'God-o-Meter' Democrats

It wasn't easy being the token evangelical in the Howard Dean office during the 2004 White House race.

Other staffers called Mara Vanderslice the "church lady" and reminded her that the loudest cheers at Dean rallies followed attacks on the Religious Right. But what really stung were her candidate's answers to religious questions.

Round one: Dean confessed that he left the Episcopal Church when his parish blocked the construction of a bike path. Round two: He names the Book of Job as his favorite New Testament book. Round three: Asked about his plans to woo religious believers, Dean said he was waiting until the campaign hit the Deep South.

Ouch. That was business as usual until the "values voters" carried President George W. Bush back into office, said author Dan Gilgoff, who dissected the trials of Vanderslice in "The Jesus Machine," his book on James Dobson and the Christian right. That election shook the Democrats and helped them realize that they needed some candidates who were not afraid of faith.

Meet dyed-in-the-wool United Methodist Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, who openly testifies about making his profession of faith at a United Church of Christ altar. God talk is back, for the Democrats, while key Republicans face unique faith challenges.

"Part of it is the candidates in the field this time," said Gilgoff, politics editor at the Beliefnet.com website. "In particular, with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton you have two people who have been very vocal about their faith and don't mind talking about it. For Democrats, you could say this was just the luck of the draw."

Meanwhile, in the Republican pews, Rudy Giuliani has a troubled Catholic past, Mitt Romney is struggling to answer Mormon questions and various GOP kingmakers – sacred and secular – have questions about Fred Thompson, John McCain and the Rev. Mike Huckabee. The Republicans are trying to preach to a powerful, but troubled, choir.

Everyone knows the stakes are high. Voters who reported attending services more than once a week supported Bush over John Kerry by a margin of 64 to 35 percent and, for those attending once a week, the gap was 58 to 41 percent. Americans who never attended services backed Kerry, 62 to 36 percent.

It's hard for outsiders to follow all of this, which is why Gilgoff and editors at Beliefnet.com and Time have created a digital guide for politicos who want to follow this contest to win the hearts of religious voters. The result is the "God-o-Meter" (blog.beliefnet.com/godometer), which, according to its creators, is pronounced "Gah-DOM-meter." If readers click on the head of a Democratic or Republican candidate, the site delivers his or her ranking on a 10-point scale between "secularist" and "theocrat."

"Our definition of 'secularist' is someone who sees no role for religion in public life and policy," said Gilgoff. "The 'theocratic' position is pretty much the opposite of that."

But there's a theological twist here. The "God-o-Meter" applies this "theocrat" label to liberals who want to see their religious convictions shape public policy (think global warning and health care) to the same degree that it does to conservatives (think abortion and the redefinition of marriage). Thus, at mid-week, theocrat Clinton had a seven rating, the same as Giuliani, and Obama's rating had soared to nine. Romney, meanwhile, was edging close to "secularist" territory, with a five rating.

The key is that the "God-o-Meter" tracks 20 criteria drawn from campaign tactics, such as whether a candidate "frames issues in religious or spiritual terms," "delivers a speech ... in an overtly religious setting" or openly "discusses his/her personal faith and how it would influence his/her presidency." A candidate would lose points, for example, by making "a remark offensive to an important religious constituency" or by declining to "discuss his/her personal faith life when asked, e.g. by a debate moderator."

Right now, words and symbolic actions are enough.

"There is going to be a test later, in terms of whether the Democrats are willing to compromise on any of the hot social issues in terms of actual laws and policy positions," said Gilgoff. "But all of that is a long way down the road. Right now, the Democrats simply have to find a way to start talking to the evangelicals and listening to what they have to say. ... What do they have to lose?"

Young, cosmopolitan evangelicals

WASHINGTON – Jim Wallis and Richard Land were preaching to the same flock, but their sermons at the recent "Values Voters Summit" reached very different conclusions.

"I am an evangelical Christian who tries to live under biblical authority. A fundamental is the dignity of human life. We are all created in the image of God," said Wallis, editor of Sojourners magazine and author of "God's Politics."

But it's time for new strategies, he said. Evangelicals should try to "dramatically reduce the number of abortions in America" through adoption and education, while striving to find "common ground to actually save unborn lives."

The message between the lines: Think about voting for Democrats.

But Land insisted that evangelicals must continue to demand legal protections for the unborn.

"I want to put together a coalition that will work and do what we can to save individual babies one at a time," said Land, leader of the Southern Baptist Convention's Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. "But the fact is, if we didn't have laws against segregation, we would still have it. If we didn't have laws against slavery, we would still have it."

The message between the lines: Stay the course with the GOP.

Both of these preachers knew that evangelical Christians – especially young ones – have yet to embrace a 2008 presidential candidate. That's why Republicans are sweating and Democrats are praying, even in public.

Wallis and Land were arguing for a reason. Young evangelicals are losing faith in the current occupant of the White House, according to new numbers from the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Many would be willing to listen to a Democrat who risked blending progressive politics with traditional moral values. But is that heresy?

Here's the big news. Five years ago, President Bush's approval rating with white evangelicals between the ages of 18 and 30 was 87 percent – a number that has fallen to 45 percent. Meanwhile, 52 percent of older evangelicals continue to back the president.

Back in 2001, 55 percent of the young who called themselves "evangelicals" or "born-again" said they were Republicans, as opposed to 16 percent who were Democrats and 26 percent independents. This time around, it was 40 percent Republican, 19 percent Democrat and 32 percent independent.

"It isn't 100 percent clear why this has occurred," said John C. Green of the University of Akron, a senior fellow at the Pew Forum. "The young evangelicals remain quite conservative on moral and social issues. That just isn't changing or it isn't changing very much. ...

"There is a real sense that they are afraid of being seen as being judgmental, but if you push further you find out that they are still not backing away from traditional Christian beliefs."

On abortion, 70 percent of young evangelicals said it should be "more difficult for a woman to get an abortion" – a stance claimed by 55 percent of older evangelicals and 39 percent of young Americans in general.

Nevertheless, it's possible that subtle changes are happening behind the political headlines, according to sociologist Michael Lindsay, author of "Faith in the Halls of Power." The "populist evangelicalism" of the past is evolving into a "cosmopolitan evangelicalism" that seeks success in Hollywood, on Wall Street and in the Ivy League, as well as on Capitol Hill.

Some of these young evangelicals don't want to hang Thomas Kinkade paintings on their walls, fill their bookshelves with "Left Behind" novels or sing pseudo-romantic praise choruses in sprawling megachurches. And when it comes to politics, they also care about the environment, health care and social justice.

Eventually, these changes will affect their politics. The young evangelicals want to keep their conservative approach to faith, but apply it to a wider spectrum of issues, while using a different style of activism.

"The edges have been softened," said Lindsay, at a forum dissecting the Pew Forum research. Thus, while "populist evangelicals want to take back America" or contribute to the "Christianization of this country, cosmopolitan evangelicals have a more modest goal.

"They simply want their faith to be seen as legitimate, authentic, and – they hope in the end – attractive and winsome. In the same way, they do want their faith to draw others, but they use different forms of mobilization that are far more subtle, more nuanced, and because of that, more significant."

VeggieMovies, take two

NASHVILLE – The idea for the movie began with a vision of three fake pirates falling from the sky into the ocean, transported in a magical rowboat back into the 17th century.

It helps to know that Elliot, Sedgewick and George have, in their previous dramatic lives, been known as Larry the Cucumber, Mr. Lunt and Pa Grape – key characters in the successful VeggieTales products created by Big Idea, Inc. Now they're headed back to theaters in "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything," a feature film distributed by Universal Pictures that is scheduled for release on Jan. 11.

This time around, the vegetables don't quote scripture and their adventure doesn't turn into a funny version of a Bible story. Still, the artist also known as Bob the Tomato stressed that Veggie fans don't have to worry that these pirates have abandoned the faith.

"You can do a story like this one of two ways," said Phil Vischer, who created Big Idea, Inc., and continues to work as a writer and performer for the company.

"You can say, 'Let's start with a Bible story and then we'll figure out where our characters fit into it.' When you do this, you know that you already have a story and some characters and there is a biblical message in there. The challenge is figuring out how to make it VeggieTales story. You have to find the humor."

This is what happened with "Jonah," the first feature-length VeggieTales production, which cost $16 million to make and took in about $25 million at the box office back in 2002. That was a lot of money for an openly Christian movie in the days before "The Passion of the Christ" and "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe."

However, "Jonah" was a high-stakes gamble for Vischer and his Big Idea team, part of a complicated legal and financial train wreck that led to the sale of the company to Classic Media. The VeggieTales franchise – which has sold more than 50 million DVDs and other video products – is now part of the Entertainment Rights, a British company.

The VeggieTales stars have also been a hit on Saturday mornings for NBC, but with some of their more explicit God references trimmed for general consumption. The big question for the Big Idea people is whether softening the religious language in their stories is a plus or a minus, when it comes to reaching a wider audience.

This is not a new question. Vischer noted that the VeggieTales team has been using a second, less explicitly religious, way of telling stories since the very beginning.

If the first approach to telling stories starts with the Bible and then blends in humor, the second begins with a funny story and then tries to blend in some faith. That's what happened in 2003 when Vischer had his rowboat vision and wrote the script for "The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything."

"You can do it either way. This time, we just started out with the slacker pirates and we went from there," he said. "When you go this route, someone always has to ask, 'So what's the lesson here?' I usually have to say, 'I don't know right now, but we'll dig around until we find one.' "

So the new movie's message is biblical, even if it doesn't openly quote the Bible.

Christian parents who take their children to see the film will recognize that it's a parable about God helping the heroes conquer their fears and weaknesses, said Terry Pefanis, the chief operating officer at Big Idea. Many other viewers will think that it's a silly, positive, wholesome story for children – period.

Studio executives know that, to be a mainstream hit, this kind of faith-friendly product has to appeal to both of these audiences. It has to please the people from the pews, while reaching out to as many other viewers as possible.

"There is a Christian market out there," said Pefanis, after a test screening of an unfinished version of the movie last week in Nashville. "Hollywood is starting to realize that, now.

"There are people who want to see good entertainment that has some Christian content. But it has to be good. You can't just put something in a Christian box and expect people to love it. There has to be a real story in there."

Does marriage have a future?

The slogan on the white t-shirts for kids is short and bittersweet.

The simple blue letters declare, "My daddy's name is Donor." You can buy a baby bib with the same proclamation.

For a self-proclaimed "marriage nut" like David Blankenhorn, it's hard to see this consumer product as a positive statement about modern family life.

Of course, America has been evolving for several decades after the cultural revolutions that changed how millions of people live together, break up, get married, get divorced, have children or some combination of all the above.

Thus, the president of the Institute for American Values keeps hearing this big question: "What is the future of marriage?" It's a logical question, since his most recent book is called "The Future of Marriage." There is no easy answer, however, other than stating the fact that elite opinion makers and academics are convinced that old-fashioned, especially religious, traditions about marriage are fading.

"The smart money says, 'Down the tubes,' " said Blankenhorn, speaking recently at Gordon College, an evangelical Protestant campus near Boston. "The big word is 'deinstitutionalization.' ... It's this notion of redefining marriage into just being a kind of Hallmark greeting card that says, 'We're in love, we have a commitment, oh special us.' That's what marriage is."

This trend can be seen in current definitions of "marriage" – legal and otherwise. During his two years of research on the question, he ran into several breezy answers to the question, "What is marriage?"

For some people, it is a "unique expression of a private bond and profound love," while others prefer a ''private arrangement between parties committed to love.'' If that doesn't work, try a ''specific relationship of love and dedication to another person" or even ''committed, interdependent partnerships between consenting adults.''

The highest court in Massachusetts, in its majority opinion in 2003 backing gay marriage, strategically called marriage the "exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other" offering "love and mutual support."

This last variation on the theme is crucial, because debates about the future of marriage are now – like it or not – part of our culture's bitter conflicts about the legal rights of gays, lesbians and bisexuals. Meanwhile, divorce rates remain high and millions of children are being raised in single-parent homes.

Blankenhorn consistently identifies himself as a Christian and as a political liberal who supports what he calls the "equal dignity of homosexual love" and of gay relationships. In an interview with the conservative magazine World, he bluntly said: "I know that many Christians believe that any sex other than sex between married spouses is wrong. I respect that view, but I do not share it."

However, Blankenhorn also argues that all attempts to define marriage as a vague, private, self-defined relationship will inevitably weaken an institution that – across a wide range of cultures and faiths – has emphasized the importance of children being raised by their natural fathers and mothers. Thus, he stressed, marriage has always had a civic and even legal dimension.

Contemporary definitions of "marriage" also strive to avoid two crucial words.

The first, Blankenhorn noted, is "S-E-X. Heat. Lust. Passion. Bodies entangled. Sex, behind closed doors in the bedroom. You know, because in the whole history of the world everybody – up until about three minutes ago – has always acknowledged that marriage is the social recognition of a sexual relationship that involves sex."

The second missing word is "children." Anyone who studies history and anthropology, he said, would quickly conclude that discussing marriage without mentioning children would be like having a "long discussion about General Motors and nobody mentioning cars."

But today, individual adults are convinced that marriage is all about them and that this means that they should be able to make their own rules. Thus, the key question is whether Americans believe that the individual couple is bigger than the institution of marriage or that "the marriage is bigger than the couple," said Blankenhorn.

"We have completely forgotten this idea that maybe there is something transcendent, maybe there is something bigger than us that shapes us," he said. "Maybe the vow shapes us. Maybe we don't simply come up with the vow ourselves and say, 'Here's our marriage – wonderful sexy us.' No, there is something bigger than us that tells us what to be and that big something else is marriage."

God and Al-Jazeera

Siti Fatimah was born a Muslim, but tried to change her name to Revathi Masoosai before marrying a Hindu man.

This created a crisis, since multi-ethnic Malaysia has both civic and Muslim courts. After the birth of the couple's daughter, the Muslim grandparents urged a Sharia court to give them custody of the baby. They won and Revathi was sent to a rehabilitation center for apostate, wayward Muslims.

"I will make her a Muslim child. That's why I took her," said the grandmother. "Her mother has no choice. ... She asked me if I can allow her to convert out of Islam. I said, 'No way, you must remain in the religion. You cannot leave, it's the law here.' "

This kind of human drama makes for gripping television news. At one point, the Hindu husband briefly managed to talk to his wife through a metal gate before being confronted by a guard – on camera.

Welcome to Al-Jazeera English, a news channel that few Americans get to see. It is operated by the controversial global network that former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld called the "mouthpiece of Al-Qaeda."

Al-Jazeera English has struggled to find a U.S. audience because cable-television executives believe Americans are not ready to see world events – many tied to religion – through a Middle Eastern lens. Also, it's easy to question the perspective of a network funded by a billion dollars or more from His Highness Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al-Thani, emir of Qatar.

But Americans need to hear the kinds of voices featured on a network that reports from the developing world back to the west, said Nigel Parsons, a BBC and Associated Press Television News veteran who is managing director of Al-Jazeera English.

"But it's not just about telling the rest of the world what is happening from inside the Middle East out. It's also about telling the rest of the world about America," he said, at a National Press Club forum in Washington, D.C. "America is often accused of not understanding the outside world, ... of being very insular and of not understanding the events that shape its policies."

However, it's possible to turn that equation around, because the rest of the world "actually understands very little about the United States," he said. "We hear about New York, we hear about Hollywood and we hear about things that go on inside the Beltway here in D.C. We don't hear much about that big bit in the middle."

The result is a kind of two-sided blind spot.

On one side, said Parsons, are millions of Al-Jazeera viewers around the world who previously had little or no chance to learn about "what makes America tick," including the diversity of religious and political beliefs found in U.S. churches, synagogues and mosques. On the other side, he is convinced that few Americans have been exposed to the variety of religious and political perspectives found in the many cultures of the Middle East and in the wider Islamic world.

That Al-Jazeera English report on the apostasy charges against Revathi Masoosai, for example, ended with a stark contrast. A "Sisters in Islam" spokeswoman backed the views of legal scholars who insist that Article 11 of Malaysia's constitution protects freedom of conscience and religion. But a conservative Muslim leader stood his ground, insisting that to "be a Malay is to be a Muslim" and that the nation will collapse if believers are free to convert to another faith.

The report ended with that question unresolved, which is the tense reality in Malaysia and many other parts of the Muslim world.

Parsons said it would be wrong to claim that Al-Jazeera English is promoting the spread of some form of "moderate Islam" – a loaded label the network never uses – because what is "moderate" in one Muslim culture would be called "apostasy" in others.

However, the network has pursued a "reformist agenda" that often clashes with state-controlled networks in the Middle East. Parsons proudly noted that Al-Jazeera has been forced, at one time or another, to leave almost every nation in the region – except Israel.

"We are not going to see major changes in that part of the world overnight," he said. "Arguments and debate and dialogue are going to have to come first. We cannot afford to have news and information going in one direction and that's that."