A group of mostly centrist U.S. evangelicals released a lengthy manifesto on Wednesday which called for the movement to pull back from explicit partisan political activity, saying faith was being used to express “political points that have lost touch with biblical truth.”

Leading figures on the conservative Religious Right, such as Family Research Council President Tony Perkins, were pointedly not asked to sign the document — a reflection of some of the divisions emerging in the U.S. evangelical movement, which numbers over 60 million by some estimates.

“I agree that evangelical Christians have become too aligned with the Republican Party which has taken them for granted,” Perkins told Reuters, adding that he saw some good stuff in the manifesto.

But he said “it was like it was written for ivory tower Christians, like they want to rid the world of evil but don’t want to get involved in the issues to do it.”

Divisions among U.S. Evangelicals — which are becoming more visible or vocal but have long been bubbling below the surface — have taken many forms.

Most publicly, they include a shift in emphasis among some evangelical leaders from the focus on culture issues such as abortion to a broader social agenda that includes calls to action on poverty and the environment

Most centrist evangelicals remain opposed to abortion rights, which they increasingly see as a social justice issue, but it is not their main focus.

The Religious Right, which has been the bedrock of conservative evangelical support for the Republican Party in recent election cycles, has also called for a broader agenda — but insists on tackling the issues that many of its supporters care deeply about.

This includes retaining an uncompromising and very public opposition to abortion and gay rights.

What do you think? Do you think the U.S. evangelical movement has become too politicized?

Move over Religious Right: you’re getting squeezed by the evangelical center.

That is one of the central points of a new book by David P. Gushee entitled “The Future of Faith in American Politics”.

To Gushee, the evangelical center combines much of the theology of the Religious Right with the social concerns of the left, give it a broad engagement in many of the pressing issues of our day.

Gushee does not demonise the Religious Right - which he says is simply exercising its citizenship responsibilities in a free society - but he does critique its entanglement with the Republican Party, its hectoring tone and what he sees as its narrow focus on issues like abortion and gay marriage.

But he also takes issue with the left’s silence on or reluctance to act on such issues.

The emerging evangelical center includes activists such as Richard Cizik, vice president for government affairs with the National Association of Evangelicals, and Florida mega-pastor Joel Hunter.

Evangelicals in this vein share the right’s opposition to abortion but also press for action on issues like climate change and global poverty.

Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at McAfee School of Theology at Mercer University, is himself firmly in the evangelical centrist camp: but this book is written with that disclosure and its stated purpose is “to stake a claim” to this emerging evangelical center.

Last week we interviewed the authors of a new book charting a way forward for the Religious Right by Tony Perkins and Harry Jackson. This week Gushee shares his thoughts on his book and other matters with Reuters:

Q: You contrast an emerging evangelical center with both the Religious Right and the Religious Left. Do you think these other movements have reached their peak?

A: I think that the Religious Right as it has existed for the last 30 years has definitely reached its peak and is declining. I think if you understand the Religious Left as the old mainline then it is definitely in trouble. There is some creative ferment on that side but on the whole they are certainly not thriving. The evangelical left of Jim Wallis and Tony Campolo, folks like that, is showing lots of vigour right now. As of today it seems to me that the center and left are both stronger than they’ve ever been and the right is fading and looking for some fresh ways to reframe itself.

Q: How do you see the Religious Right reframing itself?

A: I think there are some fractures emerging among the people who identify themselves as Religious Right. I think some are starting to deemphasise partisan politics to a certain extent. Others are attempting to reframe their message. I think the new book by Tony Perkins and Harry Jackson (mentioned above) is a reframing effort. A lot of the things I critique in my book, they say ‘you’re right we need to work on those things.’ Things like disentangling from the Republican Party, having a more positive and less negative kind of tone, emphasising a broader range of issues. I think there is a feeling on the Religious Right that those things are a problem for them.

“One of the interesting things about the Republican presidential race was John McCain. McCain ends up as the winner despite bitter opposition from some of the most visible Religious Right leaders like James Dobson. And one reason he did emerge as the winner is because his stance is more evangelical center. You will probably have two presidential candidates this fall who are center-right or center-left and the fringes have lost. Which I think is good news for America.”

Q: Do you think this fading of the fringes is a reflection of what is going on in America in general?

A: In terms of the broader culture I think there is a deep exhaustion with culture wars.

Q: Why is abortion such an important issue to evangelicals? Does your opposition to it not make it seem like you are part of a backlash against broader women’s rights?

A: I think this grief over this state of affairs in American culture is very real. Now often it has been unaccompanied by similar compassion for women and families. Grief for the 15-year-old who is pregnant and desperate; grief for the woman who has been raped; grief for a society in which men and women have sex but women disproportionately bear the consequences if pregnancy happens. Sometimes evangelicals have been insensitive to the needs of women and the rights of women. And our rhetoric has been baby-centered rather than centered on all who are in that situation.

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…”

It’s been less than a month since an underground movement of gay Orthodox Jews in Israel went online and already tens of thousands of people have visited their Web site.

The site is called HOD (for Homo’eem Dateem or Religious Homosexuals), a play on the Hebrew word hod for glory. It’s the first to cater to gay men living in Israel’s ultra-orthodox Jewish minority, where homosexuality is viewed as a sin and people are often scared to admit publicly they are gay, fearing harassment or banishment.

Of course, not all of the online visitors fit into that category, said Rabbi Ron, one of the site’s creators. The site was flooded after local media reported on its inception and Ron, a gay Orthodox rabbi who asked that his last name not be mentioned, was interviewed on Israeli radio.

The Web site, written mostly in Hebrew but with pages in English as well, was the first of its kind and broke the taboo of discussing homosexuality from within the ultra-orthodox sector.

“Our main goal is to bring the religious gay community, as well as rabbis and leaders of the religious communities, relevant information and articles concerning our issue,” HOD says in its English-language section. “This way, we hope to reduce the hate towards homosexuals in the religious society. Moreover, HOD is your place to publish your opinions, stories and anything else you wrote related to this issue.”

Rabbi Ron told the Jerusalem Post the site aimed to break down stereotypes and foster dialogue: “We want religious people to know that we want to adhere to Halacha. But we also want them to understand that a homosexual is born the way he is and has no choice … Judaism’s main emphasis is on actions. We understand that, and we are not asking rabbis to permit anal sex or to make any changes in Halacha. We just want basic understanding.”

HOD is not the first website aimed at religious gays, Itay, one of the founders of the site, explained to Ynet : “Up to now the only website catering to the religious gay community was Atzat-Nefesh (here in Hebrew and English ), which was basically run by straight people that publicly stated that a religious person cannot be gay. They tried to ‘turn’ gay religious people straight, which is something that we know cannot be done. We try to help people reconcile their religious beliefs and their sexual orientation.”

This month, Israel’s attorney general ruled that same-sex couples are allowed to adopt children that are not biologically connected to either parent. The decision expanded the legal rights of gays and lesbian couples in Israel, where the Rabbinic Court has jurisdiction over marriage. Haaretz quoted a religious cabinet minister as calling the ruling “shocking and disgusting”.

The creators of HOD take a pragmatic approach in their attempt to gain acceptance from ultra-conservative religious leaders. By breaking taboo, they hope to gain awareness, which is the first step towards acceptance, Rabbi Ron said. Once that is done, maybe they can tackle the issue of making orthodox Jewish law less stringent, he said. The Web site declares: “You cannot ignore us any longer.”

Reporters are often accused of “pack journalism” when they essentially write the same story from an event. So what should we call it when they write different reports about the same thing? That happened on Friday when Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams issued his Advent message. This was the long-awaited statement of his views on the crisis tearing away at the Anglican Communion. It turned out to be a grab-bag with something for everyone.

Jim Naughton over at The Lead blog on Episcopal Café noticed the problem and highlighted it in a quick review of the stories about the Advent message. The list shows how the same text can spawn different articles. For example, our story’s lead went for a broad overview, the AP story stressed a U.S. angle and the British papers highlighted details of the Anglican disputes.

“Reporters had their hands full yesterday trying to figure out how to pull a “lede” out of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s letter about the state of the Anglican Communion,” Naughton wrote. “He dumped cold water on everybody, so how to determine which side was wetter?”

Naughton, a veteran journalist who is spokesman for the Episcopal Diocese of Washington, added: “One thing I’ve picked up in conversations with reporters is how weary they are of covering this story, and what a difficult time they have in determining the significance of any given event. Many of them fervently wish the story would go away.”

This story is difficult to cover and some journalists might wish it would go away. But there’s no sign it will. The Lambeth Conference, a 10-yearly meeting of Anglican bishops from around the world, is coming up next July. We can probably expect more disputes over openly gay clergy and blessings for same-sex couples, more defections from the Episcopal Church and more warning declarations from the Global South as it approaches. If that weren’t enough, Gene Robinson, the openly gay Episcopal bishop of New Hampshire, plans to marry his partner only a few weeks before Lambeth begins. “I always wanted to be a June bride,” the University of Miami news service reported him as saying last month.

Do readers want this story to go away? Do they think it will?

Covering religion may be harmful to your faith. Two leading religion journalists — one in Britain, one in the United States — have quit the beat in recent months, saying they had acquired such a close look at such scandalous behaviour by Christians that they lost their faith and had to leave.

Stephen Bates, who recently stepped down as religious affairs writer for the London Guardian, has just published an account of his seven years on the beat in an article entitled “Demob Happy” for the New Humanist magazine. Bates followed the crisis in the Anglican Communion for several years and even wrote a book on it, A Church At War: Anglicans and Homosexuality.

“Now I am moving on,” his article concludes. “It was time to go. What faith I had, I’ve lost, I am afraid – I’ve seen too much, too close. A young Methodist press officer once asked me earnestly whether I saw it as my job to spread the Good News of Jesus. No, I said, that’s the last thing I am here to do.”

Bates announced his move back in September in another interesting article, this time for the website Religious Intelligence. Writing from New Orleans, where he was covering the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops meeting with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, he said: “Writing this story has been too corrosive of what faith I had left: indeed watching the way the gay row has played out in the Anglican Communion has cost me my belief in the essential benignity of too many Christians. For the good of my soul, I need to do something else.” Bates, who says he still regards himself as a Catholic, said he was turned off by the intolerance he saw towards gays and the self-righteousness of Christians who “pick and choose the sins that are acceptable and condemn those – always committed by other, lesser people – that are not.”

Shortly before Bates called it quits, William Lobdell, who gave the Los Angeles Times first-class coverage of the Catholic Church’s sex abuse scandal in California, threw in the towel with a wrenching story of his own struggle with organised religion. His farewell story in July, “Religion beat became a test of faith“ was a moving testimony of a journalist who started off as a Presbyterian, was active with evangelicals and seriously considered becoming a Catholic. But, during his eight years on the beat, the Catholic clerical sex abuse scandal put him off religion so badly that he lost his faith altogether. For an example of what he came across, take a look at Missionary’s Dark Legacy, a powerful story from 2005 about the trail of sexual abuse a Catholic missionary left behind after seven years among the Eskimos. Nearly every boy in the settlement was abused.

What do readers think? Can you understand how Bates and Lobdell reacted? Do you think a journalist has to be a believer to be a good religion reporter?