Old religious realities in a not-so-new Egypt

At the moment, Egypt is operating under a Constitutional Declaration issued soon after the recent military overthrow of President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.

This temporary declaration replaced a constitution signed by Morsi in 2012, after Islamist parties pushed it through a referendum process that turned off many voters. That new constitution replaced an ad hoc, provisional document used after the revolution that toppled President Hosni Mubarak. His regime had operated for nearly 30 years under a 1971 charter.

Yes, it's all quite complicated. What outsiders must grasp is that the fine print in any Egyptian constitution is not what is inspiring the rising tide of bloodshed in local communities that is frightening leaders of the land's religious and ethnic minorities, said Samuel Tadros, author of "Motherland Lost: The Egyptian and Coptic Quest for Modernity."

Leaders of Egypt's Coptic Orthodox Christians, an ancient community that makes up about 10 percent of the population, are not "focusing so much on what is happening at the national level," nor are they "just worried about attacks by radical Jihadists," said Tadros, a research fellow at the Hudson Institute's Center for Religious Freedom. "They are worrying about being attacked by their neighbors, by the people they go to school with, the people they ride the bus with every day. ...

"You can say what you want about religious freedom in this constitution or that constitution. But once this hatred has reached the level of your local neighborhoods it will take generations to bring about some kind of change."

This growing atmosphere of hostility and lack of concern about religious freedom can also been seen in Pew Research Center reports covering surveys done in Egypt in the past three years. The bottom line: Muslims in Egypt have become "considerably less tolerant of religious pluralism" than most Muslim communities in the Middle East and around the world, according to a Pew analysis by Neha Sahgal and Brian Grim.

Restrictions on religion in Egypt in 2011 already included "the use of force against religious groups; failure to prevent religious discrimination; favoritism of Islam over other religions; prohibitions on Muslims converting from Islam to other religions; stigmatization of some religious groups as dangerous sects or cults; and restrictions on religious literature or broadcasting."

In one Pew poll, only 36 percent thought it was very important for Copts and other religious minorities to be able to "freely practice their religions." At the same time, more than 60 percent declined to give high priority to equal rights for women and 62 percent believed Egypt's laws should strictly follow the Koran.

"Egypt is the rare case in which people are actually comfortable with the fact that others are not free to practice their faith," said Sahgal, a senior researcher at the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Many Egyptians even see this low level of religious toleration "as a good thing. ... You don't even see this in a nation like Pakistan, where at least – in theory – people believe others should be able to practice their faith to some degree," she said, in a telephone interview.

It is especially significant that a majority of Egyptian Muslims believe sharia law should govern the lives of all Egyptians, not just Muslim believers. Compared with most other Muslim lands, a much higher percentage of Muslims polled in Egypt want sharia law to control both criminal and public laws, as well as "domestic" laws affecting marriage and family life. Among the vast majority of Egyptian Muslims who support sharia, noted Sahgal, 86 percent favor the death penalty for Muslims who convert to another religion.

None of this is new, stressed Tadros. Coptic believers died in massacres and churches burned in the Mubarak era, as well as in the tumultuous months since Muslims, Christians and secular liberals rallied together in Cairo's most famous public space during the Arab spring rallies that sought real change.

The prevailing attitude nationwide is that "Christians are supposed to pray at home and stop trying to build all those humongous churches with big domes and crosses on top," he said. "Egypt is an Islamic state and Christians should not be doing anything that calls that into dispute. ...

"That's what people believe all across the real Egypt. It's crucial to remember that there is more to Egypt than Cairo and there is more to Cairo than Tahrir Square."

Goodbye to a radical Baptist patriarch

The old Southern preacher had walked through many airport security gates using his cherry-wood cane and was surprised – especially years before 9/11 – when a guard ordered him to send it through the X-ray scanner. After that rite, the Rev. Will Campbell asked the guard to bring him the cane. The guard, somewhat miffed, asked if he could walk through the scanner without it. The preacher, somewhat vexed, said that was a question for his doctor.

Facing a nervous crowd, the guard ordered Campbell to walk through the gate. So the famous civil-rights activist – the only white leader the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. invited to the first Southern Christian Leadership Conference meeting – got down on the floor and crawled through. Then he retrieved his cane.

Campbell admitted, when telling this parable to Baptist progressives in 1994, that he then gave the cane a "sassy little twirl." His wife asked: "Why do you do things like that?"

"Because, I'm a Baptist! I come from a long line of hell-raisers," said Campbell. "I was taught that I wasn't a robot – that I was a human being with a mind, capable of reason, entitled to read any book, including the Bible, and interpret it according to the ability of the mind I was given. That's why I do things like that."

The key, he said, is to ask what happened to all the Baptists who kept clashing with authority figures in the past. Where are the Baptists who were willing to be "tied on ladders and pushed into burning brush heaps because they believed in and practiced freedom of conscience," who "were so opposed to the death penalty they wouldn't serve on juries" and who "would not go to war, any war, for church or state? ... Where are they now?"

Campbell, he died last month at the age of 88, was a complex activist and writer who made lots of people mad for lots of reasons. Raised in rural Mississippi, he thrived at Yale Divinity School and failed as a small-town pastor. He accompanied the Freedom Riders in 1961 and marched in Birmingham in 1963. He tried to avoid reporters, but was tight with country-music rebels like Johnny Cash and Waylon Jennings. He opposed both abortion and the death penalty and, late in life, backed gay rights.

The self-proclaimed "bootleg Baptist" spent his life preaching forgiveness and reconciliation, yet also called religious conservatives "ecclesiastical highwaymen" who were "espousing a course that is a rollercoaster to a fascist theocracy." Pushed to summarize his theology he stated: "We're all bastards, but God loves us anyway."

"Will was fond of saying that if you are going to love one then you have to love everyone. ... This meant rednecks as well as radicals," wrote the Rev. Timothy George, for the conservative "First Things" journal. He is the dean of Beeson Divinity School in Birmingham, Ala., and a former member of Campbell's Committee of Southern Churchmen.

Campbell "infuriated many," George added, "when he befriended members of the Ku Klux Klan and even visited James Earl Ray in prison. Campbell wrote: 'I have seen and known the resentment of the racist, his hostility, his frustration, his need for someone upon whom to lay blame and to punish. With the same love that we are commanded to shower upon the innocent victim, the church must love the racist.'

"The fact is Will Campbell was simply sui generis. He cannot be comfortably squeezed into anyone's box."

In the end, the only box Campbell accepted was a Baptist box that fit his own iconoclastic specifications – rejecting all creeds, traditions and hierarchies.

"Institutions, by their very definition, are evil," he said, in that 1994 address. "Their raison-d'etre is always and inevitably self-survival. They, all of them, when they are threatened will go to any length, tell any lie, engage in any program to protect themselves. And justify it as being in defense of Almighty God."

For Baptists to be true Baptists, he said, it's crucial for them to teach that Jesus never "demanded of the people who wanted to follow him that they must first know this or that, this creed, or that catechism, the nature of the Trinity or the plan of salvation, or subscribe to an Abstract of Principles to the satisfaction of the Sanhedrin. He had not insisted on any systematic belief whatsoever."

Rather faith-free WPost story about ministry to the hungry

As happens about this time every summer, tmatt headed to the Southern Highlands to take a week off. Thus, there was no new Scripps Howard column. There was, however, this post from GetReligion.org that I think will interest the readers of my weekly column. Enjoy. For the past two decades, I have spent quite a bit of time driving the back roads of the Southern Highlands, which is one of the many names that locals use to describe the Appalachian Mountains of East Tennessee and Western North Carolina.

One of my very favorite East Tennessee roads runs from the back of Johnson City — where my family lived during our Milligan College years — down the Nolichucky River into the back side of Greeneville. The mountains there are high, lonesome and as beautiful as any in the region. They are almost completely free of development, especially when it comes to tourists.

But as any local knows, there are mountain people up in there and their lives are very hard. The word “Appalachian” has many meanings and extreme poverty is part of the picture.

The Washington Post ran a fine, but haunted, news feature the other day about a rolling food-bank project to fight hunger among the shattered families along those mountain roads above the Nolichucky. Please read it all, because it’s well worth the time.

If you look carefully at the photo that ran with the piece, you learn that this particular anti-hunger project has a name, a name that is not mentioned in the article for some reason. However, readers do find out quite a bit about the bus driver and the people he feeds.

The driver’s name was Rick Bible, and his 66-mile route through the hills of Greene County marked the government’s latest attempt to solve a rise in childhood hunger that had been worsening for seven consecutive years.

Congress had tried to address it mostly by spending a record $15 billion each year to feed 21 million low-income children in their schools, but that left out the summer, so the U.S. Department of Agriculture agreed to spend $400 million more on that. Governors came together to form a task force. Michelle Obama suggested items for a menu. Food banks opened thousands of summer cafes, and still only about 15 percent of eligible children received regular summer meals.

So, earlier this year, a food bank in Tennessee came up with a plan to reverse the model. Instead of relying on children to find their own transportation to summer meal sites, it would bring food to children. The food bank bought four used school buses for $4,000 each and designed routes that snake through some of the most destitute land in the country, where poverty rates have almost doubled since 2009 and two-thirds of children qualify for free meals.

Good stuff.

However, as a former resident of the region, my religion-ghost alarm went off immediately when I saw — in that photo, not in the story text — that the name of the food bank was Second Harvest. As it turns out, this charity is linked to Greeneville Community Ministries.

The obvious question: Is this a purely government project or, as one would expect deep in the Bible Belt hills, is this worthwhile and remarkable effort just as much a ministry among the volunteers and donors as it is a tax-funded project? It could, of course, be both. If so, that’s a very interesting angle to include in the story.

As it is, the story is poignant, moving and essential reading — yet strangely faith-free if you know anything about that part of Tennessee. Why write the story without including the religion angle?

For the full text, click here.

John Paul II and the death of 'Christian' America

It was just another day, another Washington, D.C., press conference and yet another appeal for the U.S. government to allow believers to follow the doctrines of their faith, as opposed to a Health and Human Services mandate. "The United States, at its best, is unique among the nations of the world when it defends the self-evident freedom of all people to exercise their faith according to the dictates of their consciences," said the "Standing Together for Religious Freedom" text. It was signed by 58 faith leaders, mostly from conservative bodies such as the Catholic Church, the Southern Baptist Convention, the National Association of Evangelicals and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

"Many of the signatories on this letter do not hold doctrinal objections to the use of contraception. Yet we stand united in protest to this mandate, recognizing the encroachment on the conscience of our fellow citizens. ... HHS continues to deny many Americans the freedom to manifest their beliefs through practice and observance in their daily lives."

This was just another sign of the times, along with a Texas filibuster opposing a late-term abortion ban and the U.S. Supreme Court's approval for a state-by-state legal approach to same-sex marriage.

None of this would have surprised the Blessed Pope John Paul II, according to one of America's most controversial Catholic priests. In one of his most sweeping encyclicals, John Paul foresaw a "conspiracy against life" that would threaten the suffering, the elderly and children, born and unborn.

That 1995 document was called "Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life)," and the Rev. C.J. McCloskey of the Faith and Reason Institute was recently asked to write a meditation on it during a Vatican celebration of its lasting influence.

"I was asked to write an article that would help cheer people up. Sorry, but I just couldn't do that right now," said McCloskey, in a telephone interview from Chicago.

In particular, the Opus Dei priest was struck by this sobering John Paul declaration: "The eclipse of the sense of God and of man inevitably leads to a practical materialism, which breeds individualism, utilitarianism and hedonism. ... The only goal which counts is the pursuit of one's own material well-being. The so-called 'quality of life' is interpreted primarily or exclusively as economic efficiency, inordinate consumerism, physical beauty and pleasure, to the neglect of the more profound dimensions – interpersonal, spiritual and religious – of existence." The human body, thus, is "simply a complex of organs, functions and energies to be used according to the sole criteria of pleasure and efficiency."

While this judgment will offend most liberals and some political conservatives, those words led McCloskey to write this blunt verdict: "Face it folks, the United States is no longer a Christian country.

"We already have the most liberal abortion laws in the world, responsible (at a minimum) for tens of millions of deaths, with the morning-after pill now available at your local pharmacy for teen-age girls. ... Pornography is the most profitable and watched form of 'entertainment.' Marriage is being redefined not as a covenant between man and wife, with one of its purposes being the procreation of children, but as more or less whatever one wants it to be. ... And who can disingenuously doubt that universal euthanasia for the incurable will become common with the help of our new 'health' plan?"

McCloskey knows these harsh judgments anger elites in places like Wall Street and inside the D.C. Beltway, since he worked at Citibank and Merrill Lynch after graduating from Columbia University and later led the Catholic Information Center on K. Street, near the White House. Yet over the years he has led many prominent Americans into Catholicism including columnist Robert Novak, abortion-rights pioneer Dr. Bernard Nathanson, Judge Robert Bork, U.S. Sen. Sam Brownback and economist Lawrence Kudlow.

Truth is, he noted, parts of America are more open to some forms of faith than others. Thus, McCloskey is convinced traditionalists will eventually need to cluster in states that are more faith-friendly on abortion, marriage, parental rights, home schooling and other hot-button cultural issues.

"No one in this country has ever really suffered for their faith in any meaningful way," he said. "Those days are ending, especially in certain states. ... Among Catholics, we may soon find that many are Americans more than they are Catholics."

Boy Scouts, canon law and trying to predict the future

Every since the gay Boy Scouts earthquake, many Catholics have been asking canon law expert Edward Peters to fill a role he has clearly stated he has no desire to play – that of a prophet. "I'm no good at predicting the future. My only concern is with the BSA policy as written," said Peters, reached by email during a busy week. "That policy does not conflict with the church's teachings on homosexuality or homosexual persons."

Right now, it's logical for parish leaders and Catholic parents to be asking two questions, in the tense aftermath of the recent Boy Scouts of America declaration: "No youth may be denied membership in the Boy Scouts of America on the basis of sexual orientation or preference alone."

Question No. 1: Should Catholic organizations continue to sponsor Boy Scout troops? Question No. 2: May Catholic groups or parents cut their ties to the Boy Scouts?

However, the nervous partisans in these debates keep asking Peters variations on questions that boil down to this: "What it?"

For example, "What if gay-rights groups sue troop sponsors seeking the acceptance of gays and lesbians as Boy Scout leaders?" Or there is this one: "What if openly gay Scouts want to date each other?"

How Catholics respond will be crucial, since Catholic organizations sponsor more than 8,000 Boy Scout troops or packs. Other religious organizations will also pay close attention to these debates, since Catholic teachings on related topics are so specific.

Peter's views have been circulated widely, after he posted detailed essays on his "In the Light of the Law" website. He teaches canon law at Sacred Heart Major Seminary in the Archdiocese of Detroit.

For Catholics, he wrote, the key is not to be pulled into speculation, but to seek a logical and compassionate application of all church teachings linked to homosexuality.

"First, the Church's absolute rejection of homosexual acts and her description of same-sex attraction as objectively 'disordered' ... is not subject to question among Catholics. Second, the Church calls on persons who experience same-sex attraction 'to fulfill God's will in their lives' ... and to practice chastity," he noted. As for all unmarried persons, this means, "complete continence."

Catholic teachings, he added, also warn society to avoid "every sign of unjust discrimination" against those who experience same-sex attraction.

The line between orientation and behavior is crucial, due to a clarification issued by the Boy Scouts: "Any sexual conduct, whether homosexual or heterosexual, by youth of Scouting age is contrary to the virtues of Scouting."

This firm statement, Peters argued online, "seems wholly in-line with sound Catholic teaching against sexual activity outside of marriage and stands in welcome contrast to the indifference toward premarital sex shown by some other youth organizations. ... Aside from youth programs expressly oriented toward chastity, I know of no other secular organization that so clearly declares all sexual conduct by its youth members to be contrary to its values as does the Boy Scouts."

At this point, Peters thinks it would be premature to reject the Boy Scouts, although it would not be wrong for cautious Catholics to cut those ties.

Meanwhile, another key player in ecumenical discussions of this issue – the new leader of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission – is concerned that the Boy Scouts have adopted "highly politicized" language that defines personal identity in terms of sexual orientation. This could affect how the Boy Scouts approach marriage and family.

"Churches have the ability to distinguish between penitents and seekers, and to articulate concepts of sin, etc.," said the Rev. Russell Moore, via email, while drawing these kinds of moral lines is a challenge for the Scouts. This new homosexuality policy may mean the "Scouts will have little ability to speak of, as normative, sexuality expressed only in terms of conjugal marriage and family."

Once again, said Peters, it's hard to predict what will happen as this policy is implemented, attacked and defended. However, Catholics must clearly communicate to Scouting leaders that the church cannot accept mixed signals about marriage.

"Again, I'm not good at guessing which way things will play out," he said. "But the principles for a Catholic approach here are pretty clear. Persons of the same sex cannot marry, so conduct implying that they can marry is either forbidden outright or is at least strongly discouraged on the grounds of prudence."