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The Dark Side of Global Evangelicalism
This diary is not an in depth study but the result of a little googling which produced some food for thought. Counterpoints and further information are welcome.

I have read several worrying articles recently about bad social effects related to the spread of evangelical Christianity in developing nations, but this is one of the saddest....

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The Myth of Spending Cuts for the Poor, Tax Cuts for the Rich
...More broadly, the accusation that poor families are shouldering more of the tax burden while receiving less of the spending is empirically false. From 1979 through 2003, the total federal tax burden on the highest-earning quintile (one-fifth or 20 percent) of Americans—who earn 52 percent of all income—rose from 56 percent to 66 percent of all taxes. Their share of individual income taxes jumped from 65 percent to 85 percent.[2] On the spending side, antipoverty spending has leaped from 9.1 percent of all federal spending in 1990 to a record 16.3 percent in 2004.[3]...

...[3]Total antipoverty spending is calculated based on data from Office of Management and Budget, Historical Tables, Budget of the United States Government, Fiscal Year 2007 (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2006), pp. 55–72, Table 3.2, and pp. 137–142, Table 8.5, at http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2007/pdf/hist.pdf (February 4, 2006). The spending consists of budget functions 604 (housing aid), 605 (food aid), 609 (other income support), and Medicaid and S-CHIP for health care....

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DIGGING INTO GUANTANAMO
...To summarize then: According to the National Journal's research, upwards of half of all prisoners at Guantanamo weren't captured on the battlefield. Rather, they came into our custody by way of third parties "who had their own motivations for turning people in, including paybacks and payoffs." Many — perhaps most — of the men rounded up in these sweeps have no connection to al-Qaeda or the Taliban, and the evidence against them is often weak, sometimes nonexistent, and all too frequently known to be fabricated. And yet they remain in prison....

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Democrats misplay "God Card"
...Shoot, Jim Wallis’ bestselling book on the subject of faith in public life is ostentatiously titled God’s Politics.

But a strange thing happened on the political Left’s offensive to become the party of God: their image as a “religion friendly” party actually deteriorated in the year immediately following their electoral disaster.

According to Pew Research Center data from October 2004, just one month before Election Day, 40 percent of the American public saw the Democrat Party as “friendly toward religion.” That number tumbled to 29 percent by August 2005, almost a full year (and a lot of misquoted Bible passages) later.

Moreover, as Tony Carnes points out in a recent Christianity Today article, “While overall support for George W. Bush has plummeted, evangelicals remain surprisingly loyal.”

Democrats have some serious decisions to make about the future of their party and its message. The Democrat Party cannot long stand as one that demands separation of church and state in all -- even symbolic -- matters while at the same time claiming Biblical substantiation for liberal public policies. They cannot imply John Roberts’ queasiness about Roe v. Wade breaches the “impregnable wall,” as Sen. Dianne Feinstein did during Roberts’ confirmation hearings, while at the same time urge income redistribution because “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God" (Mark 10:25). They cannot call Republicans “theocrats” for trying to save Terri Schiavo while they also claim John the Baptist endorsed their welfare state when he said, “He that hath two coats, let him impart to him that hath none …” (Luke 3:11). ...

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Religion and Political Power
...Despite the revolutionary power of religion--something that one should expect given the often radical nature of various prophet's pronouncements against their rich and powerful contemporaries--the historical fact is that when all is sorted out, religious forces usually end up on the side of power. This phenomenon is explored and instances of it are enumerated throughout Siegel's text, whether he is discussing evangelical Christianity and the robber barons in the US or Orthodox Judaism and Zionism in Israel.

Each and every time god was revived by those opposed to the power structure, whether it was the prophecies of Moses against the pharaoh and his gods or Jesus' Christian underground against the Pharisees' and their temples; to Mohammed's pronouncements against the excesses of Islam's monotheistic predecessors or Buddhism's proclamations against the Emperor's Confucianism; the oppositional religion evolves into that which it opposed. According to Siegel, this is due to religion's easy manipulation by the ruling classes- a manipulation that is facilitated by the contradictory nature of religion. ...

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The CIA Leak: Plame Was Still Covert
Feb. 13, 2006 issue - Newly released court papers could put holes in the defense of Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, in the Valerie Plame leak case. Lawyers for Libby, and White House allies, have repeatedly questioned whether Plame, the wife of White House critic Joe Wilson, really had covert status when she was outed to the media in July 2003. But special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald found that Plame had indeed done "covert work overseas" on counterproliferation matters in the past five years, and the CIA "was making specific efforts to conceal" her identity, according to newly released portions of a judge's opinion....

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Cheney 'Authorized' Libby to Leak Classified Information
Vice President Dick Cheney's former chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, testified to a federal grand jury that he had been "authorized" by Cheney and other White House "superiors" in the summer of 2003 to disclose classified information to journalists to defend the Bush administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case to go to war with Iraq, according to attorneys familiar with the matter, and to court records.

Libby specifically claimed that in one instance he had been authorized to divulge portions of a then-still highly classified National Intelligence Estimate regarding Saddam Hussein's purported efforts to develop nuclear weapons, according to correspondence recently filed in federal court by special prosecutor Patrick J. Fitzgerald.

Beyond what was stated in the court paper, say people with firsthand knowledge of the matter, Libby also indicated what he will offer as a broad defense during his upcoming criminal trial: that Vice President Cheney and other senior Bush administration officials had earlier encouraged and authorized him to share classified information with journalists to build public support for going to war. Later, after the war began in 2003, Cheney authorized Libby to release additional classified information, including details of the NIE, to defend the administration's use of prewar intelligence in making the case for war. ...

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Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Government
Ever since there was government, there have been those who want to purify it from its excesses and corruptions, rid it of its grafters and operators, and cleanse it from any taint of the sin of private interest.

Government should serve the people with an eye to the common good, they declare, and it should be part of the solution to the problem of evil in the world, and not contribute to the problem itself. Government, in short, should be good!

The naïveté of good government ideology is more widespread than is usually supposed. Those who want government to do some things always, but do other things never, embrace the same ideal.

The left is scandalized by a government that plunders foreign nations and spies on its citizens' private lives but urges that same government to plunder property owners and spy on their commercial lives. The right is disgusted by a government that slathers billions on deadbeats and ne'r-do-wells but wants the same government to squander billions on military contractors and goons that enforce bad law....

...He drinks the potion again, and turns back into Dr. Jekyll. But there is a hitch. Whereas Dr. Hyde was pure evil, Dr. Jekyll is not pure good. He is the same mix of tensions that he was before. Reverting to his old self, he was nothing more than "that incongruous compound of whose reformation and improvement I had already learned to despair. The movement was thus wholly toward the worse."

Well, that's a pretty good description of the results of most good-government legislation. It creates new obstacles for the old evil forms to get through but strengthens the evil by making the public less wary of it. A government perceived as righteous is more dangerous than one that is looked upon with suspicion. Sometimes corrupt government can actually be better than good government, if it means that unjust and unworkable laws can be bypassed through bribes and graft.

Every few years, for example, Washington, D.C., elects a mayor who promises a clean sweep of the bad and a restoration of the good. A bar owner there once told a reporter that he always dreads these changes, because it means that absurd fire codes and license requirements are enforced to the hilt. Under a corrupt regime, he needs only to bribe a few policemen and bureaucrats. Under good government, he has to cough up tens of thousands for lobbying groups, lawyers, and legislative specialists in order to keep his business running.

Good-government seeks to give us all the government we pay for, and who can but rue the day that this happens?

In the Stevenson book, Mr. Hyde grows stronger as he spends time separate from Dr. Jekyll. He is unleashed, unchecked by conscience. Whereas he was once a temporary indulgence, he eventually becomes a full-time obsession even as the good side of Dr. Jekyll seems to become less robust and shrink.

So it is with good-government movements. Once the state is reformed, the next step is obvious: a clean state that does wonderful things, untainted by nefarious practices, should be permitted to expand to do those good things with more liberality and efficacy. Thus has every government reform movement in the last century and a half ended up expanding rather than shrinking the state. And the expanded state does not end up doing good; it draws ever more evil to its side and results in an expansion rather than a shrinking of corruption.

The same is true of the pressure groups that have a selective interest in the activities of the state. The right believes the government should provide for the common defense but in so believing turn a blind eye to ghastly abuses that occur in wartime. The left believes that the government should redistribute wealth and thereby pretends not to notice that this requires increasing violence against property and subsidizes the worst propensities of human nature.

As government grows ever bigger in the guise of doing good, its capacity for doing evil expands at a far more rapid rate. Whatever true good that government might be capable of doing is swamped by growing levels of corruption, graft, payoffs, violence, arbitrary rule, and all the rest of the institutions that the movement was trying to make go away....

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Surprisingly Few Adults Outside of Christianity Have Positive Views of Christians
(Ventura, CA) - One reason why evangelical churches across the nation are not growing is due to the image that non-Christian adults have of evangelical individuals. In a nationwide survey released by the Barna Research Group of Ventura, California among a representative sample of people who do not consider themselves to be Christian, the image of "evangelicals" rated tenth out of eleven groups evaluated, beating out only prostitutes....

...In terms of the actual positive and negative percentages awarded to different groups, the study points out that less than half of the non-Christian public has a favorable impression of any of the three religious groups evaluated. Just 44% have positive views of clergy, only one-third (32%) have a positive impression of born again Christians and just one-fifth (22%) have a positive view of evangelicals....

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Gaza shopkeeper stocks up on Danish flags to burn
GAZA, Feb 6 (Reuters) - When entrepreneur Ahmed Abu Dayya first heard that Danish caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad were being reprinted across Europe, he knew exactly what his customers in Gaza would want: flags to burn.

Abu Dayya ordered 100 hard-to-find Danish and Norwegian flags for his Gaza City shop and has been doing a swift trade.

"I do not take political stands. It is all business," he said in an interview. "But this time I was offended by the assault on the Prophet Mohammad."...

..."I knew there would be a demand for the flags because of the angry reaction of people over the offence to Prophet Mohammad," said Abu Dayya, whose PLO Flag Shop also sells souvenirs and presents....

...Abu Dayya sources some of his flags from suppliers in Taiwan, but he buys Israeli flags from a merchant in Israel, even though he sells them to be burnt at anti-Israeli rallies....

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Exclusive: Can the President Order a Killing on U.S. Soil?
Feb. 13, 2006 issue - In the latest twist in the debate over presidential powers, a Justice Department official suggested that in certain circumstances, the president might have the power to order the killing of terrorist suspects inside the United States. Steven Bradbury, acting head of the department's Office of Legal Counsel, went to a closed-door Senate intelligence committee meeting last week to defend President George W. Bush's surveillance program. During the briefing, said administration and Capitol Hill officials (who declined to be identified because the session was private), California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein asked Bradbury questions about the extent of presidential powers to fight Al Qaeda; could Bush, for instance, order the killing of a Qaeda suspect known to be on U.S. soil? Bradbury replied that he believed Bush could indeed do this, at least in certain circumstances.

Current and former government officials said they could think of several scenarios in which a president might consider ordering the killing of a terror suspect inside the United States....

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Blair-Bush deal before Iraq war revealed in secret memo
PM promised to be 'solidly behind' US invasion with or without UN backing

Tony Blair told President George Bush that he was "solidly" behind US plans to invade Iraq before he sought advice about the invasion's legality and despite the absence of a second UN resolution, according to a new account of the build-up to the war published today.

A memo of a two-hour meeting between the two leaders at the White House on January 31 2003 - nearly two months before the invasion - reveals that Mr Bush made it clear the US intended to invade whether or not there was a second UN resolution and even if UN inspectors found no evidence of a banned Iraqi weapons programme.

"The diplomatic strategy had to be arranged around the military planning", the president told Mr Blair. The prime minister is said to have raised no objection. He is quoted as saying he was "solidly with the president and ready to do whatever it took to disarm Saddam".

The disclosures come in a new edition of Lawless World, by Phillipe Sands, a QC and professor of international law at University College, London. Professor Sands last year exposed the doubts shared by Foreign Office lawyers about the legality of the invasion in disclosures which eventually forced the prime minister to publish the full legal advice given to him by the attorney general, Lord Goldsmith.

The memo seen by Prof Sands reveals:

· Mr Bush told Mr Blair that the US was so worried about the failure to find hard evidence against Saddam that it thought of "flying U2 reconnaissance aircraft planes with fighter cover over Iraq, painted in UN colours". Mr Bush added: "If Saddam fired on them, he would be in breach [of UN resolutions]"....

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Religious Groups Get Chunk of AIDS Money
New groups are springing up to win a piece of President Bush's $15 billion AIDS program, with traditional players and religious groups joining forces to improve their chances in a competition that already has targeted nearly a quarter of its grants for faith-based organizations.

The administration is putting out a call for new community and church groups to get involved in HIV prevention and care in 15 target countries, most in sub-Saharan Africa. It is reserving $200 million specifically for groups with little or no government grant experience.

Groups that have deep local ties in the countries and focus on abstinence and fidelity -- instead of just condoms -- are faring well....

...Condom promotion to anyone must include abstinence and fidelity messages, U.S. guidelines say, but those preaching abstinence do not have to provide condom education....

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Operation Iraqi Freedom
Sometimes spreading freedom means taking innocent women and children hostage. It may take awhile--we've been doing it since at least 2003--but eventually the people of Iraq will cherish freedom as much as Our Leader does....

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Health trust debts more than £1bn
Every NHS trust or primary care trust in England was asked for its current financial situation, whether it was in debt or had money in the bank.

The total for the whole country showed a debt of £1.07bn - despite the NHS receiving record funding of £76.4bn for the financial year 2005-2006.

It has led to patient services being affected as trusts try to cut spending.

Some trusts revealed they had closed beds, wards or entire hospitals, others had cancelled operations and many said they had cut staff levels. ...

...The John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford announced in December that many patients would not be able to have the same heart therapy received by Prime Minister Tony Blair, with only life-threatening conditions still being treated.

The withdrawal for up to 100 patients of cardiac ablation therapy, to control an irregular heartbeat, was blamed on the need to cut Oxfordshire's £15.1m deficit. ...

...The Royal College of Nursing said earlier this month it feared more than 3,000 health service jobs could be lost through cost-cutting efforts which were having a "direct and detrimental" effect on patients.

Unison, the trade union which represents many nurses, said newly-qualified staff were struggling to find jobs because posts were being left unfilled.

And the NHS Confederation, which represents more than 90% of NHS organisations, said trusts were under too much pressure to cut deficits quickly and needed to be given "space" to deal with debt in a way which had patients' care at heart.

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Evangelical scholar looks at old war sermons
...The pro-war evangelicals have a very hard task ahead of them, because their arguments for the war haven't held up. Those who argued that war was justified because it would lead to greater religious freedom in the country now need to answer whether the war was unjustified because it has brought less religious freedom to the country.

Others are in a greater bind. One Christian leader told Christianity Today in September 2002 that two requirements must be met to justify an attack on Iraq: irrefutable evidence connecting Hussein to the attacks of September 11 and proof that Iraq's weapons of mass destruction are being prepared for imminent use.

"If you fulfill these, an attack is justified," this leader told Christianity Today. "The president has an obligation to communicate why he is asking our nation to sacrifice, as well as why he is willing to sacrifice combatants and innocents on the other side."

That person was Robert McGinnis, vice president of policy for Family Research Council, one of the most conservative religious groups in Washington. Other evangelical leaders also told us that proving connections with the 9/11 attacks was imperative to attacking Iraq. Many others in Christianity Today's survey of evangelical opinion before the war had much stricter standards.

"If all we do is blast out a regime and conditions of long-term civil war are all that's left, then the operation can hardly be justified," said the Center for Public Justice's Jim Skillen—whom no one would confuse with Jim Wallis. "Are the countries around Iraq prepared to work with us to make sure a better regime gets in, and not a worse one? Does the U.S. have the support of allies to do that while rebuilding Afghanistan? There has to be an agreement and not a presumption that the U.N. will pick up the work."...

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Democrats and Republicans Both Adept at Ignoring Facts, Study Finds
Democrats and Republicans alike are adept at making decisions without letting the facts get in the way, a new study shows.

And they get quite a rush from ignoring information that's contrary to their point of view.

Researchers asked staunch party members from both sides to evaluate information that threatened their preferred candidate prior to the 2004 Presidential election. The subjects' brains were monitored while they pondered.

The results were announced today.

"We did not see any increased activation of the parts of the brain normally engaged during reasoning," said Drew Westen, director of clinical psychology at Emory University. "What we saw instead was a network of emotion circuits lighting up, including circuits hypothesized to be involved in regulating emotion, and circuits known to be involved in resolving conflicts."

The test subjects on both sides of the political aisle reached totally biased conclusions by ignoring information that could not rationally be discounted, Westen and his colleagues say.

Then, with their minds made up, brain activity ceased in the areas that deal with negative emotions such as disgust. But activity spiked in the circuits involved in reward, a response similar to what addicts experience when they get a fix, Westen explained.

The study points to a total lack of reason in political decision-making.

"None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged," Westen said. "Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."

Notably absent were any increases in activation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the part of the brain most associated with reasoning....

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Southern Baptists now fighting each other
After purging liberals from their ranks, Southern Baptist conservatives who won control of their denomination are now taking aim at each other.

The Rev. Wade Burleson, a Baptist leader from Oklahoma, says fellow conservatives who crusaded to only elect leaders who believe the Bible is literally true are carrying their campaign too far, targeting Southern Baptists who disagree with them on other issues.

These leaders, he wrote on his blog, are "following the same battle plan conservatives used to defeat liberalism," and have started a "war" for the future of the SBC.

Burleson's postings may have already cost him a leadership role in the denomination. Trustees of the Southern Baptist international missionary agency took the first step this month toward ousting him from their board, accusing him of "broken trust" for writing about a meeting on his Web site.

The seemingly minor conflict has broader significance.

Southern Baptists are trying to reverse several years of stagnation in membership growth, partly through an ad campaign called "Caring People" that is meant to soften their image. Complaints of hardball church politics would undermine that effort.

"Conservatives who loved the battles of decades past have fallen victim to a crusading mentality of bloodthirst," Burleson wrote. "Since all the liberals are gone, conservative crusaders are now killing fellow conservatives."

Burleson first rankled the board over an obscure policy change: Trustees of the International Mission Board voted in November to bar future missionaries, from using a "private prayer language," or speaking in tongues in private. Previously, missionaries were discouraged from speaking in tongues publicly, but their private prayer was not monitored.

The practice is common among Pentecostals, whose spirited brand of Christianity is spreading rapidly throughout countries where Southern Baptist missionaries work, and in the United States. Many conservative Protestants, however, reject the practice.

Still, Burleson opposed the ban on speaking in tongues privately. He viewed the move as a dangerous effort to vet conservatives for purity, and said so on his blog.

"Sadly, the Southern Baptist Convention is now moving toward a time when everyone must look the same, talk the same, act the same, believe the same on the nonessentials of the faith, or else you will be removed as `not one of us,"' he wrote in a Dec. 10 entry....

..."The Southern Baptist leadership is so ideologically driven that it's almost impossible for them not to continually draw lines and narrow the boundaries," he said. "In the early stages, this was publicly evident with the moderates and liberals. Now, when the convention meets annually in June, you wonder who they're going to throw out this year. There's always somebody."...

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Wayward Christian Soldiers
IN the past several years, American evangelicals, and I am one of them, have amassed greater political power than at any time in our history. But at what cost to our witness and the integrity of our message?

Recently, I took a few days to reread the war sermons delivered by influential evangelical ministers during the lead up to the Iraq war. That period, from the fall of 2002 through the spring of 2003, is not one I will remember fondly. Many of the most respected voices in American evangelical circles blessed the president's war plans, even when doing so required them to recast Christian doctrine.

Charles Stanley, pastor of the First Baptist Church of Atlanta, whose weekly sermons are seen by millions of television viewers, led the charge with particular fervor. "We should offer to serve the war effort in any way possible," said Mr. Stanley, a former president of the Southern Baptist Convention. "God battles with people who oppose him, who fight against him and his followers." In an article carried by the convention's Baptist Press news service, a missionary wrote that "American foreign policy and military might have opened an opportunity for the Gospel in the land of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob."

As if working from a slate of evangelical talking points, both Franklin Graham, the evangelist and son of Billy Graham, and Marvin Olasky, the editor of the conservative World magazine and a former advisor to President Bush on faith-based policy, echoed these sentiments, claiming that the American invasion of Iraq would create exciting new prospects for proselytizing Muslims. Tim LaHaye, the co-author of the hugely popular "Left Behind" series, spoke of Iraq as "a focal point of end-time events," whose special role in the earth's final days will become clear after invasion, conquest and reconstruction. For his part, Jerry Falwell boasted that "God is pro-war" in the title of an essay he wrote in 2004.

The war sermons rallied the evangelical congregations behind the invasion of Iraq. An astonishing 87 percent of all white evangelical Christians in the United States supported the president's decision in April 2003. Recent polls indicate that 68 percent of white evangelicals continue to support the war. But what surprised me, looking at these sermons nearly three years later, was how little attention they paid to actual Christian moral doctrine. Some tried to square the American invasion with Christian "just war" theory, but such efforts could never quite reckon with the criterion that force must only be used as a last resort. As a result, many ministers dismissed the theory as no longer relevant.

Some preachers tried to link Saddam Hussein with wicked King Nebuchadnezzar of Biblical fame, but these arguments depended on esoteric interpretations of the Old Testament book of II Kings and could not easily be reduced to the kinds of catchy phrases that are projected onto video screens in vast evangelical churches. The single common theme among the war sermons appeared to be this: our president is a real brother in Christ, and because he has discerned that God's will is for our nation to be at war against Iraq, we shall gloriously comply....

...What will it take for evangelicals in the United States to recognize our mistaken loyalty? We have increasingly isolated ourselves from the shared faith of the global Church, and there is no denying that our Faustian bargain for access and power has undermined the credibility of our moral and evangelistic witness in the world. The Hebrew prophets might call us to repentance, but repentance is a tough demand for a people utterly convinced of their righteousness.

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CANADA'S GUN REGISTRATION FAILURE: VIOLENT CRIME RATE DOUBLE THAT OF U.S.
BELLEVUE, WA – Canada's billion-dollar boondoggle – the national gun registration scheme – has proven itself an abysmal failure, as that country's violent crime rates are double those reported in the United States, the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms (CCRKBA) noted today.

"We looked at violent crime rates per 100,000 population in both countries, using the most recent available data," said CCRKBA Chairman Alan Gottlieb, "and we were not surprised at what we found. Since Canada started this ridiculous and costly program, violent crime has gone up dramatically, at the same time that crime in the United States has declined. Yet, there are people in the states who think Canada's gun legislation should be the model for America.

"By comparing the data," he detailed, "we found that the violent crime rate in the United States was 475 per 100,000 population, while up north, there were 963 violent crimes per 100,000 population. The figure for sexual assault in Canada per 100,000 population is more than double that of the United States, 74 as opposed to 32.1, and the assault rate in Canada is also more than twice that of the states, 746 to our 295 for the population rate."

Noted CCRKBA Executive Director Joe Waldron: "What happened in the states to actually contribute to a reduction in our overall crime rate is simple. We've got 38 states with shall-issue, right-to-carry concealed handgun laws. While Canada has clamped down on its citizens' gun rights, our citizens have been empowered against criminals by passage of these laws. The disparity in crime rates between the two countries says it all about how well gun registration works to stop crime, as opposed to actually carrying guns to deter criminals, and fight back if necessary."

A Jan. 3 story in Canada's National Post by writer David Frum confirmed CCRKBA's independent finding. Frum wrote, "Canada's overall crime rate is now 50% higher than the crime rate in the United States." Later, Frum added: "Gun registries and gun bans…do not work." ...