically reformed.

The crisis which we have been hearing about for three decades now is really twofold in nature; there is a crisis of sex abuse, but that is aided and abetted by a crisis of the abuse of power. If the Church has, in the last two decades especially, made progress in dealing with the former, it has nowhere near begun to deal with the latter. Instead of actually examining the structural problems of governance, we have had a concerted campaign—from two otherwise ideologically opposed camps in the Church who agree on little else—to keep the focus off the problem of powerful offices embedded in structures demanding obedience. Thus we hear from one side—that around Pope Francis—that the problem is some vague and ill-defined attitude of “clericalism.” We hear from the other so-called conservative side that the problem is a “lavender mafia” living in a “gay subculture” within the Church—a claim gaining great notoriety currently with the release of Frédéric Martel’s new book.

What neither side is willing to examine is the fact that priests in parishes, bishops in dioceses, and the pope in the universal church all have a monopoly on power, and that this monopoly has allowed them to hide from any serious accountability to the people in the pews. All three, under current structures, have a right to demand obedience from those under them. None of them has to consult, much less listen to, anyone under them.

A priest is under no obligation even to have a parish council, much less consult it on anything or to take its advice. A bishop is under no obligation to hold regular synods with his clergy and laity, much less take their advice. If he does deign to hold a synod—which almost no bishop has done since the 1970s—his is the only authoritative voice. He alone determines when to call it, what it may discuss, and what decisions, if any, he will allow to be published, and perhaps implemented. A fortiori this is all true of the pope at the global level of the Church (even if Pope Francis, to his credit, has tried to nudge the church in a more synodal direction).  

The problem with these monopolistic structures is not just that they have aided and abetted the abuse crisis. The further problem is that none of the modern structures are anything other than a historical aberration and a theological abomination. To go back into Catholic history even as recently as the nineteenth century is to see at once how much greater the voice and vote of the people used to be.

Today, by contrast, the exclusion of the laity from all the councils of governance in the Church is total. This cannot be justified by history. It cannot be justified ecumenically; no other Christian body on the planet is as prelate-ridden as the Roman Catholic Church, whose cult of personality around the pope finds no equivalent in any other ecclesial body. And it certainly cannot be justified theologically. Nowhere in the Church’s theology –ancient or modern, Eastern or Western – is there even an attempt to justify the monopoly on power enjoyed by clerics, or the total disenfranchisement of the laics, to use the term of the Russian Orthodox scholar Nicholas Afanasiev, who insisted the people of God are not “laity” as in non-specialists or non-clerics, but are full members of the Church equal to clerics in the eyes of God.

How can we reform these structures and offices? Even to raise this question is to send some Catholics clamoring for their comforting clichés: “the church is not a democracy” and “we can’t look to the world for models to run the Church.”

But why can Catholics not look to their own history, and to the history, and current practice, of other Christian bodies, for models of structures that allow for voice and vote for everybody? If we look, as I do in my forthcoming book “Everything Hidden Shall Be Revealed: Ridding the Church of Abuses of Sex and Power” (Angelico Press, 2019), to other Christian bodies, including especially the Armenian Apostolic Church and some of the other Eastern Orthodox Churches, we find structures at all levels—local, diocesan, regional, and global—in which the laics have voice and vote. In those bodies, as in earlier Catholic history, we find laics voting in parish councils on not just pierogi sales or cemetery budgets, but on the choice of priest—whether to hire or fire, which is decided in conjunction with the bishop. In those bodies, as in earlier Catholic history, we find laics and clerics alike gathering in diocesan synods to elect a new bishop, and then to hold him accountable in twice-yearly meetings (a practice mandated way back in 325 at the first Nicene council that wrote the creed of that name still in use today). In those bodies, as in earlier Catholic history, we find bishops of a region or nation gathering to discipline one another when necessary, instead of standing around impotently, as American bishops did last November after a late-night phone call from Rome bid them to stand down pending apparent papal discipline, a pathetic spectacle that put one in mind of Bismarck’s arch observation after Vatican I of the bishops as the pope’s postmen.

If Catholics knew their own history and knew a bit about their sister churches in the East, they would know that the structural reforms they desperately need today are already being lived out in other Christian bodies, as I demonstrate in very careful detail in my book. The proposals made there are radical in the original sense of the word: a return to root practices that structured much of Catholic life for hundreds of years. They are therefore conservatively rooted in earlier tradition and history. But they are also, and unapologetically, “liberal” proposals for, until and unless Church structures liberate the laics to resume their rightful role in the councils of governance with voice and vote, this crisis will not end, and no amount of hot air from Rome will enable the Church to move on.

A.A.J. DeVille, is an associate professor and the Director of Humanities at the University of Saint Francis, and the editor of Logos: A Journal of Eastern Christian Studies 

Has the Catholic Church put the great scandals of 2018 behind it?

Hardly. 

The McCarrick case is about more than McCarrick’s grave failings as a priest. Stripping the former Cardinal of his rights as a priest still leaves bigger questions about the Catholic hierarchy both in America and in Rome unanswered. How did someone who engaged in such evil rise to become a prince of the Catholic Church? What happened in this case and others? How can we ensure it never happens again?  

Yes, disciplining McCarrick is an important step in reforming the Church, just as the protective steps taken already by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops have made Catholic churches and schools some of the safest places in the nation for children thanks to the Dallas Charter. In 2002, the U.S. bishops agreed to permanently remove from ministry any priest who committed even one abusive act against a child, to report every abuse accusation against priests to government authorities, to conduct background checks on all church employees who work with children, to establish abuse prevention programs and to appoint special ministers to help abuse victims as well as lay committees known as review boards to assess accusations against priests. The Vatican now must do more than simply throw out a predator priest like McCarrick so that the Catholic Church throughout the world can walk in the path of the good, true and beautiful.

Pope Francis summoned presidents of the world's bishops' conferences to Rome this month to address the matter. While deference to the regional needs of the faithful has marked Francis' pontificate, "zero tolerance" of sexual impropriety and abuse has to mean the same thing in Lima, Peru as it does in Portland, Oregon. And it must mean the same thing for seminarians, priests and members of the church hierarchy. 

Fortunately, the U. S. bishops' conference’s current leadership has already shown its interest in working with the faithful to develop pragmatic, countrywide solutions to compliment any greater Vatican oversight. These new proposals, along with the continued implementation of the American bishops' 2002 protocols, will help restore confidence among American Catholics. 

Getting "our house in order" with institutional safeguards, however, is not the end of it. The Catholic Church is not merely a human institution like a television network worried about its public image. The Church ultimately stands as a great moral authority in a growingly secular and troubled world, attending to the needs of the orphaned, the hungry, the sick, the most innocent and the vulnerable. Above all, the Church is in the business of caring for souls. More than ever, the Catholic Church has to be present to those wounded by sexual abuse in the workplace, the home and even the Church itself. 

But how can Catholics work together in such noble causes, and how can the Church stand against the barbarities of our reeling, sex-ravaged age when faced with so many open wounds and so much distrust?

Years ago, a priest from Mexico gave me some advice on how to deal with a particularly difficult group of people: "Live the virtues that others lack." Simple. Powerful. In regard to the Catholic Church’s sex abuse crisis, we can all start by (re)committing ourselves to virtue —especially purity and humility. 

Saint John Paul II, in the late pope's famous talks on the theology of the body, said "purity is a capacity centered on the dignity of the body." Such purity applies to the human body and the Church – the Body of Christ. A commitment to purity also guides our intentions. It’s a check on living inauthentic double lives.

The other virtue to adopt is humility, which Mother Teresa called "the mother of all virtues." "If you are humble," she said, "nothing will touch you, neither praise nor disgrace, because you know what you are." Humility allows for a prompt and effective correction when behavior starts to cross the line. And it guides the powerful to act in the service of others. 

Church leaders from prelates to Pope can follow up on McCarrick's defrocking this month and beyond by making plain the Church’s teaching on and commitment to purity in behavior and intentions. And they can model humility by acknowledging any role they played in allowing McCarrick – or other McCarricks – to find a home in the hierarchy and purging anyone unwilling to faithfully live out their priestly vocation.  

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is Legal Advisor for The Catholic Association Foundation.

In the early twentieth century, Catholic and Jewish loyalties to American values and democracy were questioned. In 1928, Al Smith's presidential campaign elicited anti-Catholic diatribes from many Protestant leaders. They justified their opposition because, they believed, the Catholic Church was an "un-American" and "alien culture" that opposed freedom and democracy. Presenting the official position of the National Lutheran Editors' and Managers' Association, Dr. Clarence Reinhold Tappert warned about, "the absolute allegiance [a Catholic] owes to a 'foreign sovereign' who does not only 'claim' supremacy also in secular affairs as a matter of principle and theory but who, time and again, has endeavored to put this claim into practical operation."

At the time, anti-Catholicism was eclipsed by anti-Semitism and claims of dual loyalties. Following Adolf Hitler's ascendency, Jewish efforts to respond to Nazism were seen as putting religious interests before American interests. However, anti-Semitism among the Protestant elite centered much more on the perceived undermining of traditional American culture. The progressive Henry Ford spoke for many when he condemned Jewish efforts: "Frivolity, sensuality, indecency, appalling illiteracy … are the marks of the American Stage as it approaches its degeneracy under Jewish control."

This hostility was particularly intense with respect to Jewish efforts to bring black music to the center of popular culture.  At the turn of the century, a leading music critic Daniel Gregory Mason wrote, "Ragtime … is a rude noise which emerged from the hinterlands of brothels and dives, presented in a negroid manner by Jews [who have] oriental extravagance and sensuous brilliance." Twenty years later, Ford wrote, "Jazz is a Jewish creation. The mush, the slush, the sly suggestion, the abandoned sensuousness of sliding notes are of Jewish origin.  Monkey talk, jungle squeals, grunts and squeaks and gasps suggestive of cave love are camouflaged by a few feverish notes."

In his book "American Judaism: a History," the historian Jonathan Sarna writes, "In the face of worldwide anti-Semitic efforts to stigmatize and destroy Judaism, influential Christians and Jews in America labored to uphold it, pushing Judaism from the margins of American religious life toward its very center."

The persistence of interdenominational intolerance led a group of religious leaders to form the National Conference of Christians and Jews. It organized chapters throughout the nation, stressing a unifying Judeo-Christian tradition, and instituted Brotherhood Day to combat religious prejudice.

Their efforts were given a strong boost when the US entered World War II. Deborah Dash Moore documented how the Armed Forces embraced these views as a means of generating a unified fight force. In order to further this goal, all chaplains had to go through extensive training. The Standard Operating Procedure trained them to respect and surmount formal religious differences, and doctrinal disagreement had to be accommodated and subordinated to the demands of war and military requirements.

The unity of purpose was exemplified by a much publicized wartime tragedy: the sinking of the SS Dorchester. The ship's multi-faith chaplains gave up their lifebelts to evacuating seamen and stood together "arm in arm in prayer" as the ship went down. A 1948 postage stamp commemorated their heroism with the words "interfaith in action."

The unity fostered by the war effort carried over to the postwar period. Brotherhood Day was extended to Brotherhood Week and was widely observed. In addition, the notion of a unifying Judeo-Christian tradition fit well into the anti-Communism that flourished during the Cold War period.  

Unfortunately, dual loyalty claims have resurfaced in the last few years. In 2018, Senator Kamala Harris questioned a Catholic nominee to the Court of Appeals because he was a member of the Knights of Columbus, characterizing it as an extremist group because it follows church doctrine opposing same-sex marriages and abortion. This followed Senator Diane Feinstein's questioning another nominee because "the [Catholic] dogma lives loudly within you and that is a concern."

The loyalty of Jewish supporters of Israel has also been questioned. When some Jewish legislators supported a bill regarding boycotts of Israel, newly elected Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) tweeted that they "forgot what country they represent." A few years earlier, then congressperson Keith Ellison said, "The United States foreign policy in the Middle East is governed by what is good or bad through a country of 7 million people [Israel]. A region of 350 million all turns on a country of 7 million." This did not hurt his standing as Ellison rose to become deputy chair of the Democratic National Committee. 

These current dual loyalty charges are troubling but given increased religious diversity – with Islam and secularism most notable – there are good reasons for sunsetting the use of the term Judeo-Christian tradition. Even if the term disappears, the goal of its wartime use must prevail. We must learn to respect and surmount these differences.

Robert Cherry teaches at Brooklyn College and the author of Jewish and Christian Views on Bodily Pleasure: Their Origins and Relevance to the Twentieth Century (Wipf & Stock, 2018).

But now, the voices have calmed and the dust has settled. Why? It’s true that some pastors declared a separate peace of sorts by establishing rival worship services: one for the traditionalists, one for the moderns. Others went the blended worship route, which, while leaving everybody a little dissatisfied—mixing pipe organs with electric guitars will do that—included enough elements from both styles to at least keep the group together.

It also could be that everybody is simply tired of fighting. Positions have calcified; viewpoints have hardened; nobody, however well intentioned, is changing anybody’s mind; and to bring up the subject would only pick at the still-tender sutures.

But it’s probably none of those things. The reason you don’t hear much about the worship wars is that one side has won them, or is winning to the point that the other is cowering in the back pews hoping they aren’t dragged out, made to wave their arms in the air and sing “Our God Is an Awesome God.”

Published in 2015, the National Congregations Study, a survey of nearly four thousand congregations from across the Christian spectrum undertaken by researchers at Duke University, found traditional aspects of worship in decline. Between 1998 and 2012, congregations that used choirs in worship decreased from 54 to 45 percent; those using organs dropped from 53 to 42 percent. The use of drums had a big uptick: 20 percent of congregations used drums in 1998, 34 percent in 2012. Churches printing bulletins fell from 72 to 62 percent. Informality in worship is way up (shouting “Amen,” wearing shorts to church); formality way down (calling the minister “Pastor So and So,” dressing up for services).

The survey didn’t spell it out, but informal worship with contemporary Christian music seems to have carried the day. All the megachurches are doing it. Rare—practically unknown—is the church that hasn’t bowed at least one knee to it.

Yes, that battle seems to be over. But maybe there’s still time to save the hymnals.

Hymnals, a historic legacy of Western Christianity, have been housed in pew racks in church sanctuaries for centuries, and those with musical notation as well as words have existed since the 1830s in the United States. They have been indispensable for worship for all that time, objects of treasure both in the sanctuary and in some households. In my tradition, back in the day, many confirmands received as confirmation presents not Bibles, but engraved hymnals. They carried their own hymnals to church.

Nobody’s doing that anymore. In fact, more and more worshipers aren’t even looking at hymnals once they’re in church. They’re looking at the front wall, at a screen attached to it, upon which are projected song lyrics, the words to the liturgy (if one is used), and perhaps even bullet-point outlines, photos, and YouTube videos.

The numbers are sketchy, and evidence is more anecdotal than empirical, but churches in all traditions, meeting in all manner of worship spaces, are increasingly fastening large white canvases to their chancel walls and leaving the hymn books to molder in the pew racks. Many churches have opted to use some form of projector technology; the National Congregations Study reported use of projected images skyrocketing by 23 percent from 1998 to 2012.

So, in a last-ditch effort, possibly a death rattle, let me lay out the case for hymnal-singing and against use of these omnipresent, disagreeable screens.

Which is the first point: screens are eyesores. In churches that don’t look like traditional churches, they almost fit. The accoutrements of contemporary worship dominate the space—guitars and microphones and drum kits and music stands and keyboards and amps—and behind that, you expect to see giant luminescent slabs on the wall. The incongruous fixture in these rooms is the altar.

In a traditional sanctuary, on the other hand, in a worship space with subdued natural lighting and pews and steps leading to a chancel housed with time-honored appointments like an altar, a pulpit, a lectern, and historic symbols of the faith, the screens jump out and slap your aesthetic sensibilities upside the head.

Why are they there? Some reasons are practical. They get worshipers’ heads out of the books and pointed up toward the front; this amplifies the volume during the songs. Also, the screens free up worshipers’ hands—no fumbling with books. Parishioners with weak eyes can see the words on the screens better than they can the words in a hymnal. For seekers—visitors, the unchurched—they make worship immediately more accessible.

But they also possess a less practical appeal. We live in a visual culture. The control screens have over everyday life is staggering. Between tablets, laptops, smartphones, and e-readers, not to mention all those hours at the office staring at a computer screen, and then coming home to watch another screen for the evening’s entertainment, there’s no getting away from the bits and bytes, the ones and zeros. In that environment, why not worship with screens in church? They’re everywhere else.

In a culture that treasures the new, the convenient, and the informal, and plants a sloppy wet kiss on every new tech toy, the appeal of worship screens is easily explained.

The downside is that they eliminate hymnals from the worship life of the church. Screens come in; hymnals go out. And with them goes everything those books contain and represent.

On the practical level, it becomes difficult to teach new songs on a worship screen, primarily because there are no notes. Worship screens work only because worshipers already know the melodies, which may be why the worship playlists at contemporary services are so curtailed—the same songs tend to be sung over and over.

Pastors who want to expand their congregations’ musical repertoire with new hymns have at their disposal six hundred or seven hundred time-tested, theologically sound, tradition-approved specimens, all with notes and musical staffs, located right there in the pew racks.

Theology will suffer as hymnals fade off the scene, as the rich repository of theological teaching contained in the old hymns will be lost. The language in some hymns may be an obstacle for some, but the lyrics in those old hymns teach the faith far better than most of the praise choruses that dominate contemporary services. The old hymns were carefully crafted with theology at the forefront—the hymns presented doctrine; they told the saving story of sin and grace.

On a grander scale, what effect do worship screens have on worship? Are they truly neutral, as is said about much technology, and can be beneficial when used well and deleterious when ill-applied? The argument is made that screens do not affect the larger whole. We have the same worship we had when we worshiped without screens, we are told; we simply added the screens. Instead of people looking down at their books, now they’re looking up at the wall—everything else is exactly the same.

But it’s not. Worship screens cannot help but change worship. Hymnals are decidedly old school, but sometimes the old ways have too many benefits to abandon. For one, hymnals promote good congregational singing. They present more than the words to a hymn—they feature the notes and staffs themselves. Everybody sees the same notes, so everybody knows where the song is going. Even the musically untrained—and the less musically inclined—can stumble through an unfamiliar hymn for at least a few verses, following the notes up and down the scale, noting the changes in note values, until, by the third or fourth stanza, they have sufficient command of the melody to put gusto into their words. These people would be standing mute if they were watching words on a screen. As for the musically adept, hymnals add sophistication. These folks can sing parts if they want to—the soprano, alto, tenor, and bass lines are all there on the page—thus bringing harmony into congregational singing.

When churches use screens, if you don’t know the song, you don’t sing. You don’t know how many notes to assign to a given syllable or whether the melody goes up or down. There is no musical notation to fall back on. It’s like singing completely unfamiliar songs from a karaoke machine.

Hymnals discourage distraction and allow greater concentration on the lyrics of the hymn. Screens do the opposite. They promote distraction. A lot of churches surround their projected lyrics with background features against which the on-screen words are set—maybe waves are lapping at the words, maybe sunbeams are tickling the ends of the lines. Then there are the inevitable technical faux pas: misspellings, deleted commas, misplaced apostrophes, slides that are slow to advance, even wrong slides popping up on occasion.

You can’t beat a plain old book with black letters and black notes on white paper to keep your focus on to what you’re singing. There are no surprises there, no distractions; you get only what you expected.

Also, singing from a hymnal offers the worshiper theological context. You see the whole hymn with all the verses. Many hymns are constructed as theological “stories”—they take the worshiper on a salvation journey, from sin to grace. When singing from a hymnal you get to see that story unfold; you can review where you’ve been and preview where you’re going in the hymn. You get the whole drift of the lyrics, the full content, whereas screens typically give you no more than a single verse.           

Worship screens will kill hymnals, though not at first. Long after Gutenberg, books were still being hand-copied or printed from woodblocks—as an exercise in nostalgia or by technophobes unwilling to face the future. But, as Nicholas Carr puts it in his book “The Shallows,” “The old technologies lose their economic and cultural force. . . It’s the new technologies that govern production and consumption, that guide people’s behavior and shape their perceptions.” We hymnal-singers will take the hymnal to the grave with us. As screens push hymn books out of the racks, economics will push publishing companies away from producing new hymnals or revising old ones. Eventually there will be nothing but screens.

The long-term effects of that will be dire. The musical repertoire of the church will be constricted; old favorites will dominate hymn selection; even marginally unfamiliar hymns will slide off the radar entirely. Worship will be impoverished. The theology of the church will lose one of its most effective—certainly its most poetic and beautiful—transmission vehicles.

That would be a bad thing, for church music, for the church’s theology, and for the church overall.

This has all become a familiar state of affairs now, but it was the 1980s. We have been here before: a debate about capitalism between clerics and capitalists occurred during preparation of a bishops’ pastoral letter on the economy in America almost four decades ago. This debate presaged the ongoing global debates about what is essentially the same subject. A high-quality, intellectually serious “lay letter” was prepared as part of the 1980s debate in the U.S. The lay letter, along with the way it came about and was presented, all warrant serious re-examination given the new debates into which the lay letter’s concepts should be re-introduced.

Bishops and Economics

The idea of an American bishops’ letter on the economy was first proposed at a meeting of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) in November 1980, just after Ronald Reagan was elected President. A committee to draft the letter was appointed in January 1981. It was to be chaired by Milwaukee’s then-Archbishop Rembert G. Weakland. Well-staffed and with the help of many external consultants, the committee publicly presented and discussed three drafts before submitting its final draft in November 1986 to the USCCB’s full membership, which voted to formally adopted it, 225 to 9.

“Some people argue that an unfettered free-market economy, where owners, workers, and consumers pursue their enlightened self-interest, provides the greatest possible liberty, material welfare, and equity,” according to the final draft, “Economic Justice for All: Pastoral Letter on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy.” “The policy implication of this view is to intervene in the economy as little as possible because it is such a delicate mechanism that any attempt to improve it is likely to have the opposite effect.”

On the other hand, “Others argue that the capitalist system is inherently inequitable and therefore contradictory to the demands of Christian morality, for it is based on acquisitiveness, competition, and self-centered individualism,” the bishops’ letter continues. “They assert that capitalism is fatally flawed and must be replaced by a radically different system that abolishes private property, the profit motive, and the free market.”

The 90-page pastoral attempted to even-handedly place itself between these positions. “Catholic social teaching has traditionally rejected these ideological extremes because they are likely to produce results contrary to human dignity and economic justice,” it says. “In short, the Church is not bound to any particular economic, political, or social system.”

“When the U.S. bishops published ‘Economic Justice for All’ in 1986, some thinkers on the political right urged them to leave economics to the economists and focus on the purely ‘religious’ realm,” according to the new “Catholic Bishops in the United States: Church Leadership in the Third Millennium,” by four scholars at Georgetown University’s Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate. “The political left has been perhaps equally vociferous in its critiques of the bishops, except the problem in this case is that the church’s leaders have remained too silent.”

The lay faithful on the right inclined to defend capitalism in the 1980s, of course, did not consider themselves on any “ideological extreme.” They still do not, though current papal and papally inspired pronouncements in various forms seem even more dismissive of them and their ideas. Quoting a fourth-century bishop during remarks in His native Latin America, Pope Francis called unfettered capitalism “the dung of the devil.” That was in 2015. 

Philosophically, the 1986 American prelates’ pastoral could be evidence of that which Daniel J. Mahoney considers the Christian acceptance of “the religion of humanity” in his new “The Idol of Our Age: How the Religion of Humanity Subverts Christianity.” In the book, Mahoney laments that Christianity “becomes an instrument for promoting egalitarian social justice, usually in the name of an ideological conception of the poor (clearly, Pope Francis increasingly fits into this category).” 

Regarding policy, the 1986 pastoral actually made several specific proposals that would have increased governmental “interven[tion] in the economy” and had the opposite effect of economic improvement, just as some of the supposed extremists feared. The letter included economic-policy recommendations, for example, on fiscal and monetary policy, employment programs, the minimum wage, the tax system, education policy, welfare and income-support programs, the viability of family farms, aid to developing nations, and international trade and finance. His present Holiness, one can plausibly presume, would endorse them. 

In short, Weakland really did not “leave economics to the economists,” just as the bishops’ attention-getting 1983 pastoral on nuclear weapons did not leave national security and foreign policy to national-security and foreign-policy experts. Rather, the bishops’ letters on nuclear weapons and the economy were and are plausibly considered by many on the left to constitute something of a model framework for social-justice policy advocacy—and a morally bolstered, if not outright blessed, one.

It was considered such in the 1980s, and it still is in 2019. 

Another Model

There is another, helpful model of contributing to public discourse from the 1980s. A Lay Commission on Catholic Social Teaching and the U.S. Economy was formed in 1984 to bring its expertise and analysis to bear on discourse surrounding preparation of the economic letter by Weakland and his the bishops, who always invited such dialogue. In several ways, the Lay Commission should be considered a model too—substantively and stylistically, and procedurally—perhaps particularly now.

The commission was philanthropically supported by the Olin and Scaife Foundations, among others, with grants to the American Catholic Committee. It was quintessentially good grantmaking by those foundations. The commission’s letter, “Toward the Future: Catholic Social Thought and the U.S. Economy,” was completed and released in November 1984, before the bishops’ first public draft later that year.

The 29-member Lay Commission’s chairman was successful businessman and philanthropist William E. Simon, a former U.S. Secretary of the Treasury and, at the time, Olin’s president. Simon was assisted in the task by Olin program staffer Michael S. Joyce, who went on to become president of the Bradley Foundation.

The commission’s vice chair and principal author of the lay letter was “Reagan Democrat” theologian Michael Novak—author of 1982’s seminal “The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism,” editor of Crisis Magazine and a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). A November 2018 tweet from National Review senior editor Jay Nordlinger asked, and answered, “You know what the conservative movement could use today? A team of Michael Novaks. People who will defend the morality of capitalism and explain how a free economy benefits ordinary men and women.” 

The commission’s other distinguished members included Mary Ellen Bork, wealthy industrialist J. Peter Grace, former U.S. Secretary of State Alexander M. Haig, Jr., Clare Booth Luce, Conservative Party of New York founder and future federal Court of Appeals Judge J. Daniel Mahoney, former CBS Television president and future U.S. Ambassador to the Holy See Frank Shakespeare, and eminent political scientist James Q. Wilson. 

“We lay men and lay women, in addressing our reflections on the future to all our fellow citizens, recognize that Christianity cannot be identified with any one earthly system, political party, or partisan purpose,” the 106-page letter began, before offering what seems to have been a gentle chide of the bishops. “We recognize, too, that Christian Scripture does not offer programmatic guidance for the concrete institutions of political economy.” 

A “sense of balance is sometimes lacking in the language of those who either choose individual liberty over all other concerns, and hence a kind of radical individualism,” according the lay letter, or, on the other hand, “seek to enlarge the power and scope of government, and hence embrace a kind of statist meddlesomeness.”

The lay letter has three parts. Its first part well-surveys the principles of Catholic social thought, and examines the great significance of the American experience in particular. By its own terms and implying at least some moral authority derivative of the laity’s own vocation, its second part reflects “on the lay vocation of co-creation, especially as it is now being lived by millions of lay persons in economic activities.” Co-creation in this context is defined as “bringing forth from each part of creation the economic possibilities with which the Creator unequally endowed each,” as the letter puts it.

 One strongly senses here the Novak for whom Nordlinger now pines by tweet. The lay letter argues, in-depth and with evidence, that “political economies should liberate the creative energies of each human person within them. This liberal democracies set out to do.” Specifically, “Catholic social thought needs to examine more carefully the institutional causes of economic creativity. Creativity does not just happen; in world economies, it is relatively rare,” according to the lay faithful. Presaging St. John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical Centesimus annus, the lay letter holds that, properly understood and practiced, liberal democratic capitalism allows for and even encourages that creation—with other notable benefits to boot. 

“[T]he record of capitalist societies in providing personal liberties, a creative economy, high wages, and unprecedented standards of living for the formerly poor is beyond dispute,” the 1984 lay letter continues. “The aim of capitalism has been to overcome the tyranny of poverty not solely for the few (who did not need such liberation), but for all, and not solely in one nation, but in all nations.”

An au courant term for this kind of beneficial co-creation might be “human flourishing,” about the proper degree of economic and policy emphasis on which some within the right are intelligently arguing. This is a healthy debate implicitly occasioned in part by Oren Cass’s new “The Once and Future Worker: A Vision for the Renewal of Work in America.” Earlier, conservative skepticism of capitalism’s effect on politics, culture, and society was well-catalogued by Peter Kolozi’s “Conservatives Against Capitalism: From the Industrial Revolution to Globalization.” More-recent cutting commentary from Fox News’ Tucker Carlson is consistent.

The 1984 lay letter’s third and final part makes several proposals, including many on policy that would, for the most part, decrease governmental intervention in the economy. The recommendations are regarding the family, poverty and welfare, job creation, free trade and global interdependence, and “social cooperation and providence.”

In December 1986, Simon and Novak released a separate report on the final draft of the “Economic Justice for All” pastoral letter, thanking the bishops for their invitation to engage in dialogue, complimenting some parts of the pastoral, continuing to critique other parts, and urging that the larger discussion remain ongoing. 

Simon’s and Novak’s 1986 report specifically credited the bishops with ensuring that language regarding the importance of the family was added to their letter. Under Joyce, the Bradley Foundation was just beginning its philanthropic investments in the family and welfare reform, including with a major joint project of AEI and Marquette University on the relationship between the two topics led by Novak. The effort laid the intellectual foundation for successful welfare reform in Wisconsin, which envisioned a renewal of work and which in turn ultimately led to similarly successful federal work-based welfare reform in 1996.

A Model in Other Ways, as Well

 It was the mid-1980s, but the Lay Commission on Catholic Social Teaching and its "Toward the Future" letter should be considered a model in other ways as well—again, perhaps particularly now. In addition to its substantive arguments, the tone of the commission’s activities and the letter was always respectful and engaging. The letter civilly cited concepts and tried to fairly apply them to historical and contemporary factual situations, relying on actual evidence. It was making an argument, yes, but on the merits of the issues; it was not personal. 

The replicability of the privately funded “lay-commission” vehicle should perhaps be explored, too, whether it be in the discourse about the economy, the environment, or any of the other myriad difficult and sometimes-embarrassing issues facing the church and its laity.

Given the substance and nature of current episcopal and public discourse surrounding capitalism and free markets, the Lay Commission is probably an idea whose time has come again. This discourse is occurring between Weakland’s successors on the left, including at the Vatican, and those defenders of capitalism properly understood on the right. It is also happening among those on the right itself, about that which should be the proper understanding of capitalism. While easily revisable with updated facts, figures, and communications techniques, many of the themes of and thoughts in 1984’s "Toward the Future" may be even more relevant in 2019.

Daniel P. Schmidt is the retired vice president for program at The Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation in Milwaukee. Michael E. Hartmann is a senior fellow and director of the Center for Strategic Giving at the Capital Research Center in Washington, D.C. He is a former program officer and director of research at the Bradley Foundation.

Until recently, it was hard to believe that they could be any more anti-Catholic then they were after the Amy Coney Barrett kerfuffle, in which Senators Feinstein (D-CA) and Durbin (D-IL) questioned whether Coney Barrett’s Catholic faith should disqualify her from a circuit court judgeship. Senator Feinstein now infamously said, “The dogma lives loudly within you, and that’s a concern.”

The sentence went viral not just because it was utterly weird, but because it laid bare a hostility towards religion that Democrats had previously succeeded in masking with liberal euphemisms about tolerance. Coney Barrett, an incredibly polished and accomplished working mom, became an overnight hero, and the phrase “dogma lives loudly” became a sort of rallying cry for the faithful who have suffered the left’s soft discrimination for years.

But Democrats upped the ante last month by taking a direct swing at one of the Church’s most beloved organizations: the Knights of Columbus, a men’s lay organization centered around service and charity. Yet another duo of Democratic senators trotted out the anti-Catholic song and dance, using another judicial nominee’s membership in the organization to question whether Catholics can be judges. Senator Hirono (D-HI) accused the organization – which Pope Saint John Paul II once called “the strong right arm” of the Catholic Church for its charitable work – of extremism and suggested that nominee Brian Buescher should resign if confirmed. Senator Kamala Harris (D-CA) directly attacked the organization’s positions on marriage and abortion, which happen to be core tenets of Catholic teaching. In other words, she critiqued the Knights, and consequently Buescher himself, for being Catholic.

At least one of their colleagues is worried. Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI), accused colleagues of “fomenting religious bigotry” and said that, “elected leaders who weaponize religion are playing a dangerous game.” 

And yet it’s a game Democrats seem eager to play. Look no further than California and Pennsylvania, where the politically ambitious Democratic attorneys general Xavier Becerra and Josh Shapiro have succeeded in dragging the Little Sisters of the Poor back into court. After the Trump administration put an end to the years-long fight over whether the order of nuns should have to provide things like abortion pills in their healthcare plans, Becerra and Shapiro filed challenges to their religious exception, which courts ruled earlier this week can proceed. It’s almost like the left has a maniacal obsession with the Little Sisters, never mind the creepiness of powerful men like Becerra and Shapiro trying to make nuns provide birth control pills.

All of this raises a question: why did the party that once stood with Republicans in almost unanimously passing the Religious Freedom Restoration Act turn on the millions of Americans who are proud of their religious affiliations? Many of those Americans are especially proud of their religious affiliations and memberships because of the good work those organizations do. The Knights of Columbus, for example, has been at the forefront of efforts to help persecuted religious minorities in the Middle East, efforts they were involved in long before the federal government began to take action. At home, the Knights donated $185.6 million to charity and spent 75.6 million hours in service in a year, according to their latest report. They are “extreme” only insofar as their charitable impact is staggering. The Little Sisters meanwhile, do extraordinary work caring for poor and dying elderly in clean and loving homes all around the world.

The Catholic Church is the largest non-governmental provider of healthcare, charity, and education services to the poor in this country. It counts tens of millions of Americans who view that faith as a positive contribution to a free and pluralistic society. With all due respect to Senator Feinstein, the real concern is that her party seems so eager to disagree.

Ashley E. McGuire is a Senior Fellow with The Catholic Association.

Perhaps there is nothing so clarifying as seeing oppression in person.

The first thing I saw in China on my visit to adopt my daughter a few years ago robbed me of any illusions I might have had about my child’s birth-country. While walking toward the bus that awaited our group at the Beijing airport, I saw a tiny, elderly beggar woman trying to approach us, seeking alms. Two uniformed policemen stopped her and roughly hustled her around the corner of an adjacent bus. There, they began beating her with their truncheons. I had never seen anyone being beaten before and, as I boarded our bus, I was weeping almost as hard as the poor old lady.

I wish I could somehow replay that scene so that Pope Francis could see it. 

Of course, the cruel oppression of the weak by the powerful happens everywhere. But authoritarian, atheist China has been perfecting its techniques of repression for many decades, and I’m afraid that Pope Francis may not have his finger on that nation’s pulse.

How else to explain the Vatican’s recent agreement with China, in which the Pope granted Beijing’s Communist government the power to designate the bishops who will lead his Chinese flock? The 7 bishops chosen by China are members of the Catholic Patriotic Association.

The CPA is the official state-sponsored Church that Pope Benedict not so long said had statutes irreconcilable with Catholic doctrine, including complete independence from Vatican oversight. In return for giving the Chinese Communist government the power to name its Catholic bishops – an unprecedented deferral of one of a pope’s most significant powers – Beijing will recognize (for the first time since 1951) that the pope in Rome is the head of the Catholic Church in China. This seems rather an empty gesture, coming as it does during one of Communist China’s periodic crackdowns on faith and believers.

Premier Xi Jinping has made no bones about his desire to crush religion, which he considers a threat to the Communist state. Assaults on Muslims, Buddhists, and Christians are ramping up. Freedom House writes that recently “religious groups have been swept up in a broader tightening of CCP control over civil society and an increasingly anti-Western ideological bent under Xi Jinping.” The regime routinely tortures tens of thousands of religious prisoners in China and sometimes kills them outright. Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims face even higher levels of religious persecution than do Christians. UN experts estimated in August that approximately 3 million Muslims have been sent to cultural reeducation camps just in the province of Xinjiang. According to ChinaAid, a U.S.-based non-governmental organization, recent outrages against Christians include the demolition of churches, the imprisonment of thousands of worshipers and pastors, and the removal of hundreds rooftop crosses. Just a few days ago, four brave underground priests in Hebei province who refused to join the CPA were sent away to be “indoctrinated.” Their flocks are heartbroken.

In China, religious persecution drives worship deep underground, out of reach to the growing millions of Chinese who feel an urgent need for transcendence and meaning beyond Communist politics. The state-sponsored churches, such as the CPA, lack the credibility of the underground movements that regularly produce martyrs of the faith. This is because, as Pope Benedict wrote in a letter to his Chinese flock, official recognition “obliges the people involved to adopt attitudes, make gestures and undertake commitments that are contrary to the dictates of their conscience as Catholics.” The faithful know this and are mistrustful of the government-sponsored church. It is also knows that the CPA bishops recently rubber-stamped by the Vatican as part of the deal are chosen for their complete acquiescence to the Party. They are considered to be nothing but puppets who will do what they are told. 

Pope Francis’ message to Chinese Catholics upon the signing of the new agreement is long on reconciliation and cooperation with the communist government. It is, however, short on demands for liberty and mercy for his persecuted faithful, who understand it’s nigh impossible for a good Catholic to also be a good Communist. As if on cue, the Chinese government has shown their bad faith by taking an underground-Church bishop into custody for “indoctrination." His crime? Refusal to join the CPA out of loyalty to Pope Francis, who elected him in 2016.

The clandestine Church in China feels abandoned, betrayed, and alone. Sadly, they have every reason to feel this way.

Once back in the United States with our new Chinese daughter, we promptly had her baptized a Roman Catholic. To us, her christening felt like a great rescue. Not only had we brought our daughter home to an adoring family and to citizenship in a country where police beatings in airport parking lots are illegal. We had also given her faith and the liberty to practice that faith openly and safely. This is something all Chinese people deserve, and something that any agreement with the Vatican should have as its first and unmovable goal.

Dr. Grazie Pozo Christie is a Policy Advisor for The Catholic Association.

This was not always so, and perhaps it is useful to ponder a bit of church history to recover a sense of revulsion and appropriate consequences for such behavior. After all, the lay faithful are perplexed at the relative silence from the Vatican on the case of Theodore McCarrick, who has thus far suffered only the mild rebuke of having his cardinal’s hat revoked.

Once upon a time in the church, there was a ritual called the “Degradation of the Bishop” in which one who had grossly abused his office was essentially un-ordained. The degradation went beyond merely “defrocking” a bishop, but entirely revoked ecclesiastical status in a pointed and symbolic ceremony of expulsion. 

The rite included removing the bishop’s miter, sacred vestments, and even his shoes, with these words, “We deprive thee of the rights and privileges of the episcopal dignity, symbolized in this pallium, since thou hast abused them. We strip thy head of this miter, emblem of the episcopal dignity, since thou hast befouled it by thy ill government.”

The degradation ceremony concluded with a symbolic scraping of the bishop’s hands and removal of his ring, “Rightly do we pull off thy ring, the sign of fidelity, since thou hast made bold to rape God's own bride, the Church. We utterly erase and eradicate the consecration, blessing and anointing bestowed upon thee, and we put thee out of the episcopal order, whence thou returnest unclothed.”

While the formidable words of this ritual may seem harsh to our modern sensibilities, they can remind us of what a proper sense of outrage might be when one considers the offense. St. Catherine of Siena, in her spiritual masterpiece The Dialogue, tells us starkly of God’s view of such behavior amongst the clergy. It’s worth a review of Chapter 124 in which St. Catherine talks of the leprosy of this sin among the ministers of the sacraments, producing a stench that reaches all the way to Heaven. St. Catherine says that even the devils cannot bear the sight of this horrendous sin.

Surely there are updated canonical means of addressing the likes of Theodore McCarrick and his accomplices in the hierarchy (and there are accomplices who ought to be addressed), but the degradation rite might be useful for the bishops meeting in Baltimore to ponder. More importantly, since power ultimately lies in Rome on this matter, we can hope that the “thorough study” of the McCarrick matter ordered by Pope Francis in October will yield more than the anemic response we have seen thus far.

In Crime and Punishment, Dostoyevsky returns to a similar theme on human nature; he writes, “Man grows used to everything, the scoundrel!” In this novel, the murderer gets away with his crime for some time, but only truly repents and starts on a path to redemption after he is finally imprisoned.  For Theodore McCarrick, who still denies wrongdoing as he lives freely and comfortably in a Kansas friary, it would be a true act of mercy for him to face justice.

Pope Francis, please prosecute this case fervently. Such an outcome might not only bring some desperately needed healing to the victims, it might also be the only hope of redemption for the perpetrators.

Maureen Ferguson is Senior Policy Advisor for The Catholic Association.

Our desire to serve the Lord faithfully should be our motivation. Our Lord leads and guides us and pours out His graces and mercy upon us as we strive to do His Holy will. Too often people act out of fear, fear of what might happen, fear of letting go, fear of what other people might think of them. Fear should not be our motivator. Today, we are confronted by a secular society with distorted views. Contraception, abortion, same sex unions and euthanasia are legal, but nonetheless, contrary to the teachings of the Church. Franciscan University has always stood alongside the successors of the apostles and will continue to be unwavering in our commitment to the Catholic faith and tradition.

There is no alternative for a Catholic institution focused on following Christ and striving to do His Holy will.

We are a pro-life institution that fosters the dignity of human life. We witness to this with our words and actions, as for example, when we participate in the National Prayer Vigil for Life and March for Life, even if it means being stopped on the Pennsylvania turnpike for 36 hours.

In addition, it is always inspiring to see our administrators and the growing number of faculty members (sacred music, philosophy and education) who have voluntarily offered to make publicly the profession of faith and oath of fidelity to the magisterium in addition to our theologians and pastoral ministers whom the Church asks to do so.

Recently, I spoke to a group of canon lawyers about current issues facing Catholic universities. I pointed to arguments that some people raise to suggest that the law of the Church, particularly as embodied in Saint John Paul II’s apostolic constitution Ex corde Ecclesiae, is either insufficient to address current issues or outdated and ought to be disregarded totally. I, however, believe that there is great wisdom that we can draw from the mind of the great Saint to resolve current issues.

Those of us involved in this great endeavor of Catholic higher education that was “born from the heart of the Church” should always remain focused on the “privileged task ‘to unite existentially by intellectual effort two orders of reality that too frequently tend to be placed in opposition as though they were antithetical: the search for truth, and the certainty of already knowing the fount of truth.’" 

A Catholic university should always remain true to its mission as an institution that is both Catholic and a university. Moreover, we must always remain focused on the Lord and remind ourselves of both the mandate and the promise that He gave us: “Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe always all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age” (Matt 28:19-20). If we do so, then we have no reason to fear, for the Lord walks before us calling us to follow Him.

Fr. Sean O. Sheridan, TOR, is the President of Franciscan University of Steubenville

Yes, drinking from the wrong cup and speaking her mind.

That’s the non-first world problem Asia Bibi faces today in Pakistan. Her conviction for "blasphemy" is an affront to the dignity of women everywhere.  

Asia Bibi was born and raised in a small rural village in Pakistan. Her family, the only Christian (Roman Catholic) family in the village, faced constant pressure to convert to Islam. One day, while harvesting berries, Bibi went to get water from a well. Another farmworker saw her drinking from a cup her Muslim co-workers had used. Bibi was told that Christians – even ones who toil the same piece of land as Muslims – were "unclean" and must not use the same cup as Muslims. Bibi would have none of it. She spoke up in defense of her beliefs, and her own dignity. There followed a report to the local Muslim cleric. 

In 2010, Bibi was convicted of blasphemy as a result of the argument in the field that day. The crime of blasphemy in Pakistan carries a mandatory death sentence, and Bibi was sentenced to death by hanging. Last week, eight years after Bibi’s initial conviction, a special three-judge panel of the Pakistani Supreme Court heard oral argument in Bibi’s last chance to overturn the sentence and announced that it would "reserve judgment in the matter." The hangman’s noose awaits Asia Bibi.

Is this not incredible? Pakistan, a country considered a U.S. ally in the war against terrorism, plans to execute a poor mother of five for blasphemy.  

Is it also not incredible that American women have not all joined together to mobilize on behalf of Bibi? Where is the raucous uproar?

Asia Bibi is not all that different from any one of us.  She worked tirelessly to provide for her family.  At times, she had to deal with difficult neighbors and co-workers. But unlike American women who can freely exercise our religion and speak our minds – and drink from the same cup as other American women of different races and creeds – the price for Asia Bibi may be her life.

The #metoo movement galvanized women to speak out against mistreatment, but it seems to have morphed into just another tool for sowing political discord here in the United States. Think what American women could do if they came together for Bibi Asia. Think what we all could do if we mobilized and marched and contacted our elected officials for a woman whose only “crime” was the desire to live her life and faith free from persecution. Think of the pressure points we could push to influence this U.S. ally. It would be a chance to return the #metoo movement to its roots and raise our voices in defense of the dignity of all women.

It is not too late for Asia Bibi be set free. Is it too late for the #metoo movement?

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is Legal Advisor for The Catholic Association Foundation

Earlier this year, the city demanded CSS agree to endorse same-sex couples as foster parents. Citing centuries-old Catholic teaching on marriage and the family, CSS refused, but said it would instead refer same-sex couples to one of the other 29 foster-care agencies partnering with the city. For the city, however, retaining a long-standing partner in the care of needy kids was apparently less important than scoring political points. The city refused to refer children in need of foster care to CSS for placement and has threatened to terminate its contract with CSS entirely. Tolerance, it seems, is a one-way street in Philadelphia. 

Karen Quinn has been a CSS-certified foster mother for 30 years. Her Catholic faith has played a large role in her work fostering children. “When people ask me ‘Why do you do it?’ I respond that my faith teaches me to respond, ‘Why not?’,” she says. “I can’t help the whole world, but I can help one baby at a time.”

Quinn is among the foster mothers and former foster-care children who have joined the Catholic Association in supporting CSS’s legal challenge to the Philadelphia dictate. In an amicus brief submitted last week to the United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, they shared their experiences working with CSS or growing up in CSS-certified foster homes and their opposition to the city’s attempt to effectively shut down CSS’ century-old foster-care program.

Karen “lost count” of how many foster children she and her husband have cared for over three decades. She said she thinks the number is “well over 30.” Of these, the Quinns have adopted 5 and are legal guardians of another.

Karen started caring for foster children after reading a request in her parish bulletin for long-term foster-care providers for a needy child named Jamie. Jamie is now 34 years old and knows “very little about the reasons for being placed into foster care.” But Jamie’s recollection of her life at the Quinns could not be clearer: “lots of one-on-one time playing cards or memory games” and “lots of great memories.”

Like many foster children, Jamie struggled as a child. The early years of abuse had taken their toll. “Being a foster kid was hard,” she says. “Growing up in the Quinn’s home I always knew that I was loved, but it took me a long time to accept that.” The Quinns adopted Jamie, and when she talks about them she calls them “Mom and Dad.”

As the oldest child in the Quinn home, Jamie saw first-hand the damage that unhealthy homes had inflicted on the new children placed with the Quinns. “You can tell right off the bat what kind of home a child came from,” she says. “Lots of [these] kids were not held.” That changed once these children arrived at the Quinns: They were “spoiled” with affection. “Any child that comes into my parents’ home is receiving a good home,” Jamie says. “My parents were very accepting of everyone.” 

Jamie cannot understand the CSS-intake freeze. “It is not like this issue suddenly came up. This has been part of what the Catholic Church has taught forever.” Even more distressing is the freeze’s impact on the Quinn house. “My mom is waiting for that call at 3 a.m. in the morning, on the off chance that someone is going to need her for 3 hours or 3 years.”

Like many CSS-certified foster parents, Karen Quinn is ready to receive more children. “This is very frustrating to me,” she says. “I would like to continue service, but I don’t want to do it without the support of Catholic Social Services.” 

Of course, Karen will survive the new silence at her Philadelphia home. But what about the little boys and girls who need safe shelter at three in the morning or a loving foster-care family for a year or more? Has the City of Philadelphia forgotten their needs? This is why Jamie is ready to “fight the good fight” to keep CSS open. “I gotta keep fighting for all these other kids,” she says, “so that they can have the life I had.”

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is Legal Advisor for The Catholic Association Foundation.

Sometime in the early aughts, I was attending a conference and found myself wandering more or less alone in the area where groups and organizations had their booths. I came over to one of the tables and the woman there said, “You’re Fr. Barron, aren’t you?” I replied affirmatively, and she continued, “You’re doing good work for the Church, but this means that the devil wants to stop you. And you know, he’s a lot smarter than you are and a lot more powerful.” I think I just mumbled something to her at that moment, but she was right, and I knew it. All of this has come back to me in the wake of the Archbishop McCarrick catastrophe. St. Paul warned us that we battle, not against flesh and blood, but against “powers and principalities.” Consequently, the principal work of the Church at this devastating moment ought to be prayer, the conscious and insistent invoking of Christ and the saints.

Now I can hear people saying, “So Bishop Barron is blaming it all on the devil.” Not at all. The devil works through temptation, suggestion, and insinuation — and he accomplishes nothing without our cooperation. If you want to see the principle illustrated, Google “Luca Signorelli’s image of the Antichrist” in the Orvieto Cathedral. You’ll see what I mean. Archbishop McCarrick did wicked things and so did those, it appears, who enabled him. And we have to come to terms with these sins.

Before I broach the subject of how to do this, permit me to say a few words about unhelpful strategies being bandied about. A first one is indiscriminate scapegoating. The great philosopher René Girard taught us that when communities enter into crisis, people typically commence desperately to cast about for someone or some group to blame. In the catharsis of this indiscriminate accusation, they find a kind of release, an ersatz peace. “All the bishops should resign!” “The priesthood is a cesspool of immorality!” “The seminaries are all corrupt!” As I say, these assertions might be emotionally satisfying at some level, but they are deeply unjust and conduce toward greater and not less dysfunction. The second negative strategy is the riding of ideological hobby horses. So lots of commentators — left, center, and right — have chimed in to say that the real cause of the McCarrick disaster is, take your pick, the ignoring of “Humanae vitae,” priestly celibacy, rampant homosexuality in the Church, the mistreatment of homosexuals, the sexual revolution, etc. Mind you, I’m not saying for a moment that these aren’t important considerations and that some of the suggestions might not have real merit. But I am saying that launching into a consideration of these matters that we have been debating for decades and that will certainly not admit of an easy adjudication amounts right now to a distraction.

So what should be done? The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops (USCCB) has no juridical or canonical authority to discipline bishops. And even if it tried to launch an investigation, it has, at the moment, very little credibility. Only the Pope has juridical and disciplinary powers in regard to bishops. Hence, I would suggest (as a lowly back-bencher auxiliary) that the bishops of the United States — all of us — petition the Holy Father to form a team, made up mostly of faithful lay Catholics skilled in forensic investigation, and to empower them to have access to all of the relevant documentation and financial records. Their task should be to determine how Archbishop McCarrick managed, despite his widespread reputation for iniquity, to rise through the ranks of the hierarchy and to continue, in his retirement years, to function as a roving ambassador for the Church and to have a disproportionate influence on the appointment of bishops. They should ask the ecclesial version of Sen. Howard Baker’s famous questions: “What did the responsible parties know and when did they know it?” Only after these matters are settled will we know what the next steps ought to be.

In the meantime, and above all, we should ask the heavenly powers to fight with us and for us. I might suggest especially calling upon the one who crushes the head of the serpent.

Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

This article originally appeared at WordOnFire.org.

Both the substance of the change and the manner in which it has been explained should be deeply troubling to observant Catholics.

The statement that Pope Francis changed was written in 1992 by Pope Saint John Paul II. It reads: 

The nature and extent of the punishment must be carefully evaluated and decided upon, and ought not go to the extreme of executing the offender except in cases of absolute necessity: in other words, when it would not be possible otherwise to defend society. 

In the Catechism, this statement follows a discussion of the moral duty to defend oneself and innocent victims: “legitimate defence can be not only a right but a grave duty for someone responsible for another’s life, the common good of the family or of the State.”

John Paul II’s teaching on the death penalty and his justification of self-defense are both consistent with a respect for life. His reasoning starts with the premise that respect for life must include the lives of the victims and the defenders as well as the aggressors. Indeed, he states plainly that the respect for one’s own life and that of the victims comes first: “Love thy neighbor as thyself” assumes the validity of love for one’s own life. 

The Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a letter with a terse explanation of why the new teaching was adopted: 

Today the increasing understanding that the dignity of a person is not lost even after committing the most serious crimes, the deepened understanding of the significance of penal sanctions applied by the State, and the development of more efficacious detention systems that guarantee the due protection of citizens have given rise to a new awareness that recognizes the inadmissibility of the death penalty. 

John Paul II did not go far enough, they state, because he worked “in a social context in which the penal sanctions were understood differently, and had developed in an environment in which it was more difficult to guarantee that the criminal could not repeat his crime.” 

In contrast to John Paul II’s clear theological reasoning, this new rationale combines a chronological fallacy with wishful sociology. It replaces theological reasoning with reference to “a new awareness” in the classic style of the chronological fallacy. Incredibly, this new awareness appeared in just a quarter century since John Paul II’s Catechism.

The next step in the Vatican’s justification is that we now have “more effective systems of detention … which ensure the due protection of citizens.” How this radical prison reform could have been accomplished in the scant 26 years since John Paul II wrote is never explained. 

The fact is our prison system provides no such protection. There are numerous examples of murderers who were released from prison only to kill again. While the number of convicted murders who kill again might not be a large percentage of the population, respect for life is not a matter of numbers. 

Not even a life sentence is sufficient to stop a murderer from continuing to take innocent lives. Drug lords and terrorists often run their criminal empires while in prison and commit murders through the agency of their minions. Without the death penalty, those who murder their prison guards or other inmates remain able to do so again. 

Imposition of the death penalty is not an easy decision for anyone who believes in the sanctity of human life as a matter of natural law and revelation. However, as John Paul II clearly stated, the death penalty is nevertheless permissible in certain circumstances. If we follow his reasoning, the moral obligation to defend oneself and innocent victims may justify use of the death penalty for defensive purposes. 

It is troubling that Pope Francis would change words written by his predecessor so recently, and that he would do so with such inadequate theological justification and dubious factual claims. 

It is perhaps more troubling that Pope Francis would elevate such a belief to an instruction “in light of the Gospel.” The death penalty is an act of the state, so that opinions on that topic partake of the political as well as the moral. This is why, as Edward Feser points out, “John Paul II’s Catechism appeals to prudential considerations concerning what is strictly necessary in order to protect society.” 

Pope Francis’s predecessors were much more circumspect about giving mandatory instructions dealing with matters of public policy. Notable counterexamples include the much graver and morally unambiguous matters of abortion, euthanasia, and genocide.

Pope Francis’s action on the death penalty leaves uncomfortable questions about which of his other political beliefs he will make into teachings “in light of the Gospel.”

David Montgomery is retired from a career of teaching, government service and consulting, during which he became internationally recognized as an expert on energy, environmental and climate policy. He has a PhD in economics from Harvard University and also studied economics at Cambridge University and theology at the Catholic University of America.

Last October, in response to an executive order on religious liberty, the Department issued a “20 principles” guidance to all executive departments and agencies setting forth federal legal protections for religious liberty.

According to this guidance:

Religious liberty is not merely a right to personal religious beliefs or even to worship in a sacred place. It also encompasses religious observance and practice. Except in the narrowest circumstances, no one should be forced to choose between living out his or her faith and complying with the law.

The guidance highlights a variety of protections provided by federal laws including the strict scrutiny over federal actions that substantially burdens religious observance as well as workplace accommodations for religious practice. 

But if the laws are so clear, why is there a need for executive orders and Justice Department involvement?

According to Sessions, “A dangerous movement, undetected by many, but real, is now challenging and eroding our great tradition of religious freedom.” What movement is he referring to?

A preschool was barred from competing in a state grant program to resurface its playground simply because the school is run by a church. Christian pregnancy centers have been mandated to promote state programs offering low-cost or free abortions. The Little Sisters of the Poor were forced to offer employees insurance that covered services that violated their conscience.

Fortunately, the Supreme Court has ruled in all these cases that such government-led affronts to the free exercise of religion or free speech cannot stand. Yet the attacks continue. 

Local zoning authorities have kept Orthodox Jews in New Jersey and Hindus in Maryland from purchasing land to build houses of worship. The Catholic Archdiocese of Washington, D.C., was not allowed to place on metro buses its Christmas advertisements encouraging charity to those in need.

The Department of Justice has stepped in to file legal briefs in support of these groups. Yet the attacks continue. 

Most recently, the city of Philadelphia pulled its contract with Catholic Social Services, its longtime partner in placing foster children in loving homes, because of the center’s commitment to placing children in homes with a married father and mother. At a time when the need for foster families is increasing, barring one of the most trusted and successful foster placement services because of their beliefs not only violates the conscience rights of those at Catholic Social Services, it also keeps needy children from finding loving homes. 

None of these groups seeks preferential treatment. They only want to be treated fairly or offered accommodations for their sincerely held religious beliefs and so continue contributing to the good of others. 

The nation’s top law enforcement officer understands that fundamental rights must be safeguarded. Earlier this week, at the Religious Liberty Summit sponsored by the Justice Department, Jeff Sessions announced the creation of a religious freedom task force. The task force, according to Sessions, is charged with ensuring the Justice Department is upholding the administration's guidance “in the cases they bring and defend, the arguments they make in court, the policies and regulations they adopt, and how we conduct our operations.”

Such attention to religion freedom is a boon for the civil rights community. The Justice Department’s criminal prosecution of perpetrators of hate crimes against centers of worship or people of faith, civil suits against zoning authorities trying to prevent the construction of houses of worship, “friend of the court” briefs in support of individuals and religious groups suffering discrimination — all of these actions serve to vindicate one of America’s most precious freedoms.

In closing remarks at the summit, Oklahoma Senator James Lankford applauded their work, noting: “You are not creating new policy for Americans.  You are protecting a very old policy.” Defending and promoting religious liberty is an essential American ideal; thankfully for all Americans, Jeff Sessions and his Justice Department are committed to safeguarding our country’s first freedom.

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is Legal Advisor for The Catholic Association Foundation.

This mixture of avarice and religion is not just the result of one excessively greedy individual. It has its roots in the so-called prosperity gospel, a strand of Christianity that dates back to the 19th century, which teaches that earthly riches are a sign of God’s favor. 

This is one way it works: If a Christian goes wayward of his or her Christian values and becomes destitute, he or she can be redeemed through a belief in the teachings of prosperity theology. Not only will he or she overcome destitution, but miraculously gain riches — enough to offer a generous tithing to the pastoral source of such good fortune. 

In 2009, after spending nearly two years caring for a terminally ill parent, which I knew was going to cost me my home, I was not looking for something that would turn around my material situation. I was looking for a place in a community where I could find solace for my loss, grief, trauma. What I wanted and needed was to feel well, balanced, and strong again. I saw an ad in a local paper advertising Sunday services at a Contemporary Community Church in the town where I was living.

The words “contemporary” and “community” are what pulled me in. So the next Sunday I visited the church, a group of around 30 people holding a worship service in a converted store front.

Over the years, I developed a personal and professional relationship with the church’s founding pastor, Robert Fuggi. What impressed me right away about Pastor Fuggi is that his ministry is not his occupation; it’s his passion. Rob’s day job is as a trial attorney. “What a great way to stay grounded in reality,” I thought to myself.

Over nearly a decade, I have watched Pastor Fuggi gradually and organically — through much trial and error as well as a doctoral degree in theology from Princeton University — develop a unique ministry. Pastor Fuggi’s church advocates community participation, provides practical counsel and outreach to the poor and homeless, and is buttressed by sound theological tenets. 

In time, Pastor Fuggi began writing down his ideas and experiences into what would become his first book, A New Model of The Authentic Church. (Full disclosure: I am Pastor Fuggi’s book editor.) In the preface, the Reverend George Kelsey writes the following: 

Having spent more than forty-five years in ministry in the Middle East as one of America’s earliest missionaries in Jordon, I noticed early on that some of the most effective ministry was being done by people who were gainfully employed outside the church as their attitude and commitment to their ministry consumed them. In many countries in the Middle East, volunteer and unpaid leadership has produced vibrant and powerful church ministries. Of course if a congregation grows it may become necessary for a pastor to leave his day job and devote himself entirely to his ministry. But the ministry will have by then been rooted in serving God, not personal ambitions. Too often in the modern American church this is not the case. Rev. Robert Fuggi proposes an antidote to this, first by example, then by advocating for it in his writing.

I began with the example of certain mega churches, which use prosperity theology to lure people in. Now I’d like to share a personal story about how small church ministries operate. 

As I described earlier, I started going to the Toms River Contemporary Community Church in order to begin socializing again in a safe place after being isolated for two years as a family care-giver. Unbeknownst to me at the time, the church had a ministry for Community Outreach to the Poor and Homeless. The outreach was founded by a retired school teacher who started visiting local food pantries as a volunteer. 

On one of her visits, she noticed an elderly man remove his boots in order to massage his sore feet. She also noticed that the man’s socks were soiled and had holes in them. 

It affected her deeply, so she went out and purchased large quantities of socks and began handing them out from the back of her car. When Pastor Fuggi found out about this — the woman had been his fifth-grade English teacher — he offered to let her use his converted store-front church to stage her outreach. It grew to become a hub for the community’s poor and homeless — fortifying them with free clothing, food, and a safe place to gather.

When Pastor Fuggi learned that I had lost my home and was now living in motel rooms with state assistance, he put me in touch with the woman. When you are receiving state emergency housing assistance, you are placed in motel rooms and told that you have six weeks to find permanent housing. This is an almost impossible task because most landlords are reluctant to rent to persons under such circumstances.

The few landlords who do rely on people just like the retired schoolteacher to screen potential renters for them. The woman vouched that I had neither walked out on a lease nor been involved in any other nefarious activities that led to my present situation. She explained that I was in this situation because of circumstances beyond my control, and that I just needed a steady place to live in order to get my life back on track. 

It worked, and I did. 

The point I am making with this story is that unlike mega churches that preach prosperity — make a wish and maybe it will come true — small churches do the hard work of ministering to the individual needs of those in their community. As with most things in life, there are no quick-fix solutions, only hard and committed work that reflects the true meaning of the Gospel and purpose of church.

James Abro is an independent grassroots activist for the poor and homeless in his community and a national advocate for economic justice. This summer, the Burnes Center on Poverty and Homelessness at the University of Denver will be publishing an excerpt from his latest book, “Facing Homelessness.”

In making its decision the Court erased the penalties Colorado imposed on Jack Phillips in 2012 when he declined to make a cake for Charlie Craig and David Mullins based on his sincerely held religious view that marriage was one man and one woman. Colorado ordered Phillips to undergo “comprehensive staff training,” change his business practices, and file “quarterly compliance reports” for two years because, the civil rights commission believed, Phillips’ view of marriage was “despicable and merely rhetorical,” no different than justifying the Holocaust or slavery.

Writing for the majority, Justice Kennedy latched onto these damning statements, which went unrebutted by the other commissioners. Kennedy found that Colorado violated its constitutional duty to craft and administer laws without “hostility to a religion or religious viewpoint.” The government should never suggest whether religious grounds for “conscience-based objection[s] [are] legitimate or illegitimate.” State officials could have weighed the State’s interest in shielding “gay persons [from] indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market” against Phillips’ “sincere religious objections” in a neutral way, as free exercise guarantees demand. Instead, Colorado engaged in illicit hostility, the Court decided. 

Masterpiece’s result should surprise no one. Obergefell itself contained the seeds of respect for Phillips’ views: many “reasonable and sincere people” hold precisely the same view as Phillips.

But for nearly a year, LGBT and religious freedom advocates held their breath, hoping for a dramatic victory. Both have been underwhelmed.

For LGBT and religious freedom advocates alike, there is nothing to see here — no new law is being made, no rights for LGBT persons are jeopardized or created. For that matter, no new rights are being recognized for persons of faith.

For these reasons, many charged that the Court kicked the can down the road. But Justice Kennedy did not leave for another day the face-off between two values Americans hold dear: preventing indignity in the marketplace while taking seriously sincerely held religious beliefs. On the contrary, Justice Kennedy wrote the script for a modern pluralism that allows all people to be true to who they are. 

In the U.S., most people are familiar with our Constitution and the Bill of Rights as the foundations of our government. What is less well-known is that the Bill of Rights was a compromise to gain the support of those who had concerns about the strong federal government created by the Constitution. This latter group felt the powers of the federal government needed to be tempered, which the Bill of Rights does by providing protections to the minority and not the majority. 

The result of this grand and inspired design is that the U.S. is a richly pluralistic society in which structural forces work to push us toward compromises and solutions. Pluralism does not mean we must or do agree with one another. But it has created a country where for over 200 years we have always figured out how to solve problems, move forward, and get along with one another — despite being the most diverse nation on earth in terms of creed, culture, and views. The U.S. is the land where all we ask is who you want to be, not who are you. And, as Kennedy explains, this pluralism begins with tolerance: 

These disputes must be re­solved with tolerance, without undue disrespect to sincere religious beliefs, and without subjecting gay persons to indignities when they seek goods and services in an open market. 

No law should treat LGBT persons as “social outcasts or as inferior in dignity and worth.” But neither can the government “act in a manner that passes judgment upon or presupposes the illegitimacy of religious beliefs and practices.”

Indeed, both communities can lay claim to protection in law of their dignity and worth. For LGBT persons, “the laws and the Constitution can, and in some instances must, protect them in the exercise of their civil rights” — protections tragically absent across two-thirds of the land mass in America today. For persons of faith, Kennedy notes, “the religious and philosophical objections to gay marriage are protected views and in some instances pro­tected forms of expression.”

Kennedy also paints guardrails around this pluralism. Exceptions to laws cannot be so unbounded — and utilized so often — that they result “in a community-wide stigma inconsistent with the history and dynamics of civil rights laws that ensure equal access to goods, services, and public accommodations.” Otherwise, these exceptions would be no different than “put[ting] up signs saying ‘no goods or services will be sold if they will be used for gay marriages,’ something that would impose a serious stigma on gay persons.”

The key to Kennedy’s conception of pluralism is that no one should be disparaged for who they are and what they believe, whether gay or a person of faith.

Lawmakers should build on and enact Kennedy’s script for tolerance and mutual respect. The worst possible path would be to keep litigating these cases. Instead, our political efforts should be channeled into finding new societal and legislative ways to live together, with everyone having the space to be true to who they are.

Americans are ready for a new chapter in pluralism.

William Eskridge is the John A. Garver Professor of Jurisprudence at Yale Law School. Robin Fretwell Wilson is the Roger and Stephany Joslin Professor of Law at the University of Illinois College of Law. Their book “Religious Freedom, LGBT Rights and the Prospects for Common Ground” (William N. Eskridge, Jr. & Robin Fretwell Wilson, eds., Cambridge University Press, 2018) [cambridge.org] will be out in the Fall.

“Kids bless you and they stress you.” A Black Baptist father from Louisiana nailed it with this one. No explanation is needed for anyone who has been a parent for more than two days. 

“Kids see if faith is a Sunday thing — or if it’s a 24–7 thing.” A White, non-denominational Christian father from Pennsylvania captured the importance what we call belief-behavior congruence. For those fathers, who like us, have been called hypocrites by our own young child, we are aware that kids come equipped with manure detectors that have parent-sensitive settings.

“My Grandfather didn’t act spiritual in synagogue, he was spiritual.” A Jewish father from Delaware called out his own parents for hypocrisy and putting on “appearances,” but he welled with emotion when discussing the profound faith of his Grandfather whose prayers were so powerful they shook you. 

“We wanted to come out of this being in love with God, not hating Him.” As Tom Boyer watched his six-year-old daughter Megan falling to leukemia, he and his wife made and kept this pact. Tom said, “You wouldn’t expect bedpan shuffling to be a wonderful memory, but it was. Megan trusted me to do my best job to not hurt her, and that was special to me that she let me do that.” Viktor Frankl wrote, “If there is a meaning in life at all, then there must be a meaning in suffering.” Tom witnessed Megan’s increased sympathy and concern for others and shared, “It makes you want to go forth and do likewise.”

“Every morning I look at that list and promise myself that that will never be me.” A White Mormon father told us after our extensive interview that his own father had been distant, cruel, and brutal. At 10 years of age, “Matt” began making a list of his father’s harsh actions. By the time Matt left home, it was more than 100 items long. Now a father of six, Matt kept the 30-plus- year-old list in his sock drawer. Matt is what social scientists call a “transitional character.” Another apt term for this kind of generational turn-around is “a miracle.” 

“If your child ever gets the idea into his head that there is something more important to you than he is, then you have no right to be surprised when something else becomes more important to the child than pleasing you.” It has been almost 30 years since the late John Cortell, an avowed atheist and devoted father of five from Oregon, offered us this pearl to contemplate. Sometimes the “faith” of a man consists solely of a sacred connection to his wife and children. Perhaps there is no faith more beautiful or deserving of the name.

“It seemed like church always came before family for my Dad and eventually it cost him his family.” A young father of two from Washington reflected with pain and sorrow on the life of his pastor and father. We are reminded of leading family therapist Bill Doherty’s warning to avoid “time affairs.” Whether the time affair is with NFL football, the golf course, hunting, chasing dollars, or even one’s faith community. 

“God requires much more of people than their own self-interest, and recognizing this has brought me much more happiness and joy in my life than any other type of success.” A Latino Christian father originally from Mexico went through a self-reported transformation at 30 years old. He lost his old life and found a new one that came to include a wife and two daughters. 

“Now, my most important work begins! Now, my most important work begins!” A Christian father’s daily mantra as he drove home from work based on ideas he read on a fathering website. He came to realize that he had been assuming that because he always worked hard at his job, he had the right to come home and kick back and watch TV while his wife did the hard work of parenting. He realized that, since he was usually tired after work, he needed to psych himself up during his drive home so he would be motivated to work as hard — or harder — at home as a husband and father. Rather than listen to music on the drive home, he thought about the meaningful things he would do with his kids during the few short hours he had with them before bedtime.

“God told me that I will live into the answer.” Brad and his wife had a son with some special needs. Then, several years after the birth of their son, they had triplet daughters who were born severely premature. One of the triplets died shortly after birth. The other two survived but had significant developmental delays in addition to visual and hearing problems. Our home-based interview was extended due to frequent and chaotic interruptions from a series of mild “emergencies” involving the girls, then age two. (Brad had given his wife a rare “night-off” with her friends). Brad cared for his girls with a patience and easiness of manner that seemed to evenly counter the visible chaos of an exceptionally challenging parenting situation. At the conclusion of the interview, we asked, 

“I know you are a man of faith, but don’t you ever shake your clenched fists at the heavens and say, ‘Why, God? Why!?’

Brad looked at a point off in the distance that only he could see and said, “I did once.” 

“Well, do you feel like you got a response?”

“Eventually.”

 “Please, tell me what it was…” 

Again, Brad looked at the distant point visible only to him. And then he softly replied, “God told me that I will live into the answer.” We have been pondering this response for 20 years.

Our decades of looking for answers have led us to many who are seeking their own. In our own search, we have used two diverse tools — religious traditions and social science. One teaches us to believe, the other to be skeptical. Perhaps the psychologist Charlotte Buhler was right when she said: “All we can do is study the lives of people who seem to have found their answers to the questions of what ultimately human life is about.” But perhaps there is more. 

On this Father’s Day weekend, whether or not you believe in a Father of us all we close with a final reflection from 19th Century agnostic politician Robert Ingersoll, “It is difficult for a child to find a father in God, unless the child first finds something of God in his father.” 

Loren Marks is father of Mishonne, Logan, Haley, Denton, and Aliyah and a professor of family life at BYU. David Dollahite is father of Rachel, Erica, Camilla, Katy, Spencer, Jonathan, and Luke and a professor of family life at BYU.

Today’s Supreme Court decision upholding a Colorado baker’s constitutional right to live according to his faith is a major victory for religious liberty. The fact that the decision was 7–2 (not a narrow 5–4) underscores that govt should NEVER discriminate against religious faith.

But while the Court reached the right outcome, its reasoning leaves much to be desired. Masterpiece is merely a precursor of the battles to come. 

There’s an old saying among jurists that anything but a 5–4 decision means one side has left something on the table. This case exemplifies that lesson. Justice Kennedy’s opinion is on exceedingly narrow grounds; so narrow that the case is properly characterized as “fact-bound.” That’s legalese for a ruling that has little precedential value for deciding future cases because the ruling is so closely tied to the specific circumstances of the case that it likely will never be repeated. Understanding this limitation requires taking a careful look at what the Court actually did.

The Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act (CADA) prohibits discrimination in places of public accommodation. Such laws prevent places of business, like Masterpiece Cakeshop, from refusing to serve protected categories of people, including homosexuals. The law also created the Colorado Civil Rights Commission, which investigates claims of discrimination and decides whether to initiate formal proceedings. 

The Court has previously held that “valid and neutral laws of general applicability” do not violate the Free Exercise Clause because they are not intended to burden religion. Thus, CADA itself was not at issue, only its application.

When Phillips refused to bake a cake, the gay couple raised a complaint and the Commission initiated a proceeding. Then, during that proceeding, one member made the following statement: 

Freedom of religion and religion has been used to justify all kinds of discrimination throughout history, whether it be slavery, whether it be the holocaust, whether it be—I mean, we—we can list hundreds of situations where freedom of religion has been used to justify discrimination. And to me it is one of the most despicable pieces of rhetoric that people can use to—to use their religion to hurt others. 

The blatant disparagement of religion expressed in those lines violated the Commission’s “solemn responsibility of fair and neutral enforcement” of the anti-discrimination law. And that’s the entire ruling: Because one member of the Commission accidentally vented his anti-religious ire, that specific decision is invalid.

Masterpiece did not change the law. There is no difference in the applicable legal standard governing such situations. Free Exercise is no more secure than before. The Court refused to protect Phillips’s expressive conduct on free speech grounds. And bear in mind that the facts of this case occurred before either Windsor or Obergefell were decided. In other words, if this case were to be repeated with identical circumstances minus one commissioner’s imprudent statement, there is no guarantee the Court would protect the baker’s religious beliefs.  

Commentators like National Review’s David French have nevertheless made grandiose claims such as the following:

It is no small irony that the same justice who just struck a blow for the dignity of the faithful is also the man most responsible for creating the constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

But such claims stem from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the Court in fact did. This was not a blow struck for religious liberty; it was a lucky slip from an overconfident opponent’s ill-judged haymaker.

The Court has, of course, put us on this collision course — between the values of freedom of religion and free speech, principles at the core of this nation, and the “new justice” of the dignitary rights that must be afforded to every “protected class.” While some language in the opinion weakly suggests that discrimination based on religious grounds might be permissible, it does not protect religious freedom in the meaningful way necessary for republican government. Worse, Justice Kagan’s concurrence basically wrote a rule book for future commissioners to avoid this type of challenge. 

In short, it is unclear how far the ruling will go. In totally passing on the free speech claim, the court passed on broad and enduring protection. Only Justices Thomas and Gorsuch argued Philip’s baking is protected expressive conduct. This means that when push comes to shove (and it will), the Court’s future course is unpredictable. 

We might wish we had a Free Exercise Clause that did in fact protect the exercise of sincerely held religious beliefs beyond the four walls of the sanctuary, and guarantee our constitutional right to follow God’s commandments publicly as well as privately. But this opinion does little to advance any of that. Masterpiece provides no reassurances to those citizens who simply wish to be left alone to live out morally serious lives as good and productive citizens, enjoying the “benign influence of the good laws under a free government.”

This case may have been decided by a wide margin, but liberty still hangs in the balance by a thread.

Zachary Reynolds is a student at the University of Chicago Law School and a graduate of the Van Andel Graduate School of Statesmanship at Hillsdale College.

On the train ride there, I got a text message from a homeless man in his late 20s letting me know that he’d just gotten a job stacking shelves at night in a department store. The young man is homeless in part because he was raised by an abusive, alcoholic father. He lacks self-esteem and self-confidence in social settings, including work. I knew that the job would not pay well enough to allow him to afford indoor housing, but it was still a step in the right direction. So I supported and encouraged him to try to make it work. I also kept him updated throughout the weekend on what was going on in D.C. It made him feel as though there were people looking out for him, and it reminded me for whom and what we were campaigning.

We — representatives of 31 states — checked into the Washington International Hostel in downtown D.C. on Sunday, May 10th.

On the first night of our stay, we attended a “mass meeting” (as our itinerary described it) at the National City Christian Church. We walked there. On the way, I noted four or more impressive looking Christian churches of various denominations. But none was more impressive than the National City Church. In fact, it was an epic Cathedral. I recognized it from TV as the place members of our political elite get married and eulogized.

This was the first time I heard the Reverend William Barber speak — or, better, orate. His speech was very impressive. Not only could he orate well, but he was also very specific and well-informed about why we have systemic poverty in America. So was Liz Theorosis from the Kairos Center who also spoke about the reasons 140 million Americans are living in poverty. After we got past these pep-rally aspects of the campaign, I expected we’d get down to the real business of counteracting poverty.

I can’t say that I was surprised we didn’t. I work with religious advocates for the poor and homeless on a regular basis, but by necessity, not by choice. Religious groups are the only ones who seem to care about the issue. But they mostly talk and pray over the poor and homeless. If half of the large, well-appointed churches in D.C. opened a wing of their operations to shelter and provide services to the homeless — and there are lots of them on the District’s streets — it would go a long way toward reducing the problem and providing some real relief.

The next day, Monday, May 11th, we were to start the civil disobedience. We were instructed what to do: stop traffic on the street in front of the Capitol and allow ourselves to be arrested without physical resistance. The organizers also informed us that we would each receive a fine of $50.00 for our misconduct and that the Kairos organization would pay for it.

I chose not to participate. For one thing, it was a choreographed act, not spontaneous; and secondly, there were more than 300 of us doing this. That meant $15,000 in fines — more like a passive donation to the police than real advocacy. I could use that money for a down payment on an emergency housing facility in my community, where people like the young man I mentioned earlier could get their lives back on track and permanently move out of poverty.

I also decided not to put on a black and yellow t-shirt that read, “The 2018 Campaign for the Poor: A Moral Revival.”

Instead I wore a shirt promoting KYDS: Konscious Youth Development and Services, a community-based program I contribute to in Asbury Park, New Jersey. It provides young adults living in poverty with practical life skills so that they can break the cycle of poverty, violence, and criminality they grew up in. The campaign organizers gave us talking points to tell the media, but, if asked, I would have told them I came here to support community-based programs like KYDS that do the real hard grassroots work of changing lives for the better, one person at a time.

The poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote: “The Universe is made of Stories, not Atoms.” So I will leave you with a story that I feel speaks volumes about top-down forays into social and economic justice like the Poor People’s Campaign.

In the time-honored tradition of Tom Wolfe’s “New Journalism,” I embedded myself in the story in order to get the whole picture of what was happening. At a certain point, the police stopped demonstrators from entering the area where we were to stop traffic. Because I wasn’t dressed like the other demonstrators I was able to get past them, near where arrests were being made, in a park.

Several buses full of police were there, I assumed, to cart the demonstrators away to a police station. When I asked a cop why they were doing it in the park, he said, “We were expecting a lot more people to show up. With a small group like this we can just book and release them on the spot.” And take your fifty dollar donations, I thought. Thank you very much and come back soon.

Later that day the organizers of the campaign would tell us that the police arrested and processed the demonstrators in the park because there were too many to take to a police station.

After talking to the police I went and sat down on a bench about a hundred yards from where the demonstrators were being processed. I noticed a Muslim woman stop a police SUV and frantically bang on its driver-side window until a cop opened it. She spoke with him briefly and then walked toward where I was sitting with some locals. I asked her what was going on.

She pointed to a figure back in the direction where the demonstration had begun. “Look,” she said, “It’s Rabbi Arthur Waskow. He marched with Dr. King 50 years ago at the original Poor People’s Campaign.”

The temperature was in the 90s and relentlessly sunny. The 85-year-old Rabbi was being helped toward us and eventually sat down on a bench next to mine. He looked disoriented and exhausted. The police from the SUV came over and offered him bottled water while the Muslim woman and another woman dressed in Christian garb — white collar — fanned him. 

It was obviously not a good day for an 85-year-old man to be walking around by himself in the mid-day heat. I asked the Muslim woman what had happened. She said, “He was walking slowly toward the event with the support of the other clergy. But when the commotion started and TV crews and reporters showed up, they just left him there on his own.”

A moral revival, indeed.

James Abro is an independent grassroots activist for the poor and homeless in his community and a national advocate for economic justice. This summer, the Burnes Center on Poverty and Homelessness at the University of Denver will be publishing an excerpt from his latest book, “Facing Homelessness.” 

It might be helpful to remind ourselves what Ms. Wolf is referencing when she speaks of “knocking that baby out of there.” She means the evisceration, dismemberment, and vivisection of a child. And lest one think that we are just talking about “bundles of cells,” it is strict liberal orthodoxy that a baby can be aborted at any stage of its prenatal development, even while it rests in the birth canal moments before birth. Indeed, a child, who somehow miraculously survives the butchery of an abortion, should, according to that same orthodoxy, be left to die or actively killed. Sure sounds like fun to me; hey, don’t knock it until you’ve tried it. 

I realize that these attitudes have been enshrined in American law for some time, but what particularly struck me about the Correspondents’ Dinner was how they were being bandied about so shamelessly for the entertainment of the cultural elite. Let’s face it, the people in that room — politicians, judges, writers, broadcasters, government officials — are the top of the food chain, among the most influential and powerful people in our society. And while the killing of children was being joked about — especially, mind you, the children of the poor, who are disproportionately represented among the victims of abortion — most in this wealthy, overwhelmingly white, elite audience guffawed and applauded.

And this put me in mind of Friedrich Nietzsche. I’ve spoken and written often of the influence of this nineteenth-century thinker, whose musings have trickled their way down through the universities and institutions of the high culture into the general consciousness of many if not most people today. Nietzsche held that the traditional moral values have been exposed as ungrounded and that humanity is summoned to move, accordingly, into a previously unexplored space “beyond good and evil.” In such a morally unmoored universe, the Ubermensch (superman or over-man) emerges to assert his power and impose his rule on those around him. Nietzsche had a special contempt for the Christian values of sympathy, compassion, and love of enemies, characterizing them as the ideals of a “slave morality,” repugnant to the noble aspirations of the Ubermensch. Through his many avatars in the twentieth-century — Sartre, Heidegger, Foucault, Ayn Rand, etc. — Nietzsche, as I said, has exerted an extraordinary influence on contemporary thought. Whenever a young person today speaks of traditional ethics as a disguised play of power or of her right to determine the meaning of her own life through an exercise of sovereign freedom, we can hear the overtones of Friedrich Nietzsche. 

All of which brings me back to the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. When we live in the space beyond good and evil, when morality is construed as entirely the invention of personal freedom, when nothing counts as intrinsically wicked, when any claim to moral authority is automatically shouted-down — in other words, when we live in the world that Nietzsche made possible — then the will of the most powerful necessarily holds sway. And when something or someone gets in the way of what the powerful want, well then, they just “gotta knock it out of there.” Michelle Wolf’s comment was not just a bad joke; it was a brazen display of power, designed to appeal precisely to those who have reached the top of the greasy pole.

One of the extraordinary but often overlooked qualities of a system of objective morality is that it is a check on the powerful and a protection of the most vulnerable. If good and evil are objective states of affairs, then they hem in and control the tendency of cultural elites to dominate others. When objective moral values evanesce, armies of the expendable emerge, and what Pope Francis aptly calls a cultura del descarte (a throwaway culture) obtains. One of the indicators that this has happened is lots of people in tuxedos and formal gowns, sipping from wine glasses, and laughing while someone jokes about the murder of children.

Bishop Robert Barron is an auxiliary bishop of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles and the founder of Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

This article originally appeared at WordOnFire.org.

As Villanova University Professor and current USCIRF Chairman Daniel Mark put it in his opening remarks:  

Religious freedom stands for the ultimate bulwark against totalitarianism. No matter how much control the government has, no matter the regime, religious freedom testifies that there is a source of authority beyond the state.

This truth was codified in the free exercise guarantee of the First Amendment of the United States Constitution and, more recently, in the International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA).

IRFA passed in 1998 with overwhelming bipartisan support. Rep. Frank Wolfe — a 17-term former member of the House who was affectionately referred to by colleagues as the “conscience of the Congress” — was the driving force behind infusing America's first freedom into U.S. foreign policy.  

Leonard Leo, a former USCIRF commissioner who was at the summit, identified places in the world where state actors continue to persecute their people with impunity. Such recent instances of religious violence are “shocking in their severity and breadth.” Leo also noted that less visible, creeping violations are happening in our own backyard. He warned: “How can we lecture states on repealing their blasphemy laws when we give authorities broad tools to prevent religious speech that fails to conform to the official view of what it means to be a good citizen?” Robert George, another former USCIRF commissioner and a professor at Princeton University, highlighted the importance of cooperation among leaders of various religions and governments to transform civil society. He pointed to the adoption of the “Marrakesh declaration,” which recognizes the rights of non-Muslims in Muslim countries, as a recent and important example of such cooperative efforts.   

George, like Leo, warned of growing secularism in West, which often functions as a religion. While the rights of secularists should most certainly be recognized, George insisted, we need a “fair playing field” on which comprehensive world views can compete and interact. If any particular worldview, be it secularist or religious, declares itself to be “umpire” and not a “contestant,” it very likely will “call balls and strikes” in a way that is favorable to itself. 

Former Congressman Frank Wolfe didn’t mince words, pointing out that effective work abroad on behalf of the persecuted is threatened by our own complacency here at home. According to Wolfe, Christians in the United States used to be very active about religious religion, but have become less concerned about the plight of those persecuted because of their faith. Wolfe also expressed concern over waning bipartisan support for international religious freedom as well as profit-driven American law firms who represent bad state actors. He ended not with a despondent attitude but a renewed call to action.

In his closing remarks, USCIRF Chairman Mark suggested this call to action requires, first, that the United States use all tools at its disposal to send the right message to bad actors — whether governments, non-governmental actors, or individuals. Second, religious freedom must continue to be treated as a non-partisan issue in our own country. And, finally, he called on all people of faith to pray, educate themselves, and educate others about the benefits of promoting religious freedom throughout the world.

Panel discussions at the summit focused on individuals who are or have been persecuted because of their religion. Putting a face to the persecuted is an important reminder that the struggle for worldwide religious freedom is taken up on behalf of real persons and communities. For their sake, let’s hope the next 20 years yields even greater success in promoting America’s first freedom across the globe.

Andrea Picciotti-Bayer is Legal Advisor for The Catholic Association Foundation.