What is NON-religion news?

It is Martin Marty's custom to rise at 4:44 a.m. for coffee and prayer, while awaiting the familiar thump of four newspapers on his porch.

A week ago, America's most famous church historian prepared for a lecture in Nebraska by ripping up enough newsprint to bury his table in headlines and copy slashed with a yellow pen.

A former WorldCom CEO kept teaching his Sunday school class. A researcher sought the lost tribe of Israel. Believers clashed in Sudan. Mormon and evangelical statistics were up -- again. A Zambian bishop said he got married to shock the Vatican. U.S. bishops kept wrestling with clergy sexual abuse. Pakistani police continued to study the death of journalist Daniel Pearl.

Marty tore out more pages, connecting the dots. Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey feared an Anglican schism. Public-school students prayed at flagpoles. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia explored the border between church and state. And there were dozens of stories linked to Sept. 11, 2001.

"When I read newspapers, I see religion all over the place," said Marty, whose University of Chicago Divinity School career has led to 50-plus books and countless media appearances. "This has always been the case. I simply think it has been easier for others to see this reality during the past year."

For decades, Marty has been America's most quoted expert on the question: "What is religion news?" But the University of Nebraska's journalism school challenged him to answer a new question: "Is There Any Non-Religious News After 9/11?"

It is certainly harder for journalists to avoid religion now, said Marty. This is true from Washington to Islamabad, from Wall Street to Hollywood. But the deeper reality is that Sept. 11 didn't change anything. It only made the power of faith -- as a healing force, as well as a deadly force -- more obvious.

Truth is, most Western leaders have long believed that religion would inevitably fade, he said. Thus, the West has been dominated by two big ideas.

"One idea was that every time you looked out your window, there was going to be less religion around than there was before," said Marty, in a forum for journalism students, ministers and media professionals. "The other idea was that whatever leftover religion you find, it was going to be tolerant, concessive, mushy and so on.

"Instead, there has been an increase in religion and the prospering religions are all extremely intense. The versions of Catholicism, Protestantism, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism that are prospering tend to be among people who care very much about what their faith is about."

Countless despots have learned that faith cannot be killed with force. This is especially true outside what Marty called the "spiritual ice belt" that extends across Western Europe and North America. Soon, Africa and Asia will be sending waves of missionaries to the West.

Meanwhile, most of the world's hot spots are occurring where Islamic expansion is colliding with the growth of traditional Christianity in the Third World. While the world watches Afghanistan and Iraq, the insiders are watching Nigeria and Indonesia.

It's all part of the same story.

In the mid-1990s, Marty directed a massive project to study the "militant religious fundamentalisms" on the rise worldwide. It concluded that the leaders of many such groups would resort to military action, when they failed to achieve victory through constitutional means. And if military might was not enough, Marty noted that the study warned that "they may very well take no prisoners, allow no compromises, have no borders and they might resort to terrorism."

How should networks and newspapers respond? It would help, said Marty, if they hired more journalists who are trained to cover the complex and emotional world of religion. But that response is no longer adequate, after Sept. 11.

"What I am talking about today is not a call for a huge flood of religion reporters. We need some. We need more," he said. "We need space in which they can write. ...

"But we are past that, right now. We are now dealing with issues that all journalists are going to have to try to understand. ... The horizons of religion and the news have touched and we all have to realize that, now."

My Big, Fat, Greek Mystery

To the faithful, there was nothing new about hearing an ancient litany in Greek.

But it wasn't business as usual for Gregory Waynick, who was planning to be a Southern Baptist pastor until his studies in history and theology led him into Eastern Orthodoxy. As a young deacon in Nashville, he was terrified the first time he tried to sing a few lines of Greek chant.

"I'm sure my pronunciation was pretty sad," he said. "But when I looked up, I saw that all of the little old Greek ladies had tears in their eyes. They were so moved that I was even trying to speak a little bit of their language. They responded so warmly to all of my attempts to understand their language and lives."

As a convert, Waynick flashed back to that scene in his life and many others after seeing the movie "My, Big, Fat Greek Wedding." Most of the memories were good, but not all. An older Greek priest bluntly once told him that Bible-Belt Americans didn't belong in the Orthodox faith.

It was faith, not marriage that brought Waynick into the Eastern church. Still, he said the hit romantic comedy is surprisingly accurate in its portrayal of a proud, protective community in which the lines between culture and faith are constantly blurred.

"Their faith is something they don't think about. It's at the subconscious level," said Waynick, who is now a priest in the thriving St. Mark's Greek Orthodox Church in Boca Raton, Fla. "The problem is that when that culture begins to fade in their children -- the language, the traditions -- they may have little to hang on to in terms of their faith."

"My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding" is about a young Greek woman named Toula Portokalos who falls for a white-bread vegetarian Anglo man. The movie cost only $5 million and debuted April 21 on 108 screens. Now it's on 1,764 screens and BoxOfficeGuru.com is asking if Nia Vardalos and her wacky family movie will gross $175 million in American ticket sales.

Studio executives tried to convince the actress to go with the demographic flow and turn her screenplay into a big, fat Italian or big, fat Hispanic wedding.

But Vardalos had a secret weapon named Margarita Ibrahimoff, the daughter of a Greek-born father and a mother who grew up in a Greek village on the Albanian border. This particular Greek girl turned Hollywood player is best known by another name -- Rita Wilson. It helps that Wilson married a non-Greek man named Tom Hanks.

Obviously, the team that produced "My Big, Fat, Greek Wedding" understood this emotional terrain, said Dean Popps, a national leader in networks of Greek Orthodox laypeople. The cliches were dead-on target and most Greeks will laugh and be thankful that mainstream America has acknowledged their existence. But the movie treats the church as a mere visual prop.

"It's good that someone is saying, 'It's OK to be Greek. It's OK to be Orthodox,' " said Popps. "But at the same time, it's a bit awkward. I mean, take Hanks. He's a great actor, but does he know anything about Orthodoxy? When it comes to issues like abortion and sexuality, he opposes everything the church has taught for centuries. ...

"I mean it's one thing to like our culture. But this faith is something you're supposed to live out in your daily life."

This tension is symbolized in one of the movie's few serious moments, when Toula's fiance is baptized in a rite that is a complete mystery to him. Afterwards, he shows her his new cross and says, "I'm Greek now."

The crucial question, said Waynick, is whether those whose lives are rooted in Greek culture and traditions will be able to pass on a living faith to their children. It will not be enough to simply go through the motions.

"Times have changed and their children will not remain Orthodox just because their parents are Greek," he said. "It's not enough to sing a few Greek hymns, when your kids are sticking Eminem into the CD players in their sports cars and moving in with their American girlfriends. ...

"They will have to claim the faith as their own and their churches will have to help them do that."

Spirituality up, doctrine down

During the 1990s, pollster George Barna released many reports showing that Americans were growing less traditional on issues of sin, salvation and the scriptures.

Church leaders found his data disturbing. On many occasions they asked: Could anything reverse these trends? What would it take to inspire significant numbers of Americans to repent and return to their roots?

"I told people that I thought it was going to take something big, some kind of genuinely shocking event that would show that there is right and wrong and good and evil," said Barna. "I sincerely thought that if something like that happened, many people would turn to God and that we would see lives changed."

Apparently not, he said.

The Barna Research Group's latest data indicate that nearly half of the Americans polled say faith has played a vital role in helping them cope with the horrors of Sept. 11, 2001. In poll after poll, Americans claim their interest in spirituality is rising.

But Barna said there is no evidence Sept. 11 that had any lasting impact on how ordinary people practice their faith or live their daily lives. Worship attendance quickly returned to normal -- 43 percent. Bible reading is par for the course -- 41 percent. It is especially interesting that the "unchurched," the percentage of Americans with few or no ties to organized religion, is precisely the same as before the attacks -- 33 percent.

Barna said it didn't help that 41 percent of churchgoers said their congregation did nothing at all during the past 12 months to address issues raised by the attacks. Only 16 percent said they had heard sermons or other teachings focusing on Sept. 11.

"It's clear that our churches did little to try to crack the spiritual complacency of the American public," said Barna.

Researchers at the Gallup Organization have been looking at similar numbers.

"People are talking about how they are more spiritual now," said Frank Newport, editor of the Gallup Poll. "But this just isn't showing up in any way that we can measure. Maybe they are more spiritual. Maybe that statement is true. But this new interest in spirituality is showing up in what people are feeling, not what they are doing."

The bottom line: ask Americans questions about how Sept. 11 affected their religious feelings and the poll numbers will soar. Ask them questions about specific religious beliefs and practices and the numbers will plateau or even decline. The emerging consensus seems to be that vague, comforting spirituality is healthy, but that doctrinal, authoritative religion may even be dangerous.

That may be a hard news story to report and write, but it is still a major story, according to Steven Waldman, editor and chief at Beliefnet.com. When probing the impact of Sept. 11 on religious life in America and abroad, it is fairly easy to note what did happen. Yes, Americans responded with character and compassion. American attitudes toward Islam have seemed to change on a daily basis. There has been shocking evidence of brutal anti-Semitism.

But Waldman believes the big news is "what didn't happen. The fact that people initially went to houses of worship -- and then stopped -- should be viewed as a huge story, not a non-event." The bottom line, he said, is that "Americans didn't view organized religion as much help. ... While the pews were emptying out, psychologists' offices were filling up."

And as the 12 months passed, Barna's staff kept asking a series of tough questions about right and wrong and about good and evil.

Barna was stunned to find that, soon after Sept. 11, the percentage of Americans affirming that they believe in "moral truths or principles" that are eternal and unchanging actually declined -- from 38 to 22 percent. Only 32 percent of born-again Christians still believe in the existence of absolute moral truth.

"Those numbers have not risen" in recent months, said Barna. "Why is that? ... Perhaps many Americans have simply decided that it's just too much work to claim very specific and detailed beliefs and then to try to follow them in daily life. It's just too hard. It's too limiting on their behavior.

"I think most Americans want to keep their options open."

High Holy Days, one year later

The ritual could not have been more familiar, but Rabbi Howard Shapiro found it almost impossible to say the usual prayers for the infant.

It was only a few days after Sept. 11th. Suddenly, it was hard to talk about blessings, peace, goodness, faith and hope.

"I remember what I said to the family that day," said Shapiro, the leader of Temple Israel in West Palm Beach, Fla. "I said that we must force ourselves to say these words. We must say these words, because if we do not say them, then we will never believe them. And if we never believe them, then we will never act on them."

Now rabbis across from coast to coast are facing the High Holy Days, with the first anniversary of 9/11 falling in the middle of the season this year on the ancient Jewish calendar. The Jewish New Year, Rosh Hashanah, begins at sundown Friday (Sept. 6) and the season ends 10 days later with Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement.

There will be many pages of familiar prayers to say and none of them will sound the same. Rabbis who have prepared scores of services and sermons for the High Holy Days all know that, this year, their words will carry a special weight.

What should be said? What should be left unsaid?

In his Rosh Hashanah sermon text, Shapiro listed the familiar questions: "When people reflect back they ask: What did we do? Why did this happen? What do they have against us?"

In the public square, he noted, many are trying to blame Islam, insisting that it "does not honor life as Judaism and Christianity do." Others are blaming God, insisting that Sept. 11th proved that "religion is the root of all evil." Some blame Israel. Some people, as always, blame the Jews.

"Some blame our very way of life -- from McDonalds to Hollywood to Wall Street to Washington," wrote Shapiro. "This much I know. It is none of the above and all of the above. It is all about the way we see the future and ourselves. It is all about whether we are going to enter this new century as free, independent people or we are going to walk back into the Middle Ages."

After the sermon, the choir will sing Psalm 61: "Hear my cry, O God. From the end of the earth I cry unto Thee. My heart is overwhelmed. Lead me to the rock that is higher than I. For You are a Shelter; You are a Strong Tower."

Many will flinch when hearing the words "Strong Tower." It also will be hard to pray for the day when, "Violence shall rage no more, and evil shall vanish like smoke; the rule of tyranny shall pass away from the earth, and You alone shall reign over all Your works." It will be hard to praise God, saying, "Your power is in the help that comes to the falling, ... in the faith You keep with those who sleep in the dust."

At Temple Israel, here in heavily Jewish South Florida, the faithful said they did not need a special Sept. 11 service. The High Holy Days rites will be enough.

A rabbi does not need to make many additions to a rite that already states: "On Rosh Hashanah it is written, on Yom Kippur it is sealed: How many shall pass on, how many shall come to be; who shall live and who shall die; who shall see ripe age and who shall not; who shall perish by fire and who by water. ..."

The events of Sept. 11 were shocking, horrifying and unique for believers in this generation. But the prayers of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur have been recited for centuries. They have been prayed just as often in times of terror and tragedy as in times of peace and security.

These prayers unite worshippers today with those through the ages. These prayers transcend time.

"To say these prayers is to know that we are not the first generation to deal with the precariousness of life," said Shapiro. "That is what a religious tradition offers to us. It helps us deal with the fact that life is often scary."

Elvis, a prodigal son?

As the woman reached the stage, the musicians behind Elvis Presley could see that she was carrying a crown on a plush pillow.

"It's for you," she said. "You're the king."

Gospel superstar J.D. Sumner recalled that Presley took her hand that night in Las Vegas and replied: "No, honey, I'm not the king. Christ is the king. I'm just a singer."

Anyone digging through the mud of Presley's sad decline can find many signs that he was crying out to God as well as wrestling with his demons. Like many Southern sinners, Elvis did more than his share of Sunday morning weeping while trying to shake off the shame of Saturday night.

So was Elvis a backsliding believer or a hypocritical satyr? A quarter century after his death, it's amazing that Presley can still get people all shook up in churches as well as casinos.

"To judge from some media coverage, you'd think Presley was a saint -- a role model to emulate," said evangelical activist Charles Colson, in a recent radio commentary. In their stories about Graceland pilgrims flocking to Memphis, what the journalists "neglected to mention was that, even though Elvis took much of his style from gospel sources, his primary message was the antithesis of biblical standards."

Colson noted that one ABC News clip showed "Elvis singing, 'To spend one night with you is what I pray for.' Wow! Did he really think God answered prayers to expedite one-night stands?"

The final verdict: "Elvis is an object lesson in the wages of sin."

No one would deny that Presley started a cultural earthquake, said Christian radio veteran Dave Fisher, who wrote Colson's BreakPoint.org radio script. The crucial issue is whether "his impact on our culture was uplifting or degrading."

Yes, Presley honored his mother by singing "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" on the Ed Sullivan Show. But he also helped inspire a cultural and sexual revolution, said Fisher. "Just analyze the lyrics of the songs. ... Many were quite sexual. He wasn't using the four-letter words that a lot of singers and bands today would use. But they were still suggestive. He opened the door for what was to come."

What about that gospel side of Presley? It's true that he wandered in the wilderness of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, said Steve Beard, creator of Thunderstruck.org, a website on faith and popular culture. It's also true that Elvis was an "eccentric religious seeker on turbodrive," soaking up Hinduism, numerology, transcendental meditation, Buddhism, Theosophy and whatever else caught fire in the 1960s.

But as his health failed, Presley's long-time confidant Rick Stanley -- who later became a Baptist evangelist -- remembers the singer saying Christian prayers of repentance. Only hours before his death, Stanley said he heard Elvis pray: "Dear Lord, please show me a way. I'm tired and confused and I need your help."

No picture of Elvis is complete without faith, as well as failure. He was not the first or the last devout country boy to stray in the big city.

"If Elvis was a prodigal son, then it seems that he died on the way back to his Father's house," said Beard. "That's tragic. That's a tragic story and it's a story that ought to inspire compassion, not condemnation. ... We all need to be reminded that mercy and grace are still Christian virtues."

If there is a cautionary tale here, it is another reminder that believers should be careful when dealing with heroes, said scholar Gene Edward Veith, co-author of "Honky-Tonk Gospel: The Story of Sin and Salvation in Country Music." The lives of celebrities are often full of mixed blessings.

The boy who made his profession of faith in a Baptist church in Tupelo, Miss., struggled to hold on to that faith for the rest of his life. The Elvis story is packed with pain, piety, sin, struggle, glory, guilt and repentance.

"Very few artistic people make good role models," said Veith. "That isn't what artists are about. The conflicts that make them great in the first place are the very same conflicts that would make them bad role models. ... It's the paradoxes we see in Elvis that made him the great artist that he was."

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."