Category Archives: Religion

So Who Prays for Forsyth County?

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After I vented my spleen yesterday I got to thinking that maybe I’d spouted off about the Forsyth County commissioners a little to rashly.  Specifically I said:

The Forsyth County commissioners and sectarian prayer supporters
consistently point out that the commissioners invite representatives of
different religions to open their meetings and so the current policy is
fair.  I’m left to wonder if they think that inviting Baptists,
Methodists, Catholics, Lutherans and Moravians qualifies as different
religions?  Exactly when was the last time a Pagan was invited to give
the opening prayer?  How about a Muslim or Buddhist?  Heck, what about
those Mormons that scare the crap out of your average Baptist?

I started thinking that maybe I should have checked before I wrote that, and I should probably look into it to be fair.  So I did.  I checked out the minutes for all the regular meetings held by the commissioners from 2000 to 2006 and the meeting summaries from meetings held in 2007.  That’s 175 meetings held from January 10, 2000 to April 9, 2007, each of which began with a call to order and then the attendees standing to hear the invocation and the pledge of allegiance.  Here’s who gave those 175 invocations:

  • 152 were delivered by representatives of Christian institutions (Churches, Salvation Army)
  • 16 were delivered by board members
  • 2 were delivered by a representative of a Unitarian Universalist congregation
  • 2 were delivered by a representative of Forsyth Jail Prison Ministry (both in 06)
  • 1 by a Rabbi (November of 06)
  • 1 by a representative of Carolina Dianetics (Scientologists) (1/22/07)
  • 1 (3/12/07) the notes only say "invocation" and do not indicate who delivered it

I guess I was safe in my spouting off.  Although I did see the occassional Seventh Day Adventist included I didn’t see any Mormons, Muslims or Buddhists.  I find it interesting that the Dianetics person was invited last month since that occured after the commissioners received the letter from the ACLU.  Another interesting point is that the board member who most often gave the invocation was Dave Plyler who lost his seat in a close election last year to Ted Kaplan.  Kaplan is one of the three commissioners to oppose proceeding with the court battle that the commissioners voted yesterday to pursue.

I wonder if we’ll see more diversification of invocators as we move forward thanks to the attention from the lawsuit?

More on the Church Thing

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I’ve often commented on the differences between DC and Winston-Salem.  In particular I’ve written about how in DC the first question anyone asks you at a party (or some other social situation) is "What do you do" or "Where do you work" and in Winston-Salem it’s "Where do you go to church" more often than not.

Fellow DC-to-Winston transplant Esbee wrote something similar today and one of her commenters seemed to find the idea of asking someone where they go to church to be rude.  Personally I don’t have a problem with it, and honestly I’m glad to get away from being classified by my job status and perceived earning power.  As Esbee notes what is more remarkable than asking where you go to church is the assumption that you go to church at all.  If I had to guess I’d say maybe 25% of the people I knew in Northern Virginia went to church regularly, but here it’s probably 75%.  It’s an interesting difference between the communities.

I Swear

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Here in North Carolina an appeals court just ruled that a Muslim woman can proceed with a lawsuit claiming that she should be allowed to swear to tell the truth on the Quran instead of the Bible.  As you can imagine this is causing some consternation among the locals, and it’s making for some nice debate.  Over at the Greensboro News & Record Doug Clark makes this point:

This is an important case about an old tradition, or ritual, in our
courts. I think there is continued value in asking witnesses to swear
their truthfulness upon a sacred text (or affirming their oath if they
prefer). But the practice is meaningful only if the text is held as
sacred by the persom making the promise. If that’s a Quran, or the
Hebrew Bible, or some other holy text, then so be it. Our law should
not bestow authority exclusively on one above the others.

I have to say that I agree with Doug’s point.  I mean how logical is it to ask someone to swear the truth on something they don’t believe in?  Doesn’t it give them license to lie?

In my role on the Lewisville Zoning Board of Adjustment I get to hear "cases" along with the other board members.  In our training we were told that we function pretty much like judges in a court of law; our job isn’t to offer an opinion on how properties should be zoned but rather to interpret whether or not the zoning laws are being met.  Whenever we hear a case we have witnesses who either support or oppose the proposed project and we have to swear those witnesses in.  Most do swear on the Bible but in one case we had a lady who said that it went against her Christian beliefs to swear on the Bible so she was able to simply affirm that she would tell the truth.  Her position was a new one to me and I wasn’t sure what she was talking about until I came across a comment from Cara Michele on Ed Cone’s blog about the Quran case.  Here’s what she wrote:

"Again, you have heard that it
was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not break your oath, but keep the
oaths you have made to the Lord.’ But I tell you, Do not swear at all:
either by heaven, for it is God’s throne; or by the earth, for it is
his footstool; or by Jerusalem, for it is the city of the Great King.
And do not swear by your head, for you cannot make even one hair white
or black. Simply let your ‘Yes’ be ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No,’ ‘No’; anything
beyond this comes from the evil one."  — words of Jesus in Matt. 5:33-37

If the Bible is your sacred text, then you’re not going to swear on it.  (That’s assuming that you’ve read it.  And if you haven’t read your sacred text, well… what are you waiting for!) 

And if the Bible isn’t your sacred text, then swearing on it is basically meaningless anyway, right?

Irony.

Interesting, huh?  Personally I’d be fine with moving to a non-sectarian affirmation of truth across the board.  Perjury is perjury whether you swear on the Bible or on a stack of X-Men comic books, so why not make everyone’s lives simpler by simply requiring witnesses to say "I promise to tell the truth"?

On a lighter note, this reminds me of a moment we had last year when we (the ZBOA) couldn’t find the Bible and we ended up using the town attorney’s PDA Bible memory card for the swearing in. I couldn’t stop thinking that it was an act of faith for us to believe that the memory card was in fact a Bible, but in the end it didn’t matter as long as the people involved believed it was a Bible. And of course if we hadn’t found the Bible we could have proceeded with everyone affirming that they would tell the truth.  Kind of makes me wonder what the big deal is here.

 

Where I’d Like to Position the Missionaries

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Something I’ve mentioned on numerous occasions since moving to Winston-Salem is that when I was in the DC area most people would ask me "What do you do?" when they met me but here they ask "What’s your church?".  And it’s not confined to parties or other social situations.  It happens at the grocery store, the barber shop, and just about any other public forum.  It’s also interesting to me that people here will unabashedly share their religious views with total strangers and will invoke religion in discussions of things like schools.  Let’s just say that school prayer is still a hot issue here.

It has never really bothered me that people profess their religion so publicly and it also doesn’t bother me when they ask where I go to church and then invite me to attend theirs.  The public square is as much theirs as it is mine and I’ve always felt that if it made me uncomfortable I could just ignore the question or brush them off.  Although I’ve never done it I’ve had in the back of my head a plan to say "I’ll come if you let me sacrifice a chicken on the altar like I do in my basement".

What does bug me is when members of various churches knock on my door and try to sell me on their church.  This is my sanctuary after all and I don’t like it being invaded.  I understand that most Christians believe it is a necessity to recruit (I don’t know where it is but there’s apparently a passage in the New Testament that invokes people to play Coach K and recruit for Jesus’ team), and as I said before I don’t mind if they use the public square to do it, but when I’m at home I want to be left alone. 

Quick side note: Whenever I hear people talk about the part of the Bible where they’re instructed to go out and recruit I always wonder why they assume it means for their particular church?  I mean if I’m Christian then I’m Christian, so what does it matter where I go to church?  Two words: collection plate.

A notable exception is the Mormons.  Yes this is very inconsistent but there’s a personal reason.  When I was a kid my family was Mormon and at an early age I was being prepared for the day that I would go on my mission.  I started saving money at around 8 years old, but when my parents got divorced we left the church so I never got much past saving $20 for the bike I was going to ride for God.  To this day I’m still on the books with the Mormons and they periodically send the boys in white shirts to my house to say hi.  It’s easy for me to see myself in their shoes so I’m inclined to be sympathetic.  And because they’re so young it’s also easy for me to steer them away from selling to talking basketball over a glass of water that they’re always thankful for, which means it’s almost always a pleasant 15 minutes.

The other churches tend to send little blue haired ladies who are not easily swayed from their topic.  They’re also stubborn and doctrinaire and exactly the kind of people I don’t much want to hang with, but because they’re little blue haired ladies I’m incapable of brushing them off. It would be too much like brushing off my grandmother.  I think if they sent someone younger I’d be able to invoke my chicken sacrifice ploy, but I just can’t do it with the blue hairs.

So I’ve started to think about how I can cut them off at the pass, as it were.  Some ideas include:

  • Putting a Buddha on the front porch.
  • Keeping a turban by the front door that I can don before opening the door.  They wouldn’t know a Sikh from a Shitzu, but they’d know that whatever I was I wasn’t Christian.  It’d probably scare ’em to death and I’m willing to bet they’d set a record for the 100 yard dash in the 80+ division.
  • Put a statue of the Virgin Mary on the front porch and a sign on the front door that says "We’re Catholic and One of Us Used to be Mormon".  This has the advantage of being true and thoroughly confusing.  What could they possibly say?

For the record we’ve been attending the Moravian church down the road for the last several months.  They’re great people, they never once knocked on our door and they spend an inordinate amount of time eating chicken pie and drinking coffee.  Exactly the kind of people I want to hang with.

In anticipation of those of you who I’m sure I’ve offended let me say this: I’ve spent a lot of time in various churches including Mormon, Presbytarian for a couple of months, Unitarian for one service, Baptist with some of my cousins, Lutheran High School for three years, Lutheran College for one year, Catholic for much of my adulthood, Methodist for several services and now Moravian.  There is much more similarity than difference between them, and almost all of the difference is in what I’ll call ceremony.  From what I can tell the doctrinal differences are more important to the church leaders than their congregations so where I choose to spend my time is based more on the people of the church than the doctrine.  That probably best explains my peturbation at being evangelized (I feel like a Verizon customer being cold-called by Cingular) and my inclination to be attracted to the Moravians’ honey-pot practice of "Food and Fellowship."

From Krakow to Winston-Salem with the ‘Devil’ in His Heart

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Here’s an interesting first-person account of a Polish exchange student who ended up with a host family of fundamentalist Christians in Winston-Salem.  The situation was a little awkward, to say the least.

"When I got out of the plane in Greensboro in the US state of North
Carolina, I would never have expected my host family to welcome me at
the airport, wielding a Bible, and saying, ‘Child, our Lord sent you
half-way around the world to bring you to us.’ At that moment I just
wanted to turn round and run back to the plane.

Things began to
go wrong as soon as I arrived in my new home in Winston-Salem, where I
was to spend my year abroad. For example, every Monday my host family
would gather around the kitchen table to talk about sex. My host
parents hadn’t had sex for the last 17 years because — so they told me
— they were devoting their lives to God. They also wanted to know
whether I drank alcohol. I admitted that I liked beer and wine. They
told me I had the devil in my heart.

My host parents treated me
like a five-year-old. They gave me lollipops. They woke me every Sunday
morning at 6:15 a.m., saying ‘Michael, it’s time to go to church.’ I
hated that sentence. When I didn’t want to go to church one morning,
because I had hardly slept, they didn’t allow me to have any coffee.

One
day I was talking to my host parents about my mother, who is separated
from my father. They were appalled — my mother’s heart was just as
possessed by the devil as mine, they exclaimed. God wanted her to stay
with her husband, they said.

The kid bailed after six months and ended his year abroad with a young family who enjoyed spending his time with very much.  I don’t care what your belief system is, inviting a child to live with you and then informing him at every turn that he and his family are screwed up is no way to treat a guest.

Found via Connecting the Dots.

I Can See This Going Over Well in the Miss America Bathing Suit Competition

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MuslimbikiniDavid Boyd points to an interesting product from an Australian company that produces swimwear and activewear for traditional Muslim women.  I truly love watching entrepreneurialism at work and these guys have found what has to be a truly unique niche.  Of course I truly hope the fashion doesn’t catch on at the Outer Banks.

These things kind of remind me of the uniforms the sports teams at a fundamentalist Baptist high school that my school would play against once a season.  Neither the girls nor the boys were allowed to show their legs so the girls would wear these pants that looked like bloomers and the boys would wear sweat pants.  They looked very uncomfortable so I’m willing to bet they would have welcomed this kind of activewear sans the hoods.

And You Thought Going Blind Was the Worst Possible Outcome

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I can remember hearing all the crazy things people used to say to disuade boys from pleasuring themselves.  You know, spanking their proverbial monkey.  Hairy palms and blindness were the most oft-warned side effects of this ubiquitous practice.  Well, since we don’t have an epidemic of men with fuzzy hands, wearing dark sunglasses and using a tap cane we can safely assume that these warnings were fabricated by grossed out moms and priests who wanted to keep all the fun to themselves.

Interestingly, though, Iran’s supreme leader Sayyid Ali Khameini has weighed in on the subject of self diddling (found via Boing Boing).  According to his blog men should not exercise their wrists during Ramadan.  He has a Q&A section where he addresses the issue:


Q: "If somebody masturbates during the
month of Ramadan but without any discharge, is his fasting invalidated?"

Iranian Supreme Leader: "If he do not intend masturbation and
discharging semen and nothing is discharged, his fasting is correct
even though he has done a ḥarām (forbidden) act. But, if he intends
masturbation or he knows that he usually discharges semen by this
process and semen really comes out, it is a ḥaram intentional breaking
fasting."

Here’s the interesting thing to me; by saying that it’s not good during Ramadan it seems to me he’s saying that it’s okay during the rest of the year.  Combine that with the whole "virgins waiting for you once you blow yourself and a few hundred innocents up" thing and you’ve got quite the recruiting video for young radicals.

The Guys in White Shirts and Riding Bikes Found Me Again

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Last night I was visited by two Mormon missionaries and a volunteer from their local Ward.  This is part of the church’s ongoing campaign to try and win me back, a campaign they’ve been waging since 1976 when my parents got divorced and left the church. 

Back when I was a kid some people from the church would call and offer me and my brother a ride to church.  My mom told me I could go if I wanted but I don’t know many 10 year olds that would a. go to church without their mom, or b. go to church without being physically carried.  So I always respectfully declined the ride.

The Mormons lost track of me in college but once I got married I somehow re-appeared in their database and they started calling on me again.  Usually it’s just a couple of missionaries coming by the house, and because I respect who they are and what they’re doing I invite them in, sit them down, give them a cold drink, tell them my life story and that there’s not a snowball’s chance in hell of me coming back to the church, and then end up talking hoops for a while (it’s amazing how many Mormon missionaries played high school basketball).  I also give them an open invitation to stop by if they’re tired or thirsty and we’ll have a cold glass of water or lemonade waiting for them.

Sometimes, like last night, they’ll have another church official call or visit.  I’m also nice to them, but since they’re driving I don’t feel the need to offer an open invitation for a cold drink.  Other than that I have the exact same conversation with them that I have with the missionaries, and it’s amazing how each takes it.  Without exception they don’t try to "sell" me, they just give me their name and welcome me to call if anything ever changes.  I have to respect that.

Now that they know my story I won’t be getting another visit until the next batch of "recruits" comes to town, so I guess we’ll have those cold drinks ready in about 6 months.

Side note: If you need to find someone forget hiring a PI, just go straight to the Mormons because their people tracking skills are amazing.  No wonder so many work for the FBI.

Does Evangelical Christian = Republican?

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There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times (found via Ed Cone) about a pastor at an evangelical mega-church in Minnesota who denounced the practice of churches closely identifying with a particular political party or getting involved in political issues.  The pastor, the Rev. Gregory A. Boyd, refused to allow anti-abortion activists to set up tables in the church, refused to endorse political candidates or to allow pamphlets for candidates to be distributed and eventually gave a series of sermons titled "’The Cross and the Sword’ in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up
moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a
“Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns."  In the process he lost about 20% of his congregants and a church fundraising campaign fell well short of the church’s goal, but he says he has no regrets.

What is most interesting to me is that as I was reading the article I realized that I had assumed all along that all evangelicals are right-wing, super-conservative, pro-war, Bush evangelists.  I had fallen into the trap of lumping everyone into the same category, of not giving evangelical Christians the credit for being able to think for themselves.

Kind of scary how easy that is to do.