Psst, want to know a secret? Some U.S. evangelicals are Democrats. But you wouldn’t know this from the exit polls in the state-by-state presidential nominating contests for both major parties. Virtually none to date have asked Democratic voters a question often posed to Republicans: are you a born-again or evangelical Christian?

Some critics say this state of affairs gives a skewed impression of evangelical voters who are widely regarded as a key base for the Republican Party.

“To get an accurate picture of how evangelicals are voting in this election, the exit polls need to step up to the plate,” said Katie Barge, director of communications at Faith in Public Life, a non-partisan resource center for religious leaders.

“They need to stop pigeonholing an entire faith group and ask all voters, not just Republicans, if they are born-again or evangelical,” she told Reuters.

In Tuesday’s primaries in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia, the pattern appears to have repeated itself.

CNN’s exit poll for example asked Republicans about their evangelical or born-again affiliation but not Democrats.

But they did ask Democratic voters how regularly they attended religious services. In Virginia, Barack Obama beat Hilary Clinton by 67 percent to 33 percent among Protestants who attended church on a weekly basis.

Faith in Public Life and the Center for Progress Action Fund last week commissioned Zogby International to ask Democratic voters the “evangelical question” during the Missouri and Tennessee primaries.

The findings reinforced other surveys showing that Republicans still command most of the support of this voting bloc but by no means have a monopoly on its affections.

This is an important area to watch as many U.S. evangelical leaders are now calling for a broader Biblical agenda that includes helping the poor and protecting the environment. These issues are not typically Republican but this trend will not automatically translate into Democratic gains.
In Missouri, the exit polls showed 34 percent of all white evangelicals who voted took part in the Democratic primary versus 66 percent in the Republican primary.

In Tennessee, the polls indicated 32 percent of primary voters who fit this profile were Democratic and they accounted for 29 percent of the party’s vote there.

Before it slips from the news, take a look at a scandal in India that illustrates one of the biggest bioethical challenges we face in a globalised world. Last weekend, Nepal handed over to Indian authorities an Indian man arrested on suspicion of running a huge illegal kidney transplant racket. It seems this ring duped poor Indians into selling kidneys that could be transplanted into rich Indians and foreigners at many times the fee that the unwitting donors received. At least five foreigners — two U.S. and three Greek citizens — were found in a luxury guesthouse run by the racket in a city of high-tech companies just outside New Delhi.

Demand for cheap kidneys has skyrocketed in recent years in rich countries, mostly because people there are becoming more obese and suffering from kidney failure. This has led to “transplant tourism” where patients from rich countries travel to the developing world to receive new kidneys. It has led to serious proposals to set up a global kidney market to meet the demand.

This black market in kidneys for transplants is widely denounced as illegal and immoral because it exploits poor people. But would creating a worldwide organ trade make the practice any more moral? Is the danger of exploitation of the poor so strong that lawmakers should ensure that money doesn’t end up deciding everything?

This is one of those bioethical challenges that are multiplying as science and technology create situations that were unthinkable not so long ago. Ethics councils, churches and philosophers develop guidelines to keep up, but reality has a way of pulling ahead of them. Globalisation means agents in one country can arrange for patients in a second country to have the transplant performed in a third. We will probably see more rather than fewer cases like this one in Nepal and India.

We’ve written on this issue from several datelines over the past year. Here are a few that give an idea of the problem:

Keen demand fuels global trade in body parts

The who, what, where and why of organ trafficking

Calls for kidney market as transplant demand soars

China, Pakistan bowing to pressure on organ trade

Beijing approves organ transplant hospitals

Human organ trafficking threatens donations schemes

Pakistani gang arrested for stealing kidneys

Here’s the video of the arrest of the Indian suspect in Nepal:

If you read religion news from around the world, you’ve probably heard about a shadowy group called the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda. You’ve probably wondered what part religion has played in this group known for its child soldiers, mutilations of innocent civilians and plans to create a theocratic state based on the Ten Commandments. And who is Joseph Kony, the self-styled messenger of God who abducted thousands of children over two decades?

In his new book The Wizard of the Nile, British journalist Matthew Green investigates those questions and offers explanations based on political, tribal and regional tensions behind the conflict known outside for its bizarre religious trappings.

Some background before going any further — Matt worked for Reuters in east Africa for five years until 2006 before leaving to write the book. But we’re apparently not the only ones who liked his “splendidly spun yarn” (review in The Times). His current employer, the Financial Times, ran an excerpt last week.

Researching the Lord’s Resistance Army was tough and its leader Joseph Kony was particularly hard to track down. But journalists in the region also carry part of the blame for not exposing his story earlier, Matt says:

“For a long time, the only explanation was that there was this lunatic with an army of child soldiers and a maniacal obsession to rule by the Ten Commandments while breaking every one of them. Part of the reason was that this idea of the dreadful, dreadlocked one, the Pied Piper with a harem of 80 wives and army of child soldiers in the bush was so seductive we tended to stop there and not ask how somebody so apparently deranged survived so long.”

Our interview with Matt gives more background on the political side of the story. Here are his comments about religion that couldn’t be included in the interview for space reasons:

“Kony as a leader manipulated the spirituality of his Acholi people to tighten his grip on his followers. He used religion and spirituality to bind his group together. When Kony says he wants to rule according to the Ten Commandments, it invites ridicule. To Western ears, it does sound absurd and proof that he’s deranged. But there’s a much deeper layer that is often missed out, where he’s used both the Christian beliefs that Acholi have adopted in the last century, and blended them with much older, deeper belief to really create a genuine sense of loyalty. The spiritual universe he created did resonate among the people who followed him. Although the atrocities he committed and the terrible things that the rebels did could never be described as anything other than abhorrent crime, he was able to manipulate older, deeper beliefs to give his movement a sense of justification. He used religion and spirituality as a vehicle, as a tool to manipulate his followers, and that shouldn’t be underestimated.”

More in the book…

An important question in the Pakistani general election and provincial elections coming up on Feb. 18 is how the Islamist parties there will fare. These parties, which usually scored below 10 percent in the past, shot up to a total 17 percent of seats in the National Assembly at the last election in 2002. They also won power in North West Frontier Province (NWFP) and shared power in Baluchistan — the two provinces that border Afghanistan and have been most destabilised by the Taliban and Al Qaeda operating in the region.

Zeeshan Haider, senior correspondent in our Islamabad bureau, visited the NWFP capital Peshawar to gauge the voters’ mood. Here’s what he found :

Pakistani voters are expected to succeed where President Pervez Musharraf has failed, pushing back the Islamist tide and throwing out of power political clerics governing Pakistan’s violent northwest.

“God forbid, I will never vote for mullahs,” said Saif-ur-Rehman, a bearded stall owner in Qissa Khawani, a famous bazaar in Peshawar, before rushing for prayers at a mosque in the provincial capital of North West Frontier Province (NWFP).

Parliamentary and provincial assembly polls set for February 18 will take place against the backcloth of a Taliban and al Qaeda campaign to destabilize President Pervez Musharraf.

For all the revulsion over almost-weekly suicide attacks, conservative religious folk of the area have more immediate concerns, like lack of jobs, rising food prices, power outages and gas shortages that left them without heat over the winter.

The bureau also reports on a survey by the U.S.-based International Republican Institute showing that 75 percent of Pakistanis want Musharraf out. Another poll by the U.S.-based group Terror Free Tomorrow showed falling support for Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda. Comparing its latest findings to its previous nationwide survey in August 2007, it said:

In August, 46 percent of Pakistanis had a favorable opinion of Bin Laden — that’s down to 24 percent now, while al Qaeda has dropped from 33 to 18 percent, the Taliban from 38 percent to 19 percent, and other related radical Islamist groups from nearly half of the Pakistani public with a favorable view to less than a quarter today.

Here’s a Reuters factbox giving the essential details about the election and a report in the Karachi daily Dawn about the Terror Free Tomorrow survey.

Falling support for radical Islam doesn’t mean that Pakistan’s tense border regions are necessarily getting safer. On Saturday, a suicide bomber killed over 20 people at an election rally near Peshawar by the Awami National Party, a secular party for Pashtuns — the same ethnic group the Taliban comes from. Here’s our video report:

The video also shows a demonstration by lawyers in Islamabad who have been campaigning against Musharraf since the president first tried to depose former Supreme Court Chief Justice Iftikhar Chaudhry last March. Musharraf dismissed Chaudhry in November in a move his critics say aimed to block the court from declaring his election as president unconstitutional. The leader of the lawyers’ movement, Aitzaz Ahsan, was released in early February after three months of house arrest. Undaunted, he repeated the call for Musharraf to go and he was arrested once again.

The uproar over Archbishop Rowan Williams and sharia law brings up a question we’ve asked before with Pope Benedict — are we too addicted to soundbites to discuss complex religious issues in public? Both have tackled difficult issues in nuanced speeches, only to see — rightly or wrongly — that what they thought was their message did not come across.

The Guardian says Williams was naive to discuss such a complex argument in public: “This was the stuff of seminars and was never going to register in the mass market without being boiled down into soundbites. The archbishop did not do that, ensuring others would. As a result, this most humane of men finds himself being caricatured as supporting the severing of limbs.”

Do you think religious leaders should simplify their message when they speak in public? Or do we — the media, politicians, bloggers, readers — have to make more of an effort to understand them?

There’s been a blizzard of commentary about Rowan Williams saying that adopting some aspects of sharia into British law was unavoidable. A lot of it was predictable, like The Sun’s “Bash the Bishop” headline. But there are several thoughtful pieces out there that ask important questions about religion and the law. Below are links to some of the best I found surfing around today.

Our contribution is “Devil in details” in archbishop’s sharia plan.”

– What lies beyond Lambeth’s Sharia humiliation? and A multi-faith muddle — two pieces by Simon Barrow, director of the Ekklesia religious think tank, who sees Williams trying to link a declining Church of England with growing minority groups to press for opt-outs for religious groups from laws they find aggressively secular.

– Opposing Sharia Arbitration Courts in UK — U.S.-based blogger Ali Eteraz lists the problems he sees with incorporating sharia concepts into British law: “Conclusion — There is absolutely no reason for a Muslim to support Sharia arbitration.”

– Reinventing sharia — Asim Siddiqui, chairman of the City Circle network of young British Muslim professionals, says Muslim scholars have to reinterpret sharia laws in a liberal way to ensure these “become dominant over time.”

– The Trouble with Shariah — Yahya Birt, the former City Circle chairman, seems sympathetic to the idea but notes problems squaring sharia with civil law. “More clarity about what Shariah actually means is essential to moving this debate forward constructively.”

– Islam Channel — This is a London-based satellite broadcaster by and for Muslims. Click on News-08-02-08 to get Friday’s newscast, with a long interview with Lord Nazir Ahmed. Note he says Muslims in Britain who want sharia law to encompass all aspects of life should move to a Muslim country that tries to do that.

– BBC Reporting Religion — An interview with Baroness Haleh Afshar, a law professor who opposes introducing any aspects of sharia in British law.

– A noble, reckless rebellion — Guardian columnist Madeleine Bunting says “there is something mad and admirable” in the archbishop’s refusal to turn complex ideas into soundbites.

– Misjudgment that made martyrs of others — Another Guardian columnist, Andrew Brown, says “there are certain things which may very well be true, and urgent and important, but which no archbishop can possibly say.”

– Catholics say their tribunals do not seek civil law enforcement — It’s easy to forget that the Roman Catholic Church also has its own tribunals for personal law issues such as divorce and remarriage, but does not seek any legal recognition for this process.

The late Indian mystic Maharishi Mahesh Yogi lived out his final years in a golden yellow wooden residence on a secluded site of a former monastery. His house was surrounded by a well-tended garden dotted with animal figures that lit up at night. Two blue elephant statues with raised trunks flanked the front gate.

Visitors removed their shoes when entering the building constructed in a traditional Vedic architectural style in harmony with natural law patterns of orientation, placement, proportion and materials. Nearby was a tent decorated with pots of roses, daffodils and orchids. Rajas in white robes and golden crowns sat on red velvet seats, sometimes drifting off into deep contemplation.

India? Nepal? No, the Netherlands. The former Beatles guru, the man who brought Indian mysticism to the West and attracted westerners to his ashram in India, lived his last years in the Dutch countryside, close to the small town of Vlodrop near the German border.

The most interesting part of the house was the “Centre of Silence” right in the middle. It sounds like it might be their main meditation room, but it turned out to be a meeting room for the Maharishi’s Global Country of World Peace movement.

The room was full of flowers and pictures of Indian saints hung on the walls, but my eyes were immediately drawn to the table in the middle of the room, which was covered in trays overflowing with glistening golden coins.

Each tray was marked by a national flag from around the world and brimming with the coins of various countries tinted in gold.

“The gold coins symbolise the fact that the Maharishi believed that every nation should have affluence,” a spokesman said.

The Maharishi died at his home overnight on Wednesday at 91. The memorial service was held in Vlodrop on Thursday and a funeral is due to take place in the Indian city of Allahabad on Monday.

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams has set off a storm in Britain by saying that some aspects of sharia Islamic law would have to be integrated into the legal system there. There has been almost unanimous criticism of his proposals, including from some Muslim politicians. I’ve read through both his BBC interview and Temple Festival speech to see if there is another message that is being drowned out by the headlines and hullabaloo. There are signs of one, but there are so many questionable assumptions and assertions about Islam and sharia in there that these issues naturally dominate.

The archbishop’s statement about some aspects of sharia being”unavoidable” is so clear that it is hard to argue in his defence that it was taken out of context or hardened up by headline-hungry hacks. This is not like Pope Benedict’s ill-fated Regensburg speech in 2006, where the pontiff quoted a Byzantine emperor slamming Islam and later said he didn’t mean to say he agreed with it. Williams talked about accommodating some aspects of sharia law and spoke in detail about this.

His main complaint seems to be summed up in this passage late in the speech: “One of the most frequently noted problems in the law in this area is the reluctance of a dominant rights-based philosophy to acknowledge the liberty of conscientious opting-out from collaboration in procedures or practices that are in tension with the demands of particular religious groups.” His example for this is the case of Catholic adoption agencies in Britain that have been told they must stop refusing to provide children to gay couples or risk being shut down. The law should allow opt-outs for cases of conscience, he argues, something that is already allowed for doctors who refuse to perform abortions. He also notes that Orthodox Jews have their own courts for some religious issues. So his argument seems to be that opt-outs are needed and Muslims need to have theirs.

Simon Barrow, director of the religion think tank Ekklesia, told me he thought “there may be a more reasonable case here than what’s come over.” But the former theology professor tripped up by trying to discuss the issues in public as if he were back in academe. The BBC interview only compounded this by adding the word “unavoidable.”

Williams made several assumptions and assertions about sharia law that cried out for explanation. If he held a news conference to explain his thinking, here are a few that I would expect to be challenged.

Some points by Williams (”ABC“) in the BBC interview:

ABC – “Sharia is a method rather than a code of law … there’s a lot of internal debate within the Islamic community generally about the nature of Sharia and its extent.” — Q. If sharia is so unclear, how can it be accomodated into something as exacting as a Western legal code?

ABC — “The principle, the vision, that animates the Islamic legal provision (on women’s rights) needs broadening.” — Q. Who will decide how to reform women’s rights in Islam and ensure that all sharia courts in Britain apply it? Who will suspend the traditional sharia rule that a woman is worth half a man when it comes to issues like inheritance or testimony in court?

ABC — “It would be quite wrong to say that we could ever licence so to speak a system of law for some community which gave people no right of appeal.” — Q. What is the purpose of allowing religious courts if defendants can turn around and appeal to civil courts to overturn decisions against them?

ABC — “That principle that there’s one law for everybody is an important pillar of our social identity as a Western liberal democracy, but I think it’s a misunderstanding to suppose that that means people don’t have other affiliations, other loyalties which shape and dictate how they behave in society.” — Q. Should Britain undermine such a fundamental legal principle to accomodate a minority (and probably a minority within that minority)? Is this the only way to do it? Would decisions by a sharia court, such as a divorce, have to be confirmed by a civil court?

Some points from the Temple Festival speech:

ABC — “There are a good many voices arguing for an extension of the liberty of ijtihad – basically reasoning from first principles rather than simply the collation of traditional judgments.” Q. — Aren’t most of those Muslims stressing ijtihad the kind of liberal Muslims whose views are rejected by the more traditional scholars who would man a sharia court bench?

ABC — “This account would be hotly contested by some committed Islamic primitivists, by followers of Sayyid Qutb and similar polemicists; but it is fair to say that the great body of serious jurists in the Islamic world would recognise this degree of political plurality as consistent with Muslim integrity. ” Q. — Who defines who the ‘primitivists’ are and whether their views get a hearing?

ABC –”There needs to be access to recognised authority acting for a religious group … if we were to see more latitude given in law to rights and scruples rooted in religious identity, we should need a much enhanced and quite sophisticated version of such a body, with increased resource and a high degree of community recognition, so that ‘vexatious’ claims could be summarily dealt with.” Q. – There is no single religious authority in Islam and Muslims themselves often disagree on certain issues. How can Britain succeed in creating something Muslims themselves have not produced?

Andrew Brown put it well in The Guardian Comment is Free blog: “Dr Williams, characteristically, is interested in the arguments over what sharia law actually says. The rest of the country is more interested in whether and how it might be enforced. Only if Islamic law can be reduced to a game played between consenting adults can it be acceptably enforced in this country; and that’s not, I think, how it is understood by its practitioners. Let’s hope I’m wrong.”

Have you noticed any other questions that should be put to His Grace?

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, spiritual leader of the world’s Anglicans, has said the introduction of some aspects of sharia, Islamic law in Britain, was unavoidable. Other religions enjoyed tolerance of their laws in Britain, he told the BBC, and he called for a “constructive accommodation” with Muslim practice in areas such as marital disputes.

Williams stressed that “nobody in their right mind would want to see in this country the kind of inhumanity that’s sometimes been associated with the practice of the law in some Islamic states; the extreme punishments, the attitudes to women as well.

“There are ways of looking at marital dispute, for example, which provide an alternative to the divorce courts as we understand them. In some cultural and religious settings they would seem more appropriate.” He also said that the argument that “there’s one law for everybody … I think that’s a bit of a danger“.

Talk about opening a can of worms … Who would decide which sharia laws would apply and which would not? Would Muslims be able to choose between the civil and the sharia courts? Could defendants appeal to civil courts if they thought a sharia court decision violated their basic rights? And is Williams right to say there is a danger in having one law for everybody?

What do you think about this?

P.S. — By coincidence, Williams spoke up for sharia on the same day as Britain denied a visa to Sheikh Youssef al-Qaradawi, one of Islam’s leading preachers known for his sermons on the Arabic-language satellite television channel Al Jazeera.

Preparations are under way for a planned visit to the Vatican by representatives of the “Common Word” Muslim appeal for a theological dialogue between Christianity and Islam. This group of Muslim scholars and leaders got to be known as the “138″ because that was the number of initial signatories, but the total has grown to 221, so that label is a bit confusing now. Anyway, veteran vaticanista Sandro Magister informs us that five Muslim representatives were at the Vatican early this week to start preparing for the visit expected to take place in the next month or so. One interesting aspect is simply the geographical mix of people involved — they come from Turkey, Britain, Jordan, Libya and Italy.

Discussion of this initiative continues apace.

The conservative U.S. Catholic author George Weigel argues that the”Common Word” authors “seemed to be trying to change the subject ” in their statements about the planned dialogue because they did not address what Pope Benedict cited as discussion points when he addressed the Roman Curia in December 2006. In that speech, Benedict said Muslims and Christians had to “counter a dictatorship of positivist reason that excludes God from the life of the community and from public organizations” and “welcome the true conquests of the Enlightenment, human rights and especially the freedom of faith and its practice, and recognise these also as being essential elements for the authenticity of religion.”

In his weekly column, the National Catholic Reporter’s Vatican expert, John Allen, has a long interview with Father Thomas Michel S.J., one of the Catholic Church’s leading experts on Islam. Allen notes two interesting points Michel makes:

• Michel said: “It’s about time that somebody moved the conversation off geopolitical conflicts and onto faith questions.” Although some Vatican officials have argued that inter-religious dialogue ought to be seen as part of a broader dialogue among cultures, Michel said he doesn’t share that view. “Religion is already too often relegated to the status of folklore, of being a mere artifact of culture,” he said. “Muslims are making us all aware that if we’re not talking directly about God and religion, we’re not accomplishing anything.”

• I asked Michel to comment on one issue certain to surface in any Muslim-Christian conversation: “reciprocity,” or the insistence that if Muslim immigrants in the West receive the benefit of religious freedom and protection of law, Christian minorities in the world’s 56 Muslim-majority states ought to get the same deal. “We have to be careful,” Michel said. “Reciprocity is not a gospel value, but something that comes out of diplomatic and trade negotiations.” It was entirely appropriate, Michel said, to insist that Muslims treated minorities fairly. On the other hand, he said, respect for human dignity could not become a bargaining chip.

Sohail Nakhooda, editor-in-chief of Islamica magazine, kept the focus on what Muslims and Christians have in common. He made two interesting points about that in an interview for the Venice-based journal Oasis :

• “The document definitely caught people by surprise, particularly the naysayers in both religions who prefer to keep complete theological distance to legitimise their polemics … the document generated dialogue within and between communities. Its aim is not to whittle away differences in doctrine or, say, soteriology, but it is more about a recognition that we need to retrieve and learn to appreciate shared history and shared theological principles.

• “What is innovative and seminal about ‘A Common Word’ is that it starts from unity and moves to difference, rather than from difference to unity. It began with unity, that is, with what both communities shared deeply. That unity, or sharedness, was to be the basis for difference. This is an altogether different way of approaching the problem of intercultural relations and of plurality; it preserves their religious and cultural identities; it enables each to come together on solid theological grounds whose basis are in their own scriptures and which both share. They may disagree, and naturally they will, but when dialogue is based on the dual principles of love of God and of neighbour, it will ensure that they always leave as friends and that their disagreement does not escalate into all-out conflict.”

It’s interesting to see some people such as Weigel pointing to a large gap between Christianity and Islam and others like Nakhooda stressing what links them. Which approach do you think is more realistic or has more chance of fostering understanding?