MY neighbor was a child molester.

I know because of the signs.

Michael Miletti’s face, name and address appear on posters lining Wapello Street in Altadena, with the admonishment: “Leave Our Neighborhood Now Child Molester.” Up since May, the signs are staked into lawns, taped to trash cans and nailed to tree trunks.

I live around the corner with my wife and 7-year-old daughter. Suddenly, an issue that had seemed abstract became deeply personal.

The article is written by Peter Hong, who lives around the corner from Miletti. As he says, his account isn’t abstract, it’s deeply personal. It’s also morally ambiguous: should someone who has served his time in prison be forced out of a neighborhood without any evidence that he presents a danger? Miletti was convicted of abusing his daughter and served his prison time. When he married a widow in Altadena (next door to Pasadena), he registered according to the requirements of the California sex offender laws. Since then, his neighbors have been trying to force him to move out of their neighborhood. Recidivism rates for sexual offenders is 40%, but Miletti maintains that he isn’t a pedophile (he says he began abusing his daughter for emotional and psychological reasons following the sudden death of his wife).

This is such a compelling story because both sides are right. Hong hasn’t painted this in black and white, but shades of gray. Here’s the side of those that want him to leave:

More than 30 houses line Miletti’s block, and most of them have signs calling for him to leave. One of the homes at the end of the block belongs to Erik Hargrave, 40. He recalled the day he and his wife received the mailer. It came on his daughter’s second birthday. His wife, who had recently given birth to their second child, burst into tears.

Hargrave and about a dozen neighbors met at Farnsworth Park’s Greek-style amphitheater. There was anxiety over having a sex offender on a block with so many young children. They also discussed the potential effect his presence could have on property values and decided both to post the signs and create an e-mail distribution list.

Another of the anti-Miletti organizers, Joseph Llorens, the father of a 12-year-old boy, lives across the street from Hargrave. A manager for a utility company, Llorens, 44, had actually been a friend of Miletti’s wife; he had joined her and her then-husband for Thanksgiving dinner a few years ago.

“I do not want him to harm children in our area,” he said. “I cannot protect the whole world; my goal is just to get him out of our area.”

Then there are those on the other side of the debate:

Some of those who are most against vilifying Miletti live closest to him.

Wayne Weiss, 58, a documentary filmmaker who lives across the street, said he finds the signs unsightly. He thinks they so dominate the streetscape that the neighborhood could end up defined by them.

“They’ve got Christmas Tree Lane over there,” he said, gesturing across Lake Avenue to the neighborhood famous for its holiday light displays. “Is this going to become Pedophile Lane?”

Hari Nayar, 48, and Ruth Landsberger, 47, who have two children ages 9 and 6, also live across the street. The couple don’t know Miletti and his wife, and they don’t feel their children are endangered. Sexual abuse typically is inflicted by family members or friends, they believe, as it was in Miletti’s case. The state’s Megan’s Law website confirms their view, noting that 90% of child victims know their abuser, with almost half the offenders being a family member.

As they discussed their views with me, their 6-year-old listened in while their 9-year-old sat nearby reading “How The Grinch Stole Christmas.”

The sign campaign “may not be teaching these guys good values,” Landsberger said. “It is not teaching tolerance. It’s more like vigilantism.”

I appreciate the ambiguity, the shades of gray in this story, because it requires us to be humble. We often think our legal system is able not just to judge a person’s guilt or innocence, but their soul as well. The theological argument is that governments are acting as God’s agents on earth, and when judges impose a sentence they are meting out God’s own justice. Thus, God is on our side, and we are free to judge as harshly as we see fit.

Bunk.

No legal system can judge a person’s soul and deliver the punishment they truly deserve, nor the grace they truly deserve. Jesus tells us that we aren’t to judge others, but are to leave judgment in God’s hands. What our justice system can do, and do well, is to deter crime. By imposing consequences on criminal behavior, we create a disincentive for those behaviors, and hopefully dramatically reduce their frequency. The purpose of these deterrents is to protect our selves, our families, and our property, but not to deliver judgment in God’s stead. If we are truly to follow Jesus’ commands, we should forgive, and even love, the sex offender even as we sentence them to prison for their actions. There is no conflict between the forgiveness and the punishment – we do what we have to do to protect society, all the while recognizing that redemption is available even to the child molester.

So when we look at a convicted child molester in our midst, the same thiinking should pertain. We can’t judge the man’s soul. He is a sinner, but then so are we, and we all need forgiveness and grace. If the job of judging is lifted from our shoulders, then all have left to do is to protect our children and love our neighbor. So the question in this situation isn’t the state of Miletti’s soul, but whether he is still a danger to children, and if so how to protect them.

Here’s the part that bothered me:

Llorens and Hargrave once got into a heated exchange with Miletti over their signs. The two raised their voices in anger, while Miletti remained calm.

Llorens felt Miletti wanted to bait him or Hargrave into hitting him so he could make some kind of claim against them, he said. No blows were struck. Miletti also offered to tell his story, Llorens recalled. “I said I don’t even want to know. How can you justify doing that to a 6-year-old?” Llorens told Miletti to go home, which he did.

Mr. Llorens is not interested in learning more about Milietti so he can determine whether he is still a danger. It’s all judgment, with no door open to grace. The least his neighbors owe Miletti is to hear his story. With this article, now they have.

And what about the author? He concludes:

I did not enjoy meeting Michael Miletti. I wanted him to show more remorse. I thought a father who had harmed his child ought to outwardly display torment. Forever.

But perhaps his behavior reflected his having had 13 years to come to terms with his sins, while my expectations were based on learning of them only months ago.

In any case, Miletti’s obligations are to the law, not to me. I know he has paid for his crime and has led a law-abiding life ever since. Yet I will keep my child away from him. That is good enough for me.

I know it’s not enough for some of my neighbors. The signs remain on Wapello Street. Those who want Miletti out are planning pickets outside his house. They will not stop, they say, until he leaves.

Jesus’s commandment that we shouldn’t judge others is incredibly difficult to follow, as is his commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves. And the first commandment is the corollary of the second – we do not want others to judge us, and especially not before they’ve heard our story. The residents of Wapello Street owe Mr. Milleti no less.

I started blogging almost two years ago because of the 2004 election, and the media’s storyline that the Christian vote won it for Bush. Not so this time around. From Amy Sullivan:

It’s finally time to retire that tiresome, inaccurate phrase “the God Gap,” so beloved by pollsters and commentators after the 2004 election. Coined to reflect the fact that weekly churchgoing Americans split their votes 58 to 41 percent for George W. Bush that year, the label ignored the fact that a supermajority of Democratic voters attend church as well. And, more importantly, it implied that the loyalty of religious Americans was securely with the Republican Party, not to be wrested away by heathen Democrats.

Yesterday, the God Gap all but disappeared.

Even before we started voting, Newsweek came out with cover stories titled “Sex vs. Social Justice: Evangelicals at a Crossroads” and “A New Faith-Based Agenda”. The latter is authored by Michael Gerson, a former Bush administration speechwriter, who writes:

The goal is not only to stand for Christianity’s moral teachings but to emulate the manner of its Founder, who showed that kindness is not weakness, and had more tenderness for moral outcasts than for moral hypocrites.

So the storyline that Christians elected Bush to stop abortion and protect marriage from gays has now been replaced by a storyline that Christians care about the poor and the suffering and are as willing to vote for Democrats as they are for Republicans.

Well, it’s been a long, tough two years blogging about Christian progressives, but it seems I have successfully turned American Christianity around from an arch-conservatism to political pluralism, from a narrow focus on sex to a social gospel. My work here is done.

(Just kidding.)

Enter the Iowa Electronic Markets, where individuals can trade futures contracts on the outcomes of political and economic events, including the outcomes of elections. Traders are putting their own money on the line, so the over-riding objective is to be right, not to push a particular agenda. This isn’t to say that traders don’t have their own biases, but the Iowa Electronic Markets, like any free and open market, does a good job of cancelling individual biases to arrive at a market price, which in this case predicts the election outcome. This chart shows the market trends as of today.

The various lines represent the value of the 2006 congressional election contracts, which pay off in the event of different results:

RH_RS06 $1 if Republican House, Republican Senate in 2006 election
RH_NS06 $1 if Republican House, Non-Republican Senate in 2006 election
NH_RS06 $1 if Non-Republican House, Republican Senate in 2006 election
NH_NS06 $1 if Non-Republican House, Non-Republican Senate in 2006 election

The most valuable contract today (the black line), and therefore the most likely outcome, is the one that pays if the Democrats take the House but not the Senate. The red line shows the probability of Republicans holding both houses, and the blue line the probability of Democrats taking both houses.

The chart shows that, for a day or so, the Foley Scandal put both houses within reach of the Democrats (the high point for the blue line), but since then the scandal seems to have fizzled, and the Republicans have recovered a bit. The bottom line: unless something changes between now and election day, the Democrats take over the House but not the Senate. I’ll say more on this outcome in another post.

Update: Click here for the latest market chart from the Iowa Electronic Market

The entire mechanism of American government was designed to ensure that as little as possible is ever done by government, that doubt is welded into the core system, that certainty is always checked by other powers, and that the great Certainty of Divine Truth is always, always, always kept at bay.

It’s easy to see why a conservative like Sullivan and a progressive like me both agree on the gross incompetence of the Bush administration: a lack of doubt. The insecurity of doubt forces politicians (and us mere mortals) to constantly question whether we’re really on target, whether we’ve looked at all the angles, considered all the data, done everything we can to achieve the best outcome. It’s always seemed to me that the best leaders are driven to succeed by a few neurotic doubts rattling around in their souls.

But doubt is more than a beneficial leadership quality. Doubt is a vital and central aspect of Christianity. God, for reasons we can’t possibly understand, has built doubt into the very fabric of God’s relationship with humanity. Does this sound somehow heretical? But just think — without doubt, there is no room for faith. Faith is only possible in the face of doubt and uncertainty — remove the doubt, and faith becomes mere knowledge. I don’t need faith to believe the sun will rise again tomorrow, but I do need faith to believe that if I don’t live to see it rise, I will instead see God face-to-face. Faith is very important to God. “Oh ye of little faith.” “If you have faith the size of a mustard seed…” “Your faith has healed you.” Without doubt, there would be no faith. As Jesus said to Doubting Thomas, “blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

We can have two reactions to doubt — we can fear it, deny it, and try to erase it by claiming certainty where none exists. The Christianists (to use Sullivan’s term) certainly do this. The belief that the Bible is inerrant is a noble but doomed effort at banishing uncertainty. The desire for ideological (and political) purity among the SBC leadership seems to be an attempt to remove any source for nagging doubts to arise. The certainty of so many Christians that their understanding of God’s will is the correct one, and that any who hold different conceptions are substituting their own will for God’s, might erase doubt, but it also erases the need for faith.

So while Andrew Sullivan believes in a conservatism of doubt, perhaps I’d call my progressivism a progressivism of doubt. All the opinions I’ve expressed on this blog are provisional, ready to be changed in the face of further enlightenment. Even Martin Luther held out the possibility of changing his mind: “unless convinced by scripture and by reason that I am in error…here I stand.”

But I’d also call my Christianity a Christianity of doubt. Instead of fearing doubt and attempting to banish it, I embrace it. I take out my doubts, examine them, let them speak, run around a little bit. And when I do, I always end up coming back to faith, not by virtue of my own faithfulness, but by virtue of God’s grace.

Thanks be to God.

There, I’ve said it.

I like David Kuo. I haven’t read his book, yet, and have only seen his interviews on 60 Minutes and CNN’s morning show and read his interview on Salon, so I don’t really know him. I’m sure there are many theological and political points upon which we differ. But still…

I like David Kuo. Apparently, that puts me on Amy Sullivan’s side in her big dust-up with Pastor Dan. The short version is that Pastor Dan made some pretty pointed critiques of Kuo and his book, which Amy took as further evidence that liberals are allergic to evangelicals, which Pastor Dan refutes. However, I am adamantly not entering this fray, except to say that I like The New Republic inspite of Marty Peretz, that I think everyone has gotten way too worked up over Lieberman-as-litmus-test, and that Amy Sullivan isn’t the only one with a schtick.

The reason I like Kuo is that, first, he seems truly sincere, unlike Towey, the Bush Administration’s designated hit man. Kuo seems sincere in a truly refreshing, entirely transparent, way that is seldom seen in the age of 24 hour cable news. The man seems incapable of artifice, which I’m sure is why the “naive” charge has legs, but it is also why I’m thinking I like naive in this political season.

Of course George Bush sounds sincere when he says that we are winning the war in Iraq or any of the other inanities he is wont to say. But if Bush is sincere, he isn’t serious. Bush may have believed what he said about compassionate conservatism during the 2000 election, but if he were also serious about compassionate conservatism, he wouldn’t have had to ask “have we done compassion?” He would have already known.

It seems to me that Kuo is both sincere and serious about helping the poor and sick. Given that, he is a natural ally for Christian progressives. After all, I am not a Christian Democrat, but a Christian progressive, and I’m happy to support anyone willing to work to alleviate suffering in the world. It’s only if we begin to identify more with the Democratic party or a specific policy agenda than with our Christian calling that Kuo becomes suspect.

Pastor Dan, along with E.J. Dionne, doesn’t like Kuo’s call for a season of political fasting for evangelicals. But if I’m reading Kuo right, I think he’s got a valid point. I don’t hear him saying that evangelicals should isolate themselves from society and shun their civic duties. After all, he says evangelicals should vote. I think he’s calling on evangelicals to give up their quest for political power. Dobson, Perkins and the rest aren’t just after civic engagement, they’re after raw, unadulterated political power, and that has led them to compromise their Christianity. Kuo is right to call on the Christian right to refocus away from power and back on ministry.

But there is one more aspect to Kuo that I like — his humility. In his book Faith and Politics, Senator (and Episcopalian priest) Danforth spends an entire chapter extolling the virtue of a Christian humility that reflects our profound lack of certainty regarding God’s will. We see through a glass darkly, and to pretend otherwise is to usurp God’s role. A lack of humility is perhaps the defining characteristic of much of the Christian right, as well as the Bush Administration. Kuo seems to wear his humility on his sleeve, and I like that.

There are lessons here for us on the embryonic Christian left. We need to speak truth to power, Republican or Democrat, instead of trying to accumulate power ourselves. Of course the Democrats currently represent our best hope for achieving our goals, but that may not always be so, and we risk losing our way if we forget that. We need to keep hold of not only the sincerity of our beliefs, but also our humility. And we need to be open to working with those, like Kuo, Danforth, Cizik and others, that don’t share all of our theological or political beliefs. This isn’t about being victorious on the political battlefield, but responding to Jesus’ call to “follow me”.

Update: Kuo appeared on the Colbert Report, and comes off very Wallis-like (which is a good thing, imo.)

Via Amy Sullivan blogging on God’s Politics, an NPR commentary by theologically orthodox (and Orthodox), politically progressive Caroline Langston, who began as a conservative but has evolved into a left-of-center Democrat. Another compelling testimony propagating the “I am a Christian too” meme. Langston is pro-life, and while she no longer identifies with the right, she is not sure she is welcome on the left: “Is there a place for me at the [progressive] table, exactly as I am?” I hope so.

Also from NPR (where would we be without non-commercial radio?), a This I Believe segment by Susan Cosio on prayer as silent listening, not as speaking. “I am most at peace when I tune out the voices of the world long enough to hear the still, small voice of God directing me. ‘Be still,’ Psalm 46 reminds me, ‘and know that I am God.’”

His Abysmal Sublimity Undersecretary Screwtape (first introduced to us in C.S. Lewis’ classic, The Screwtape Letters) is still writing letters to Wormwood. This letter has been obtained by Cary McMullen at theledger.com, and it appears Screwtape was rather encouraged by the Values Voters Summit.

At a recent rally in Pennsylvania, Focus on the Family founder James C. Dobson told a crowd of 3,000 that it would be “downright frightening” if Republicans lost control of Congress. If there’s a good Christian on the ballot, he said, failing to vote “would be a sin.”

This statement is unremarkable for Dobson et al. The recent Values Voters Summit had much more of the same on display. Of course, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton are good Christians, but Dobson’s audience understands that “good Christian” is code for “our kind of Christian”, a fundamentalist, conservative Republican Christian. Dobson’s Family Research Council, along with the rest of the organizations represented at the Values Voter Conference, has been a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Republican party for years.

The implication here that failing to vote for a Republican is a sin is not only untrue, but an obstacle to Christian witness. Because of course there’s Mark Foley. And Tom Delay and Jack Abramoff. Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and “aggressive interrogation” techniques. Bob Ney. Ken Lay. And then there’s Katrina and Michael Brown.

My point isn’t that Democrats are somehow holier than Republicans, although Republicans have been far out-scandaling Democrats of late. My point is that both Republicans and Democrats are condemned by their membership in the human race to scandal. We are all sinners. This describes not our actions, but our condition, and applies to members of both political parties.

Which puts any religious leader in a pretty awkward situation when they get in bed with a political party. Dobson, Perkins et al may feel they are now power players, getting access to top administration figures, having the administration trot out to speak at every event they host. But in return, they have lost their independent prophetic voice. Of course they will condemn Mark Foley’s actions, but I am sure they won’t criticize Dennis Hastert for knowing of Foley’s behavior for months without taking action. They can’t, because to do so would put at risk their position of power in the Republican party, and they have spent years acquiring that power. They will rationalize away their silence, telling themselves that fighting abortion and gay marriage is too important to get sidetracked over Hastert’s inaction regarding a House pedophile.

Dobson’s decision to become a politician instead of a prophet can only hurt his own moral authority. The more he acts like just another special interest group lobbyist trading favors with politicians, the less he is seen as a Christian voice calling the nation to follow Christ. Which is why I have slowly come around to favoring the Houses of Worship Free Speech Restoration Act (HR 235).

All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena has made public the investigation by the IRS into whether All Saints violated restrictions on partisan activity by churches. Some, like Mark D. Roberts, have argued that All Saints did in fact violate IRS regulations because the sermon in question, criticizing the Iraq War, did not criticize John Kerry and George Bush equally. But how could it? If Rev. Regas was to preach about war and peace, it would have been an amazing act of contortionism to criticize John Kerry to the same extent as the Bush administration. Granted, the sermon was given a few days before the election, but when else would a liberal “peace and justice” church speak out about peace and justice? To muzzle this kind of outspokenness would hamper the ability of the church to be prophetic just as much as their sell-out to the Republicans has done for the conservatives.

But isn’t All Saints just getting in bed with the Democrats in the same way the Values Voters crowd is in bed with the Republicans? My limited acquaintance with members and clergy at All Saints leads me to believe they are not, and that if the Democrats deserved criticism it would be forthcoming just as quickly as it was directed towards the Republicans. This is the crucial difference — maintaining loyalty to the Gospel regardless of where it leads. After all, we are to be in the world, but not of it. It appears to me that All Saints is truly in, but not of, while the Family Research Council is not only in, but of as well.

Allowing churches to endorse political candidates will do far more harm to churches that take advantage of that freedom than it will to our democracy. The consequences for conservative churches that allow themselves to be co-opted by the Republican party will be the eventual loss of their prophetic voice and their moral authority. That wll be bad for them, but I don’t see why we need to pass laws to protect churches from themselves. There is a free market for religion, and I have faith that the silent majority of Christians will look for authentic spirituality and spurn overtly political churches. And it’s not as if the current IRS regulations have prevented the growth of the Republican Christian Church in the US, as demonstrated by the Values Voters Conference. It could even be that allowing churches to endorse candidates will reverse this trend as the true partisan nature of many conservative churches becomes apparent and alienates their parishoners.

If this Act does pass, liberal churches need to be very careful not to give in to the temptation to be co-opted by the Democratic Party. But the down-side is far greater, so the Values Voters Conference would suggest, on the right. So let the Republicans and their Christian Right supporters pass the Act. Why should we save them from themselves?

Is what is moral commanded by God because it is moral, or is it moral because it’s commanded by God?

This is Euthyphro’s Dilemma, so-called because either answer presents us with theological problems. If something is commanded by God because it is moral, then God is not the highest authority, since God must be subservient to a greater quality called morality. On the other hand, if something is only moral because God commands that it is so, then morality is an entirely arbitrary standard that depends on God’s whim. Both alternatives seem equally unacceptable.

The resolution to this dilemma is that, included among the characteristics of God such as omniscience and omnipotence, is omnibenevolence. God is all-loving. Therefore, God can not command anything for us that is not ultimately best for us and the rest of God’s creation. God is not subservient to morality, but because of God’s love for us, God’s commands aren’t really arbitrary either. (For a fuller explanation, see God and Morality by Derrick Farnell.)

What I find interesting is an implication of this resolution to the dilemma. If God’s commands, as required by God’s very nature, are what is best for us, then morality can be objectively determined by reason independent of God’s revelation in Scripture. Now I accept the Bible as authoritative, but not as innerrant, and I’m often accused of “picking and choosing” Scripture to justify my opinions. In discussions on this blog and elsewhere, the conservative argument ultimately rests on “the Bible says it, so that settles it.” I’ve never had a good response to that argument other than the observation that the Bible contradicts itself, so we all end up picking and choosing verses to justify our positions.

But this observation that God is omnibenevolent and that God’s commands are therefore based on what is best for us gives another way to think about this. We must either accept that a) everything God commands us in the Bible is good for us, even if our intellect is not able to understand why, or that b) anything commanded in the Bible that is not good for us does not come from God. The first proposition places a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible over our ability to reason, and the second places our ability to reason over a belief in the inerrancy of the Bible.

There are many commandments in the Old Testament that we understand as having been superseded by the new covenant through Jesus Christ, so let me stick with the New Testament. Paul says that gays are condemned to live outside God’s grace, and that women can not hold positions of authority over men. Both these statements often seem to be in conflict with Jesus’ teachings, such as loving our neighbor as ourselves, or loving our enemies. (I really don’t want to get into yet another debate on these issues, but am just using them as examples.) If the Bible is inerrant, then we have to conclude that loving our neighbor as ourselves requires rejecting gay marriage and women pastors. It may seem that loving gays would mean allowing them the sacrament of holy marriage, or that loving women would mean allowing them full equality in our churches. But we are wrong. God, who is all-knowing as well as all-loving, has commanded us differently through the pen of the apostle Paul. This is the position of conservative Christians.

But I can’t buy it. I too believe in an all-knowing and all-loving God, but I also think our faculty of reasoning is a gift of God and not as fallible as conservatives would have us think. I just can’t logically see how loving gays means making them accept life-long celibacy or else forcing them from the church. I can’t think of any rational argument why keeping women out of positions of authority is an act of love. I humble myself before God and others, but I’m sorry, I just can’t see how these can be part of God’s morality, commanded by God out of God’s perfect love for us. Here I stand, I can do no other.

So this seems to be a fundamental difference in theology between Christian conservatives and progressives. By knowing God’s nature, are we capable of understanding God’s reasons for God’s commands to us, and thereby able to better discern God’s will? Or are we forever incapable of understanding why God has seemingly commanded those things that by our reasoning seem to violate God’s all-loving nature, and so forced to accept these commands anyway?

Nonbelievers are good conservatives, too.

I have said repeatedly that I am a progressive because of, not in spite of, my Christian faith. Ms. MacDonald echoes this when she says:

Skeptical conservatives—one of the Right’s less celebrated subcultures—are conservatives because of their skepticism, not in spite of it

Eerily similar, no? I have a great deal of sympathy for MacDonald. The conflation of Christian faith and conservative politics has created, it seems, two communities of outcasts: Christian progressives and non-religious conservatives.

In fact, I hate to say it, but I have more in common with MacDonald than I do with most Christian conservatives. MacDonald and I both cherish the ideals of the Enlightenment and believe in the separation of church and state. We both understand that atheists and agnostics can be moral people while Christians can behave immorally. We both believe the claim of superior Godliness by conservatives is harmful — she bemoans its harm to the conservative movement, and I its harm to the church.

Much of her article is a well-articulated discussion of the theological problem of theodicy, and she is right to point out the fallacy of much of our relgious thinking in that regard. Here again, I find myself agreeing with MacDonald, even though we ultimately come to opposite conclusions regarding God and the existence of pain in the world.

I may be deluding myself, but if all conservatives were like MacDonald, it seems the political debates in the country would be much more enjoyable. The conservative arguments would be based on rational argument rather the need to demonize, literally, we liberals.

Allen’s opinion piece is full of so many rhetorical excesses, logical fallacies and flights of fancy, I’m not sure where to begin. But I will start here:

It doesn’t help matters that the mainline churches were pioneers in ordaining women to the clergy, to the point that 25% of all Episcopal priests these days are female, as are 29% of all Presbyterian pastors, according to the two churches. A causal connection between a critical mass of female clergy and a mass exodus from the churches, especially among men, would be difficult to establish, but is it entirely a coincidence? Sociologist Rodney Stark (“The Rise of Christianity”) and historian Philip Jenkins (“The Next Christendom”) contend that the more demands, ethical and doctrinal, that a faith places upon its adherents, the deeper the adherents’ commitment to that faith. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, which preach biblical morality, have no trouble saying that Jesus is Lord, and they generally eschew women’s ordination. The churches are growing robustly, both in the United States and around the world.

Correlation does not imply causation. Allen makes a specious connection here between the growth of female clergy and the decline in mainline church membership. This is a rhetorical smearing based on a none-too-subtle question: is it a coincidence? Asking the question presupposes the answer, all in the absence, as she must admit, of any evidence.

What’s interesting is that Allen ties this in with the observation that strict churches result in more committed adherents. Allen is implying that strict churches are growing churches, when the research only says that strict churches’ members are more committed. Whether a church is strict has nothing to do with whether it’s liberal or conservative. I believe that liberal mainline churches demand much more of their members than conservative mega-churches do. The vast majority of mainline church members are straight, but their churches are increasingly demanding them to be tolerant and accepting towards gays. This is change, and change is hard! The conservative megas make no such demands of their members. Mega-churches draw members with comfortable seating, lattes, the gospel of prosperity, and a worldview that validates their members’ deepest prejudices as biblically ordained. Liberal churches are making their members uncomfortable, forcing us to reconsider our unexamined assumptions such as whether God has a gender, the nature of sexual orientation, and the morality of our comfortable suburban affluence. Many liberal Protestant churches, growing or not, have devoutly committed members, because they have been confronted with a God who demands they move away from an easy judgmentalism to a very disomforting love of “the other.”

Allen calls the ECUSA a “Church of What’s Happening Now” concerned with whatever feels good. I really doubt any of the liberal members of the Episcopal Church are feeling very good right now. Meanwhile, many conservative churches engaged in an orgy of patriotic songs and flag-waving last Sunday that must have felt very good, while having nothing to do with worshiping our Lord.

But the worst part of this piece is the statement that mainline churches no longer believe that Jesus Christ is God incarnate, fully human but also fully divine, our Lord and Savior. Allen says that “the Episcopalians at Columbus overwhelmingly refused even to consider a resolution affirming that Jesus Christ is Lord”, something that I am not familiar with and can’t comment upon. She also says that Presiding Bishop-elect Katharine Jefferts Schori “invited former Newark, N.J., bishop John Shelby Spong, famous for denying Christ’s divinity, to address her priests” as Bishop of Nevada. From these two assertions, Allen infers that not only the ECUSA, but all of mainline protestantism, has abandoned “a bedrock Christian theological statement.”

What in the world is she talking about?

Tolerating diverse opinions such as Spong’s is not the same as agreeing with them. Unlike Roman Catholics or the Southern Baptist Convention, Episcopalians have a tradition of allowing diversity of belief, while uniting around a common religious practice, a compromise that served them well through England’s religious conflicts.

Spong aside, let me be clear: mainline Protestantism continues to confess the Triune God. My denomination, the ELCA, stands firm in the Lutheran tradition of a faith based in God’s saving grace through the death and resurrection of God’s only son, Jesus Christ. Allen’s assertion is libelous.

Given her rhetorical excesses and logical fallacies, I was left wondering why Allen would go so far out of her way to slam us liberal Christians. It would seem her conclusion provides the answer:

And they [liberal Christians] keep telling the Catholic Church that it had better get with the liberal program — ordain women, bless gay unions and so forth — or die. Sure.

It seems her objections ultimately come down to the ordination of gay and women clergy, the search for inclusive language and the tolerance of dissenting theologies. Upon these objections, she condemns the entire mainline. But her battle isn’t with liberal mainline Protestantism at all, but with progressive elements in the Roman Catholic church.

If Allen wants to pick a fight with fellow Catholics, she can go right ahead — just leave us Protestants out of it.