by Jennifer Hahn

Six years after President Bush announced a faith-based initiative to treat addiction, Jennifer Hahn investigates its effect on drug- and alcohol-ravaged New Orleans

Like many people living in New Orleans today, James Banks knows what it means to lose everything. But Banks' ruin came not at the hands of a Category 3 hurricane, but from an equally destructive force: crack cocaine.

A criminal defense attorney with his own practice, Banks managed to hide his drug use for twenty years. But in 1999, his addiction took over, and he started behaving erratically and missing court dates. He was disbarred and quickly hit rock bottom.  Through word of mouth, he heard about a treatment program run by Living Witness Church of God In Christ. There, with the help of Pentecostal Christian teachings as well as traditional clinical methods, Banks got sober and regained his life. Now off drugs for seven years, he's in training to become a licensed addictions counselor.

Though Banks believes the clinical approach to addiction treatment is important, he, like many who have faced the wreckage of addiction, feels that “without a higher power, you can't recover.” This, in fact, is the central tenet of Alcoholics Anonymous, the most widely utilized addiction treatment program in the world, and many treatment centers and programs throughout the country also stress the fundamental importance of a higher power.

So for some, President Bush's 2003 announcement of Access to Recovery, a new federal addiction treatment initiative that would include faith-based providers, was welcomed as an important new tool in the fight against drug and alcohol abuse. For others, though, it was a dangerous and potentially unconstitutional intermingling of church and state that would do more harm than good to addicts.
Though a favorite program of the Bush Administration, the future of ATR remains uncertain as President Barack Obama reorganizes what he has renamed the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. While Obama promised to expand upon Bush's faith-based efforts in July, it is still unclear how his administration will differ in its support and oversight of religious organizations that provide social services. This could have far-reaching effects on federal funding for faith-based treatment programs. But the issue of addiction promises to remain relevant for the new administration, as some researchers predict a potential mass increase in addiction as a result of the economic crisis.

ATR's ability to deal with sudden increases in addiction was tested early on, as the first round of funding for the program came through in 2005, just prior to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Recent studies have shown that the traumas inflicted by these hurricanes caused an increase in alcohol dependency and illicit drug use among survivors in New Orleans, putting many ATR recipients on the front lines of the post-hurricane drug and alcohol recovery effort.

ATR works through a voucher system allowing it to circumnavigate the most obvious church/state constitutional violations. The government grants individuals seeking treatment a voucher which they can then use at a treatment program of their choosing, whether faith-based or secular.

More than three years later, are the faith-based options provided by ATR helping to curb the increase in addiction unleashed by the storm? Would the potential elimination of ATR by a new administration be felt as a loss to the addiction treatment community there? Or, are critics of ATR right to protest an intermingling of church and state that they say only siphons federal money away from scientifically vetted secular programs?

***
Hundreds of recovering addicts ride the elevator each month to the sixth floor of one of the tallest buildings on Tulane Avenue where Pastor Pythian Noah oversees their treatment. Pastor Noah sits at his desk in front of a window overlooking the New Orleans Superdome. He continuously monitors a television at the back of the room which shows the front lobby because “if anything jumps off that's where it happens”. Many of the clients he treats at Grace Outreach Center are ex-offenders on probation or parole.

According to Pastor Noah, Grace Outreach is unusual in its use of both spiritual and clinical treatment methods. The center, which carries a hospital licensure, employs sociologists, psychiatrists, and addiction counselors, just as a secular program would, but the most important therapist here is Jesus.
“A lot of people are struggling with some simple things like who am I…what's my purpose in life, what would God have me to do?” Pastor Noah says.  “And we take that anxiousness away from them because we give them consistent and concise answers. What's my purpose in life? Your purpose in life is Jesus. Where am I going? You're going to Jesus. Who am I going to be? That's inside of him, who he is. You find your identity from who Christ is.”

Though Pastor Noah believes that the concise answers provided by Jesus play an important role in recovery, he does not think all faith-based programs are created equal. “A lot of the faith-based and a lot of churches and such are not equipped for the malady of drug addiction and mental illness,” he says. “It can be done through faith-based, but it has to be done correctly so they won't do more harm than good.”

In overseeing the Access to Recovery program in Louisiana, the state does make distinctions between programs that provide clinical as well as faith-based treatment and those that just use faith-based methods. According to Charlene Gradney, the state's ATR project director, both in-patient and out-patient treatment programs must be licensed by the state's Department of Health and Hospitals and must include a clinical component. In contrast, recovery support services – which include life skills training, job readiness preparation, and spiritual support groups – can be solely faith-based, but a client can only take advantage of them if he or she is first enrolled in a clinical program.
This rubs some in the faith-based community the wrong way. Keenan Dufauchard runs a Christ-centered recovery support service program affiliated with the Apostolic Outreach Center church. Dufauchard says that prior to ATR, he actually saw more clients because there was no government program requiring them to go to clinical treatment before coming to see him. He says that attending both clinical treatment and faith-based recovery support services is just too much for some people to take on at one time, so they drop the optional faith-based component to comply with the required clinical component.

“While I love the fact that President Bush has put this program into place, I think that it's misleading in that they make it sound as though it pays only faith-based organizations,” he says. “But that's not true. Clinicians are the ones that are getting paid, not necessarily faith-based unless we have clinicians. But as a faith-based organization you won't always have clinicians. That's why so many of us have gone away from ATR and have ceased to use their services…”

One group that stopped working with ATR is Louisiana's branch of Teen Challenge, a nationwide faith-based drug and alcohol treatment program. Their Ruston center benefited from ATR status for a few years, but the state refused to renew their contract due to insufficient dormitory space, among other things. “Unfortunately, like anything that comes from government even though it was earmarked faith-based it still had a lot of bureaucratic red tape and regulations attached to it,” says Greg Dill, the executive director of Teen Challenge in New Orleans.

But Alex Luchenitser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State has a different set of problems with ATR. Though the voucher system purports to give clients a choice between faith-based and secular treatment, Luchenitser still believes ATR is a misguided policy, which may also be on shaky constitutional ground.

“What we know is that this program has been used to funnel substantial sums of federal money to religious organizations that supposedly provide substance abuse treatment,” Luchenitser said. “But some of these organizations that provide treatment under this program don't use methods of treatment scientifically accepted by social scientists, but use purely religious methods.”

Luchenitser believes that the fact that states determine which treatment programs are eligible to receive the vouchers leaves ATR vulnerable to a constitutional challenge. “The less individual choice there is and the more government choice there is, the more likely it is that the court will find public funding of the religious institutions to be unconstitutional.” It doesn't help, he says, that the Louisiana Office of Addictive Disorders has explicitly stated the goal of increasing faith-based participation.

Stanford psychiatry professor and addictions specialist Keith Humphreys served on the White House Advisory Committee for Drug Free Communities from 2005 to 2006 and consulted on the creation of ATR.  He says that while he sees where organizations like Americans United for Separation of Church and State are coming from, he believes ATR's ability to provide more treatment options to a diverse population outweighs their concerns. 

“The issues are always framed in terms of how would someone not religious feel in a program that was religious and I just think it is also important to think about the fact that the situation is often reversed,” Humphreys says. “What's happened, you've got the chattering class, the sort of commentator class, the professional class, the academic class [who] are generally white educated people who have health insurance and they will never access any of these programs. They're also very secular people. And so they think, 'I would really be upset if that happened to me.' But that's not who we're talking about. We're talking about the most religious segment of the country, who don't have health insurance, who end up in the public sector system. So I'm ultimately worried less so about how somebody who is not part of that world and will never be affected by this program speculates about it and how the people who actually need these services so they don't die of this rotten disorder feel about it.”

Tonja Myles agrees that church/state concerns miss the point when it comes to ATR. She operates a faith-based inpatient treatment program in Baton Rouge, Louisiana called Set Free Indeed and has trained many faith-based organizations on how to provide addiction treatment. In 2003, when Bush announced the ATR program during his State of the Union address, Myles was a special guest in the First Lady's box and Bush gave a shout out to her program.

Myles believes that while everyone should have a choice in where they seek treatment, faith-based programs are better equipped when it comes to addressing addiction. “What a faith-based program can offer is more hope, more long-term treatment,” she says. “I'm just not worried about a person and them being sober, I'm worried about their eternal life.” Frustrated by constant questions over the effectiveness of faith-based treatment, Myles says “The proof is in the changed lives. How many changed lives do they want me to give them?”

But Luchenitser of Americans United for Separation of Church and State says that he's not convinced it's true that everyone always has a choice between faith-based and secular programs. He points to the fact that as of January 2008, 48 out of 52 ATR providers in Missouri were either Christian or Christian-affiliated. He says that the dominance of faith-based programs presents a particular problem for addicts living in rural areas where there may be very few options for treatment, none of them secular.

Of the 45 providers in Louisiana able to accept ATR vouchers through the 2007 federal appropriation to the program, 24 are faith-based.  Gradney says her office has worked to make sure that there is always a secular option within 35 miles of any potential client, and notes that ATR pays for transportation.

Many faith-based groups readily admit that their goal is to convert their clients to their particular form of Christianity and away from any other faiths or behaviors, such as homosexuality, that they perceive as anti-Christian. Pastor Noah, for example, says he would happily take in a Muslim client and even “provide the place for him to put his rug down and to face the north and to pray three times a day.” But asked if he would try to convert him, Pastor Noah hesitates. “No…” he says. “Do I lean towards it? Yes. Everything that come out of my mouth? Yes.” He says he takes a similar approach to homosexuals, emphasizing that they must be met with love and acceptance when they come in and through his program they eventually learn that “even though their physical man wants to do these things, that's not who they are,” he says. “They realize, 'You know, I'm not gay. I'm a child of God.'”

While Pastor Noah's remarks would obviously irk more secular Americans, defenders of ATR note that clients know what they're getting into when they sign up for a particular faith-based program. Since there's always a secular option, they argue, concerns over conversion to Christianity (or heterosexuality, for that matter) are really irrelevant.

Luchenitser believes it's not always so clear just how religious a particular program is and this could have major ramifications for certain clients. “What happens if an individual enters one of these religious programs and then when they get there they realize it was more religious than they were notified?” he says. “These issues might be particularly important for someone who is…using this program to satisfy the terms of their parole. In that case, [they] may not be able to leave the provider they're using without getting in trouble with the court [and] having their parole or probation revoked.”

While the state of Louisiana does collect information on success rates for clients of ATR-affiliated programs, as of yet they have not broken these numbers down to compare faith-based vs. secular programs. As of August, 77 percent of ATR clients had been abstinent from drugs or alcohol at discharge and 98 percent had avoided encounters with the criminal justice system for at least 30 days. National data from March 2007 showed that 71 percent of ATR clients were abstinent at discharge and 85 percent were not involved with the criminal justice system. Again, there is no breakdown of the data along religious vs. secular lines at the national level.

Statistic comparing faith-based and secular programs might become essential as the new administration evaluates Bush's faith-based legacy. But for now, faith-based providers like Living Witness eagerly apply for ATR status, hoping that increased funding will help them expand their ministries.
Gilbert Olinde, 42, is working the Living Witness program with determination. Recently released from prison after serving six years, this is Olinde's second time at Living Witness. In 2002, he quit the program three weeks shy of graduation and quickly got himself sent to prison.

“Some people say, well [God] gave me a second chance,” Olinde says. “I have messed up so many times in my life [and] he gave me another chance and I don't want to take that for granted, to go backwards. I want to go forwards.”

According to a new survey by the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, religion coverage represented about 1 percent of last year's newshole. Granted, that's not a lot, but it's the same amount of space devoted to stories about immigration, education and race and gender issues.

The biggest religion story of the year was the pope's visit to the U.S. in April, followed by coverage of religion in the presidential race. After those two biggies, the amount of attention given to any story fell precipitously to 3 percent or less, which was devoted to the holiday season, the Pew Forum's Religious Landscape Survey, the raid of the polygamous compound in Texas, Gordon Hinckley's death and the Mumbai terrorist attacks.

The content of the coverage given to the big stories focused on conflict—stories about the clergy sex abuse scandal dominated papal coverage and articles on the “'horse-race' aspects of the [presidential] campaign rather than on the religion angle of the stories” about Jeremiah Wright, Rick Warren's candidate forum and Sarah Palin's appeal to 'values voters.'

None of this is surprising but it does beg the question: What exactly is a religion story? This website contends that many non-religion stories have a strong spiritual, religious or ethical angle. How to parse political stories in Iraq and Iran? Or fighting in Gaza? What about the battle over Prop 8? And films, books, television shows, music and the visual arts that explore meaning, mortality and the struggle between good and evil?

It's no surprise that the Pew poll favors stories about institutional religion when it does its count. The kinds of coverage I'm advocating is squishy, amorphous and subjective. But that's how and where most of us encounter religion in our own lives – not in the hoo-haw of a papal visit or the “he said/she said” of an election, but rather in choices about how to define family, face adversity, participate in civic life and conduct ourselves at work.

These stories may not be counted, but they are being written—how and why this came to be is the biggest news of all.

Diane Winston

Creeds and collars, religious forms and formality, don't do well on television. So when I heard about Kings, a new NBC series based on the Biblical hero David, I expected a train wreck.

The series, which premieres on March 15, is anything but: It's visually compelling, engagingly written and serviceably acted (much depends on whether Ian McShane's scenery-chomping and Chris Egan's crinkly-eyed smile appeals). Updating the story cuts down the coy factor, allowing writers to make the villains (the big money guys) and the heroes (health care advocates, energy activists and farmers) recognizable but the absence of time/place specificity lends an appealing (to some of us) sci-fi aura.

Kings makes plain what many other TV series keep hidden: their “divine” inspiration. Bible stories have been told, read, acted and illustrated for 2000-plus years because they're dramatic, character-driven yarns that mirror basic human themes, and TV writers know a good thing when they see it. Sibling rivalry? Last season's Cane. Reluctant prophet? Eli Stone. Fallen woman? Saving Grace. Wounded healer? House.  Kings makes its source material explicit, which seems like a calculated risk.  

That's because the specificity of institutional religion practically begs both critics and adherents to weigh in on verisimilitude, and showrunners rarely please either. Remember Book of Daniel, Revelations, and Nothing Sacred? On the other hand,  shows with a spiritual bent or a quirky religious character frequently succeed. Buffy battled evil for 7 seasons and during President Jed Bartlet's 7-year tenure, Catholicism secured his moral compass. Subtlety continues to trump heavy-handed plots and characters, which is why Lost survives and Eli Stone went missing.

Kings is not subtle. Everything is over the top: Battle scenes, palace interiors, corporate meetings are stuffed with detail and drama more akin to a big budget movie than a weekly TV show. The acting is melodramatic and the conceit—Bible story as science fiction—requires a leap of faith. It's probably for the best that the religious piece is subtlely unsubtle. Echoing our own equivocations—King Silas Benjamin tells his subjects, “It's not popular to speak of God but I do because I am blessed.” But he also displays a marked ambivalence to God's messenger, the Rev. Ephram Samuels—who's wise in the ways of single malt scotch and royal matchmaking.

I can't guess how viewers will react but I can predict what reviewers and pundits will say. There will be much talk of acting and aesthetics, genre-bending and dramatic pretensions. But I hope to see some thoughtful writing on why this story at this moment; how a writer and executive producer of Heroes went on to Kings, and whether a modern day reinterpretation of the Bible resonates the same way as the original.

On another channel this Sunday, Big Love will depict an endowment ceremony. Both HBO and the show's writers/producers have been criticized by Mormons for depicting this sacred and secret ritual. In response, HBO offered a tepid apology and the series' producers said they had been faithful to both the intent and actuality of the ritual.

No surprise, most news outlets jumped on the conflict, but some commentators offered thoughtful reflections on issues of religion vs artistic expression.

Diane Winston

by Andrea Tabor

The results of the 2008 American Religious Identification Survey are out, and it appears Americans aren't just losing faith in the economic system, they're just plain losing faith.  The Christian population has declined by 10 percent since 1990, with mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches the hardest hit.

Maybe with widespread belt-tightening, people have stopped going to church to avoid their weekly tithes.  (A friend of mine once called them “church cover charges.”)

But, perhaps more likely, the recession could give religion a jumpstart in 2009.  The music industry seems to think so, predicting that Gregorian chants and other religious music will top the charts as times get tough.  Meanwhile, new religious books are hitting the shelves, including “Finding Happiness,” which James Martin of America magazine says, “shows how monastic practices (and Benedictine spirituality) can help everyone be happier.”  And, this Sunday, NBC premieres “Kings,” the Biblical tale of King David with corporate America for its backdrop.

When we first started sliding into recession, Jonathan Walton opined that this could be boom-time for prosperity preachers, who would repackage their gospel of wealth for the unemployed.  It seems that many media outlets have picked up on that trend, and are placing their bets that religion will sell in 2009.

It could be a wise business decision.  A 2005 study found that the religious suffer less emotional stress due to unemployment.  After what happened to me at church Sunday morning, I can see why.

I was greeted with a handshake from our Monsignor.  Rather than the usual small talk, he asked me that dreaded question: “How's the job search going?”
    “Oh, you know—it's tough,” I replied.  (For me and 10 percent of Los Angeles County.)

When most people ask me this question, they lament the job market and commiserate with me.  They extend their pity.  But instead, the Monsignor showered me with encouragement, inspiration and compliments.
   “You have such wonderful qualifications.”
   “The right company will come along.”
   “The news business will turn around soon.” (Don't ask me how he knows.)

He ended the conversation telling me that he will pray that I get hired.  At this point, the prayers of a Monsignor may be just that extra boost my resume needs.

My experience reminded me of an email sent from an evangelical pastor to his congregants in Northwest Arkansas.  With the local Wal-Mart considering layoffs, Pastor Mark Lindstrom wrote, “As Wal-Mart makes decisions about the future of the company, many in our church family are experiencing the nervousness and uncertainty that accompanies such a 'restructuring'.  If you are worrying about your job, please know you are loved by all of us at the church. I am praying for you today.”

Another study from Texas State University looked at the major recessions from 1968 to 2004.  In each case, the study found, evangelical churches experienced a 50 percent rate of growth. 

Still, the positive aspects of religion in recession may go untapped this time around.  With religion already on the decline, most faiths will be lucky to get back to their 1990 numbers during this downturn.  If we've learned anything from the ARIS study, it's that all churches have a long way to recover from their recent declines.  Despite past trends of growth, could religion-themed media outlets crash and burn along with the rest of the economy?  It's a story worth following for the next few months.

The fight to roll back Proposition 8 continues. Earlier this week, a non-binding resolution approved by the California legislature questioned its status.

The problem? The proposition had not been approved by a two-third majority of that body before being placed on the ballot. Oops.

This week the state Supreme Court heard the judicial challenges.

But the battle is being waged on more than just legal and legislative grounds. There's also a campaign for hearts and minds and this week the NAACP opened a new front.

Writing for the online edition of The American Prospect, Adam Serwer does a good job of explaining the situation.

“”The NAACP has been walking a tightrope on gay rights. Polls show that African Americans overwhelmingly oppose gay marriage, but much of the high-level leadership of the nation's oldest civil rights organization opposes legal efforts to deny gays the right to marry. Last week, the national office of the NAACP leapt into the fray when it sent a letter to California legislators urging them to support legislation that would repeal Prop. 8.”

Serwer did a good job of explaining the politics behind the NAACP's decision as well as its strategy. The group's leaders seek to vindicate their opposition to Prop 8 as a civil rights issue rather than a religious or moral one. What Serwer didn't probe was the context for homophobia within the African American religious community, and the efforts of younger leaders to change it. The tangled web of sex, race and religion has had deep implications for gender roles, sexuality and notions of respectability and proprietary among African Americans. Understanding the history behind the current story helps explicate how longstanding race relations continue to play out in American politics.

Diane Winston

A new poll from the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies is “the first ever nationally representative study of a randomly selected sample of Muslim Americans.” Random is the key word because the findings—unlike those from surveys that target people with Muslim-sounding surnames or mosque attendees or residents of Muslim neighborhoods—are not overdetermined by ethnicity, demography or institutional affiliation.

The study offers several avenues for investigative and explanatory journalism—especially on gender issues. Among the highlights:

• Muslim American women are among the most highly educated female religious groups in the U.S. second only to Jewish women.
• Muslim American men and women have greater economic parity at the high and low ends of the income spectrum than members of other religious groups.
• Muslim American women are as likely as men to say they attend mosque at least once a week, in contrast with women in some predominantly Muslim countries.

Since the study notes the racial and ethnic diversity of Muslims Americans (who are significantly more diverse than any other religious group), reporters can track how gender equity looks across different Muslim groups: whites, African Americans, Hispanic, Asian and other. This could illuminate the relationship among gender, ethnicity and religion as well as the impact of Americanization on immigrant faiths.

Besides gender issues, the study opens up questions about civic engagement, religiosity and quality of life. Why are Muslim youth the least likely to register to vote? (I'd been under the impression the younger generation was more politically engaged.) How does religion play a key role in believers' lives? (Only Mormons say their faith is more important to them.) And what constitutes “thriving” for Muslim Americans?

No surprise that the lede for some news outlets is that American Muslims have a more positive outlook on their lives than their counterparts in Muslim countries. That's true, but it politicizes the findings in ways that puff up America's self-image. It's actually a both/and story, as Laurie Goodstein writes in the New York Times.

American Muslims may feel more content than their co-religionists in Muslim countries, but domestically—in comparison with Protestants, Catholics, Jews and Mormons, they're not so happy. But that finding reflects ethnic and racial considerations. In other words, African American Muslims suffering from lower standards of income, education and employment are much more discontent than Asian American Muslims, who are doing better than almost all other Americans.

Good religion story? Or maybe an even better one about race.

Diane Winston

In a newly released report,  Amnesty International says “Israel and Hamas used foreign-supplied weapons to attack civilians” during the recent conflict in Gaza.

Israel and Hamas quickly rejected the report's conclusions as unfactual, biased or both.

Amnesty specifically criticized the United States' role in arming Israel with weapons including white phosphorous artillery shells and Hellfire missiles. The human rights organization also called on the United Nations to “impose a comprehensive arms embargo” on both sides.

Released Monday, news of the report was in the Sunday online editions of Jerusalem Post, Guardian and MSNBC among other worldwide news outlets. Many American media groups, however, did not immediately carry stories on the findings.

Here are my questions: 

•    Is the report news and will it make headlines later in the week?
•    Will critics dismiss Amnesty's charges as anti-Israel and thus illegitimate?
•    Will the Obama administration use the report as political cover for a policy change? (Okay, that's  dubious.)

Here are your questions:

•     Should you cover this? (Is it news or propaganda?)   
•     Why cover this? (Imagine the hate email you'll get!)
•     How do you cover this? (What's the smart way to write the story?)

I believe this is an important issue. Whether or not Amnesty is right about the type and quantity of American weapons used by Israel can and should be independently verified. But the larger point is that the American government “has long been the largest arms supplier to Israel” and that is a moral position worth considering. But since questioning American policy on Israel is unpopular with a very vocal slice of the public, it's a consideration that many news outlets would prefer not to plumb.

In my alternative universe, the press is bold, pro-active and willing to speak truth to power. Sadly, news outlets in the real world often lack the resources to investigate controversial claims; are loath to antagonize advertisers and subscribers, and prefer slide shows of stars on the red carpet to photos of maimed children and dead civilians.

Diane Winston

Princess Hijab has been around since 2006, but having just found her I wanted to share. The princess is actually a 21-year old who “hijabizes” advertising that objectifies women. Politicizing Paris' trendy avenues and most fashionable thoroughfares, this anonymous guerilla artist spray paints veils and chadors on scantily clad female forms, as well as posts her own “hijab ads.”

Quoted in Muslimahmediawatch.org, the Princess (or PH, as she prefers) explained, “I would say my work is inspired from the anti-consumerist movements, I'm an advertising hijabist. In other words, I cover all advertising with a black veil, which is a dark symbol, a reference on pop culture, and way to hide elegantly advertising.”

No one knows if she is Muslim or not, but PH's art hit a nerve in France, where debates over the veil—spurred by schoolgirls who wanted to wear them—challenged the nation's cherished notions of secularization.

I couldn't find a lot about PH online, just some recycled descriptions on alternative Muslim blogs. There hasn't been much mainstream coverage of her here and I understand why: American ambivalence about Muslim veils, female bodies and public art make PH a lot more complicated than Banksy. But at a moment when unregulated market capitalism is in free fall and traditional religion seems stronger than ever, why not ponder both their messages about women and the often occluded relationship between the two.

Diane Winston

Valentine's Day on a money diet? Light on oysters, jewelry, and champagne, heavy on cupcakes, chocolates and Prosecco. Since I'll be wearing those valentine pounds for the next few months, I'm taking extra time to chew over stories of lust, love, sex and romance—as well as their fraught intimacy with religion.

No better place to begin than Paul Elie's profile of Rowan Williams, the embattled Archbishop of Canterbury. Many inside and out of the Anglican Communion have been surprised by Williams' seeming diffidence on the subject of sexuality. Rather than press for full inclusion of the GLBT community, as his writings suggested he might, Williams seems to have retreated. Elie's elucidation of Williams' theology of grace explains his positions on both sexuality and the church.

(It's a long quote but it elegantly sums up the debate over homosexuality and illustrates why Williams' perspective is radical.)

“The sources of Christian strictures on homosexuality are many: passages in the book of Genesis and the letters of St. Paul; church traditions and customs; the notion of men and women as sexually complementary; the teachings that the only place for sex is within marriage and that the essential purpose of sex is the begetting of children. Over time, many of these strictures have been eased, if only informally—through readings of the Bible that acknowledge it as a selective, time-bound document, say, or through a view of sex that acknowledges all the good things about it inside procreation. Some thinkers have sought to argue that the prohibitions against homosexuality are theologically unsound. Others have sought to show them as petty compared with Jesus' concern for oppressed people in the Gospels (which have nothing to say about homosexuality). Traditionalists, in response, treat homosexuality as a slippery slope—arguing that any easing of the prohibitions against gay sex will undercut the broader Christian view of sexuality, disfiguring not only the institution of marriage but 'the nature of man . . . created in the image of God,' as Pope Benedict put it in a now-notorious address in December.

“Williams took a different approach, focusing on the concept of grace. From a sex scene in Paul Scott's Raj Quartet, he drew a definition of grace as beautiful and convincing as any I know.
   
       There may be little love, even little generosity, in Clark's bedding of Sarah, but Sarah has discovered that her body can be the cause of happiness to her and another.  It is this discovery which most clearly shows why we might want to talk about grace here. Grace, for the Christian believer, is a transformation that depends in large part on knowing yourself to be seen in a certain way: as significant, as wanted.

“From there, the essay has the inevitability of a proof in philosophy. Gay people, too, deserve to be wanted sexually–deserve the body's grace. The full expression of this grace through sexual relations takes time and the commitment of the partners to come to know each other—through the commitment of marriage or something like it. Sexual fidelity is akin to religious fidelity—'not an avoidance of risk, but the creation of a context in which grace can abound.' For the church to stand in the way of such relationships, straight or gay, is to stand in the way of God's grace.”

Besides illuminating Williams' theology of sexuality (you'll have to read the article for more), Elie describes why Williams' apparent backpedaling is a reasonable course forward. (Elie adds more on the topic here.) Eschewing the breathless sound bites, sports metaphors and demise-of-the-denomination scenarios that have turned the “gay issue” into a long-running soap opera, Elie shows why the Archbishop of Canterbury measures progress differently than Rev. Williams did. All in all, “The Velvet Revolution” is an exemplary piece of writing that manages to educate, delight and inspire. That's all the more impressive since the topic has devolved into sensationalist fodder for most of the press. (For another perspective, see this. The critique and subsequent comments, illuminating a conservative take on the profile, demonstrate how difficult it is to write a story that satisfies a discerning but often partisan readership.)

For those who would persevere in promoting thoughtful coverage, the Pew Forum has posted a helpful resource.  A new survey on religiously mixed relationships can be used to contextualize any number of stories on love and romance in the postmodern era. Why are Hindus the least likely religious group to marry outsiders while Buddhists are the most? Is it a surprise that Jews, evangelicals and historically black Protestants have the same percentage of mixed marriages? (The survey counts a Methodist-Lutheran union as mixed, whereas many Jews might say a Jewish-Christian union takes “mixed” to a wholly different level.) Still the data suggests a wealth of ethnographic articles as well as the nub of a nifty nut graf.
 
Building on Elie's piece and the Pew survey, there may even be a way to intelligently revisit the new evangelical sex-craze stories.  Ever since Rev. Ed Young Jr. sermonized about the beauty of Christian “sexperiment,” reporters have mined this seemingly oxymoronic story. But I haven't seen a serious secular media piece on evangelical theology of the body or similar reflections in other faith traditions. Hmm—that's a series of stories that would go well with a box of See's soft centers.

Diane Winston