It’s another day in the life of the busy Obama administration.  In this case, it means another day of despair for America’s social and religious conservatives.

President Barack Obama lifted restrictions on federal funding of human embryonic stem cell research on Monday, angering abortion opponents but cheering those who believe further scientific investigations could lead to breakthrough treatments for many diseases. You can see our report here.

Since taking office on Jan. 20, Obama has also lifted a ban on funding for overseas groups or clinics that provide or counsel on abortion services, rescinded a Bush administration rule to protect health workers who refuse to provide services and information on moral grounds, and publicly backed the constitutional separation between church and state which he said America’s founding fathers “wisely drew.”

This is a sharp departure from his predecessor, George W. Bush, whose eight years in office represented a challenge to the country’s liberals. Now it’s conservative Christians, who comprise a key base for the opposition Republican Party, who find themselves in a dilemma.

Religious and social conservatives oppose embryonic stem cell research because it involves destruction of human embryos.

Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, a leading member of the Republican Party’s conservative Christian wing,  summed up this view in a statement: “If an embryo is a life, and I believe strongly that it is life, then no government has the right to sanction their destruction for research purposes.”

Obama also signed a presidential memorandum directing the head of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy to develop a strategy for “restoring scientific integrity to government decision-making.”

Some scientists accused Bush of sacrificing scientific research and subverting scientific findings to appease his conservative political and religious base, not only on stem cells but on climate change policy, energy and reproductive and end of life issues 

If you tune into conservative Christian radio stations or read press releases and blogs from groups such as the Family Research Council, it’s clear that the “Religious Right” sees more gloom and liberal doom on the horizon.

As Obama moves to unravel the Bush legacy on social and scientific policies, they are likely to have more sleepless nights over the next four years.

(Photo: A human embryonic stem cell line derived at Stanford University is seen in this handout photo REUTERS/Julie Baker/Stanford University School of Medicine/California Institute for Regenerative Medicine/Handout, March 9, 2009)

U.S. President Barack Obama has pleased some religiously motivated activists in his first week in office and angered others, setting the stage for “culture war battles” to come.

Obama courted voters of faith during his election and several groups were pleased by his decision on Thursday to close Guantanamo prison and bar harsh interrogation techniques of terrorism suspects that critics said amounted to torture.

“The religious community has labored faithfully for three years to end U.S.-sponsored torture. We are grateful today for this important step,” said Linda Gustitus, president of the National Religious Campaign Against Torture.

Some of the most active critics of the detention policies of former president George W. Bush were drawn from the faith community and included centrist evangelicals, Catholics and Jewish groups.

But Friday’s move by Obama to lift restrictions on U.S. government funding for groups that provide abortion services or counseling abroad, reversing a key social policy of his Republican predecessor, has roiled religious conservatives. You can see our report here.

It is probably true that few of these conservatives voted for Obama in the first place and that the move was critical to maintain the support of a key Democratic Party base.

The withdrawn policy has been been called the Mexico City Policy because it was unveiled at a United Nations conference there in 1984 and became one of the centerpiece social policies of the conservative administration of former President Ronald Reagan, a Republican.
Critics call it the “gag rule” because it also cuts funds to groups that advocate or lobby for the lifting of abortion restrictions, so they say it infringes on free speech. They also say it has reduced health care for some of the world’s poorest women.
Former President Bill Clinton, a Democrat, rescinded the rule when he took office in January 1993 and his successor, Republican George W. Bush, reinstated it in January 2001.

Many conservative Christians are convinced that the next big change in abortion policy will be the passage and signing of the Freedom of Choice Act, which they claim will sweep away virtually all of the existing restictions on abortion rights such as parental notification laws.

But Obama has also pledged to expand programs to help single mothers and make contraceptives more available — policies that have won approval even from some religious abortion rights opponents because they say such action will reduce the need for abortions as well as their numbers.

Stay tuned: the story of Obama presidency and the “faith vote” may prove more interesting in some ways than that of the previous occupant of the White House.

(Photo: President Barack Obama attends the National Prayer Service/REUTERS/Larry Downing, Jan 21, 2009, USA)

Cardinal Renato Martino, the papal aide who angered Israel and Jews by comparing Gaza to a “big concentration camp” is no novice at being outspoken or controversial. The southern Italian cardinal speaks his mind, loves to talk and sometimes has had to pay the price. Martino, head of the Vatican’s Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace (effectively its justice minister), has a laundry list of people and governments with whom he has clashed. But that hasn’t stopped him.

(Photo: Cardinal Martino at the Vatican, 12 April 2005/Tony Gentile)

Perhaps his most famous remark came in December, 2003 when, shortly after U.S. troops captured former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, Martino told a news conference at the Vatican that U.S. military were wrong to show video footage of Saddam. “I felt pity to see this man destroyed, (the military) looking at his teeth as if he were a cow. They could have spared us these pictures,” he said at the time.

The “treated like a cow” remark was heard around the world and, needless to say, was not very appreciated in the White House. The Vatican had opposed the U.S.-invasion of Iraq in March of that year. In fact, a certain chill developed between Martino and then U.S. ambassador to the Vatican Jim Nicholson, a Vietnam veteran who later went on to become Bush’s Secretary for Veteran Affairs.

While that is the Martino quip everyone remembers, there has been no lack of others.

In 2005, ahead of a meeting of the Group of Eight rich nations summit in Scotland, he pointedly said the United States had to “open its eyes” about the problems of Africa. He angered anti-immigration parties in Italy by backing a proposal to allow Muslim pupils in Italy to study the Koran in state schools. He angered U.S. conservatives, including well-known television commentators, when he said Washington’s plan to build a fence on the U.S.-Mexican border was part of an “inhuman programme.”

(Photo: Cardinal Martino visits AIDS patient in Abidjan, 19 May 2007/Luc Gnago)

The former Vatican diplomat, who was the Holy See’s permanent observer to the United Nations in New York from 1986 to 2002, made headlines again last year when he called on Catholics to withdraw support their financial support for Amnesty International over the group’s call to decriminalise abortion.

Martino had more of a free rein during the papacy of Pope John Paul, who was not shy himself about speaking out. But Vatican sources have said Pope Benedict wants his cardinals to keep a lower profile and that Martino had been told by Secretary of State Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone to keep the lid on and not be so controversial.

The cardinal obviously disregarded the advice when he gave his interview with the Gaza=concentration camp comparison to the Italian on-line newspaper Ilsussidiario.net. His comment only added to the speculation Israel’s military operation in Gaza is putting Benedict’s tentatively planned trip to the Holy Land in May in serious doubt. While both the Vatican and Israel have officially said the trip is still on, diplomats are not so sure.

(Photo: Israeli weapons explode over Gaza, 9 Jan 2008/Suhaib Salem)

What do you think of Martino’s concentration camp comment and his outspokenness in general? Do you think the pope should go ahead with his planned Holy Land visit despite events in Gaza?

There’s been a lot of discussion over the past few months on this and other blogs about Barack Obama and religion. Looking back at it now that the campaign is over and he is starting to shape his administration, it’s interesting to see how many of those discussions shed little light on what he would actually do. There were comments about him being a hidden Muslim, for example, or not a real Christian. That speculation seemed based on thin evidence and the assumption he was running for preacher and cleric-in-chief rather than president and commander-in-chief. As a journalist covering religion in public life, after learning whether a candidate professes a certain faith, I want to know how that faith will really influence his or her decisions in office. This is not necessarily the same as listing the soundbite positions used on the campaign trail.

(Photo: Barack Obama at the Apostolic Church of God in Chicago, 15 June 2008/John Gress)

Seen from this point of view, probably the most interesting fact about Barack Obama’s religious views is one that rarely gets mentioned. It’s that he’s an admirer of the late American Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr (1892-1971). The President-elect has clearly named “America’s leading public theologian” as a major influence on his thinking. It comes out less in specific positions than in the way he looks at problems and discusses policies in terms with a ”Niebuhrian” ring about them.

In April 2007, Obama told David Brooks of the New York Times that Niebuhr was one of his favourite thinkers.  So I asked, What do you take away from him? Brooks asked:

“I take away,” Obama answered in a rush of words, “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world, and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate those things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter realism.”

Brooks noted that this was “a pretty good off-the-cuff summary” of Niebuhr’s The Irony of American History. Although written in 1952 during the Cold War (and recently republished), that short book reads today like a warning against what historian Andrew J. Bacevich calls “the evangelical moment in U.S. foreign policy” marked by “an urge to launch crusades against evil-doers.”

Since domestic issues are so different now, I asked Niebuhr’s biographer Richard Wightman Fox for his view of the theologian’s influence here. He first mentioned Niebuhr’s belief — which he shared with another Obama favourite, Abraham Lincoln — that God acts in history but human beings cannot know his plans. This puts limits on utopian aspirations and quick-fix approaches. “This is very much part of Obama’s sensibility,” Fox said.

(Photo: cover of The Irony of American History)

But both also have a larger vision behind their realism, he added, taking Obama’s economic plans as an example: “It’s about a sort of green New Deal. This is not just about economic stimulus or putting people back in their homes. It’s about a kind of social justice where the green revolution would actually make life better for the poor, the sick and the old who suffer disproportionately from environmental devastation.   He may not talk about that side of it as much as he talks about economic stimulus, but if we were to ask him what the Christian side or Niebuhrian side of his politics was, he would say something like this. There’s a vision behind the pragmatism.”

The Niebuhr perspective gives Fox a different view of another big blogosphere issue, Obama’s relationship with his former pastor Jeremiah Wright and his Trinity Church. “He didn’t go there because it was racially inflected ministry. He went there because it was a social justice inflected ministry. It was the United Church of Christ, and therefore I don’t think he ever subscribed to the particularly racial view Wright had,” Fox said. “It’s much more a Niebuhrian vision, where social justice comes first, and that’s for everybody, not just blacks but other groups that are excluded.”

One big unanswered question is what a Niebuhrian outlook means for Obama when it comes to an issue like abortion. “I don’t recall Niebuhr ever weighing in on that. It never came up,” Fox said, noting that Niebuhr focused mostly on foreign policy in years before his death in 1971.  But Obama has spoken about the “moral dimension of abortion” and ways to reduce the level of abortions — remarks that are not usually heard from Democrats.

(Photo: University of Southern California history professor Richard Wightman Fox)

Niebuhr could be so nuanced in his positions that both conservatives and liberals cite him as an influence. During his campaign, Obama pleased liberals by pledging to pass the Freedom of Choice Act (FOCA) as soon as he became president, which would effectively scrap federal and state limits on abortion. This has become a major issue for anti-abortion activists, including the Roman Catholic Church, who are actively campaigning against it. Since being elected, though, several of Obama’s key appointments have pleased conservatives and disappointed liberals. Some observers think Obama has no real intention of pushing FOCA through when he has so many pressing economic issues before him.  Is he planning to finesse his position here to something more balanced, complex and, well … Niebuhrian?

The U.S. Democratic Party has gained a larger following over the past two decades but America’s ideological landscape has remained largely unchanged over the past two decades, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press. You can see the analysis here.

What is of interest for readers of this blog may be the implications of this “cultural trench warfare” — with neither side gaining much ground from the other — for red-hot social issues such as abortion rights and the future prospects for both the Republicans and the Democrats.

“The Democratic Party’s advantage in party identification has widened over the past two decades, but the share of Americans who describe their political views as liberal, conservative or moderate has remained stable during the same period. Only about one-in-five Americans currently call themselves liberal (21 percent), while 38 percent say they are conservative and 36 percent describe themselves as moderate. This is virtually unchanged from recent years; when George W. Bush was first elected president, 18 percent of Americans said they were liberal, 36 percent were conservative and 38 percent considered themselves moderate,” the report, released late on Tuesday, says.

On the divisive issue of abortion rights, the report, using survey data from October, said 57 percent of Americans believed it should be legal. Breaking opinion up by ideology, it found that 43 percent of conservatives were in favour of it being legal while 77 percent of self-described liberals held that view.

This is not surprising — there are many Americans who regard themselves as economic or “tough on crime” or national security conservatives who still support abortion rights. What may surprise some is that 19 percent of liberals feel it should be illegal. These could be people influenced by Catholic social teaching or other trends who regard themselves as liberal on most issues but not this one.

For all the talk of an emerging evangelical center, the report says that: “White evangelical Protestants are the most conservative Republicans: 79 percent describe their political views as conservative, compared with 17 percent who say they are moderate and just two percent who call themselves liberal.”

This suggests that they will remain a key Republican Party base — but in an age of cultural trench warfare, can the party rely on this base to propel itself back into power? On the other hand, the survey’s findings certainly reinforce the wide perception that America is a “center right” country. Maybe that helps to explain the Democratic Party’s subtle shift on abortion rights to an emphasis on reducing the number of abortions and talk of it being a “tragic choice?” If you can’t win them outright, do you need to find common ground in the no-man’s land between the trenches?

Does it also mean both sides are “dug in” for the long haul as they are winning few ideological converts from the other ? What do you think?

Two months ago, a Vatican official branded the U.S. Democrats the “party of death” because of its pro-choice stand on abortion. His words failed to sway millions of Catholics who cast their vote for Barack Obama.

Now, the Vatican will have to deal with the first pro-choice U.S. administration since that of former President Bill Clinton, with which it had very scratchy relations.

Nearly 25 percent of U.S. adults — about 30 million — are Catholic and, according to exit polls cited on the non-denominational Beliefnet website, some 54 percent of them voted for Obama as opposed to 46 percent for McCain.

Here’s the full text of Vatican correspondent Phil Pullella’s analysis.

The issue of whether Catholics could vote for Obama was widely debated on Catholic blogs during the campaign. Do you think his election has answered the question? Should the bishops keep the debate going with regular statements about his policies?

With the charge about the “party of death” still ringing in its ears, a group called Catholic Democrats has issued a Q&A on abortion setting out its case that faithful Roman Catholics can vote for Barack Obama despite his consistent pro-choice record. Catholic Democrats makes the same argument as the Matthew 25 network, i.e. that Democratic policies would actually reduce the abortion rate, which spiked under Republicans in the 1980s, fell during the Clinton administration and have leveled off — and may have begun rising again — in the Bush administration.

Former St. Louis Archbishop Raymond Burke, who is now prefect of the Vatican’s Supreme Court of the Apostolic Signature, told an Italian newspaper two weeks ago that the Democrats risked becoming the “party of death” for their support for abortion rights. Other U.S. bishops have criticised two prominent Catholic Democrats — vice presidential candidate Joe Biden and House speaker Nancy Pelosi — for suggesting the Catholic Church was anything but totally against abortion.

Catholic Democrats cites the bishops’ own guidebook, “Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship,” to stress that Catholics should not be one-issue voters and could vote for a candidate if his overall platform is morally good, despite a pro-choice plank that the Church regards as intrinsically evil. “If the only difference between two candidates is that one is pro-life and the other is pro-choice, then a pro-life voter should obviously vote for a pro-life candidate,” Catholic Democrats says. “However, elections are never so clear cut. Republican and Democratic candidates differ on many issues: healthcare, the war, the economy.”

The “Faithful Citizenship” guidelines do say that “as Catholics we are not single-issue voters” (item 42) and that “there may be times when a Catholic who rejects a candidate’s unacceptable position may decide to vote for that candidate for other morally grave reasons” (item 35). They also say “that all issues do not carry the same moral weight and that the moral obligation to oppose intrinsically evil acts has a special claim on our consciences and our actions. These decisions should take into account a candidate’s commitments, character, integrity, and ability to influence a given issue. In the end, this is a decision to be made by each Catholic guided by a conscience formed by Catholic moral teaching” (item 37).

Even though it leans heavily towards a “no” answer, “Faithful Citizenship” seems to leave a door open for the interpretation that Catholic Democrats and the Matthew 25 network favour. Nor do the bishops seem to have a clear view of how to end abortion.

Take a look at John Allen’s interview with Washington Archbishop Donald Wuerl, who offers no simple answers: “When you get into the realm of politics, the realm of translating the need to preserve life into the circumstances of our day, what is conceptually possible and what is pressingly obligatory now begin to become two different things. That’s why there is so much confusion. I don’t think you can make things black and white, I don’t think you can separate or rule out the grays.”

Wuerl would like to see the Supreme Court’s pro-choice ruling Roe v. Wade overturned but also says: “Politically right now, existentially, if Roe v. Wade is not overturned, is there any other possible strategy that’s going to work? That’s the question with which we’ve got to grapple.”

In the avalanche of comments we got on Phil Stewart’s original “party of death” post, many readers seemed firmly convinced the Church’s position unequivocally ruled out voting for a pro-choice candidate. Is there some gray area here after all?

Financial fears and campaign-trail mud-slinging have so dominated the U.S. presidential race in recent weeks that several issues worth serious debate have mostly drifted off the public radar screen. Judging by the latest presidential debate, one of them off on the sidelines now is abortion. This has hit my radar screen, though, because some Barack Obama supporters have made what seems to be an incredible claim — that the most pro-choice candidate in the running could actually lower the overall number of abortions in the United States. Huh?

The Matthew 25 Network, which calls itself “pro-life pro-Obama,” says “an Obama administration will do more than a McCain administration for the cause of life, by drastically reducing abortions through giving women and families the support and the tools they need to choose life.”

Over at Beliefnet, editor-in-chief Steve Waldman has two very interesting posts about this. The first one says that Obama supports Medicaid funding for abortion, which obviously would make getting one easier. The Democratic candidate also supports the Freedom of Choice Act, which “would wipe out state laws, including moderate ones that merely require parental notification for teens seeking abortion.” So it looks like total abortions would rise during an Obama administration.

But Waldman’s second post points to a rarely discussed aspect of the abortion issue: “during Democratic administrations (pro-choice administrations) the average annual abortion rate is virtually identical to that under Republican administrations.” There may be something to the Matthew 25 claim, he says, “however, Barack Obama has severely undermined his ability to make such an argument.”

Waldman’s second post is long and thoughtful, so I won’t try to condense it. Read it in full.

This paradox about abortion rates first caught my attention years ago when I was covering Germany’s reunification. Communist East Germany had abortion on demand while West Germany allowed abortion with several restrictions. When he tried to harmonise all eastern and western laws in an East-West treaty in a hurry before unification in 1990, West German Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble (who is once again interior minister in Berlin) found to his surprise that “at least according to the statistics, the protection of unborn life is neither more nor less guaranteed in East Germany than it is in West Germany. The number of abortions per capita is about equally high in both parts of Germany.” He and his East German counterpart had to leave the abortion issue out of the treaty because they couldn’t find away to resolve it in the short time available to them. It was left to the future united German parliament to decide and it basically adopted the western law.

We had a heated debate here about a Catholic archbishop calling the Democrats the “party of death.” What do you think of this Matthew 25 claim? Can some pro-choice policies really lower the abortion rate? Or is that not the question to ask at all?

If you’re a white evangelical or black Protestant attending church in America, you have probably heard a thing or two about homosexuality. If you’re Catholic, maybe not.

Those are among the findings of a new survey conducted by Public Religion Research on behalf of Faith in Public Life, a non-partisan resource center.

It found that among the white evangelicals and black Protestants surveyed, 67 percent said their pastor speaks out about the issue of homosexuality — among Catholics that number drops to 37 percent.

But Catholics at 78 percent were the most likely to hear about abortion while attending a religious service.

Hunger and poverty topped the list of what Americans from a range of Christian denominations hear in church. Among white mainline Protestants, 88 percent reported their clergy speaking about such things; among Catholics, 90 percent did.

Immigration was at the bottom of the list. Among white evangelical Protestants only 12 percent reported their pastors speaking about the issue.

The survey included a national sample of 2,000 adults including an oversample of 974 respondents aged 18 to 34. It was conducted from Aug 28 to Sept 19. The margin of error for the broader survey is +/- 2.5 percent and for the younger group it is +/- three percent.

(PHoto Credit: REUTERS/Shannon Stapleton, Aug 13, 2008. A church seen from inside a Greyhound bus in Alabama)