The Church of England fought back this week against the "seeming intolerance and illiberality" aimed at their faith by public bodies.

Often seen as a peacemaker in a multi-faith Britain, church leaders and priests said it was time to give more voice to their own religion.

Recently, the media has been dotted with stories about Christians being ostracised in their workplace because of their faith.

Last week, a community nurse was suspended after offering to pray for a patient's recovery before being reinstated, while this week a primary school receptionist was facing disciplinary action as a result of sending out an e-mail asking friends to pray for her daughter.

Archbishop of York John Sentamu said such behaviour "leads us to questions about how it is that those who share or express a trust in God - or more precisely, in these cases, in the Christian faith - are deemed worthy of discipline".

Writing in the Daily Mail, the archbishop said these two cases were the symptom of a lack of understanding of Christianity, and it was time to reinstate its status.

"Those who display intolerance and ignorance, and would relegate the Christian faith to just another disposable lifestyle choice, argue that they operate in pursuit of policies based on the twin aims of 'diversity and equality'.

"Yet in the minds of those charged with implementing such policies, 'diversity' apparently means every colour and creed except Christianity, the nominal religion of the white majority; and 'equality' seemingly excludes anyone, black or white, with a Christian belief in God," he wrote.

"Those employed as public servants and charged with running our local services, be they schools, hospitals or councils, receive their public authority only under a system of governance which is constitutionally established from the 'Queen in Parliament under God.'

"For public servants to use their authority to deny the legitimacy of the Christian faith, when they receive such authority only through the operation of that same faith, is not only unacceptable but an affront.

"The requirement of common consent that underpins any operation of the democratic contract is being placed under strain by those who, with the best of motives, are making the worst of mistakes."

He added: "For those who despair at the treatment meted out to these Christian women, the message is clear: wake up, Christian England!"

The Revd. David Felix told the church's General Synod a "religious illiteracy" existed in many public bodies.

"They find it hard to acknowledge that the Church of England exists for the benefit of all, and not just its members," he said.

He called on members to become more involved in civic society.

"Civic society also exists for you and me," he said. "We've got to get stuck in and stay there.

"And if that means that we have to keep correcting, challenging or reminding the others at the table just who we are, then so be it."

Meanwhile, Paul Eddy asked the synod: "If the CofE, which values its parish system as a unique mission opportunity, does not actively seek to offer Christ to these people, could we be creating 'no-go areas for the Gospel' by a sin of omission?"

He added: "I would strongly argue that we are failing in our duty as Christians, and failing in our duty as the state church, if we do not offer the claims of Jesus Christ, and salvation through Him alone, to people of other faiths."

"We must not allow the arguments for diplomacy and social cohesion to detract from our primary calling to be Christ's disciples and evangelists."

Political scientist Samuel Huntington, whose controversial book “The Clash of Civilizations” predicted conflict between the West and the Islamic world, has died at age 81, Harvard University said on Saturday. You can see our story here.

In his 1996 “The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,” which expanded on his 1993 article in Foreign Affairs magazine, Huntington divided the world into rival civilizations based mainly on religious traditions such as Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Confucianism and said competition and conflict among them was inevitable.

His thesis was one of the most influential, controversial and widely debated in foreign affairs circles in the past decade or so.

His focus on religion rather than ideology as a source of conflict in the post-Cold War world triggered broad debate about relations between the Western and Islamic worlds, especially in the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States in 2001.

Huntington famously asserted that “Islam has bloody borders.”

“In Eurasia the great historic fault lines between civilizations are once more aflame,” he wrote. ”This is particularly true along the boundaries of the crescent-shaped Islamic bloc of nations from the bulge of Africa to central Asia. Violence also occurs between Muslims, on the one hand, and Orthodox Serbs in the Balkans, Jews in Israel, Hindus in India, Buddhists in Burma and Catholics in the Philippines.”

Fifteen years later, tensions between India and Pakistan are near the boiling point in the wake of last month’s attacks in Mumbai by Islamist militants; an Israeli military offensive has killed more than 300 people in Gaza over the last three days in the deadliest violence in the territory in decades; hundreds died in Muslim/Christian clashes in Nigeria last month; and the United States finds itself bogged down in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But next month America will swear in its first black president, a Christian whose Kenyan father had an Islamic background. And there has been an outburst in recent months of inter-faith dialogue and initiatives, including at the street level in tense places such as Nigeria.

What do you think? Are civilizations doomed to clash, especially if they are divided by religion? Or can cooler heads prevail?

The latest issue of The Economist has a provocative essay on Darwinism asking if Charles Darwin’s insights can be used profitably by policymakers. You can read it online here.

“America … executes around 40 people a year for murder. Yet it still has a high murder rate. Why do people murder each other when they are almost always caught and may, in America at least, be killed themselves as a result?” it asks.

It goes on to ask why men still earn more than women 40 years after the feminist revolution and why racism persists.

“Traditionally, the answers to such questions, and many others about modern life, have been sought in philosophy, sociology, even religion. But the answers that have come back are generally unsatisfying. They describe, rather than explain. They do not get to the nitty-gritty of what it truly is to be human. Policy based on them does not work. This is because they ignore the forces that made people what they are: the forces of evolution.” it says.

The essay is not proposing some new theory of eugenics or related nonsense — it just lays out interesting areas where human behavior may be explained by evolution and asks if this could help inform public policy.

What is of particular interest to readers of this blog is the waves that Darwin’s theory of natural selection — more popularly referred to as his theory of evolution — has stirred among many of the world’s religious faithful. And as 2009 will mark the 150th anniversary of the publication of “On The Origin of Species,” one can expect a flood of Darwin-related debates and publications in the coming months.

The late American historian Richard Hofstadter wrote on the 100th anniversary of Darwin’s seminal work that “… mankind has lived so long under the brilliant light of evolutionary science that we tend to take its insights for granted.”

Fifty years later, in Hofstadter’s America, many evangelical Christians dispute the claim that Darwin’s theory provides “insights.” They argue that the Bible is the literal word of God and any theory that suggests organisms evolved over hundreds of millions of years or that we are related to the Great Apes cannot be true.

Proponents of “Intelligent Design” maintain that life is so complex that it must have had a creator. Critics say this is biblical creationism under a different name and that its claims to use scientific methods are absurd.

Darwin’s theory has long been the foundation of modern biological inquiry. Its supporters,  nearly all of the scientific community, draw on an abundance of evidence to support their view, including the diversity of life on islands, even those in close proximity to each other.

This highlights how isolation appears to spur evolution in different directions, which is what got Darwin going in the first place.

We have written and blogged at length on Darwin’s reception among various religious groups. The Vatican believes the theory of natural selection is compatible with the Bible; within the Islamic world there is a growing creationist movement.

Darwin is certain to stir up more fiery debates in 2009.

A thought-provoking new book on Christianity’s “lost history” holds that one of the central causes of 14th century religious persecution may well have been climate change. You can read my interview with author Philip Jenkins about “The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand-Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa and Asia — and How It Died” on the Reuters website here.

“The Chronology of Christian sufferings under Islam closely mirrors that of Jews in Christian states,” he writes, noting that “Around 1300, the world was changing, and definitely for the worse.”

“If we seek a common factor that might explain this simultaneous scapegoating of vulnerable minorities, by far the best candidate is climate change, which was responsible for many economic changes in these years, and increased poverty and desperation across the globe.”

Jenkins notes that after a period of warming that had seen Europe’s population double from the 11th to the 13th centuries, the world entered a period of cooling which historians have long dubbed “The Little Ice Age.” Cooler, wetter summers hit harvests, leading to famines in Europe. Meanwhile, in the Middle East, there was widespread environmental collapse in the face of desertification.

This was all followed of course by the Black Death of the mid-14th century, which struck severely weakened societies and in Europe saw fresh persecution and pogroms against Jewish communities. This pushed many Jews to less developed, eastern regions of the continent; and Christians in Muslim societies also eked out their existence mostly in marginal or remote areas.

Jenkins is hardly the first historian to highlight the impact of climate change on past societies. But his observations are sobering against the backdrop of global warming and environmental pressures in our own time and the role many analysts think they are playing in stoking social conflict in places such as Nigeria and India, where religious tensions run high.

Climate change in our day — which most scientists attribute to greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels — is seen exacerbating conflict in poor, rural communities in the developing world in part because of competition over increasingly scarce resources such as arable land and water. It may also raise tensions in overcrowded urban areas as rural migrants leave the land.

As an aside, it is interesting to note that some fundamentalist Christians in the United States think climate change may be a sign of the End of Times — a widespread take in the 14th century on that period’s turmoil. Other U.S. Christians have joined the green crusade on the grounds that rising temperatures and their associated problems will be felt most harshly by the poor, making global warming a moral issue.

What do you think? Are there lessons from the links between religious conflict and climate change in the past that we can usefully draw on today?

Of all the things to get exercised about, yoga would seem to be an unlikely candidate for controversy. But such has been the case in Malaysia this week.

Malaysia’s prime minister declared on Wednesday that Muslims can after all practice the Indian exercise regime, so long as they avoid the meditation and chantings that reflect Hindu philosophy. This came after Malaysia’s National Fatwa Council told Muslims to roll up their exercise mats and stop contorting their limbs because yoga could destroy the faith of Muslims.

It has been a tough month for the fatwa council chairman, Abdul Shukor Husin, who in late October issued an edict against young women wearing trousers, saying that was a slippery path to
lesbianism. Gay sex is outlawed in Malaysia.

The council’s rulings, and other religious controversies, might at first blush seem to indicate a growing strain of conservative Islam in mostly Muslim Malaysia. But it could also
reflect the growing unease of Islamic authorities in defending the faith in a rapidly modernising Malaysia where non-Muslims constitute 40 percent of the population and are increasingly
asserting their rights.

The yoga fatwa stirred up a hornet’s next, not only in the blogosphere where that could be expected, but in another deeply conservative Malaysian institution — the sultans.  Sultan Sharafuddin Idris Shah, who presides ceremonially over the central state of Selangor, said Abdul’s fatwa council should have consulted the nine hereditary Malay rulers who take turns being Malaysia’s king before announcing the ruling.  The highly unusual comment from one of the sultans on a
policy matter suggests some discord about who speaks for Malaysia’s Muslims on matters of faith. Islam is the official religion in multi-religious Malaysia and the constitution designates the nine sultans as guardians of the faith. The (rotating) king is the head of Islam in Malaysia.

The sultans, for their part, have seen what remains of their secular powers eroded over the years, particularly under the two-decade administration of former prime minister Mahathir
Mohamad. They could be defending a last bastion of royal prerogoative in the religious arena.

Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badaw, who has been preaching a moderate brand of Islam called Islam Hadhari, moved to contain the damage saying Muslims can do exercises like the “sun
salutation” so long as they don’t start chanting.

The fatwa council’s rulings, in any case, are not legally binding until they are adopted as national laws or sharia (Islamic) laws in individual states. There seems to be little appetite for that. No laws have been made against young women wearing trousers. The government in May dropped a proposal to restrict women from travelling abroad by themselves after a storm of derision from women activist groups.

But even as the flap over yoga is relaxing, the government is crossing swords with Christian groups.

A Christian federation  claimed Bibles were seized at entry points earlier this year. Malaysian Catholics are having an ontological argument with the authorities about the word “Allah”.
The government banned the Malay-language section of a Catholic weekly newspaper from using the word, saying it creates confusion among Muslims. Catholics say Allah is simply the Arabic word for
“God”, and has long been used in Malay-language Bibles. (A Dutch bishop has stirred debate in Europe with a similar argument)

Non-muslims, who constitute 40 percent of Malaysia’s population, sometimes worry that things such as the fuss over fatwas and words for God, may augur a mini-clash of civilisations in Malaysia, which last year saw a harsh crackdown on Indian rights protesters. It was one year ago that 10,000 ethnic Indians defied tear gas and waterr cannon to voice complaints of racial and religious discrimination in its biggest ever anti-government street protest.

“Those who are thirsty need to seek the right fountain: the one without the spoilt water” — Angolan Cardinal Alexandre do Nascimento

There seems to be quite a thirst for faith these days in Angola, which abandoned Marxism in the 1990s after three decades of civil war and is now experiencing a boom in religious sects that often mix traditional African belief in witchcraft with elements of the Christianity brought by the Portuguese colonialists.

Some 900 religious groups are waiting for the official registration required by the government, which has launched a campaign to stamp out illegal sects in the capital Luanda and provinces bordering Democratic Republic of Congo where witchcraft is believed to be widespread. Last week, an ailing 28-year-old woman died when her sect barred her from seeking medical treatment and 40 children were rescued from two other religious groups that accused them of possesing evil powers.

Cardinal Alexandre do Nascimento, the leading Catholic cleric in this mostly Catholic country, told Reuters in an interview (full story here) that he saw a bright side to the sect boom: “The positive side of this phenomenon is that it shows there is an increasing thirst for God. But those who are thirsty need to seek the right fountain: the one without the spoilt water.”

The Roman Catholic Church has also grown since in the early 1990s, but is increasingly being challenged by evangelical churches and these syncretic sects, often supported by poor people lacking jobs and education. Maybe the cardinal shouldn’t be so optimistic after all?

It’s already been a big theme in Germany, France, Turkey and the Netherlands, and now the Austrian far right is asking: Should public employees be allowed to wear Muslim headscarves at work?

Two women have become the first schoolteachers in Vienna to wear headscarves while teaching.

One is also a local centre-left Social Democrat politician.

Teachers in other parts of the country already wear headscarves, and there is no law banning public employees from wearing such items as there is in some other European countries.  

But the two women have now found themselves featured on the front page of the Austrian daily Oesterreich and have drawn criticism from the resurgent far right, which won a combined one-third of the vote in a parliamentary election several weeks ago.

“Headscarves are a symbol of Islamism and female oppression. They have no place in Austria,” says Heinz-Christian Strache, head of the far-right Freedom Party, which has now become Austria’s third most powerful.

The director of the state schools in that part of Vienna fully supports the women — one-third of the school children come from Turkish families so the women “break down linguistic and cultural barriers”, she says.

But some feel a division between religion and state is more important.

“Something that would be unthinkable in Turkey is a reality in red (left-leaning) Vienna,” says Martin Strutz, the general secretary of the right-wing Alliance for Austria’s Future.

“The (Vienna) Social Democrats don’t value the separation between church and state any more,” he adds, calling for a complete ban on headscarves and veils in public office.

While Freedom and Alliance call for symbols of Islam to be removed from state schools, they do not seem to object to symbols of Christianity in Austria, which is predominantly Roman Catholic.

The ban on religious symbols in France, on the other hand, covers all faiths in a strict separation of religion and state. The arguments to uphold the ban there also focused more on women’s rights, rather than equating the veil with Islamism.

By targeting Muslims specifically and raising fears about Islam, the Austrian far-right parties can touch on the kind of themes that helped them win so many votes in September 

Comedian and talk-show host Bill Maher has issued the latest “call to atheist arms” in his recently released documentary “Religulous.”

He wants his fellow non-believers and doubters to “come out of the closet” to counter what he views as religion’s dangerous influence on the world. To do so, he preaches to the converted in “Religulous”, a scathing documentary that skewers Christianity, Islam and Judaism.

The film is part of the “neo-atheist” backlash to the rising influence of religion in public life, following a path recently blazed by a trio of best-selling books by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Dawkins, a renowned Oxford biologist, has also presented a documentary critical of religion called “Root of all Evil?” on British television.

The Maher film obviously aims to entertain — the audience at the viewing I attended in a suburb north of Dallas laughed almost non-stop through the whole show and a colleague of mine in Arizona reported the same at one he attended. You can see our report here.

But Maher clearly has a political purpose in mind just weeks ahead of the Nov. 4 presidential election between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain. The latter picked conservative Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin , a staunch conservative Christian, as his running mate to energize an evangelical base which Maher regards as scary.

Maher notes that America’s religiously unaffiliated population is 16 percent, a number drawn from Pew surveys. He pointedly says this is a larger percentage of the population than several other influential lobby groups such as the National Rifle Association. Hence his call for doubters to “come out of the closet” — a call that other atheist groups and bloggers have been making in recent months.

For an example of this, see The Out Campaign.

America’s rates of religiosity are far higher than those found in most other developed countries. Some vocal non-believers believe peer and social pressure prevents others from expressing their doubt.

Maher sees this religiosity as a clear and present danger in a world bristling with nuclear and bio-chemical weapons. He doles out the blame all around, rapping the “End of Times” views of some conservative Christians but also radical Islam and militant Zionism.

What do you think? Is religion a “danger”? And will fellow non-believers heed Maher’s call and start emerging from the closet? Or is “disbelief” a difficult concept to rally around?

And they’re off!

Readers of this blog will know we have been following the “Common Word” initiative for Christian-Muslim dialogue from its beginning last October. We already have a long list of blog posts about how the 138 Muslim scholars invited Christian leaders to a new dialogue, how some churches responded promptly and positively while others (especially the Vatican and some evangelical Protestants) were more wary but came around, how the preparations for their dialogue have progressed, etc. Now the first in their series of dialogue conferences, with a Christian side made up mostly of United States Protestants (including some evangelicals), has kicked off at Yale Divinity School in New Haven, Connecticut.

The conference started with a closed-door meeting among theologians from Friday to Monday for an initial round of discussions of how Christianity and Islam view what the Common Word says are the two core principles they hold in common, i.e. that love of God and love of neighbor are the foundations of both faiths. This is one of the novel aspects of the Common Word initiative, identifying core concepts that many Christians and Muslims did not think they shared so closely. This half of the meeting is partly a getting-to-know-you session, since most of the Muslims come from the Middle East and Europe while most of the Christians come from the United States. But it is also a forum to test out some theological ideas in debates without television cameras or journalists hanging on every word. The journalist in me would like to be in there following the debates, but it’s obvious the participants need a little time warming up before they can discuss these issues in public. The second session, from Tuesday to Thursday, will be open to the public.

Since I’ve been in New York all this month at Union Theological Seminary attending a research colloquium run by CrossCurrents magazine, I was able to dash off to New Haven for the start of the conference and will be covering it this week. Here is my opening report on the meeting.

Several participants told me they saw this conference as the beginning of a new phase in relations between Christians and Muslims because the Common Word group could speak for a broad consensus of the mainline Muslims that Western critics often accuse of being silent when confronted with acts of Islamist terrorism. Individual Muslim leaders severely condemned Islamist attacks in New York, Madrid, London, Bali and elsewhere but their declarations often went unheard because Islam has no pope or other central authority who can speak for all Muslims. By providing a platform for mainstream Muslim scholars and leaders, the Common Word initiative gave them a voice that many Christian leaders have now recognized.

Listen, for example, to Mustafa Ceric, the grand mufti of Bosnia, as he recounts to me how mainstream Muslim scholars have been trying to establish a dialogue with Western leaders since 9/11.:

“Muslims were trying to find a way to reach the West, to send a message of opening new gates, new doors for a kind of dialogue. There were many attempts. but the most successful is this Common Word with 138 Muslim scholars who signed… the West has received this message more (clearly) than any other messages that we were trying to send. So the significance of this is that we have broken the ice of mistrust between West and Islam with this initiative and we have opened many doors now… I don’t think we’ve removed all suspicions yet, we have a lot of work to do, but this is a good beginning.

“You can send a message, but if there’s nobody there to receive it, it’s useless. Also, you may be ready to receive a message, but if there is nobody there to send it, then you’re also left empty-handed. Here I think we are fulfilling both sides.”

An interesting aside: two main figures at the conference on Friday were from former Yugoslavia, a country where Christians, Muslims and communists lived in relative peace until Serbian nationalists such as the late Slobodan Milosevic and the recently arrested Radovan Karadzic waged wars that tore the country apart. Ceric lives in Sarajevo, the once multicultural city besieged by Karadzic’s Bosnian Serb forces. By the way, he speaks fluent English thanks to this Ph.D studies at the University of Chicago. The other former Yugoslav is the conference’s Croatian-born co-host Miroslav Volf (picture below), a Protestant theologian who runs the Yale Center for Faith and Culture.

Volf told me: “One of the most exciting things about this conference is that it brings to the table a signficiant number of evangelicals. In this country, evangelicals command quite a bit of influence on politics. If they’re open to improving Muslim-Christian relations, I think that’s good news.”

Among the evangelicals who signed a Yale Divinity School letter welcoming the Common Word initiative are Leith Anderson and Richard Cizik of the National Association of Evangelicals, Richard Mouw of Fuller Theological Seminary, David Neff of Christianity Today, Jim Wallis of Sojourners and Rick Warren of the Saddleback Church.

Many evangelicals have not exactly been friendly to Islam in the past, so I’ll be asking evangelical leaders attending the public conference what made them support this initiative.

Do you have any questions you’d like put to them?

Religion reporters have been tracking the slow disintegration of the Anglican Communion since 2003 with one word itching away at the tips of their typing fingers — schism. We don’t get to write history with a capital “H” that often and the few times we do can be career high points. So the prospect of covering an event where you can draw parallels to the Great Schism of 1054 (east-west back then, north-south now, etc) is tempting. In the meantime, though, even a hint of a schism is enough to land the term in a story. But it has to have the right packaging — adjectives such as “potential” or “looming” or something else — to indicate the big kaboom has not actually happened (or at least not yet). So we can scratch the itch a bit, but not too much.

Covering the current orthodox Anglican conference GAFCON in Jerusalem, the Daily Telegraph has scratched at that itch really hard with a story headlined “Anglican church schism declared over homosexuality.” It took a 94-page guidebook for “a pilgrimage to a Global Anglican future” as proof that Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinole and his allies have finally cut their ties to the Anglican Communion. “Hardline church leaders have formally declared the end of the worldwide Anglican communion, saying they could no longer be associated with liberals who tolerate homosexual clergy,” it wrote.

Well, up to a point, as our news story reports. The guidebook, entitled “The Way, The Truth and The Life”, goes to the rhetorical brink of schism … and stops. “There is no longer any hope … for a unified Communion,” Akinola writes. “All journeys must end some day.” He gives no road map for the future.

Robert Duncan, the Episcopal bishop of Pittsburgh, also edged right up to the brink in a speech to GAFCON: “There remains no way to go forward together.” But no S-word…

Having followed this drama since gay bishop Gene Robinson’s consecration five years ago, I well understand the itch to finally write what seems to be the logical conclusion of this endless muddling through. But maybe a schism is not the conclusion we’ll get. Over at The Lead, Jim Naughton, spokesman for the Episcopal diocese of Washington, D.C., had an interesting take on why this goes on and on:

“Whether there will actually be schism is an open question, but at least one factor mitigates against it: as soon as schism is declared, the media will loose interest in the Anglican Churches of Nigeria and Uganda, and their small, but influential group of followers in the United States. (How much had you read about these Churches before the consecration of Gene Robinson?) At that point, these churches will no longer be useful to the donors who have made GAFCON possible, and the money will be reallocated to other fronts in the culture wars. It is in the interest of Akinola, Orombi, Minns, Sugden, etc. to sustain the Communion in a state of near-schism for as long as possible, and then, at some point, find a way short of schism to declare victory.”

Did you read much about the Anglican Communion before this dispute over Gene Robinson appeared? If not, do you think it will disappear from the news when and if the issue is ever solved?