If you’re the Pope, you welcome him with open arms.

Photo by Phillip Roth (Flickr Creative Commons)

Well, not quite. In the week after Benedict XVI restored an ultra-conservative Catholic sect known as the Lefebvrevists, the Vatican has been desperately trying to make it clear that the Holocaust (or Shoah) was a very real blight on human history.

The reason for these public statements? British-born Richard Williamson, a nutty 68 year-old priest ordained as a bishop under the Lefebvrevist movement, openly opined on Swedish TV that the Nazi gas chambers did not really exist. Yikes!

As the public relations nightmare continues, the Pope should take the Williamson gaffe as an opportunity to soften his image.

Show the world that being Pope does not mean you can’t openly and unequivocally apologize. Paint a giant mea culpa (Latin for “my bad”) across the sky. Better yet, mea maxima culpa (Latin for “no really, my bad”). People would be relieved and the problem would go away a lot sooner. Call it for what it is: a well-intended but poorly-researched decision.

What does Benedict have to lose?

What about papal infallibility, the Roman Catholic belief that whatever the Pope says goes? Not a problem. In 1996, long before Joseph Ratzinger became Pope, Benedict told an interviewer that the doctrine is not well understood:

“As a matter of fact, this dogma does not mean that everything the Pope says is infallible. It simply means… there is a final decision-making authority.”

Ratzinger/Benedict has long had a public image problem, and has been criticized as an ultra-conservative himself. A lot of this is unavoidable: the teachings of Catholicism are at odds with much of the public opinion in the western world, as is the idea of an octagenarian religious leader pronouncing on contemporary social issues. But as I said in my last blog post, religious leaders can’t be simply reduced to politicians without remainder.

But a strong direct statement could have a healing effect, much like Pope John Paul II’s tearful apology for the sufferings of the Jewish people.

A bonus for directly calling the Williamson fiasco a mistake?

It means Holocaust-denial doesn’t get any more time in the spotlight.

Photo by Hamed Saber (Flickr Creative Commons)

As in Zzzzz….

Located near the back of the Saturday paper, the weekly “Religion” section might include a feature of some ‘radical’ clergyman who believed science and faith need not conflict (gasp!). Oh yeah! Plus the addresses and service times for local congregations.

Yawn! Where’s the comics!?!

These days, however, religion is hard-hitting stuff.

This is the age of fundamentalisms, civilization clashes, sexual politics, and weird stories about Holocaust-denying priests. Religion is routinely portrayed as a source of entrenched ideological chasms, battlegrounds where conservative and liberal voices contest claims to institutional and cultural power.

A perfect example of this surrounds Barack Obama’s inauguration, where the very public prayers of Rick Warren and Gene Robinson inspired a truly dizzying array of responses.

But as veteran religion journalist Terry Mattingly points out, the MSM’s (Main Stream Media) obsession with a highly politicized religious world can occasionally run it into difficulties. Mattingly is head contributor to GetReligion.org, the blog of the Oxford Centre for Religion and Public Life.

Mattingly’s brilliant post, “Oh no, a modern patriarch?” examines media coverage of the election of Metropolitan Kirill as the new patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church. A truly soporific story reminiscent of the olden days, yes, but of some significance on the stage of world religions.

Photo by Rinzewind (Flickr Creative Commons)

Mattingly compares New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Associated Press stories, noting the use of political labels like “modernizer” and “politically savvy” in a story not readily built for such terms. As a journalist with his own religious stake in the story (he is Orthodox), Mattingly chides the MSM for its failure to simply report facts around a religious happening:

When in doubt, do not attach political labels to people whose primary role in life is defined by doctrine. We know that this is hard for reporters, since politics is the true religion for them and real religion is often viewed as a totally private hobby with slightly less cultural importance than, oh, reality television.

Mattingly is a little snarky, and perhaps rightly so. The new religion-as-hard-news era comes with an expectation that religion is primarily about influence, even when that influence isn’t readily understood.

To the editors at The Los Angeles Times, for instance, religion becomes newsworthy when it’s about implementing morality on a global scale, or about the extremes one might go to make such changes. Stories are crafted to highlight the political implications of an event and borrow terms from mainstream political discourse.

But in reality, most healthy, functional religious or spiritual convictions indirectly address all aspects of life, not just politics.

But people like Mattingly shouldn’t complain too much. The old religion beat has changed, and the change benefits people like him.

For the few who can pull it off, the religion and spirituality beat (its overblown political stories included) can become one of the most interesting parts of the news. And in an era when pundits are saying local news is key for survival, it may become an indispensable part of the surviving news machine.

For the rest, remember where we were before politics became the true religion and religion part of politics.

Oh yeah. Zzzzzz.

These words have been emblazoned on hundreds of buses, all at the behest of a young blogger at the Guardian . The campaign, soon joined by Oxford evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins, placed over 800 of these messages on buses in the UK.

Photo by PabloBM (Flickr Creative Commons)

The attention received by the campaign has spawned movements in North America, such as the Canadian Atheist Bus Campaign, which will soon launch similar campaigns in Toronto and Calgary.

While the existence of God is a perennial debate of modern times, the emergence of pop atheism is something else.

Pop atheism is a very public movement designed to needle and confront, to upend cherished beliefs. It’s also a call to arms for all atheists, agnostics, and secular folk to stand up and be counted.

To this end, Dawkins is heading a movement called OUT, encouraging atheists to sport t-shirts decorated with a giant, red A on the front.

In the publishing realm, curmudgeons like Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, and Christopher Hitchens have scored runaway hits with their confident declarations that religion is a dangerous delusion. Dawkins purportedly gave £5,500 to the bus campaign himself (a trifle given sales of The God Delusion surpassed 1.5 million). As I reported in an earlier post, atheism and agnosticism have made their mark in recent documentary films like Religulous, The Four Horsemen, and The God Who Wasn’t There.

And while pop atheism has been an interesting movement, it seems destined to die down.

There are several reasons for thinking so:

1) Pop atheism stakes itself to shifting political grounds.

By BohPhoto (Flickr Creative Commons)

It’s hard to deny that the last 8 years have been changed by religious terrorism and its equally religious response.

For many Americans, the end of the Bush era means the end to one of the worst and most vocally religious administrations in American history. And while former British PM Tony Blair was quieter in his professed beliefs, he admitted to praying over the decision to go with the US to Iraq.

Will a politically motivated atheism have enough political grist for the Mill with Barack Obama as the new US president?

IMO, probably not. Obama’s cultivated civic religion is about as inoffensive as possible. In his inauguration speech, Obama even made mention of non-believers to the delight of many atheists.

2) Pop atheism underestimates the role of doubt in faith.

Fyodor Dostoevsky, a fierce Russian Orthodox Christian, had his saintly Prince Myshkin relativize the threat of atheism in The Idiot. “Atheism preaches a negation,” Myshkin says, “but Catholicism goes further: it preaches a distorted Christ…”

Dostoevsky’s nationalism and anti-Catholicism aside, he shows the persistence and passion of religious belief. This may be hard for agnostics and atheists to understand, but bad and corrupt religion historically leads to reform movements, not outright abandonment of belief.

Indeed, Swiss theologian Karl Barth would make his students read the Essence of Christianity by Ludwig Feuerbach (the God Delusion of the 19th century). Barth used Feuerbach’s claim that theism is a projection, as a way of refining and deconstructing the thought of his students.

Not surprisingly, The Christian Science Monitor is already claiming religious leaders are hopeful about how Dawkin’s bus campaign could could open dialogue.

3) Pop atheism is just as black and white as any other belief system.

The success of pop atheism lies in its punchiness, its over-the-top rhetorical fluorishes. But rhetoric will only take you so far. The very reason for its success are the reasons why pop atheism is destined for the dustbin.

When scrutinized by philosophers and religious scholars, Dawkins et al fall flat. Notre Dame analytical philosopher Alvin Plantinga sums up the sophistication of Dawkins in his lengthy review of The God Delusion:

You might say that some of his forays into philosophy are at best sophomoric, but that would be unfair to sophomores; the fact is (grade inflation aside), many of his arguments would receive a failing grade in a sophomore philosophy class. This, combined with the arrogant, smarter-than-thou tone of the book, can be annoying.

4) Finally, is it really that hard to be a secular person?

And while Maclean’s non sequitir followed comments about wearing uncomfortable clothes on a Sunday, he is not alone in casually comparing Canada’s cherished sport and traditional religion.

Photo by Borman818 (Flickr's Creative Commons Attribution License)

During the All-Star weekend, Vincent Lecavelier responded to trade rumours that would transport him to the sacred ground of Montreal’s Bell Centre. “It’s basically like a religion here. Everybody loves the Canadiens,” said the Lightening captain.

CBC’s George Stroumboulopoulos went even further in the Globe and Mail: “hockey is my religion, the Canadiens are my god, so this then was my cathedral.”

As strange as such comments may be, they reflect a Canadian fascination with comparing hockey and religion, particularly for fans of Les Habitants. Over the past year, numerous papers have reported on the religiosity of Canadiens fans, including a recent feature in the New York Times, as well as Canadian Press and Globe and Mail reports about a University of Montreal course (and book) on hockey and divinity.

But media reports about the religiosity of hockey extend well beyond La Belle Province. Doug Todd, The Vancouver Sun spirituality and ethics writer, recently breached the subject in his post, “Are Trevor Linden and Mats Sundin Bigger Than Jesus?” After looking at the fawning coverage of two Canuck heroes last year, Todd answered in the affirmative: “In popular secular Canadian culture, these hockey celebrities draw much more devotion, more psychic energy, than Jesus Christ.”

While all these examples are recent, there are hosts of “puckish” reflections from revered journalists on the deeper meanings of the game. Longtime Morningside host Peter Gzowski used to wax eloquent about the game, while prolific columnist Roy McGregor continues to do so.

Photo by Joe Shlabotnik (Flickr's Creative Commons Attribution License)

But what do these kinds of stories really mean? Are they really news?

I think the answers are “not much” and “not really.”

Except that many people, like me, really, really, REALLY like hockey.

Many Canadians follow hockey on a daily basis, scrutinizing box scores or standings like scriptures or prayer books. Many Canadians get caught up in the euphoria of the game, much like the feelings associated with worship. And when people participate together in sports, they experience a church-like connection with other people.

Oh yeah, and puck-heads are asked to give until it hurts. For many, hockey is synonymous with financial sacrifice, a show of true devotion and faith in difficult economic times.

But that’s hardly the same thing as ascribing ultimate meaning to the game.

Perhaps the reflexive Canadian comparison of hockey and religion is a vestige of a disappearing formal religiosity. As institutional religion continues to give way to a broader, more fractured, individualized spirituality, people naturally ascribe religious characteristics to other parts of life.

Maybe there’s a little bit of residual guilt: sports fandom is hard to explain or justify (particularly for Leafs and Canucks fans). I’m speaking from personal experience. Invoking religious passion and good old patriotism at least makes it seem a little less ridiculous.

Photo by Starbuck (Flickr's Creative Commons Attribution License)

Then again, the sports and religion angle might simply be an easily filed story for a type of journalism known for stretching puns and metaphors beyond the point of disintegration. It would go a long way in explaining why the Canadian devotion to the hockey gods is by no means exclusive. While hockey (in the broader sense) is also a religion for Latvians and Tamils, American sportswriters frequently muse about the religious dimensions of baseball, football, and basketball.

Church is out.

“I’m afraid to watch Jesus Camp,” he said about the 2006 documentary on a Pentecostal summer camp. “It looks too painful.”

I can see what he means. Documentary films are scary business for religious folk these days. And while documentaries can scrutinize the spectrum human behavior, they can easily simplify or distort complex social patterns and beliefs.

Yet religious documentaries are exploding. For every well-known film like Jesus Camp or Bill Maher’s Religulous, there are a myriad of pretenders, like The God Who Wasn’t There or Waiting for NESARA . There seems to be a healthy industry dedicated to exposing the weird, wonderful, and downright perplexing world of religion.

So between other activities, I spent this weekend perusing two documentaries, Jesus Camp and Religulous.

Jesus Camp is a more traditional documentary examining a North Dakotan summer camp. The camp is run by Becky Fischer, a Pentecostal children’s pastor and culture warrior of the American Midwest. Fischer is an ardent supporter of George Bush and engages in Jesus-inspired demagoguery throughout the film.

Jesus Camp takes a before/during/after look at Fischer’s ministry. Shots of uproarious camp meetings are interspliced with examinations of three representative children attending the camp. A cocky pre-fall Ted Haggard even has a cameo, teasing the camera with seemingly autobiographical moral accusations. Haggard is currently promoting a new HBO doc on his life over the past year.

My friend was right. It is painful.

But the film works. The camp is a spectacle. Fischer is unapologetic about her ruthless, strange tactics. The children do what they’re told in dramatic fashion, exhibiting religious behaviour with childlike seriousness and malleable hearts. It’s fascinating. It exposes how the politics of abortion and morality still divides America.

The second film I watched was Bill Maher’s Religulous, last year’s smarmy docu-ganda on the religions of the world.

Like its title, Religulous is slightly off-centre and less funny than it thinks.

With his trademark swagger and wit, Maher interviews a host of religious folk and asks tough questions. He is not especially interested in getting coherent answers, but in exposing the irrationality of religious belief through a flurry of one-liners. Maher is quicker on his feet than most people he interviews, and it’s a guilty pleasure to watch people squirm.

As expected, Maher paints religion with a broad brush and little sympathy. He is not above shooting fish in a barrel. Bizarre clips are edited in to reign in ADHD viewers.

“Doubt is humble and that’s what man needs to be,” Maher says. He exhibits little doubt or humility when he offers his final challenge to religious people: “Grow up or die.”

Maher’s tour of American and world religion reminded me of Borat. This is not surprising since both films were directed by Larry Charles and share a basic formula. Like Borat, Religulous is inherently and unapologetically superficial, jumping between complex social communities while Maher does his schtick.

While funny and occasionally insightful, Maher is ultimately unconvincing in his rants. I wonder if Maher really cares that much, or simply sees an opportunity with Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens on bestsellers lists (beating the “Four Horsemen“ of atheism to the punch).

As different as these movies are, they show the power of documentaries to shape opinions about religion. In both cases, viewers are encouraged to objectify religious expressions, to gawk at the weirdness of belief. The films are inherently distortive, which isn’t necessarily bad, but the documentary format has consequences for its subject.

I’ll have to tell my friend not to be afraid of Jesus Camp (even if I tell him to skip Religulous). No, it doesn’t fully contextualize its subject. Yes, it’s painful.

But it could be the start of a conversation.

If you had to pick the source of these words, you might hazard any number of guesses.

The Torah? The Qur’an? Maybe even Dostoevsky’s Elder Zossima?

But you’d be wrong. These words are not an ancient prophecy or hermit’s aphorism, but a musing from six years ago in the inaugural issue of The North Star, the monthly newsletter of Bountiful B.C. polygamist Winston Blackmore.

While recent media coverage has splashed Blackmore and Bountiful across national headlines, one of the many fascinating background stories is how Blackmore has crafted an online self-portrait of a humble benevolent patriarch. And while his blog and website may not be a hit on Technorati, both have received notice from Maclean’s and the Tyee.

The blog is a crude WordPress Q&A forum. Blackmore’s The North Star newsletter, however, reveals one side of the goings-on in Bountiful. Issued every month or so from January 2003 to December 2005, the 4 page newsletters include basic community news, spiritualized editorials, history of the community, and quotes from ancient Mormon leaders Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, and Uncle Roy, the FLDS community’s spiritual mentor.

Throughout issues of The North Star, Blackmore assumes the guise of spiritual advisor:

“Mormonism has always been about brotherhood.  You know, the kind that defends each other, protects each other, and stands fast for the vision that allows all mankind to hold his human treasures strictly to himself.  No true brother will covet his brothers wives or children, ox or ass, or anything else.  Mormonism strictly forbids it, and brotherhood demands that it be so.  Since the days of John Y. Barlow, Mormonism has produced lots of men, but recent times have proven that it has produced few brothers.” (March 25, 2004)

The Fundamentalist Spirit of Mormonism is the salvation of the human family.  It is about forgiveness, morals, free agency.  It is about the sanctity of families, of men and women loving each other in a family unit.  It is about busy minding the Mormon business of being honest, moral and strictly truthful in the gospel cause.  You can’t blame anyone if you fail. (May 15, 2004)

While urging honest hard work and brotherhood (and protecting his own interests), Blackmore is occasionally menacing in what failure might mean:

“Yes, if you believe a lie that you know is a lie, you will be damned.” (March 29, 2003).

With an increasingly heightened sense of public scrutiny, he advises people to be careful with outsiders:

“Be very careful what you say to the media.  They do not want to hear the truth or they would have tried to print some of it.” (November 6, 2004)

Throughout the newsletters, Blackmore hints at the many events affecting the community. Alongside livestock diseases and construction of farms, there are estrangements, excommunications, and betrayals. In each and every case, Blackmore assumes a stance, not of an authoritarian or exclusivist, but a genuinely concerned father or older brother. He frequently defies naysayers by arguing that if his words don’t match up with the Book of Mormon, they should be ignored.

Strangely but not surprisingly, Blackmore is convincing. Which is why media scrutiny is so crucial to Bountiful and yet unlikely to penetrate its heart.

The arrests of Blackmore and James Oler came only one day after the paperback release of The Secret Lives of Saints , Daphne Bramham’s expose of the horrible goings-on in Bountiful. The Vancouver Sun columnist is undoubtedly struck by the timing. Or would be, if the story wasn’t so tragic.

Hopefully, Blackmore’s prophecy is right.

Molly Worthen’s feature last weekend, “Who Would Jesus Smack Down?” profiles Mark Driscoll, 38 year-old pastor of the Seattle megachurch Mars Hill Church. Worthen calls him “American evangelicalism’s bete noir,” a charismatic pastor who embraces cutting edge technology, explicit language, and vintage ball caps.

But that’s not all. WWJSD exemplifies how the mainstream media continues to politicize and stir up fear of Evangelical religion. And in focusing on bizarre, larger than life characters like Driscoll, the New York Times is helping create and sustain a politicized religious climate in America.

At first glance, Worthen’s feature is the classic soft news feature of the ‘not your father’s Fr.’ variety: an old religious message gets a bizarre or hip makeover. Usually, the religious makeover story is told as a sign of changing times or a show of the resilience of old time religion. This has been the angle of other excellent pieces covering Driscoll and Mars Hill on sites such as Salon.com or Crosscut.com.

Driscoll certainly works as an example of “revamp[ing] the style and substance of evangelicalism,” to use Worthen’s words. With weekly podcasts, popular youtube videos, and simulcasts, the Seattle pastor is tech savvy. Driscoll’s meta-church boasts an attendance of 7,500 across seven satellite locations. The use of simulcasting is a technological progression from the megachurches of the 90s: congregants get a dynamic speaker, a small local church community, without an enormous, costly facility.

But the more persistent message of Worthen’s piece is that these religious ideas of Worthen and others are inherently dangerous. Whether it’s bellicose, otherworldly, or downright backward, Evangelical religion is portrayed as a bizarre belief system to be reckoned with as a political entity.

Driscoll is once again a perfect subject for such a piece. With his alpha male personality and open disdain for platitudinous ‘feminine’ religion, Driscoll comes across as an overmasculine reactionary. His legendary machismo has even been the subject of Onion-esque Christian satire. Last July, The Wittenburg Door published a spoof story in which Driscoll beats himself up at a pastors conference, ridiculing “insulated coffee cups, haiku and dental floss as feminine while extolling athletic cups, tobacco spit and broken load-bearing bones.”

Not helping Driscoll’s case is his avowedly complementarian beliefs, meaning that Mars Hill Church teaches that men and women have different, prescribed roles in the church context. In other words, Driscoll’s successor won’t be a woman.

Online jabs at Driscoll are less subtle than the Wittenburg Door. “Mark Driscoll’s Jesus is a s***kicker who washes his hands with the blood of infidels and never has to tell his woman twice,” says Damon Agnos on a blog post for Seattle Weekly. Agnos even mistook the Wittenburg Door for a genuine piece.

For her part, Worthen neither ridicules nor vilifies Driscoll, but consistently portrays him as an alpha male hardliner with a paradoxically antiquated message:

what is new about Driscoll is that he has resurrected a particular strain of fire and brimstone, one that most Americans assume died out with the Puritans: Calvinism, a theology that makes Pat Robertson seem warm and fuzzy.

Click here to view the embedded video.

In mentioning Calvinism in the same breath as Pat Robertson and the Puritans, however, Worthen is deliberately playing on ignorance and fear and giving people like Agnos plenty of ammo.

Ah yes, Calvinism. Most Americans may assume Calvinism is dead, but you know what they say about what happens when you assume.

Truthfully, Calvinism is alive and well in a host of Presbyterian, Reformed, Anglican, and Baptist species throughout the world. As a family of belief systems, it never really died out. In Evangelical circles, Calvinism is particularly vital in an array of colleges and seminaries. Calvinism (or “Reformed” belief) has even spawned revered academics such as Notre Dame philosopher Alvin Plantinga, historian Mark Noll, and social movements such as the recent renewal of Evangelical concern for the environment.

As a form of Christian belief, Reformed theology has many attractive features to its adherents: an emphasis on intellectual coherence, a sense of personal purpose, without the (stereo)typical evangelical focus on end times. True, there are Calvinists who tend to be theocrats and reactionaries, but these are the minority.

Worthen’s portrayal of Driscoll as Calvin 2.0 is unnecessary and overblown, even according to the hipster himself. In a 2006 interview with Christianity Today, Driscoll called himself a “boxer, not briefs” Calvinist: “I am pretty laid back about it and not uptight and tidy like many Reformed guys.”