Perpetuating the rubbish: Hypocrisy, thy name is News and Tribune.

Hmm.

It's the very same newspaper that runs two weekly Christian advocacy columns, balanced by zero -- zilch, cerro, nada -- "alternative" religion or non-religion essays.

"Maybe we should find out, before passing judgment."

So maybe if Susan Duncan is serious about boosting comparative religious enlightenment, her own newspaper might -- you know, inform us about the alternatives rather than doubling down each week on evangelical Christianity.

Wait ... it might even take the form of a Muslim telling us about Islam. 

Or is Bill Hanson still paying back Tom May for penny ante poker debts by giving May two weekly columns, one of which is plainly evangelical?

DUNCAN COLUMN: Piling on the rubbish, by Susan Duncan

Trash.

I heard the word and my heart sank. The man wasn’t talking about refuse that’s collected and taken to a landfill.

No, he was using the word to describe people. A whole group of people.

With dismissive authority, he said, “Muslims are trash. Every one of ’em.”

He was conversing with a woman as the two were seated near the prescription counter of a local chain drug store. I had wandered into that area in search of an item on my shopping list. Unfortunately, I overheard his world view as I compared products and prices.

How had the man become such an expert on the followers of Islam, I wondered. Had he studied them to know with absolute certainty that Muslims — who number nearly a quarter of the world’s population — all are trash?

Plug in any people of faith from any religion into his original quote: Hindus. Jews. Buddhists.

What if he had said, “Christians are trash. Every one of ’em”? That surely would offend the sensibilities of any followers of Jesus who happened to be within earshot.

So, why is it OK to lump all Muslims together, into the same heap as it were?

The woman tried to add some perspective, I think.

We grew up here, she told her seat mate, and you know as well as I do that there’s white trash, too. The man readily agreed, adding in some blacks, as well. Apparently trash knows no color. It also doesn’t differentiate between heritage and religion.

I wanted to insert myself into their garbage gab, but I knew I wouldn’t change their minds, and I could almost hear the 911 call to police referencing a trio of gray-haired folks scuffling at the pharmacy. It could have gotten ugly in a hurry.

So, my purchase decided, I walked toward the checkout counter, burdened by their words.

The comments struck me as judgmental. Who sits in such an exalted place that they can look down upon others?

Troubling, too, was the casualness of the conversation. The pair just as easily could have been discussing the weather, or the merits of M&Ms vs. Reese’s peanut butter cups.

If I were to label the musings I overheard, I’d call it hate speech. Hate grows from fear, which is rooted in the unknown or the unfamiliar.

In a world of seven and a half billion people, is there anyone as worthy as are we? Anyone?

Maybe we should find out, before passing judgment.

— Susan Duncan is the editor of the News and Tribune. Reach her at 812-206-2130 and susan.duncan@newsandtribune.com.

I got your message: Tom May's sermons are opinions, not news. C'mon, journalists -- get it right.

It says right there it's a "column," which is a questionable assessment in itself, seeing as Preacher Tom May's screed is a religious "message" of the sort distributed by street corner Jehovah Witnesses, except in this instance it is published weekly in the pages of the Jeffersonville newspaper, to be filed on line not under "opinions," which is how columns generally are classified, but as "news," a term implying factual comment utterly absent from an evangelist's pitch.

Or, the News and Tribune's decline continues unabated.

Not a Tom May topic: "Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power over Christian Values."

As The Economist noted in 2017 (photo credit above), the secret of evangelical support for Donald Trump lies in the prosperity gospel.

The idiocy of the "pastorpreneurs" -- or, the prosperity gospel, as lifted straight from the corporate capitalist playbook.

Money, power.

Is anyone detecting a trend?

The Immoral Majority review: how evangelicals backed Trump – and how they might atone, by John S Gardner (The Guardian)

As a scandal-ridden presidency lurches towards impeachment, Ben Howe offers valuable insight into how it came to this

In his new book, Ben Howe attempts to explain something that should never have occurred: why most white evangelicals voting in 2016 chose Donald Trump.

Many observers thought Trump could not win because evangelical Christians could not support someone whose life (and tweeting) was so at odds with their beliefs and practices. Indeed, Trump failed to win a majority of evangelicals in any Super Tuesday primary.

Howe’s subtitle tells the tale: Why Evangelicals Chose Political Power over Christian Values.

snip

As Howe notes, “Trump evangelicals are very fond of binary choices”, many of which are in essence “false dilemmas” in which a supposed “greater moral consideration takes precedence”. This “whataboutism” was key. Could one have opposed Trump and Clinton? Of course – and Trump would have lost. Yet, as Howe reminds us, “putting God in one compartment” and politics in another “is clearly out of step with Christian tradition”.

This provides a further clue. Howe writes extensively about the impact of social media and cable news in deepening the political divide in America and intensifying it to fresh levels of vitriol and “hyperbolic outrage”, largely based on the idea of victimization. This had dramatic effects: a spirit of bitterness and a “persecution complex” on the right meant that “ [a]s the clicks came, and the ideas were reinforced through group dynamics, they became even more pronounced. Anger had become a currency.”

snip

Trump promised power. “In the end,” Howe writes, “It’s what many absolutely believe Trump as president has given them.”

Power was one of the temptations the devil offered Jesus. He refused.

This is a deeply introspective, at times anguished book ...

Martin Luther "prefigured modern-day evangelicalism, and a look back at his life can help explain why so many evangelicals support Trump today."

In 1989 during my month's stay in East Germany, three of us skipped work one day and took the train to Lutherstadt Wittenberg on the Elbe River to the southwest of Berlin.

Wittenberg is where Martin Luther may have posted his 95 theses on the cathedral door (this isn't definitively known), but it's definitely where he kicked off the Protestant Reformation. Soon I'm hoping to begin digitizing the slides from the trip, and maybe after seeing the photos I'll remember a bit more about the day apart from buying bottles of beer and drinking all the way back to base camp.

All I knew about Donald Trump in 1989 is what I'd read while abstracting magazine articles at the long defunct UMI-Data Courier. It wasn't a favorable appraisal, and my impression cannot be said to have improved.

Trump's more vinegar than vintage wine ... but when it comes to the sweet taste of exposing the breathtaking fraudulence of white American evangelicals, I've got to hand it to the kitschmeister. It may be the only mission he's accomplished as president, but I cannot think of a more important one.

How Martin Luther Paved the Way for Donald Trump, by Michael Massing (The Nation)

To understand why evangelicals support the president, look to the first Protestant.

 ... The verdict is clear: In supporting this thrice-married, coarse, boastful, divisive, and xenophobic president, evangelicals are betraying the true nature of Christianity. In making such charges, however, these commentators are championing their own particular definition of Christianity. It is the Christianity of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus blesses the meek, disdains the rich, welcomes the stranger, counsels humility, and encourages charity. “Do not resist an evildoer. But if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also,” he declares—a most un-Trumpian sentiment.

Yet this irenic message is just one strain in the New Testament. There’s another, more bellicose one. In Matthew, for instance, Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace to the earth; I have not come to bring peace but a sword”—to “set a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.” In John, he declares, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life,” and “no one comes to the Father except through me”—a statement long used to declare Christianity the one true path to salvation. The Book of Revelation describes with apocalyptic fury the locusts, scorpions, hail, fire, and other plagues that God will visit upon the earth to wipe out the unbelievers and prepare the way for the Messiah.

From the earliest days of the faith, this militant strand has coexisted with the more pacific one. And it was the former that stirred the founder of Protestantism, Martin Luther. In his fierce ideas, vehement language, and combative intellectual style, Luther prefigured modern-day evangelicalism, and a look back at his life can help explain why so many evangelicals support Trump today.

In defending the cause of Christ, Luther was uncompromising. No one, he wrote, should think that the Gospel “can be advanced without tumult, offense and sedition.” The “Word of God is a sword, it is war and ruin and offense and perdition and poison.” In Luther’s famous dispute with Erasmus of Rotterdam over free will and predestination, the renowned Dutch humanist suggested that the two of them debate the matter civilly, given that both were God-fearing Christians and that the Bible was far from clear on the subject. Exploding in fury, Luther insisted that predestination was a core Christian doctrine on which he could not yield and that Erasmus’s idea that they agree to disagree showed he was not a true Christian ...

One positive aspect of our Trumped-up times is the "discrediting of evangelical Christianity."

Ed Simon at Newsweek:

 ... Jerry Falwell Jr., cognizant enough of the disjuncture between personal piety and support of Trump but apparently not cognizant enough to avoid uttering inanities like the following, has compared the president to King David. That is to say that he acknowledges Trump’s copious personal failings (and steadfast refusals at contrition for any of them) but sees the president as a tool of the Lord meant to enact Christian policy, and so it behooves evangelicals to support him.

One imagines that whatever makes it easier for the good Rev. Falwell to sleep better at night, but perhaps he is the sort of man whose sleep is untroubled, for hypocrisy has a handy ability to cleanse the conscience.

Whether Trump or the supposedly pious, it's all blowhardism to me.

Why Evangelicals—Still!—Support Trump, by Katha Pollitt (The Nation)

If you leave out the part about him being a corrupt, immoral con man and bully, there’s lots for them to like.

... In the latest issue of The Atlantic, Michael Gerson, a former Bush speechwriter and current Washington Post columnist, mourns the loss of evangelical credibility in an angry, eloquent essay, “The Last Temptation.” As Gerson writes: “The moral convictions of many evangelical leaders have become a function of their partisan identification. This is not mere gullibility; it is utter corruption.” An evangelical himself, Gerson excoriates those leaders who make outlandish excuses for Trump’s behavior (my personal favorite: James Dobson’s explanation that the president is a “baby Christian”). Evangelicals, he says, have been driven to a kind of paranoia by their loss of cultural hegemony: They fall into absurd and unnecessary battles over school prayer and creationism, and losing those battles has made them seem—or actually be—“negative, censorious, and oppositional.”

The late Billy Graham: "Lying to the young for a living."

At the 1:21 mark of this video clip from 2007, Christopher Hitchens observes that any American president, however deserving of condemnation or impeachment, always could rely on Billy Graham to run to his side as a defender, toady and crony.

Son Franklin has filled those shoes capably with regard to Donald Trump, hasn't he?

Long-time FFRF foe and state-church opponent Billy Graham dies (Freedom from Religion Foundation)

... Anti-Semitism was not Graham’s only vice. He also worked to destroy our secular government. Graham helped corrupt America’s secular foundations by riding the wave of religious fervor in the 1950s, which brought with it “under God” into the Pledge of Allegiance, the Capitol prayer room, and “In God We Trust” as a national motto.

The National Day of Prayer is set by federal statute, Public Law 82-324, which was passed in 1952 at the direct suggestion of Graham to help bring “the Lord Jesus Christ” to the nation. “What a thrilling, glorious thing it would be to see the leaders of our country kneeling before almighty God in prayer,” Graham proclaimed. FFRF’s major challenge to the National Day of Prayer uncovered the forgotten history of Graham’s role in this troubling, theocratic act by Congress.

Several years ago, Graham passed the reins of his religio-economic empire to his son, Franklin, who has turned out to be even worse than his father. Graham leaves behind a legacy that has severely damaged our Constitution and the wall of separation between state and church. FFRF will continue to work to undo this legacy.

You can count me out of any paeans of praise for Graham.

Billy Graham: An Old Soldier Fades Away, by Cecil Bothwell (Common Dreams)

An Obituary

... Based on that Biblical mandate for all governments, Graham stood in solid opposition to the work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. In his Letter from Birmingham Jail, all but addressed to Graham, King noted, "We should never forget that everything Adolf Hitler did in Germany was 'legal' and everything the Hungarian freedom fighters did in Hungary was 'illegal.' ... If today I lived in a Communist country where certain principles dear to the Christian faith are suppressed, I would openly advocate disobeying that country's antireligious laws. "

Fear is the stock in trade of most evangelists, of course, comprising the necessary setup before the pitch. As historian William Martin explained in his 1991 account of Graham’s early sermons, “... even those whose personal lives seemed rich and fulfilling must live in a world filled with terror and threat. As a direct result of sinful humanity’s rebellion against God, our streets have become jungles of terror, mugging, rape, and death. Confusion reigns on campuses as never before. Political leaders live in constant fear of the assassin’s bullet. Racial tension seems certain to unleash titanic forces of hatred and violence. Communism threatens to eradicate freedom from the face of the earth. Small nations are getting the bomb, so that global war seems inevitable. High-speed objects, apparently guided by an unknown intelligence, are coming into our atmosphere for reasons no one understands. Clearly, all signs point to the end of the present world order.

“... Graham’s basic mode of preaching in these early years was assault. ... Then, when he had his listeners mentally crouching in terror, aware that all the attractively labeled escape routes—alcohol, sexual indulgence, riches, psychiatry, education, social-welfare programs, increased military might, the United Nations—led ultimately to dead ends, he held out the only compass that pointed reliably to the straight and narrow path that leads to personal happiness and lasting peace.”

Debunking Pascal's Wager, which Christopher Hitchens aptly described as "hucksterism."

A variant of Pascal's Wager has been circulating (again) on social media.

You don't believe in God? Fine. Why is it so important for many of you to mock those of us that do? If we're wrong, what have we lost when we die? Nothing! How does our believing in Jesus bring you any harm? You think it makes me stupid? Gullible? Fine. How does that affect you? If you're wrong your consequence is far worse. I would rather live my life believing in God and serving Him, and find out I was right, than not believe in Him and not serve Him, and find out I was wrong. Then it's to late.

It's a bit more complicated that than, but not much. Pascal's Wager holds that one might as well believe in God, just in case God exists, rather than risk eternal damnation if She doesn't.

Pascal's Wager is an argument in apologetic philosophy devised by the seventeenth-century French philosopher, mathematician and physicist Blaise Pascal (1623–62). It posits that humans all bet with their lives either that God exists or that he does not. Pascal argues that a rational person should live as though God exists and seek to believe in God. If God does not actually exist, such a person will have only a finite loss (some pleasures, luxury, etc.), whereas they stand to receive infinite gains (as represented by eternity in Heaven) and avoid infinite losses (eternity in Hell).

A few days after I saw the Fb passage, I took my mother to her dentist in Georgetown, where I grew up. The Southern Baptist church in the middle of town has an electronic message board, and it was transmitting a two-part admonition, paraphrased: Those who deny Jesus Christ are rebelling against God.

Why must I mock those of you who believe? I typically don't, although I also don't take kindly to being threatened, because as a rebel against God, am I not marked for some variety of physical punishment, perhaps by an angry mob of believers?

I might turn this notion of presumed mockery on its ear, and say "Why is it so important for so many believers to impose their belief system on me," as when Governor Pence describes himself as a Christian first, conservative second and Republican third?

I can't recall any point in my life where theism made sense, but I've no interest in mocking the devout so long as they stay off my porch, metaphorically.

In an interview roughly a year before his death, Christopher Hitchens briefly dispenses with Pascal's Wager. It's at the 22.13 mark. The entire interview is worth watching.

However, this blogger does an even more thorough job of it.

The Fatal Flaws of Pascal’s Wager, by Diplodocus G (Average Atheist)

... The point, and I think Christopher Hitchens was on to something when he called it hucksterism, is that Pascal’s Wager isn’t an honest question. It’s a trick. It’s trying to goad the non-believer into staying quiet about religion and just go along with the Christian majority. It’s saying, “Hey, you don’t believe, but wouldn’t you rather get along with all of us who do? Yes? So why not just make the professions, perform the sacraments, and come join us in church? It’s easy; just tell yourself you believe every night before you go to bed. Who knows, maybe one day you’ll wake up and it’ll be true! I mean, think about it: What if you’re wrong about Jesus?” Well, what if you’re wrong about Muhammad? Or Mahavira? Or Sheva? Or Ganesh? Or Zeus? Or Odin? Think about it.

A brief note on the jarring persistence of fundamentalist douchebaggery in L'America.

In this case, at the monolithic edifice known as Southeast Christian.

Oy.

“We want everyone, including ourselves, to live by biblical standards,” (Mullah) Hester said.

Great.

Suit yourself.

Just leave me out of it, okay?

Take two: Get off of my porch, Journey Church. Go away. Leave me be.

Good news: This one was on the door handle, not in the letter box.

Bad news: We just went through this on Sunday, and now it's more litter for the landfill.

Sunday rant: Get off of my porch.

There was feedback from a friend after Sunday's post, which refers to the handout shown above. My guess is that it's legal, but isn't it also legal for me to remind the church's roaming ambassadors of litter to GET OFF OF MY PORCH?

Journey is going to hold Bible school in the S. Ellen Jones (they must mean Ritter) Park this summer. Is that legal?

Here's the church's mission statement:

“Journey Church has a vision to become a healthy, reproducing community of believers sold out to the Gospel while planting new churches on the local, national and global levels.”

Here's their website: http://www.journeyindiana.com/new-here/vision/

Athevangelism?

But why go door to door when one could send blank mass-email spam?

Making your own dirt: Why not evangelical atheism?

It used to be that you couldn’t switch on an old-fashioned non-digital television set and watch a major sporting event in peace without seeing a man with a crazy rainbow Afro, always seated somewhere squarely within the most prominent camera angle, and holding up a sign touting John 3:16, which for the uninitiated, is a Bible verse that provides a handily terse defense of Christian doctrine so that we, too, can sign on the dotted line.

Accordingly, Wikipedia tells the story of Rollen Stewart.

Rollen Frederick Stewart (born May 20, 1944), also known as Rock 'n' Rollen and Rainbow Man, was a fixture in American sports culture best known for wearing a rainbow-colored afro-style wig and holding up signs reading "John 3:16" at stadium sporting events around the United States in the 1970s and 1980s.

Apparently at first just in it for the publicity stunts, Stewart became a born again Christian obsessed with "getting the message out" via television.

His first major appearance was at the 1977 NBA Finals; by the time of the 1979 MLB All-Star Game, broadcasters actively tried to avoid showing him. He "appeared behind NFL goal posts, near Olympic medal stands, and even at the Augusta National Golf Club" strategically positioned for key shots of plays or athletes. Stewart's fame led to a Budweiser beer commercial and a Saturday Night Live parody sketch, where he was portrayed by Christopher Walken.

Stewart was briefly jailed by Moscow police at the 1980 Olympics. Other legal troubles followed. In the late 1980s, he began a string of stink bomb attacks. Targets included Robert Schuller's Crystal Cathedral, the Orange County Register, the Trinity Broadcasting Network, and a Christian bookstore. The stated intent of an attempted attack at the American Music Awards was to show the public that "God thinks this stinks."

Stewart was arrested in 1992 after a standoff in a California hotel during which he entered a vacant room with two men he was attempting to kidnap and surprised a chambermaid who then locked herself in the bathroom. Reportedly, Stewart believed that the Rapture was due to arrive in six days. During the standoff, he threatened to shoot at airplanes taking off from nearby Los Angeles International Airport, and covered the hotel room windows with "John 3:16" placards.

Rollen is currently serving three consecutive life sentences in jail on kidnapping charges. He became eligible for parole in 2002, but was denied as recently as September of 2005. After this conviction, he was found guilty of four stink bomb attacks.

Rollen Stewart’s career of religious advocacy came back to me in vivid Technicolor after I read a recent guest column in the Tribune.

DeKAY: Latest import — New Atheism, by Peggy DeKay (local Tribune columnist)

What's new about the New Atheism? The New Atheism, and its believers, aren't satisfied to deny the existence of God, or even condemn the belief in God, but they are out to destroy our “respect for our belief in God,” in short, they want to make atheism “cool.”

They paint believers with a broad, harsh brush.

(Richard) Dawkins is an atheist; but he is not content to be an atheist, he wants converts and lots of them. His killing field is comprised of agnostics and non-committed non-believers. He, and his fellow British atheist, Christopher Hitchens represent the New Atheists religion.

DeKay offers the usual tired arguments in favor of theism in general and “intelligent design” in particular, but what seems to annoy her the most is that atheists would have the unmitigated gall to go out in public, write books, and attempt to convince others that there is no supreme being.

That’s breathtakingly hypocritical.

Think of Rollen Stewart. Think of every Jehovah’s Witness or Mormon who has ever come knocking at my door while I’m busy eating, drinking, sleeping or fornicating. Think of the transformational zeal of generations of ravenous Christians, traveling overseas for the peaceful purpose of subduing decadent native culture and spreading Western microbes even as they blame the dying natives for being sick and urging them to find God as a cure.

In short, the entire history of Peggy DeKay’s preferred religion is one of evangelical outreach, to put it mildly, except that it’s seldom anything but intrusive, amounting to incessant interference in the space of non-believers as well as believers in other forms of supernatural fiction. And yet, she’s aghast that an atheist would dare to explain why he or she doesn’t believe, and ask other to consider the evidence?

Most readers know that I’m an atheist. I don’t go door to door, and I don’t show up at the front gate of Christian churches on Sunday mornings to protest the delusion residing therein. I don’t go to the balcony and swing my Oakland A’s pennant or, even worse, wave my portrait of Bertrand Russell at the minister and demand the honcho repent from sin -- or whatever that other columnist, the prison lawyer, wants to call it.

Peggy DeKay needs desperately to get a clue. Until she does, here’s the reprint of a piece I wrote a year or so ago on much the same topic.

---

No better day than Sunday to be a gadfly.

A few weeks back, as Tribune syndicated religion columnist David Yount wrote carefully erected a straw man out of atheism before predictably and delightedly bashing it to bits, he ventured, “It is no more credible that there is no God than that God indeed exists.”

I submit that this statement is at best an example of logical sleight of hand, and at worst, downright nonsensical.

If I were to write, “It is no more credible that there is no Blue Speckled Hungadunga than that a Blue Speckled Hungadunga indeed exists,” it is quite likely that any rational person would demand an immediate definition of a Blue Speckled Hungadunga in order to proceed with the discussion.

Moreover, lacking persuasive proof for the existence of the Blue Speckled Hungadunga, there would be no need for further debate, and subsequently no need for a syndicated religion columnist to utter a statement that is at base invalid, for it assumes the existence of a conjectured entity, then uses this assumed (and as yet unproven) existence to impugn the allegedly faulty perception of those who insist in pointing to the obvious nature of the theist’s logical fallacy.

In fact, atheists don’t “believe” there is no God; rather, they are absent such a belief. As with the Blue Speckled Hungadunga, the responsibility for proving the existence of God lies with the one advancing a positive belief in the conjectured deity, not with the one who has no belief.

Atheists offer no positive claims with respect to knowledge presumed to derive from outside the realm of human experience and perception. As Yount correctly notes, some atheists go a step further and proselytize in the manner of the religionist, but it’s a very safe bet that during the past two thousand years far more people have been asked to convert to religion at the point of a bayonet, and died as a result of their refusal, than have been forcibly converted to atheism.

After all, if religious belief really remains a matter of heart and soul, isn’t it impossible to “convert” anyone to atheism? Outward symbols and pageantry are superfluous with regard to inner feeling, aren’t they?

In my experience, atheists generally just want to be left alone, and prefer that religious belief remain a matter of private conscience and not a public policy stick. We respect a separation of church and state and take such a division at face value precisely because we’ve studied history, and we know against whom that public policy stick inevitably is wielded – against us, to be sure, but far more often against other religionists who believe in their variant of the supernatural entity just as much as the ones shooting at them from a nearby trench.

The result is a sad continuation of the war, violence and strife that has accompanied religion throughout human history.

To summarize, atheism is a negation in the absence of verifiable evidence, and it is the theist who is obliged to prove that God exists – not the other way around.

With apologies to the Tribune’s youthful, periodically published “natural law” guest writer: “It is no more credible that there is a necessary higher power than such a necessary higher power does not exist.”

"Evangelicals Everywhere": Personal piety, politics ... and economic development?

If I were so inclined, there might be a blog posting each day culled from those publications that comprise the regular household reading list.

Generally speaking, I resist the impulse … though not today. Reprinted below are the opening paragraphs from a book review by Alan Wolfe that appeared in the New York Times (November 25, 2007). The highlighted section is my doing. After all, it's about polemics with me, isn't it?

Evangelicals Everywhere, a review of “Faith in the Halls of Power: How Evangelicals Joined the American Elite,” by D. Michael Lindsay.

In August, Washington watchers were titillated by a particularly fascinating insider account of the Bush White House: Matthew Scully, one former speechwriter, accused another, Michael Gerson, of egocentric careerism. It is not usually considered sinful in Washington to advance yourself; that is pretty much what the place is about. But Gerson, an evangelical Christian, had developed a reputation among the Washington press corps just this side of sainthood. One need not accept every word Scully wrote to conclude that Gerson had expended considerable energy on his own deification.

Should we expect evangelicals, because they are so upfront about their faith, to act differently than the less devout? Evangelicals, as D. Michael Lindsay demonstrates with impressive research and inexhaustible energy in “Faith in the Halls of Power,” have made great strides in entering mainstream institutions like academia, government, the media and business. Unless we are interested in religion for reasons of pride — the way young Jewish baseball fans would single out Sandy Koufax, or, in my Philadelphia childhood, Saul Rogovin, for special notice — Lindsay’s subject matter should pique everyone’s curiosity. Evangelicals are best known for their determination to witness their faith to others. This makes others inevitably interested in them.

Lindsay conducted 360 interviews in all, including one with Michael Gerson in 2005. “Christianity is not just a statement about personal piety,” Gerson told him; “it’s a statement about social justice.” It is, I guess, a worthwhile sentiment, not so much for what it says — don’t we all profess to believe in social justice? — but because the person who said it worked for a president singularly intent on cutting taxes to redistribute income to America’s wealthiest. It would be interesting to know how Gerson reconciled his faith with the priorities of his party …

Not to mention the Bush administration’s reactionary social agenda as a whole, encompassing the whole range of positions espoused by evangelical lobby organizations like Reclaim Our Culture Kentuckiana (ROCK).

Has anyone heard whether One Southern Indiana will be bringing Gerson to New Albany to speak on social justice, the bridges project and what Jesus would say about 8664?