Across the Great Divide

Evangelical Hammer Says He's Not a Nail.

A recent comment left on an old post about Kenneth Copeland reminded me it has been nearly six months since we checked in on him and the other five Prosperity Gospel evangelists being investigated by Sen. Charles Grassley.

And there's not much new to report on the Grassley Six. Although Grassley has put himself back in the news with this.

Obama used his weekly radio and Internet address Saturday to call on Congress to enact legislation to reform the health-care system.

Grassley responded by texting, "Pres Obama you got nerve while u sightseeing in Paris to tell us 'time to deliver' on health care. We still on skedul/even workinWKEND."

A short time later, Grassley sent, "Pres Obama while u sightseeing in Paris u said 'time to delivr on healthcare' When you are a 'hammer' u think evrything is NAIL I'm no NAIL."

A Grassley spokeswoman verified that the senator wrote the messages.

Riiiight.

It may be that some elected officials do tweet. But when you figure John McCain was still learning how to get on the internet a year ago, how many of these cosseted old farts, who have staffers write their speeches, committee statements, correspondence and bills, do you think could even snap a picture with their cell phones, let alone figure out Twitter?

Meanwhile, Benny Hinn is touring Africa. In Uganda, he charged the equivalent of $50 to those attending his healing show, and his host pastor commented: “these days even the word of God is not for free.”

Joyce Meyer Ministries, always the most cooperative with Grassley's committee and disclosing more than any of the Six, has met the standards of the Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability (ECFA), the Christian accreditation agency that oversees the financial accountability, fund-raising and board governance of many leading Christian nonprofit organizations.

Without Walls International Church, run by Paula and Randy White, has been fighting foreclosure by the Evangelical Christian Credit Union that had called its loans.

Creflo Dollar has declared himself to be on another Change Tour and is featured in the new book, Crooks and Homos in the Pulpit, which its author calls "a wake-up call to the Body of Christ."

Eddie Long, who defied Grassley's Committee, and Copeland, who openly ridiculed it, seem to remain untouched by the investigation so far.

Whether on not Grassley was right about them, I wonder if they were right about Grassley?

More Value for the Way We Live.

I spent the morning at the Day Center and then at the Food Pantry. Highlight of the first shift was listening to three women discussing the various fine points of double jeopardy, then providing two of the women envelopes, paper and stamps for correspondence to men in detention facilities.

One woman returned the sheet of paper to me as if I were an idiot. "I want lined paper. I'm writing a letter, not drawing a picture!"

Good to have that one for future reference.

I've also been acquainting myself with low cost foodstuffs during time between filling orders. Our Beef and Chicken Rice Mix packages come from Brooklyn Park, Minnesota. The Beef Ravioli comes from Second Harvest of Middle Tennessee, with the catchy slogan on the back: "Non-Profit Serving Non-Profit Serving Hungry People."

The vegetable soup comes from the Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints in Salt Lake City. The label advises our guests can visit www.providentliving.org for advice on self-reliant living, which I'm sure many would do if the wireless connection just reached down to their camp by the river.

Guests come in for various types of assistance, and my job is putting together three meals each for three days for those who the counselors determine need help with food. For one or two people, it's a pretty simple process, heavy on rice, canned goods, tuna, generic Cheerios (No Cap'n Crunch!), peanut butter and assorted other items to fill out the order.

Things can get a bit complicated when an extended family is getting help, since you're trying to integrate nutrition, variety, ages and larger quantities with the stock available. We always have peanut butter, but not always bread, for example. And some guests have no cooking facilities, or they're walking and can't carry a lot of canned goods.

All we had for non-canned meat product today were the same two frozen containers (chicken livers and tripe) that were there last week. Midmorning, someone cleaning out their freezer brought in a reasonable stock of roasts, steak and stew meat. I forgot to take a picture of the elk steak from 2003. The newest package was dated February 2007.

I suppose some person went home feeling good and maybe planned to claim a charitable deduction. No one got the meat, unless there are some brave dumpster divers out there.

Speaking of unsafe food, the top photo is from the supermarket today, where they were having a special on pistachios.

The Outreach Center is church affiliated, though not all volunteers and staff belong to the Catholic Church. They do not push religion in any way on the people coming through the doors. They do pray before they start work, but it's about humility and serving people and seeing Jesus in the faces they meet during the day. 

It's an aspect of religious faith in action that would be good for us non-believers to see once awhile, to remind us that the religious are not all the same, either.

 

Faith-Based Balancing Act.

In upcoming months, I'll be spending time in Colorado and missing my volunteer commitment in Minneapolis. Recently, I looked for a local agency that would allow me to continue working with homeless kids.

My most likely place to volunteer is run by Catholic Charities.

As a secular volunteer, I'll be in the minority, but won't be subject to restrictive hiring practices at the root of contention over faith-based initiatives that funnel federal money to religious organizations. As a progressive, I wish President Obama had made a more definitive statement against faith-based hiring when he announced his extension of Pres. Bush's faith-based initiative.

But we replaced the Decider with the Nuancer, and we'd better get used to it.

Groups on different sides of the hiring issue are not going to agree, no matter what Obama decides. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 gives faith-based organizations the right to discriminate in hiring with respect to religion. Most progressives think groups that discriminate shouldn't receive public money. And many advocates for the poor are interested in what works for them, which is where I come down.

According to this analysis, Obama isn't waffling on his campaign statements against federally funded faith-based hiring. He's considering the "legal, political and operational issues" more thoroughly before making a judgment.

Meanwhile, Obama will make two significant changes in the Bush-era office.

An expanded portfolio that "will include abortion reduction, promoting responsible fathering, and engaging in global interfaith dialogue, particularly with the Muslim world."

A less evangelical orientation that "includes Jewish, Muslim, mainline Protestant, and Catholic members, along with representatives of secular organizations."

Religious groups like the Mormons are likely to remain on the funding sidelines, where they will continue to promote discrimination in society at large.

Ted Haggard: Redemption, of a Sort.

Do you think you're -- you're over the hump?
— Larry King to fallen evangelist Ted Haggard

Leave it to Larry to find a Freudian way to ask Ted Haggard if he's over guys.

Haggard led a huge Colorado Springs congregation and headed the National Association of Evangelicals, before succuming — oh, now I'm doing it — to unGodly urges that were exposed in 2006. He's back, promoting an HBO documentary on all the networks.

All evangelists of his stripe creep me out, but Haggard out-ranked even Kenneth Copeland on the Hypocri-meter. In his reincarnation, Haggard acknowledges his sins and uses the word "process" a lot like a man in recovery. He's still a flawed person who remains at the center of universe Ted. His fundamental embrace of the bible doesn't make it easy to be a normal, tolerant human being, but he's trying.

When his wife Gayle can get a word in, she talks how they better understand the Christian message of love and forgiveness, and Ted seems to have repudiated his past compulsive behavior without renouncing gays. I find myself hoping they make it.

But I also found myself wondering how a disgraced pastor with a big house can make a living. It's not as if he can just move his act to an evangelical church in another town. Love and forgiveness haven't quite made it that far. In fact, just today, I read a story about a small town doctor badly injured in a bike accident who readers criticized for not acknowledging god for saving his life.

Another writer wonders if the Haggards might be angling for some kind of media deal. I did check their web site that has been named in most of the TV stories. It's not about redemption; it promotes insurance sales and debt consolidation services.

Oy.

Number of the Day: Pledge! What Pledge?

A Johns Hopkins Study of youth abstinence programs found no significant difference in sexual activity between matched participants and non-participants — including the number of partners, incidence of sexually transmitted diseases or the age at which the teen lost his or her virginity.

It also found that teens who had taken a virginity pledge were less likely to use condoms or other birth control.

Five years after taking an abstinence pledge, 82% of pledgers denied having ever made such a pledge.

Recession is a Mixed Blessing.

Whatever you think about the cosmic realities of religion, churches are especially important social institutions that provide support to people facing tough times. They can also be sources of innovation, as they are forced by their values to deal with situations that businesses and secular institutions may see as losing propositions. (For example, Minnesota's treatment/recovery industry grew out of mission work on Washington Avenue's skid row.)

As government agencies and social service non-profits cut back, churches become the last resort for people who can't rely on their families for help. Outreach — especially by evangelical churches whose members tends to be less affluent — may increasingly become "inreach" as new members swell the numbers of parishioners in need. 

The picture is mixed.

In Michigan, Salvation Army branches have cut employees. Donations are down, which means thrift store sales are down, and customers also have less to choose from.

People of moderate means in Montana and California towns appear to be stepping up with increased giving. (Donations to churches typically don't drop in the first year of a recession, according to some research.)

A New York Times story says, "Bad times are good for evangelical churches." It cites growing attendance as the country's economic troubles have deepened. 

Higher attendance can be a mixed blessing. The story also points out that "a recession also means fewer dollars in the collection basket" and more people seeking material as well as spiritual help.

Then there are the churches that have been preaching the prosperity message.

Over the past year, we've seen signs that megachurches such as Mac Hammond's Living Word Christian Center were already facing difficulty. I've also gotten reports of "restructuring" and layoffs coming from the prosperity gospel empire of Kenneth Copeland due to declining revenues. Hammond and Copeland have also battled with tax authorities over disclosing their compensation, which might lead to even further erosion of contributions.

Hammond won his case against the IRS, while Copeland just lost a fight with Texas appraisers who said he had to reveal the pay of his ministry's top people — including his wife, son, daughter and son-in-law. Failure to do so means he loses a $75,000 tax exemption on one of his jets. (Texas has no income tax but taxes business personal property, which includes things like filing cabinets, computers and nine-passenger aircraft.)

Copeland got that particular jet from Billye Brim, a close friend and fellow prosperity gospel jet launderer.

How these high fliers justify their riches in the here and now may grow as an issue when the faithful, like other disappointed investors, start wondering if the miraculous returns have really been coming from their own contributions.

Planning and its Perils.

When I'd give sessions on strategic planning, I used to tell people the reason you do it is so you've already thought through all the issues when nothing goes as planned.

Jim has another take.

Just a few months ago, gas was $4, and the only person who believed $2 gas would ever again be a reality was noted camera-loving screwball Rep. Michele Bachmann (R - MN), though Bachmann's predictions invoked a mechanism different than what has actually happened. Interestingly, our oil consumption is falling off drastically even as we see multi-year lows in the price of consuming oil. Who would have guessed this outcome earlier this year? Who would have based actual plans on such a guess?

*****
On the family planning front, Margaret Talbot asks why so many evangelical teens become pregnant. [via Open Education]

[T]he reactions to [Bristol Palin's pregnancy] have exposed a cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.

A sociologist who has studied teen sex "argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among teen-agers who identify themselves as evangelical."

The vast majority of white evangelical adolescents—seventy-four per cent—say that they believe in abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in abstinence.) Moreover, among the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them.

I haven't read the study or the entire New Yorker article that quotes it, but I wonder why this should be surprising, since to my mind, extreme religion (take your pick) seems largely organized on behalf of men who couldn't get laid on their own merits.

Hammond on IRS: They Didn't Ask Nicely.

Pass the potatoes.

What?

Please pass the potatoes.

Dum dee dum...

Pretty please!

Too late.

Like the passive aggressive kid at the family dinner table, Pastor Mac Hammond won a victory in court yesterday because the IRS failed to say pretty please with sugar on it.

[Living Word Christian Center] had argued that it didn't have to provide detailed financial information focusing on the compensation of its founder and senior pastor, James (Mac) Hammond, requested by the IRS.

Earlier this year, the IRS petitioned the U.S. District Court to force the church to answer its demand for information. The church argued that the request wasn't made by a "high-ranking official" as required by law, and the magistrate judge agreed.

Next, a U.S. District Court Judge can decide to follow the ruling, or a higher-ranking IRS official can request the information. Both Hammond and his mentor Kenneth Copeland insist they'd cooperate with the IRS... they just haven't.

The case is specific to laws covering religious organizations. That means kids being told by the teacher to sit down in class still can't hold out for an order from the principal. Perps had best listen to the cop with the Taser when he says to freeze.

If you've just bankrupted a company, though, be sure to pick up your check as you're shown the door. And don't forget your bag of sugar.

Through an Ass, Darkly.

Occasionally, I stumble across an essay in Power Line that makes me work my way through the smug  conservatism and tin ear lawyer prose. The latest example, Scott Johnson's "From Keith Ellison to Barack Obama, " starts out this way:

After Barack Obama clinched the Democratic presidential nomination this past June, I set out a comparison between Minnesota Fifth District Rep. Keith Ellison and Barack Obama. (Minnesota's Fifth District covers Minneapolis and its inner-ring suburbs.) I think the comparison remains both valid and illuminating. I am taking the liberty of revisiting my argument this morning.

Watching the emergence of Barack Obama this year I have experienced at least a slight sense of déjà vu. With modifications and variations, the Obama phenomenon was anticipated by the rise of Keith Ellison in 2006.

What evoked this at least slight tingle? Johnson provides the context.

After I first posted an item or two about Ellison in June on Power Line, writing about him as carefully as I could, I started getting calls from prominent Democrats and other knowledgeable sources with first-hand knowledge of Ellison. They were unhappy at the thought that Keith Ellison might become the face of the Democratic Party in Minnesota's largest city. [Emphasis mine.]

In other words, the same types who feed their "concerns" to Michael Brodkorb, so they can undermine their in-party opponents, came to Johnson for some dirty work. After all, no Minnesota Democrat hoping for the party's nomination could suggest a black face would be the wrong one to replace the farina-hued countenance of Rep. Martin Sabo.

The media conspired in the political correctness, according to Johnson, by not sufficiently exposing Ellison's supposed radical Islamic affiliations.

Johnson continues in this fashion, conflating Ellison's embrace of Islam with Barack Hussein Obama's embrace of...

Obama nevertheless found the functional equivalent of Farrakhan in Jeremiah Wright. Wright had no such reservations regarding Farrakhan. He has an enduring relationship with Farrakhan that goes back at least as far as their joint trip to visit Col. Gadaffi in 1984. In casting his lot with Wright's Trinity United Church of Christ, Obama found the useful Christian analogue of the Nation of Islam.

Of course...

Both Ellison and Obama have friends among home-grown terrorists.

Johnson can't see the actual pragmatism that links these "leftward-most viable candidates" (they both voted for the Wall Street rescue bills), but mentions their shared opposition to the Iraq War.

Obama staked his campaign on the proposition that he was the Ivory Soap candidate on the issue of Iraq.

Johnson no doubt means this as "100% Pure" on the war, but how many people will read the text and ignore its strong subtext?

And how does Johnson clinch his comparison?

Despite the natural alliance that should exist between them, Obama has scrupulously avoided Ellison.

See, being black lefties and all, the two should be tight, but Obama doesn't want to be seen as Muslim. Isn't their lack of association an important clue to Obama's real self?

Sort of like Johnson's piece provides a glimpse into the dark heart of today's conservatism.

Does 1st Amendment Put Churches Out of Range?

Local prosperity gospeleer Mac Hammond and his Living Word Christian Center (LWCC) are in court for resisting an IRS summons that demanded the church provide it with detailed financial information. Hammond and his lawyers argue "the case is about the First Amendment, separation of church and state and the reach of the government into the actions of religious organizations."

About the same time Hammond was getting the IRS order last March, his mentor Kenneth Copeland was asking the IRS to audit his ministry.

Copeland's ministry had resisted a request for financial information from Sen. Charles Grassley's Senate Finance subcommittee, which was investigating whether high-profile televangelists were taking advantage of their tax exemptions to operate related business entities and enrich the leaders. Copeland took the position that the information should come from the IRS, and in April, he made his show of requesting an IRS audit.

That's a sly PR move, since requesting an audit doesn't mean you'll be audited. Most observers might conclude that meant Copeland had nothing to hide, and he only wanted Grassley "to follow the law" and protect the church's First Amendment rights.

The IRS can only enforce existing law, and unless it finds illegality, the results of its investigation won't be public. Grassley says his committee is not looking to enforce the tax laws, it's trying to determine

whether the law should be changed, such as prohibiting tax-exempt organizations to compare themselves to for-profit corporations when determining reasonable compensation for their executives. Specifically, with respect to churches, I am interested in the lack of information reported to the IRS on transactions with related entities as well as activities overseas. These are things a regular charity has to report on its 990 but a church is exempt from filing. I also wonder whether it makes sense for ministers to completely exclude from income the parsonage and housing allowance they receive. When these exclusions were provided, I doubt that Congress contemplated that a minister would have multiple parsonages across the country and overseas or that a church would deem the majority of its employees "ministers" so that everyone could get these benefits. It is the role of Congress – not the IRS – to consider these questions.

Should an actual audit come, however, Copeland's "bring it on" tactic may change, if Hammond's response is any indication. (Hammond serves on Copeland's Board and Copeland's son John serves on Hammond's. Any investigation uncovering abuse in one ministry could implicate the directors and lead to more scrutiny of how they run their own affairs.)

I'm reminded of a scene from Lonesome Dove in which some bad guys with a buffalo rifle have Gus McRae pinned down. They think they're out of range from his smaller bore rifle, so one genius stands up and does a mocking chicken walk...

Hammond's case is being handled by Walter Pickhardt [the Strib story typos the spelling], the head of Faegre & Benson's tax practice. The legal team also includes Amy Rotenberg, a former VP at PR firm Padilla Spear Beardsley, who heads a firm that provides "strategic communications counsel."

It remains to be seen whether Copeland's and Hammond's respective dances will keep them out of range.