Environmentalist Religion Explained

Freeman Dyson:

There is a worldwide secular religion which we may call environmentalism, holding that we are stewards of the earth, that despoiling the planet with waste products of our luxurious living is a sin, and that the path of righteousness is to live as frugally as possible. [From, "The Question of Global Warming."]

Freeman Dyson is one of the most highly-regarded physicists in the world. Wikipedia introduces its entry on him thus

Freeman John Dyson FRS (born December 15, 1923) is an English-born American theoretical physicist and mathematician, famous for his work in quantum mechanics, solid-state physics, and nuclear engineering. He is a lifelong opponent of nationalism and a proponent of nuclear disarmament and international cooperation. Dyson is a member of the Board of Sponsors of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.

A true intellectual heavyweight, his essay in the New York Review of Books this month is a very important analysis that I urge you to read in full. Dyson is not the first to point out that environmentalism has morphed into an actual religion in its own right. Michael Crichton and J.R. Dunn have written highly insightful essays about how environmentalism is a religion in its own right. See “Environmentalism as Religion” by Crichton and Dunn’s piece, “A Necessary Apocalypse," in which he shows how global-warming environmentalism is not merely a religion, it is an apocalyptic religion. Its deity is Mother Earth (Gaia), for whom human beings are mortal enemies. NBC’s Matt Lauer inadvertently gave away Gaiaism’s central article of faith thus:

Earth’s intricate web of ecosystems thrived for millions of years as natural paradises, until we came along, paved paradise, and put up a parking lot. Our assault on nature is killing off the very things we depend on for our own lives … The stark reality is that there are simply too many of us, and we consume way too much, especially here at home.

My second son was required to take ecology his junior year in high school; he related to me that the curriculum basically said there was nothing wrong with earth that the disappearance of humanity wouldn’t cure. Jonah Goldberg wrote recently of the "Church of Green."

"At its core, environmentalism is a kind of nature worship. It’s a holistic ideology, shot through with religious sentiment. ...

Environmentalism’s most renewable resources are fear, guilt, and moral bullying. Its worldview casts man as a sinful creature who, through the pursuit of forbidden knowledge, abandoned our Edenic past. John Muir, who laid the philosophical foundations of modern environmentalism, described humans as “selfish, conceited creatures.” Salvation comes from shedding our sins, rejecting our addictions (to oil, consumerism, etc.) and demonstrating an all-encompassing love of Mother Earth. Quoth Al Gore: “The climate crisis is not a political issue; it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.”

I heard Gore on NPR recently. He was asked about evangelical pastor Joseph Hagee’s absurd comment that Hurricane Katrina was God’s wrath for New Orleans’s sexual depravity. Naturally, Gore chuckled at such backwardness. But then the Nobel laureate went on to blame Katrina on man’s energy sinfulness. It struck me that the two men are not so different.

As Crichton pointed out, "environmentalism is in fact a perfect 21st century remapping of traditional Judeo-Christian beliefs and myths." Let me elucidate.

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There are other religions than Judaism and Christianity, of course, but modern environmentalism was born in the West, whose cultural heritage and common languages are steeped through and through in Christian tradition, which was itself a daughter of Judaism.

The common themes of both scriptural Judaism and Christianity deal with deity, the natural world (existing first in a purity state), a corruption of the purity state (Augustine: "fall from grace,"), redemption and liberation/salvation. Then follows paradise. A prominent, though not universal, strain in both Judaism and Christianity is a looming apocalypse that in potential or in fact destroys enormous swaths of humanity.

Modern environmentalism has all these elements, with an emphasis on apocalypticism. I'll examine these religious elements in turn.

Deity: That would be the earth itself. "Mother Earth" is a term tossed about among the religion's adherents, thus personalizing what is really only a gazillion-ton hunk of rock. Personalization of the planet is necessary to deify it. Adherents often call this new deity, “Gaia,” the name of an ancient Greek earth goddess. The Gaia hypothesis was first proposed by NASA scientist James Lovelock, who introduced it thus:

What is the hypothesis of Gaia ? Stated simply, the idea is that we may have discovered a living being bigger, more ancient, and more complex than anything from our wildest dreams. That being, called Gaia, is the Earth.

The most important tenet of Gaiaism is that the earth is itself alive and is a being in its own right.

Creation: Environmentalism offerns no real theory of how the earth came to be, it focuses on the biosphere. In that manner it does echo the Jewish Scriptures, once removed. The Scriptures do inquire how the earth came to be, but not how God came to be. But since Gaia is god(dess), she simply is in the same way God simply is.

As for the appearance of life, environmentalism drops the Bible's creation stories and substitutes evolution. Now, I am not arguing here against the theory of evolution. I am simply pointing out that evolution theory is environmentalism's explanation of life on earth and its diversity. The earth's biodiversity is extremely important for environmentalism, since evolution-driven biodiversity undergirds the apocalypticism of religious environmentalism. The apocalypse of "climate change" is predicted to destroy the evolutionary niches of various species. They won't be able to adapt.

The Purity State: Take your pick:

• Gaia before the appearance of human beings or,
• Gaia after we showed up, but before we invented civilization. (The anti-civilization theme is present in the Hebrew Scriptures, too.) This aspect romanticizes pre-civilizational peoples, often portraying them as gentle souls "living in harmony" with nature and imagining that they worshiped the earth, too, which in fact some did. (However, this notion is rebutted by contemporary researchers.)

The Corruption of (or Fall from) Purity: This is easily defined. It was the invention of the internal-combustion engine and the use of fossil fuels that followed. Burning coal also. More broadly, though, the Fall is consumerism and international industry, especially chemical industries.

Redemption: There is no savior per se in environmentalism. We have to save ourselves. Environmentalism relies on cultic leaders to guide the masses and give enlightenment to them. Like the Law of Moses, their commandments are to be obeyed from faith rather than inquiry: recycle, drive less, eat organics, drive hybrids, etc.

Paradise: Sorry, environmentalism offers not. There is no longing for "life more abundant," since abundancy is exactly what environmentalism uses for original sin. Instead of paradise, environmentalism promotes stasis. Folks my age and maybe a little younger can remember when the Environmental Apocaplypse was not global warming but global cooling. So let us suppose two things: first that global warming really is occurring and human attention to it can reverse it, and second, that we do reverse it. Are we then to agree that a cooler earth really is in our best interests? Why? I’ve always kind of suspected that underlying much of environmentalism is a desire for the impossible: stasis.

Moreover, environmental stasis can be accomplished only by human austerity. Environmentalism's New Jerusalem is not prosperity, but decline, presented as a return to humanity's purity state: the simple life arranged around a village-type lifestyle where everything is within walking distance of everything else. Who else but George Monbiot to explain? 

Everything we thought was good turns out also to be bad. It is an act of kindness to travel to your cousin's wedding. Now it is also an act of cruelty. It is a good thing to light the streets at night. Climate change tells us it kills more people than it saves. We are killing people by the most innocent means: turning on the lights, taking a bath, driving to work, going on holiday. Climate change demands a reversal of our moral compass, for which we are plainly unprepared.

Apocalypticism: Like religious apocalypticism, environmental apocalypticism - in fact, the whole movement - is predicated on the imminent, substantial destruction of the natural world and its inhabitants. This from no less a personage than United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, who just five months ago said that "humanity faces oblivion if it fails to confront global warming." Oblivion, he said. Rising seas, expanding droughts, melting sea ice, increased desertification, scorched crops, mass human suffering and death - all inhabit the same enviro-religious space as Revelation's horsemen of the apocalypse.

Important in Jewish and Christian apocalypticism was the concept of "children of light" versus the "children of darkness." The children of darkness were those who rebelled against God, who turned away from righteousness and embodied evil. Children of light were those who apprehended the truth of God and cleaved toward spiritual purity. This notion has been adopted wholesale by environmentalism. Dyson again: 

Scientists and economists can agree with Buddhist monks and Christian activists that ruthless destruction of natural habitats is evil and careful preservation of birds and butterflies is good. The worldwide community of environmentalists—most of whom are not scientists—holds the moral high ground, and is guiding human societies toward a hopeful future.

Catch that? This is a clear delineation of the realm of light and of darkness, and whom inhabits each. "The worldwide community of environmentalists ... holds the moral high ground," and thus are the children of light. Who are the children of darkness? They are the "evil" ones who conduct or permit the "ruthless destruction of natural habitats." Dyson continues,

Unfortunately, some members of the environmental movement have also adopted as an article of faith the belief that global warming is the greatest threat to the ecology of our planet. ... Much of the public has come to believe that anyone who is skeptical about the dangers of global warming is an enemy of the environment.

(Italics added.) "Enemy of the environment" = child of darkness. (Dyson does not himself promote such a belief, but certainly it is out there.)

Another tenet of religious apocalypticism is that things will get worse before they get better. And so it is with environmentalist apocalypticism. No matter what we do now, greenhouse gases, and therefore climate change, will intensify until at least mid-century, and only then might be abated.

Still skeptical that environmentalism is a religion in its own right? In The Beast in the Garden, David Baron tells of a young man named Scott Lancaster, 18, who was killed and eaten by a mountain lion.

Scott’s friends and family consoled themselves that his death, sad and untimely though it was, had somehow been kind of fitting for him. As James Valdez put it, "He was a real outdoorsy guy."

"It felt natural," said Abby Heller. "It felt like it was part of nature, and part of the way the cycle happens. It seemed kind of pure."

It was "natural," part of the pure cycle of life for a young man to suffer a gruesome, horrifying, massively painful death by means of the "red in tooth and claw" of one of Gaia's creatures. And so the case that environmentalism is a religion in its own right is hereby closed.

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But there is more than mere religiousity at work in religious environmentalism. H.L. Mencken observed, "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule it." And that is the true foundation of environmentalism today: the desire of its gurus to regulate the way others live. Monbiot again:

We can deal with climate change only with the help of governments, restraining the exertions of our natural liberties.

Dyson wrote that, "Environmentalism has replaced socialism as the leading secular religion." I demur. Environmentalism has not replaced socialism at all. Instead, the old-line socialists, faced with decades of the failure of political socialism, have jumped on the environmentalist bandwagon to keep socialism alive. Environmentalism has become a much better vehicle to achieve a rigid regulation of people's lives than political socialism ever was. After all, the fate of the entire planet is at stake! Environmentalism has already led some British members of Parliament to propose that the government regulate almost every aspect of buying and selling by private individuals. If this is not socialism, it is a distinction without a difference. 

(A correspondent of mine observed that environmentalist religion is attractive to people who define who they are by their habits and patterns of consumption and spending. The rituals of environmentalism -- recycling, using low-wattage lights and all the rest -- are the way they buy indulgences to offset their sins of conspicuous consumption, which they do not in fact lessen. They've just found a way to feel less guilty.) 

At bottom, modern environmentalism has discarded scientific rigor to embrace something not much different than Leninism, the desire to control the major components of the way individuals live. From there it is a short step for environmentalism to Leninism's successor: Stalinism, the desire to control every aspect of the way we live. That's our future, minus the gulags. We hope.

This seems an apt time to quote the old liberals' bumper sticker: "If you're not outraged, you are not paying attention."

Update, Oct. 2022: The World Economic Forum is a Dangerous Religious Cult

The presenter is a 61-year-old MD from Helsinki. For more than 30 years, he has studied the new-old nature pantheism that was born in the UN framework with its partners, the Club of Rome and the World Economic Forum. This religion has much replaced Christianity in Western countries. Nature pantheism specifically draws from the “wisdoms” of theosophy, which is based on the esotericism and occultism of the world's most famous con artist, Madame Blavatsky, who proclaimed to have discovered the lost truth that unites the world religions.

 

Many Christians around the world have been worried about the rise of the nature pantheism for decades and have harshly criticized church fathers who have stumbled into the new religion, such as the Pope. As an agnostic and a former long-term social democrat, I find myself in the same front with these Christians, because these Christians do not mix faith and reality like nature believers.

Updates:

The originator of the Gaia theory, which pretty much kicked off the environmentalist movement, now says it's a load of crock and that environmentalism is a totally unscientific religion.

Arthur Chrenkoff elaborates more on Environmentalism as a religion. Excellent essay!

March 2020: Now the Judeo-Christian template Crichton spoke of is being abandoned for full-up paganism and the practice of child sacrifice to achieve religious goals: "Bernie Sanders: Abortion And Population Control Are Important Parts Of Addressing Climate Change."

Read and read again

I still think that Christopher Hitchens' 2006 Memorial Day essay is one of the finest I have ever read. Read the whole thing.

How to stop doing what you think you ought to do . . .

... and do what you want to do.

It is easy for us to forget that the church is supposed to be a supernatural institution. The New Testament teaches repeatedly that churches are to be inspired and led by the Holy Spirit. And it was to remind the church in Corinth, Greece, of that fact that concerned Paul for a good part of his first letter to them.

1 Corinthians 12:1, 4-11:

Now concerning spiritual gifts, brothers and sisters, I do not want you to be uninformed. ... Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of services, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who activates all of them in everyone. To each is given the manifestation of the Spirit for the common good. To one is given through the Spirit the utterance of wisdom, and to another the utterance of knowledge according to the same Spirit, to another faith by the same Spirit, to another gifts of healing by the one Spirit, to another the working of miracles, to another prophecy, to another the discernment of spirits, to another various kinds of tongues, to another the interpretation of tongues. All these are activated by one and the same Spirit, who allots to each one individually just as the Spirit chooses.

Paul’s letters to the church in Corinth offers guidance, advice and correction of theological errors. One thin he emphasized was how the members of a church, though many, comprise only one body of believers. He put it this way:

“For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body ... and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.”

So since then we of the church call ourselves the body of Christ – I say this all the time. Like our individual bodies, we may think of the church as a living organism. As a church we breathe both ordinary air of the atmosphere and the spirit of the Lord.

Here are a couple of illustrations of how the church is made up of individual members comprising one body.

Geese fly in V-formation as they migrate. Research revealed that this formation is very aerodynamically efficient for them. Each goose except the lead goose is aided by the turbulent air ahead that is created by flapping wings, just as NASCAR drivers try to “draft” cars ahead of them.

As a whole, the V-formation is a lot like the swept wing of a jet plane. In formation, the geese can fly nonstop a distance two-thirds greater than one goose can fly alone. Common direction and purpose makes for easier trips, less fatigue and faster arrivals.

The lead goose has the toughest job. That’s why the lead changes every so often. That made me think of the Methodist practice of no one occupying any office permanently. It’s a good idea not to have permanent occupiers of church offices.
For geese, the greater body is a formation, and they are all members of one formation.

In New York city the renowned Orpheus Chamber Orchestra does not use a conductor. The orchestra developed a process called, naturally enough, the Orpheus Process, “built on individual responsibility, shared leadership and workplace democracy."

The orchestra achieves excellence through team building and collaboration. For concerts, “an elected committee of musicians selects a concertmaster and each instrumental section chooses a representative.” This core group determines how to play and interpret the music and the structure for rehearsals. Then the whole orchestra begins to rehearse. This method provides leadership and ensures that every member has a stake in the outcome of each performance. Businesses, colleges, non-profit and public-sector organizations have adapted this model.

Their body is the orchestra. The Orpheus process works because each member is both individually and collectively responsible. Everyone participates. No one shirks.
John Wesley wrote, “There are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit - Divers streams, but all from one fountain.” The essential character of the church can rightly spring only from one source: the Spirit of the Holy God, the grace of Jesus Christ. And Paul adds, the gifts of God to the members of the church by which the church is empowered to be the body of Christ. We “are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”

So far so good, but then Paul starts talking about God’s appointment of apostles, prophets, teachers, gifts of healing and other things. And this teaching often throws people for a loop. There’s a saying I heard once, “God doesn’t call the qualified. He qualifies the called.” That’s where spiritual gifts come in. They are how God qualifies Christ’s disciples to flower as members of the Christ’s body, the church.

God’s grace is given to us that we may be saved. Spiritual gifts are given us that we may help save others. That is what a church is for. We are to live as disciples of Jesus Christ and lead others to become disciples. By grace we are disciples, by God’s gifts we lead others to discipleship.

Spiritual gifts are abilities that God gives his people by the Spirit to enable them fully to be his disciples. Cathy and I attended a weekend workshop in 1989 where we discerned our spiritual gifts. It turned out to be our first step in the journey that led us to be called by God into the ministry. So for us, discovering our spiritual gifts was literally life changing.

Paul mentions apostles, prophets and teachers, among other gifts. An apostle is one who has the spiritual power to adhere to the personality of Christ in such a way as to wield spiritual authority and oversight of groups in other places to extend the Gospel to new people, places and circumstances.

Prophets are those who have the spiritual power to make contemporary connections between biblical truths and God’s will for today’s living, and to manifest or reveal God’s word for Christian living in this time and place.

Teachers are those who have been gifted with the ability to discern, analyze and deliver spiritual and biblical truths in such a way that others hear and learn the clear calling of God to righteous living.

Paul also discussed speaking in tongues, which is what the Corinthians focused on too strongly. Tongues, or praise language, is the ability to praise God with utterances not familiar as a known language, and with such a joy-filled intimacy with Christ that the church’s faith is strengthened.

There are at least 32 spiritual gifts identified in the Bible, so a full discussion of gifts can’t be done in one sermon. Discovering one’s spiritual gifts is one of the most liberating experiences a Christian can have. It sets you free from doing what you think you “ought” to do to doing what you want to do. Martin Luther said, “Love God and do what you want.” Using the gifts is the way to do so.

Churches that ignore the gifts may survive, but they will never thrive as God intends unless they study and use the gifts. For members to devote themselves to discovering their gifts makes the usual worries churches have almost irrelevant. Churches worry about things like money, whether they are too small or too big, who will teach Sunday school, who will serve on various committees – all kinds of peripheral junk like that. Churches whose members know and use their gifts still have to deal with such issues, but they do so far more easily and without worry.

John Wesley began his conferences with a simple question: "How may we best improve the time of this Conference?" The answer: "While we are conversing, let us have an especial care to set God always before us." Wesley's vision for the people called Methodists was "to reform the nation, and to spread scriptural holiness across the land."

By remaining focused on this fundamental Christian duty, we will avoid what Methodist minister and seminary professor David Lowes Watson called,

... a common mistake in the life and work of the church. ... We join the church as a community of those who receive new life in Christ, by grace through faith, and who seek to grow in that grace as faithful disciples. But all too often we find ourselves distracted by a range of activities that focus on the life of the congregation rather than the commandment of Christ to be his witnesses in the world. Instead of growing as disciples, we find ourselves enveloped by church programs...

The danger is that we start and continue programs that serve our own interests first, rather than the work of Christ.

How is the Holy Spirit leading us? There is more than one way to discern it: Bible study, prayer, worship, devotional. But the key way is to study and discern the spiritual gifts God gives each believer.

Do you want to know what God wants you personally to do? Then study the spiritual gifts and discover the ones God has gifted to you. It is so simple as that.

In spiritually thriving churches, many ministries and programs come and go as the Spirit leads the spiritual formation and re-formation of the church. One of the warning signs that a church suffers from what Samuel Chadwick called human management rather than God-government is that programs and ministries are done this year simply because they were done last year, and the year before that and the year before that, and so on.

We will never thrive with top-down leadership, where the pastor and committees decide what the ministries of the church will be, then nominate and elect members to carry them out. We will thrive with ministries that emerge from Spirit-led disciples who are mostly self-organizing.

When churches lose contact with the Spirit, they become church factories, where newcomers are evaluated on how they help the church continue to do what it has always done. Spirit-led churches don’t do that. We understand our enduring goal to be to help people grow into Spirit-led builders of transformed homes and communities. We know that the church is not a fortress for the saved, but a base of operations from which scriptural holiness may grow across the community.

How is that done? The prophet Zechariah explained, “Not by might, nor by power, but by my spirit, says the Lord of hosts.”

See also:

Chapter 12 of 1st Corinthians (click here)

The UMC's own web site devoted to the gifts (click here),

Bible.org's web page on the gifts (click here)

Catholic churches coming to Saudi Arabia?

In a medium-long article about the delayed but still arriving "Arab Spring," Abe Greenwald notes,

[T]he Vatican has confirmed that it’s in negotiations with Saudi Arabia to establish the first Catholic Church inside the Kingdom.

Well, zing! As you know, it is presently against Saudi law for any non-Muslim congregation to meet in the kingdom. Even house churches there are illegal, and the penalties can be quite severe. (In fact, mere possession of a Bible is illegal.)

Abe documents how Islamism in in retreat almost everywhere in the Muslim world, being steadily rejected by the ummah every opportunity they get to do so. I remember reading (I think on Michael Yon's site) of an Anbar sheik who said the Sunnis in Iraq had become so lethally oppressed by al Qaeda that even the shephers in the desert hated al Qaeda. "And the shepherds a hundred years from now will still hate al Qaeda."

But back to the church in Saudi Arabia. The Telegraph reports:

Archbishop Mounged El-Hachem, the papal envoy to Kuwait, Qatar, Bahrain, Yemen and the United Arab Emirates said talks had started a few weeks ago, in the wake of King Abdullah’s visit to Pope Benedict last November.

Currently, all Saudi citizens are required by law to be Muslim, and the Mutaween, or religious police, strictly prohibits the public practice of non-Muslim religions.

The last Christian priest was expelled from the kingdom in 1985.

However, the Vatican’s relationship with the Muslim world is improving rapidly, and Qatar opened its first Catholic church on Sunday.

Mgr El-Hachem said a church in Saudi Arabia would be an important sign of “reciprocity” between the faiths.

The Times OnLine site has this:

Not by chance, the disclosure came just after the first Catholic church in Qatar, Our Lady of the Rosary, was inaugurated at a mass in the seaside capital of Doha attended by 15,000 people and held by Cardinal Ivan Dias, head of the Congregation for Evangelisation, who presented a chalice sent by Pope Benedict XVI. ...

This would involve negotiations for the "authorisation of the building of Catholic churches" in Saudi Arabia, he said. Father Federico Lombardi, the Vatican spokesman, said he could not confirm that the two sides were "in negotiations" but added: "If, as we hope, we reach an agreement authorising the construction of the first church in Saudi Arabia, it will be a step of historic importance."

The way was paved not only by King Abdullah's talks with the Pope but also more recently by the setting up of a permanent Catholic-Muslim Forum to repair relations between the two faiths after the Pope's controversial remarks on Islam at Regensburg University in 2006.

The Pope said his apparent reference to Islam as inherently violent and inhumane had been "misunderstood," and he made amends by praying at the Blue Mosque in Istanbul shortly afterwards. He has called however for "reciprocal" gestures by the Muslim side, such as greater tolerance for Christian minorities in Muslim countries.

Vatican Radio said the opening of the church in Qatar was "an event of historical importance after 14 centuries". The church, which bears no crosses or bells, stands on land donated to the Church by Qatar's emir, Sheikh Hamad Bin Khalifa Al-Thani, who favours interreligious dialogue.

Yet, as Abe Greenwald points out, the West is decidedly behind when it comes to whose religion is waxing, and where.

The only places we’re faced with renewed Islamic radicalization are in the Muslim enclaves of the West. The Archbishop of Canterbury speaks about the inevitability of sharia in England; France is at a semi-permanent boil of ghettoized Islamic discontent; last month a week of cartoon-inspired riots in Denmark was capped off by a (shockingly unpublicized) bomb in Copenhagen; Canada’s courts are clotted either by alleged terrorists or by “human rights” violators who dare criticize the alleged terrorists; and in Lodi, California more and more Muslim families are home schooling their daughters so that they may “clean and cook for [their] male relatives” and also “to isolate their adolescent and teenage daughters from the corrupting influences that they see in much of American life.”

As Qur’anic government has been a demonstrable failure everywhere it’s arisen, the West is becoming one of the last places in which fanatical Muslims are safe enough and comfortable enough to indulge in the decadence of their caliphate fantasies.

Read the whole thing.

A short Jerusalem photo tour

Photos copyright 2007 by the author; may not be used or hotlinked without permission.

The first photo is of the Gethsemane Church on the Mount of Olives outside Jerusalem. The church's proper name is the Church of All Nations and was built from 1919-1924. It was to Gethsemane that Jesus and his disciples, except Judas, came after the Last Supper. It was here that Judas brought the Temple police to arrest Jesus.

The first thing Pontius Pilate sentenced Jesus to endure was flagellation, a whipping with a particular whip called a flagellum. Although probably not quite as brutal as depicted in Mel Gibson's movie, The Passion of the Christ, it was a bloody ordeal nonetheless, and considerably weakened Jesus before he was crucified, which may help account for the speed at which he expired on the cross.

As at most Christian holy sites in Israel, there is a church built at the site where Jesus was whipped. This plaque at the church explains its history.

This is the interior of the Church of the Flagellation. There is little historical doubt that this is indeed the actual site where the scourging took place. Jesus' trial took place only a half-block away; Pilate's "courtroom" is still there and is undeniably of Roman origin. The courtyard between that site and this church is verifiably also of Roman origin.

This is a small chapel along the via dolorosa, the Way of Sorrows that Jesus walked to his execution. At this station of the cross, Jesus stumbled and fell, depicted in the mural below. It was not at this place, but a later one, where the Roman soldiers made a bystander help carry the cross because Jesus was too weakened to continue alone.

The scene depicted is of the ancient Roman Catholic tradition of Jesus carrying the entire cross, the upright and crossbeam included. Relatively recent historical research has revealed, though, that almost certainly there were permanent uprights built outside Jerusalem, a sort of ready-to-use gallows, if you will. Jesus and other condemned would have carried only the crossbeam.

Below is a street scene along the via dolorosa. This and many other sections are lined with shops, all seeking the tourists' trade. In the first century, the streets were much wider and certainly not so commercialized.

Finally, you see the dome and cross of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre.

This is a view from the courtyard of the church.



Another view. As you can see, the church is extremely large. Under one roof the church encompasses the site where Jesus was crucified, the place his body was (incompletely) prepared for burial, and his tomb.




A schematic of the church from Sacred Destinations Travel Guide.

This is a tableau on the wall next to the place where Jesus' body was prepared for burial. The rock of preparation is on the floor just beneath here. Except it is not actually the rock even if it is the actual location - the actual rock was taken away in bits and pieces centuries ago by religious pilgrims who wanted a relic.



Inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, this is the entrance to the traditionally-sited tomb of Jesus. I did not go inside since the waiting line was more than an hour long.



The Sepulchre Church is, as I said, simply enormous. High above the tomb's site is this dome, which is not the largest dome of the church by any means.

Sacred Destinations' page on the church is worth reading and includes the arguments in favor of the site being the actual location of Jesus' death and entombment.

Generosity makes you happy

If you spend as little as $5 per day for the benefit of others, you will automatically be happier.

"We wanted to test our theory that how people spend their money is at least as important as how much money they earn," said Elizabeth Dunn, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia.

They asked their 600 volunteers first to rate their general happiness, report their annual income and detail their monthly spending including bills, gifts for themselves, gifts for others and donations to charity.

"Regardless of how much income each person made, those who spent money on others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves did not," Dunn said in a statement.

Dunn's team also surveyed 16 employees at a company in Boston before and after they received an annual profit-sharing bonus of between $3,000 and $8,000.

"Employees who devoted more of their bonus to pro-social spending experienced greater happiness after receiving the bonus, and the manner in which they spent that bonus was a more important predictor of their happiness than the size of the bonus itself," they wrote in their report, published in the journal Science.

"Finally, participants who were randomly assigned to spend money on others experienced greater happiness than those assigned to spend money on themselves," they said.

Something else I've learned: generous people cope with their own mortality much better than others. In the years I've ministered to the terminally ill and people dealing with aging-toward-mortality, invariably the ones who have been generous towards others - routinely, not just for birthdays or holidays - finally die more peaceably than non-generous people.

How the stock market works

Once upon a time in a jungle village, a man appeared and announced to the villagers that he would buy monkeys for $10 each.

The villagers seeing that there were many monkeys around, went out to the forest, and started catching them.

The man bought thousands at $10 and as supply started to diminish, the villagers stopped their effort. He further announced that he would now buy at $20. This renewed the efforts of the villagers and they started catching monkeys again.

Soon the supply diminished even further and people started going back to their farms. The offer increased to $25 each and the supply of monkeys became so little that it was an effort to even see a monkey, let alone catch it!

The man now announced that he would buy monkeys at $50 ! However, since he had to go to the city on some business, his assistant would now buy on behalf of him. In the absence of the man, the assistant told the villagers. 'Look at all these monkeys in the big cage that the man has collected. I will sell them to you at $35 and when the man returns from the city, you can sell them to him for $50 each.'

The villagers rounded up with all their savings and bought all the monkeys. Then they never saw the man nor his assistant again, only monkeys everywhere!

Now you have a better understanding of how the stock market works.

From the Braden Files.

The Sederot Gambit

Sederot (sometimes spelled Sderot) is an Israeli town in the country's south, only one kilometer from Gaza. On Feb. 27, a college student in Sederot was killed by a Kassam rocket. Hours later, a father of four was killed by a Grad rocket in neighboring Ashkelon, reported the Jerusalem Post.

Shortly after a student at Sapir College in Sderot was killed and one other person was wounded by shrapnel in a Kassam rocket attack, a barrage of four Grad missiles struck the Ashkelon area. According to Channel 1, one person was wounded by shrapnel.

The Sapir College casualty has been identified as Roni Yihieh, 47, of Moshav Bit'ha near Ofakim. Yehieh, a father of four, was critically wounded when a rocket hit a parking lot on the western Negev campus, and died shortly after being evacuated to Barzilai Hospital in Ashkelon.

Hamas has been firing the anti-personnel rockets into Israeli towns and countryside with regularity for years.

On Oct. 23 of last year I visited the towns of Sederot and Ashkelon. Six rockets fell near Sederot not long before my group arrived. Here are the remains of three of them (all photos and video taken by me).



There is a large rack of exploded rockets outside Sederot's police station. They have a diagram explaining how the rockets are made.



These are purely anti-personnel rockets. The warhead section contains only a couple of pounds of high explosive to propel pellets or ball bearings intended to do nothing but shred flesh. The rockets lack the explosive power to destroy buildings, although they can penetrate unreinforced walls or roofs and cause substantial damage:



Israel has tethered three blimps around the northern perimeter of Gaza with automated warning sensors and systems.



The town official who showed us around said it is optically based. When a launch is detected, warning speakers in the town - there are a lot of speakers - announces "red dawn" over and over. Townspeople have only 20 seconds to seek shelter before the rockets hit. The town continues to build shelters such as this one.



Here is a video of the extent of the rack of recovered detonated rockets. This rack shows only six months worth of rockets launched. Some people of Sederot have been killed before the latest round of attacks, including children, as well as some Israelis in the surrounding areas.





Bret Stephens writes about the dilemma facing Israel because of the rockets Hamas rains down on the south Israel town of Sederot.

The more vexing question, both morally and strategically, is what Israel ought to do about Gaza. The standard answer is that Israel's response to the Kassams ought to be "proportionate." What does that mean? Does the "proportion" apply to the intention of those firing the Kassams -- to wit, indiscriminate terror against civilian populations? In that case, a "proportionate" Israeli response would involve, perhaps, firing 2,500 artillery shells at random against civilian targets in Gaza. Or should proportion apply to the effects of the Kassams -- an exquisitely calibrated, eye-for-eye operation involving the killing of a dozen Palestinians and the deliberate maiming or traumatizing of several hundred more?

He goes on to discuss the lack of Israeli options in more detail - read the whole thing - but the elephant in the living room is this: as long as Europe and the United States hold Israel and Hamas to two different standards, then Israel can only suffer these attacks with little hope of ending them. Hamas is a terrorist outfit founded for one reason only: the destroy Israel. As Stephens points out,

Hamas has also made no effort to rewrite its 1988 charter, which calls for Israel's destruction. The charter is explicitly anti-Semitic: "The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews (and kill them); until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come on and kill him!" (Article Seven) "In order to face the usurpation of Palestine by the Jews, we have no escape from raising the banner of Jihad." (Article 15) And so on.

What Israel has been doing is conducting "targeted assassinations" of senior Hamas leaders and of those involved in the manufacture and deployment of the rockets. The strikes have mainly been done by guided missiles fired from attack helicopters. But of course, the West condemns those strikes, apparently for no other reason that sometimes, despite Israel's pains to be precise, other Gazans are killed or wounded. That and the now-reflexive response that "it's Israel's fault" no matter what happens.

From Israel's own perspective, invading Gaza is not an option. It would bog the country down for years of occupation at prohibitive cost in both money and lives of Israeli troops. And of course it would also be condemned by the West and the UNSC. Finally, Israelis are acutely aware that a a Jewish country, founded because of the Holocaust, is morally restrained in unique ways from "going Roman" on Gaza, no matter how many rockets fly from there.

So Hamas gets to play its Sederot Gambit with impunity and insignificant cost to itself or to Gazans. Hamas can make life unendurable for thousands of Israelis who simply want to live in their own country. And the gambit is working not because of Israel's own lack of options, but because the West, which could make life very hard for Hamas and could interdict its supplies of lethal materials from Iran, averts its eyes, pretends it isn't happening, and washes its hands of the whole situation.

Update: Herb Keinon, reporting from Israel, says that Israel may be about to launch a "large-scale incursion into Gaza."

According to defense sources, the goals of such an operation - reportedly in the planning stages for weeks if not months - would not "merely" be to reduce the threat of rocket fire and rocket manufacturing in the Gaza Strip, but would also likely entail paralyzing the Hamas government's ability to operate, and even include "regime change."

We'll see. The Olmert government pretty much proved in 2006's Lebanon invasion that it does not have the stomach or the will to bring military campaigns to actual decision. There's no real reason to think it will be more determined this time.

"Merely a theory"

Florida education officials show they are uninformed about what "theory" means in science.

"Florida will teach evolution but only as theory":

TALLAHASSEE, Florida (Reuters) - Florida education officials voted on Tuesday to add evolution to required course work in public schools but only after a last-minute change depicting Charles Darwin's seminal work as merely a theory.

Bending to pressure from religious conservatives, the State Board of Education on a 4-3 vote included the "theory" language as part of a retooling of the state's science standards for public school education.

The compromise would require teaching that Darwin's proposal -- that natural selection has driven the evolution of many species from a few common ancestors over billions of years -- has yet to be conclusively proven.

That some scientific claim is "just a theory," and therefore may be dismissed, is an accusation that actually makes no sense. It's really "just a theory" that gravity holds us on the earth with a force equal to the inverse of the square of our distance from the planet, but does anyone care to jump off the Empire State Building tomorrow because, hey, gravity is "just a theory?" Our understanding of how wings keep airplanes up is just a theoretical understanding, but millions of people per month literally bet their lives that the theory is correct.

Theory is to science as money is to finance. Theory is to science as scales are to music. Theory is to science as yard lines are to football games.

A theory is how scientists express the interpreted results of many observations carried out over a long time. A theory is how scientists make sense of their collective experience. The formulation and reformulation of theory is, I think, grounded in the deep human need to establish meaning. Because we exist in nature, we are compelled at a most fundamental level to explore what nature means. Science is a very powerful and reliable way we do that. Science, and scientifically-based meaning, can no more exist apart from theory than Barry Bonds' home run record could exist apart from baseball.

The source of contention, of course, is that conservative Christians object that evolution is not "proven" and therefore mustn't be taught as such.

During more than two hours of testimony, scientists and religious representatives argued over whether teaching that humans evolved from a single-celled species over hundreds of millions of years should be taken as gospel.

Ironic that, eh: should evolution be "taken as gospel." Heh!

How Nietzsche refuted atheism

A long essay by Edward T. Oakes, "Atheism and Violence," discusses and refutes the recent books of Richard Dawkins, Chris Hitchen, et. al., that if all humanity would only renounce religious belief, then violence would cease and permanent peace would result. Curiously enough, the rant-filled Friedrich Nietzsche, who claimed that "God is dead" and originated the germanic idea of the Superman, offers the best argument against these arguments, claims Oakes. 

The point, rather, is that Nietzsche saw. However much he (usually) advocated what ought to be most abhorred, he at least recognized that true morality and Christian belief are siblings. Moreover, in tones redolent of Jeremiah he saw the consequences to civilization as a whole when its citizens lose their faith in God. For what will take the place of God will be only a passionate—and largely empty—politics:

For when truth enters the lists against the lies of millennia, we shall have convulsions, a
spasm of earthquakes . . . the likes of which have never been dreamed. Then the concept of politics will be completely dissolved in a war between spirits, all authority structures of the old order will be blown into the air—one and all, they rest upon a lie; there will be wars the likes of which have never existed on earth. From my time forward earth will see Great Politics.

Such are the contradictions of atheism. With hope in progress gone, with the lessons of the twentieth century still unlearned in the twenty-first, with technology progressing, in Adorno’s words, from the slingshot to the atom bomb (a remark cited in Spe Salvi), with a resurgence of religiously motivated violence filling the headlines, all that the new atheists can manage is to hearken back to an Enlightenment-based critique of religion. But they find their way blocked, not so much by Nietzsche (whom, as we saw, they largely ignore) but by the ineluctable realities he so ruthlessly exposed. Not Nietzsche, but the history of the twentieth century has shown that godless culture is incapable of making men happier. All Nietzsche did was to point out that no civilization, however “progressive,” can dispel the terrifying character of nature; and once progress is called into question, the human condition appears in all its forsaken nakedness.

Jesus died for your mortgage

The most successful satire strikes so close to believability that the reader/listener/viewer can't actually know it is satire unless told so.

According to Billings, the average unchurched person in suburban Chicago isn’t interested in religiosity. They want, he suggests, a “deep spirituality that fits into their busy schedule.” Instead of making Jesus challenging or complex, Billings offered a Jesus that “gives people exactly what they want.” ...

Pastor Billings credits last Easter’s mailer for the increase in weekly attendance–which is up to 4000. One new member, George Eliason praises the approach: “Look, I really love what Jesus offers. But most churches make it inconvenient to be a Christian. Journey does a great job conforming Christianity to me, rather than asking me to conform to some abstract “rules” spouted off 2000 years ago in the Middle East.”

It's satire, and so noted at the very end. But sadly, it is believable.

WWJD? Not this

WWJD? Not this.

When visiting the traditional birthplace of Jesus in Bethlehem, especially at

Christmastime, is it best to:

A. Kneel worshipfully at the manger's site and touch it reverently, as millions of people have done through the centuries? (This is a picture of the manger site that I took in October.)

B. Approach the altar of the Church of the Nativity, built over the manger site, and pray or meditate silently.

C. Get into a fistfight with other Christians over the custodianship of the church.

I mean, WWJD, yes?

If you answered, "C," then step to the head of the line.

Seven people were injured on Thursday when Greek Orthodox and Armenian priests came to blows in a dispute over how to clean the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

Following the Christmas celebrations, Greek Orthodox priests set up ladders to clean the walls and ceilings of their part of the church, which is built over the site where Jesus Christ is believed to have been born.

But the ladders encroached on space controlled by Armenian priests, according to photographers who said angry words ensued and blows quickly followed.

For a quarter of an hour bearded and robed priests laid into each other with fists, brooms and iron rods while the photographers who had come to take pictures of the annual cleaning ceremony recorded the whole event.

A dozen unarmed Palestinian policemen were sent to try to separate the priests, but two of them were also injured in the unholy melee.

Click this pic to see video of the fight.

National Geographic has an article this month on Bethlehem. It mentions the contentiousness over "every square foot" of the Church of the Nativity.

The Christians themselves are not immune to infighting. Literally every square foot of the Church of the Nativity is battled over by the three sects that share use of the
church: Greek Orthodox, Roman Catholic, and Armenian Orthodox.

The holy men of the three denominations bicker over who gets to clean which sacred wall, who can walk in which aisle. The guards in the church, it sometimes seems, are not there to protect tourists but to keep priests from attacking each other. "Apart from Christ," says Father Ibrahim Faltas, a Franciscan friar who served in the Church of the Nativity for 12 years, "there have been few here who would turn the other cheek."

Yes, I am sure Jesus is so proud.

Apart from that, though, the Geographic's piece seems fairhanded, based on what I learned there. And it does explain the plight of the Christians, although its numbers are off. My studies showed that the percentage of Christians living in Bethlehem was never as high (since World War II, anyway) as the 90 percent the article says; it was between 70-80 percent. And today the percentage of Christians is down to no more than 15 percent (and likely less than 10 percent), rather than the 30 percent the article claims. Also, the article does not relate the fact that Christians there and in the rest of the Palestinian areas are strongly persecuted by Palestinian Muslims. Even murder is not unusual, and the Palestinian Authority does not investigate.

(Fuggitaboudit in Gaza, controlled by Hamas.) More routine is property confiscation or destruction or coerced emigration. The week before my group arrived, 300 Palestinian Christian families were forced to leave their home in and near Bethlehem. They were simply thrown out of their houses and told that for their safety they'd better get out of town.

Together, the fighting at the Church of the Nativity (not by far the first time it's happened) and the Geographic article show that all religion is volatile in Israel and surrounds, in fact, throughout the whole Middle East. Peace shall not come easily there.

I gotta get me one of these

Behold, the Segway of the Sky.



It works like the ground Segway - you lean (but not too far!) in the direction you want to go and the stand-on helicopter flies that direction. Known as the Vertipod, it's not a new idea, being about 50 years old. None of the earlier concepts got off the ground (heh!) but AirBouyant promises to get this machine to both military and civilian market within a short time.

Gizmodo, whence the link, says that the Vertipod "is intended to travel five to 15 feet above ground at a top speed of 40 mph" and will cost about ten large. That's about what it costs to buy a new, no-frills ultralight airplane, which can fly a lot higher and farther and one-fourth faster. But you still need a runway, even if it can be a flat pasture.

Anyway, the ultimate in personal flight has always been seen as vertical takeoff, as in from your back yard. I'd say they should push the Vertipod's ceiling up to 50 feet. Then most of us could fly over obstacles around the manse.

The Hiller Flying Platform of 1955 did fly higher and was very stable. So stable, in fact, that the Army rejected it (and for other reasons).



Another concept from the 50s was the WASP - a jet-powered, one-man platform that could fly up to 10,000 feet altitude.



I'll take any of 'em.

Clarity

"Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing." Battered pilot Bob Robertson waits in shock for rescuers to cut him free from his plane after it disintegrated around him.

In The Right Stuff, the story of the Mercury 7 astronauts, Tom Wolfe related some stories about jet fighter flight testing in the 1950s. This was the time when the first supersonic fighters were being developed. Not much was known then about the aerodynamics of transonic and supersonic flight. Some of the early designs turned out to be unstable. They oscillated wildy - nose up, nose down - at transonic speeds.

Pilots found that they could not give control inputs in time to counteract the oscillation. By the time they tried to correct an upward oscillation, the plane was already heading down. The control inputs therefore only made the problem worse.

The pilots who lived to tell about it said once they figured out they were not going to be able to control the plane, they used the "Jesus maneuver." They cut the throttle, folded their hands in their lap, took their feet off the pedals and said, "Jesus, it's your airplane."

Sometimes the plane stabilized. Sometimes it didn't. Sometimes the pilots walked away from their landing. More often, they were carried, provided there was anything left to be carried.

Any stop you can walk away from is a good stop. The remains of my 2004 Chevy Malibu after spinning off Interstate 40 at 70 mph, Dec. 15.

Hard rain, a shallow left turn, I-40 West at Tenn. mile marker 171, near Dickson, 1:30 Saturday afternoon. I pretty quickly figured out that my control inputs were not doing any good. Looking through the windshield at other westbound traffic behind me was one clue. (Fortunately, the nearest traffic was 200 yards or so away.)

In one gestalt moment, I realize that I am wrecking at interstate speed and surely will not survive.

"Jesus, it's your automobile."

There were two or three high-speed revolutions on the road surface. All I heard was whizzing of the tires skidding across first the pavement and then the grass. The windshield went opaque from water and thrown mud. I hear two loud bangs and the car suddenly stops. I am surrounded by pine trees. I smell and see smoke. The car's on fire! Seat belt off, pull the door handle.

Nothing happens. The door's jammed. I see shattered glass all over me and feel cold air against my face. The driver's side window is shattered. Even if the door worked, it wouldn't open more than two inches because of the trees. Great: I lived through the crash to burn to death.

But the smoke smells different than smoke from burning petroleum or rubber. It smells explosive. Then I see the deflated air bags and realize they are the smoke's source. Relax. I feel no pain.

The front of the car is buckled upward. Nothing penetrated the passenger compartment, which did not deform.

I find my Treo 650 phone on the floor and punch 9-1-1. The dispatcher gets a fix on my phone's GPS signal and assures me help is on the way.

I hang up. Then I tell God I am thankful I am alive and for whatever he had to do with it. ("In all things give thanks," says the Good Book, so I did, right then.)

A man and a woman appear to the left, unable to come close because of the trees. I assure them I am fine and say I've already called 9-1-1. A very cold rain is falling hard. The man leaves but the woman says it's hard to see the car from the interstate, so she will stay to flag down the police.

I try to call my wife but get her voice mail. So I call my eldest son and tell him what happened. I see blood on my right hand. A glance in the mirror reveals cuts above my left eyebrow. Blood covers my left cheek, but the cuts are very small.

I call a colleague and ask him to call our district superindendent. He doesn't have the number with him (he's traveling, too) so he calls my church's secretary, who quickly calls me. I assure her I am fine.

"Here they come," says the woman. I hear a police siren. The interstate is 30 feet behind my car and about 10 feet higher. A highway patrol car screams by, blue light flashing, siren yelling. It disappears over the far hill.

The woman says, "Chasing a speeder, I guess."

Soon a deputy's car appears, parks, and the deputy walks to my car. The woman says she is leaving now. "I am very grateful," I call to her. Later, I berate myself for never asking for her name. I tell the deputy that, except for the cuts on my face, I am uninjured. He asks for and takes my license and makes a report to his dispatch office. A few minutes later the rescue squad appears. One man come to my window and confirms that I am of sound mind ("What is today's date? What is your full name? Do you know where you are?") and so he believes me when I say I have no injuries.

"Do you want us to take you to a hospital?" he asks. I tell him I want the glass cleaned from the cuts in my face and that my left eye feels like glass dust may have gotten in it. So they put the collar around my neck, ignoring my protestations. I crawl headfirst out the front-passenger door. They say they'll get the stretcher-board to take me to the ambulance. I insist on walking.

I should have let them carry me, that way my dress shoes wouldn't have been ruined!

I say I'll sit up in the ambulance for the ride. "Okay," the medic says, "but you'll have to sign all kinds of release forms."

So I lie on the board. They strap me down. "What hospital?"

Dickson's is nearest, but my wife doesn't know how to get there and I don't want her to learn in the driving rain. "Vanderbilt," I say, in Nashville.

After 40 minutes riding on the board, I almost wish I'd said Dickson, rain or not.

Two X-rays, one eye exam and a face swabbing later, I'm checking out. Not even a headache, not a Band-Aid.

While walking from the car to the ambulance I had seen that the car had plunged off the interstate's outer edge, fortunately facing forward, and down the sodded embankment. The Malibu bounced over a small, concreted drainage ditch and then front-first into a stand of pine saplings, plowing over successively larger trees until it hit one that stopped it. The loud bangs I heard were the air bags deploying.

For five seconds - surely the whole event lasted no longer - I expected that I would not celebrate Christmas this year or ever again. But in truth, I've had roller-coaster rides that were rougher.

When the car left the road, it missed by two feet hitting the end of a guard rail head on, which would have been disastrous.

Another two or three feet to the left and it would have bounced off the rail back onto the road. Maybe it would have gone across to the median, which was broad and level, but more likely the car would have stopped in the middle of the lane, almost invisible in the pouring rain to oncoming traffic. That would likewise have been disastrous.

Samuel Johnson, one of the leading literary figures of 18th-century England, wrote, "When a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully."

So does spinning out at high speed in the rain on the interstate. It gives your mind a certain focus.

Today, someone asked me what I want for Christmas. "I've already got it," I answered.

"The Lord kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up." - The Song of Hannah, 1 Samuel 2.

Clarity.

It is not really that for five seconds I was dead, and now am alive again. That is God's gift truly, but my life has always been God's gift, even before I acknowledged it.

The clarity is this: I know that for the rest of my life, I am really just a dead man walking. That evokes a certain freedom and a longer view of life. So Saturday night, just before I went to bed, I went alone in the dark to my living room, sat down and thanked God for the clarity.

God, guns and signs

A Bible scholar she ain't:



Here is what Malachi 1:3 says in its entirety: "but I have hated Esau; I have made his hill country a desolation and his heritage a desert for jackals."

Sorry, I don't get the connection.

Chicken, egg, religion, family

Mary Tedeschi Eberstadt of the Hoover Institution has a fascinating essay about the relationship between family size and religion, "How the West Really Lost God." She explains the conventional wisdom of the anti-religious class , that large families result from religious belief and, not quite so explicitly, that the diminution of religion has resulted in the shrinking of the family - especially in Europe, where the birth rate has plummeted in just the last generation or two.

But Mary stands this thesis on its head and posits that the demographic data of Europe and America show just the opposite: that religion is inculcated by large families, and that the decline of religion in Europe generally and in certain American demographic classes has followed rather than preceded shrinking family size.

Southern Baptists are worried about their birth rates, as are other denominations:

It is time for us, as Southern Baptists, to recognize that our success can kill us. As a denomination that once was derided as "redneck" and backward, we're now invited to the Rotary Club meetings. We're being elected to Congress. We're not in the trailer parks anymore. Our young men are successful, suburban, and careerist, and our young women are too. And we think that's a sign of health. Meanwhile our baptisms go down, and our birthrates do too. It turns out keeping up with the Episcopalians can have a downside.

John Ballard has some commentary on Eberstadt.

Is Methodism's decline inevitable?

I've just returned from three days of the Bishop's Convocation of the Tennessee and Memphis Conferences of the United Methodist Church. The theme of the convocation was "Restoring Methodism."

I'll not address the content of the convocation in this post except to note that the presenters, Professors James and Molly Scott, offered excellent ideas and processes for a potential restoration, if one is to be done. Their book and CD can be found here.

However, despite my enthusiasm for their ideas, I am pessimistic that anything can be done to reverse the decades-long downward trend in the number of people belonging to the UMC in the United States. (The UMC is a worldwide denomination and is growing outside the US.) In 1968 there were almost 13 million UMs; now there are about 8 million. Of these, we were told, the average age is 60. They didn't say what the median age is, but I expect it's higher. However, for this post I'll assume that the median age and the average age are about the same. The median age for all Americans is 36.4 years (Census tables here).

What the convocation ignored was what the graying of the denomination portends. Once the mention was made of UMs' ages, the subject was dropped and we moved on to discussing how to fix the machinery of the denomination as a whole.

Most demographers say that Europe is in a demographic death spiral, that is, the birth rate has fallen so low that there literally is not enough time left for the declining populations to recover and begin to grow in number. I could not help but ponder whether United Methodism is in the same fix. The thrust of the convocation was that we UMs can reverse the decline if we return to Wesleyan basics. Now, I'm keen to return to Wesleyan basics and think we should do that anyway, but the idea that we can (much less will) evangelize faster than the Grim Reaper reduces our numbers is a proposition that I find highly dubious.

Consider some actuarial facts. If indeed the median age is about the same as the average age, 60, that means that of the 8 million UMs living today, one-fourth, or 2 million, will be dead within 20 years, and another million dead about eight years later. So in less than 30 years, we will lose from death alone three-eighths of our present membership, leaving us at 5 million.

That decline does not include the hemorrhage of our youth who, when graduating from high school, graduate from the church as well (an issue affecting all denominations). I don't have the
demographic breakdown for that age group as a percentage of the UM total, but the church admits that, relative to the general population, people under 35 are underrepresented.

So the decline due to death of our numbers will be amplified by dropouts, mostly, though not exclusively the under-35 cohort.

There is only a small chance, IMO, that the number of people electing to leaved the denomination can be matched by those joining. But the idea that new members can offset losses from both dropouts and death is simply not supportable. If we could do that (or were willing to do it), we would already be doing it. And the losses from death in the coming years will only accelerate.

It goes without saying that with an average age of 60, United Methodists are generally no longer bearing children. Of course there are families in our churches, but there is a very large number of UM churches that have no children. The fertility rate among European-descended, American women is lower than the 2.1 replacement rate. The overall American fertility rate of 2.08 is that high only because non-white women are having more than two children each (on average, of course).

This national trend is reflected in the UMC, so I think I stand on safe ground in saying that, on average, UM adults of childbearing age are not having enough children to replace themselves when they die, much less replace themselves and one or more older members. But no one I know of in the Methodist church's hierarchy or think tanks is addressing this part of the issue.

We might also consider that the median age of UM elders (who serve as senior pastors of churches) is 52, which is my own age. The average age is almost 51. Of the 17,000-plus elders in the denomination, only about 840 are 35 or younger. As a rule, older clergy will not attract younger members, especially families.

Furthermore, with a mandatory retirement age of 72, half of all elders will retire within 20 years (most clergy elect to retire before 70). So in addition to a shrinking membership, the UMC will be faced with a steadily graying clergy and an accelerating shortage to boot.

Update, 2016: "Coming to Terms with Numerical Decline in the U.S. UMC"

... the latest iteration of Vital Congregations data were released last month. They show growth in some faithful practices among American United Methodists, but declines in the production of new members. Combined with the death and other losses of existing members, this struggle with producing new members contributes to a pattern of numeric decline among American United Methodism that continues a decades-long trend in place since the formation of the denomination through merger in 1968.

Eternal Father, Strong to Save

In the century and a half since, "Eternal Father, Strong to Save," was composed, it has come into widespread use by both Britain's Royal Navy and the US Navy, becoming known as the Royal Navy Hymn in the former and the Navy Hymn in the latter.

William Whiting of England composed the poem in 1860 for a student of his who was soon to sail for America. The music was composed by another Englishman, Rev. John Bacchus Dykes, an Episcopalian clergyman. The music was published in 1861, but I don't know how the lyrics and the music came to be put together.

 The hymn was sung at Franklin D. Roosevelt's funeral, as well as the funerals of John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. And as the 1999 movie, Titanic shows, it was sung during services aboard the doomed vessel the Sunday before she sank. (However, the version sung in the movie was not arranged until 1940.)

Since the hymn was penned, a number of other verses have been composed by various persons over the years. Some of these have been adopted by the Armed Forces Chaplain's Board for inclusion in worship services conducted by military chaplains. These additional verses, prayers for the Marines, aviators, astronauts, the wounded, families at home and others, are included as an addendum on the US Navy's web page devoted to the hymn. Verses for the hymn are easy to write. The rhyming is simply, aabbcc, with each line consisting of eight syllables in iambic tetrameter (which, definitionally, is eight syllables anyway).

The original hymn itself, of course, long ago passed into the public domain, so anyone may use the music or compose a verse thereto. In my church service today, we will sing the hymn in five verses honoring all who serve at sea, on the land or in the air, finished by a verse of prayer for our country, thus:

Eternal Father, strong to save,
Whose arm hath bound the restless wave,
Who bidd'st the mighty ocean deep
Its own appointed limits keep;
Oh, hear us when we cry to Thee,
For those in peril on the sea!

O Lord of hosts, to you we turn
To give us grace we cannot earn.
Our soldiers guard our way of life;
Be with them all in times of strife.
Let courage flow from your command;
We pray for those who fight on land.

Eternal Father, grant, we pray,
To all Marines, both night and day,
The courage, honor, strength, and skill
Their land to serve, thy law fulfill;
Be thou the shield forevermore
From every peril to the Corps

Lord, guard and guide all those who fly
Through the great spaces in the sky.
Be with them always in the air,
In darkening storms or sunlight fair;
Oh, hear us when we lift our prayer,
For those in peril in the air!

Almighty God, whose arm is strong,
protect us e'er from doing wrong.
We pray to always do what’s right,
for justice only be our fight.
Let peace now reign across our land,
brought to us by your gracious hand.

Of the verses above, authorship is as follows:
Verse 1 - William Whiting, the original first verse.
Verse 2 - me, composed for this day as a prayer for the Army Verse
3 - J. E. Seim, 1966
Verse 4 - Mary C. D. Hamilton, 1915
Verse 5 - me again

 You can hear the US Navy Sea Chanters, the service's chorus, sing the first verse by clicking here.