Missionary cohabitating, Part II

From the pulpit, the typical pastor can see all kinds of people whose ears will burn during a sermon about what used to be called "living in sin."

There will be a few young adults who are cohabitating, as well as many moms and dads whose children quietly share street addresses with their significant others. There will be smiling couples the pastor married without asking many personal questions. There may be one or two divorced deacons with skeletons in their closets.

Few ministers have the courage to risk offending these people, said Scott Stanley of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver. Pastors are afraid that if they preach on cohabitation many people will get mad and that some will hit the exits.

"Pastors are getting very gun shy when it comes to issues of marriage, family and sex," he said. "Certainly, cohabitation would be right at the top of a list of these issues, along with premarital sex. They are so tired of getting beat up because they have hurt people's feelings.

"So they just give up and what you hear is silence from the church. All people are hearing are the 'Go!' signals from the media and the culture."

This silence seems to be having an effect, especially with women, according to a study by Stanley and his colleagues Sarah Whitton and Howard Markman.

The researchers found -- as expected -- that deeply religious men are much less likely to cohabitate before saying their vows. But, to their surprise, they learned that religious women are just as likely to move in before marriage as non-religious women.

These religious women probably think they are being cautious and "testing" their relationships. They may be convinced that they have to cohabitate in order to compete for love in this day and age. Some may believe that they will eventually be able to convert their live-in lovers to a traditional view of faith, marriage and family.

"Truth is, a woman gains nothing" by cohabitating before marriage, said journalist Michael McManus, author of "Marriage Savers: Helping Your Friends and Family Stay Married." Whatever their rationalizations, these women "are just being fools. ... Too many women today are allowing themselves to be used as playmates," he said.

Some church leaders, said McManus, have fallen silent on this issue because they no longer believe that sex outside of marriage is sin. Their silence is understandable. It is harder to understand the silence in so many congregations -- Catholic, Protestant and Orthodox -- that still affirm centuries of Judeo-Christian teachings on sexual morality.

Yet that silence is real. The "Marriage Savers" network (www.marriagesavers.org) is active in 163 cities and towns in 39 states and, wherever he travels to speak, McManus said he never sees more than one or two hands raised when he asks, "How many of you have ever heard a sermon on cohabitation?"

McManus is convinced most pastors simply do not know that 5 million unmarried Americans are living together. More than 60 percent of couples cohabitate before marriage. Pastors do not know that these women face higher levels of depression and lower levels of communication and commitment. They are more than 60 percent more likely to be assaulted and their children are endangered, as well.

Data from the University of Wisconsin provides a painful bottom line: couples that cohabit before marriage increase their odds of divorce by 50 percent. Researchers found that only 15 out of every 100 cohabitating couples were married after a decade.

The goal is not to attack couples with these numbers, said McManus. The goal is to warn them and to offer them mentors, in the form of married couples who understand the challenges that are ahead. The church needs to reach out to young people while they are dating, before the pressures built to live together. Parents need this information, too.

"We need to set a high standard, but we can do that in a loving way," he said. "What the church has done is collapse its standards. The modern church is -- by its silence -- giving young couples nothing to aspire to. They need a higher goal."

Missionary cohabitating, Part I

Church people have a name for what happens when young believers get romantically involved with unbelievers.

They call it "missionary dating," usually with one eyebrow raised in skepticism. Most of these relationships involve a good girl who is convinced that, with time, she can help a bad boy see the error of his ways and learn to walk the straight and narrow path.

Times have changed. According to new research, a surprising number of females have graduated from "missionary dating" to "missionary cohabitating."

"My theory is that women are willing to make sacrifices for their partners, once they have become emotionally attached," said researcher Scott Stanley, co-director of the Center for Marital and Family Studies at the University of Denver. "They're willing to make compromises to try to hang on to the relationship. Men won't do that. ...

"These girls are probably thinking, 'He's not perfect. But I love him and I can help him change.' Meanwhile, we know what the guys are thinking. They're thinking, 'I'm not sure she is the one I want. She's not my soul mate. But she'll do for now.' "

What is fascinating is that women who say they are deeply religious are just as likely to live with men before marriage as women who are not, wrote Stanley, Sarah Whitton and Howard Markman. Their work is summarized in "Maybe I Do: Interpersonal Commitment and Premarital or Non-Marital Cohabitation," written for the Journal of Family Issues.

Meanwhile, they found that men with strong religious beliefs are much less likely to cohabitate before marriage than non-religious men.

As a rule, people who lived together before marriage were less religious than those who refused to do so. Religious believers also said they were more committed to the institution of marriage. This is precisely what Stanley and the members of the University of Denver team expected to find as they interviewed 908 people who were married, engaged or cohabitating.

What surprised them was the sharp contrast between the choices made by religious women and religious men.

Do the math. There are currently more than 5 million unmarried American couples living together. Somewhere, there are a lot of religious women who have taken "missionary dating" to a whole new level. They seem to think that they can evangelize the men in their beds.

Meanwhile, Stanley and his colleagues are convinced that women who want solid, "until death do us part" marriages should be on the lookout for men who have strong religious beliefs, who are deeply committed to the institution of marriage and who, as a matter of conviction, reject cohabitation.

That may sound obvious, but it was in the data. If religious women want the odds on their side, they have to hunt for men who are willing to rebel against the conventional wisdom of this age.

"Given that 60 percent or more of couples now live together prior to marriage," wrote Stanley, Whitton and Markman, it seems that "not living together prior to marriage is becoming unconventional. From such a viewpoint, the unconventional couples who do not live together prior to marriage may be the couples with the more dedicated and religious males."

These unique religious males appear to be trying to "preserve the maximum differentiation between marriage and non-marriage. ... In the context of societal trends that increasingly blur the lines between cohabitation and marriage, this stance would represent the new unconventionality."

Stanley said that his team's research parallels other studies on one key point. Millions of young Americans are terrified of divorce and, thus, want to be careful before tying the knot. Young men seem to grasp that marriage does require major sacrifices, sacrifices that many are not willing to make.

Thus, they use cohabitation as a stalling device.

"Young men and women have accepted the message from their culture -- a message that is not supported by the data -- that cohabitation is a good way to prepare for marriage," he said. "They believe that they are in training for marriage. They are in training, but it seems that cohabitating is training them to develop exit strategies for getting out of relationships, including their marriages."

Topless culture wars in Idaho

Strange things happen when it gets hot in Moscow, Idaho.

In the summer of 1998, three women stayed cool by going topless on a major street. They were arrested, but a judge ruled that the local indecent exposure ordinance was too vague. The issue stayed on a low boil.

"That was a mini-tempest in a tea cup that just set the stage," said the Rev. Douglas Wilson of Christ Church, a conservative Presbyterian congregation in a town dominated by the University of Idaho. "What we're having right now is a lot bigger and more interesting than another debate about topless women."

The topless issue is back, but that's not the real story. While the Moscow City Council has attempted to map the topography of the female breast -- imagine lawyers defining "cleavage" -- many citizens are plunging into the philosophical issues at the heart of the topless culture wars.

Facing off in an Internet forum called Moscow Vision 2020, activists on both sides are letting it all hang out. This isn't just a debate about topless women, it's about burkas, bikinis, breastfeeding, marriage, rape, feminism, Nazis, the Vatican, slavery, hate crimes, Darwinism, property rights, postmodernism, birth control, media bias, free speech, sexual harassment, home schooling, gay rights, abortion, spirituality, heaven, hell, fundamentalism, Hollywood, parenting and, of course, the pledge of allegiance.

That's all.

The latest battle of the breasts began when 22-year-old Daisy Mace and her two roommates lost their jobs and fell behind on their June rent.

To the joy of newspaper headline writers everywhere, the young women decided to start a topless car wash, operating at different sites each day in neighborhoods and public parking lots. Soon, Moscovites were "steamed up" and their council was "in a lather" -- resulting in an ordinance banning females from going topless in the city.

Liberals and libertarians started talking about the Taliban.

Obviously, if religious conservatives were strongly opposed to topless car washing, then the right to wash cars while topless must be a vital civil liberty. And what would the Religious Right do next? Take over the town?

As the leader of a growing evangelical flock, Wilson threw down a gauntlet in the Vision 2020 forum. The left can be as fundamentalist and judgmental as the right, he said. The ultimate question was whether it was possible to say that some behaviors are socially acceptable and some are not.

Both sides want to shape the laws. Were there no moral absolutes to guide them?

"By what standard do you judge anything? We have a standard and everyone knows what it is -- Genesis through Revelation," argued Wilson. "You make quite as many value judgments as we do, even if it is only about us, but when pressed for details on when and how your Moses came down off your Sinai, everything goes blurry."

Everyone believes something is true, he said. Everyone has a worldview that guides his or her actions.

The implication was clear, responded Joan "Auntie Establishment" Opyr, in a chorus of outraged voices on the left. Wilson was claiming to speak for God, while the "rest of us have to make do with secular humanism, MTV and old bits of string and paperclips." But she noted that Christian denominations and sects often disagree over how to interpret their own scriptures.

So, wrote Opyr, "By what standard do we judge? By our own lights. ... No doubt you believe that you take your orders directly from on high. Oddly enough, that's where I get my orders, too, but I get them via The Tanakh, not the Christian bible. Others get theirs from the Koran, from the Tao Ti Ching, from the Upanishads, from the Rig Veda, or from time spent meditating in Joshua Tree State Park."

For Wilson and many others, it was simply impossible to say that all standards are equally valid. There would be no easy peace.

"When two contradictory claims of absolute truth collide, both can be wrong, but both cannot be right," he replied. "My complaint is that however much they complain about the threat of conservative Christianity, relativists are far more afraid of their own position than they are of ours. This is because if relativism is the case, then anything goes, including the worst forms of absolutism."

Alchemy comes to Canterbury

In the halls of Anglican power, the leader of the tiny Church of Wales is respected for his skill at blending theology and poetry into sermons that are both impressive and mysterious.

Archbishop Rowan Williams has been called brilliant, charming, "turbulent," mystical, humble, brave and witty -- a true ecclesiastical chameleon. His own website trumpets his "radical views" on sexuality and church-state relations in England.

The 52-year-old Welshman speaks seven languages, has taught at Oxford and Cambridge universities, but has never led a local parish. He has praised "The Simpsons" and blasted the Walt Disney Co. He is a pacifist pro-lifer who has attacked America's war or terrorism. He will soon be inducted into the Welsh Gorsedd of Bards, donning a white robe and headdress while other druids chant prayers at sunrise to the ancient god and goddess of their land.

Oh yes, and Prime Minister Tony Blair has chosen Williams as the 104th archbishop of Canterbury, the spiritual leader of the world's 70 million Anglicans. He follows Archbishop George Carey, a soft-spoken evangelical.

"Recent months and recent weeks have been a very strange time," Williams said, when his long-rumored appointment became official. "It's a curious experience to have your future discussed, your personality, childhood influences and facial hair solemnly examined in the media and opinions you didn't know you held expounded on your behalf."

Williams has lived a charmed life, performing feats of verbal alchemy before legions of clergy and academics. Now his every word will be studied under a microscope as he leads a global communion that is bitterly divided -- primarily between First World liberals and Third World conservatives -- on issues of sex and biblical authority.

For example, consider an essay entitled "The Body's Grace." In it, Williams questioned traditional definitions of "sexual fidelity," sharply criticizing conservatives who would attempt to "legalize" such a term. Sexual bonds can lead to spiritual transformation, even in relationships outside of marriage.

"The realities of our experience in looking for such possibilities suggest pretty clearly that an absolute declaration that every sexual partnership must conform to the pattern of commitment or else have the nature of sin and nothing else is unreal and silly," he wrote. While many worry about the impact of this viewpoint on Christian morality, "more damage is done ... by the insistence on a fantasy version of heterosexual marriage as the solitary ideal."

Another passage would certainly provoke strong debate at any ecumenical gathering, especially with its sharp attack on traditional Catholic teachings on natural law.

"In a church which accepts the legitimacy of contraception," wrote Williams, "the absolute condemnation of same-sex relations of intimacy must rely either on an abstract fundamentalist deployment of a number of very ambiguous texts, or on a problematic and non-scriptural theory about natural complementarity, applied narrowly and crudely to physical differentiation without regard to psychological structures."

Thus, Williams voted against a 1998 resolution at the global Lambeth Conference stating that sex outside of marriage is "incompatible with scripture" and urging a ban on same-sex unions and the ordination of non-celibate homosexuals. The vote was 526 bishops in favor, with 70 opposed and 45 abstentions.

Williams defends same-sex relationships and has ordained a non-celibate gay. This is awkward since there are 45,000 Anglicans in Wales and, by way of contrast, 15 million in Nigeria.

The moral innovations Williams advocates are "not going to resonate with millions of Anglicans in Africa and Asia," said Canon Bill Atwood of the Ekklesia Society, a global network of Anglican conservatives. "It's fascinating to me that people can so easily dismiss what the church has believed throughout the ages. It's pretty arrogant."

Meanwhile, Anglicans on the other side of this doctrinal divide are celebrating and facing the future with new optimism.

"For the first time lesbian and gay Anglicans can feel that they have a real friend at Lambeth. No longer will we need to feel shut out of the heart of the church," said the Rev. Richard Kirker of the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement.

"The new archbishop's intellect is outstanding. He will apply intellectual rigor to the deliberations of the church. There will be no woolly thinking in a church led by Rowan Williams. Homophobia will be challenged and intolerance rooted out."

Yes, there is a Mitford

Just north of Columbia, S.C., there is an unincorporated community called Mitford.

As far as author Jan Karon knows, this is the only place in North America that bears the name of the mythical North Carolina mountain town she has made so famous with her novels.

The real Mitford has a Baptist church and a barbecue joint and that's about it.

"Now what more do you need, I mean, if you really stop and think about it?", asked Karon, before letting loose with a Southern hoot and a cackle.

Yes indeed, all that the Mitford lady needs to tell most of her tales is a busy church, a gossipy diner and the people who frequent one or the other or both. She has taken these humble ingredients, slipped them into the structures of the British "village novel" and created a franchise that keeps taking small-town virtues into the uppity territory of the New York Times bestseller lists.

"Who would want to read books with no cussing', no murder, no mayhem and no sex? ... How can something so innocuous as these Mitford books sell 10 million copies?", asked Karon, speaking at Calvin College in Grand Rapids, Mich., just before the release of "In This Mountain," the seventh Mitford novel.

"This is what I think. I think there was a wide vein of readers out there who were just waiting for someone to write a book about them, about their dreams and their lives and their values. ... With Mitford, we look at the ordinary lives and see something extraordinary and dramatic and full of feeling and worthy to be observed."

The books revolve around Father Timothy Kavanagh, a shockingly orthodox Episcopal priest who is so behind the times that he even converts people to Christianity. Late in life, the shy bachelor marries Cynthia Coppersmith, a witty blond divorcee who moves to Mitford to create her award-winning books for children. The surroundings yield legions of colorful characters.

Karon began writing books in the early 1990s in the picturesque town of Blowing Rock, N.C., and other pieces of Mitford can be found in her life. When she was six she wanted to be a preacher. When she was 10 she wanted to be an author. Today she is an author who crafts the words spoken by one of America's most beloved preachers.

But the witty blond didn't start writing until mid-life, when she abandoned her career as an advertising executive and escaped to the mountains. The pain of a divorce and the sweetness of a newborn faith figure into her story as well.

Thus, her fiercely loyal readers keep asking: Is she Cynthia?

No, says Karon, Cynthia has better legs.

But the questions keep coming. Is Barnabas, the priest's scripture-friendly dog, going to die? Now that the Appalachian urchins Dooley Barlowe and Lace Turner have grown up, will they get married? What will Dooley do with the fortune the late Miss Sadie secretly left him? Where does Uncle Billy get his corny jokes? And what is livermush, anyway?

Then there is the ultimate question. In the new novel, Father Tim crashes into his own mortality and even survives a near-death experience. Karon has promised that the next Mitford book, "Light From Heaven," will end the series. Readers now ask: Is Father Tim going to die?

"No, he's not going to die," she said. "This is about his LIFE."

The books are relentlessly cheerful, even though Karon weaves in dark threads. There is schizophrenia and depression, greed and grinding poverty, child abuse and alcoholism, disease and death. But most of all there is faith, even though her books fly out of secular bookstores.

Karon said it would be impossible to edit out her beliefs. It would be like trying to filter a shot of brandy back out of a cup of coffee. Once they're mixed, they're mixed.

"Even if I never mentioned the name of Jesus Christ, I can't hide from you who I am," she said. "In truth, the work that has no faith is for me not a whole work. It may be an amusing or credible or clever work, but not a whole work. Faith is a critical and urgent and necessary component of human wholeness."

Degrading the Catholic bishops

Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw and Peter Jennings rarely cover religious rites, but they would certainly show up if Rome decided to use Pope Benedict XIV's "Degradatio ab ordine pontificali."

This 1862 rite for the "Degradation of a bishop" is not for the liturgically faint of heart. In it, a bishop who had committed disgraceful acts was stripped of the symbols of his office -- mitre, crosier and ring. The prelate leading the rite would say: "Rightly do we pull off thy ring, the sign of fidelity, since thou has made bold to rape God's own bride, the Church."

Try to imagine that on Nightline.

When reclaiming the book of the Gospels, the prelate would exclaim: "Give us back the Gospel! Since thou has spurned the grace of God and made thyself unworthy of the office of preaching, we rightly deprive you of this office."

Finally, someone would take a knife or "a shard of glass" and lightly scrape the thumbs, fingers and forehead of the disgraced bishop, or someone standing in for him. The goal was to remove to "the extent of our powers" the anointing of his holy office.

"It's like playing a film of an ordination rite, only backwards," noted a conservative Jesuit scholar who, in an act of ecclesiastical self-preservation, always uses a nom de plume. He published his translation of this obscure text in Catholic World Report's anonymous "Diogenes" column.

"To use our modern jargon, this rite would have been a 'teaching moment.' The point would have been to act out what it means to be a bishop and what it means for a bishop to fall."

No one would dare use such a rite today. These days, bishops slip away quietly. Some hold press conferences, which offer a more modern approach to shame.

So far, a dozen Catholic bishops -- in America and around the world -- have resigned during the current wave of sexual-abuse scandals. Bishops have resigned for health reasons, legal reasons, psychological reasons and, sometimes, to move to a less public form of ministry. What is missing is any sense that these resignations have spiritual significance.

What Catholics need right now is a strong dose of liturgical catharsis, according to this Jesuit "Diogenes."

"There are souls at stake. There are spiritual consequences to what is going on," the priest said. "What many faithful Catholics have been saying is that too many bishops have failed to keep the promises that they made to God and to his church. It's not a just matter of making bad management decisions. It's a matter of defending the faith."

The bishops are the key. During their Dallas media blitz they approved a "zero tolerance" policy for priests and deacons guilty of sexual abuse of minors. This was a crucial step, since about 2 percent of U.S. priests have been accused of sexual misconduct. But a stunning Dallas Morning News investigation has shown that 60 percent or more of U.S. bishops have been accused of failing to stop sexual abuse or covering up past crimes. On this, the new "Charter for the Protection of Children and Young People" is silent.

The bishops also avoided debate to clarify how this charter will affect the overwhelming number of cases -- some say it's as high as 96 percent -- that involve the homosexual abuse of adolescent males. An attempt to discuss the impact of doctrinal dissent in seminaries was greeted with silence. Both of these explosive issues had been emphasized in an April document signed by U.S. cardinals after they met with Pope John Paul II.

The bishops approved a "zero tolerance" policy that will have an immediate impact on their priests. The question is whether a "zero tolerance" policy will be created for bishops.

This appears unlikely. If there are going to be any rites for the "Degradation of a bishop," they will almost certainly have to be held in secular courts.

"Would it be a 'zero tolerance' offense if a bishop lied to a judge or a grand jury? Yes, I think it would be," said Robert Royal, president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, D.C. "Yes, I think we could see some bishops in jail."

The Church -- going, going, gone?

For two millennia, if you knew a church's name then you knew something about the people inside its doors.

Church names stood for timeless saints and traditions -- from the Church of the Nativity to the Church of the Resurrection. A potluck supper at St. Patrick's would be different than one at Santi Giovanni e Paolo or Our Lady of Guadalupe.

In some flocks, a name might tell a church's location or hint at its origins. The Southern Baptist Convention's directory includes almost every name under the sun -- from Enigma Baptist to Black Jack Baptist, from Hanging Dog Baptist to First Baptist of Disney (Okla.).

But out with the old and in with the focus groups. Who needs an old church?

"First the vogue was for local churches to drop their denominational affiliation from their name," noted scholar Gene Edward Veith, in the evangelical magazine World. "Then came the fad of dropping the word church. The Community Assembly of God Church became first 'Community Church' and then 'The Community Family Worship Center.'

"Now, words that so much as connote religious activities are considered too negative for the unchurched, so we have congregations that go by names such as 'The Center for Family Love.' "

But the sign outside is just the beginning. Inside these doors, many church leaders are morphing into chatty spiritual guides. Hymns are out and so are sermons, litanies and scripture readings. Thousands of churches are rigging up video screens and adding drama and humor.

"Some churches are doing everything they can to eliminate anything that might make them seem like churches," said Veith.

This trend has been growing in recent decades, affecting flocks on left and right. Some people defend the church of the ages. Others yearn for the church of the future.

Now broadcaster Harold Camping has turned up the heat by saying it's time for Christians to realize that all modern churches -- liberal, conservative and everything in between -- have gone apostate. Key Bible prophecies say so. The radio preacher once drew media attention by preaching that the world would end in 1994.

Camping is using his global network to tell believers that the era of the "corporate external church" is over. It's time to form "fellowships" -- with no pastors -- that exist to support mass-media evangelism.

"No longer are you to be under the spiritual rulership of the church," he said, in a manifesto posted at www.FamilyRadio.com. "This message should be clear. We must remove ourself from the church. ... The church has ceased to be an institution or divine organism to serve God as His appointed representative on earth."

This concept might appeal to millions of consumers. Sunday morning? Sleep in. No more boring rituals and sermons. No frustrating committee meetings. No guilt-inducing programs to help the poor.

The big problem is that Camping doesn't sound all that radical these days.

"American churches," said Veith, "have been complicit in this new and heretical anti-church movement. Many have become so indifferent to theology that their version of Christianity consists of little more than, to use the words of country singer Tom T. Hall, 'me and Jesus.' If Christianity is about the private, inner, undefined relationship between an individual and Jesus, there is little need for God's word, the sacraments, doctrine, pastors or the church."

Veith is a very traditional Lutheran, but his critique also rang true with the most influential voice in mainline Lutheranism.

"The leading actors in the Fade Away Church Movement certainly must have read marketing guides," noted historian Martin Marty, in The Christian Century. "Those guides must have told them that the Fade Away Church is what many want."

Yet there is a sad reason that many people yearn for a perfect church, a non-offensive church or a mass-media church, he added. Many do not want to sit in real pews with real people, "those tangible, offensive, smelly things called human beings, those 'really real' children of God who refuse to act like 'virtually real' people."

But if someone does create a non-church church, Marty concluded, "there will be just one thing wrong with it: It will have nothing to do with the Christian faith. And, therefore, it is likely to sell well."

The pledge of conformity

Instead of creating a mere educational program, the Baptist minister set out to write something historic -- a patriotic rite for use across the United States.

This ritual included a proclamation from the president, the singing of "national songs" and prayer or Bible readings. But the pivotal moment would come after veterans raised the Stars and Stripes, when the assembled students recited their new pledge of allegiance.

As written by the Rev. Francis Bellamy, it said: "I pledge allegiance to my Flag and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

The pledge was used for the first time on or around Oct. 12, 1892. The rest is a long story, a story that from the beginning has included tensions between church and state and between public and parochial schools.

"You know, it never would have occurred to Francis Bellamy to put 'under God' in the pledge, at least according to what he had to say at the time," said John W. Baer of Annapolis, Md., author of "The Pledge of Allegiance: A Centennial History, 1892-1992."

"I imagine that that he was thinking like a Mason and he was thinking like a Northern Baptist. Francis Bellamy had a thoroughly modern mind and he knew what he was trying to do. ... You're talking about creating a mandated form of patriotism to be used with millions of children in classrooms everywhere. So he chose every word for a reason."

As part of a prominent Baptist family, Bellamy had nothing against God.

Still, he wrote his pledge shortly after resigning at Bethany Baptist in Boston. It seems that several wealthy businessmen did not appreciate their pastor's many sermons on topics such as "Jesus the Socialist" and "The Socialism of the Primitive Church." But his fiery social activism did appeal to Daniel Ford, publisher of a prominent magazine entitled The Youth's Companion.

Thus, Bellamy leaped from a local pulpit to national journalism. Within weeks, he was helping the National Education Association plan a massive celebration of public schools, backed by publicity in The Youth's Companion.

"Our fathers in their wisdom knew that the foundations of liberty, fraternity, and equality must be universal education," wrote Bellamy, in a speech that was supposed to be read as part of the rites surrounding the pledge of allegiance.

"The free school, therefore, was conceived as the cornerstone of the Republic. Washington and Jefferson recognized that the education of citizens is not the prerogative of church or of other private interest; that while religious training belongs to the church, and while technical and higher culture may be given by private institutions -- the training of citizens in the common knowledge and the common duties of citizenship belongs irrevocably to the State."

This was, of course, a jab at the parochial schools being built by Roman Catholics, in part due to a rising tide of immigration from Eastern Europe. This was not the American way, said Bellamy. He even argued that God opposed parochial schools.

"We uplift the system of free and universal education," he said, "as the master force which, under God, has been informing each of our generations with the peculiar truths of Americanism." Thus, American children should attend the same schools, recite the same pledge and unite "under the sacred flag."

The pledge caught on in Protestant-friendly public schools, with the American Legion urging that its use be mandatory. Soon, noted Baer, "my flag" was changed to "the flag of the United States of America" because officials feared immigrants might think the pledge referred to the flags of their homelands. During World War II, students stopped extending their right arms in salute and began placing their hands over their hearts. Finally, the Knights of Columbus led a campaign to add "under God," in part so that public and religious schools could use the pledge.

That worked for a few decades.

"The public loves the pledge. That's the bottom line," said Baer. "But this is a form of conformity. Anyone who doesn't want to conform to this one prescribed version of patriotism is going to question it. ... The pledge has offended different kinds of people at different times. But it has always offended somebody."

Trust your feelings, Darth?

No wonder Anakin Skywalker seems so confused.

Every time the Jedi apprentice turns around, a spiritual master tells him to trust his feelings, search his feelings or follow his feelings. Trouble is, the young super-warrior in "Star Wars: Attack of the Clones" is a tornado of feelings. He feels love. He feels hate, ambition, desire, frustration, fear and fury.

Yet when he follows his heart, the Jedi tell him to set aside his desires and do his duty.

Well, do feelings trump duty or is it the other way around?

"I don't know what it says in the Jedi handbook, but it's obvious that George Lucas hasn't answered this question," says Catholic writer Roberto Rivera, who is best known for his pop-culture research for evangelical leader Chuck Colson.

"It's especially interesting that the characters that represent the good side of the Force -- like Obi-Wan Kenobi -- stress the importance of following your feelings. But the characters that represent the dark side -- like Chancellor Palpatine -- are also telling Anakin he must learn to trust his feelings. Why do the good guys and the bad guys agree with each other?"

This may sound like the geeky Star Wars nit-picking that thrives in cyberspace, where legions of Lucas acolytes circulate catechisms detailing how many Jedi can twirl on the point of a light saber. But these are not meaningless questions for the generations baptized in images from the original trilogy and its sequels. The grand finale looms ahead on May 25, 2005.

Like it or not, what Lucas says about God and man is important.

"Star Wars is the closest thing many Americans have to a myth -- by which I mean the stories that help us make sense of our lives and the world around us, and the traditional means by which cultures transmit their values and beliefs," argues Rivera, in a Boundless.org essay called "Love, Sacrifice and Free Will in Star Wars."

Thus, it matters if Lucas has created a myth that makes any sense, even on its own terms. It matters if the Force provides a coherent framework for the actions of his characters. It matters if Lucas is stuck somewhere between karma and Calvinism, spinning morality tales in a universe ruled by an impersonal "energy field created by all living things" that somehow has a will and a plan for the souls it controls.

After all, notes Rivera, it "was Lucas who called Star Wars the story of a man's fall from grace and his subsequent redemption. These are terms with moral, if not religious, significance."

The key is that Lucas created a pop faith the same way he created his monsters. He took the head of one creature, attached it to the body of another, stuck on the tail of something else and enlarged the result to awesome size.

"I didn't want to invent a religion," Lucas once told journalist Bill Moyers. "I wanted to try to explain in a different way the religions that already existed. ... I put the Force into the movie in order to try to awaken a certain kind of spirituality in young people -- more a belief in God than a belief in any particular religious system."

The bottom line: "The conclusion I have come to is that all the religions are true."

Yet Lucas wanted an epic story of good and evil, darkness and light. His films center on the life of an anointed one who "will bring balance" between the yin and the yang of the Force, yet Lucas never defines his terms. He never says what is good and what is evil and why. Heroes and villains alike have to follow their feelings.

"There is zero evidence in the Star Wars films that anyone is ever taught anything about what is right and what is wrong," notes Rivera. "We don't even know why the dark side is dark. It's a mystery. It's a concept with no meaning. ...

"Everybody is supposed to do the right thing, but nobody wants to stop and give any serious thought as to how a person is supposed to know what is the right thing to do. That is a rather important question to leave unanswered, if you stop and think about it."