Peace Messenger

Adventists at Envision 08

Adventist peace activists and bloggers Ryan Bell and Johnny Ramirez have both recently posted information about Envision 08, a major conference on Christian engagement in the public square, June 8-10 in Princeton, New Jersey.  The conference promises to bring together sixty leading scholars, artists, activists and pastors and offers twenty "learning tracks." One of these, "Religious Pluralism and Christian Faith," will be co-lead by Samir Selmanovic of Faith House Manhattan and the renowned Miroslav Volf of Yale Divinity School. (Johnny's post also includes video of a lecture by Volf on 'How Do You "Un-Do' the Culture of War?")

Shane Claiborne, Brian McLaren, John Perkins, Ron Sider, Jim Wallis and many, many more noteworthies will be among the speakers and learning track leaders.  This should be an exceptionally enriching experience for those dedicated to following Christ in the public square.

A New Way to "Proclaim Jubilee"

Brian Swarts, an Adventist activist for justice and peace, and currently national field organizer for Jubilee USA, calls for action on the Jubilee Act at the God's Politics blog.  The proposed legislation recently won support of the House Financial Services Committee and is now before the full House of Representatives.

This week Congress will vote on the Jubilee Act, the most important debt legislation since 2000. I was an undergraduate theology student when the Jubilee 2000 movement made headlines, and it transformed the way I saw my faith. In short, I discovered the prophetic power of faith to transform injustice and what it looks like to see the Word made flesh....

The Jubilee Act will expand access to debt cancellation to all the countries that need it to fight extreme poverty. Without debt cancellation, it will be nearly impossible for many countries to achieve the U.N. Millennium Development Goals to cut extreme poverty in half by 2015.

Read Brian's full piece at the God's Politics blog.

Free the Church From Political Captivity!

In a USA Today column, David P. Gushee issues a "plea to evangelicals" to "rethink our engagement with politics." Gushee believes American evangelicals have gotten both the "how" and the "what" wrong in relating faith to politics, gaining influence at the expense of the church's identity and mission.

The "how" problem, among other things, is that [conservative evangelicals] are married to the Republican Party and have therefore compromised the political independence of Christianity and the church...

Once any group of Christians gives itself away so completely to a political party, it ceases to be the church. The church becomes a branch office of the group's political party of choice ...

The "what" problem is more subtle but just as important. Conservative evangelicals generally offer an unbiblically narrow policy agenda focused on just a few moral issues such as abortion and gay marriage instead of tackling the full range of biblical concerns, which include poverty, oppression and war. And when they do engage some of these other issues, such as the foreign policy of our nation, they are (ironically) not Christian enough. Their faith doesn't inform their vote in a way that makes sense biblically. They are getting their values from somewhere else — not from Jesus ...

... [T]he mission of the church is to be Christ's faithful people, and to do its core work of preaching, teaching and serving our neighbors. If it is true (as we boldly believe) that the church is the central location for the work God is doing to redeem the world, then our focus should be on the church's work, not the state's. As one aspect of our God-inspired love for our neighbor, we can ask the state and its leaders to do justice, protect life and advance the common good. We can do this in many quite constructive ways, from scholarly work to declarations of principles to activism on specific issues.

But we dare not identify the work of any state, any political party or any politician with the work of God or the task of the church.

Gushee is a professor of Christian Ethics and Mercer University in Georgia, and president of Evangelicals for Human Rights. His new book, The Future of Faith in American Politics, is scheduled for release this week. With Glen Stassen, he co-authored Kingdom Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context.

The Tragedy of the U.S. Foreign Policy Consensus

In "The Case for Restraint" (The American Interest, November-December 2007) Barry Posen of MIT points out the costs of the "grand activist strategy" that the U.S. has pursued since the end of the Cold War. He proposes instead a "grand strategy of restraint" -- the U.S. can become more secure by doing less.

The activist U.S. grand strategy currently preferred by the national security establishment in both parties thus has a classically tragic quality about it. Enabled by its great power, and fearful of the negative energies and possibilities engendered by globalization, the United States has tried to get its arms around the problem: It has essentially sought more control. But the very act of seeking more control injects negative energy into global politics as quickly as it finds enemies to vanquish. It prompts states to balance against U.S. power however they can, and it prompts peoples to imagine that the United States is the source of all their troubles.

Iraq should therefore be seen not as a singular debacle, but as a harbinger of costs to come. There is enough capacity and motivation out in the world to increase significantly the costs of any U.S. effort to manage global politics directly. Public support for this policy may wane before profligacy so diminishes U.S. power that it becomes unsustainable. But it would be unwise to count on it.

If more activism has not produced better policy, what is to be done? The United States should try doing less: It should pursue a grand strategy of restraint. Less is not nothing, however, meaning in essence that the United States should conceive ways to shape rather than to control international politics...

Not surprisingly, Posen's article has stirred controversy amongst the foreign policy intelligentsia. In a feature on Posen in the January 2008 issue of The American Diplomat, John Shaw summarizes what the "grand stratey of restrain" entails:

... Posen believes the United States should undertake positive projects in the developing world such as the humanitarian aid it provided to Southeast Asia after the tsunami of December 2004. And although the United States should participate in some humanitarian interventions, he said these missions should have reasonable guidelines, be in alliance with international coalitions, and operate under a legitimate mandate.

Posen also advised that the United States reduce its presence within “the abode of Islam” by abandoning permanent or semi-permanent land bases in Arab countries and lowering the profile of its military and security cooperation with Arab states. In addition, the United States should focus less on the export of democracy and more on promoting the rule of law, press freedom, and the rights of collective bargaining.

Photo above: Anti-WTO protestors in the Philippines, 2003; Associated Press.

Foreign Policy in Focus Zeroes in on Religion

Foreign Policy in Focus -- a "think tank without walls" -- is making the role of religion in global affairs a theme of emphasis this Fall. Its web site makes available a series of articles that combine the virtues of scholarly expertise, thorough documentation and brevity:

Jon Basil Utley reports on a powerful subset of the Religious Right. Their message: the end is near. Their influence on U.S. foreign policy: considerable.

Religious faith and institutions can be positive factors in peacebuilding, writes Bridget Moix. But there are also many potential pitfalls.

Heather Wokusch describes how the Vatican and Washington have butted heads on several global issues, and how these conflicts are only multiplying.

Ira Chernus writes that Americans crave a foreign policy based on moral conviction. Neoconservatives have offered one version. The left must provide a different one.

Stephen Zunes reports on a meeting with Iranian president Ahmadinejad, whose inflammatory and religiously charged rhetoric has obscured the fact that Iran poses little threat to the United States.

The full text of these and more are available through the "Religion and Foreign Policy" section of the FPIF web site.

FPIF connects the research and action of more than 600 scholars, advocates and activists who believe that U.S. security and world stability are best advanced through a commitment to peace, justice and environmental protection as well as economic, political, and social rights. It is a project of the Institute for Policy Studies.

Launching Pentecostals into Politics

Aimee Semple McPherson and the Resurrection of Christian America
by Matthew Avery Sutton
Harvard University Press / 2007

Sutton suggests that the most pertinent legacy of the flamboyant Pentecostal revivalist and founder of the International Church of the Foursquare Gospel may stem from her involvement with conservative Christian politics late in her career.

Reviewer Caleb Crain ("Miracle Woman," New York Review of Books, 19 July 2007, 56-58) writes:

Early Pentecostals had thought earthly politics a waste of time in light of the Second Coming. But McPherson convinced her followers "that their citizenship in heaven did not nullify their citizenship on earth," Sutton writes. As early as 1926, she fought to bring the Bible into public

schools and take evolution out of them. In 1934, she helped to quash Upton Sinclair's campaign for governor by throwing a pageant celebrating America's Christian heritage on the Friday before Election Day. Sinclair had been running on an antipoverty platform, and McPherson continued to preach against left-wing politics to the end of the 1930s. During World War II, she opposed the release of Japanese Americans from internment camps in California and broke with Pentecostalism's tradition by refusing to support church members who claimed a conscientious objection to armed service. Sutton suggests that she was the pioneer for such recent Pentecostals in politics as Pat Robertson, Oliver North, James Watt, and John Ashcroft.

Yet McPherson also left a legacy of open-hearted benevolence to those in need. More from Crain's review:

In 1927, just in time for the Great Depression, she founded a commissary that fed everyone, in defiance of a Los Angeles County order the prohibited publicly funded charities from helping those who had lived in California less than three years. "The one human being that never asked you what your nationality was, what you believed in and so forth, was Aimee Semple McPherson," the actor Anthony Quinn recalled of her impact on the Mexican-American community he grew up in.

Colbert's Iraq War Scrapbook

Stephen Colbert dips into his "Iraq War Scrapbook," marks the fifth anniversary of Vice President Cheney’s unequivocal declaration that Saddam possessed WMD, and talks things over with Thomas Ricks, author of Fiasco. View the video segment at Crooks and Liars.

Hollywood Adventist Pastor a Spokesperson on Housing Issues

Ryan Bell, pastor of the Hollywood Seventh-day Adventist Church, in Los Angeles ABC-affiliate Ch. 7 news coverage of Town Hall meeting housing issues:

The Political Captivity of American Evangelicalism

"With many other Christians in the United States and many more abroad, I have watched with horror in recent years as the name of Jesus has been used to serve national ambitions and justify war. Forgetting the difference between discipleship and partisanship, and with complete indifference to the wisdom and insights of the Christian tradition, we have recast the faith according to our cultural preferences and baptized our prejudices, along with our will-to-power, in the shallow waters of civic piety."
--Charles Marsh, "God and Country: What it Means to Be a Christian After George W. Bush," Boston Globe, 8 July 2007.

Marsh is a professor of religion at the University of Virginia. His newly-published book, Wayward Christian Soldiers: Freeing the Gospel From Political Captivity, is described by Jim Wallis as "a book that will help us move past partisan religious politics to recover the Good News of Jesus."

Christian Leaders Call for Restoration of Habeas Corpus and Abolition of Torture

The National Religious Campaign Against Torture (NRCAT) joined with other advocates of human rights on Capitol Hill June 26 for a "Day of Action to Restore Law and Justice." The rally focused on urging Congressional action to restore habeas corpus for individuals held in U.S. custody, with the rights of detainees at the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, particularly in view.

The Adventist Peace Fellowship is one of the NRCAT's 115 member groups. The NRCAT has gathered nearly 16,000 individual endorsements for its statement, "Torture is a Moral Issue." Endorsers include Pastor Rick Warren, former president Jimmy Carter, and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Weisel.

Professor Charles Gutenson of Asbury Theological Seminary set forth a Christian basis for the campaign against torture.

The words of Jesus are unambiguous when it comes to expressing how we are to love each other--we are to love others as we love ourselves.  In fact, the paradigmatic, the normative test case for Christian love is love of enemy.  In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus tells us that we are to love our enemies and to good to them.    Surely we can agree that it is exceptionally difficult to see how one can genuinely love the other who is enemy to us at the same time that one is engaged in their torture.  As a matter of fact, I take it to be an unconditional aspect of Christian faith that torture is always immoral.

On the standard justification of torture as an emergency means of preventing a terrorist act, Gutenson had this to say.

Sadly, in our entertainment-oriented society, we find that telling stories where this scenario is dramatically portrayed are particularly effective in drawing high ratings.  Even more sadly, one member of the Supreme Court of the United States recently responded to the torture question, not by appeal to hard fact, but rather by asking what jury would convict Jack Bauer.  Thereby, this SC justice conflated reality and drama in such a way as to create the illusion that a scenario from the hit TV series “24” was an accurate representation of the world in which torture is used.  Every torturer, then, is justified because the payoff will be the same as we see on TV, but is this really the case?  As best we can tell, the answer is no...