Elvis, a prodigal son?

As the woman reached the stage, the musicians behind Elvis Presley could see that she was carrying a crown on a plush pillow.

"It's for you," she said. "You're the king."

Gospel superstar J.D. Sumner recalled that Presley took her hand that night in Las Vegas and replied: "No, honey, I'm not the king. Christ is the king. I'm just a singer."

Anyone digging through the mud of Presley's sad decline can find many signs that he was crying out to God as well as wrestling with his demons. Like many Southern sinners, Elvis did more than his share of Sunday morning weeping while trying to shake off the shame of Saturday night.

So was Elvis a backsliding believer or a hypocritical satyr? A quarter century after his death, it's amazing that Presley can still get people all shook up in churches as well as casinos.

"To judge from some media coverage, you'd think Presley was a saint – a role model to emulate," said evangelical activist Charles Colson, in a recent radio commentary. In their stories about Graceland pilgrims flocking to Memphis, what the journalists "neglected to mention was that, even though Elvis took much of his style from gospel sources, his primary message was the antithesis of biblical standards."

Colson noted that one ABC News clip showed "Elvis singing, 'To spend one night with you is what I pray for.' Wow! Did he really think God answered prayers to expedite one-night stands?"

The final verdict: "Elvis is an object lesson in the wages of sin."

No one would deny that Presley started a cultural earthquake, said Christian radio veteran Dave Fisher, who wrote Colson's BreakPoint.org radio script. The crucial issue is whether "his impact on our culture was uplifting or degrading."

Yes, Presley honored his mother by singing "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" on the Ed Sullivan Show. But he also helped inspire a cultural and sexual revolution, said Fisher. "Just analyze the lyrics of the songs. ... Many were quite sexual. He wasn't using the four-letter words that a lot of singers and bands today would use. But they were still suggestive. He opened the door for what was to come."

What about that gospel side of Presley? It's true that he wandered in the wilderness of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, said Steve Beard, creator of Thunderstruck.org, a website on faith and popular culture. It's also true that Elvis was an "eccentric religious seeker on turbodrive," soaking up Hinduism, numerology, transcendental meditation, Buddhism, Theosophy and whatever else caught fire in the 1960s.

But as his health failed, Presley's long-time confidant Rick Stanley – who later became a Baptist evangelist – remembers the singer saying Christian prayers of repentance. Only hours before his death, Stanley said he heard Elvis pray: "Dear Lord, please show me a way. I'm tired and confused and I need your help."

No picture of Elvis is complete without faith, as well as failure. He was not the first or the last devout country boy to stray in the big city.

"If Elvis was a prodigal son, then it seems that he died on the way back to his Father's house," said Beard. "That's tragic. That's a tragic story and it's a story that ought to inspire compassion, not condemnation. ... We all need to be reminded that mercy and grace are still Christian virtues."

If there is a cautionary tale here, it is another reminder that believers should be careful when dealing with heroes, said scholar Gene Edward Veith, co-author of "Honky-Tonk Gospel: The Story of Sin and Salvation in Country Music." The lives of celebrities are often full of mixed blessings.

The boy who made his profession of faith in a Baptist church in Tupelo, Miss., struggled to hold on to that faith for the rest of his life. The Elvis story is packed with pain, piety, sin, struggle, glory, guilt and repentance.

"Very few artistic people make good role models," said Veith. "That isn't what artists are about. The conflicts that make them great in the first place are the very same conflicts that would make them bad role models. ... It's the paradoxes we see in Elvis that made him the great artist that he was."

Missionary cohabitating, Part II

From the pulpit, the typical pastor can see all kinds of people whose ears will burn during a sermon about what used to be called "living in sin."

There will be a few young adults who are cohabitating, as well as many moms and dads whose children quietly share street addresses with their significant others. There will be smiling couples the pastor married without asking many personal questions. There may be one or two divorced deacons with skeletons in their closets.

Few ministers have the courage to risk offending these people, said Scott Stanley of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver. Pastors are afraid that if they preach on cohabitation many people will get mad and that some will hit the exits.

"Pastors are getting very gun shy when it comes to issues of marriage, family and sex," he said. "Certainly, cohabitation would be right at the top of a list of these issues, along with premarital sex. They are so tired of getting beat up because they have hurt people's feelings.

"So they just give up and what you hear is silence from the church. All people are hearing are the 'Go!' signals from the media and the culture."

This silence seems to be having an effect, especially with women, according to a study by Stanley and his colleagues Sarah Whitton and Howard Markman.

The researchers found – as expected – that deeply religious men are much less likely to cohabitate before saying their vows. But, to their surprise, they learned that religious women are just as likely to move in before marriage as non-religious women.

These religious women probably think they are being cautious and "testing" their relationships. They may be convinced that they have to cohabitate in order to compete for love in this day and age. Some may believe that they will eventually be able to convert their live-in lovers to a traditional view of faith, marriage and family.

"Truth is, a woman gains nothing" by cohabitating before marriage, said journalist Michael McManus, author of "Marriage Savers: Helping Your Friends and Family Stay Married." Whatever their rationalizations, these women "are just being fools. ... Too many women today are allowing themselves to be used as playmates," he said.

Some church leaders, said McManus, have fallen silent on this issue because they no longer believe that sex outside of marriage is sin. Their silence is understandable. It is harder to understand the silence in so many congregations – Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox – that still affirm centuries of Judeo-Christian teachings on sexual morality.

Yet that silence is real. The "Marriage Savers" network (www.marriagesavers.org) is active in 163 cities and towns in 39 states and, wherever he travels to speak, McManus said he never sees more than one or two hands raised when he asks, "How many of you have ever heard a sermon on cohabitation?"

McManus is convinced most pastors simply do not know that 5 million unmarried Americans are living together. More than 60 percent of couples cohabitate before marriage. Pastors do not know that these women face higher levels of depression and lower levels of communication and commitment. They are more than 60 percent more likely to be assaulted and their children are endangered, as well.

Data from the University of Wisconsin provides a painful bottom line: couples that cohabit before marriage increase their odds of divorce by 50 percent. Researchers found that only 15 out of every 100 cohabitating couples were married after a decade.

The goal is not to attack couples with these numbers, said McManus. The goal is to warn them and to offer them mentors, in the form of married couples who understand the challenges that are ahead. The church needs to reach out to young people while they are dating, before the pressures built to live together. Parents need this information, too.

"We need to set a high standard, but we can do that in a loving way," he said. "What the church has done is collapse its standards. The modern church is – by its silence – giving young couples nothing to aspire to. They need a higher goal."

Missionary cohabitating, Part I

Church people have a name for what happens when young believers get romantically involved with unbelievers.

They call it "missionary dating," usually with one eyebrow raised in skepticism. Most of these relationships involve a good girl who is convinced that, with time, she can help a bad boy see the error of his ways and learn to walk the straight and narrow path.

Times have changed. According to new research, a surprising number of females have graduated from "missionary dating" to "missionary cohabitating."

"My theory is that women are willing to make sacrifices for their partners, once they have become emotionally attached," said researcher Scott Stanley, co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver. "They're willing to make compromises to try to hang on to the relationship. Men won't do that. ...

"These girls are probably thinking, 'He's not perfect. But I love him and I can help him change.' Meanwhile, we know what the guys are thinking. They're thinking, 'I'm not sure she is the one I want. She's not my soul mate. But she'll do for now.' "

What is fascinating is that women who say they are deeply religious are just as likely to live with men before marriage as women who are not, wrote Stanley, Sarah Whitton and Howard Markman. Their work is summarized in "Maybe I Do: Interpersonal Commitment and Premarital or Non-Marital Cohabitation," written for the Journal of Family Issues.

Meanwhile, they found that men with strong religious beliefs are much less likely to cohabitate before marriage than non-religious men.

As a rule, people who lived together before marriage were less religious than those who refused to do so. Religious believers also said they were more committed to the institution of marriage. This is precisely what Stanley and the members of the University of Denver team expected to find as they interviewed 908 people who were married, engaged or cohabitating.

What surprised them was the sharp contrast between the choices made by religious women and religious men.

Do the math. There are currently more than 5 million unmarried American couples living together. Somewhere, there are a lot of religious women who have taken "missionary dating" to a whole new level. They seem to think that they can evangelize the men in their beds.

Meanwhile, Stanley and his colleagues are convinced that women who want solid, "until death do us part" marriages should be on the lookout for men who have strong religious beliefs, who are deeply committed to the institution of marriage and who, as a matter of conviction, reject cohabitation.

That may sound obvious, but it was in the data. If religious women want the odds on their side, they have to hunt for men who are willing to rebel against the conventional wisdom of this age.

"Given that 60 percent or more of couples now live together prior to marriage," wrote Stanley, Whitton and Markman, it seems that "not living together prior to marriage is becoming unconventional. From such a viewpoint, the unconventional couples who do not live together prior to marriage may be the couples with the more dedicated and religious males."

These unique religious males appear to be trying to "preserve the maximum differentiation between marriage and non-marriage. ... In the context of societal trends that increasingly blur the lines between cohabitation and marriage, this stance would represent the new unconventionality."

Stanley said that his team's research parallels other studies on one key point. Millions of young Americans are terrified of divorce and, thus, want to be careful before tying the knot. Young men seem to grasp that marriage does require major sacrifices, sacrifices that many are not willing to make.

Thus, they use cohabitation as a stalling device.

"Young men and women have accepted the message from their culture – a message that is not supported by the data – that cohabitation is a good way to prepare for marriage," he said. "They believe that they are in training for marriage. They are in training, but it seems that cohabitating is training them to develop exit strategies for getting out of relationships, including their marriages."

Topless culture wars in Idaho

Strange things happen when it gets hot in Moscow, Idaho.

In the summer of 1998, three women stayed cool by going topless on a major street. They were arrested, but a judge ruled that the local indecent exposure ordinance was too vague. The issue stayed on a low boil.

"That was a mini-tempest in a tea cup that just set the stage," said the Rev. Douglas Wilson of Christ Church, a conservative Presbyterian congregation in a town dominated by the University of Idaho. "What we're having right now is a lot bigger and more interesting than another debate about topless women."

The topless issue is back, but that's not the real story. While the Moscow City Council has attempted to map the topography of the female breast – imagine lawyers defining "cleavage" – many citizens are plunging into the philosophical issues at the heart of the topless culture wars.

Facing off in an Internet forum called Moscow Vision 2020, activists on both sides are letting it all hang out. This isn't just a debate about topless women, it's about burkas, bikinis, breastfeeding, marriage, rape, feminism, Nazis, the Vatican, slavery, hate crimes, Darwinism, property rights, postmodernism, birth control, media bias, free speech, sexual harassment, home schooling, gay rights, abortion, spirituality, heaven, hell, fundamentalism, Hollywood, parenting and, of course, the pledge of allegiance.

That's all.

The latest battle of the breasts began when 22-year-old Daisy Mace and her two roommates lost their jobs and fell behind on their June rent.

To the joy of newspaper headline writers everywhere, the young women decided to start a topless car wash, operating at different sites each day in neighborhoods and public parking lots. Soon, Moscovites were "steamed up" and their council was "in a lather" – resulting in an ordinance banning females from going topless in the city.

Liberals and libertarians started talking about the Taliban.

Obviously, if religious conservatives were strongly opposed to topless car washing, then the right to wash cars while topless must be a vital civil liberty. And what would the Religious Right do next? Take over the town?

As the leader of a growing evangelical flock, Wilson threw down a gauntlet in the Vision 2020 forum. The left can be as fundamentalist and judgmental as the right, he said. The ultimate question was whether it was possible to say that some behaviors are socially acceptable and some are not.

Both sides want to shape the laws. Were there no moral absolutes to guide them?

"By what standard do you judge anything? We have a standard and everyone knows what it is – Genesis through Revelation," argued Wilson. "You make quite as many value judgments as we do, even if it is only about us, but when pressed for details on when and how your Moses came down off your Sinai, everything goes blurry."

Everyone believes something is true, he said. Everyone has a worldview that guides his or her actions.

The implication was clear, responded Joan "Auntie Establishment" Opyr, in a chorus of outraged voices on the left. Wilson was claiming to speak for God, while the "rest of us have to make do with secular humanism, MTV and old bits of string and paperclips." But she noted that Christian denominations and sects often disagree over how to interpret their own scriptures.

So, wrote Opyr, "By what standard do we judge? By our own lights. ... No doubt you believe that you take your orders directly from on high. Oddly enough, that's where I get my orders, too, but I get them via The Tanakh, not the Christian bible. Others get theirs from the Koran, from the Tao Ti Ching, from the Upanishads, from the Rig Veda, or from time spent meditating in Joshua Tree State Park."

For Wilson and many others, it was simply impossible to say that all standards are equally valid. There would be no easy peace.

"When two contradictory claims of absolute truth collide, both can be wrong, but both cannot be right," he replied. "My complaint is that however much they complain about the threat of conservative Christianity, relativists are far more afraid of their own position than they are of ours. This is because if relativism is the case, then anything goes, including the worst forms of absolutism."