The recent turmoil surrounding the recent passage of healthcare legislation by the United States Congress is providing ample opportunity to look at the absence of Orthodox leadership. As a reminder, this blog’s purpose is not political. To the extent this legislation reflects Caesar’s affairs, it is generally best for the Church to remain silent.

Sadly, though, this legislation is not purely about political matters, for it has provisions for using taxes gathered from individuals, including Christians, to pay for elective abortions in all or part (c.f., here and here). Despite the scandalously equivocal language used by the Ecumenical Patriarch in discussing abortion (c.f., here, here, here, and here), the Church’s teaching cannot be misunderstood. As a best example, consider St. Basil the Great (AD 330-379), who says absolutely nothing new: “Women also who administer drugs to cause abortion, as well as those who take poisons to destroy unborn children, are murderesses” (Letter 188).

Children in the womb are human beings, and their willful destruction is murder. So what about all those who will now find themselves accessories to the crime through the new legal requirement to fund abortion?

In the face of this legislation, this question, and the evil that is elective abortion, the silence from our Orthodox leaders is deafening.
Goarch.org?
Oca.org?
Antiochian.org?
ROCOR?
The Serbian Church in America?
SCOBA?
Nothing.

We are justified in wailing with grief over more than 250,000 dead in Haiti, yet over 1.2 million elective abortions are performed each year in the United States alone. All is now set to begin funding them with tax dollars, and no official word of protest or exhortation is to be found.

Worse, at least one professor at Holy Cross Seminary is reportedly elated at the passing of this legislation, and I am nearly certain he has company among the faculty at St. Vladimir’s. Is it any wonder, then, that our parishes have so many individuals – often lifelong Orthodox Christians – who think abortion is no big deal? Is it any wonder that many of our parish clergy are indifferent to (if not supportive of) abortion? If the shepherds won’t wield their staves to drive away wolves wearing power suits and lab coats, aided by the Internal Revenue Service, who will? If they won’t, who can reasonably be expected to?

To those bishops (especially those whom I have overlooked) and my brethren who are speaking against the wanton destruction of these little ones, I thank you and pray that your efforts would yield much fruit by strengthening and encouraging the Orthodox faithful to stand firm against such wanton destruction of human beings. To the others, the bigger lambs need someone to feed them (Jn 21:14-19), and the littlest ones need someone to speak in their defense. Who will do it?

HT: The Orthodox Leader

Sociologist Christian Smith began his ambitious, multivolume effort to plumb the religious lives of Americans across the life course in his 2005 with Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers. In that book—aimed at an audience that the author hoped would include general readers as well as clergy and scholars—Smith painted an incisive portrait of religion among America’s adolescents. Especially insightful was the way Smith explained why the more sectarian religious traditions in the United States, such as evangelical Protestantism and Mormonism, were achieving greater success than more churchly traditions such as mainline Protestantism and Roman Catholicism in transmitting their faiths to the next generation. Also notable was the way Smith explained how the guiding religious ethos of American teenagers—what he aptly termed “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism”—seemed so suited for our culture.

Smith contended, in his 2005 book, that most religious teens in the U.S. had very little appreciation or regard for the theological and doctrinal particulars of their own religious traditions but did believe that God exists, loves them, wants them to follow the Golden Rule, and comforts them in the midst of the emotional ups and downs of adolescence. Moreover, Smith argued, most teens, including teens who were regular churchgoers, believed that all religious traditions are functionally equivalent, and that they provide spiritual succor, moral guidance, and emotional support in about equal measures. This, then, is Moralistic Therapeutic Deism; and, as Smith pointed out, it has proved enormously useful to American adolescents because it allows them to navigate the increasingly pluralistic milieu of the United States without stepping on the religious sensitivities of their peers or violating the tolerant conventions of the larger society.

In his latest book, Souls in Transition: The Religious & Spiritual Lives of Emerging Adults, Smith revisits the spiritual state of his respondents as young adults aged 18 to 23, at a life stage that is now called “emerging adulthood” in the social sciences. In a sense, not much has changed among the emerging adults Smith discusses in this new book. Young adults from more sectarian religious communities still do comparatively better when it comes to outcomes such as church attendance and orthodox religious belief, and most emerging adults still seem to subscribe to a form of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.

Smith notes, however, that emerging adults are less religious than they were as adolescents. Only 15 percent attend church on a weekly basis, and 26 percent indicate they have no religion. Part of the story here is that young adults often drift away from formal religious practice after they move out of their family homes and return to regular churchgoing only when they marry and have children. For much of recent American history, young adulthood has been the religious nadir of the life course for most Americans.

But the religious disconnect—institutional, moral, and theological— among contemporary emerging adults that Smith describes in Souls in Transition seems more profound than the typical pattern of temporary religious disengagement that has marked the lives of young adults over the last century or so. A majority of today’s emerging adults do not regularly darken the door of a church; are largely indifferent or, in some cases, hostile to religion; and are similarly indifferent or hostile to religious teachings about the good life—especially as they relate to sex, drinking, and drugs. Furthermore, a majority of the 30 percent of this cohort of emerging adults who are regular churchgoers are “selective adherents” who “believe and perform certain aspects of their religious traditions but neglect and ignore others.” By Smith’s reckoning, only 15 percent of emerging adults count as “committed traditionalists” who are committed and consistent believers. When it comes to religion, this seems to be a generation of lukewarm believers.

This should come as little surprise, however, when we step back from the religious lives of today’s emerging adults and look at the larger social milieu in which they find themselves. Their connections to education and work tend to be fragile and unstable. They live much of their lives in an isolated, electronically mediated world in which iPods, personal computers, and cell phones link them to their preferred music, movies, and friends and not much else. They are largely indifferent to the great causes of the right and the left. And, most importantly, for most of these emerging adults, marriage is not on the horizon. It is little wonder, therefore, that the members of this lukewarm generation are largely disconnected from American religion, given that they are also disconnected from stable long-term employment, civil society, and family life.

What is to be done? Smith does not provide any easy answers to this question in Souls in Transition. He does, however, offer some excellent advice to parents and religious leaders about how they can steer today’s children away from the lukewarm lives being lived by contemporary emerging adults. According to Smith’s analyses, children are more likely to end up as committed and consistent young-adult believers if their parents integrate religious faith into daily family life; if children are exposed to engaging adult believers in their churches; if they have good religious friends; if they live chaste lives; and, interestingly, if they have to suffer for their faith. Smith notes that adolescents who were “made fun of by peers for [their] religious faith” were more likely to end up as serious believers as young adults. In other words, family, friends, sex, and suffering will have a lot to do with how successful the next generation of young people will be in avoiding the lukewarm path being trod by many of today’s emerging adults.

HT: FirstThings

One of today’s most contentious culture wars is over the religious commitments of our nation’s founders.

Were most of them orthodox Christians, deists, or agnostics? Scholarly books, college classes, radio talk shows, and blogs all debate this issue, and the Texas Board of Education recently joined the fray. Because of Texas’ large number of students, its huge educational fund, and its statewide curriculum guidelines, this board strongly influences what textbooks are published in the United States. Last month the board reviewed the state’s social studies curriculum, and its conservative Christian members injected more analysis of religion into the guidelines, including assessment of whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation and how Christian were the founders.

This issue is so heated that it was the subject of an extensive article in the most recent New York Times Magazine, titled, “How Christian Were the Founders?”

Conservative Christian authors such as David Barton, Peter Marshall Jr., and Tim LaHaye contend that most of the founders were devout Christians who sought to establish a Christian nation. Isaac Kramnick and R. Laurence Moore in “The Godless Constitution” and Brooke Allen in “Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers” counter that very few founders were orthodox Christians. They and others often generalize from famous founders, such as George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Thomas Paine, to argue that most founders were deists who wanted strict separation of church and state.

The truth lies between these two positions. Almost every major founder belonged to a Christian congregation, although a sizable number of them were not committed Christians whose faith strongly influenced their political philosophy and actions.

Two recent books edited by Daniel Dreisbach, Jeffry Morrison, and Mark David Hall—The Founders on God and Government and The Forgotten Founders on Religion and Public Life—carefully explained the religious backgrounds, convictions, and contributions of numerous founders. They show that many who played leading roles in the nation’s Declaration of Independence, the Continental Congress, and the devising and ratification of the Constitution were devout Christians, as evident in their church attendance, commitment to prayer and Bible reading, belief in God’s direction of earthly affairs, and conduct.

Among others, these books discuss John Witherspoon, James Wilson, Samuel Adams, George Mason, Oliver Ellsworth, Patrick Henry, John Jay, Benjamin Rush, and Roger Sherman. A third book, which is currently being written, will explain how the faith of Congregationalist John Hancock, Quaker John Dickinson, Presbyterian Elias Boudinot, and Episcopalian Charles Pinckney, and others helped shape their political views, policies, and practice. Abigail Adams and Catholics Charles Carroll, Daniel Carroll, and John Carroll also were dedicated Christians. Moreover, Jay, Boudinot, Pinckney, and numerous other founders served as officers of the American Bible Society.

Even many of those often labeled as deists—Washington, Franklin, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Alexander Hamilton—do not fit the standard definition of deism, which asserts that after creating the world, God has had no more involvement with it. Deism views God as a transcendent first cause who is not immanent, triune, fully personal, or sovereign over human affairs.

All of these founders, however, repeatedly discussed God’s providence and frequently affirmed the value of prayer. Their conviction that God intervened in human affairs and directed history has led some scholars to call these founders “warm” or “enlightened” deists, but these terms seem like oxymorons. A better label for their position is theistic rationalism.

As Professor Gregg Frazer explains, this hybrid belief system combines elements of “natural religion, Protestant Christianity, and rationalism—with rationalism as the controlling element.” Those espousing this perspective believed in a powerful, benevolent Creator who established the laws by which the universe operates. They also believed that God answered prayer, that people best served Him by living a moral life, and that individuals would be rewarded or punished in the afterlife based on their earthly deeds. Only a few founders, most notably Thomas Paine and Ethan Allan, can properly be called deists.

Despite their theological differences, virtually all the founders maintained that morality depended on religion (which for them meant Christianity). They were convinced that their new republic could succeed only if its citizens were virtuous. For both ideological and pragmatic reasons, the founders opposed establishing one denomination as a national church. However, they provided public support of Christianity through various means, including establishing Christian denominations at the state level, passing state laws restricting public office holding to Christians and punishing blasphemy, issuing proclamations of thanksgiving to God and calls for fasting, using federal money to finance missions to Indians, and permitting Christian congregations to use governmental facilities, both at the state and federal level, for their worship services.

While we must be careful not to overstate the role of religion in the founding of our nation and the Christian convictions of the founders in textbooks or public discourse, the tendency in many scholarly circles has been to ignore or discount these matters. The battle over how Christian the founders were is likely to continue in Texas and across the country. Fortunately, meticulous scholarship is providing a much more accurate picture of the founders’ religious commitments.

HT: BreakPoint.org

The Declaration opens:

We are Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christians who have united at this hour to reaffirm fundamental truths about justice and the common good, and to call upon our fellow citizens, believers and non-believers alike, to join us in defending them. These truths are (1) the sanctity of human life, (2) the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife, and (3) the rights of conscience and religious liberty…We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

The three issues that Declaration signers see as preeminent and the rationale for opposition:

Human Life

The lives of the unborn, the disabled, and the elderly are ever more threatened. While public opinion has moved in a pro-life direction, powerful and determined forces are working to expand abortion, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide, and euthanasia…We pledge to work unceasingly for the equal protection of every innocent human being at every stage of development and in every condition. We will refuse to permit ourselves or our institutions to be implicated in the taking of human life and we will support in every possible way those who, in conscience, take the same stand.

Marriage

The institution of marriage, already wounded by promiscuity, infidelity and divorce, is at risk of being redefined and thus subverted. Marriage is the original and most important institution for sustaining the health, education, and welfare of all. Where marriage erodes, social pathologies rise. The impulse to redefine marriage is a symptom, rather than the cause, of the erosion of the marriage culture. It reflects a loss of understanding of the meaning of marriage as embodied in our civil law as well as our religious traditions…Marriage is not a “social construction,” but is rather an objective reality—the covenantal union of husband and wife—that it is the duty of the law to recognize, honor, and protect.

Religious Liberty

Freedom of religion and the rights of conscience are gravely jeopardized…Attacks on religious liberty are dire threats not only to individuals, but also to the institutions of civil society including families, charities, and religious communities. The health and well-being of such institutions provide an indispensable buffer against the overweening power of government and is essential to the flourishing of every other institution—including government itself—on which society depends.

With these three issues in mind, and aware of the secularist undermining of tradition and culture, the signers resolved:

Unjust Laws

As Christians, we believe in law and we respect the authority of earthly rulers. We count it as a special privilege to live in a democratic society where the moral claims of the law on us are even stronger in virtue of the rights of all citizens to participate in the political process. Yet even in a democratic regime, laws can be unjust. And from the beginning, our faith has taught that civil disobedience is required in the face of gravely unjust laws or laws that purport to require us to do what is unjust or otherwise immoral. Such laws lack the power to bind in conscience because they can claim no authority beyond that of sheer human will.

Therefore, let it be known that we will not comply with any edict that compels us or the institutions we lead to participate in or facilitate abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide, euthanasia, or any other act that violates the principle of the profound, inherent, and equal dignity of every member of the human family.

Further, let it be known that we will not bend to any rule forcing us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriages or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality, marriage, and the family.

Further, let it be known that we will not be intimidated into silence or acquiescence or the violation of our consciences by any power on earth, be it cultural or political, regardless of the consequences to ourselves.

We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s. But under no circumstances will we render to Caesar what is God’s.

Orthodox signers of the original Declaration include:

• Metr. Jonah Paffhausen Primate, Orthodox Church in America (Syosset, NY)
• His Grace, The Right Reverend Bishop Basil Essey The Right Reverend Bishop of the Diocese of Wichita and Mid-America (Wichita, KS)
• Fr. Chad Hatfield Chancellor, CEO. And Archpriest, St Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary (Yonkers, NY)
• Fr. Johannes L. Jacobse President, American Orthodox Institute and Editor, OrthodoxyToday.org (Naples, FL)
• Fr. Patrick Reardon Pastor, All Saints’ Antiochian Orthodox Church (Chicago, IL)
• Fr. Alexander F. C. Webster, Ph.D. Archpriest, Orthodox Church in America; Professorial Lecturer, The George Washington University (Ashburn, Va.)

You can sign the declaration on the Manhattan Declaration website.

From OCA News:

NEW YORK, NY (OCA Communications) – His Beatitude, Metropolitan Jonah, Primate of the Orthodox Church in America, and the Very Rev. Chad Hatfield, Chancellor of Saint Vladimir’s Seminary, were among some 125 US religious leaders who signed a 4,700-word declaration addressing the sanctity of life, traditional marriage, and religious liberty here recently.

The statement, known as the “Manhattan Declaration: A Call of Christian Conscience,” issues “a clarion call” to Christians to adhere to their convictions and informs civil authorities that the signers will not “under any circumstance” abandon their Christian consciences. The text of the declaration, which already has generated considerable controversy, was released on Friday, November 20, 2009.

“The Manhattan Declaration is the result of several months of dialogue among Orthodox, Catholic, and evangelical Christian leaders culminating in a gathering of approximately 100 leaders in New York City on September 28, 2009,” Catholic News Agency [CNA] reports. “Attendees considered an early draft… but the document was entrusted to a drafting committee.”

“We are Christians who have joined together across historic lines of ecclesial differences to affirm our right—and, more importantly, to embrace our obligation—to speak and act in defense of these truths,” the Declaration reads. “We pledge to each other, and to our fellow believers, that no power on earth, be it cultural or political, will intimidate us into silence or acquiescence.

“We recognize the duty to comply with laws whether we happen to like them or not, unless the laws are gravely unjust or require those subject to them to do something unjust or otherwise immoral,” the signatories explain.

But, CNA reports, they also made clear that “we will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia, or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriage or the equivalent, or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family.”

The signatories explained that they speak now because in order “to defend principles of justice and the common good that are now under assault.”

“We will fully and ungrudgingly render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, but we will under no circumstances render to Caesar what is God’s.”

. . . more