This from an article in the Pittsburg Post-Gazette article yesterday concerning mainline denominations, America’s moral compass, and the Culture Wars:

The single issue hamstringing the mainline churches is homosexuality and its place in the church. At its 2004 General Conference in Pittsburgh, the United Methodist Church maintained its stance against gay ordination and same-sex blessings. Last year, it was the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. The national gatherings this summer of both the Presbyterians and Episcopalians were consumed by it.
“We’ve been fighting in this ditch for 28 years and the ditch is getting deeper,” the Presbyterians’ former moderator, Marj Carpenter, of Big Spring, Texas, said in a speech at the denomination’s General Assembly last month. “It’s starting to affect our mission work, our youth ministry, and our evangelism, and I’m ready to try something else.
“Please, let’s get on with being the church, taking the gospel into the world and offering them something else other than arguments.”

I’m beginning to believe that the only honest solution to these incessant arguments and battles is a rearrangement of American Christianity. Even in the denomination that is known to be the middle-way, the Via Media, The Episcopal Church/Anglicanism is being pulled apart.
The extremes of both the liberal and conservative sides in the mainline denominations will not allow for the compromise that the middle-ground normally enforced. As the articles says below, the middle remains silent and allows the issues to be framed and debated by the extremes. It is similar to the American Culture Wars lived out in our nation’s government as extreme partisanship rules the day and the necessary element of compromise that is essential for democratic government falls by the wayside.

Derek H. Davis, dean of the college of humanities at the University of Mary Hardin-Baylor in Texas and an expert in church-state relations, said part of the problem is that moderates in the mainline churches have gone silent.
“My own sense is it’s a voice that’s greatly needed in our present condition,” he said. “It tends to be a debate that’s vigorously pursued on the far ends. It makes the cultural wars in America seem more profound than they should be.
“The mainline churches have always represented this moderate middle. Without their voice, we’re not debating, we’re dividing.”
John C. Green, a senior fellow with the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and a professor of political science at the University of Akron, blames the churches’ divisions on the country’s deep rifts.”What we lack is a consensus on what is moral and what we should do about it,” he said. “But if history is any guide, the current warring parties — whether in the mainline churches or in the country at large — are unlikely to provide a solution.
“Quite literally, they are part of the problem.”

If the middle does not rise up to keep the extremes under control and from destroying the denominations, then the mission of the Church will never go forward and the ditch truly will become deeper and deeper, or else one side or the other will prevail and we will see the same kind of purge we witnessed when the fundamentalists gained full control of the Southern Baptist Convention.
Monday, July 17, 2006 By Steve Levin, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

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The politicized Religious Right and “pro-family” groups keep pushing for victim-hood status as they claim their free speech rights are being violated. There is an element of truth here in the sense that chaplains at the air-force academy, for example, are being kept from praying and saying very sectarian things in the midst of the religiously mixed student body. Another example, see below, is a high school valedictorian who began witnessing to the assembled students, family, and friends about Jesus Christ. Her microphone was turned off shortly after she deviated from her text and began evangelizing the crowd. She and the Religious Right legal organization – The Rutherford Institute – are suing for the violation of the student’s First and Fourth Amendment rights.
There have been so much negative representations of Christianity over the past few decades – much of it self-inflicted and not as a result of blatant anti-Christian sentiments of the media, as some claim. It is not a matter of our rights to force people to listen to us as we witness to them, but we are to earn the right to be listened to. We fall far short in our actions and words, particular by those who most stringently demand their rights. Many in the politicized Religious Right claim that their imperative to “save souls” – in their particular, very American, and very sectarian understanding of how that is supposed to happen – supersedes any consideration of the rights or feelings of those who do not agree with them. They are demanding that they have the right and the ability to evangelize anyone, anywhere, no matter the venue or purpose of the event – especially when the situation is a government sponsored event, as in a public high school graduation ceremony.
It is their right to free speech. I agree that it is their right, in the same way that it is the right of a Muslim, Hindu, or a Buddhist to witness before the same crowd in the same way. (Of course, the politicized Religious Right would have a fit if a Muslim valedictorian evangelized the crowd at a graduation ceremony – because they have a right not to hear the deceptive lies of Satan spewed forth by false religions in a government sanctioned function.) I say, let them say all this stuff whenever and however they want as long as they allowed others the same right. I fear, however, that they do not want others to have that same right.
The problem is that in this day in age most people are going to react very negatively when they are confronted with blatant and sectarian evangelization – not necessarily because they hate “real Christians” or hate God, but because these “real Christians” are acting with very little respect or consideration for those before whom they are speaking. In the long run, it will be counter-productive to the Religious Right’s cause of saving the souls of everyone – again, according to their understanding of how that is supposed to happen to the exclusion of any other form or means.
The loud, shrill, arrogant, and demanding tone of speech and action being employed by the politicized Religious Right will not bring mass conversations to their form of the Christian faith, but more likely will turn more people away from the cause of Christ and Jesus’ call for all to be reconciled to God and one another. There is such a profound lack of “love your neighbor” in their actions – it’s all about securing their rights, regardless of the rights of anyone else.
Yes, anyone who claims to be a Christian can express their faith and their experience, but there are times and places and means of doing so that truly will be effective and others that will not be. A lot has to be undone at this point before earning the right to be heard from here on out.

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Questions and answers in the The Wittenburg Door
Bob Gersztyn for the Door asks, “Someone has said that Star Wars is the myth of the 21st Century, for Americans.”
Terry Mattingly responds, “…The Star Wars universe gives you good verses evil, yet then turns right around and puts you in kind of an Eastern religious, yin yang context where there are the two sides of the force, the dark side and the light side. It wants to have Eastern religion and Western religion at the same time… People are constantly telling Anakin Skywalker, later Darth Vader, to trust his feelings. Why? Why are you supposed to believe that both the good guys and the bad guys want him to trust his feelings? They guy’s feelings are all messed up. How is he suppposed to get to truth through is feelings when his feelings are a circus? You can’t have truth any way other than feelings because the culture of the 60’s, and thereafter, is all based on experience, feelings and emotions. Anything else is linear, transcendent, doctrinaire truth, and we can’t have that. That’s old fashioned Judeo-Christian or something. So, however you find truth, it’s got to be entertaining, fun, edgy and visual, and make you feel a certain way. Trusting your feelings is very close to the heart of the ’60’s, as I said earlier”
A bit later Terry Mattingly responds, “Yes, that’s what Roberto [Rivera Arcarlo] means when he says the Star Wars universe wants it both ways. It wants to have good and evil, and moral certainty but yet then again it doesn’t want to have a conceptof truth taht actually gives you that, and that’s America. We want very badly for everything to be true except the parts that kind of bug us.”
Terry Mattingly being interviewed by Bob Gersztyn of the Wittenburg Door. Mattingly writes the column On Religion and works as a journalist for the Scripts Howard News Service in D.C. His new book is entitled, Pop Goes Religion: Faith in Popular Culture
Pertaining to a question about the potential for TV and the Internet as vehicles for evangelism or church programs, “I’m of the belief, as I say in the book, that media makes lousy evangelism, but media makes tremendous pre-evangelism.”
The Wittenburg Door July/August, 2006, Issue No. 206, pp 8-9.

Here is another indication of the underlying intent of Religious Right (RR) groups. The RR has given itself over to a strange ideology and political, social, and theological fundamentalism (little “f”). They no longer reflect the Christian faith, in my humble opinion. They are not even conservatives in the classical sense.
A new organization of “family-values” organizations in Georgia have banned together to form the “Coalition for Clean Baseball” to try to stop the sale of the Atlanta Braves to a person they don’t like. I don’t necessarily like what this guy does for a living (amassing a fortune of around 4 billion dollars) – he is a large distributor of pornography (according to this new coalition).
This group has a right to advocate for their position against porn, and frankly I would support advocacy against pornography, but what concerns me is that they are taking upon themselves the role of arbiters of who is and who is not worthy or eligible to buy and sell in Georgia and regarding the national organizations nationwide.
There was a time when men held that women were not worthy of owning land. Not too long ago, certain groups determined that blacks were not worthy to buy and sell certain assets within our nation. Now, these groups are deciding that this man is not morally worthy and should be ineligible to buy the Atlanta Braves. What if a gay person was attempting to buy the Braves – would this group mount a nation campaign to keep this “reprobate homosexual” from engaging in the economic process?
You can see what would happen if these people (who are defaming the Church and the cause of Christ) every truly obtained power. Just wait, this kind of thing will only increase. It just depends on whether their influence will continue to cause people in power to listen to them. Their true intent is being slowly laid out before the American public, and while many Americans can and do agree with some of their policies, this kind of thing (the interference with commerce) goes too far. Who is next on their list of people who are not worthy of buying and selling within the United States? They can only become more extreme.

July 11, 2006
Campaign Launched to Stop Porn Magnate from Buying Atlanta Braves
by Pete Winn, associate editor
Baseball, apple pie and pornography?
A Colorado billionaire wants to buy the Atlanta Braves baseball team. But a pro-family grassroots campaign in Georgia is springing up to oppose the purchase because of the way he made his fortune.
Major League Baseball owners will meet Aug. 8-10 in New York City in a regularly scheduled meeting. They may discuss whether John Malone’s company, Liberty Media, can buy the struggling Braves from Time Warner.
No one doubts Malone’s financial resources. The Englewood businessman, one of the world’s richest men, is estimated by Forbes Magazine to be worth $4 billion.
But Stephen Adams, associate editor of Focus on the Family’s Citizen magazine, says Malone is not what he appears to be — and doesn’t deserve to own the Braves.

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