Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, is well known as one of the leading activists of the Religious Right in the United States. Bishop Harry R. Jackson Jr, founder of the High Impact Leadership Coalition, is one of the most influential voices of the black conservative movement.

The two have come together to chart a future course for conservative Christian political activism in a just published book entitled “Personal Faith, Public Policy”. The issues they discuss include the value of life, poverty and justice and rebuilding the traditional family unit.

They argue that conservative Christians need to speak out more on issues like poverty and racial reconciliation while maintaining their opposition to abortion and gay rights. They say no one political party - i.e., the Republican Party - should assume to command evangelical support unless it delivers the goods and that born-again Christians should also woo Democrats.

They also say that an evangelically inspired third party is a “powerful possibility”.
The book is sure to raise some eye-brows. The authors say that “what Jesus warned would occur in the last days are almost identical to what some global warming theorists say is going to happen”, pointing to what they see is the parallel between scientific and Biblical predictions of famines and extreme weather events.

But they adopt the view of secular sceptics of climate change who say economic resources spent on capping carbon emissions would be better spent in areas like poverty alleviation. The authors spoke with Reuters about their book and the future of the Religious Right, whose obituary they say is being prematurely written - and not for the first time.

Q: You say the Religious Right is not dead. How will it change in the next few years?

PERKINS: “It’s growing more diverse and it’s maturing. And it’s becoming more focused on the issues as opposed to the more political or partisan side … ”

Q: How is it losing its partisan edge?

PERKINS: “In 2004 evangelicals were clearly very in line with the Republican Party but that’s because of what they were saying. George Bush campaigned very hard on the marriage issue … There was promise of a (federal) marriage amendment (to ban gay marriage) and of course after the election all of that fell by the way side. The Republicans did not advance the values agenda that they had committed to … The Republican Party has drifted away from those issues and to the degree that they drift away from those issues they will lose support …”

JACKSON: “I think you’ll find that if in fact the GOP moves away from a lot of the values that it has stood for you will find that (evangelicals) will have no problem moving into an independent kind of status.”

PERKINS: “That is actually happening. The polling data shows more and more evangelicals are not identifying with the Republican Party, they are identifying as independents. The way that this has been misconstrued is that somehow the Republican loss is a Democratic gain. That’s just not true…It’s not as if evangelicals have suddenly become liberal.”

Q: Bishop Jackson, you have called abortion a “black genocide”. Do you see an intrinsic racism on this issue from some on the liberal/left?

JACKSON: “I do believe that it is a strategic plan. We only need to look at Margaret Sanger’s (founder of the American Birth Control League which became Planned Parenthood) philosophical orientation. From the beginning she thought that she should exterminate inferior races … There is this openness to receive money to abort all babies but black babies in particular.”

Q: On global warming, you say there is a possibility that what some people say is climate change may be the pre-signals of the End of Times. Can you elaborate on this?

PERKINS: “We need to be careful about surrendering national sovereignty or grinding our economy to a halt thinking we can stop all of this … There is very clear evidence in the scripture that some of these things will occur in the End Times.”

JACKSON: “I would add that as a return on investment there is no provable model yet that shows that X-amount of dollars into CO2 reduction yields so many degrees cooler…”

An interesting thing happened in the Pakistani elections this week. A country where radical Islamism has been on the rise in recent years went to the polls and voted Islamists out of office. In North West Frontier Province (NWFP), the most “Talibanised” part of the country, an avowedly secular Pashtun party — the Awami National Party — emerged as the largest party by far. This bucks what seemed to be a trend in the Muslim world, i.e. the freer the election, the more chances the Islamists have. Think back to late 1991, when the Algerian military cancelled the run-off round of elections after the FIS (Islamic Salvation Front) took a strong lead in the first round. In more recent years, elections in Egypt, Lebanon, the West Bank and Gaza have shown Islamists doing well at the polls. In a very different context, Turkey’s “post-Islamist” AKP has gone from strength to strength thanks to the ballot box.

We expected the Islamists to lose but that doesn’t make the result any less interesting. The Islamist parties won only about 1 percent of the seats in the National Assembly, a precipitous drop from the 17 percent they scored in the 2002 vote. One crucial factor here is that opposition parties like the PPP of the late Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif’s Muslim League were allowed to run, in contrast to the 2002 poll that the then soldier-president Pervez Musharraf restricted to”friendly” parties. The conspiracy theory in Pakistan was that Musharraf made sure the Islamists advanced in order to make himself indispensable to the United States, the argument being “if you drop me, they’ll take my place”.

In NWFP, the Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal (MMA) alliance of Islamist parties won only 11 of 99 seats in the provincial assembly after governing there with a majority in the assembly for the past five years. One of the most prominent Islamist leaders, the Taliban-friendly Maulana Fazlur Rehman, was defeated in his NWFP home town of Dera Ismail Khan in his bid for re-election to the National Assembly. In Baluchistan, the other province with Islamists in government, the MMA won only five of the 65 seats in the provincial assembly.

The big winner in NWFP was the Awami National Party (ANP), which went from 7 to 31 seats. The ANP was founded by Wali Khan, a secular left-winger whose father Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was a legendary figure among the Pashtuns, the same ethnic group as today’s Taliban. Known as the “Frontier Gandhi,” he was an ally of Mahatma Gandhi who opposed the partition of India and creation of a “Muslim homeland” in Pakistan. A suicide bomber killed at least 16 people at an ANP rally in Charsadda, near Peshawar, only days before the election. In short, this party comes as close as could be to the opposite of the religious parties.

“The greatest achievement of this transition to democracy is the rout of religious extremists who wanted to plunge Pakistan into anarchy,” wrote Najam Sethi, editor of the Daily Times. “It is the rise of liberal democracy … that will help solve the problem of religious extremism in Pakistan.”

Ali Eteraz has taken a close look at what this means:

The success of the ANP in the face of the Islamist programme … shows that one way of defeating Islamism is to offer a potent and viable alternative narrative. The ANP does that in the form of Pashtun nationalism.

In my opinion, the secular resurgence has far more to do with material concerns than ideological ones. Ordinary Pakistanis didn’t vote for the ANP because they suddenly became hip to Thomas Jefferson or because they became persuaded by some blogger in Birmingham. They voted for the ANP because they want clean water. If the ANP fails to deliver the essentials of life - and simply uses nationalism the way Islamists use Islam - then they will be replaced. If western interests want to maintain the secular resurgence, they are going to have to make sure that these groups do not fail. At the moment, though, I don’t see any discussion about this in our press.

For an example of how India often struggles with its secular ideals, especially in election years, look no further than Andhra Pradesh. The chief minister Y.S. Reddy has decided the large southern Indian state will subsidise pilgrimages for Christians who want to travel to Israel.

This kind of subsidy is not new. The central government has for years offered subsidies to Muslims wanting to join the annual haj pilgrimage to Mecca. New Delhi even has a special haj air terminal for Muslims, who account for about 13 percent of India’s 1.1 billion population. Tens of thousands travel every year from India.

But the latest announcement has sparked debate in India over whether it further eats into the country’s secular ideals.

“The government has undermined Indian secularism once again,” said one India’s leading newspapers, the Times of India. The Indian constitution says there should be no discrimination on religious grounds. It is broadly intepreted to mean that none of India’s religious groups, whether majority Hindus, Muslims, Christians, Buddhists and Sikhs, should ever dominate. That secular identity was the pride of many of the country’s founders 60 years ago after independence.

The debate is now focused on what kind of secularism should exist. Should there be the kind of separation of church and state as in France, where the idea that religion should be kept out of public life is strong? Or should India make compromises by appeasing minority faiths to ensure religious harmony?

The original argument for subsidies for Muslims, who are among the poorest members of Indian society, was that it helped them go on the haj many could not otherwise afford. It’s still controversial, though, and even one of India’s school text books has a chapter titled “Should a secular state provide subsidies for the Haj pilgrimage?”

But critics say the latest move over Christians was a cheap populist trick ahead of state elections this year. While Christians account for only 2 percent of Andhra Pradesh’s population, that’s still 1.2 million people.

Subsidies like this have long been criticised by India’s main Hindu nationalist opposition, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The party has asked why Hindus, who account for about 80 percent of the population, don’t get subsidies to visit Hindu temples. For the BJP, the current secularism in India is another word for “appeasement of minorities”.

Defenders of the move argue that India’s secularism is much more loosely fitting, as highlighted by the controversy last month when the French government awarded an exiled Muslim woman writer in India with the Simone de Beauvoir Prize. That prize met with silent disapproval from the Indian government, worried the award could incite Muslim groups. It showed how the Indian government is reluctant to speak publicly of lofty secular ideals — ideas the French loudly defend — if it means upsetting a religious group.

The debate this time round has also come down to politics and electoral votes. As the Times of India’s Ronojoy Sen pointed out, those opposing the subsidies to Christians should also oppose the haj subsidy. But no political party, even the BJP, has ended that.

With 13 percent of India’s population, that’s a lot of Muslim votes to lose. Especially in an election year.

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 gloves are off in the election campaign for a new primate of the Greek Orthodox Church following the death of Archbishop Christodoulos last week. At least four metropolitan bishops are openly vying for the powerful Greek Church’s top post, some of them making their intentions known literally minutes after Christodoulos was buried last Thursday. The election is set for Feb. 7 and mud-slinging and accusations of blackmail are on the daily agenda.

A total of 78 members of the Holy Synod, the majority of whom were appointed by the late Archbishop Serafim (died 1998), are entitled to vote. Metropolitan Bishop Chrisostomos from the Peloponnese said in an open letter at the weekend he was a victim of “blackmail and mud-throwing” from supporters of Efstathios, Metropolitan Bishop of Sparta. Efstathios, one of two front-runners in the race, said: “I cannot believe any one of my supporters could be involved in something like that.”

What is at stake is the powerful influence of the Church over about 95 percent of Orthodox Greeks among the 10 million population, the Church’s extensive financial interests including major real estate developments and a mending of ties with the Istanbul-based Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew I. The Church of Greece’s relations with the spiritual head of the world’s Orthodox Christians were damaged to the brink of collapse during Christodoulos’s tenure. While Christodoulos deftly used the media to raise his own profile, this exposure turned some supporters away in the later years of his 10-year reign. Critics said he used the media to interfere in government policy-making, accuse homosexuals of having a “handicap,” call Turks “barbarians” and attack the patriarchate. Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew, an ethnic Greek from Turkey, runs a tiny Orthodox community in what was once the Byzantine capital of Constantinople and needs outside support for his delicate balancing act with the Turkish government.

Many Greek Orthodox say it is time for the Church to move away from such a public profile and revert to its strictly religious role, minimising the loss of supporters. Efstathios and Metropolitan Bishop of Thebes Hieronymos are the two front-runners. Hieronymos had repeatedly clashed with Christodoulos and refused to back the Church in crucial large rallies to oppose the then Socialist government’s plans to remove a reference to religion from EU-approved IDs. He is considered a more progressive choice than Efstathios, a strict follower of religious protocol and an aide to the late archbishop. Efstathios was also in charge of the Church’s finances for the past six years.

The two other candidates seem to have weaker support from members of the Holy Synod. One is Anthimos, the Metropolitan Bishop of Thessaloniki, who is known for his fiery comments regarding Greek ethnicity and the alleged threat to its national identity from Balkan neighbours. The other is Ignatios, Metropolitan Bishop of Dimitriada, who is seen as the candidate most like Christodoulos.

Father Adolfo Nicolas, the new superior general of the Jesuit order of Catholic priests, possesses, besides decades of experience, a good sense of humour. At his first meeting with reporters since his election on Jan 19, the 71-year-old Spaniard spoke about his life, his formation in Asia and what he had been reading about himself in the media.

“I’ve read that I am 50 percent Kolvenbach and 50 percent Arrupe,” he said, referring to his two immediate predecessors, Peter-Hans Kolvenbach and Pedro Arrupe. “However, no one has yet said I’m 10 percent Elvis Presley, although one could say this and it wouldn’t surprise me. But I think this is all false.”

After the laughter died down, the soft-spoken Spaniard became a bit serious: “I am not Kolvenbach and I am not Arrupe. I am made for the reality in which I find myself.”

Even religious media have had a hard time defining him after his election to lead the Roman Catholic Church’s largest clerical order. “I am an unknown,” said Nicolas, who has spent much of his life in Asia. “So this has been like a treasure hunt (for the media). ”

Jesuit superiors general are known as “black popes” because, like the pontiff, they wield worldwide influence and usually keep their position for life — and their simple cassock is black, in contrast to the pope’s white.

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He dismissed media reports that there was a “theological gap” between himself and the Pope. “That is not true,” he said, calling him “a great professor” whose work he had studied while in Japan. “Theology is a dialogue …sometimes there are differences.”

Nicolas spoke much about how Asia had taught him tolerance. “The way of seeing faith in Asia is totally different from the way we see it here. Asia changed me, I hope for the best … Asia can do much to enrich the universal Church.”

“In Japan, I discovered that true religiosity is much deeper, that you must go to the heart of the person, the heart of the question when we speak of God, just as when we speak of ourselves or of human life. This taught me to smile in the face of things that in Spain would have upset me. But human life is like this, people are like this. Imperfection is so natural that one must accept it and not look for people who are perfect … It scandalises the Japanese that we are so strict, intolerant, so unaccepting of diversity.”

Then, at the end of the meeting, his sense of humour returned. He said one of the most interesting places in Asia is the Philippines and noted some similarities between the Filipino and Italian characters. “Like Italians, the Filipinos see traffic laws not as laws but as suggestions.”

A year can seem like an eternity in India, especially for a foreign correspondent discovering how complex the links between religion and politics can be here.

The last time I went from New Delhi to Uttar Pradesh was in January 2007 to cover the Kumbh Mela, one of the largest religious gatherings in the world. Around seven million Hindus and thousands of holy “Sadhus” descend on the junction of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers to pray and make offerings.

I stood where the two rivers meet along with thousands of poor Hindus performing their ritual baths. At night, whole families huddled together to keep warm on the river bank. Small paper boats with candles floated precariously down the river.

At the time, this felt like the essence of Hinduism — a relationship with nature and its cycles, its running rivers, the elements of fire and water. New to India then, I don’t remember thinking about caste once in my three-day visit.

The second visit to the state this month was an eye-opener.

A journalist’s early impressions on a trip are often gleaned from the back seat of an airport taxi. Uttar Pradesh is the heart of the Hindu “cow belt” and one of the poorest, most populous and caste-ridden places in India. Yet what we drove through this time looked like a birthday bash for royalty.

The state capital Lucknow was decked out in mile upon mile of blue decorations, light bulbs and banners to celebrate the birthday of the new chief minister — a Dalit (”untouchable”) former teacher known as Mayawati. She has stormed onto the national stage as such a champion of the rights of the poor that she’s known as the “Untouchables Queen.”

Welcome to caste politics in Uttar Pradesh.

Mayawati is everywhere in Uttar Pradesh. Statues of her abound thanks to a building spree she launched that employs many Dalits and other lower castes. She has spent lavishly on one of India’s biggest highway projects, creating even more jobs for the poor, and on parks dotted across the country’s most populous state. A huge park in honour of her party’s founder is being built in Lucknow for around $100 million. Hundreds of poor women bricklayers toiled nearby, their children camped out next to them.

Mayawati is a politically astute politician. Many analysts rate her as a middle-of-the-road leader who surrounds herself with well-meaning technocrats. But her rise highlights the importance of caste in northern Indian politics — and what Indian critics of this kind of caste politics call the darker side of Hinduism.

Despite the secular ideals of modern India, whose founders prided themselves on not being a religious state like neighbouring Pakistan, Uttar Pradesh shows that caste politics is alive and kicking in this part of northern India.

Much of this surfaced because the Indian government decided two decades ago to introduce caste quotas into civil service hiring and college admissions. Around one-third of state jobs are now dished out by caste preference.

It pays to have a caste and be proud of it. Academics and reformers may say the essence of Hinduism does not have to be related to caste and that one can coexist without the other. But it’s hard to see that on the ground in India these days.

The rise in caste politics has also been accompanied by the rise of Hindu nationalist political parties that say the prevalence of caste shows India is a religious, not a secular nation. The main Hindu nationalist party, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), just scored important victories in the western state of Gujarat last month and the southern state of Karnataka (its capital is high-tech centre Bangalore) in November.

I spent three days in Uttar Pradesh visiting Dalit villages where poor villagers were beaten up by higher castes for collecting firewood from the wrong forest, and where water supplies are so bad and appeals to officials for help so ineffective that their only hope left is their rain god. I talked to politicians, academics and NGO workers.

All their talk was related to caste. It was a sobering look at the flip side of the modern hi-tech India that so often hits the headlines. For all the talk of a globalising India, Mayawati’s focus on caste may be a sign of things to come. She has talked about running for prime minister in the next elections, in 2009, and some Indian analysts think she could pull it off.

My second trip to U.P. left me wondering what path caste and Indian politics will take. Can Hinduism keep the spirit I saw last year on the banks of the Ganges, where caste seemed secondary, if even only for a few days? Or will caste stay and grow in India’s political fabric, justifying those politicians that say India is religious, not a secular society?

There’s a story unfolding in France that isn’t about religion, but says a lot about the hurdles that residents with a Muslim background here can face. When youths in the poor suburbs complain about discrimination (discussed here in a post about the riots last month), they mention stories like this one to highlight their point.

Bagdad Ghezal, 53, is a community activist who has been the local Socialist Party (PS) section leader for the past six years in the Channel fishing port of Etaples. He recently learned the regional PS leadership wanted to “parachute” in a candidate for the mayor’s race in March. The outsider was a 35-year-old énarque (graduate of the elite ENA school of public administration) with the very aristocratic name of Antoine de Rocquigny du Fayel. He lives in Lille, about 150 km away, but has a summer house in Etaples. Ghezal protested that he was first in line and wanted to run, but the regional leadership refused to consider him.

The Etaples PS section held a primary vote and Ghezal trounced de Rocquigny du Fayel 3-to-1. But the regional leadership annulled the result, saying the loser was “more credible” as a candidate. “Why would de Rocquigny du Fayel, who does not live in Etaples, be better than Bagdad who has been an activist here for the past 10 years?” Ghezal asked (Europe 1 audio in French here). “This is clearly discrimination.”

Socialist Party leaders met in Paris on Saturday to approve lists of candidates for the municipal elections around the country in March. These opposition Socialists would like to turn them into a setback for conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy. They like to say they respect diversité — the politically correct way of referring to promoting candidates of immigrant backgrounds. So the resistance by the Pas-de-Calais regional PS leadership was an embarrassment and the national leadership told the regional barons they must respect the vote of the Etaples local section.

The PS has a problem here, though. It did little to promote minorities to important and visible jobs on the national level when it last held power in Paris. By contrast, Sarkozy has given top-level posts to three women of immigrant origin and has defended them against some rough criticism. They are Justice Minister Rachida Dati and Secretary of State for Urban Policy Fadela Amara (both French-born, of Moroccan and Algerian origin respectively) and Secretary of State for Human Rights Rama Yade (a naturalised citizen born in Senegal).

As it now stands, the regional PS barons are resisting the pressure from the national leadership and going ahead with the candidacy of de Rocquigny du Fayel. As one article put it in its headline, “Being named Bagdad is a handicap.”

Religion plays no part in this story, but Ghezal’s Arab background probably does. Even larger looms the fact that French politics is dominated by a “classe politique” that is notoriously wary of outsiders. Women also suffer from this; France is far behind its European neighbours in the percentage of women in parliament, which women blame on the fact that they — like Bagdad Ghezal — often fail to get nominated by the party barons who control the process. According to the left-wing daily Libération, de Rocquigny du Fayel enjoys solid support form a leading énarque in the regional PS hierarchy.

None of this justifies rioting. None of this says minorities cannot advance in France. But it does go some way towards explaining why many French from minority backgrounds say the cards are stacked against them.

It is now clear that Turkey, a country to which Western visitors have often applied adjectives such as “timeless” and “slothful”, is changing profoundly, and with un-Oriental speed.

Anyone who’s been following the news out of Turkey this year has to nod in agreement when reading the lead to Christopher de Bellaigue’s interesting article in the New York Review of Books. It was only last April that the army issued a veiled threat to intervene if the governing AK party — usually called a “party with Islamist roots” — tried to overturn Turkey’s secular system.

Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan called their bluff and won a snap general election, allowing his AK partner Abdullah Gül to be elected president. The AK-led government now plans to replace the military-era constitution with a new document that will confirm “our democratic, secular and social state and guarantee basic rights and freedoms”, as Gül told parliament early this month.

Gül and Erdogan started their careers as Islamists critical of secularism, but along the way came to see secularism as the best guarantee of more rights for Muslims. The secular system, they found, pledges to respect individual rights — the problem was that the rigid army-guided secularism of Kemalist Turkey did not allow them. One shorthand way of describing these ex-Islamists is “Muslim Democrats” analogous to the Christian Democrats of post-war Western Europe. Their stress is much more on promoting Muslim values than imposing Muslim laws. This is an important turn in political thinking in the Muslim world. If Turkey continues along the road it’s on, it could become easier to answer the question of whether Islam is compatible with democracy.

De Bellaigue’s “Turkey at the Turning Point?” gives a useful overview of the evolution of the AK party which he says “gives grounds for hope. It is possible that an Islamist movement with a history of intolerance and bigotry will succeed in transforming Turkish politics along genuinely democratic lines”.

One of the factors behind this evolution in Islamist thinking in Turkey is Fethullah Gülen, a Muslim preacher who founded a large and influential movement named after him. He advocates what might be called a “middle class Islam” that advocates a secular state, personal freedom, religious tolerance and an entrepreneurial spirit. The movement has built up a large media and business empire in Turkey and a network of more than 100 schools in Turkey and Central Asia. It is active in international dialogue with other religions.

A three-day conference on Gülen and his movement was held in London last weekend. Its website has posted a massive 755-page PDF with all the papers presented there. Two that are particularly helpful for understanding this movement and the changing relationship between Islam and politics in Turkey are “What Made The Gülen Movement Possible?” by Mustafa Akyol and “Changing Perspectives on Islamism and Secularism in Turkey: The Gülen Movement and the AK Party” by Ahmet T. Kuru.

Akyol makes the interesting point that these Turkish Muslims came to see the West as better than the limited “Westernising” that Turkey’s secularist establishment offered them. He quotes Gülen, who lives in the United States, as saying:

“Islam flourishes in American and Europe much better than in many Muslim countries. This means freedom and the rule of law are necessary for personal Islam. Moreover, Islam does not need the state to survive, but rather needs educated and financially rich communities to flourish. In a way, not the state but rather community is needed under a full democratic system.”

Is there a straw that will break the Anglican Communion’s back? One move that, like the gay bishop consecration that started the current crisis, can trigger a landslide that finally pushes the Communion into schism? Religion reporters are now watching each and every conference and bishop’s election to see if it will hit the tripwire.

The next flashpoint in the Anglican Communion’s struggle with gay issues looked like it could come from Chicago, where the Episcopal (U.S. Anglican) diocese on November 10 will pick a new bishop from among eight candidates, one of them an openly gay woman. The Episcopal Church promised last month to “exercise restraint” in naming further homosexual prelates. In an interview this month, its Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori (in picture at right) stressed there would be “no outcasts in this Church.”

Judging from how things look now, the lesbian Rev. Tracey Lind, who is now the dean of Cleveland’s Trinity Cathedral, may not be among the favorites vying for the post, Chicago Tribune religion reporter Manya Brachear reported on Monday.

Based on inteviews with church members who attended sessions where the candidates visited various congregations during the weekend, she wrote that the two favorites appear to be Rev. Jeffrey Lee, rector of St. Thomas Church in Medina, Washington, and Rev. Petero Sabune, chaplain of Sing Sing prison in New York state. They seemed to have connected more with the congregations than the six others, including Lind.

If chosen, Lind would be only the second openly gay bishop in Anglican history, the other being Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. If anything, the faithful in Chicago spoke more of Lind’s managerial and fundraising capabilities than they did about her sexual orientation, the report said. Those who favored Lee and Sabune emphasized their confidence and their feeling of personal connection.