This was an interesting find today. Kevin Drum, over at his blog on Mother Jones, offers us this graph, adapted from a post on a website called Secular Right, showing the frequency of prayer plotted against strength of partisanship:

Drum comments:

The data is from the General Social Survey. Apparently, strong political partisans also tend to pray a lot. Weak partisans and independents, not so much. The effect is roughly the same if you confine the analysis to whites only.

Why? Is it just a reflection that some people are strong believers and others aren’t, and this temperamental cast applies to everything they believe in? Or is it something else? Speculate away!

Its not directly related to this point, but its been frequently reported that there is a strong correlation between “weekly church goers” and republican affiliation, but I’ve long suspected (and have seen some evidence for the notion that) if one looked at “not-quite-weekly church goers” the numbers even out much more. The data that form the basis of this graph seem to bear out the notion that its not right to correlate faith with a particular partisan affiliation. But what does it mean that those with comparitively weaker partisan affiliation seem to report praying less?

I’m not sure…

Some backstory: Adam Walker Cleaveland, recent PTS grad and proprietor of pomomusings, is a candidate for ordination in the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). As part of his final steps towards ordination, he must be examined by his Presbytery of Call, and part of that examination includes the presentation of a statement of faith.

These statements of faith are typically a page or so (single spaced), and cover things like who God is, humanity’s relationship to God, who Jesus is, what the Bible and Sacraments are all about, and so on. Its not easy to condence the basics of one’s religious beliefs to a single page, but those of us who’ve been examined by a presbytery for ordination are asked to do it, and he’s working on it.

Also, you should know about what twitter is: a social-networking tool that enables people to “micro-blog,” similar to status updates on facebook, using 140 characters or less. For those who love status updates on facebook, this is right up your alley, and you can access it through the web, through a number of apps, through SMS Text Messages, etc. (Adam also wrote about why one should use twitter at pomomusings.)

So Adam has been twittering about his writing of this statement of faith, and Shawn Coons of igeekrev suggested that those who know him try to use twitter to make a statement of faith, that is, to write one using 140 characters only.

The thing has taken off today, and is now called Twitter of Faith. Adam posted the particulars on his website, but you can also look at the facebook page.

The original challenge was:

Twitter of Faith: What do you believe? You have 140 characters – give us your statement of faith in 140 characters. #TOF

And here was my offering:

God is love, and lovingly empowers, forgives, redeems me. Thus I am God’s, and live to do the same for others, so that love might win. #TOF

You can keep up with the various postings about it here. Its pretty cool!

Update (11/23/08): I slept on the above, and really like it, but see that my first TOF leaves out Jesus Christ. I’m ok with that, but it is incomplete. So I offer this modification, which adds Christ but which makes it slightly different:

God is love, and in Xp lovingly calls, forgives, redeems me. Thus I am God’s, and live to do the same for you, so that love might win. #TOF

Take your pick. I like to place them together, but that’s against the rules.

There is now a post about this up on presbymergent, and the following blogs as well: wendy, mark, mycontemplations. Its taking off..

I’ve not been tagged before, but I just now saw that The Church Geek did me the favor the other day. So here, in no particular order, are 5 things I dig about Jesus:

1. Jesus teaches us some very important things about God. In Jesus’ crucifixion, we see that God is willing to dwell in the depths of human suffering. In Jesus’ resurrection, we see God doing a new thing that has started and ultimately will lead to the reconciliation of the whole world. We need this very very much. Yes, very theological, but Moltmann captures me like that…
2. I don’t deserve it, but God loves me. Jesus taught me that. Jesus demonstrated that. Jesus wants me to live in the freedom that comes from it…
3. Jesus inspires me to do better, every day. Jesus challenges me to love deeper, forgive more, help often, be grace-ful always.
4. God in Jesus Christ loves everyone, but enters into a special solidarity with the poor, the suffering, the outcast, the week, the downtrodden. This is what I take to be the radically inclusive love of God that underlies so many of Jesus’ parables.
5. Speaking of his parables, did you notice that Jesus refuses to give a simple answer to a complex problem? I love that!

Those are the five that popped into my head this morning. I’ve never done this taggin’ thing before, so lemme see…

Consider yourself tagged, folks:
Very Left Reverend
Michael Kruse
Jan Edmiston
Denis Hancock
Bruce Reyes-Chow

Here is Kevin Drum’s Washington Monthly post today entitled “Secular Humanism“:

As we all know, our universities were long ago taken over by an elite cadre of latte-quaffing, postmodern, anti-American ultra-liberals. That’s what National Review says, anyway. But I’ve always wondered just what actual effect this has on America’s youth. Do kids become more liberal than they otherwise would when they attend these dens of radicalism? Or are our academic fifth columnists so incompetent that they have no influence at all?

Well, I’m still wondering.  But Inside Higher Ed reports today on a related question: do university faculties shot through with secular humanists make college kids less religious? The answer appears to be no. A study that tracked 10,000 subjects for seven years between adolescence and young adulthood found that among those who didn’t attend college, 76% reported a decline in church attendance. Conversely, college grads reported only a 59% drop. The study found similar results on two other measures of religious activity.

Needless to say, I’m bitterly disappointed. The shock troops of atheism are apparently falling down on the job. Better get cracking, folks.

Via Chad Orzel, who offers up some possible explanations for the results. I didn’t find any of them very persuasive, but your mileage may vary.

The Episcopal Church‘s House of Bishops has responded anew yesterday to the crisis in its worldwide communion. Here’s the sum and substance:

It is incumbent upon us as disciples to do our best to follow Jesus in the increasing experience of the leading of the Holy Spirit. We fully understand that others in the Communion believe the same, but we do not believe that Jesus leads us to break our relationships. We proclaim the Gospel of what God has done and is doing in Christ, of the dignity of every human being, and of justice, compassion, and peace. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no male or female, no slave or free. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children,
including women, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church. We proclaim the Gospel that in Christ all God’s children, including gay and lesbian persons, are full and equal participants in the life of Christ’s Church. We proclaim the Gospel that stands against any violence, including violence done to women and children as well as those who are persecuted because of their differences, often in the name of God. The Dar es Salaam Communiqué is distressingly silent on this subject. And, contrary to the way the Anglican Communion Network and the American Anglican Council have represented us, we proclaim a Gospel that welcomes diversity of thought and encourages free and open theological debate as a way of seeking God’s truth. If that means that others reject us and communion with us, as some have already done, we must with great regret and sorrow accept their decision.

I’m impressed with their faithfulness and their stand on this matter.

I was glad to see the rhetoric about an ostensible “war” on Christmas virtually gone this holiday cycle. Replacing it, however, seems to be an ostensible “war” on those who believe in the divinity of the Torah. Dennis Prager (my emphasis):

If you want to predict on which side an American will line up in the Culture War wracking America, virtually all you have to do is get an answer to this question: Does the person believe in the divinity and authority of the Five Books of Moses, the first five books of the Bible, known as the Torah? (“Divinity” does not necessarily mean “literalism.”)

I do not ask this about “the Bible” as a whole because the one book that is regarded as having divine authority by believing Jews, Catholics, Protestants and Mormons, among others, is not the entire Bible, but the Torah. Religious Jews do not believe in the New Testament and generally confine divine revelation even within the Old Testament to the Torah and to verses where God is cited by the prophets, for example. But “Bible-believing” Christians and Jews do believe in the divinity of the Torah.

And they line up together on virtually every major social/moral issue.
…
Very often the dividing line in America is portrayed as between those who believe in God and those who don’t. But the vast majority of Americans believe in God, and belief in God alone rarely affects people’s values. Many liberals believe in God; many conservatives do. What matters is not whether people believe in God but what text, if any, they believe to be divine. Those who believe that He has spoken through a given text will generally think differently from those who believe that no text is divine. Such people will usually get their
values from other texts, or more likely from their conscience and heart.

That a belief or lack of belief in the divinity of a book dating back over 2,500 years is at the center of the Culture War in America and between religious America and secular Europe is almost unbelievable. But it not only explains these divisions; it also explains the hatred that much of the Left has for Jewish, Protestant, Catholic and Mormon Bible-believers.

…
This divide explains why the wrath of the Left has fallen on those of us who lament the exclusion of the Bible at a ceremonial swearing-in of an American congressman. The Left wants to see that book dethroned. And that, in a nutshell, is what the present civil war is about.

What’s this all about? Muslim congressman-elect Keith Ellison’s plans to re-take his oath of office with a hand on the Quran. (Yes, all congress members are sworn in through a general oath, not related to any hand on any holy book; many congress members choose to have additional ceremonies with their hands on the bible, or the TaNak, or the Book of Mormon, or the like… Check out that very good NPR report…) Prager and some others (like congressman Virgil Goode) are apoplectic about this…a good example of Christian Fusspots.

And what exactly is the divinity of the Torah, specifically, or scripture generally, in Christian thought? Scripture may be considered “god-breathed,” or divinely-inspired, by most Christians. But divine? No. Thinking God speaks through a text (a medium) is not the same thing as regarding that medium, that revelation, as itself divine. Thinking that a text points uniquely, authoritatively, to the experience of human beings with a loving, covenantal God throughout human history is not the same thing as to deify the account of that experience. We worship Christ the Word made Flesh as one person of the trinity, of the one triune God. We don’t worship the text. It is not divine. And its authority isn’t, repeat, isn’t something that just conservatives subscribe to.

I don’t know what’s worse: calling the bible itself divine or saying that only my way of reading  it is the only way to believe in its “authority.” Both smack of idolatry and hubris to me.

This is not even to get into the crap Prager deals about liberals and conservatives in that piece (and note earlier posts on this board about conservative Judaism ordaining gays and lesbians, for example; so much for that theory that “bible-believing” folk line up on every major social issue…)….

This is not to get into Prager’s isolation of the Torah within the Christian canon, or the elision of major interpretive, theological, and yes axiological differences we have with other “people of the book”.

And this is not even trying to parse out exactly what Prager means when he says his complaint about “divinity” does not “necessarily” mean something with regards to “literalism.”

Regardless of all this, this choosing which holy-book congress members are permitted to chose when taking their unofficial oaths business is loony. But then again, loony seems to sell, which is the sad thing to me.

(h/t Joshua Micah Marshall)

… guest blogger Steve Benen also has comments over at The Washington Monthly.

I’d commend E. J. Dionne Jr.’s piece in the Washington Post today. An excerpt:

American politics took an important turn last week at a church in the foothills of Southern California’s Santa Ana Mountains.

When Rick Warren, one of the nation’s most popular evangelical pastors, faced down right-wing pressure and invited Sen. Barack Obama to speak at a gathering at his Saddleback Valley Community Church about the AIDS crisis, he sent a signal: A significant group of theologically conservative Christians no longer wants to be treated as a cog in the Republican political machine.

…

And thus it came to pass that when Warren called a conference at his church last Friday on World AIDS Day, among those he invited were two potential presidential candidates. It was unsurprising that one of them was Sen. Sam Brownback, the Kansas Republican and a loyal social conservative who has taken up the AIDS issue with passion and commitment.

But when the other invitee turned out to be Obama, parts of the old evangelical political apparatus went after Warren as a heretic. Rob Schenck, president of the National Clergy Council, declared that Obama’s views on abortion — Obama is pro-choice — represented “the antithesis of biblical ethics and morality” and insisted that Warren had no business inviting him to Saddleback.

Warren’s church issued a statement reaffirming its strong opposition to abortion, but Warren did not back down. Indeed, he seemed to revel in rejecting the old evangelical political model. “I’m a pastor, not a politician,” Warren told ABC News. “People always say, ‘Rick, are you right wing or left wing?’ I say ‘I’m for the whole bird.’ “

When it came his turn to speak, Obama took on the moral message of evangelical AIDS activists — and then challenged them.

“Let me say this and let me say this loud and clear: I don’t think that we can deny that there is a moral and spiritual component to prevention,”he declared. “In too many places . . . the relationship between men and women, between sexuality and spirituality, has broken down and needs to be repaired.”

Then Obama got to what “may be the difficult part for some,” as he put it, that “abstinence and fidelity, although the ideal, may not always be the reality.”

“We’re dealing with flesh-and-blood men and women, and not abstractions,” Obama said, and “if condoms and potentially things like microbicides can prevent millions of deaths, then they should be made more widely available. . . . I don’t accept the notion that those who make mistakes in their lives should be given an effective death sentence.”

That Obama received a standing ovation suggests that Warren is right to sense that growing numbers of Christians are tired of narrowly partisan politics and share his interest in “the whole bird.” In their different spheres, Warren and Obama are both in the business of retailing hope.

Great ending paragraph, too:

One more thing: If you read Obama’s speech, you’ll realize he demonstrates a much truer Christian spirit than the GOP masterminds who have recently tried to push people away from Obama by pointing out that his middle name is Hussein.

If you’re curious about that last reference, you can find more info, among other places, at Joshua Micah Marshall’s TPM Cafe.