It's not been so different from other parts of the country these past few days in Connecticut. We've followed the story on screens, talked about it among ourselves, said the things that everybody's saying. But geography alters the point of view.

There's your next-door neighbor who grew up in Newtown; your friend who works at Mass Mutual with a colleague who lives there now; your friend who teaches at the University of St. Joseph, which lost one of their own, a stellar student who had just started an internship at Sandy Hook Elementary. This time it was our state, a town like ours, people we know or who know people we know.

We think of ourselves as common-sense folks, not very demonstrative but with plenty of civic pride. We are not easily thrown, and continue to call ourselves the land of steady habits. When evil occurs--and we've had our share of it--we do not let it deter us from doing the right thing. This year, in the wake of one of the most terrible home invasion crimes in American history, we went ahead and abolished the state's death penalty.

We're attached to our public schools. We fund them well, and they repay us by doing a fine job of educating our children. The claim, made on Friday by Mike Huckabee, that what happened in Newtown was somehow the result of the Supreme Court's ending school prayer a half century ago, makes no sense to us. We will have no interest in arming school principals, as suggested by Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX).

Adam Lanza's mother was, it seems, a survivalist who stockpiled weapons against what she believed was the coming collapse of society. Lanza himself--afflicted with some kind of personality disorder--went with her to practice at shooting ranges. 

The survivalist point of view is encouraged by the likes of Huckabee and Gohmert. As we go about strengthening our gun laws here, we will be trying to hold it at bay.

On Monday, the Rabbinical Council of America applauded the conviction of a leader of the Satmar Hasidic sect for sexually molesting an adolescent girl. In doing so, the umbrella organization of mainline "Modern Orthodox" rabbis called attention to the practice of hushing up such acts.

For many years the RCA has condemned the efforts of many parts of the Jewish community to cover up or ignore allegations of abuse, viewing these efforts as against Jewish law, illegal, and irresponsible to the welfare of victims and the greater community.

Yesterday, the RCA had the tougher task of addressing a coverup of sexual abuse at its flagship institution, Yeshiva University. An  investigation by the Jewish Forward revealed that students at Yeshiva's high school for boys were abused by two senior staff members in the late 1970s and early 1980s. When allegations were brought to the attention of Yeshiva's leaders--including, most notably, current chancellor Norman Lamm--the men were not reported to the authorities but simply permitted to resign and find jobs elsewhere. 

“If it was an open-and-shut case, I just let [the staff member] go quietly," Lamm told the Forward. "It was not our intention or position to destroy a person without further inquiry.”

Current Yeshiva president Richard Joel has issued an apology that the RCA takes at face value. "It is especially hard to confront improprieties which may have occurred in our own house, yet that is where the responsibility lies," said RCA president Shmuel Goldin. "We are confident that Yeshiva is equal to the task."

What's missing, however, is a call for holding the perpetrators of coverup to account. It is not good enough to condemn the practices of silence and to urge "a strengthening of synagogue and school policies." The only way to get the full attention of those in charge is to make it clear that they will be punished if they do not refer reports of abuse to the civil authorities. And the only way to make that clear is for those who haven't done so to actually be held responsible, including by the institutions themselves.

In the case of Yeshiva, one step is obvious. The 85-year-old Lamm, for all his distinguished career as a "a revered scholar, rabbi and communal leader," needs to be relieved of his chancellorship.

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Not surprisingly, there's been some push-back to my suggestion a few days ago that religious conservatives would do well to adapt to increasing social acceptance of same-sex marriage. "Sorry," writes Perpetua, in one of the less vituperative comments. "God said that heaven and earth will pass away, but his Word will never pass away."

Not much in evidence was a willingness to conjure with the challenge that religious traditions face in peddling their wares to a changing world. "So Mr. Silk," questions Joel Wegman, "how is it that back in the day when the Church more or less followed societal norms like slavery (to use your example), they were wrong, but today when the Church resists societal norms they are wrong?"

Actually, I never said that the Church was wrong when it accepted slavery; what I implied was that it did well to oppose slavery as society at large began to do that. It's a nice question whether Christian leaders should have run the risk of undermining the progress of the Gospel by vigorously opposing slavery when slavery was an intrinsic part of the social order. 

No doubt, there's cultural pottage that religions cannot sell their birthrights for. In an amusing spoof on Pope Benedict's new Twitter feed, The Onion imagines @pontifex connecting to Christian youth by tweeting out messages like, "Can someone go to church for me lol."

On the other hand, there's the longstanding evangelical recognition that if you don't meet people where they are, you won't meet them at all. In his latest post, the conservative Southern Baptist pastor Wade Burleson takes on those of his co-religionists who deplore Super Bowl fellowships and other cultural adaptive religious practices. "I propose in this post that the adoption of cultural mores and norms to communicate the message of Jesus Christ is precisely what the inspired Scriptures mandate we Christians should be doing, he writes.

Burleson is hardly down with same-sex marriage, but he's not all that bent out of shape about it either. The point about Christianity, I always thought, was that it came into being as a religion that abrogated "the law" for the sake of sharing its good news with one and all. While the legalism of my Christian correspondents is unsurprising, it doesn't seem to me all that Christian.

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From one religious body to another, there's a horrible sameness about the sexual abuse of children by those charged with their moral and spiritual development. The differences come in the institutions and communities, and how they deal with the abusers and their victims.

The trial and conviction of a leader of the Satmar Hasidim in Brooklyn for the sexual abuse of a young girl has laid bare how the sect has protected abusers by ostracizing and threatening those who would call them to account. As the Daily News reported, "Many in the Satmar world were angered to see such a highly-regarded man in the community forced to defend himself in the 'unreliable' secular court system, instead of secret rabbinical court proceedings." That a rabbi active in the effort to bring abusers to justice had bleach thrown in his face on a Brooklyn street yesterday is testimony that the struggle for child protection is just beginning. 

Then you've got the situation of a Southern Baptist pastor in Missouri indicted for abuse of a girl but still presiding over his congregation without so much as a proposal to remove him from his position. In a fine piece of reporting, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch's Tim Townsend uses the case to explore the challenges of addressing abuse when it comes to self-governing congregations that belong to umbrella denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention. 

Meanwhile, out in Los Angeles, the files on abusive priest in the Catholic archdiocese are finally being released to public view, but it's unclear whether the clerical superiors responsible for covering up the abuse will have their names uncovered. Last year, the judge in the case permitted those names to be blacked out. “You know that the Church recycles priests," he said. "Now you want to know who in the clergy recycled. For what useful purpose? The case is settled.” 

Three cases, three religious cultures. What's should be clear by now is that the cultures themselves need to be held to account if the scourge of child sexual abuse is to be controlled. And unless names are named, that will never happen.

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As the Supreme Court turns to same-sex marriage in the wake of popular approval in three states last month, the religious opposition is beginning to adjust to American society's accelerating acceptance of full civic equality for gays and lesbians. 

The LDS Church, which went all out in support of California's anti-SSM Proposition 8, has adopted a new posture of openness towards same-sex attraction. The University Notre Dame, with the support of its local bishop, has announced a plan to provide support and services for GLBTQ students.  

Of course, changes in attitude are not the same as changes in doctrine. One can hope, as Michael Sean Winters does, that the Catholic Church will achieve a new theological understanding of homosexuality, as it has in the past achieved new understandings of slavery, lending at interest, and the status of non-Catholic faiths. Unburdened by Roman bureaucracy and the heavy hand of natural law doctrine, the Mormons could move faster, given the First Presidency's accessibility to direct revelation (as in the forswearing of of plural marriage and the admission of African-American men to the priesthood).

But in the meantime, public acceptance of SSM can serve as a timely reminder to conservative religious leaders that their traditions have always adapted to changing social norms. And that they have usually been wise to do so.

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Is Christianity responsible for the ecological crisis of our time? Back in 1967, when the environmental movement was in its salad days, the medieval historian Lynn White said yes.

In a famous article in Science titled, "The Historical Roots of our Ecologic Crisis," White traced planetary depredation to the Christian--or Judeo-Christian--conception of putting the human species in control of nature. Christianity, he wrote, "not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends."

The pushback came pretty quick from Christians who insisted that the first chapters of Genesis, properly understood, mandated that humans provide responsible stewardship of the earth. And out of the debate came a widespread embrace, from mainline Protestantism to the Pope to the Patriarch of Constantinople, of environmentalism.

Still, not all Christians are with the program. For example, on Bryan Fischer's radio show the other day anti-climate change publicist Calvin Beisner offered this interpretation of the Parable of the Talents, wherein the servant who buries his master's money in the ground for safe-keeping is berated for not putting it out at interest. 

“The wicked and lazy steward," as the master called him, was the one who buried his talent in the ground and didn’t do anything to multiply it. That’s essentially what those who say we need to stop using oil, coal, and natural gas are telling us to do. Just leave those resources buried in the ground, rather than pulling them out and multiplying their value for human benefit.

Perhaps reflecting that the Parable is really about differentiating the kingdom of heaven's spiritual capital from thisworldly money-grubbing, Fischer took a different tack, comparing the refusal to exploit fossil fuels to telling someone you don't like your birthday gift.

That's kinda how we're treating God when he's given us these gifts of abundant and inexpensibve and effective fuel sources and we don't thank Him for it and we don't use it...God's buried those treasures there because He loves to see us find 'em and put 'em to use.

Somewere Lynn White, who died in 1987, is saying, "I told you you so."

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I for one am glad that Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Earth) has clarified his position on the age of the planet. You'll recall that last month GQ asked him, "How old do you think the earth is?" In reply, the senator tap-danced thusly:

I'm not a scientist, man. I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

I'm pretty sure that recorded history has little to say on the subject but "6,000 years give or take" pretty much sums up the theological dispute over how to do the calculation based on biblical chronology. As for how the universe was created and whether it took seven days or seven eras, the senator would have done better not to go there.

In any event, when the subject came up again at a breakfast the other day, he was better prepared. "Science says it’s about four and a half billion years old," he said, "and my faith teaches that that’s not inconsistent.” A nit-picker might ask, "Inconsistent with what?" But we get the idea. Rubio's faith can live with the idea of a four-and-a-half-billion-year-old earth. 

Actually though, there's been some uncertainty about what Rubio's faith is. Last June, when he was under consideration as the GOP vice presidential candidate, it emerged that he and his family had been Mormons for a while but had reverted to his mother's prior Catholicism, with some evangelical Protestantism thrown in along the way. In a Q. and A. with Christianity Today's Sarah Pulliam Bailey, he had this to say about his current spiritual allegiances:

Sometime in 2000, I unfortunately got really busy with my political stuff. I perhaps didn't do a good job of spiritually leading my family, which is one of the roles I play alongside my wife. In the meantime, my wife and my sister found an excellent local church, Christ Fellowship. It does a phenomenal job on two fronts: bringing people to Jesus, and teaching the written Word through phenomenal preachers. And it has a fantastic children's program. For a period of time, it became our church home almost exclusively. I felt called back to Catholicism around 2004, but have maintained the relationship with Christ Fellowship and attend their services often or listen to the podcasts.

Christ Fellowship is one of those multi-site evangelical megachurches that is pretty shy about advertising its doctrine. But I'm guessing that it's on the biblical creationist side of the age-of-earth controversy, based on the description of "Creation v. Evolution," a three-week course offered at its main campus: 

Are you interested in having the knowledge necessary to share the creation story with confidence? Join us for this three week class. It will provide participants with both Biblical and scientific evidence for creation.

Catholicism is pretty much down with the scientific evidence and the no inconsistency. So I'd say that as of now Rubio's faith is, at least as far as the age of earth is concerned, Catholic, just like he says.

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Credit for the Senate's rejection of the U.N. Disabilities Treaty yesterday belongs to the Values Wing of the Republican Party, which mounted a vigorous campaign against it. 

Sure, it was an opportunity for the GOP to hand President Obama a post-election defeat. But with wheelchair-bound Bob Dole showing up in the chamber to support ratification, approval could easily have been spun as a victory for its former standard bearer. That a mere handful of Republican senators voted in favor is testimony to the fact that the Family Research Council & Co. is every bit as powerful as Grover Norquist and the Plutocrats.

The question is, what big value was the Values Wing defending? Right Wing Watch cites chapter and verse to show how the Treaty, which tracks the Americans with Disabilities Act, threatens none of the horribles that Rick Santorum, Bryan Fischer, MIchael Farris et al. alleged. The National Right to Life Committee itself denied the charge that the Treaty would promote abortion.

Behind all the straw men, I'd submit, is the metaphysical anxiety described in Ephesians 6:12: "For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places." 

What the Disabilities Treaty threatened, opponents kept saying, was American sovereignty--because that is the result of binding ourselves to any international treaty (especially one sponsored by the demonic U.N.). Not that the opponents are happy when America exercises that sovereignty by, for example, mandating health insurance. In that context, they count the federal government among the powers and principalities.

According to a new poll, 49 percent of Republicans think that the defunct grassroots organization ACORN stole the election for President Obama, and 25 percent would like their states to secede from the Union. Not that state government can't also be a high place serving up wickedness. 

Richard Hofstadter famously called this the paranoid style in American politics. Over the next four years its grip on the Republican Party promises to be stronger than ever.

"I know it when I see it," Justice Potter Stewart famously wrote in a 1964 pornography case. Evidently, Bill Donohue doesn't.

Bill's got his knickers in a twist because the New York Times has stated that Kansas City Bishop Robert Finn's criminal conviction “stemmed from his failure to report the Rev. Shawn Ratigan to the authorities after hundreds of pornographic pictures that Father Ratigan had taken of young girls were discovered on his laptop in December 2010.” Asserteth Donohue: "That statement is factually wrong."

He then goes on to argue, as he has before, that what was discovered on Ratigan's computer was not pornography. So what was Finn convicted of? He doesn't say.

Factually speaking, Ratigan did have child porn. Here's a passage from the Graves Report, commissioned by the diocese of K.C. itself, describing a series of the priest's photos as described by diocesan information systems manager Julie Creech:

The first showed a little girl, face visible, standing and holding a blanket. In a “staged sequence,” the photos depicted a girl lying in a bed, from the waist down, and focused on the crotch. The girl was wearing a diaper, but with each photo, the diaper was moved gradually to expose her genitals. By the last photo, her genitals were fully exposed. According to Ms. Creech, there were approximately six to eight pictures in this sequence of photos; two displayed fully exposed genitals and one displayed her fully exposed buttocks. The little girl’s face was not visible in the staged sequence, but due to her apparent physical size and the fact that the photos were in the same folder, Ms. Creech assumed the photos were of the same little girl whose face appeared in the initial picture.

That's not just pornography, Bill, it's the kind of child abuse that is supposed to get a priest reported to the civil authorities. How do I know this? It's right there in the USCCB's Rome-approved "Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People," which mandates compliance with civil reporting statutes for the "grave delict" of "the acquisition, possession, or distribution by a cleric of pornographic images of minors under the age of fourteen, for purposes of sexual gratification, by whatever means or using any technology." 

It was for failure to report Ratigan for such acquisition and possession, as mandated by Missouri law, that Finn was convicted. The conviction, let us note, amounted to a guilty plea. Finn stipulated the facts of the case and the judge declared him guilty.

Let us also note, for the record, that Finn pretends to a great awareness of the evils of pornography. In 2007, he treated his flock to a lengthy pastoral letter on the subject, and did not hesitate to issue such severe judgments as the following:

Pornography harms others. It exploits other people, usually women but also men and children. To engage in pornography is to support this terrible and scarring exploitation. To participate financially in this contributes to an industry that perpetuates a grave moral evil.

Pornography is not harmless; it is a grave, dehumanizing evil.

It's been three months since Finn's conviction, and (as the Times article reveals) there are even priests in his diocese willing to say publicly that he should be gone. But neither his fellow bishops nor the Vatican has uttered so much as a peep about the first American hierarch to be convicted of covering up a case of clerical sexual abuse. 

It's called hypocrisy. And we know it when we see it.

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Is there an Abrahamic solution to the travails of Israel-Palestine?

Yesterday, my old friend Guy Stroumsa suggested as much in his Advent Sunday sermon at the Oxford University Cathedral. Guy is Oxford's first professor of the study of the Abrahamic religions, a position he assumed a few years ago after a career studying religion in Late Antiquity as the Martin Buber Professor of Comparative Religion at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He sees the idea of an Abrahamic tradition as more than a coat of happy talk applied to an edifice of hostility among Judaism, Christianity, and Islam.

There is, he told the solemn assembly of dons, an Abrahamic ecosystem that makes it impossible to understand each of these faiths in isolation: "The complex hermeneutics developed in Late Antiquity and in the Middle Ages by the competing communities perceiving themselves to be the true heirs of Abraham remain our inheritance."

Those hermeneutics resulted in, among other things, each community laying its own exclusive claim to the Holy Land. But, Guy reminded his audience, Genesis 17 makes Abraham the ancestor of a multitude of nations. What's needed is a recasting of traditional religious language in terms of cultural memory, such that age-old Jewish, Christian, and Muslim conceptions can be broadened into mutual understanding and acceptance.

That is, of course, a tall order--one that seems positively utopian given the current situation in Israel-Palestine, and the determination of much of the religious leadership there to do nothing but harden the walls of separation. 

But perhaps we take heart in Guy Stroumsa's own situation as an Israeli Jew occupying a chair funded by a Saudi businessman and welcomed by Oxford's Anglican establishment. The Abrahamic ecosystem holds many surprises. 

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My friend and colleague Charles Haynes would like the atheists who have been insisting on erecting anti-religious winter solstice displays to declare victory and go away. They've established their right to be there. Now, he writes, "Let Christian groups set up Nativity displays in public spaces unanswered in December--and save the atheist messages for another time of year."

I don't think that's going to work. As Charles recognizes, the object of the exercise, at least for some of the atheists, is to create a situation where there will be no religious installations of any kind on public land. Make yourself intrusive or obnoxious enough, and authorities everywhere will ban them all, as has happened in Santa Monica.

I'm no great fan myself of public Nativity Scenes, Menorahs, etc., but what's important to recognize is that there are generally observed if not legally binding rules that govern how we do religion in public. Foremost among them is not attacking others' faith. Nativity Scene sponsors do not, for example, affix messages to the manger damning to hell all who are not with the Xmas Program. Unfortunately, the winter solstice displays do the anti-religious equivalent of that.

I agree with Charles that "we can all benefit from a more civil and peaceful public square." But I'd say that the best way to get there is not to invite the atheist grinches to butt out. After a few years, they will seem as innocuous as all the other displayers, and who knows, they may even have evolved a Winter Solstice holiday worth celebrating.

I was flying from Chicago to Washington for Thanksgiving last week when out of the corner of my eye I detected, on a page of SkyMall being flipped through in the next seat over, a photo of a Christmas  tree topped by a Star of David. Talk about your revelations!

Somehow, religion-in-public-life maven though I am, I had missed the Menorament phenomenon. It seems the idea occurred to Morri and Marina Chowaiki, a "Jewish-born" couple from Los Angeles, back in 2005, when Morri suggested affixing a six-pointed star to their Christmas tree. They've been selling their patented design on Amazon since 2009, mostly to intermarried Jewish-Christian couples and evangelicals eager to do the Judeo-Christian thing.

Now there are those Jews who take a dim view of the mash-up. The Christmas tree is about, more or less, the birth of Jesus. The Star of David is about Jewish identity. It's got to be traif--unkosher--to shove the one onto the other.

And yet, and yet. As a connoisseur of the Judeo-Christian tradition, I'd say the Menorahment is the perfect counterstroke to all those fuddy-duddies, from Arthur A. Cohen to Shalom Goldman, who insist that those who employ Judeo-Christian terminology are actually subordinating Judaism to Christianity--that the adjectival "Judeo-" somehow signifies that Christianity (the substantive) has superseded its predecessor faith.

So here comes the Menorahment, sitting atop the Christmas tree as a symbol of Jewish supersessionism. Mixed-faith families use it? Great! Evangelical families? Even greater!

Now, if only I were willing to have a Christmas tree in the house.

As it dawns on the Republican Party that the American people are not entirely down with the Norquistian anti-tax pledge, so is it dawning that the upper hand in the culture war may not lie with religious conservatives. So along comes Richard Stearns, president of the evangelical international aid agency World Vision, with a call to Christians to lay down their arms.

On Election Day, he blogged on Huffpost that "we are quickly moving toward a secular society."

As this cultural shift has occurred, many Christians have reacted in frustration. We have fought to place the Ten Commandments in courtrooms and Christmas crèches outside town halls. We have sued over public prayers and crosses in state parks. One court recently weighed in on whether cheerleaders at a Texas school should be allowed to post Bible verses on their banners.

On Sunday, he returned to the theme, declaring that "engaging in a bitter 'culture war' in order to preserve America's formerly dominant Christian culture has been largely a failed strategy. We cannot win in the courts and at the ballot box that which we have lost in the court of public opinion."

Stearns' idea is that you can catch more flies with a strategy of Christian love. More power to him.

But the new strategy won't succeed, I'm afraid, unless Stearns' Christians decide to back away from tougher culture war battles than Ten Commandments plaques and crèches in the public square. There's abortion and same-sex marriage and, yes, Obamacare's contraception coverage mandate that provide the real tests for whether they can make their peace with today's secular civic order.

If they don't disengage from those battles, it will be as Jeremiah said: "They have healed also the hurt of the daughter of my people slightly, saying, Peace, peace; when there is no peace."

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A couple of weeks ago I called attention to a striking graphic from the Public Religion Research Institute that compared the religious layout of the Obama and Romney coalitions with the religious layout of the electorate by age cohort. Short version: Obama's (i.e. Dems) looks like the electorate of the future; Romney's (i.e. GOP's), like the electorate of the past.

But that, it turns out, was based on pre-election survey data. Now PRRI has a similar graphic up with post-election data. And let's just say that the news for the Republicans is even worse. 

For example, pre-election, evangelicals made up 37 percent of the Romney coalition. In the actual vote, it was 40 percent. Meanwhile, the proportion of Nones slipped from eight percent to seven. On the flip side, the proportion of Nones in the Obama coalition bumped up two points to 25 per cent, even as the proportion of Nones in the 18-29 voting cohort jumped from 32 percent to 35 percent. 

Nothing is more stunning, however, than the Catholic youth vote. Pre-election, PRRI found found roughly equal proportions of young Hispanic and young non-Hispanic Catholics: 10 percent of the former versus eight percent of the latter. Post-election, it was 11 percent Hispanic Catholics and just five percent non-Hispanics. By comparison, among Catholic voters over the age of 30, there's less than one Hispanic for every four non-HIspanics.

The Obama coalition was 10 percent Hispanic Catholics of all ages versus 13 percent non-Hispanics. The Romney coalition was 2 percent Hispanic Catholics versus 18 percent non-Hispanics. 

Think of it this way: Not only did the vast majority of Hispanic Catholics vote Democratic but also, the rising generation of Catholic voters is twice as Hispanic as it is non-Hispanic. Bottom line: The GOP's demographic problem is as much with Catholics as it is with Hispanics.

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One way to gauge how the Republican Party's is evolving since the election is to see what its 2016 presidential hopefuls have to say about the pre-election litmus test issues. 

On immigration, evolution is definitely taking place. On tax policy, there are signs it may be. On evolution, not so much.

"I'm not a scientist, man," was Sen. Marco Rubio's evasion when asked how old he thinks the earth is.

I can tell you what recorded history says, I can tell you what the Bible says, but I think that's a dispute amongst theologians and I think it has nothing to do with the gross domestic product or economic growth of the United States. I think the age of the universe has zero to do with how our economy is going to grow. I'm not a scientist. I don't think I'm qualified to answer a question like that. At the end of the day, I think there are multiple theories out there on how the universe was created and I think this is a country where people should have the opportunity to teach them all. I think parents should be able to teach their kids what their faith says, what science says. Whether the Earth was created in 7 days, or 7 actual eras, I'm not sure we'll ever be able to answer that. It's one of the great mysteries.

Of course, there's no Republican reluctance to embrace science when it comes to the question of the beginning of a human life. That's not one of the great mysteries. 

After the 2008 election, there was a lot of chatter about whether the GOP would be able to reconcile its social conservatives and its economic conservatives. And it must be said that, through the medium of the Tea Party, that was pretty much accomplished. But now that the Party feels the need to moderate its act, the question is back on the table. 

I'm betting that the economic conservatives blink first.

Earlier this month, the AP's Rachel Zoll reported that Russell Renwicks, a manager in the IRS Mid-Atlantic region, had recently said that the agency "had suspended audits of churches suspected of breaching federal restrictions on political activity." Oh no, claimed IRS spokesman Dean Patterson. Renwicks had "misspoke." 

But Patterson could provide no evidence of any IRS effort to audit churches engaged in political activity, and no one in the church-state business has heard of any. Back in 2009, a judge order the IRS to identify an official who would have responsibility for such audits, and somehow the agency hasn't gotten around to doing it.

Comes now the Freedom from Religion Foundation with a lawsuit against the IRS demanding that it do its job. It will be interesting to see how the Department of Justice chooses to defend it.

For the IRS is behaving pretty much the way DOJ has with respect to the Obama version of President Bush's faith-based initiative. The most contentious issue was whether fairth-based organizations receiving government funds to do social service provision could discriminate on religious grounds when hiring people to do the jobs. The Bush Administration said OK. The Obama Administration dropped the subject into a black hole at DOJ, and so the Bush rule continues to apply. 

Over at Religion Dispatches, Emory political science professor Michael Lee Owens has a good piece laying out the pros and cons of the congressional ban on church politicking, and even proposing a modest solution. This is a good conversation to have.

Conservatives have charged the Administration with waging a war on religion. It's more accurate to say that when it comes to public policy, it prefers to look the other way.

Averse as he is to hyping apocalyptic hyperventilating by right-wing preachers, Terry Mattingly takes the MSM to task for ignoring the pre-election assertion by the Rev. Robert Jeffress that President Obama is preparing the way of the Antichrist. Here's what the senior pastor of First Baptist Dallas had to say, as reported by the Christian Post last week.

"I want you to hear me tonight, I am not saying that President Obama is the Antichrist, I am not saying that at all. One reason I know he's not the Antichrist is the Antichrist is going to have much higher poll numbers when he comes," said Jeffress.

"President Obama is not the Antichrist. But what I am saying is this: the course he is choosing to lead our nation is paving the way for the future reign of the Antichrist."

Saith Mattingly:

I would have been interested to have known WHY Jeffress made this statement, doctrinally, other than the usual serious social issues linked to the sanctity of human life and the decline of marriage in our culture. When people make this kind of statement, it helps to carefully quote them on some of the specifics, to provide context (or perhaps further outrage).

Actually, tmatt could easily enough have satisfied his interest by clicking over to First Baptist's Sermon and Worship Library web page and listening to the sermon, "America's Coming Storm," himself. Doctrinally, Jeffress is an old-time premillennial dispensationalist, given to scrutiniizing current events for signs of the End Times. And in the policies of the Obama Administration he finds them--viz., not only its support for abortion rights and same-sex marriage but also its opposition to the ministerial exception in the Hosanna-Tabor case and the contraception mandate of the Affordable Care Act.

Jeffress went on to say it was "time for Christians to stand up and to push back against this evil that is overtaking our nation...via the ballot box"--which I'm inclined to think was not a recommendation to reelect the president. Nevertheless, it's worth contextualizing his remarks via the sermon he gave the Sunday after the election: "Hope...and No Change."

In it, Jeffress argues for the continued political engagement of premillennialists purely on the grounds that pushing off the time of the Antichrist for as long as possible enables Christians to have more time to do the work of evangelization. At the same time, he comforts his politically disappointed congregation by declaring that the light of the gospel shines brightest in the darkness. 

Indeed, Jeffress rejects the sacralization of America that has established itself at the heart of the religious right over the past several decades. "There is no such thing as American exceptionalism when it comes to the standards of Almighty God, he says. "God no more favors America than any nation just because of who we are....There is no saving of America. We haven't been called to save America. We have as Christians been called as Christians to save Americans."

In today's Washington Post Jeffress has a column laying out a political way forward for evangelicals under the second dispensation of Barack Obama. It's to hew to the hard line on abortion and same-sex marriage but to be prepared to compromise on the rest of the GOP agenda: taxation, health care, environmental protection, and gun control. 

If sadder but wiser evangelicals follow Jeffress' lead, we will find ourselves in a new political world come 2016.

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You've got to feel a little sorry for the Catholic bishops.

They declared that the Obama administration was making war on religion and not only was the president reelected but Catholics were the only Christian religious body to vote for him. To make matters worse, after devoting much talk and treasure to combatting the rising tide of same-sex marriage, they got their butts kicked from coast to coast by a populace that voted the other way.

No wonder Cardinal Dolan made penance the theme of his presidential address to the USCCB during their semi-annual fling in Baltimore this week. The problem was, no one was prepared to point the penitential finger at Bishop Robert Finn of Kansas City, whose continuance in office after being convicted of failing to report a sexually abusive priest makes a mockery of the USCCB's claims to have addressed the cover-up scandal.  

Equally embarrassing was the fate of a letter on poverty that +Dolan pushed to at least get the bishops on the record in re: the recession that started four years ago. The letter did everything in its power to skate over the tradition of advocacy embedded in Catholic social teaching, failing even to mention American bishops' own 1986 pastoral letter, "Economic Justice for All."

It was a document more in tune with Rep. Paul Ryan than Pope Leo XIII--one that sought to fulfill the church's preferential option for the poor via such subsidiary institutions as one-man-one-woman marriage and voucherized schooling. After being roundly denounced by retired Archbishop Joseph Fiorenza of Galveston-Houston and some other episcopal old-timers, the letter failed to garner the necessary two-thirds vote and was pronounced DOA by +Dolan.

The bishops then unanimously decided that this would be a good time to proceed with the canonization of Dorothy Day, the founder of the Catholic Worker Movement who famously declared, "Do not call me a saint." As a devout anarchist, Day was not a fan of big government social programs--but she had no use whatsoever for the kind of laissez-faire subsidiarity advocated by Ryan & Co. She loved organized labor, bosses not so much. As she wrote after a visit to the farm workers in California:

What I saw when I visited Stockton in December was the problem of the land. How much land does a man need? Surely not the tens of thousands of acres owned by the California Packing Company, the Southern Pacific, the Pacific Gas and Electric, the Bank of America, in addition to some individuals whose families administer their holdings like medieval barons, ruling over vast territories and treating their laborers like serfs. These corporations and individuals make up the Associated Farmers.

Reflecting on Los Angeles Cardinal McIntyre's efforts to squelch the civil rights movement in his city, Day had this comment about the relationship of the laity to episcopal authority:

The way I have felt about Los Angeles is that the lay people had to go ahead and form their groups, "Catholics for interracial justice," form their picket lines, as they are only now doing, and make their complaints directly, to priest and cardinal, demanding the leadership, the moral example they are entitled to.

You figure Day would have preferred it if the USCCB spent less time promoting her cause and more time paying attention to what she had to say.

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Republicans should be more worried about appealing to Nones than to Latinos. That's the message of PRRI'S stunning new graphic showing how the respective religious coalitions of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney on election day relates to the religious demography of age groups in the U.S.

It's hard to argue with the headline: "The End of the White Christian Strategy." White Christians--evangelicals, mainliners, and Catholics--made up fully seventy-five of Romney's coalition but only 38 percent of Obama's. It's the age distribution, however, that tells the deeper story.

Romney's coalition most closely matches the over-65 crowd, only older. It's whiter and less religiously diverse than seniors are. Call it your great-grandfather's Oldsmobile.

By contrast, Obama's coalition fits snugly in between the youth cohort of 18-to-29-year-old Millennials and the 30-49-year-old Gen-Xers. It's unsurprisingly overrepresented among African-Americans and a little light on evangelicals and "other Christians," but generally presents a fair picture of where America's religious layout is headed in the coming decades.

What's most striking is how evangelicals and Nones change places through the four age cohorts. From old to young, the evangelicals go 30-25-18-9, while the Nones go 9-14-19-32. Romney's coalition was composed of 37 percent evangelicals and eight percent Nones. Obama's coalition had 9 percent evangelicals and 23 percent Nones. 

If I were a Republican, that would scare the hell out of me.

http://www.nhclc.org/en/our-leadership

With Republican Beltwaydom now agreeing that something must be done to bring Hispanics into the GOP tent, eyes have turned to Rev. Samuel Rodriguez as the Great Brown Hope. I fear the hope is misplaced.

Rodriguez is president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, an organization that "not only strives to serve the 16 million Evangelical Hispanics in America but also, the NHCLC strives to serve the entire 40 million plus Latino Community." It sees itself as the Hispanic equivalent of the National Association of Evangelicals. Let's start with the numbers.

The best estimate we have--from Trinity's 2008 American Religious Identification Survey--is that non-Catholic Christians constitute 22 percent of the adult Latino population. According to the Census, there are now 50 million Latinos in the U.S. There's no way that there are more than 10 million evangelicals among them, given that a significant portion of the 22 percent are mainline Protestants, Mormons, and others outside the evangelical fold.

In terms of the electorate, of the 12 million Latinos who voted last week, the number of evangelicals would have been closer to two million than three.

Rodriguez and company could argue that the evangelical segment of the Latino population is growing, but that's not the case. While the number of non-Catholic Christian Latinos nearly doubled between 1990 and 2008, their proportion of the Latino population actually declined slightly relative to Latino Catholics. The big proportional growth came from the Latino Nones, who increased their share of the pie from six to 12 percent--3.8 million adults who identify with the Democrats over the Republicans by a 5-1 ratio.

Latino Nones will hardly be sympathetic to the evangelical values message, but neither will the other non-evangelicals. There is a fond Republican notion that Latinos are traditional folk susceptible to GOP social conservatism. Not true. They are actually more likely to support same-sex marraige and abortion rights than other Americans.

For his part, Rodriguez is far from a spiritually irenic figure. As the liberal blogger Greg Metzger points out, he has dabbled in Islamophobia and declines to cooperate with Catholics. His Christian Americanism harks back to the heyday of Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson.

No doubt, Rodriguez will serve as the poster boy for a Republican Party that understands it must embrace comprehensive immigration reform or give up all hope of recapturing the presidency. But as someone to lead Latinos into the Promised Land of Republicanism? Forget about it. 

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If you want to understand why President Obama campaigned on abortion rights this year, look no further than the national exit polls, which show that 59 percent of Tuesday's electorate think abortion should be legal in all or most cases, as opposed to 36 percent who think it should be illegal in all or most cases.

Moreover, more than twice as many voters think abortion should be legal in all cases than think it should be illegal in all cases. That is to say, only 13 percent take the official Catholic position.

It gets worse for pro-lifers. In all the battleground states where the exit polls asked the question, the legal abortion side did a lot better than President Obama did. The results in the battlegrounds ranged from 53-40 in North Carolina to 72-25 in New Hampshire. In Missouri, where Rep. Todd Akin was buried in a 55-39 landslide after his "legitimate rape" remark, the margin was 53-44.

What's clear is that to the extent that the right to an abortion is an issue in a popular election, it's a winning one for the pro-choice side. So the pro-life side has effectively two choices.

One is to do everything possible to pretend that the right to an abortion is not an issue and then, if elected, do what you can to restrict it as much as possible. The other choice is to respect that most Americans want women to be able to obtain abortions and to work to minimize their desire to do so. There are two ways to do this.

First, you work to improve access to services, from contraception to neo-natal care, that make it easier for women both to avoid unwanted pregnancies and to carry to term pregnancies they might terminate for lack of such services. Second, you continue to try to persuade them that while they have a right to abortion, it is a right that should not be exercised because abortion is a bad thing. 

This approach is pro-life even as it acknowledges that America doesn't want to do away with abortion rights. There's evidence that a majority of Americans are pro-life in this sense. I commend it to the Republican Party as it seeks to recalibrate its identity as a national political organization.

The morning-after snapshot of religion and the election is that, as usual, Catholics were the bellwether. They voted for Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by 50-48, and Obama captured the popular vote by...50-48.

Obama lost non-Catholic Christians (i.e. Protestants) by a hefty 15-point margin, 42-57. but this was more than compensated for by the rest of the pack: Nones (70-26), Jews (69-30), Others (74-23). 

Evangelicals in the end don't seem to have sat on their hands, and they voted for the Mormon candidate at Bushian levels, 78-21. Indeed, evangelicals voted for Romney at exactly the same rate as his own co--religionists. Imagine that.

As for the God Gap, despite earlier signs to the contrary, it again outstripped the Gender Gap. Those who said they attend worship weekly preferred Mitt Romney by 20 points, 59-39. Those who said they attend less frequently went for Obama by 25 points. That compares to a male preference for Romney of seven points and a female preference for Obama of 11.

All told, it looks like the basic religious divides in the U.S. electorate remain where they were established in the 1990s. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

With all eyes on the Buckeye State--which according to Nate Silver has nearly a 50 percent chance of being the tipping point in the Electoral College today--it behooves us to take a look at last look at what's happening to the evangelicals who constitute the state's largest religious voting bloc.

They've been tracked on a weekly basis by SurveyUSA, and when last we checked two weeks ago, there was at least a hint that they might be headed towards voting for Mitt Romney over Barack Obama at close to the 71-27 margin that they voted for John McCain in 2008. But that doesn't seem to be happening.

At the beginning of October, Romney led Obama by just 20 points, 57-37. Two weeks later, the margin was up to 28 points, 60-32. But then last week, it slipped back to 24, 59-34.   Now it's back up to 27, 61-34. If that number holds in the voting today, Romney will poll 13 points worse with evangelicals than McCain did four years ago.

SurveyUSA finds Obama leading Romney overall by five points in Ohio. With evangelicals constituting one-third of Buckeye voters, that 13-point differential thus represents better than a four-point swing in the survey total--accounting for nearly all of Obama's 5-point lead. In other words, if SurveyUSA is on the money, Romney's loss of Ohio will be largely the result of his failure to maintain the GOP's recent hold on its evangelical base 

Sneaking in a few minutes yesterday to do a conference call with thousands of Ralph Reed's Faith and Freedom evangelicals, Paul Ryan averred that President Obama had put the country on "a dangerous path"; to wit:

It's a path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty, and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, Western civilization values that made us such a great an[d] exceptional nation in the first place.

Evangelicals have been pledging allegiance to Judeo-Christian America for decades--ever since the rest of the country began to tire of that Cold War shibboleth in the 1970s. This was Ryan's cute way of calling the president both unAmerican and anti-evangelical. 

But it also begs the question of which particular foundational values the Obama path is compromising.

Opposition to abortion and same-sex marriage may, by evangelical lights, be core Judeo-Christian values, but it is hard to claim that these made America great and exceptional in the first place. One original value that set U.S. apart from the community of nations was the refusal to have an establishment of religion, but that's pretty much a minority report in the Judeo-Christian scheme of things.

Personally, I think that Judeo-Christian value that made our nation so great and exceptional was the conviction that we were great and exceptional. It's something we inherited from the sense of chosenness that the Jews inherited from Abraham and the Christians inherited from the Jews.  

But, answering a reporter's question at a NATO summit in Strasburg in 2009, President Obama seemed less than a true believer: "I believe in American exceptionalism, just as I suspect that the Brits believe in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believe in Greek exceptionalism."

That's a dangerous, dangerous path.

Four years ago, Barack Obama beat out John McCain by one point among Protestants in Pennsylvania, 50-49, and lost the Catholic vote by four points, 52-48. This year, the two groups have switched sides.

According to the latest Franklin and Marshall poll, Protestants in the Keystone State are backing Mitt Romney over Obama by a whopping 18 points, 55-37, while Catholics are backing the president by a hefty 11 points, 52-41. Those are swings of 19 and 15 points respectively. What gives?

In the case of the Catholics, I'd say they have come around to seeing Obama as the kind of Casey-Biden Democrat who's concerned with the interests of ordinary folks and committed to helping the poor. Note to Archbishop Chaput: they don't give a fig about that Obamaite war on religion you've been promoting.

As for the Protestants, it's a trickier story. Pennsylvania doesn't have a lot of evangelicals, but in the western part of the state, mainliners are good deal more conservative than the norm: Their support for Obama may well be down. What's striking about the comparison between the 2008 exit poll data and the 2012 F&M survey, however, is that the proportion of Protestants differs by a full nine points--48 percent and 39 percent respectively. 

While the differential may just be an artifact of survey criteria, it's possible that a significant number of voters who identified as Protestants in 2008 have drifted into the camp of the Nones, or joined other religions. Those two groups constituted 16 percent of the Pennsylvania electorate in 2008, but show up as 26 percent in the F&M survey. In that case, it would not be so much that Obama has lost Protestants as that Protestants have lost Obama voters.