That Christians For Dean www guy

John Paget has no doubt there are conservative Christians in cyberspace who are praying for the salvation of his soul.

This may seem like a strange use of prayer time, seeing as how he is a pro-life, evangelical Christian who is a graduate of Biola University – once the Bible Institute of Los Angeles – and active at the First Baptist Church in Olympia, Wash.

Then again, Paget runs a certain political website.

It's www.ChristiansForDean.info, with this cheery headline: "Good News! Christians don't have to vote Republican anymore!"

Thus, Paget gets mail. Some of it says "hallelujah" or "Thank God somebody is doing this." But many correspondents disagree.

"Lots of people assume I'm a fake, some stooge working for the campaign who is trying to fake Christians into voting for Dean," he said. "Some people think I'm all mixed up. Many others assume that I'm lost and they say they're praying that I will accept Jesus Christ as my Lord and Savior."

Paget laughed and added: "So I feel supported in what I do. I have all these people praying for me."

Other letters urgently question Paget's core belief – that his progressive views on peace, economics, gender and the environment can justify voting for a politician who backs abortion rights and gay rights.

Consider this email from Austin, Texas: "If you are a Christian and plan to vote for Dean, or a Democrat, you need to get on your knees and ask God for guidance because you are on the wrong track, or you do not worship the same God as do most Christians. ... They will eventually lead to the downfall of this nation. Wake up."

Actually, Paget is a documentary filmmaker and he does not work for Dean. He also noted that he is registered as an independent. Nevertheless, he is a statistical rarity. He is a morally conservative churchgoer who feels at home among Democrats. Dean and the other Democrats know they need to find more people like Paget – quick.

It's a matter of numbers. Voter News Service found that 14 percent of 2000 voters attended religious services more than once a week. These voters backed George W. Bush by a 27-percent margin. The 14 percent of the voters who said they never attended went to Al Gore by a 29-percent margin.

These secular voters are especially crucial in major cities on both coasts, noted Louis Bolce and Gerald De Maio of the City University of New York, writing in The Public Interest. But national Democratic candidates know they also need votes in the Bible Belt and heartland.

This "pew gap" is not new. While trends vary among blacks and Hispanics, they noted, the religion gap among white voters in the 1992, 1996 and 2000 presidential elections was "more important than other demographic and social cleavages. ... (It) was much larger than the gender gap and more significant than any combination of differences in education, income, occupation, age, marital status and regional groupings."

Meanwhile, the fastest growing Democratic power bloc is what Bolce and De Maio called the "anti-fundamentalist" voter. In 1996 and 2000, about a third of the total white Democratic presidential vote came from these voters that identified themselves as intensely secular or religious liberals.

As a member of the progressive United Church of Christ, Dean was preaching to these voters when he told a Houston crowd, "We've got to stop voting on guns, gods, gays and school prayer." He also told the Washington Post that his faith played a crucial role in convincing him to sign a Vermont bill legalizing civil unions for gays. "From a religious point of view, if God had thought homosexuality is a sin, he would not have created gay people," he said.

Hear those church doors slamming?

At some point, said Paget, Democratic candidates will have to learn how to reach out to traditional believers, especially those – such as Southern evangelicals and northern Catholics – who once were crucial to their party's fortunes.

"Democrats have to get over their hostility to Christians and realize that we are not all Pat Robertsons and Jerry Falwells," he said. "They have to stop taking pot-shots at us and be willing to invite us into a broader, more diverse Democratic Party."

The passion of old words and symbols

Jesuits rarely receive frantic calls from Hollywood megastars rushing to finish movies that are causing media firestorms.

But Father William Fulco is getting used to it, as Mel Gibson completes his cathartic epic "The Passion of the Christ."

While mixing dialogue the other day, Gibson hit a scene in which a man standing at a door lacked something to say. The director needed a line – right now. Fulco's first question was unique to this project: Was this character supposed to speak Latin or first-century Aramaic?

"Mel said the camera was not on the speaker's face, so we did not need to synchronize what he said with his the movements of his mouth," said Fulco, who translated the screenplay into the two ancient languages, with English subtitles.

"The character needed to say something in Aramaic in the ballpark of, 'What do you want?' So I had him say in rather colloquial early Aramaic, 'MAH? MAH BA'EH?' That is literally, 'What? What wanting?' "

That worked.

It has been nearly two years since Fulco answered the telephone and heard a strange voice blurt out: "Hey Padre! It's Mel!"

Gibson's proposal was unusual, but fit the Jesuit's skills as a professor of ancient Mediterranean studies at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. Fulco began digging into Hebrew texts seeking the roots of the now-dead Aramaic language, while simultaneously exploring dialects such as Syriac spoken today in tiny Christian enclaves in Iran, Syria and Turkey. He also stepped into heated academic debates between those who favor a more Italian-friendly Latin and those who reject this approach.

"I'm getting hate mail about Latin pronunciations," said Fulco. "On guy wrote who was angry about what he called 'these ecclesiastical bastardizations' of the Latin. Not only was he going to boycott the movie, he said he was going to call his high school Latin teacher and tell her to boycott the movie as well. ...

"I have to keep reminding people: This is not a documentary. We had to make artistic choices."

Legions of critics, of course, oppose the film for other reasons. Liberal Catholics and some Jewish leaders claim the script is tainted by anti-Semitism. Meanwhile, Gibson – who has invested $25 million in the project – has previewed early versions to rapt audiences of traditional Catholics, evangelicals and others. The film opens on 2,000 U.S. screens on Feb. 25, which is Ash Wednesday.

It is crucial to realize that the images and language at the heart of "The Passion of the Christ" flow directly out of Gibson's personal dedication to Catholicism in one of its most traditional and mysterious forms – the 16th century Latin Mass.

"I don't go to any other services," the director told the Eternal Word Television Network. "I go to the old Tridentine Rite. That's the way that I first saw it when I was a kid. So I think that that informs one's understanding of how to transcend language. Now, initially, I didn't understand the Latin. ... But I understood the meaning and the message and what they were doing. I understood it very fully and it was very moving and emotional and efficacious, if I may say so."

The goal of the movie is to shake modern audiences by brashly juxtaposing the "sacrifice of the cross with the sacrifice of the altar – which is the same thing," said Gibson. This ancient union of symbols and sounds has never lost its hold on him. There is, he stressed, "a lot of power in these dead languages."

Thus, the seemingly bizarre choice of Latin and Aramaic was actually part of the message. The goal of Gibson's multicultural, multilingual team was to make a statement that transcended any one time, culture and tongue.

"We didn't want another movie with Jesus as some kind of Aryan superman or Jesus as a surfer," said Fulco. "We saw one movie in which Jesus was almost this Michael Jackson kind of character. Try to imagine that. ...

"We didn't want an American Jesus, or a Japanese Jesus or a French Jesus. What we wanted was a language that allowed Jesus to be none of these nationalities, so that he can be all of them at the same time. This is a universal story."

Deja vu Nativity wars

Another Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and Winter Solstice season has come and gone, but the lawyers will be cleaning up for quite a while.

Things got rough on the church-state front. Pick a zip code.

Firefighters in Glenview, Ill., were ordered to take down their station's lights, tree and Santa when neighbors said they were offended.

A pastor in Chandler, Ariz., was grieved when the public library set up a display of readings about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, but not Christmas. Instead of adding Christian books, as the pastor requested, the library staff removed the whole display.

The American Civil Liberties Union intervened in Tallahassee, Fla., when the Jewish Chabad offered to help county commissioners buy a 22-foot menorah for the courthouse yard. Both sides threatened lawsuits, until a shopping center offered to play host.

The conflict is now global. Leaders of the Abbey National Bank in England ordered the Upminster branch to remove an offensive Nativity scene from private property. Down under, the Anglican archbishop of Sidney, Australia, protested new bans on Christmas decorations in businesses and schools.

There were waves of similar cases.

But this drama would not be complete without an election dispute in Palm Beach, Fla., where protestors are trying to unseat council members who nixed a creche on public land, next to a holiday tree and a city-owned menorah. This gets complicated. Officials offered to allow a creche in a city park next to a menorah used in rites by the Orthodox Lubavitch Center. So there could be a Nativity scene next to the "religious" menorah in the park's display area, but no Nativity scene next to the "secular" menorah on a street median.

This week, the council voted to avoid the religious symbolism wars altogether.

"It's a mess," said Richard Thompson, president of the Thomas More Law Center in Ann Arbor, Mich., which is involved in several Christmas cases. "The key ... is that a Christmas tree simply does not equal a menorah, because the courts have said that a Christmas tree has become a secular symbol while a menorah is a religious symbol.

"To put a more neutral spin on it, it's really clear that an evergreen holiday tree with totally secular decorations on it is not a Christian symbol."

Not all creche controversies are created equal. The most problematic involve government-owned and operated decorations on public land. In other cases, authorities may allow diverse collections of private religious decorations on public sites that are zones for free speech. With private groups, on private property, anything goes.

The case law is actually decades old, noted Marci Hamilton, a law professor at Yeshiva University. Nevertheless, many public and private leaders remain confused.

In a recent Pennsylvania case, a school's multicultural committee set up a display with a creche, a menorah and a Kwanzaa scene, she noted, writing for FindLaw's Legal Commentary. Although this display was almost certainly constitutional, a principal panicked and ordered only the creche removed.

The message in the original, diverse display, she noted, was "not one of endorsement for a particular religious viewpoint," but that government was "acknowledging the celebrations of its various citizens. And that is perfectly constitutional."

Meanwhile, there is no legal entitlement for citizens to demand that government acknowledge their particular faith, she noted. Civic leaders should try to offer equal access or do nothing. But if diverse decorations are allowed, then there "no constitutional right not to be exposed to the holidays, either," she noted. Some may be offended.

At times, the whole debate becomes a tornado of lawyers arguing about how many generic angels, non-liturgical stars and strings of secular twinkle lights beleaguered politicos must drape around religious symbols to make them safe for public consumption.

Enough is more than enough, said J. Brent Walker, executive director of the Baptist Joint Committee on Public Affairs in Washington, D.C.

"Why not just put Nativity scenes on the front lawns of every single church in town?", he asked. "Why do people think they need to get the government get involved, which shoves things into a constitutional zone where you have to start counting the number of reindeer and Santas around your Nativity scene so that everybody knows you're trying to be neutral?

"Why don't our churches just get together and handle this?"

Divided by the Creeds?

The words are ancient, yet affirmed by all who join the Episcopal Church.

The bishop asks them: "Do you believe in God the Father?" New members reply: "I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth."

The bishop asks: "Do you believe in Jesus Christ, the Son of God?" They reply: "I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord. He was conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary."

There are more doctrinal questions where those came from. This covenant is based on the Nicene Creed (325 A.D.), which is affirmed at Anglican altars everywhere.

This is good, according to one network of progressive Episcopalians, because the way to avoid a global Anglican schism will be to focus on creeds, rather than trying to agree on what the Bible teaches about sex.

The bottom line, argues the Claiming the Blessing coalition, is that "there is no universal 'plain truth of Scripture' in our tradition, save that interpreted for us by the universal creeds. To claim differently is ... to propose a change in the fundamental nature of Anglicanism."

But what if postmodern believers can't agree on what the ancient creeds teach?

The Claiming the Blessing document is backed by groups such as the Episcopal Women's Caucus and Integrity, the caucus for gay, lesbian and bisexual Episcopalians. It was released after the election of a noncelibate homosexual as bishop of New Hampshire.

While Bishop V. Gene Robinson has continued to dominate news reports, many Anglicans are trying to move on and debate more fundamental issues, said the Rev. Susan Russell, director of Claiming the Blessing and president of Integrity.

"Believe me, I would much rather be having deep conversations about peoples' theological orientations than their sexual orientations," she said. "But anything that is about sex is, well, sexy and that's going to get attention. ... Those issues are so polarizing. What we need to find is some unity."

The Claiming the Blessing document is crucial precisely for this reason, said journalist Douglas LeBlanc, writing in the Episcopal Life newspaper. It has candidly underlined the "clash of worldviews that is ultimately at the foundation of our church's arguments about sex. To the letter's question about whether the Nicene and Apostles' Creeds are our common confession, I must answer: I sure hope so."

But creeds only provide unity if people agree on what the words mean. LeBlanc asked, for example, if Claiming the Blessing's leaders believe the creeds are literally "statements of theological reality?