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In most mainstream news reports, President Bush’s campaign is built on a foundation of right-wing religious zealots who want to lock homosexuals in closets, trample women’s rights and, what the heck, flirt with a Left-Behind nuclear showdown by building a Messianic Jewish megachurch on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem.
It’s hard to know what criteria apply to scoring the presidential debates anymore, but it’s a safe bet to say that when pundits are looking at last night’s contest and comparing the president to Aristotle, we can call it a Bush win. Before the debate, I had heard lots of carping by conservatives about the faux town hall format, in which supposedly undecided voters usually pepper candidates with questions about what government can do for them, but that was not the thrust of most of the queries.
The Oct. 11 issue of The New Yorker (not yet available online) includes an eight-page article about Creflo Dollar, who preaches what is widely called prosperity theology. The article, by New York Times writer Kelefa Sanneh, mines some of the rich details a reader would expect in a New Yorker profile, such as these:
Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold of the Episcopal Church has responded to Archbishop Peter Akinola’s description of a private conversation with Griswold. (Today’s picture shows Griswold, Akinola and Desmond Tutu together at a U.S. House of Bishops meeting in 2002.)
The more one looks at the literature put out by Australia’s upstart Family First Party, the less adequate our treatment of the party thus far appears. Go to the website and read the FFP’s positions and the reasoning behind them. The party is having to defend itself against charges that it is the political arm of the Assemblies of God church. A vote for Family First, opponents warn, is a vote for fundamentalist Protestantism.
We don’t go out of our way, here at GetReligion, to write about articles featured in religion publications and we certainly don’t throw a lot of digital ink at the materials sent out by denominational press offices and public-relations companies.
Here’s a fun fact: Australia is holding a national election Saturday. There isn’t much hand wringing in the nation’s press about low voter turnout because skipping that trip to the polls is against the law, and punishable by a fine. The fire this time is over the relatively new Family First Party, a socially conservative, economically flexible political party that advocates stronger controls on pornography, drugs, gambling, stem cell research, and genetically modified foods — and a general rethink of how the Australian government regards people. According to the FFP’s website:
Journalists cannot always predict which stories will cause a ruckus, but reporter Jeffrey Weiss of the Dallas Morning News knew that his report about a local “Bus 19″ exhibit was going to raise eyebrows. The bus had been attacked by terrorists, with 11 people dead. Now it was being used as part of a tour to promote the cause of Israel. It was being displayed in North Dallas as part of the Yom Kippur holy day.
I returned late Tuesday from a last-minute trip to Washington to hear Peter Akinola, the primate of the Church of Nigeria, discuss his plans to launch a U.S. alternative to the Episcopal Church. (The picture shows Akinola greeting Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold at a meeting of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops in 2002.)
