Even as Californians await a decision on the constitutionality of Proposition 8, the initiative that limits marriage to unions between men and women, a new survey reports that only 1 in 5 residents believe the ballot measure was “good for the state.”

But an even more important, if not surprising, finding is the widespread acceptance of gay identity and issues among California Christians. Even churchgoers who don't support gay marriage favor full acceptance of gays in the workplace and in the military, and some also acknowledge their right to adopt and to have civil unions. (You can find the numbers here) Bottom line: the old narrative “religion discriminates against gays” needs to be nuanced.

The survey, released this week by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI), is the “most comprehensive breakdown by religion of where Californians stand on same sex marriage” since the proposition's passage in November 2008. (Disclosure: I participated in July 21 press conference at which results were announced.)
 
The PRRI survey made clear that news coverage claiming the religious community ensured Prop 8's passage did not tell the full story. Yes, some evangelical, Mormon and Roman Catholic leaders deployed funds and foot soldiers to support the primacy of heterosexual marriage. But people in the pews hold more subtle positions than an up-or-down vote conveys.

For example, large majorities of white Catholics, white Protestants and Latino Catholics apply the Golden Rule to same-sex relationships, affirming that gay couples with long term commitments should be allowed to marry. (These three religious groups, along with the unaffiliated, are most supportive of gay marriage.) Yet significant minorities among religious groups opposed to same sex unions also see the case for “doing unto others.” Specifically, 48 percent of black Protestants, 37 percent of white evangelicals and 34 percent of Latino evangelicals are willing to apply the Golden Rule to committed gay relationships. Significant numbers in these groups also say they would support gay marriage if they were sure their churches would not be forced to do them. (In point of fact, clergy and religious institutions cannot be compelled to marry anyone.)

These findings, as well as evangelical support for non-discrimination in the public square, indicate that religious conservatives are more tolerant and open-minded than the media gives them credit for. The majority does support Proposition 8–and thanks to PRRI's inclusion of theological questions in the survey, we know why. Prop 8 supporters believe in a personal “Father” God and a divinely inspired Bible. Their religious outlook places morality and faith at the center of religious life.

It's insights like these that underscore the importance of the new data. Fine-grain findings open avenues for future exploration: news stories that would help us understand each other more than we currently do. Rather than focus on church leadership and meta-politics (do we really need another story about a possible schism in the Episcopal Church?) there are some great leads to follow:

• Despite pro-proposition 8 preaching from the clergy, a majority of white and Latino Catholics are supportive of gay marriage. Why in this case has personal experience trumped clerical guidance?
• While 57 percent of Latino Catholics support same sex marriage, 73 percent of Latino evangelicals oppose it. Other surveys show significant social and cultural overlap between these two groups. How to explain this difference?
• Many black Protestants say that same sex marriage is not their issue; is that changing?
• Other than the religiously unaffiliated, the greatest predictor for support of same sex marriage is age. People under 30 are much more likely than their elders to reconsider Prop 8. Will that demographic tide affect evangelical communities too; if so, will it manifest more among whites than blacks and Latinos?

Diane Winston

by Courtney Bender

Christopher Hitchens is in treatment for esophageal cancer, and the prognosis is grim. If Hitchens were anyone other than Hitchens, this sad news would already be a footnote in last week's news cycle. But, since he is an outspoken atheist and since the typical American response to others' suffering is to pray for them, a public debate has popped up.

Should one pray for an atheist?

The American press is in remarkable agreement that it is appropriate to pray for an atheist. Even an atheist who has argued that intercessory prayer is not only “in bad taste” but also “immoral.”

Despite the objections and pleas of a handful of atheists and freethinkers  (and a few others), most seem to agree that there is nothing wrong with praying for Hitchens (as long as they praying is done “quietly, quietly“).

Praying is the most common religious act performed by Americans (nearly sixty percent of all Americans say they pray at least once a day). Americans regularly and reflexively tell others that they are praying for them, and in so doing explicate their relationships with other and to the divine. There are, of course, ongoing debates about the “efficacy” of prayer. But more frequently “prayer” is a way for Americans to describe their relations with others, and to talk publicly about the meaning of suffering and humans' ability (or inability) to do anything about it.

Enter the atheist. Hitchens and others like him cogently and vociferously contend that a way of life – public or otherwise – where prayer shapes understandings of human relationships, suffering, and morality is fraudulent, immoral, and wrong. Hitchens, in other words, envisions a different kind of world altogether. One grounded on non-transcendent frameworks and ethics, one that begins with a rejection of whatever social (or divine) powers that prayer may have. Their refusal to live on the religious grid, even a “plural” religious grid, makes them a symbolic other – a godless atheist communist, in the old parlance. Sociologists note that Americans remain less tolerant of atheists than Muslims. To be nonreligious is worse than believing in the wrong religion.

Some praying for Hitchens do so with a view that he is their enemy. Their prayers are, in their own understanding, acts of aggression upon an opponent whose challenges seek to undermine the very basis on which prayers are grounded.

But most who have weighed in about praying for Hitchens have a hard time viewing him as an enemy. They live in a pluralistic universe where there are no (religious) enemies, only religious differences. In these stories, atheists have joined a religiously plural grid as another “religious” minority, taking up a place alongside the Muslims and Sikhs and Zoroastrians. No longer not tolerated, they have been welcomed in.

We need look no further than Obama's inaugural vision to see this at work: “we are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and non-believers.” Secular humanists are invited to (and attend) the interfaith meetings at the White House. The military considers atheist chaplains. Pundits and journalists state that praying for an atheist is a nice, generous and innocuous thing to do. And even Hitchens comes to see the point.

But what is the consequence? Tolerance is good, to be sure. But if prayers for Hitchens herald the beginnings of a shift toward toleration of atheism, it also augurs a shift in our view of atheists – as another minority embedded in the pluralistic grid. Which raises the question: if atheists are just another kind of religious person, then are we all religious now?  The irony here might be that an increased tolerance for atheism, along with Americans' affinity for  prayer, make Hitchens' and other atheists' desire to live non-religiously an ever more elusive goal. Reporters seeking to understand Americans' religious practices and perspectives may need to factor this into new mental maps.

* * * * * *

Courtney Bender is an associate professor of religion at Columbia University. She is the author of the forthcoming The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago, 2010) and Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (Chicago, 2003) as well as the co-editor (with Pamela Klassen) of After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagements (Columbia, 2010).

By Richard Flory

The recent retirement, then non-retirement, of famed Crystal Cathedral and “possibility thinking” pastor Robert Schuller, was reported over the past weekend, first in the Orange County Register, and picked up by the AP. The story was then denied by Schuller's daughter and now “sole lead pastor,” Sheila Schuller Coleman, in an L.A. Times article, although it took a day for the AP and the Register to catch up. (For more on the coverage of this story click here.) The confusion over who is really in charge at the Crystal Cathedral is an issue that many similar churches are likely to face in the coming years as the pastors who built these large, complex organizations reach retirement age and/or move on to their ultimate reward. How can reporters cut through the mystification to explain what is actually happening? A quick review of recent history is a good start.

Schuller and his church have long occupied a strange place within American Christianity. Although a member of the Reformed Church in America (RCA), a denomination considered part of the liberal Christian mainline, it's seen as an evangelical megachurch, even though that many might characterize Schuller's “possibility thinking” approach to Christianity as too short on Jesus and too long on self-help pop-psychology.

Schuller is best understood as a southern California incarnation of Norman Vincent Peale's “power of positive thinking.” Schuller's genius was to wed his theology and worship environment to the growing post-WWII southern California suburbs and its car culture, establishing his church in the 1950s in a rented drive-in movie theater. His effort was not the only one in southern California, but it was the most successful at blending Christianity with the feel-good vibe of living in the land of the endless summer and the freedom that the automobile provided. As a measure of its success, the church currently claims 10,000 members and has a global reach through its weekly television show, The Hour of Power. Indeed the program, and church, bills itself as America's Television Church, and judging by how many people are actually in the pews on Sunday morning, at least some of those 10,000 members rarely, if ever, set foot in the physical space of the Crystal Cathedral.

The deep story behind last week's report is much larger than just the Crystal Cathedral and its particular problems. Many churches that are organizationally similar to Schuller's, founded and shaped by one central figure—usually a man—who is now at, past, or nearing retirement age. Schuller is eighty-three years old and still involved in the church he built. Likewise, Chuck Smith, who founded Calvary Chapel in the late 1960s, and which grew to be a global movement, is also eighty-three, and there is no clear successor, at least with the same name recognition and charisma. An offshoot of Calvary Chapel, The Vineyard, founded by John Wimber in the early1980s, has never been as vibrant, at least in the U.S., as it was before he died in 1997. So the issue is how to pass on to a new generation a large, complex organization that was built and nurtured by a particular person, rooted in a particular time, place, cultural sensitivity, and vision for its ministry and mission.

This is clearly an issue at the Crystal Cathedral. Daughter Sheila Schuller Coleman consistently refers to “Dad” and his involvement in the church, implying a continuity to his vision. She is officially now the senior or lead pastor of the church, and was “commissioned” as a pastor in the church, but that is not, according to the RCA, exactly the same as being an ordained minister in the church. This is a subtle difference, but one that allows Schuller's daughter to take charge of the organization, keeping it in the family and presumably within the aims that Schuller himself would approve of, without having to search for a seminary trained senior pastor.

To dig into the bigger story of how a church or movement tries to perpetuate the authority of its longtime leader, journalists might look at the group's theology and  how it informs the code language that explains the organization's present and future. Thus journalists might ask what it means for Coleman, both as a woman and as someone with no seminary training, to be a “commissioned” senior pastor by the RCA, despite her lack of credentials. Further, how does the polity of the RCA square with the way that Coleman became Schuller Sr.'s successor, and who are the church and the denomination trying to please here, the congregants, the TV audience, Schuller?

Churches like Schuller's may be non-reproducible, at least in the sense of passing on one organizational form, vision and mission to the next generation. This is not inherent to megachurches, rather the problem lies in who—or what—the church is organized around, whether personality, generation, hip factor, or whatever. There are more recently established churches  that are as innovative as Schuller was in his day, but two examples– Rick Warren's Saddleback Church and Greg Laurie's Harvest Fellowship are as locked into their own cultural forms, primarily catering to an upwardly mobile, Baby Boomer population, as Schuller is to his mid-20th century sensibilities.

Ironically, an even newer version of a “culturally relevant” church is an offshoot of the Crystal Cathedral. Schuller's grandson, Robert V. “Bobby” Schuller—the son of the exiled Robert A. Schuller—is the pastor of a small hipster church, The Gathering. The Gathering started at the Crystal Cathedral but now meets a mere three miles from the mother ship, in an old American Legion hall in the City of Orange, California.

The youngest Schuller is tapping into the current zeitgeist just as his grandfather did 50 years ago, though instead of an orientation to cars and pageantry, The Gathering is organized around creating a small caring community to support each other and to serve its surrounding community.   Whether it becomes as large and publicly successful as his grandfather's church remains to be seen. Indeed it is an open question as to whether the youngest Schuller is even interested in religion on such a grand scale since he's part of a movement among younger evangelicals to establish small, community-minded congregations. Maybe that's the best approach, if success means establishing something that will outlive a charismatic founder.

Although there has been some minimal coverage of Bobby Schuller's church, this is a story that is still to be written. Can young Schuller contextualize his religious vision within a much different cultural environment than what his grandfather experienced? How will he and others like him, measure their success? Will they count ever larger numbers of members, eyeballs and cars, or is some other calculus at work that previous generations of leaders don't share?  And as the religion beat continues to fade, how will journalists adequately cover religious movements in ways that do justice to their historic particularities as well as their relevance to the current cultural moment?

Richard Flory is associate research professor of sociology and senior research associate in the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California. He is the co-author of Growing Up in America: The Power of Race in the Lives of Teens (Stanford, 2010) and Finding Faith: The Spiritual Quest of the Post-Boomer Generation (Rutgers, 2008).

by Dalia Hashad

The world's greatest sporting event will soon come to a close.  Long after the incessant honking of vuvuzelas cease, this World Cup will be remembered for its unique character.  Among the bright spots is that, for the first time, it has been staged on African soil in a country struggling to release itself from the devastating legacy of apartheid.  In addition, the U.S. team's energizing performance helped spark national enthusiasm for the long-neglected world pastime and brought us a bit more in step with the rest of the globe.  Unavoidably, the games had its lows.  In videos for all to replay, there are the now-famous mistakes and missed calls by referees.  And then there is “Les Bleus” France's national team, winners of the 1998 World Cup, the 2000 European Championship, and runners up of the 2006 World Cup. The team self-imploded and, humiliated, booked an early flight back home.  

French media pummeled the team. Hurling insults like ” hoodlums”, “scum” and “gang bosses” at the players who are largely black, African and Muslim, the oversized reaction smacks of French anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant racism. In France, the “race” problem is largely a religious one conflated with immigration and race due to its particular social, economic and political realities. These terms are frequently used in racist rants against Muslim immigrant communities from Africa and the Middle East.  The press reaction wasn't surprising given France's political climate.  (Just a couple of weeks ago, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, in a historic address before the entire Parliament, warned, “the burqa is not welcome in French Territory.”  Next week the French legislature is set to debate a draft law banning the niqab.)

What is unexpected, is the spillover of the French perspective into the news media. Instead of dissecting the more interesting story on why the French national conversation ties their team's failures to religion, race and class, a few U.S. journalists picked up on French biases and parroted the far-fetched assertions. In his analysis of the failings of the French team, Roger Cohen of the New York Times, like many in France, insinuates that religion played a key role.  His analysis resonates throughout French media and society but is out of step for U.S. readers who haven't suffered constant exposure to France's racial and religious struggles and slurs.

In “Feeling Bleu”, Cohen starts with the undeniable premise that the breakdown of the French team is due to the failings of their coach, Raymond Domenech, “a disaster, a little man in a big job and one in need of a good smack.”  No argument there.  But Cohen quickly moves on to say that “there's more to the demise of 'Les Bleus' than Domenech's incompetence.”  He claims that “no middle ground binds the Muslim boys from the suburban projects and the clean-cut, middle-class French lad — Yoann Gourcuff of good Breton lineage”.  The reference to Muslim players, all grown men, as “boys” juxtaposed with a “lad…of good lineage” serves only to create a derogatory comparison that has nothing to do with performance.  He points to three French players who converted to Islam and players coming out of the projects as being deficient in French “pride”. The reader is left to infer that being Muslim or coming from a poor background makes a player less disciplined, lacking in professionalism and most of all, unwilling to play at his best. The French team underperformed because some players are Muslim?

In a team that was burdened with institutional problems, there was no reason to conflate the failure with France's religious struggles. Many journalists in France layered Les Bleus implosion with Frances religious struggles as opposed to seeing and reporting on the very obvious technical problems that would have sunk any team (including a team full of Gourcuffs).  Not so surprising of coverage in France.  A little more surprising when it spreads to this side of the Atlantic.  Cohen's column did not make a strong argument, which is especially disturbing when his implication is that religion is a problem.  Where was the evidence that this failure is due to religious discord?

If Cohen truly wanted to discuss what plagued the French team, there was no lack of material:  from the French Futbol Federation's horrible decision to keep Domenach as the coach to the terrible decisions in terms of team tactics and formation, including the decision to not start Thierry Henry, Djibril Cisse and Flaurent Malouda—all worthy veterans with plenty of World Cup and top club level experience.  

But oddly, Cohen bypasses all the technical futbol analysis, in favor of religiously biased reasoning and incomprehensible insinuations.  

It is no surprise then, that long before Cohen mentions Eric Abidal's marriage to a Muslim woman, saying that France has become a nation of “Fatima Duponts”, he lost me.  Why is it even important to talk about religious identity when discussing these footballers and their team?  In her Newsweek article, “Soccer is Not a National Metaphor“, Eve Fairbanks gets it right when she expresses exasperation with her colleagues' coverage, warning “investing so much meaning in a team can be not only silly, but dangerous. France needs a national identity crisis like it needs a hole in the head, and it really doesn't need one triggered by something as trivial as a grudgematch between a soccer player and his coach.”

Interestingly, sports journalists' post mortems were generally more accurate sans the dramatic (and false) overlay of religion.  Journalists who understand the sport were able to see and depict the French loss for what it was:  soccer that fell apart not because of religion, but because of layers of strategic and technical blunders.  The team's failure at the World Cup isn't a direct result of France's religious and immigration problems, but the journalistic reaction sure was.

Dalia Hashad is an attorney specializing in human rights and civil rights.  She has also been a host and co-executive producer of “Law and Disorder,” a weekly talk-radio program.

by Brie Loskota

The only thing Americans seem to like more than the culture war is trying to make money off the culture war. As soon as the “Jesus fish” appeared on the back of a minivan, another enterprising group started selling the “The Darwin fish” (it has feet). “The Truth fish” ate “The Darwin fish”, “The Gefilte fish” arrived on the scene, and even people who liked the band Phish jumped in. A small but vocal segment of our country decided to play out centuries old debates about religion, identity, ultimate truth, and the meaning of life by sticking cheap metallic decals on the back of their cars. Talk about merging the sacred and the profane.

Paul Vitello writes about the next evolution of this phenomenon in a New York Times story about the proliferation of iPhone applications dedicated to getting the upper hand in the never-ending argument between Christians and atheists. Savvy application developers are arming atheists with the ability to quickly look up contradictory and ridiculous verses in the Bible and flummox the most knowledgeable Christian believer.

Christians, on the other hand, can make hasty work of atheists' standard arguments about the lack of ultimate truth with primers on how to skillfully back them into a logical corner. Vitello does a good job of contextualizing this phenomenon within a cultural shift that has seen both the rise of the new atheists and what he calls our “fractious talk-show culture.”

Unfortunately, the new technology doesn't seem to be adding anything new to the content of the debate. By opening up the digital market to culture war profiteering, these apps allow skeptics and believers to outsource not only their knowledge but the foundations of their own convictions all for a couple of bucks. Why would anyone actually internalize (or let alone memorize) what they believe when they can just look it up? Maybe I'm just rehashing arguments about the internet making us stupid but that is only part of it.

Another part that is missing in the discussion, and the reporting, is what religion actually is outside of our narrow culture-warring view.  Yet again, I feel the need to point out that reducing religion, this time to a set of texts, misses the mark. Whether the believers do it, or atheists, or reporters who do not pause for a moment to point it out, scripture alone does not a religion make.  Religion is an historically unfolding system of living, made up of rituals, texts, traditions, teachings, theologies and institutions. Arguing on this narrow battlefield may make for good bar banter and selling products but it doesn't make for honest discussion.

The article itself is a pretty straight down the line conflict story. Christians can't stand atheists. Atheists ridicule Christians. Academics would rather we all read Kant. The only winner is the news outlet that sells a paper or grabs another eyeball. Reporting on the two sides misses the opportunity to probe others angles in this story and to point out the fundamental misunderstanding of religion by these two sets of fundamentalists.

Brie Loskota is Managing Director of the Center for Religion and Civic Culture at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. She also serves as the program officer for the CRCC Pentecostal and Charismatic Research Initiative, a program that seeks to spur new research on one of the world's fastest growing religious movements.

On Friday, the New York Times added another piece to the puzzling history of the Vatican's response to the crisis of clergy sexual abuse. Reporters Laurie Goodstein and David Halbfinger plumbed church documents and interviewed church leaders to ascertain how Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, as head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, deployed church policy to address scandals that, by the 1990s, were erupting globally.

Despite recent Vatican efforts to paint the current pope as a responsive leader seeking to address the problem, the reporters draw a picture of a bureaucrat more concerned with protecting his institution than with preventing abuse and disciplining abusers.

As Goodstein and Halbfinger write: “the future pope, it is now clear, was also part of a culture of nonresponsibility, denial, legalistic foot-dragging and outright obstruction. More than any top Vatican official other than John Paul, it was Cardinal Ratzinger who might have taken decisive action in the 1990s to prevent the scandal from metastasizing in country after country, growing to such proportions that it now threatens to consume his own papacy.”

Read the article to see if you agree. More to the point, decide whether it addresses the key question bedeviling public opinion: why did church officials place institutional issues—preeminently the shortage of priests and the sanctity of its theological claims—above the safety of its children?

It's this question that raises the story from a one-off, garden-variety scandal to an ongoing crisis. As others, including Vatican officials, have noted it's a sad reality that children are abused in schools, camps, and religious settings. Typically when the crime comes to light, the offender suffers the consequences and the story comes to an end. But if a powerful institution shields the guilty party, obstructs justice, and enables the offending behavior to continue, it's newsworthy.

Critics complain that the Times is out to get the Church and Pope Benedict, in particular. They cite theological inaccuracies, historical misunderstandings and editorial intimations to justify their stance. But they miss the forest for the trees. The intricacies of priestly ordination, Vatican law and institutional preservation are important to the story, but they're not the point. The point is the church's choice: opting to safeguard the institution, its priests and reputation at the expense of children and families. The Times is, as any news outlet should be, interested in making sense of this decision and, of course, grabbing readers' attention.

Newspapers and other news outlets exist to make money for owners and shareholders. That primary economic objective is central to any analysis of what's covered and how it's reported. Journalists desirous of speaking truth to power, comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable only occasionally get satisfaction. It's a lesson I learned when I went to work for the Baltimore Sun in 1989. The religion reporter had written an exposé of clergy sexual abuse in the local Roman Catholic diocese. But the story was spiked because, depending on whom you believed, diocesan leaders complained to the editors; the editors were afraid of offending readers, or the business side did not want to rattle advertisers.

That scenario undoubtedly was replicated in many newsrooms until the Boston Globe's 2002 Pulitzer Prize winning coverage made reporting on clergy sex abuse de rigueur. But despite the frisson of revealing religious hypocrisy, it's not just a “gotcha” phenomenon. It's also a call for accountability. “Who allowed this to happen” is a question that echoes in all cases of misconduct and reflects journalistic insistence on the public's right to know.

Should religious organizations be exempt from the close scrutiny directed at other institutions? The Times' critics seem to believe that the Church deserves special dispensation. They seem to want reporters steeped in its history and mission who treat it with the empathetic understanding of insiders mindful of its divine calling. But journalists are, by definition, outsiders who report on human foibles. The church gets the same treatment as the military, the unions, the government or any other powerful bureaucracy mired in malfeasance.

I welcome the Times' spotlight on the Vatican's handling of the crisis. Its reporting should be debated and its assertions can be critiqued. But it's helpful to have the timeline, context and overview which articles like this most recent one provide. Religious groups may aspire to a different standard of coverage but as long as they operate on this side of paradise, I expect journalists to give them the same treatment as they do any other human endeavor.

Diane Winston

by Don Lattin

Having spent the last three years tripping through the history of the psychedelic sixties, I couldn't help but laugh at the following paragraph in a recent front-page story in the New York Times:

Scientists are especially intrigued by the similarities between hallucinogenic experiences and the life-changing revelations reported throughout history by religious mystics and those who meditate. These similarities have been identified in neural imaging studies conduced by Swiss researchers and in experiments led by Roland Griffiths, a professor of behavioral biology at John Hopkins.

Keep those latest findings in mind as you travel back in time to an article titled “Mysticism in the Lab.” That story, published in the September 23, 1966 edition of Time magazine, reported:

Most experiences of mystical consciousness have come only after hard work — spartan prayers, meditation, fasting, mortification of the flesh. Now it is possible, through the use of LSD and other psychedelic drugs, to induce something like mystical consciousness in a controlled laboratory environment. Such experimentation should be pushed forward, contend Psychiatrist Walter Pahnke, who holds a Harvard theology degree.

Such experimentation, however, did not push forward – at least not in the lab. There are lots of reasons for that, but high on the list are the excesses of Dr. Pahnke's faculty advisor at Harvard, Dr. Timothy Leary, one of four psychedelic pioneers I write about in my recent book, The Harvard Psychedelic Club – How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age for America.

Leary helped inspire President Richard Nixon's “war on drugs,” which included a crackdown on serious scientific research into the potential medical – and, yes, spiritual – benefits that may come from the responsible use of psychedelic drugs, which some authorities, such as religion scholar Huston Smith, prefer to call “entheogens,” referring to their ability to help users tune into “the God within us.”

It has taken some four decades the government and media backlash against the psychedelic sixties to subside. Today, there's a new wave of a research into the therapeutic potential in such drugs as psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”), MDMA (also known as “Ecstasy”), and even LSD, the most notorious and most misunderstood enemy of the drug war.

Media coverage has also shifted. Careful readers notice a new tone to the mainstream news coverage of the psychedelic drug movement, which never really went away.
Examples are the aforementioned Times piece, “Hallucinogens Have Doctors Tuning In Again,” and several recent reports on CNN. The tone in actually reminiscent of some of the optimistic reports from the pre-Leary era, such as a glowing 1958 CBS News documentary about LSD that was broadcast as part of the network's “Focus on Sanity” series.

While it may seem still “far out” to many mainstream editors, this new wave of psychedelic drug research provides fertile ground for religion reporters interested in stories about brain chemistry, “the God gene,”  and the science of spirituality.

Turn on, tune in, and check it out. 

Don Lattin is a veteran religion reporter. He is the author of Jesus Freaks: A True Story of Murder and Madness on the Evangelical Edge and, most recently, The Harvard Pschedelic Club: How Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Huston Smith and Andrew Weil Killed the Fifties and Ushered in a New Age in America. He can be reached through his web site.

by Jennifer Hahn

The wait is almost over. On Wednesday, the third movie installment of the Twilight saga, “Eclipse,” will light up silver screens and fan faces across the country. The media—tabloid and reputable sources alike—have followed this event with a devotion matching that of the most obsessed Twi-hard. But, as with the other films, most stories focus on the young stars' superbly crafted abdominal muscles, tantalizingly disheveled hair or rumored real-life hookups. While I'm just as likely as the next person to pick up US Weekly to find out what Robert Pattinson and Kristen Stewart are up to behind closed doors, I can't help feeling that journalists have yet to explore what's really driving this popular culture phenomenon.

And yet, I'm not surprised. As a society, we have a history of dismissing popular culture, especially that consumed by young women, as silly and therefore irrelevant. As I wrote here when the first Twilight movie came out, to locate the draw of Twilight in Taylor Lautner's beefed-up body or Pattinson's tortured brooding is to miss the point entirely. There are plenty of movies and TV shows featuring exceedingly beautiful young people and unlikely love stories that do not even come close to achieving the kind of off-the-charts popularity of the Twilight franchise. Clearly there's something more than a sexy teenage love-triangle behind the nearly $1 billion the movies have already grossed worldwide, not to mention 100-million-plus copies of the books sold to date.

So what is this “something more”? I think it's none other than the “something more” the founding father of American psychology, William James, identified over 100 years ago when trying to explain the object of all religious experience. For James, the religious person experiences a world beyond ordinary, workaday existence that he or she is able to “keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck.”

I believe that it is a longing for a world beyond ordinary experience that drives much of our fixation with the supernatural in our current pop culture offerings. (For a great exploration of pop and the paranormal, see Jeffrey Kripal's fabulous new book, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal as the Sacred). In my view, the massive popularity of Twilight can only be properly understood if one sees its human-vampire romance as a vehicle for supplying subtle and easily digestible religious content to a spiritually starved culture.

Seen in this light, the Twilight phenomenon is fueled not (just) by teen hormones and melodrama, but also by spiritual longing. While it is no doubt true that many Twilight fans are active in traditional religious settings, an increasing number of spiritual-but-not-religious Americans feel that traditional religious organizations are failing to satisfy their spiritual needs. If this trend continues, we will likely see more pop culture offerings that address spiritual needs through supernatural storytelling.

While Stephenie Meyer's Mormonism is mentioned almost fetishistically in most articles about Twilight, very few have written in depth about the Mormon themes that animate the series (the books begin with a quote from Genesis, for God's sake). For example, Bella and Edward's potentially immortal, eternal romance screams out the Mormon concept of celestial marriage. Twilight also deals heavily with themes of free will and redemption – the apple on the cover of the first book serves as a good hint of its driving Adam-and-Eve motif.

When a pop culture phenomenon grabs hold of an entire generation of young women (not to mention their Twi-moms), plumbing the reasons for its popularity can yield incredible insights into contemporary culture. For an excellent breakdown of the religious themes in Twilight, see John Granger's essay, “Mormon Vampires in the Garden of Eden.” For a great example of the kind of nuanced, insightful work that comes from taking Twilight and the lives of young women seriously, see Caitlin Flanagan's 2008 piece in the Atlantic Monthly, “What Girls Want.”

Jennifer Hahn has a Master's degree in specialized journalism with an emphasis in religion from USC. She is currently pursuing a doctorate in religious studies at UC Santa Barbara. Her work has appeared in Ms. magazine, Religion Dispatches, and Los Angeles City Beat.

by Courtney Bender

On the morning of June 15, Americans woke up to the surprising story that “Touchdown Jesus” – or, as some called it, the “Big Butter Jesus” – a six-story Styrofoam sculpture along an interstate in Ohio, had been struck by lightning and quickly burned to the ground. Only the steel frame remained, a freaky Terminator-like skeleton.

Touchdown Jesus was kitsch; it was religion; it was both at the same time. Commentators in the press, attentive to this rich mix, were quick to say that the lightning strike was no accident. “Thor is mad“or maybe even Zeus. And of course God was regularly cited as the source of this thunderbolt – all that was left to figure out was the meaning. Was God grossed out by the statue's buttery aesthetics? Was God mad about the unchecked oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico? Had God just had a bad day?

The tongue-in-cheek snark that assigned God some active role in the statue's demise was not met happily by other religion writers or the ministers at the church that had erected it. The builder of “Touchdown Jesus” flatly stated that the lightning strike was not an “act of God.” God wasn't – and isn't – mad at the statue, or at anyone.   
 
This is an odd, if understandable, statement. In American contract law, the phrase “acts of God” refers to hurricanes, earthquakes and lightning strikes. In other words, to natural events outside of human control. Thus in a sense the lightning strike was just such an act.

As this little kerfuffle demonstrates, in American life “act of God” has two meanings that unsteadily coexist. We do not need to be reminded of the ways that religious figures have assigned divine agency and moral meaning to Katrina, Haiti's earthquake or the Deepwater Horizon petrochemical geyser. There seems to be no opportunity lost to call attention to the angry divinity standing behind these natural events. And, likewise, to call attention to the presumably morally repugnant human acts that call down divine retribution. And then there is the secular version of this narrative, where wasting the earth's resources or scoffing at climate change bring dire consequences. One way or another, Judgment Day is coming.

The Ohio lightning bolt struck less than 24 hours before President Obama weighed in on the oil spill with an address to the nation from the Oval Office. There was most certainly a religion story in that speech: most observers focused on the President's call to prayer, what some deemed a “hail Mary” pitch. Yet listening closely to the speech, we can also hear how Obama answered the act-of-God question – an attempt to frame our understanding of the nation's degree of collective responsibility for the disaster.

Recounting the story of the “Blessing of the Fleet” that takes place each year in the Gulf, Obama noted that clergy gather with fishermen to ask for a blessing. The blessing, he notes “is not that God has promised to remove all obstacles and dangers. The blessing is that He is with us always,” a blessing that's granted “…even in the midst of the storm.” Obama worked to reassure the nation not only that God is not mad at us but that we're not really to blame for the dismaying scene unfolding beneath, within and around the Gulf. It is like a storm or a lightning strike. It is not a sign of divine displeasure.

I believe that it is going to be difficult to convince either secular or religious Americans that what happened in the Gulf is unequivocally one kind of act of God or another. The language of “signs” and the semiotics of lightning strikes are simply too religiously, psychologically and culturally complex to be contained by bland assurances of God's gentle presence. Following the story of how we reckon with our collective responsibility for an environmental calamity will be ongoing work, but it begins with the observation that public discussion of God's acts has a more serious side than coverage of religious comment around events like Touchdown Jesus (or Katrina or Haiti) often allows.

Courtney Bender is an associate professor of religion at Columbia University. She is the author of the forthcoming The New Metaphysicals: Spirituality and the American Religious Imagination (Chicago, 2010) and Heaven's Kitchen: Living Religion at God's Love We Deliver (Chicago, 2003) as well as the co-editor (with Pamela Klassen) of After Pluralism: Reimagining Religious Engagements (Columbia, 2010).