“Top 10 Stories” lists are a perennial feature,  especially in the United States (which explains a lot of the picks below). Now that they’re all out there, I took a quick look at the “Top 10 Religion Stories 2008″ lists to see if any pattern emerged. Of course one did: “It was the election, stupid.” Even a website dedicated to pagan news found a “pagans and politics” angle to top its list.

The Religion Newswriters Association, which polls member religion reporters, has been drawing up such lists for about 30 years. Election-related stories swept the top three slots last year. They did the same in 2004 as well, but the election shared the top spot back then with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ movie. The election-dominated lists show some divergences, but the most interesting compilations were the more specialised ones down in the second list below.

Here’s a quick list of the Top 10 lists, first those dominated by the U.S. election and then others I actually found more interesting:

President-elect Barack Obama is seeking peace at his inauguration, but gay and lesbians see his choice of pastor as a nakedly political continuation of war.

"It is important for America to come together, even though we may have disagreements on certain social issues," the prez-elect said, defending his choice of Saddleback Church Pastor Rick Warren -- a same-sex marriage opponent. Obama said he personally would continue be a fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans.

Equality California chief Geoff Kors said the decision amounted to choosing someone who 'declared war on one minority community'.

Warren's evangelical ministry is known more for its focus on social issues than many other evangelical pastors seen as strong political conservatives.

He calls his grand plan PEACE: Promote reconciliation, Equip leaders, Assist the poor, Care for the sick, Educate the next generation.

So is it war or peace?

Obama says the expression of diverse views was the spirit of his campaign that he hopes to carry over to his administration, starting on Jan 20 with his inauguration, where others who disagree with Pastor Warren will also speak.

"And that's how it should be, because that's what America is about," Obama told reporters. "That's part of the magic of this country -- that we are diverse and noisy and opinionated." 

For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Chip East (Pastor Rick Warren speaks at Clinton Global Initiative in New York on Sept. 26, 2008)

The “Is Obama a Christian?” discussion is starting up again, this time not by people who suspect he’s a Muslim but those who think he’s a phony follower of Jesus Christ. The occasion for this is the posting on Beliefnet of an interview he gave to the Chicago Sun Times in 2004, while he was still an Illinois state senator. Conservative Christians have taken his religious views as proof he’s not a real Christian, but there’s support from a more liberal corner for his views.

That there is disagreement isn’t really a surprise. Theologians have been debating who is a Christian almost since the dawn of the faith and still dispute where the dividing lines lie. What is more interesting is that critics are picking apart his views — or purported views — on theological issues that have no obvious importance for his job as president.

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

Bloggers Joe Carter and Rod Dreher read in Obama’s interview a denial of the Nicene Creed since he called Jesus “a bridge between God and man” rather than clearly saying he is the Son of God (hat tip to Steve Waldman). “Unless Obama was being incredibly and uncharacteristically inarticulate, this is heterodox. You cannot be a Christian in any meaningful sense and deny the divinity of Jesus Christ. You just can’t,” Dreher writes. Has Obama denied the divinity of Jesus Christ here? That’s not clear here. Another point that Carter notes is that he doesn’t believe that people who have not embraced Jesus as their personal saviour will automatically go to hell. “I can’t imagine that my God would allow some little Hindu kid in India who never interacts with the Christian faith to somehow burn for all eternity. That’s just not part of my religious makeup,” he said.

Elsewhere on its site, Beliefnet quotes a prominent Catholic theologian saying the same thing: “…Everything we believe about God, and everything we know about man, prevents us from accepting that beyond the limits of the Church there is no more salvation … We are no longer ready and able to think that our neighbor, who is a decent and respectable man and in many ways better than we are, should be eternally damned simply because he is not a Catholic. We are no longer ready, no longer willing, to think that eternal corruption should be inflicted on people in Asia, in Africa, or wherever it may be, merely on account of their not having “Catholic” marked in their passport.” This came from none other than a certain Joseph Ratzinger, aka Pope Benedict XVI. The quote is from 1964, from the young Ratzinger, and is not what he would say today. But even he said it back then and many theologians would agree with Obama’s view today.

As Waldman points out, it’s a view that George Bush would also agree with. And apparently with him many Christians as well:“millions and millions of people call themselves Christian, worship at Christian churches and believe that acceptance of Christ is not required for entry into heaven. In a recent Pew poll, 70% said ‘many religions can lead to eternal life.’ 66% of Protestants and 79% of Catholics said they agreed with that idea.”

Over at the Episcopal Café blog The Lead, blogger JB Chilton reprints reprints Obama’s answer about his suspicion of dogma and cautious turn towards faith and says: “Sounds like a good Episcopalian. The Episcopal Church welcomes you.”

Do you think it’s important to know exactly which Christian teachings the president-elect embraces and which ones he doesn’t, even if they have no relevance to his performance in the White House?

(Photo: President Bush at St. Louis Cathedral in New Orleans, August 29, 2006/Jim Young)

Did the “Obama-is-a- Muslim” whisper campaign energise Muslim voters to turn out en masse for him? Did the widely circulated DVD “Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West” actually end up helping him at the polls? That seems to be the case, our Chicago religion writer Mike Conlon reports in this analysis.

“Unpublished polling data indicated that the Democratic President-elect got somewhere between 67 percent and 90 percent of the Muslim vote, probably nearer the higher end, Ahmed Younis of Gallup Center for Muslim Studies, said in a telephone briefing,” Conlon writes.

“Mukit Hossain, executive director of the Muslim American Political Action Committee, said at the briefing that support for Obama among Muslims ‘changed dramatically’ in the last three to four weeks of the campaign ‘when people started calling Obama a terrorist’ in the crowds at Republican rallies.”

Do you think the smear campaign backfired? Whichever way you answer, how can you prove it?

DALLAS - Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has had to fend off all sorts of spurious Internet rumours suggesting he is a closet Muslim and even linking him to the Ku Klux Klan.

Our columnist Bernd Debusmann has written about this elsewhere. But a new line of character attack has emerged: Obama, while not the Antichrist, has provided a dress reherasal for the End of Times as foretold in the Bible with his recent overseas tour.

At least that is what Hal Lindsey, a leading figure in U.S. apocalyptic Christian circles, claims.

On Friday, Lindsey wrote in a commentary on the conservative Web site WorldNetDaily that Obama’s recent overseas tour blazed a trail that the Antichrist was sure to follow.

In apocalyptic U.S. Christian circles, the Antichrist is often portrayed as the leader of a world government who will probably emerge from the United Nations or some other multilateral institution loathed by some on the U.S. right.

The Antichrist’s rise and dark reign is believed to be foretold in the Bible, notably the Book of Revelation that is also known as the Apocalypse of St. John.

“… the Bible says that such a leader (the Antichrist) will soon make his appearance on the scene. It won’t be Barack Obama, but Obama’s world tour provided a foretaste of the reception he can expect to receive,” wrote Lindsey, author of the 1970 Biblical prophecy blockbuster “The Late Great Planet Earth.”

“He will probably also stand in some European capital, addressing the people of the world and telling them that he is the one that they have been waiting for. And he can expect as wildly enthusiastic a greeting as Obama got in Berlin.”

Other prominent figures in U.S. apocalyptic circles include Texas mega-preacher John Hagee, whose endorsement of Republican presidential candidate John McCain was rejected after it emerged Hagee had once claimed God had allowed the Holocaust to happen because it led to the creation of Israel.

Hagee sees current events in the Middle East and elsewhere as unfolding biblical prophecy and his organization Christians United for Israel is an influential lobbying group.

Conservative U.S. Christians who strongly believe in a brewing End of Times battle are regarded as a sub-culture of the broader evangelical movement but the success of the best-selling “Left Behind Series” by Tim LaHaye — which chonicles the  looming final conflict — suggest such views have some resonance in the American heartland.

Conservative evangelicals are a key Republican Party base and while they are lukewarm on McCain, Obama obviously has some seeing red.

The Huffington Post, a liberal blog and news site, did a blog on Sunday detailing liberal Christian concerns about a McCain ad campaign “The One” which they see as a code to some conservative Christians to view Obama as a kind of Antichrist figure.

Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Barack Obama in Berlin on July 24)