Latest articles from ChristianAggression.org http://www.christianaggression.org 2010-03-06T23:11:42+01:00 text/html http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1267935102 Q: Is there a problem with proselytism overseas by U.S. religious groups? Isn't sharing one's faith part of religious freedom? When does it cross the line into manipulation and coercion? I believe systematic and institutionalized endeavors to proselytize on a global stage is warfare by other means. I am not opposed to conversion per se. If someone finds meaning in a particular message and seeks to embrace it, congratulations. If one feels an urge to share one's beliefs and what it means with others, then again that is welcome. But if one starts a campaign to "recruit" people through an organized crusade, then it is, I believe, contrary to the very idea of spiritualism as understood by most faiths, and is an act of aggression. Faith is not a commodity that lends itself to a global consumer marketing campaign. To treat it as such is demeaning to faith itself. Marketing it using brochures and not compassion, arguments and not service, providing material incentives and not spiritual comfort, is abhorrent. Islam and Christianity have reputations for proselytizing. But often the rapid growth of Islam is assumed to be as a result of Christianity like attempts at systematic proselytizing. This is far from the truth. There are no lifelong missionaries in Muslim societies. Mosques do not have budgets or fund raisers for missionary work. Islam is today the fastest growing religion in America and Europe and that is not because of some major missionary campaign, but indeed in spite of all the demonization of Islam in the media as a false religion, as a religion of violence and as a value system intolerant towards women. Many Western commentators interpret the extremism of al-Qaeda and other groups as indicative of the Islamic mandate to convert people to Islam. I personally have difficulty understanding this claim. How does one convince others of the virtue of one's ways through murder and slaughter? On the other hand, many Islamic and third world countries associate Christian missionaries with crusades, colonization and imperialism. If you see a Christian missionary, run! Western armies are not far behind, or they are already there. Even the U.S., the champion of secularism and freedom of religion, has had so much trouble disassociating itself and its foreign policy from proselytizing. U.S. armies in occupied Iraq have been used to protect Christian missionaries distributing Bibles along with food to starving Iraqis and associating Christian symbols with military ones in Iraq and Afghanistan. Efforts to safeguard freedom of religion, such as the now controversial U.S. Commission of on International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) has been shown as biased towards Christianity. It has over the years shown more concern for opening opportunities for evangelism in the Muslim World than protecting the religious freedoms of Muslim Women in France. In India too there is a large constituency for banning conversions because they see it as a cultural invasion of India, by Islam and Christianity. Clearly proselytizing has no place in the global village. Islamic sources, regardless of how some Muslims may act or interpret them, are overwhelmingly against active proselytization. The Quran states very clearly that there is no compulsion in religion. There is no need for compulsion, since the truth is elf evident (Quran 2:256). In several other places, the Quran states very clearly that the role of Prophet Muhammed (pbuh) is to only deliver the message from God. He does not have the right to exercise power over those who receive his message (Quran 88;21-22), it is God, not people, who will exercise accountability upon the creation (Quran 88;26]. The job of a Muslim is to deliver the message, not to manage, not to act as an advocate nor to seek to act as a guardian of others (Quran 10:18, 3:29, 18:29). I like Jefferson's idea that the best way to communicate what one's values and beliefs are is by living them. If Muslims want to bring the message of Truth to others, then rather than launching global campaigns to proselytize, they should live their faiths and let its grace work. The same applies to others. Be good so we know your values are good. To be concise proselytization is neither good religion nor good politics. Religion's objective is to build a spiritual link between the creation and the creator, not to serve as an identity marker engaged in a battle for market share of souls. text/html http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1263492537 Religious conversion has to be examined in its global context, because coerced conversion is not a spiritual but a political act with economic motives. So was colonization; though they said they came to civilize us! The so-called religious wars such as the Crusades were about wealth and dominance. War is not an option any more because it is no longer economically viable. It can lead to expensive recurring conflict, and though beneficial to the Western military industrial complex, have negative political implications at home for the politicians. Therefore cultural hegemony achieved through conversion is an effective political and economic strategy. The imposition of the belief of cultural superiority of the colonizer was particularly important in effecting social control of the colonized. It also underpinned their racial superiority firmly. This process, defined as hegemony enabled the wheels of capitalist system to move efficiently. The colonizers also created a comprador class, whom they educated, trained and some times christianized to continue their work when they eventually withdrew their military forces of domination. This class has completely internalized the idea of European cultural and racial superiority. Present new missionary activity is simply a readjustment of colonial strategy to suit the new global order. The British colonizers had an existing developed literary and cultural tradition which they used to good effect through education, to create a tame brown elite in colonized countries; to carry out their policies. But in US, which later became the dominant capitalist state, religion provided the basis for social solidarity in place of a shared culture and it was but natural that they would use controlling forms of Christianity to establish hegemony over people they wished to dominate. This form of Christianity arose from Puritanism, a strict, narrow and literal interpretation of the Bible and has evolved into the present day Fundamentalism. Economically, religion has proved to be a cost-effective form of social control. Fundamentalist Christian groups, funded mainly from America have continued to use religion as a weapon, funding ‘local’ groups to convert the ‘heathens’. They conduct a spiritual war using sophisticated, psychologically devised forms of mind control and aggressive marketing strategies using electronic media and incorporating them into proselytizing in India and Sri Lanka and other parts of Asia as well as Africa. It is an attempt to retain economic dominance through cultural/religious hegemony in order to maintain control of valuable resources. At these mass rallies for conversion they use religion as propaganda. The methods used in conversion are the same as those used in advertising and war fare. They attack the mind from several directions, breaking down the buyers’ or enemies’ resistance. Buddhism which appeals to reason and focuses on disciplining the mind and promotes critical thinking stand little chance against this onslaught. There are many morally reprehensible methods used in conversion but only a few can be dealt with here. One of the main techniques used by missionaries is to create a state of cognitive dissonance in their victims’ minds. That is, they would create doubts about the validity of their existing belief systems, at the same time offering some thing ‘far superior’ which would advance them materially and spiritually. The interpretation of reality offered by their original religions as well as the customs etc. will be shown to have less status and usefulness. Holding two contradictory views at the same time would cause psychological tension, motivating the person to reduce dissonance by changing their attitudes, beliefs or behavious. Aggressive missionary activity would create dissonance and convince some, that their beliefs and culture was inferior; leading them to avoid this emotional tension or cognitive dissonance by changing them. The targeted would shift their allegiance to the spiritual colonizers and identify with them, while seeing the ‘natives’ and their religions through the missionaries’ interpretation. At some of the prayer meetings where new recruits had been lured, they had been asked to bring a statue or picture of the Buddha or Shiva etc or a picture of the Pope. Then after the initial preamble of denigrating their religions, the recruits would be asked to smash the statue or tear and trample the holy pictures. This would create a situation of ‘no return’ spiritually. The prayer leaders are powerfully persuasive, similar to modern salesmen and use the vulnerability and weakness of the victims to their own advantage, so that they would be forced to conform with the group. The idea of purifying one’s soul through confession and completely washing away one’s sins (total immersion baptism) has existed since early biblical times. Since man was ‘born of sin’ he had to be made ‘pure’. During the Cold War, enterprising psychiatrists began to experiment with electric shock therapy and mind altering drugs on their patients. According to Naomi Klein, (The Shock Doctrine 2007), Dr. Ewen Cameron, who had been the president of the American Psychiatrist Association and later of the World Psychiatrist Association, rejected Freud’s talk therapy and began using electroshock therapy as well as a cocktail of newly discovered mind altering drugs to try to return the minds of patients to a state of tabula rasa, where the earlier personality was wiped out, so that he could reprogram them as he wished. For example, the sheer volume of noise at one of these ‘prayer meetings’ shuts out thoughts and one has no choice but to listen to the magnified voice of the Pastor. His shouting and Halleluiahs are interspaced with loud religious pop music and shouting to Satan, Mahasona (a local demon) and related demons etc to leave forthwith! The confused patients allow manipulation through being stunned by the force of persuasion. Sometimes physical force is used to restrain them. Sometimes it is not only their freedom to think that is murdered but their bodies as well. In the recent deaths that took place at one of these Evangelical Meetings in Viharamaha Devi Park, one of the women who subsequently died was tied up and isolated in a cage, and her father or relatives were forcibly prevented from accessing her. Thus isolated and intimidated by a screaming Pastor and a shouting and singing mass of unfamiliar people she had gone into shock, as they would have expected, and then they would have reprogrammed her, or ‘saved her soul’; but her body was not prepared for the violence imposed on it. It was a very public execution, all in the name of religion. There are usually thousands at these conversion meetings and many who come due to sickness or poverty or helplessness are intimidated and coerced by the weight of sheer numbers. The total power of the presiding Pastor backed by the shouting, singing and praying congregation shocks the victims into compliance. As anyone who reads the history of the Christian religion will know that it has a long history of torture and murder of those who reject their views. According to Klein, Dr Cameron used what he called “input-overload” or use of six times the normal electroshock to change behavior. Dr Cameron spoke of ‘wearing down of defenses’ and the ‘breaking down of the individual under continuous interrogation’. The label applied to ‘the enemy’ then was Communist, and now it is ‘infested by Satan’ which really mean non-believer. The word that is repeated again and again is “Jesus” so that Satan is driven out and that word replaces Buddha or Shiva etc. It is ‘shock and awe’ by other means. Hitler and Mussolini used similar methods very successfully. For them the Satan was the non Aryan Jews and Slavs etc. The conversions are a two pronged attack against society. They target the poor and vulnerable, because in a democracy numbers mean power, but they also hunt the vulnerable among the power elite. Here, they are able to manipulate the nation through internal interference with the machinery of power, subtly. They target the lonely or the bereaved and depressed among the rich and powerful and promise personal peace and of course salvation. The prayer group provides a substitute family to the lonely and the real family and community are gradually ripped apart. The core of a culture is religion. The foundation of a nation is its culture. The loss of culture and religion weakens a people and naturally and instinctively we tend to react emotionally and irrationally when our way of life is threatened by alien forces. But in modern context this is not skillful. It is made out into an attack on freedom of choice and therefore a rights issue and also since ‘their’ right to ‘save our souls’ has been given to them by God. Our actions have to be justified through rational behavior and the use of law. In acting like victims we become disempowered and taking the law into our own hands criminalizes us and makes them, into martyrs - which is what these Evangelists want; in order to obtain more funding from their donors. There is no accountability to the donors or the Government who is responsible for the people they prey on, as to how this vast amount of money is spent. We are no longer fighting the Portuguese but sophisticated, well funded pseudo-religious organizations who use criminal methods against our society to re-colonize us again. Therefore we should use the law against them but, also ask ourselves why, with free education and free healthcare people still flock to these false messiahs. text/html http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1258603142 America’s mainstream religious denominations used to teach the faithful that they would be rewarded in the afterlife. But over the past generation, a different strain of Christian faith has proliferated—one that promises to make believers rich in the here and now. Known as the prosperity gospel, and claiming tens of millions of adherents, it fosters risk-taking and intense material optimism. It pumped air into the housing bubble. And one year into the worst downturn since the Depression, it’s still going strong. by Hanna Rosin Did Christianity Cause the Crash? Image credit: Mark Peterson/Redux Like the ambitions of many immigrants who attend services there, Casa del Padre’s success can be measured by upgrades in real estate. The mostly Latino church, in Charlottesville, Virginia, has moved from the pastor’s basement, where it was founded in 2001, to a rented warehouse across the street from a small mercado five years later, to a middle-class suburban street last year, where the pastor now rents space from a lovely old Baptist church that can’t otherwise fill its pews. Every Sunday, the parishioners drive slowly into the parking lot, never parking on the sidewalk or grass—“because Americanos don’t do that,” one told me—and file quietly into church. Some drive newly leased SUVs, others old work trucks with paint buckets still in the bed. The pastor, Fernando Garay, arrives last and parks in front, his dark-blue Mercedes Benz always freshly washed, the hubcaps polished enough to reflect his wingtips. It can be hard to get used to how much Garay talks about money in church, one loyal parishioner, Billy Gonzales, told me one recent Sunday on the steps out front. Back in Mexico, Gonzales’s pastor talked only about “Jesus and heaven and being good.” But Garay talks about jobs and houses and making good money, which eventually came to make sense to Gonzales: money is “really important,” and besides, “we love the money in Jesus Christ’s name! Jesus loved money too!” That Sunday, Garay was preaching a variation on his usual theme, about how prosperity and abundance unerringly find true believers. “It doesn’t matter what country you’re from, what degree you have, or what money you have in the bank,” Garay said. “You don’t have to say, ‘God, bless my business. Bless my bank account.’ The blessings will come! The blessings are looking for you! God will take care of you. God will not let you be without a house!” Pastor Garay, 48, is short and stocky, with thick black hair combed back. In his off hours, he looks like a contented tourist, in his printed Hawaiian shirts or bright guayaberas. But he preaches with a ferocity that taps into his youth as a cocaine dealer with a knife in his back pocket. “Fight the attack of the devil on my finances! Fight him! We declare financial blessings! Financial miracles this week, NOW NOW NOW!” he preached that Sunday. “More work! Better work! The best finances!” Gonzales shook and paced as the pastor spoke, eventually leaving his wife and three kids in the family section to join the single men toward the front, many of whom were jumping, raising their Bibles, and weeping. On the altar sat some anointing oils, alongside the keys to the Mercedes Benz. Later, D’andry Then, a trim, pretty real-estate agent and one of the church founders, stood up to give her testimony. Business had not been good of late, and “you know, Monday I have to pay this, and Tuesday I have to pay that.” Then, just that morning, “Jesus gave me $1,000.” She didn’t explain whether the gift came in the form of a real-estate commission or a tax refund or a stuffed envelope left at her door. The story hung somewhere between metaphor and a literal image of barefoot Jesus handing her a pile of cash. No one in the church seemed the least bit surprised by the story, and certainly no one expressed doubt. “If you have financial pressure on you, and you don’t know where the next payment is coming from, don’t pay any attention to that!” she continued. “Don’t get discouraged! Jesus is the answer.” America’s churches always reflect shifts in the broader culture, and Casa del Padre is no exception. The message that Jesus blesses believers with riches first showed up in the postwar years, at a time when Americans began to believe that greater comfort could be accessible to everyone, not just the landed class. But it really took off during the boom years of the 1990s, and has continued to spread ever since. This stitched-together, homegrown theology, known as the prosperity gospel, is not a clearly defined denomination, but a strain of belief that runs through the Pentecostal Church and a surprising number of mainstream evangelical churches, with varying degrees of intensity. In Garay’s church, God is the “Owner of All the Silver and Gold,” and with enough faith, any believer can access the inheritance. Money is not the dull stuff of hourly wages and bank-account statements, but a magical substance that comes as a gift from above. Even in these hard times, it is discouraged, in such churches, to fall into despair about the things you cannot afford. “Instead of saying ‘I’m poor,’ say ‘I’m rich,’” Garay’s wife, Hazael, told me one day. “The word of God will manifest itself in reality.” Many explanations have been offered for the housing bubble and subsequent crash: interest rates were too low; regulation failed; rising real-estate prices induced a sort of temporary insanity in America’s middle class. But there is one explanation that speaks to a lasting and fundamental shift in American culture—a shift in the American conception of divine Providence and its relationship to wealth. In his book Something for Nothing, Jackson Lears describes two starkly different manifestations of the American dream, each intertwined with religious faith. The traditional Protestant hero is a self-made man. He is disciplined and hardworking, and believes that his “success comes through careful cultivation of (implicitly Protestant) virtues in cooperation with a Providential plan.” The hero of the second American narrative is a kind of gambling man—a “speculative confidence man,” Lears calls him, who prefers “risky ventures in real estate,” and a more “fluid, mobile democracy.” The self-made man imagines a coherent universe where earthly rewards match merits. The confidence man lives in a culture of chance, with “grace as a kind of spiritual luck, a free gift from God.” The Gilded Age launched the myth of the self-made man, as the Rockefellers and other powerful men in the pews connected their wealth to their own virtue. In these boom-and-crash years, the more reckless alter ego dominates. In his book, Lears quotes a reverend named Jeffrey Black, who sounds remarkably like Garay: “The whole hope of a human being is that somehow, in spite of the things I’ve done wrong, there will be an episode when grace and fate shower down on me and an unearned blessing will come to me—that I’ll be the one.” I had come to Charlottesville to learn more about this second strain of the American dream—one that’s been ascendant for a generation or more. I wanted to try to piece together the connection between the gospel and today’s economic reality, and to see whether “prosperity” could possibly still seem enticing, or even plausible, in this distinctly unprosperous moment. (Very much so, as it turns out.) Charlottesville may not be the heartland of the prosperity gospel, which is most prevalent in the Sun Belt—where many of the country’s foreclosure hot spots also lie. And Garay preaches an unusually pure version of the gospel. Still, the particulars of both Garay and his congregation are revealing. Among Latinos the prosperity gospel has been spreading rapidly. In a recent Pew survey, 73 percent of all religious Latinos in the United States agreed with the statement: “God will grant financial success to all believers who have enough faith.” For a generation of poor and striving Latino immigrants, the gospel seems to offer a road map to affluence and modern living. Garay’s church is comprised mostly of first-generation immigrants. More than others I’ve visited, it echoes back a highly distilled, unself-conscious version of the current thinking on what it means to live the American dream. One other thing makes Garay’s church a compelling case study. From 2001 to 2007, while he was building his church, Garay was also a loan officer at two different mortgage companies. He was hired explicitly to reach out to the city’s growing Latino community, and Latinos, as it happened, were disproportionately likely to take out the sort of risky loans that later led to so many foreclosures. To many of his parishioners, Garay was not just a spiritual adviser, but a financial one as well. Many of the terms and concepts used by prosperity preachers today date back to Oral Roberts, a poor farmer’s son turned Pentecostal preacher. Garay grew up watching Roberts on television and considers him a hero; he hopes to send all three of his children to Oral Roberts University, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. In the late 1940s, Roberts claimed his Bible flipped open to the Third Epistle of John, verse 2: “Beloved, I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health. Even as thy soul prospereth.” Soon Roberts developed his famous concept of seed faith, still popular today. If people would donate money to his ministry, a “seed” offered to God, he’d say, then God would multiply it a hundredfold. Eventually, Roberts retreated into a life that revolved around private jets and country clubs. Roberts’s fame had faded by the late 1980s, and prosperity preaching briefly imploded soon after. We all remember Tammy Faye Bakker and her mascara tears, along with her husband, Jim, and his various scandals. They took their place in a procession of slick, showy faith healers on Christian television who ultimately succumbed to earthly temptation. But since that time, the movement has made itself over, moving out of the fringe and into the upwardly mobile megachurch class. In the past decade, it has produced about a dozen celebrity pastors, who show up at White House events, on secular radio, and as guests on major TV talk shows. Kirbyjon Caldwell, a Methodist megapastor in Houston and a purveyor of the prosperity gospel, gave the benediction at both of George W. Bush’s inaugurals. Instead of shiny robes or gaudy jewelry, these preachers wear Italian suits and modest wedding bands. Instead of screaming and sweating, they smile broadly and speak in soothing, therapeutic terms. But their message is essentially the same. “Every day, you’re going to live that abundant life!” preaches Joel Osteen, a best-selling author, the nation’s most popular TV preacher, and the pastor of Lakewood Church, in Houston, the country’s largest church by far. Among mainstream, nondenominational megachurches, where much of American religious life takes place, “prosperity is proliferating” rapidly, says Kate Bowler, a doctoral candidate at Duke University and an expert in the gospel. Few, if any, of these churches have prosperity in their title or mission statement, but Bowler has analyzed their sermons and teachings. Of the nation’s 12 largest churches, she says, three are prosperity—Osteen’s, which dwarfs all the other megachurches; Tommy Barnett’s, in Phoenix; and T. D. Jakes’s, in Dallas. In second-tier churches—those with about 5,000 members—the prosperity gospel dominates. Overall, Bowler classifies 50 of the largest 260 churches in the U.S. as prosperity. The doctrine has become popular with Americans of every background and ethnicity; overall, Pew found that 66 percent of all Pentecostals and 43 percent of “other Christians”—a category comprising roughly half of all respondents—believe that wealth will be granted to the faithful. It’s an upbeat theology, argues Barbara Ehrenreich in her new book, Bright-Sided, that has much in common with the kind of “positive thinking” that has come to dominate America’s boardrooms and, indeed, its entire culture. On the cover of his 4 million-copy best seller from 2004, Your Best Life Now, Joel Osteen looks like a recent college grad who just got hired by Goldman Sachs and can’t believe his good luck. His hair is full, his teeth are bright, his suit is polished but not flashy; he looks like a guy who would more likely shake your hand than cast out your demons. Osteen took over his father’s church in 1999. He had little preaching experience, although he’d managed the television ministry for years. The church grew quickly, as Osteen packaged himself to appeal to the broadest audience possible. In his books and sermons, Osteen quotes very little scripture, opting instead to tell uplifting personal anecdotes. He avoids controversy, and rarely appears on Christian TV. In a popular YouTube clip, he declines to confirm Larry King’s suggestion that only those who believe in Jesus will go to heaven. Video: Watch a clip from Joel Osteen’s Larry King appearance Osteen is often derided as Christianity Lite, but he is more like Positivity Extreme. “Cast down anything negative, any thought that brings fear, worry, doubt, or unbelief,” he urges. “Your attitude should be: ‘I refuse to go backward. I am going forward with God. I am going to be the person he wants me to be. I’m going to fulfill my destiny.’” Telling yourself you are poor, or broke, or stuck in a dead-end job is a form of sin and “invites more negativity into your life,” he writes. Instead, you have to “program your mind for success,” wake up every morning and tell yourself, “God is guiding and directing my steps.” The advice is exactly like the message of The Secret, or any number of American self-help blockbusters that edge toward magical thinking, except that the religious context adds another dimension. Your Best Life Now, which has fueled a TV show that Osteen claims is now seen in 200 million homes worldwide, opens with a story of a man on vacation in Hawaii. He was “a good man who had achieved a modest measure of success, but he was coasting along, thinking that he’d already reached his limits.” While sightseeing, he and his wife admired a gorgeous house on a hill. “I can’t even imagine living in a place like that,” he said. For this bit of self-deprecation and modesty, Osteen pities the man: “His own thoughts and attitudes,” he writes, “were condemning him to mediocrity,” or what is known in the gospel as the “defeated life.” A few pages later comes the corrective, the model of a “victor” and not a “victim.” Osteen and his wife, Victoria, are walking around their neighborhood in Houston when they pass a beautiful house being built. “Most of the other homes around us were one-story, ranch-style homes that were forty to fifty years old, but this house was a large two-story home, with high ceilings and oversized windows,” he writes. “It was a lovely, inspiring place.” Victoria desperately wanted a house “just like it,” but Joel was worried about how stretched they already were. “Thinking of our bank account and my income at the time, it seemed impossible to me,” he writes. But this, of course, is an example of ungodly, negative thinking. With her unwavering faith, Victoria wouldn’t let it drop. Soon she convinced Joel and then he, too, started to believe that “God could bring it to pass.” There is no explanation of how they came to own such a house—whether Osteen worked hard to grow his ministry or got rich from his TV show or received an inheritance from his father’s estate. In this story they are standing in for an average middle-class couple who set their sights on a bigger house and believed, despite all the financial evidence, that God would bestow it upon them, like a gift. And he did. Theologically, the prosperity gospel has always infuriated many mainstream evangelical pastors. Rick Warren, whose book The Purpose Driven Life outsold Osteen’s, told Time, “This idea that God wants everybody to be wealthy? There is a word for that: baloney. It’s creating a false idol. You don’t measure your self-worth by your net worth. I can show you millions of faithful followers of Christ who live in poverty. Why isn’t everyone in the church a millionaire?” In 2005, a group of African American pastors met to denounce prosperity megapreachers for promoting a Jesus who is more like a “cosmic bellhop,” as one pastor put it, than the engaged Jesus of the civil-rights era who looked after the poor. More recently, critics have begun to argue that the prosperity gospel, echoed in churches across the country, might have played a part in the economic collapse. In 2008, in the online magazine Religion Dispatches, Jonathan Walton, a professor of religious studies at the University of California at Riverside, warned: Narratives of how “God blessed me with my first house despite my credit” were common … Sermons declaring “It’s your season of overflow” supplanted messages of economic sobriety and disinterested sacrifice. Yet as folks were testifying about “what God can do,” little attention was paid to a predatory subprime-mortgage industry, relaxed credit standards, or the dangers of using one’s home equity as an ATM. In 2004, Walton was researching a book about black televangelists. “I would hear consistent testimonies about how ‘once I was renting and now God let me own my own home,’ or ‘I was afraid of the loan officer, but God directed him to ignore my bad credit and blessed me with my first home,’” he says. “This trope was so common in these churches that I just became immune to it. Only later did I connect it to this disaster.” Demographically, the growth of the prosperity gospel tracks fairly closely to the pattern of foreclosure hot spots. Both spread in two particular kinds of communities—the exurban middle class and the urban poor. Many newer prosperity churches popped up around fringe suburban developments built in the 1990s and 2000s, says Walton. These are precisely the kinds of neighborhoods that have been decimated by foreclosures, according to Eric Halperin, of the Center for Responsible Lending. Zooming out a bit, Kate Bowler found that most new prosperity-gospel churches were built along the Sun Belt, particularly in California, Florida, and Arizona—all areas that were hard-hit by the mortgage crisis. Bowler, who, like Walton, was researching a book, spent a lot of time attending the “financial empowerment” seminars that are common at prosperity churches. Advisers would pay lip service to “sound financial practices,” she recalls, but overall they would send the opposite message: posters advertising the seminars featured big houses in the background, and the parking spots closest to the church were reserved for luxury cars. Nationally, the prosperity gospel has spread exponentially among African American and Latino congregations. This is also the other distinct pattern of foreclosures. “Hyper-segregated” urban communities were the worst off, says Halperin. Reliable data on foreclosures by race are not publicly available, but mortgages are tracked by both race and loan type, and subprime loans have tended to correspond to foreclosures. During the boom, roughly 40 percent of all loans going to Latinos nationwide were subprime loans; Latinos and African Americans were 28 percent and 37 percent more likely, respectively, to receive a higher-rate subprime loan than whites. In June, the Supreme Court ruled that state attorneys general had the authority to sue national banks for predatory lending. Even before that ruling, at least 17 lawsuits accusing various banks of treating racial minorities unfairly were already under way. (Bank of America’s Countrywide division—one of the companies Garay worked for—had earlier agreed to pay $8.4 billion in a multistate settlement.) One theme emerging in these suits is how banks teamed up with pastors to win over new customers for subprime loans. Beth Jacobson is a star witness for the City of Baltimore’s recent suit against Wells Fargo. Jacobson was a top loan officer in the bank’s subprime division for nine years, closing as much as $55 million worth of loans a year. Like many subprime-loan officers, Jacobson had no bank experience before working for Wells Fargo. The subprime officers were drawn from “an utterly different background” than the professional bankers, she told me. She had been running a small paralegal business; her co-workers had been car salespeople, or had worked in telemarketing. They were prized for their ability to hustle on the ground and “look you in the eye when they shook your hand,” she surmised. As a reward for good performance, the bank would sometimes send a Hummer limo to pick up Jacobson for a celebration, she said. She’d arrive at a bar and find all her co-workers drunk and her boss “doing body shots off a waitress.” The idea of reaching out to churches took off quickly, Jacobson recalls. The branch managers figured pastors had a lot of influence with their parishioners and could give the loan officers credibility and new customers. Jacobson remembers a conference call where sales managers discussed the new strategy. The plan was to send officers to guest-speak at church-sponsored “wealth-building seminars” like the ones Bowler attended, and dazzle the participants with the possibility of a new house. They would tell pastors that for every person who took out a mortgage, $350 would be donated to the church, or to a charity of the parishioner’s choice. “They wouldn’t say, ‘Hey, Mr. Minister. We want to give your people a bunch of subprime loans,” Jacobson told me. “They would say, ‘Your congregants will be homeowners! They will be able to live the American dream!’” Garay often tells his life story from the pulpit, as an inspiration to the many immigrants in his church, some legal, some not. He grew up an outsider—a citizen by birth, but living a marginal existence in a diverse, working-class neighborhood in Flushing, Queens. His mother left when he was 8, and he was raised mostly by two older brothers; he spent most of his time on the street. “I ate jars of peanut butter for dinner,” he says. The story of how he became a Christian begins in 1989, when he was 28 years old, and involves a large sum of money. He’d been selling drugs in Miami, then started using, and owed some dealers $30,000 that he didn’t have, and they were going to kill him. He was on his mattress one night, in despair, when a picture of Jesus up on his wall “winked at me.” Soon after, he became a born-again Christian, and he told everyone about it. The dealers, he says, then went away. He doesn’t offer much explanation; he just says, “They were after me. They were going to kill me. And then they just backed off.” He credits Jesus. Garay tried many churches, but they all felt alien and “dead” to him. “That’s not me, sitting quietly and saying ‘Thank you, God.’” Finally he came upon a Pentecostal prosperity church, much like the one he leads now. The church was full of miracles and real emotion, which drew him in, but it also offered practical benefits. The pastor pointed out Bible passages that referred to finances in specific terms, giving him images of wealth he could almost reach out and touch: “Give, and it shall be given to you; good measure, pressed down, and shaken together, and running over”—a passage that’s now often read at Garay’s church during tithing time. “Then it started happening. It started happening!” He enrolled in a community college and began selling roses from buckets in the backseat of his Honda (“no AC, no radio”). In no time, as he tells it, he had worked himself up to roses in plastic straws, laid neatly across the backseat of his Cadillac, with no water sloshing on the white leather. With this story, Garay hopes to convince his followers that God has a bounty for them, but that to get it they have to take the first step of faith. One analogy he likes to use is a box of gifts in heaven; if you never reach up to get it, then it won’t come down to you. It’s a curious mix of active (a step of faith) and passive (“It started happening!”). In Garay’s testimony, his life proceeds that way: part hard work, part miracle. He applied himself, eventually got married, and had children. One day, for no reason, he quit his job as a social worker counseling addicted juvenile delinquents. “I almost hit him with a frying pan,” Hazael, his wife, jokes. But the very same day, his mother-in-law walked into the house and said the bank was looking for a bilingual loan officer. He had no experience and had never used a computer. Yet he got the job and within a year was earning six figures. How did that happen? How did it all come together so neatly, one door opening the moment another had closed? When I asked him that, he smiled and pointed up at the sky. Garay is like a father figure to his parishioners; I met a few who had named their children after him or his wife. Parishioners told me stories about his coming with them to their court hearings, showing them how to buy a phone card or find a good school for their children or, for the more entrepreneurial, invest in a small business. Oral Roberts’s seed-faith concept is the source of much suspicion about prosperity churches; pastors, including Garay, ask their parishioners to give 10 percent of their income to the church. But to Garay, seed faith is the church’s central tenet. The tithe, he says, is tangible proof that a believer has taken the first step toward God. It is the spiritual equivalent of spending three years selling flowers door-to-door. He often tells what’s known as Jesus’ parable of the three servants, from Matthew. A lord gives three of his servants money. Two invest the money and double their profit, and a third hides his in the ground. When the master returns, he declares the third “wicked and lazy” and a “worthless slave,” and casts him into the “outer darkness.” “To receive God’s bounty, you cannot hide your head in the sand,” Garay preaches. “You have to take a leap of faith.” I asked Garay why his parishioner Billy Gonzales, who earns barely $25,000 and has no money to fix his car, should donate 10 percent of his income. “Because it gives him a new mentality. It teaches him that money can breed more money, that you can have money in your pocket on Saturday morning even though you got paid Friday night. People who support the church week after week have a dedication. Those who just give $5 or $10 here and there, you’ll hear them have the same problems week after week.” Jackson Lears would add another explanation: tithing is like the moment the gambler lays his money down on the table—it “promises at least a fleeting opportunity to contact a realm where hope is alive,” he writes. Without it, there’s only the dull regularity of $2,000 a month and a dead car. During the boom years, Apostle Garay, as he is known in church, was brasher than he is now. He spoke in very specific terms during church services, promising that a $100 offering would yield a $10,000 return: “This is not my promise. It is God’s promise, and he will make it happen!” he would say. While it sounds absurd, this kind of message can have a positive influence, according to Tony Tian-Ren Lin, a researcher at the University of Virginia who has made a close study of Latino prosperity gospel congregations over the years. These churches typically take in people who had “been basically dropped into the world from pretty primitive settings”—small towns in Latin America with no electricity or running water and very little educational opportunity. In their new congregation, their pastor slowly walks them through life in the U.S., both inside and outside of church, until they become more confident. “In Mexico, nobody ever told them they could do anything,” says Lin, who was himself raised in Argentina. He finds the message at prosperity churches to be quintessentially American. “They are taught they can do absolutely anything, and it’s God’s will. They become part of the elect, the chosen. They get swept up in the manifest destiny, this idea that God has lifted Americans above everyone else.” At Casa del Padre, the celebration of consumer culture is quite visible, along with a sense of boundless opportunity. The people in the church, for instance, tend to have very expensive cell phones—never the free ones that come with a calling plan, nor the sort that can be bought cheaply at a convenience store. “They start wanting what’s considered the best and the most technologically advanced in this country,” Lin says. Garay’s church, it seems to me, teaches them that they deserve these things, so they go about getting them, with few resources and infinite adaptability. Before the crash, one group of young men got a $12,000 loan to start a landscaping company; another man bought a $270,000 house. One of the church’s Bible-study leaders, who’d grown up in a remote village in Mexico with an abusive, alcoholic father, had become a very successful contractor by the height of the boom, managing 30 men on multiple jobs and winning contracts to paint luxury subdivisions in the exurbs. The tenets of the prosperity gospel, and the practical advice that pastors often give their parishioners, help immigrants learn “not just how to survive but how to thrive; not just live paycheck to paycheck but handle money—manage complicated payrolls, invest in equipment,” Lin told me. Along the way, they become assimilated. “While they’re trying to be closer to God, instead they become American,” he says, from their optimism and entrepreneurialism to the very nature of their dreams. These days, Garay’s message is more subdued than it was at the height of the boom, but not substantially different. In a sermon on Father’s Day, he did not make specific claims of financial returns on investments but instead spoke vaguely about how his congregation’s prospects were “good and going to get better.” After church, I asked Garay about how the gospel was holding up in the recession. It was a hot summer day, and although he had just finished one of his feverish two-hour sermons, he seemed energized rather than drained. “Look,” he said, and rounded his hands as if to indicate a protective shield. “The recession has not hit my church.” He reminded me that when he had asked how many people were out of work, only four people out of about 100 there had raised their hands. But in a church where failure is seen as a kind of sin, it seems credulous at best to expect an honest response to that question. I later met at least one person—Billy Gonzales’s younger brother—who didn’t have a job but hadn’t raised his hand, because he thought he’d “have one lined up soon.” Garay describes the recession as God’s judgment—for abortion, taking prayer out of school, bikinis on television, “Desperate Housewives, whatever.” But God is also giving us a two-year window to repent, he says. He calculates that we’ve had five years of extreme plenty and now the clock is running out, based on the biblical story of Joseph and the great famine—seven years of plenty followed by seven years of a failed harvest. If we don’t repent, we will experience “misery like we have never known it.” These days, if any parishioners or fellow pastors ask Garay for investment advice, he tells them to wait two years before making a move. Like much of Garay’s advice, this recommendation is partly grounded in economic reality, and partly drawn from mystical notions about a biblical calendar. “I’m very real,” he once told me. “If you want to eat at Red Lobster, you better have a Red Lobster paycheck, and enough left over to pay your electric bill. But I’ve also seen miracles of God.” Later, during one of our talks over coffee, his wife echoed the sentiment. “If you can’t afford a house, you shouldn’t buy it,” Hazael said, when I asked whether the prosperity gospel might push people to take irresponsible risks. “But if the Lord is telling you to ‘take that first step and I will provide,’ then you have to believe.” I asked Garay many times about a connection between the mortgage crisis and the gospel, but he does not really see one. From everything he says about his time as a loan officer, it seems he was involved in the kinds of subprime loans that led to so many foreclosures. He was hired in Countrywide’s emerging-markets division, which meant he was expected to target the growing Latino community in the area. Like Beth Jacobson, he had no previous experience, but was valued for his connections and hustle. He makes astute criticisms of the risky loans but, like many former loan officers, he does so with a curious sense of distance, as if he had been just a cog in the machine. Loans got “too easy,” he says. “Mortgages would be $1,500 a month, and that was all [the loan applicants] made in a month,” he recalls, “but they figured they would rent the basement.” He says sometimes he told people the loans were going to kill them, but they would plead, “Please help me, please. I want a house.” Because he was becoming an increasingly prominent pastor at the time, many people who came to see him assumed he was the president of the bank and could protect them, he recalls. Garay says as far as he knows no one in his church defaulted. But at a bare minimum, some of his parishioners have run into intense financial difficulties, sometimes defaulting soon after leaving the congregation. The man who’d bought the $270,000 house threw a huge housewarming party and invited everyone from church. He gave a weepy testimony about the house God had given him, passing around the title for all to see. At the time, he was working as a handyman, putting up drywall, painting, roofing, and doing other odd jobs. Within three months he had three families living in the three-bedroom house, and he still could not keep up with the payments. After five months, he went into foreclosure and ducked out of the country. Tony Lin is careful—and of course correct—to say that neither immigrants nor Latinos caused the crash; adherents of every stripe exhibited the same sort of magical thinking about finances, as did millions of nonbelievers. Still, he recalls, “I wasn’t very surprised when the whole subprime-mortgage thing blew up. I’m sure a loan officer never said, ‘God wants you to have a house.’ But you’ve already been taught that. Now here comes the loan officer saying, ‘Sign here, and this house will be yours.’ It feels like a gift from God. It’s the perfect fuel for the crisis.” The guys who’d started the landscaping company also fared badly. They had a pretty good spring and summer in 2007, their first year of operation, and then business started to fall off. In church they kept giving positive testimonies, bragging about their success. But by October, they’d begun selling off their equipment; eventually they lost the business and had to go into hiding. The most interesting part of the story is the epilogue. One of the partners in the group, whom I’ll call Luis, eventually moved to Richmond, and an acquaintance from Casa del Padre told me that he’d recently run into him there. Luis hadn’t been embittered by the experience; he blamed the disaster on the fact that he’d started working on Sundays instead of going to church. Luis asked the man to come visit with some of the parishioners of his new church, to confirm that he had once been a great success. As they talked, he seemed happy and positive. “He wasn’t angry that things didn’t work out. He wasn’t angry at God. He looked back at those days and thought, ‘I can still have everything. Look what God gave me. That was a time when I had it all.’” By many measures, Billy Gonzales does not have it all. He lives with his wife and three children in a tiny apartment on the back side of a development at the edge of town, where people hang out on the stoop until all hours. He works 45 minutes away and his car has been broken down for three months, and he does not have any money to fix it. Every day at work he is faced with a vision of what he does not have. He works for a man who just built a $4 million house—one of four the man owns. Gonzales’s job is to make sure every wine glass, garden statue, and book is dusted and in its proper place. Yet when I talked to Gonzales he was like a child hearing the ice-cream truck, or a man newly in love. “I’m crazy! Just crazy,” he said, meaning crazy for the Lord, and giving little jumps out of his chair. I visited Gonzales one evening after he’d had a long day at work; his brother had given him a ride home. Gonzales has a wide, earnest face that can look like a child’s or, if he is tired, like an old man’s. He sat in his favorite squeaky leather chair with his Bible in one hand and a soccer ball at his feet. The sofas in the tiny living room are actually backseats ripped out of cars, with cushions thrown on them. He got the cushions from a man he once shared a trailer with, and they turned out to be infested with cockroaches. As we talked, the roaches crawled across the floor or on the sofas. Gonzales apologized but did not pay them much attention. He told me he feels pity for his employer. He assumes the man must have been close to God at one point, or at least his family must have been, “because the rich are closer to God.” But now the man has lost his way. He laughs when Gonzales talks to him about Jesus, and he wastes his money, buying $500 birdhouses and hiring Gonzales to clean them. Gonzales was once lost too. He came from a big family in Guatemala so poor “that the poor people would call us poor.” For a while after he came to the U.S., he sent money home, but then like many of his friends he lost the rhythm of work. Instead, he was snorting cocaine and getting drunk four nights a week. “I hated Americans. I hated them,” he said, and I had trouble believing him, given his now-innocent, open demeanor. He says that back then, he spent most of his days fantasizing about killing his brother-in-law, whom he hated for no reason he can remember. His conversion came two years ago, in the form of a sudden vision like Garay’s. One night, in a drugged-out haze, he saw a polished, shimmery stone. He later realized it was a jewel, one of the many treasures in God’s vast storehouse, destined for him. Eventually he made his way to Garay, whom he now calls his father. When I mentioned Gonzales to Garay, the pastor praised him as a model congregant. Indeed, by any standard Gonzales is an admirable man. He is 24, married, works hard, and limits his extracurricular activities to Bible study and soccer. It took me a few visits to realize that two of the three small children in the house are not his. He married a woman with two sons and takes care of them. They call him Papa and he reads to them at night and speaks to them gently, exactly the way he speaks to his own baby son. He has every reason to be frustrated with his circumstances, but I never once saw him express anything but delight. The gospel obviously grounds Gonzales in a very concrete way. But I can also see how, one day, it might send him floating into the air. “I want to buy a house,” he confessed to me one evening this summer. It turned out his lease was almost up, and he needed to move in the fall. “Not a small one but a really huge one, a nice one. With six bedrooms and a kitchen and living room. I know, it’s crazy! But nothing is impossible! God, you saved my life,” he said, no longer speaking to me. “You saved my life, and now you will give me a gift. Now I’m crazy!” Last I heard, he and Garay were house-hunting together. A year or so after the crash, there are signs of a new sobriety—higher savings rates, for example, and a reduction in conspicuous spending. But it’s hard to imagine Americans reverting to frugality the way, say, the Japanese did during the “lost decade” after their economy crashed. If by stereotype the Japanese are savers, then Americans are consumers, and ever hopeful. Already, countless “entrepreneurs” are finding a silver lining in the mortgage crisis, buying up foreclosed lots—often sight unseen, based on Web listings alone—in desolate parts of Cleveland and Phoenix and other places where abandoned houses can sometimes be had for a few thousand dollars or less. The buyers pay these bargain-basement prices eagerly, in the belief that the houses must be great deals, when they are just as likely to be overtaken by mold, or have every one of their doors and windows missing and the roof caving in. In America there is always a next play, another opportunity, an “unearned blessing” that can make up for a lifetime of disappointment. It is not all that surprising that the prosperity gospel persists despite its obvious failure to pay off. Much of popular religion these days is characterized by a vast gap between aspirations and reality. Few of Sarah Palin’s religious compatriots were shocked by her messy family life, because they’ve grown used to the paradoxes; some of the most socially conservative evangelical churches also have extremely high rates of teenage pregnancies, out-of-wedlock births, and divorce. As Garay likes to say, “What you have is nothing compared to what you will have.” The unpleasant reality—an inadequate paycheck, a pregnant daughter, a recession—is invisible. It’s your ability to see beyond such things, your willing blindness to even the most hopeless-seeming circumstances, that makes you a certain kind of modern Christian, and a 21st-century American. There is the kind of hope that President Obama talks about, and that Clinton did before him—steady, uplifting, assured. And there is Garay’s kind of hope, which perhaps for many people better reflects the reality of their lives. Garay’s is a faith that, for all its seeming confidence, hints at desperation, at circumstances gone so far wrong that they can only be made right by a sudden, unexpected jackpot. Once, I asked Garay how you would know for certain if God had told you to buy a house, and he answered like a roulette dealer. “Ten Christians will say that God told them to buy a house. In nine of the cases, it will go bad. The 10th one is the real Christian.” And the other nine? “For them, there’s always another house.” text/html http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1252433543 [Author\'s note: What I write here is controversial, perhaps even inflammatory, but unequivocally true. The daily incidents unfolding in south India, at the missionaries and churches had been verified thoroughly during my trip last year, in direct contact with the victims, re-converts, village and panchayat officers. More than anything, what really prodded me to address this chilling milieu is a simple fact, I also, in my liberal and open mindedness have been the unfortunate and involuntary beneficiary of religious intolerance, especially the subversive conversion machinations through my two marriages and a relationship. It is eerily corroborative with the incidents presented here.] \"Religious intolerance was inevitably born with the belief in one God.\" —Sigmund Freud \"The oldest aspects of Hindu mythology give place to the most profound and subtle utterances about the nature of ultimate reality, it is in itself a liberal education in humility, tolerance and suspense of judgment.\" —Aldous Huxley (Swans - July 27, 2009) Despite the decades that slipped by, I distinctly remember the smells and sounds of the remote south Indian villages. In the innocent years dissolved, you could hear mothers calling out to their kids to come home for supper at sunset. Sunsets demarcated life from slumber. Standing on the high verandahs you could hear the thunderous stampede of returning cattle from grazing, and smell and see the distant clouds of billowing dust permeated with the golden rays of the descending sun. Farm boys and shepherds in cussing repartees in rural dialects, blessed by the tolling bells of evening prayers at a nearby temple; coteries of village elders discussing crops and older couples visiting neighbors, and an occasional distant melancholic flute coaxing the wind to carry the ironies of past paradises. After a hot supper on the verandah, under the fading light, folding cots or reed mats were set up for the nights under the twinkling eternity and soothing conversation of leaves and the wind. It was peaceful and ethereal, almost therapeutic for the tired souls and revelatory for the young ones. Bedtime stories proliferated from grandmothers and great aunts. Ah, that innocence and dusty rural fragrance of daily struggles expiated our mendacious and jaded city souls. All is lost now, assailed by the din of fervent missionaries. (please click on the source link to read the complete article) text/html http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1240366641 This week, Barack Obama is expected to sign into law the GIVE Act, which aims to increase volunteering. It gives young people a way to pay for education with public service. Some right wingers have been squawking because the plan excludes religious activities like church attendance and outreach from the social service hours that can be applied for credit. Personally, I'm relieved. I want my taxes to pay for programs with clear benefits, and I want the wall separating church and state repaired. But before we secular types get all high and mighty we should take a look at why some people think that faith-based programs are necessary for the good of society. Several studies (e.g. here and here) show that religious people give more dollars and volunteer hours to charity than do nonbelievers. Evangelical Christians have been trumpeting these findings: No matter what you may think about our exclusive offer of salvation, our religion is a social good. As a former Evangelical I tend toward skepticism, especially when it comes to data that have been assembled and promoted by ideologues. And yet I'm inclined to suspect that these results tap into something real. Sociologists have found that tribal identity increases altruism toward other members of the tribe (though at the expense of outsiders). In many ways, a religion functions as a tribe. Besides ordinary in-group/out-group effects, religions explicitly teach that we are made to serve something larger than ourselves. They encourage members to give of themselves to gods, co-religionists and others -- in part by promising deferred compensation. But perhaps even more importantly, they provide a community and structure for doing so. Let's assume that religious people are more generous or altruistic. An interesting follow-up question is this: Where is this generosity directed? Does it serve the cause of goodness? By a scientific definition of altruism, suicide bombing is an altruistic act supported by religious attendance. It is the individual sacrificing his life (and reproductive potential) in the service of another individual or the greater collective -- in this case Allah, Islam, the Muslim brotherhood. But is it as a social good? Within conservative Christianity, a tremendous amount of donated time and money is solicited for conversion activities: Go ye therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Is religious recruiting a social good? On this, most evangelists and I would have opposite opinions, at least about Christian recruiting. (We might be more in agreement about the proselytizing done by Hare Krishnas or Scientologists.) It is only fair to give evangelical missionaries credit for their intentions. If you truly believe the unsaved are going to be tortured eternally, then there is no greater good than to spend your life saving their souls. By comparison, nothing else matters. A missionary, operating on this premise, may experience herself as highly generous, because she is. She also might protest that independent of afterlife benefits, accepting Jesus makes people happy in this life, here and now. This is true. Sometimes. Jesus worship can fill people with deep joy. It can get alcoholics to stop drinking and abusers to stop abusing. It can save marriages. But sometimes the opposite happens. (See thousands of testimonials at exChristian.net.) Pentecostals point to happy African church-going children singing and dancing. A former Pentecostal might point to the African children who have been kicked out of their communities or killed because new converts to Pentecostalism saw them as witches and took their Bibles literally. The net here and now benefits of proselytizing are arguable. A darker way to look at Christian "outreach" is as an example of how viral beliefs, sometimes called meme complexes, can exploit the human tendency toward altruism. What I mean is that a belief set can redirect altruistic do-gooder impulses away from activities that actually serve human well-being and onto activities that serve to replicate the belief set itself. When the Asian tsunami hit, a highly successful Seattle mega church directed members to do three things: pray for people who were affected, give to Mars Hill Church, and give to the Mars Hill church-building work in India. Why not reverse this -- pray for Mars Hill church, pray for our missionary work, and give money to the people who were affected? Churches that make suggestions like these are, on average, shrinking. Churches that follow the Mars Hill model are growing. In the first three pages of his book, Breaking the Spell, Daniel Dennett beautifully narrates how a similar redirection occurs in nature. An ant climbs to the top of a stem of grass and lingers there. Why? Not because it is adaptive for the ant. Rather, another organism has taken charge of the ant's brain and to reproduce it needs the ant to be eaten by a cow. When a person's altruistic impulses are directed toward winning converts, it is valid to ask whether they are actually serving human well-being or simply serving a mind virus. If we don't count their recruiting activities, do Evangelical Christians actually give more than non-religious? Do they give more to things that we humans pretty much agree are social goods? Sorry, all you fellow secularists, though the gap narrows the answer still appears to be yes. Besides outreach, giving to churches funds what economists call "club goods". Churches often do a wonderful job of providing and organizing members services: warm meals for kids with sick parents, adventures for teenagers, housing for young adults, support during bereavement, even free counseling or legal services. And with regard to outsiders, even if food, medical care, or friendship is offered primarily as bait to set a fish hook, the food and medical care are real. But even beyond the money given to churches, religious people appear to give more to ordinary charities than secular folks do. At least based on self report data, religious participation and religious giving are positively correlated with giving to nonreligious charities like educational institutions, social services, even blood banks. This appears to hold true for the 40ish percent of Americans who self-describe as Evangelical or born again as well as their more theologically open counterparts. If this makes those of us who are freethinkers squirm a bit, perhaps it should. You might protest that that charity should be only a way station on the road to justice, and that your energies are better spent working for structural change. Many secular folks and liberal people of faith believe this is true. I know I do. As a non-theist, I once sat on the nonprofit board of an organization called the Washington Association of Churches because their mission was my mission: Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly. Like me, they sought solutions that went beyond charity. But even if justice is the destination, those way stations are still needed. Most of us agree that both generosity and justice are virtues. We prefer to live in a world where both are in rich supply. Maybe, now that freethinkers are coming out of the closet it is time for us to begin thinking about how to create our own communities and structures that empower personal generosity. Since we don't have a sales mandate or a promise of treasure laid up in Heaven, we -- unlike many Christians -- are free to give without expecting something back except maybe a bit of good will. Recently Seattle Atheists organized a blood drive for members. Now, that's what I'm talking about. text/html http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1237950973 World Vision, the world’s largest Christian church mission agency, has traditionally been closely linked with successive American governments. The former US Ambassador for International Religious Freedoms, Dr Robert Seiple, was World Vision chief for 11 years till 1998 when he was picked by former president, Bill Clinton, to head the office of International Religious Freedoms. Around the period when Seiple was the president of World Vision, its vice-president from 1993 to 1998 was Andrew S. Natsios. He is now the administrator of the US Agency for International Development (USAID). For more than 40 years, USAID has been the leading government agency providing economic and humanitarian assistance to developing countries. World Vision’s focus is children and community development. It is involved in more than 162 projects in 25 states. It projects its community development programmes as “holistic development”. This is implemented through Area Development Programmes (ADP). Each ADP works in an area that is contiguous geographically, economically or ethnically. These programmes provide access to clean drinking water, healthcare, education and setting up of income generating projects. But infused with such development works is the spiritual component - Bible classes. In India, World Vision projects itself as a “Christian relief and development agency with more than 40 years experience in working with the poorest of the poor in India without respect to race, region, religion, gender or caste.” However, Tehelka has in its possession US-based World Vision Inc.’s financial statement filed before the Internal Revenue Service, wherein, it is classified as a Christian church ministry. In any case, its mission statement is self-explanatory: “World Vision is an international partnership of Christians whose mission is to follow our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, in working with the poor and oppressed, to promote human transformation, seek justice and bear witness to the Good News of the Kingdom of God.” Though World Vision has consultative status with UNESCO and partnerships with UN agencies like UNICEF, WHO, UNHCR and ILO, the fact is that its financial records reveal that it has funded evangelical activities all over the world including India. World Vision uses its international clout and its close links with the US government through USAID to network with governments and corporate entities in the developing world. World Vision has an ongoing channel of interaction with the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII); in its 2003 financial report it states that “the Rural Development Department of the Government of Assam recognized World Vision India as a leading development agency in the state and has recommended that World Vision be the choice for receiving bilateral funds. The government has also sought World Vision’s assistance in creating a proposal for US$ 80 million for development work in the state.” The income and expenditure account for the year ended September 30, 2002 shows that its total income was Rs 95.5 crores, which included foreign contribution of Rs 87.8 crores. For an organisation that claims to be only involved in development and relief work, it is quite secretive about its positioning and exact nature of activities. When approached by Tehelka as part of its undercover operation for an interview, World Vision India’s national director, Dr Jayakumar Christian, after having agreed to the interview backed out because he wanted copies of the fictitious Christian magazine that Tehelka claimed to be representing. However, what goes unnoticed by the governments and the corporate world is World Vision India’s evangelical missions as part of its development agenda. Proselytisation (conversion of faith) is an integral part of its provision of development services under its much-touted ADP programmes. Though none of the literature published by World Vision India even mentions its evangelisation missions, foreign publications of World Vision India proudly proclaim its “spiritual” component. Take, for instance, World Vision New Zealand’s report (4 September 2002) on the funding of ADP in Dahod, Gujarat. Under the head, “spiritual development” the report states: “Held a vacation Bible school for 150 children from different villages. The children participated in games, Bible quizzes, drama and other activities. Organised a one-day spiritual retreat for 40 young people and a children’s Christmas party. Each of Dahod’s 45 villages chose five needy children to attend the party.” In Dumaria, Banka district, eastern Bihar, “the ADP supports local churches by running leadership-training courses for pastors and church leaders.” What has an Area Development Programme (ADP) got to do with running leadership training courses for pastors and church leaders? Incidentally, World Vision New Zealand funds ADP programmes in the tribal pockets of India. The New Zealand Government’s Voluntary Agencies Support Scheme (VASS) jointly fund the two-year project, the NZ government matching World Vision contributions on a 2:1 basis. There are many other instances of evangelical programmes run by World Vision India. In the Gajapati ADP, situated in Gumma Block of Orissa’s Gajapati district, a World Vision report admits that “Canadian missionaries have worked in the area for just over 50 years and today 85-90 percent of the community is Christian. However, local church leaders had little understanding of the importance of their role in community development. ADP staff build relationships with these leaders to improve church co-operation and participation in development initiatives.” Here World Vision organised two training camps for local church leaders in holistic development. In Mayurbhanj, again in Orissa, World Vision regularly organises spiritual development programmes as part of its ADP package. The World Vision report says: “Opposition to Christian workers and organisations flares up occasionally in this area, generally from those with vested interests in tribal people remaining illiterate and powerless. World Vision supports local churches by organising leadership courses for pastors and church leaders.” In India is active in Bhil tribal areas and openly admits its evangelical intentions: “The Bhil people worship ancestral spirits but also celebrate all the Hindu festivals. Their superstitions about evil spirits make them suspicious of change, which hinders community development. ADP staff live among the Bhil people they work with, gaining the villagers’ trust and showing their Christian love for the people by their actions and commitment.” This being the case it is not surprising that World Vision India was honoured with the 2003 Mahatma Gandhi Award for Social Justice. This award is hosted by the All India Christian Council. Incidentally, Joseph D’Souza who was AICC’s President during that year also heads an evangelical network, Operation Mobilisation, in India. Operation Mobilisation, again, is an American missionary organisation. It was founded by Georg Verwer and today is a global ministry “committed to working in partnership with churches and other Christian organisations for the purpose of World mission.” Somebody should bell the cat! By Dr. Mrs. Hilda Raja I know about World Vision personally because many of my students were recruited to work in it. But invariably at the interview the question which they asked is about "evangalisation". Even a friend of mine who had applied for a chartered accountant post in response to an advertisement, was asked not of his professional and knowledge skills but about evengalisation. He came home and shared this with me and wanted to know if World Vision was a purely a development organization or one for evangalisation. Poor fellow does not know that development is the cover up for its evangalisation. At a public meeting I raised this issue in Chennai. I had even responded to Mani Shankar Iyer who stated that to his knowledge there is not a single Christian development agency involved in evangalisation. I reacted to that by citing the case of World Vision. It was published in the papers. I can cite quite a few examples. World Vision will not recruit a single non-Christian, no matter the competence. They will not even recruit a Catholic because they do not trust the Catholics. They once offered one of my Catholic students a job provided she leaves the Catholic church and joins in a Protestant church. She did convert because she was in dire need of a job for financial support. Two Brahmins were converted to the Protestant church and placed in high official positions. In fact World Vision looks out for Brahmin converts to make them show pieces. These head the various departments which is highly remunerative. This is my own micro-level first hand knowledge. So what will it be on the all India level? World Vision has a narrow, myopic vision of the world where their main agenda is evangalisation. The government of India must be aware of it. I have been always advocating for a ban on foreign funds. China, France and so many countries will not tolerate what India not only tolerates but even abets. The fight against terrorism will be futile unless and until foreign funds for "development" are monitored and banned. Dr. Mrs. Hilda Raja is a retired professor of social sciences from Stella Maris College, Chennai (Madras). She is Catholic by religion and an outspoken critic of religious conversion as it is practiced by Christian missionaries in India. text/html http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1237950832 Mangalore, Mar 19: In connection with indulging in rampage in a banana plantation belonging to Babbukatte Nityadhar Church and trying to disrupt peace in the region, Ullal policemen arrested seven persons on Wednesday March 18. They are Jayson Verghese (23), Vijit Sunny Rozario (21), Araki Alfred (20), Roshan Cutinho (26), all from Nityadhar Nagar and Ronald Roshan (22), a resident of Kuttar Prakash Nagar. They were produced in the court on Wednesday. On Monday morning, the banana plantation was found to have been damaged heavily to look as if people belonging to a particular community had barged into the plantation, and a saffron flag had been planted there, signifying that Hindu outfits had been involved with the destruction. The incident took place at a time when Hindu Samajotsav was being organized in the city. The policemen said that during interrogation, the arrested persons revealed, they wanted to disturb the peace in the region by projecting the incident as a handiwork of a particular community. Banana Plantation that was damaged While making inquiries about those who inflicted the above damage, the policemen could by chance, lay their hands on the two accused, who had burnt down a motor bike on November 30 near Pandit House. Joy D'Souza (20) and Calvin Johnson D'Souza, from Nityadhar Nagar, accused of this act, were arrested and produced in the court on Wednesday. The policemen are also looking at the possibility of these two having been also involved with the destruction of the banana plantation. Under the guidance of the city rural inspector Lingappa Poojary, Ullal sub-inspector of police Shivprakash has been conducting investigation. text/html http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1237950739 “In the night, we stumble over the things and become acutely conscious of their separateness. But the day reveals to us the great unity which combines them all. Similarly, the man who is enlightened at once realizes the spiritual unity reigning supreme over all the differences of races, creeds and colours, and his mind, therefore, no longer awkwardly stumbles over individual facts of separateness, accepting them as final.” - Rabindranath Tagore The Upanishads describe Brahman as the One without the other (ekamevadvitiyam). Jehovah revealed himself to Moses as the only God of the Jews, according to the Bible. There is no God other than Allah, says Quran. If God is one, why should his followers fight bloody battles in his name? The short answer is that although all peoples and cultures have a God in some form or other, the word does not mean the same thing for everyone. Even within the same culture, its meaning varies representing different grades and levels. For the same individual, the meaning of God changes with his spiritual evolution. The unity of God in monotheistic religions is quite different in concept, content and consequences from the spiritual unity sought by the Indic traditions, and indeed by all ancient religions, eastern and western. One way or no way The Abrahamic traditions make a sharp distinction between the Only True God and all other gods. The latter are regarded as usurpers, pretenders, impostors and abominations, if not handiwork of Devil. The God of the Semitic creeds is single, male, exclusive, external and all powerful. He is kind and benevolent to his followers (and them alone), though he could be ruthless in testing their loyalty to him. Above all, this God is jealous. He brooks no other god. He seeks to command supreme allegiance of the entire mankind by denying and destroying all other rival objects of worship. He is Ishmael-like, his hand against everyone and everyone’s hand against his. His followers are forbidden from believing in or worshipping any other god in any manner. “Slay everyman his brother, and every man his companion, and every man his neighbour,” ordered Jehovah to those who truly followed him. The only true god does not speak directly to his followers, the Chosen People, but only through a messenger or prophet. The importance of the messenger or the prophet cannot be overstated. He and he alone receives the word of the God, which is recorded in the Book. Everyone else has to learn it second-hand, and accept it as authentic even when it runs counter to one’s experience, or reason, or moral sense, or all of them taken together. No one else can have direct knowledge of it or aspire to enter the consciousness to which it was revealed. Belief in the word of God as spoken by the Prophet and as written in the Book is, therefore, all that is needed for qualifying as one of the faithful. This theology, which underlies Judaism, Christianity and Islam, speaks of One God but two humanities. The distinction between the believers and the unbelievers, the faithful and the heathen, the Mu’min and the Kaffir is as clear as between white and black, day and night. The prophet intercedes on behalf of the faithful on the Day of the Judgment and saves them (and them alone) from eternal Hell fire, which is the final destiny of mankind unless it believes in the only true God. Jehovah, the exclusive and jealous God of the Jews was adopted by Christianity and Islam. In their hand, he became even more exclusive, jealous and far more ambitious and bellicose. With Jews, he was their God alone. Other people had to be content with their gods, however false these gods might be. But with Christianity and Islam, he offered to become the God of all mankind, opening the floodgates of crusades, missionary subversion, and jihad. The first thing that strikes us is the irrationality of it all. The Book is the Word of God, because the Prophet or the Saviour has said so. The Prophet or the Saviour represents God, because the Book says so. There is no independent proof. The claims made on behalf of the Book and the Saviour or the Prophet cannot be referred to any system of logic, and they cannot be verified by any experience that human beings in this world are capable of. They are to be accepted on authority. More important is the intolerance that is the fruit of such bitter seeds. Other Gods must be dethroned, and so must also die those who speak in the name of other gods (Deut. 18.18-19). The “Articles of Religion” of the Anglican Church makes it clear, “They are also be had accursed that presume to say that every man shall be saved by the Law or Sect which he professeth… for holy Scripture set out unto us the Name of the Jesus Christ whereby men must be saved.” Misaq, the covenant into which Allah enters with Muslims (Ummatu Muhammadi) commands them to worship him alone. Nor is the intolerance merely passive, confined to the psychological level. The believers must strive, ceaselessly and by every means at their disposal, to convert the unbelievers to the new creed. Religions and cultures which preceded the arrival of the Prophet or the Saviour or the Messenger have to go and yield place to the religion and culture of the age of ‘enlightenment’. Finally, the lands of the believers must be made into launching pads for missions as well as military expeditions to be sent to the lands of the unbelievers, so that the latter are conquered and turned into lands of the believers. Ekam sat Any follower of Indic religions would at once realise that he is in an unfamiliar world, on a strange terrain. The Hindus do not call their gods either ‘One’ or ‘Many’. What they worship is One Reality, ekam sat, which is differently named. This Reality is everywhere, in everything, in every being. It is one and many at the same time and it also transcends such distinctions. Everything is an expression, an image, a play or an echo of this Reality. Reality is like Ganga. Different villages situated on it know it by different names, but they are all on the same river and nourished by the same waters. Just as sugar is sweet at all points, just as a nugget of pure gold is the same at all corners, just as the ocean is the same on all its shores, the Reality is the same everywhere at all times. In the language of philosophy, it is the material as well as the efficient cause of the world. It pervades, encompasses and transcends everything. It alone is. Nothing is outside it. In such an approach, the number of gods can be increased or decreased at will. It is a matter of classification or viewpoint. In the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, to a repeated question regarding the number of gods, Yajnavalkya began with the popular figure of 3306 and ended up by reducing them all to one. But this ‘one’ God of Yajnavalkya was not the God of Christian or Islamic theology. For, on further questioning, this one God turned out to be “Breath” (Prana), also called Brahma. Yajnavalkya was speaking the language of Yoga, of the Sadhana of Prana, the churning of the life force. In such an approach, it is not surprising that each Vedic god has a thousand names (Sahastranama), some of which he shares with other gods. Each god has multiple functions and multiple forms. Gods are friends, one and equal. Several gods are invoked together, are given offerings together. Each god is supreme in turn. All names are His/Her names, all forms are His/Her forms, all worship is His/Her worship, for this Ultimate Reality is without or above gender. As a result, praises and hymns that are given to one also belong to the other. God or path In this deeper approach, the distinction is not between a true One God and false Many Gods, but between a true way of worship and a false way of worship. Wherever there is sincerity, truth and self-giving in worship, the worship reaches the true altar by whatever name we may call it. “Whatever excellent praises are given to other divinities also belong to Indra, the bearer of the Thunderbolt” (Rig Veda 1.7.7). In a hymn addressed to Agni, the sage says “Whatever we offer in repeated and plentiful oblation to any other deity is assuredly offered to thee” (Rig Veda 1.26.6). In Gita, Lord Krishna assures us that “those who worship other gods with faith worship me” and that “I am the enjoyer of all sacrifices” (Gita 9.23-24). On the other hand, if worship is associated with ego, falsehood, conceit and deceit, then it is unavailing, though it may be offered to the most True God. This deeper approach to gods has bred a spirit of tolerance and freedom. It draws into a fellowship all those who accept the moral law and earnestly search for the truth. Here there are no blood-chilling cries of jihad, no Church to terrorise the heretics, no missionary machinations of conversions, no devils, no curses, no Hell fire. There is no need to despise others, or worry about bringing them to the ‘right’ path. This spiritual approach is variously called Vedic, Indic, Eastern or Oriental. But there is nothing geographical about it. It was shared by all ancient cultures. Ancient Rome, Greece and Egypt worshiped many gods, but were remarkably free from religious wars, although they had their full quota of other kinds of wars. Rome, Athens and Alexandria were open places where followers of different religions met and discussed freely. When St. Paul visited Athens, he was invited by Athenians to speak about his doctrines. In ancient Rome, followers of different sects built their temples and worshipped gods of their choice in their own way. This freedom disappeared when Christianity, the religion of One True God, took over. The author is Executive Editor, Corporate India, and lives in Mumbai text/html http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1237950657 (CBS) In life, Mother Teresa was an icon — for believers — of God's work on Earth. Her ministry to the poor of Calcutta was a world-renowned symbol of religious compassion. She was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. In a rare interview in 1986, Mother Teresa told CBS News she had a calling, based on unquestioned faith. "They are all children of God, loved and created by the same heart of God," she said. But now, it has emerged that Mother Teresa was so doubtful of her own faith that she feared being a hypocrite, reports CBS News correspondent Mark Phillips. In a new book that compiles letters she wrote to friends, superiors and confessors, her doubts are obvious. Shortly after beginning work in Calcutta's slums, the spirit left Mother Teresa. "Where is my faith?" she wrote. "Even deep down… there is nothing but emptiness and darkness... If there be God — please forgive me." Eight years later, she was still looking to reclaim her lost faith. "Such deep longing for God… Repulsed, empty, no faith, no love, no zeal," she said. As her fame increased, her faith refused to return. Her smile, she said, was a mask. "What do I labor for?" she asked in one letter. "If there be no God, there can be no soul. If there be no soul then, Jesus, You also are not true." "These are letters that were kept in the archbishop's house," the Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk told Phillips. The letters were gathered by Rev. Kolodiejchuk, the priest who's making the case to the Vatican for Mother Teresa's proposed sainthood. He said her obvious spiritual torment actually helps her case. "Now we have this new understanding, this new window into her interior life, and for me this seems to be the most heroic," said Rev. Kolodiejchuk. According to her letters, Mother Teresa died with her doubts. She had even stopped praying, she once said. The church decided to keep her letters, even though one of her dying wishes was that they be destroyed. Perhaps now we know why. text/html http://www.christianaggression.org/item_display.php?type=ARTICLES&id=1237431401 WHY did a film like Slumdog Millionaire, which conveys an utterly negative image of India — slums, exploitation, poverty, corruption, anti Muslim pogroms — create so many waves in the West, pre and post Oscars? And why does not the Indian government protest, as the Chinese would indeed have, for a twisted and perverted portrayal of its own reality? There are several answers: When the missionaries began to evangelise India, they quickly realised that Hinduism was not only practised by a huge majority, but that it was so deeply rooted that it stood as the only barrier to their subjugating the entire subcontinent. They therefore decided to demonise the religion, by multiplying what they perceived as its faults, by one hundred: caste, poverty, child marriage, superstition, widows, sati … Today, these exaggerations, which at best are based on quarter-truths, have come down to us and have been embedded not only in the minds of many Westerners, but also unfortunately, of much of India’s intelligentsia. We Westerners continue to suffer from a superiority complex over the socalled Third World in general and India in particular. Sitting in front of our television sets during prime time news, with a hefty steak on our table, we love to feel sorry for the misery of others, it secretly flatters our ego and makes us proud of our so-called ‘achievements’. That is why books such as The City of Joy by Dominique Lapierre, which gives the impression that India is a vast slum, or a film like Slumdog Millionaire, have such an impact. In this film, India’s foes have joined hands. Today, billions of dollars that innocent Westerners give to charity are used to convert the poorest of India with the help of enticements such as free medical aid, schooling and loans. If you see the Tamil Nadu coast posttsunami, there is a church every 500 metres. Once converted, these new Christians are taught that it is a sin to enter a temple, do puja, or even put tilak on one’s head, thus creating an imbalance in the Indian psyche (In an interview to a British newspaper, Danny Boyle confessed he wanted to be a Christian missionary when he was young and that he is still very much guided by these ideals — so much for his impartiality). Islamic fundamentalism also ruthlessly hounds India, as demonstrated by the 26/11 attacks on Mumbai, which are reminiscent of the brutality and savagery of a Timur, who killed 1,00,000 Hindus in a single act of savagery. Indian communists, in power in three states, are also hard at work to dismantle India’s cultural and spiritual inheritance. And finally, the Americanisation of India is creating havoc in the social and cultural fabric with its superficial glitter, even though it has proved a failure in the West. Slumdog plays cleverly with all these elements. Many of the West’s India-specialists are staunchly anti-Hindu, both because of their Christian upbringing and also as they perpetuate the tradition of Max Mueller, the first ‘Sankritist’ who said: “The Vedas is full of childish, silly, even monstrous conceptions. It is tedious, low, commonplace, it represents human nature on a low level of selfishness and worldliness and only here and there are a few rare sentiments that come from the depths of the soul”. This tradition is carried over by Indologists such as Witzel or Wendy Doniger in the US, and in France where scholars of the state-sponsored CNRS, and its affiliates such as EHESS, are always putting across in their books and articles detrimental images of India: caste, poverty, slums — and more than anything — their pet theories about ‘Hindu fundamentalism’. Can there be a more blatant lie? Hinduism has given refuge throughout the ages to those who were persecuted at home: the Christians of Syria, the Parsees, Armenians, the Jews of Jerusalem, and today the Tibetans, allowing them all to practise their religion freely. And finally, it is true that Indians, because they have been colonised for so long (unlike the Chinese) lack nationalism. Today much of the intellectual elite of India has lost touch with its cultural roots and looks to the West to solve its problems, ignoring its own tools, such as pranayama, hata-yoga or meditation, which are very old and possess infinite wisdom. Slumdog literally defecates on India from the first frame. Some scenes exist only in the perverted imagery of director Danny Boyle, because they are not in the book of Vikas Swarup, an Indian diplomat, on which the film is based. In the book, the hero of the film (who is not Muslim, but belongs to many religions: Ram Mohammad Thomas) does not spend his childhood in Bombay, but in a Catholic orphanage in Delhi. Jamal’s mother is not killed by “Hindu fanatics’, but she abandons her baby, of unknown religion, in a church. Jamal’s torture is not an idea of the television presenter, but of an American who is after the Russian who bought the television rights of the game. The tearful scene of the three children abandoned in the rain is also not in the book: Jamal and his heroine only meet when they are teenagers and they live in an apartment and not in a slum. And finally, yes, there still exists in India a lot of poverty and glaring gaps between the very rich and the extremely poor, but there is also immense wealth, both physical, spiritual and cultural — much more than in the West as a matter of fact. When will the West learn to look with less prejudice at India, a country that will supplant China in this century as the main Asian power? But this will require a new generation of Indologists, more sincere, less attached to their outdated Christian values, and Indians more proud of their own culture and less subservient to the West. fgautier26@gmail.com