Category Archives: Religion

Warren Jeffs’ total control over followers from prison questioned

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—Stuart A. Wright

The April 4 news story by ABC News regarding the imprisoned leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), Warren Jeffs is misleading in several respects. The reporter, Amy Robach, asserts that “there are some people who believe that he is more powerful now that he is behind bars than he was when he was living in that community.” Played to the listening audience, a Texas Department of Corrections (TDC) official’s statement (recorded by telephone) implies a sense of helplessness: “If somebody comes in and visits with [Jeffs] and he gives them instructions and they take them back by word of mouth, there’s just nothing we can do to control that.” In the closing segment, ABC anchor Diane Sawyer asks Robach if the young girls are still in danger. Robach responds by stating that “according to every ex-FLDS member we’ve spoken to, the answer is unfortunately yes. The police say they have very little authority at this point because the parents of these young girls and children are relinquishing the control over to other adults as has been dictated by Warren Jeffs and police say without a witness, there is very little they can do.”

I would like to counter the first claim that Jeffs is somehow more powerful than ever in his incarcerated state. While Jeffs is still issuing edicts from prison, there are approximately 1,500 members who are not in compliance with his demands. Simply put, the community is in disarray. Several hundred members have left and hundreds more are following another rival leader, William E. Jessop, who was a former FLDS bishop and who rejects the authority of Jeffs. In contrast to Jeffs, Jessop has liberalized gender roles, condemned underage marriage, and promoted high school and college education. Therefore, it is clear that Jeffs does not have “complete control” over the FLDS. And since Jeffs is never likely to leave prison, his authority will likely wane, not increase.

In terms of the second claim that the police has little authority in FLDS cases concerning young girls, I would like to demonstrate that the state actually has considerable space to intervene. The District Court in Texas, in vacating its conservatorship over the FLDS children at the YFZ Ranch in 2008, mandated that each parent, child, or other person, could not interfere with the ongoing supervision of the children by the Texas Department of Family and Protective Services. In other words, the state may visit the home of the children to interview and even examine (medically or psychologically) at any time, without announcing the visit ahead of time. Thus, there is extensive state control over the young FLDS girls in Texas. Moreover, the families and children are not allowed to leave the state, further underscoring its authority in a space that media discourse has claimed it has had none. As well, I question whether family and children protective services in southern Utah or Northern Arizona, where the main communities are located, are as powerless as implied.

Finally, let’s draw attention to reporter Robach’s preface to the claim that the young girls are in danger. She states, “According to every ex-FLDS member we’ve spoken to….” There are volumes of research literature to show that the accounts of ex-members of controversial religious groups such as the FLDS are notoriously unreliable. My book (co-edited with James T. Richardson) on the FLDS raid, specifically addresses this unreliability. I am not discounting all of these accounts, but it’s important for us to consider the sources and recognize that some ex-members are disgruntled and may have an axe to grind; they are not purely objective or impartial sources, and accordingly inflect our understanding of the events with their biases.

Stuart A. Wright is Professor of Sociology and Chair of the Department of  Sociology, Social Work & Criminal Justice at Lamar University.  He is the co-editor (with James T. Richardson) of Saints Under Siege: The Texas State Raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints (NYU Press, 2011).

Blame the popes, not the nuns

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—Margaret M. McGuinness

Pope Benedict XVI’s recent decision to resign from the papacy has generated a number of commentaries, op-ed pieces, and blog posts on the significance of the pontiff’s actions for the future of both the throne of St. Peter and the greater Catholic Church. Some writers have focused in particular on what this means for U.S. sisters and nuns who have had their differences with Catholic clerical leaders over the years. Most American women religious, the prevailing institutional argument claims, have deviated from traditional Catholic teaching, especially those related to abortion, same-sex marriage, and an all-male priesthood. In addition, sisters have moved too far from their convents and are now engaged in advocacy work—or ministry, depending on your point of view—that focuses too much on the poor and underserved.

When examining the history of women religious, however, it is hard to ignore the role the papacy played in leading sisters and nuns to embrace the world and its problems. Although Bonifice VIII issued a bull, or proclamation, ordering nuns to be cloistered in 1298, twentieth-century popes have taken a somewhat different approach. In 1929, Pius XI encouraged sisters to receive the education necessary for staffing parochial schools. Almost thirty years later, in 1958, his successor, Pius XII, urged religious communities to abandon those practices that kept them from being in touch with the modern world.

By the time of Pius XII’s call for women religious to consider their role in contemporary society, sisters and nuns had taken Pius XI’s admonition to heart. Focused on the education of nuns, the Sister Formation Conference (SFC) developed the Everett curriculum, which focused on the liberal arts, Catholic social teaching, and ways to effect “structural change in society.”  Their education, combined with several documents produced by the bishops at the second Vatican Council (1962-1965)—notably Lumen Gentium (1964), Gaudium et Spes (1965), and the Decree on the Renewal of Religious Life, (Perfectae Caritatis, 1965)—led sisters to conclude that they were called to return to the original reasons behind the founding of their communities; in other words, they were to read the “signs of the times” and meet the needs of twentieth-century Americans.

American women religious of the twenty-first century continue to teach school and nurse the sick, but they also minister to the undocumented, the poor, and those living on death rows throughout our nation’s prisons. Who is to blame for women religious leaving the traditional cloister and entering a ministry devoted to advocacy and social justice? Maybe, just maybe, it’s the popes.

Margaret M. McGuinness is Professor of Religion and Executive Director of the Office of Mission Integration at La Salle University, Philadelphia. She is the author of Called to Serve: A History of Nuns in America (NYU Press, 2013).

A Disney World Christmas—and American Christianity

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—Jason S. Lantzer

This year for Christmas, my wife and I gave our kids the gift of a nearly week long trip to Walt Disney World in Florida.  Considering the turn the weather took the day after Christmas at home in Indiana, and how nice it turned out to be in Florida, it also ended up being a gift to us as well.

Now, how did I come to write a blog post about Disney World? I surely didn’t intend to do so, but one of the nice things about a vacation that includes waiting in line is, you get some time to think. And for me, this post started when my son, while we were in EPCOT’s Norway, said, “Let’s go into that church.” For those of you who are rusty on your EPCOT Norwegian lay of the land, the pavilion includes a stave church building (which houses an exhibit on the Vikings). My son’s request got me thinking about where God was at Disney World (a topic which very well could, as I thought some more about it, be worthy of a whole article in and of itself). But this is not that article; rather, this is about Disney World at Christmas time, and what American Mainline Christianity (whether of the old or new variety) might learn from the House of Mouse.

Before anyone assumes this is going to be some new angle on the whole “church as business model,” let me lay those hopes/fears aside for you. It is not. While I think there are some valid arguments one could make along those lines, this post is different. You see, one of the main reasons my wife and I had decided to do this trip was that we wanted to see what Disney did for Christmas. We knew we wouldn’t make the journey at Christmas, but after discovering that the parks stayed decorated into the New Year, the deal was sealed.

What Disney does to their parks at Christmas is pretty special: the lights, the displays, the merchandise! One could visit Disney World at Christmas and see nothing but commercialization and consumerism and even secularization run amok. Indeed, a trip here at Christmastime might fire some members of American Mainline Christianity into bemoaning what the Magic Kingdom has done to our culture, including Christian culture, for all of those reasons. Before you know it, we’d see calls for boycotts, petitions asking Disney to support “traditional values,” and maybe even op-eds about Disney’s self-portrayal of being “family friendly,” while making money off of movie divisions that “glorify violence” or some such. If that seems far fetched, it shouldn’t—all of those things have happened in the last 10 to 15 years (usually from some corner of the Religious Right, or from evangelical circles, and all with precious little to show for it).

But before that happens here, let me ask you, dear reader, to step back—either from launching such a drive or from shaking your head at those who would—and join me for a second at Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Click on that highlighted hyperlink and behold the Osborne Family Spectacle of Dancing Lights. You’ll be beholding for awhile, as there are some 5 million lights involved. And let me tell you what I saw, and heard, just the other night, when I beheld them for the first time: the very spirit of Christmas.

We were directed by the park staff (“cast members,” in Disney-speak) down and around the byways of park’s streets to begin in front of a Nativity light display. We’d seen it earlier in the day of course, and I’d thought it odd that it seemed tucked away near the back of the (then unlit) display area. But now I understood why. You start there, away from the bulk of the display, so that those lights stand out more. They draw you in. Soon enough, you are pulled away (if only by the strength of the crowd) to other displays. Some are religious in nature (the wise men, angels, peace on earth); some are not. But even when you aren’t focused visually on the Nativity, you are never far from it, thanks to the music that is playing—the sounds of the season, some secular, some holy, but all Christmas.

And that trip through the lights got me thinking. I have heard Christmas music virtually everyday since late November. At Disney World, it was playing still. “Light” seemed to be the buzzword this year at the Advent and Christmas services I either attended or watched. Here were 5 million lights in just one section of one Disney park. The people I had attended services with—friends, family, neighbors—had all likely heard those messages before. Here at Disney World, I was hearing (and singing) some of the same hymns, “seeing” the same message, with thousands of people I didn’t know, literally from every corner of the globe (and not just the EPCOT globe—we saw groups from various Central and South American nations, and encountered visitors from across Europe, as well as from Asia and Australia, amongst other places). Can any American denomination, inside or outside of the Mainline, say their message (while no doubt more deeply seeded with theology and doctrine) was heard by so many? Did any have such an “evangelizing moment” to reach out to those outside of the Christian faith and tradition (those whom many American evangelicals would have once called “the lost,” or “unreached”) with the Good News of Christ’s birth?

Now, I’m not saying that Disney World was attempting to spread the Christmas message of the Church in an evangelizing way. If it gets cold and snowy enough in Indiana later this winter, you might even get me to say (as my favorite of Snow White’s dwarfs, Grumpy, might do) that even if they were, it wouldn’t make up for all the commercialization and secular message that came with it. But that doesn’t mean that there isn’t a lesson to be had in all of this about the Mainline of American Christianity either. If a secular corporation can do this (or this), what more can (and should) the Church be doing? As one of my favorite sermons from this past Advent season pointed out, Christmas started with Christianity and the Church—and Christians should not be afraid to say so!  Perhaps scholars need to look a bit more deeply into issues of culture (something that gets a few pages in the Mainline book, but no doubt needs more attention).  Maybe there is more for the church planners (as well as those who study such movements) to learn about/from the whole “corporation model” of Church growth.

With less than a year until the start of the next Advent and Christmas season, there is still time to think about such things before they are upon us again.  And there is also time to reflect that sometimes such epiphanies can come to us at the most unexpected times and places—not unlike that very first Christmas itself.

A version of this article originally appeared on the author’s blog—read it here.

Jason S. Lantzer is Adjunct Professor of History at Indiana University Purdue University and at Butler University. He is the author of Mainline Christianity: The Past and Future of America’s Majority Faith.

 

Announcing our Spring 2013 Catalog…

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NYU Press Spring 2013 Catalog is now online, featuring an exciting range of new books in history, media studies, law, and more!

Highlights include:
TWO PRESIDENTS ARE BETTER THAN ONE: Making the case for a two-party, two-person presidency, this “pipe dream of a book” presents a “novel and provocative thesis worth hearing out” (Kirkus Reviews).

A DEATH AT CROOKED CREEK: Marion Wesson, author of best-selling and prize-winning legal novels including Render up the Body, combines drama and intrigue  with cutting-edge forensic investigation techniques and legal theory in this superbly imagined historical novel.

CAPITAL OF THE WORLD: Charlene Mires tells the dramatic, surprising, and at times comic story of hometown promoters in an extraordinary race to host the U.N. headquarters at a pivotal moment in history.

(You can also click here to access this catalog via our website, or find our catalogs available on Edelweiss.)

The not-so-simple ‘Decline of Evangelical America’

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—Justin Wilford

A week after the 2012 national and state elections, I noted how downcast many evangelical leaders were about the election results. There was a widespread sense that evangelicals were facing “a new moral landscape,” one in which they were marginal figures. No doubt, for many institutional leaders in American evangelicalism, this is worrisome news. If it is “the end of evangelical dominance in politics,” as one evangelical writer put it, then this cannot bode well for what really matters for these leaders: putting people in the pews.

This past weekend, James S. Dickerson, an evangelical pastor writing in the New York Times’s Sunday Review, argued that although “it hasn’t been a good year for evangelicals” and things look to be trending downward, there is hope still for this embattled form of Christianity.

Dickerson argues that the American evangelicalism can right itself if it embraces its new marginalized status, acting less with the “superior hostility” of a bullying, dominant cultural group, and more with the “grace and humility” of outsiders in a strange land.

This may be good advice in any case; who among us couldn’t do with a little more grace and humility? But it also happens to be the only card left to play for conservative Protestantism. As I show in Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism, many of the largest and fastest growing churches in America—like Rick Warren’s Saddleback Church—foreground everyday secular problems of work-life and family, modulate hot-button cultural issues such as abortion and homosexuality, and downplay theological differences between denominations. And yet, these churches hold the same conservative theological views as the churches of older generations. The difference is in presentation, not in the core doctrines held by the church leaders.

This might appear as the purely cynical marketing strategy of a failing brand. Even Dickerson’s excellent presentation of the matter leaves room for such an interpretation (he implores evangelicals to hold on to their “unpopular doctrines” while “re-emphasizing” the less off-putting message of God’s saving grace). But I don’t think the matter is so simple.

First, these hardline doctrines have served as important boundary markers, clearly delineating the sacred in-group from the secular out-group. Now that many evangelicals like Dickerson and Rick Warren are concerned that these very boundary markers are keeping people away, even relegating these issues to secondary importance is a major shift for evangelicalism. It means that the most defining issues of conservative Protestantism, chiefly biblical literalism, could be up for debate as leaders begin to grapple with an increasingly eclectic membership body with few historical ties to evangelicalism who have been drawn in by the “good news” but turned off by the increasingly unpopular cultural doctrines.

Second, the structure of these new churches is built around blurring the distinctions between the sacred and secular. Their buildings are designed to blend into the secular landscape; the weekend sermons are focused on success at work, marriage difficulties, underachieving children, and even fitness and diet; and the most important gatherings in the church occur during the week, in small groups in members’ homes. This is not about drawing boundaries between a (spiritually and doctrinally) pure church and secular world, but rather about tearing down these boundaries to make the church more meaningful in the context of the world. Unfortunately for hardliners, this means that many of the aforementioned “unpopular doctrines” become issues pushed off for another day that never comes.

Finally, Dickerson’s piece and the examples he gives of churches like Warren’s Saddleback are tacit acknowledgments of something that many social researchers’ of religion have been resisting for several years: old-school secularization. When he writes of a “shrinking minority [of evangelicals] in the United States” and a generational crisis in which the young are not replacing the old, he’s describing what has become fashionable to refer to as the “European exceptionalism” of secularization. It appears now that Europe is not so exceptional after all.

What is, however, exceptional about American evangelicalism, and pastors like Dickerson and Warren, is their willingness to innovate, blur old distinctions, and adapt to the culture they are in, rather than fight it. To my eyes, this means that secularization is not a fate, but a situation that can be responded to in a multitude of ways.

Justin Wilford is author of Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism (NYU Press, 2012).

Halloween book giveaway:
The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle

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Next Wednesday, October 31st (Halloween!) marks the official publication of our book on marriage, murder, and madness in Puritan America: The Notorious Elizabeth Tuttle. To celebrate, we’re giving away one FREE copy to one lucky winner.

To enter for a chance to win, show us some love—LIKE us on Facebook (if you haven’t already). We’ll select one winner via a random drawing on Friday, October 26th, at 3:00pm (EST). Good luck, and happy Halloween!

For more on the book, read the introduction or browse in Google Preview.

Super-queering Jesus

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—Bernadette Barton

We tackled queer theory this week in an upper-level undergraduate Religion and Sexuality course I teach at a regional university in Kentucky. After allowing students the space to process their reactions to the dense and circuitous language, we launched into impassioned queer readings of some visual texts. We loved the “polefessional” featured on America’s Got Talent, and concluded that Steven Retchless had managed to “queer” just about everything, including the stripper pole. We dissected a recent Hardee’s commercial featuring two scantily clad women making out with a burger—and the conversation shifted from a feminist critique of “compulsory bisexuality” to a queer reading that the commercial’s same-sex eroticism challenged heteronormativity and, arguably, that the women’s erotic engagement with the burger “queered” even eating.

And then somehow, as it often does in this class, fundamentalism emerged. Half of the students identify as gay or bisexual, most come from conservative Christian families, and all live in the Bible Belt. Four students in the class are actively and openly working on issues of self-acceptance in the face of strong religious and familial socialization that “you can’t be gay and Christian.” “So,” I asked the students, “how can we queer fundamentalism?”

Two students from conservative Christian families, Mark and Caroline (names changed here), wanted to queer the closet. They had spent much time in their adolescence not fully out or in and believed this was a kind of queer location. Another student ventured that perhaps the recently found piece of papyrus in which Jesus refers to “my wife” queered Christianity. Eyes widening in amusement, we imagined a range of church authorities—from Roman Catholic to evangelical Christian—rejecting the papyrus that supported a heterosexual Jesus while relentlessly fighting for traditional family values. “We just super-queered Jesus!” I exclaimed, and then we all laughed in delight.

These students are typical of the Bible Belt gays I write about in Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays. Several began the class openly wrestling with fundamentalist upbringings that taught them there is only one path to heaven. But the more we contemplated the buffet of spiritual paradigms available, the more comfortable they appeared to become with the possibility of many paths to the Divine.

The microcosm of my classroom mirrors the dynamics playing out across the country as gay rights are loudly debated in the media. The issues that continue to confound and trouble people most have to do with religious-based opposition to homosexuality. People from non-religious or open-minded religious backgrounds reject the biblical arguments conservative Christians make against homosexuality. On the other side, conservative Christians who feel a deep commitment to adhering to scriptural literalism fear that allowing same-sex relationships offends God. The gay people from conservative Christian families or communities, the Bible Belt gays I interviewed, and Matthew Vines, a Kansas native, straddle this divide.

Vines, a young, devout Christian, was recently featured in a New York Times piece for giving a biblical lecture titled “The Gay Debate” to a large church crowd in Wichita. His primary point was that “the Bible does not discuss or condemn loving, gay relationships.” Adhering closely to biblical literalism, Vines argues that “these texts have a meaning, and the traditional reading of them is wrong. It is incorrect—biblically, historically, linguistically.”

Vines paid a recording company five hundred dollars to tape the lecture to put on YouTube. So far, the hour-long video has been viewed almost 400,000 times and generated over 7,000 comments. Given the dense, scholarly nature (and length) of the lecture, such attention is compelling evidence of the hunger people feel to reconcile a close reading of scripture with their desire to accept homosexuality as part of God’s design.

What strikes me as I watch Vines, a slight, sober, serious young man, deliver his lecture—and as I observe my students grapple with parents, grandparents, and extended family who tell them with unshakable certitude that homosexuality is sinful—is that the struggle for gay rights is most effective when it is multi-pronged. For someone like myself—raised Roman Catholic but always taught to embrace inclusivity and diversity—coming out as a lesbian was not in contradiction with my personal spiritual beliefs. Further, no sin-based argument ever resonated with me as necessary or believable. It is simply not important to those like me to, as Vines eloquently expresses, “uphold the Bible as authoritative and take biblical scriptures seriously.”

Yet for others, for some conservative Christians both gay and heterosexual, Vines’s scripturally grounded, earnest theological arguments for the holiness of homosexuality, coupled with his assertion that he believes in abstinence until marriage and longs for marriage himself, can be persuasive. Not only is the gay rights movement adequately capacious to include tight doctrinal arguments and a super-queer Jesus, both also allow us to more quickly achieve the base line that Vines advocated in the NYT piece: That “no one in the world anywhere should be homophobic at all.”

Bernadette Barton is Professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Morehead State University in Morehead, Kentucky. She is the author of Stripped: Inside the Lives of Exotic Dancers (NYU Press, 2006) and Pray the Gay Away: The Extraordinary Lives of Bible Belt Gays, to be released next month.

Celebrate Rosh Hashanah!

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Happy Jewish New Year! Check out the video below from Deborah Dash Moore, editor of City of Promises: A History of the Jews of New York. And be sure to take a peek at our book sale on the NYU Press website for 20% off selected titles!

Also, join us at the Lower East Side Tenement Museum this Thursday for a City of Promises event… Hasia Diner introduces Tenement Museum Vice President, Annie Polland and co-author Daniel Soyer for a talk and performance on Emerging Metropolis, the second volume in the City of Promises series. It’s a great way to celebrate the holiday and watch the story of urban Jewish immigrant society come to life!

Clint, the Chair, and Esalen

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—Marion Goldman

© photoburt (via Flickr)

An op-ed piece in the August 31st New York Times (“What the Chair Could Have Told Clint”) explained Clint Eastwood’s imaginary dialogue at the Republican National Convention as a form of a psychodrama technique that was developed by psychiatrist Jacob Moreno over a century ago. In the sixties and seventies, conversations with an empty chair were incorporated into Gestalt and humanistic psychology workshops at Esalen Institute, a retreat and personal growth mecca on the central California Coast, which has several connections to Eastwood.

Esalen, the subject of my book, The American Soul Rush, is located about 25 miles south of Eastwood’s luxurious Tehama Golf Club. And both golf and proximity tie the movie star, Esalen, and the Institute’s diverse practices for personal and spiritual expansion together.

Michael Murphy, one of the Institute’s two founders, wrote Golf in the Kingdom, a fantasy novel that Eastwood loved and hoped to make into a movie. The book promises golfers that the perfect swing is inside them, just as humanistic psychology promises everyone that a perfect life awaits within. To reach that ideal swing (or life), you must confront and rid yourself of old emotional patterns that stand in the way of your self-actualization.

An early Esalen workshop.

That’s where the chair comes in. In therapeutic and educational settings at Esalen, guided conversations with an imaginary person or symbolic object facilitate expression of suppressed emotions that can impede present happiness. In my research for The American Soul Rush, I participated in a workshop where members talked with symbols of money, power, sex, time, and death that rested on different chairs. This exercise and and six others designed to facilitate personal and spiritual growth are offered in the book’s Appendix. Before incorporating any of these, I test drove them myself and also with various classes of about 40 students. The chair work amazed all of us and effectively demonstrated the ways that the Human Potential Movement and Esalen can take people beyond words.

The beliefs and practices that the Institute popularized have seeped into America’s culture of individualism—a culture that Clint Eastwood so effortlessly, and publicly, personifies.

Marion Goldman is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of Oregon, and author of The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege.

Interpreting the Esalen dream

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—Marion Goldman

An article published in Sunday’s New York Times (“Fabled Spiritual Retreat Debates Its Future”) uncovered a schism at Esalen Institute that has been brewing for most of its fifty years. Over its lifespan, the legendary retreat on the central California Coast has been characterized as a think tank; spiritual retreat; hot springs spa; educational institution; and crucible for self-actualization. Founded in the 1960s as a place for personalized spirituality, the Institute has long been a haven for the “spiritual but not religious”. For at least a decade, however, people who have dedicated their lives to Esalen and its utopian visions have faced-off against individuals who want to change its financial model and make it into a spa that would be attractive to new constituencies.

Sociologists can rarely predict the future, but I was able to describe the mounting tensions and anticipate the current conflicts—and did so in my book, The American Soul Rush. Because this portrait could be interpreted as ‘unfavorable’ to Esalen, individuals associated with the current management informally banned the book and used Amazon reviews to encourage people not to read it. And some long-time community members felt that I had not fully captured their standpoint.

At least Esalen is in the news once more, as it was in the late sixties, appearing in the New York Times, Life, Newsweek, and even on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. As with many other California stories, the crux of the matter may be real estate. Esalen occupies a coastal stretch that is extraordinarily gorgeous and stupendously expensive. Back in the sixties, when its founding generation was young, beautiful and wild, there were handshake deals in the hot springs and generous gifts for buildings and land made under the influence of psychedelic drugs. Some people remember those agreements; others may have chosen to forget them. In the 21st century, money at Esalen is short—and so is trust. Ultimately, it may be attorneys who interpret the dreams that built the ‘human potential movement.’

Marion Goldman is Professor of Sociology and Religious Studies at the University of Oregon, and author of The American Soul Rush: Esalen and the Rise of Spiritual Privilege.

Where are Evangelicals in the 2012 U.S. Presidential Campaign?

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—Justin Wilford

Four years ago, Rick Warren and Saddleback Valley Community Church in Orange County, California hosted the first campaign meeting of presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain. Warren called it the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency, and structured it as a set of interviews so that the candidates would meet with him separately on stage, each answering identical questions. As the announcement of the event in late July of 2008 was reported in almost every major U.S. media outlet, and even garnered coverage abroad, critics quickly expressed fear at the thought of a megachurch and its pastor holding such prominent positions in a presidential campaign.

It was bad enough for religious figures to endorse particular candidates, they argued, but here was a strongly evangelical pastor presiding over one of only a small handful of candidate meetings. (Obama and McCain would go on to hold three face-to-face debates in the following months.) At a minimum, it seemed, the event legitimized a particular religious group as an arbiter in American electoral politics; at worst, it allowed a particular religious group to tip the scales of a democratic election in an anti-democratic way.

Was it a slippery slope to theocracy, as some critics argued? As I show in the forthcoming book, Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism, which centers around 18 months of field work at Saddleback and surrounding communities, Warren and Saddleback did very little to wring any sort of political results from that unique event. While some aspects of the event appeared questionable, the sermons and programs at Saddleback in the following days and weeks were remarkably anodyne and apolitical. As I relate in a chapter on the event:

Far from being an act of encouraging political engagement, however, the incorporation of [the Civil Forum on the Presidency] into the American political process was seen by Warren as a way to legitimize the church, not sacralize politics. The forum was not followed by voter registration drives at the church, as in the past. Nor was it followed by a politically relevant sermon or church campaign. In fact, three weeks after the Civil Forum, Saddleback launched the “Forty Days of Love” campaign, which consisted of a series of sermons and small-group study guides centered on [a Saddleback pastor’s] new book about relating with Christlike love to those close to you. It could not have been more apolitical. (p. 158)

So while critics were worried about the rise of American theocracy, might it have been the case that the Saddleback Civil Forum on the Presidency was political evangelicalism’s national denouement? If so, it didn’t go out with a bang, but instead exited quite gracefully (or, rather, civilly). A pastor and church that in 2004 had rallied its members to vote for the candidate who opposed same-sex marriage, stem-cell research, and abortion (no candidates’ names were mentioned, wink, wink) in 2008 simply hosted a “civil” event that allowed each candidate equal time and opportunity to express his views, and left it that. (Although, there was the later matter regarding a certain state ballot measure.)

And in 2012? So far, there has been no hint that any “civil” event is on the horizon, nor any Saddleback-sponsored political event for that matter. The closest Warren has come to the political arena this year is when he tweeted on August 1, that the CEO of Chik-Fil-A called to tell him that they ran out of chicken on a day that was supposed to symbolize anti-same-sex marriage views. But even then, Warren deleted the tweet within a day.

It could be that evangelicals are just sitting this election out or will vote with little enthusiasm, as many have argued. But I think something much bigger is going on. Regardless of the religion of the Republican candidate, no big religious policy issues are even up for debate this year. Same-sex marriage? It seems like an issue that is best left to the fast-food sector. Abortion? A down-ticket issue that can only mobilize local pockets of voters but is a loser on the national stage. Stem-cell research? It’s hard to imagine that this was ever an issue.

There is no daylight between Romney and evangelicals on these and just about every other issue that matters to the religious right. So why the silence? It has something to do with what makes places like Saddleback Church work so well. The focus there is on intimate relationships that are nurtured in small groups; on personal growth achieved through service work (what they call missions); and on private, individual happiness underwritten by a clear and accessible evangelical narrative of self and society.

The old battleground of the culture wars is a strange land to many of today’s megachurch evangelicals. While the substantive views on these matters might not have changed much (though there is evidence of some shift), they just don’t make as much sense in the context of a popular, contemporary evangelicalism that is much more concerned about personal well-being. Therefore, we shouldn’t mistake the latter’s absence in the 2012 presidential election for its decline. American evangelicalism is alive and well. It’s just that its lifeblood is no longer culture war politics.

Justin Wilford is author of Sacred Subdivisions: The Postsuburban Transformation of American Evangelicalism, forthcoming in November 2012 from NYU Press.

[This article originally appeared on the University of Southern California's Center for Religion and Civic Culture blog, on August 14, 2012. Read it here.]

Sikh temple shooting: A call to take extremists seriously

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—Jeannine Bell

At a time when the United States has elected a black president, many Americans tend to dismiss racial extremists. This makes sense. The Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis and other ideologically committed racists with their uniforms, rhetoric and violence seem so passé, remnants of a long dead pre-civil rights era. In the last 30 years when the Ku Klux Klan has held marches in cities around the country, protesters outnumber marching Klan members and police are called out to protect the extremists from protesters’ violence.

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Every so often there is a tragic reminder of the fact that extremists still exist, and of the danger they pose. On Sunday, August 4, 2012, Wade M. Page, a member of various racist rock bands, walked into a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin and opened fire. Six Sikhs worshipping at the temple were killed and three others were wounded.

There is a clear connection between Page’s massacre at the temple and his music. White supremacist organizations use racist rock bands as a way of recruiting and furthering their message. The message in the music of racist rock bands is frequently one of hatred and violent eradication those who “threaten” blacks, Jews and other minorities.  According to news reports, Page played in the Blue Devils. One of the Blue Devils songs, “White Victory” included the lines: “Now I’ll fight for my race and nation/Sieg Heil!”

As a society we should be much more aware of the threat posed by extremist groups.  Though their numbers are small, the Southern Poverty Law Center suggests that membership in extremist groups is growing. Hate crime scholars know that extremist groups do not commit the majority of hate crimes, but what has yet to be acknowledged is that when the deadliest attacks occur, often the culprit is a member of an extremist group. Recent examples include Benjamin Smith, whose multistate state killing spree led to the death of former Northwestern University basketball coach Ricky Byrdsong in Illinois, and graduate student Won-Joon Yoon in Bloomington, Indiana. Smith was a member of the World Church of the Creator, a neo-Nazi group. The killers of James Byrd—a black man who was dragged behind a pickup truck in Jasper, Texas—were members of racist prison gangs.

We don’t need hate crime legislation to punish these high profile attacks. Rather, hate crime legislation is needed for the thousands of other bias-motivated attacks that take place without national scrutiny. What might make a difference in preventing horrible hate crime murders like those that took place in Wisconsin is for the government, and for everyone else, to take seriously the dangerous threat posed by racial extremists.

Jeannine Bell is Professor of Law at the Indiana University Maurer School of Law in Bloomington, Indiana. Bell has written extensively on hate crime and criminal justice issues. Her newest book, Hate Thy Neighbor (forthcoming from NYU Press), explores hate crime in integrating neighborhoods.