Lutherans take surprise step in electing female presiding bishop

(RNS) What started as just another church assembly turned into a historic one for the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as members elected the Rev. Elizabeth Eaton the denomination’s first female presiding bishop.

Eaton will take over from Presiding Bishop Mark Hanson, who will step down after 12 years of overseeing the ELCA, one of the country’s largest denominations.

“I’m still in a state of shock,” Eaton said on Thursday (Aug. 15). “We wanted to open up a conversation, and as I said to the assembly, it looks like the conversation got out of hand.”

Lutherans elected the Rev. Elizabeth Eaton to be its first female presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She is married to the Rev. Conrad Selnick (left), an Episcopal priest. Photo courtesy of ELCA News Service. This image available for Web and print publication. For questions, contact Sally Morrow.

Eaton argued that incumbent Hanson paved the way for her election on Wednesday (Aug. 14). “The election of the woman to the office of presiding bishop is a fulfillment of his ministry of making this church a welcoming place,” she said.

It was under Hanson’s leadership that the denomination voted in 2009 to allow openly gay and lesbian clergy. And in June, Lutherans elected the denomination’s first gay bishop.

“It was a costly decision for our denomination,” Eaton said. The ELCA, which has lost members nearly every year since its founding in 1987, saw the biggest drop when it lost nearly half a million members in 2010 and 2011, as many conservatives upset with the decision to allow gay clergy defected to a new denomination, the North American Lutheran Church.

“We’ve thrived on paradox, that’s always been part of Lutheran history,” said Eaton, who received 600 votes against incumbent Hanson’s 287.

Eaton, who supported the denomination’s decision, said it’s important to include those who disagree.

“We can disagree on decisions as long as we agree on the cross,” she said. “My goal is to make sure we make room for the possibility that people disagree, that they are fully Lutheran, fully valued and fully part of this denomination.”

“Do I have a killer app or program that’s going to change turnaround in six years? No, I don’t,” said Eaton, who has led the more 77,000-member Northeastern Ohio Synod since 2007. “I see a sense that we have to be missionaries again.”

Even with the recent defections, the ELCA remains the largest of the Lutheran denominations in the United States, with 4 million members.

“We’ll watch to see if the actions of this bishop changes in any commitment to scriptural values,” said David Wendel, assistant to the bishop for ministry and ecumenism in the rebel NALC, who attended the assembly as an ecumenical guest. “We’re certainly hopeful that the ELCA might move back to a more centrist position in a scriptural stance, but a new election of a presiding bishop doesn’t indicate a change in the direction of the ELCA.”

There were murmurings among bishops who wanted to see the first presiding bishop of color or a woman, said April Ulring Larson, the first women bishop in the ELCA. It was somewhat awkward, she said, when Hanson ran for a third term.

“I don’t think any of us expected the outcome,” she said. “The women were less organized. I think it was the men who were thinking it’s time for a new leader.”

Among those on the ballot was the Rev. Barbara Lundblad, a professor of preaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York, who is now married to her longtime lesbian partner. Lundblad, who didn’t attend the assembly, removed herself from consideration, saying she didn’t feel called.

“I don’t know anyone who went into an assembly saying ‘Boy we’re going to elect a woman this time.’” Lundblad said, noting this year as the denomination’s 25th anniversary. “People had a lot of respect for Mark, but I think they felt in this anniversary year, they needed new leadership.”

Eaton is relatively unknown across the denomination, Lundblad said, but she responded well as she addressed the assembly.

“She was honest about the need to work hard to heal divisions that remain,” Lundblad said. “She’s funny and she comes across as being very real, very authentic.”

Eaton could bring a fresh face to the denomination and to the role of presiding bishop, Lundblad said.

“It knocks our assumptions about quintessential bishops,” Lundblad said. “Anytime you say a leader of a church breaks down stereotypes, it breaks down stereotypes across the church about what a Christian looks like.”

Episcopal Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, who in 2006 became the first woman to lead a church in the worldwide Anglican Communion, praised Eaton’s election in a statement on Thursday.

“There are excellent foundations already in our common work, and I expect further growth as we seek to serve God’s mission as ministers of justice and healers of the breach,” Schori said.

The denominations share a full communion agreement that allows shared clergy and joint ministry. A native of Cleveland and a graduate of Harvard Divinity School, Eaton is married to the Rev. Conrad Selnick, an Episcopal priest, and they have two adult daughters, Rebeckah and Susannah.

Noting other changes in church leadership this year, including the elections of Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby and Pope Francis, Eaton said hers was a little different.

“This was just like the papal election,” Eaton said jokingly. “No, we don’t do it in secret. It’s all out in the open. And we had a conference room. It’s a lovely conference room, but there are no frescoes. Michelangelo didn’t paint anything.”

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COMMENTARY: Islamist suppression could reach U.S. shores

(RNS) Egypt now teeters on the edge of an abyss. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was in Cairo last week at President Obama’s request to mediate between the military-backed interim government and supporters of ousted President Mohammed Morsi, told CBS News: “Oh my God, I didn’t know it was this bad. These folks are just days or weeks away from all-out bloodshed.”

The widely anticipated military crackdown against pro-Morsi demonstrators began yesterday, so we’d better brace for the blow-back.

The rising specter of repression in Egypt is difficult to watch for two reasons. First, it confirms that the counterrevolution is successfully restoring the deep state — the vast security apparatus upon which military autocracy in Egypt has been based since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rule in the 1950s, effectively extinguishing any hope of transition to democracy. Second, the violent crackdown evokes bad memories of earlier efforts by Egypt’s military strongmen to crush their Islamist opposition.

In regular 20-year cycles, starting with Nasser in the 1950s, the Egyptian military regime has launched brutal campaigns of repression against its Islamist opponents. Although each of those previous suppression efforts succeeded in eliminating the immediate challenge to military rule, they never addressed the root causes of the problem.

Because Egypt has served as the global epicenter of political Islam for close to a century now, what happens there has enormous repercussions worldwide, especially for the United States.

The repression of the late 1950s led to the radical theories of Sayyid Qutb, which still inspire Islamist extremists from Aceh in Indonesia to Timbuktu in Mali. The campaign of the 1970s prompted only increasingly fanatical and violent expressions of Islamist extremism, culminating in the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981.

The 1990s campaign of repression by Egyptian security services convinced Islamist extremists such as Ayman al-Zawahiri, the Egyptian-born leader of al Qaeda, that to succeed in Egypt they must first strike “the far enemy,” the United States, upon whose support, they reasoned, the Egyptian military autocracy relied.

History suggests that when Egypt’s military suppresses its Islamist opponents, it has serious repercussions for the United States.

And on Sept. 11, 2001, it was an Egyptian, Mohamed Atta, who flew American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Center, signaling the start of the 9/11 attacks.

Already last week, 19 U.S. embassies and consulates were shuttered as Zawahiri sought to underscore his argument to mainline Islamist sentiment around the world that the overthrow of Morsi demonstrates the futility of democracy with a spectacular new terrorist attack.

With the United States serving as the main supplier of the Egyptian military, it should not surprise Americans that we are held responsible for what the Egyptian military does. Our government’s official silence on whether or not Morsi was overthrown by an obvious military coup is not helpful because it conveys hypocrisy and complicity.

We need to be absolutely clear with Gen. Abdel Fattah al-Sissi that, contrary to the conventional wisdom in Cairo, brutal suppression of the Islamist opposition does not work in the long term — it only breeds increasingly violent extremism.

What does work is inclusive democracy. Nothing was more effective in undermining the credibility and attraction of Islamism in Egypt than the pathetic failed experiment with actual Muslim Brotherhood rule.

There can be little doubt that U.S.-Egyptian relations will be rocky in the near future no matter what we do, but if we don’t stand decisively for democracy now, the long-term horizon will be even worse. We must be firm with the generals who are busy re-establishing their control that the only effective antidote to Islamism is democracy and a sustained effort to address the real grievances that give rise to the Islamist opposition in the first place.

This will be a hard sell, but history shows that when the generals in Cairo decide repression in is the only solution to their Islamist problem, the rest of us should brace for the global blowback.

(Christopher S. Taylor is professor of Middle East Studies and comparative religion at Drew University where he directs the Center on Religion, Culture & Conflict. He wrote this article for The Star-Ledger of New Jersey.)

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Oklahoma anti-Shariah amendment struck down

(RNS) A federal judge has struck down Oklahoma’s constitutional amendment that would have prohibited judges in the state from considering Shariah law.

The amendment was approved by about 70 percent of Oklahoma voters on November 2, 2010, but the American Civil Liberties Union and the Council on American-Islamic Relations sued to block the amendment, arguing it violated separation of church and state and discriminated against Muslims.

A U.S. District Court judge agreed and issued a temporary injunction against the amendment. That decision was upheld in 2011 by a federal appeals court that returned the case to the judge, who made the final ruling Thursday (Aug. 15).

“It is our hope that, in finding this anti-Islam law unconstitutional, lawmakers in other states will think twice before proposing anti-Muslim laws of their own,” said Gadeir Abbas, a CAIR staff attorney and counsel for the plaintiffs.

A call to the Oklahoma governor’s office was not immediately returned.

The amendment struck down Thursday specifically mentioned Shariah, and is different from anti-Shariah laws adopted over the last few years by state legislators in Arizona, Kansas, Louisiana, South Dakota, Tennessee, and Oklahoma. North Carolina legislators also passed an anti-foreign-law bill this spring, which is now on the desk of Gov. Pat McCrory, who must decide by August 25 whether to sign or veto it.

While these laws do not mention Shariah, but “foreign law,” their backers have stated Shariah was their target. Those laws have not been challenged in court, although Muslim civil rights activists say they may still try.

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Friday’s Religion News Roundup: Goy George * The T in LGBT * Nuns on Lockdown

That 2010 Oklahoma constitutional amendment that tried to ban Shariah and other “international laws”? The federal judge who struck it down issued a final ruling, striking it down again.

Our own Lauren Markoe debunks the rumor that wee Prince George (heir to the British throne) is actually Jewish. I guess that’d make him Goy George, not Boy George.

Outspoken Arizona sheriff Joe Arpaio plans to place white crosses in the spots where migrants die while trying to cross the border into the U.S.

Sarah Pulliam Bailey caught up with the new presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, Elizabeth Eaton, who said she’s still trying to take it all in. “Do I have a killer app or program that’s going to change turnaround in six years? No, I don’t,” she says.

American nuns met Thursday under lock and key with Seattle Archbishop Peter Sartain, who’s been tasked by the Vatican with bringing the independent-minded sisters back in line.

Southern Baptist policy guru Russell Moore tackles the complicated and sensitive debate over transgender sexual identity, and concludes that “we can no more surgically alter our gospel than we can surgically alter our gender.”

Omar Sacirbey has all the week’s Muslim news in the new edition of Moozweek, including a wrap-up of the carnage unfolding across Egypt.

Speaking of, Egyptian Christians’ support of the crackdown against pro-Morsi supporters isn’t working out too well for them; there are reports of churches burned across Egypt as the situation goes south.

Coming soon to a PBS station near you: a nuanced mostly sympathetic biography of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad (and no, they don’t show his face).

Dartmouth College nixed the appointment of a former Anglican bishop from Malawi after the bishop’s comments about homosexuality came to light.

The Mormons have a record 75,000 missionaries out there knocking on doors, a growth fueled by the decision last year to lower the age for wannabe missionaries.

RNS alum Alfredo Garcia writes about churches’ response to “the new Jim Crow,” mass incarceration.

About time someone said it: former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams said Christians in the West need to “grow up” and get a real handle on what Christian persecution really looks like.

And with that, we’re off to the weekend. But before you go, make sure we have your email address so you can get the Roundup for free each day in your in-box.

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Categories: Beliefs

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5 reasons people think Prince George is Jewish (even though he’s not)

(RNS) A Royal Bris! A Royal Bar Mitzvah! Hanukkah at Buckingham Palace!

From the moment Prince William and Kate Middleton got engaged, a rumor ran happily through the Jewish blogosphere (and menacingly on many anti-Semitic websites): the couple’s progeny, the heir to the British throne, would be Jewish! And then, on July 22, a son was born — a Son of Israel!

Um, no.

His Royal Highness, Prince George Alexander Louis of Cambridge, is not Jewish — and you can bet your yarmulke on that.

But because Jewish law considers a child Jewish if the mother is Jewish, and because Kate’s mother’s maiden name is Goldsmith — a name not uncommon among British Jews — some wrongly conclude that the wee prince’s matrilineal line  is Jewish, and so is he must be too.

But before we dispel the rumor that the world’s WASPiest baby is an Israelite, here are five reasons why some people assume he is.

1. The Iranians said so. The Tehran-based Mehr News reported that not only is Kate Jewish, but she was secretly baptized in the Church of England so she could marry William, and then they faked their whole Christian wedding. The story goes on: “Nevertheless even being baptized by the bishop of the church cannot prevent Prince William’s son, the next king and the senior governor of the Church of England, from being a Jew as Kate and William’s child will inevitably remain a Jew.”

2. In a YouTube video that is circulating widely, dead ringers for William and Kate, their families and the Archbishop of Canterbury dance down the wedding aisle to klezmer music.

3. In 1937, Jewish philanthropist Frank Charles Lindo donated the wing at St. Mary’s Hospital, where George and William were born.

4. The artist formerly known as Prince, according to at least one person, is half Jewish. So, if you’re fully a prince … maybe you’re fully Jewish.

5. Former BBC reporter Michael Cole, who covered the royals beat, wrote a letter to the Times of London declaring that Kate is Jewish — again, drawing on the surnames of her forbears. Even the New York Post decided this was meshugas.

So what’s Kate’s religious history?

She and her Anglican family were never big on going to church. She was baptized as an Anglican in 1982, when she was five months old, and then, before her wedding two years ago to William, who will as king one day assume the title “Defender of the Faith,” she was confirmed by the Bishop of London. Many explained the confirmation as a measure to make it absolutely, positively clear that Kate is in no way Catholic (still frowned upon for royal spouses).

But Jewish?

Genealogists have traced her lineage back generations, and all you can find is church wedding after baptism after church wedding.

Or, in the words of the widely-quoted Doreen Berger, the chairman of the Jewish Genealogy Society: “I’ve looked back as far as it’s possible to look back and she doesn’t have a Jewish link at all — it’s just not true. I’m 100 percent sure.”

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Are atheists smarter than believers? Not exactly.

(RNS) A new study of almost a century’s worth of data shows that the smarter you are, the less likely you are to believe in God.

The study, conducted by Miron Zuckerman, a psychologist at the University of Rochester, examined the findings of 63 earlier studies — one dating back to the 1920s — that measured intelligence and religiosity. The majority of those studies found that more intelligent people were more likely to lack religious beliefs.

“The relation between intelligence and religion is negative,” Zuckerman said. “It was very early in the study that we realized that.”

But Zuckerman is careful to point out that his work — known as a “meta-study” because it examines a range of other studies — does not mean only dumb people believe in God.

Rather, he said, it shows only that more intelligent people may have less need for religion.

“It is truly the wrong message to take from here that if I believe in God I must be stupid,” he said. “I would not want to bet any money on that because I would have a very good chance of losing a lot of money.”

Rather, Zuckerman and co-authors Jordan Silberman and Judith Hall write that more intelligent people may find certain basic needs — “functions” in psychology-speak — fulfilled outside of religion. These functions include self-esteem, a sense of community and a sense of purpose, among others.

“We say it is possible that having a high level of intelligence provides similar functions to what religion provides” for people who adhere to a religion, Zuckerman said.

The study also concludes that more intelligent people are less likely to believe in God because they are more likely to challenge established norms and dogma. They are also more likely to have analytical thinking styles, which other studies have shown undermine religious belief.

The news is not bad for believers, Zuckerman insists.

“The functions we cover imply that in many ways religious people are better off than those who are nonreligious,” he said. “There are things about self-esteem and feeling in control and attachment that religion provides. In all those things, there are benefits to being religious, and that is the take-home message for those who are religious.”

R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. This image available for Web publication. For questions, contact Sally Morrow.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., said he has “great concerns” about the study.

“This kind of study points to a very clear issue for believing Christians,” he said. “We do not draw support for our faith from scientific reports. Anyone whose faith is shaken by the claim that research proves that higher intelligence leads to lower levels of religious belief has a misplaced faith.”

Lillian Daniel is a Congregationalist pastor and author of the recent book “When ‘Spiritual But Not Religious’ is Not Enough.” She said many intelligent people are comfortable with “the metaphor and mystery” of faith.

“It’s not that intelligence leads to atheism, or education leads to loss of faith,” she said. “But I think there is a certain peer pressure as one moves up the educational ladder to dismiss all religion as fundamentalism. It’s one of the last acceptable biases in an environment that prides itself on being open-minded.”

The study appeared in the online version of Personality and Social Psychology Review, an academic journal, and will appear next year in the print version.

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Is God an angry ogre? Presbyterians and Baptists debate

(RNS) The dispute over dropping a beloved Christian song from a new Presbyterian hymnal has widened into a multi-denominational tussle, with Baptists joining the fray.

At issue are various Christian doctrines of the atonement, which attempt to explain why Jesus died and whether his death satisfies God’s wrath over humankind’s sinfulness. But some Christians warn that emphasizing these doctrines may have the unintended consequence of turning God into an angry deity who had to be appeased by shedding Jesus’ blood.

Songwriters Keith and Kristyn Getty. Photo courtesy Getty Music This image available for Web and print publication. For questions, contact Sally Morrow.

That’s the view taken by the Presbyterian Committee on Congregational Song. The committee removed the hymn “In Christ Alone” from the new Presbyterian Church (USA) hymnal after the song’s co-authors, Stuart Townend and Keith Getty, refused to change a line about God’s wrath being satisfied.

Bob Terry, editor of The Alabama Baptist newspaper, stepped into a theological landmine when he wrote an editorial saying Presbyterians got it right. Terry said he believes Jesus’ death paid the price for sin. But the song’s lyrics went too far.

“Sometimes Christians carelessly make God out to be some kind of ogre whose angry wrath overflowed until the innocent Jesus suffered enough to calm Him down,” Terry wrote.

That editorial, which ran earlier this month, touched a nerve.

In blogs, tweets, letters to the editor and phone calls, angry Baptist readers accused Terry of being theologically liberal and abandoning the Bible. Some wanted him fired.

In an unusual move, the president of the Alabama Baptist State Convention and the executive director of the Alabama Baptist State Board of Missions issued a statement that criticized the editorial.

“As Alabama Baptists seek to be true to Scripture, we affirm the essential and historic Christian doctrine of substitutionary atonement,” they wrote, referring to the doctrine that Jesus died as a substitute for humankind.

The fact that a Baptist newspaper editor sided with the Presbyterians made things worse, said the Rev. John Thweatt, pastor of First Baptist Church in Pell City, Ala.

Conservative Baptists have long viewed mainline denominations like the PCUSA with suspicion, accusing them of abandoning Christian beliefs. Siding with them was a bad move for Terry, he said.

“He opened up a Pandora’s box,” Thweatt said. “I don’t think he thought things through.”

Thweatt is a fan of the song “In Christ Alone.” He said he couldn’t understand why anyone would want to change it.

The song’s original lyrics say that as Jesus died on the cross, “the wrath of God was satisfied.” The Presbyterian committee wanted to change that to “the love of God was magnified.”

“To remove that line would gut the gospel,” Thweatt said.

R. Albert Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky. RNS photo courtesy SBTS This image available for Web publication. For questions, contact Sally Morrow.

R. Albert Mohler Jr., president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky., agreed.

Mohler said there is no contradiction between God’s love and God’s wrath. Both are needed to deal with human sin.

That’s why he believes penal substitutionary atonement is essential. Critics who want to change “In Christ Alone” to remove the line about God’s wrath have bad theology, Mohler said.

“It reveals deeper problems with what they believe about atonement,” he said.

Mohler also gave some context on why penal substitutionary atonement matters to Southern Baptists. It was one of the issues that led to the conservative resurgence — or fundamentalist takeover — among Southern Baptists in the 1980s and 1990s, when some seminary professors began criticizing substitutionary atonement, leading to full-blown questions about biblical inerrancy.

Memories from that conflict are still fresh, he said.

But Jay Phelan, senior professor of theological studies at North Park University, said too much wrath also leads to bad theology.

Phelan said Mohler and other critics are motivated by church politics as well as theology. They’re part of the movement known as neo-Calvinism, which stresses God’s anger over sin.

“You have all the neo-Calvinists who see any move away from strict satisfaction theory as the straight road to liberal hell,” he said.

Phelan said the neo-Calvinist view of Jesus’ death is too limited.

Most Christians believe in substitutionary atonement. But Christians have differing views on how Jesus’ death forgave sinners, said the Rev. Morgan Guyton, a blogger and associate pastor of Burke United Methodist Church in Burke, Va.

Among them are the ransom theory, which holds that Jesus’ death was taken to be a ransom paid to the devil to liberate human sinners from bondage.

No one theory can explain the atonement, Morgan said. And too much focus on wrath causes problems with the Trinity by making it appear God crucified Jesus.

Mohler argues that critics of substitutionary atonement forget God is always motivated by love, even in punishing sin.

The word “wrath” does not appear in another popular song written by Townend about the cross, titled, “How Deep the Father’s Love for Us.”

Written in 1995, that song remains one of the top 50 popular songs in churches, according to the Christian Copyright Licensing International. Its last verse claims the details of the atonement remain a mystery.

“Why should I gain from His reward?” it says. “I cannot give an answer. But this I know with all my heart, His wounds have paid my ransom.”

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