Skipping the 12 days of Christmas

It was around 200 A.D., according to St. Clement of Alexandria, that theologians in Egypt settled on May 20 as the birthday of Jesus, while others argued for dates in April and March.

This wasn't a major issue, since early Christians emphasized the Epiphany on Jan. 6, marking Christ's baptism. Then sometime before 354, Rome began celebrating the Feast of the Nativity on Dec. 25. Eastern churches kept using different dates, but the Roman custom became the norm by the end of the 4th century.

"It was all quite confusing," explained classics scholar Joe Walsh of Loyola College in Baltimore, who explores this maze during his "History of Christmas" class. "Early Christians didn't really lock in on this kind of thing, since they believed their world was going to end soon anyway."

It took time for the nativity feast to become the 12-day Christmas season. Today, Christmas has become something else altogether.

Easter traditions developed first, with Holy Week events on specific days of the week and a firm link to the Jewish Passover. A nativity date was harder to pin down and, over time, conflicting traditions created tensions. The Second Council of Tours clarified matters in 567, establishing Dec. 25 as the nativity date and Jan. 6 as Epiphany.

The council took another diplomatic step and proclaimed the 12 days between the feasts the holy season of Christmas -- the biggest party in Christendom.

This act linked believers in East and West and offered a symbolic alternative to competing pagan festivals in the marketplace. Drawing a parallel with Easter, it also made sense for a reflective season of prayer and fasting to precede Christmas. This became Advent in the West and Nativity Lent in the East.

That was then. This is now.

Walsh said his students assume that Christmas equals "The Holidays," the marketing season between Thanksgiving and Dec. 25, which is followed by a festival of returned gifts and football games. Most do not know that there is more to the 12 days of Christmas than a song about a partridge, a pear tree and other bizarre gifts.

Times change. A few generations ago, department stores stayed open until midnight on Christmas Eve, a tradition seen in many old Christmas movies.

"Why did they do that? Because people were out doing the shopping that we start doing in October," said Walsh. "The days before could get pretty intense, but that's the way things were. Christmas was still Christmas. That really didn't change until Christmas got sucked into the whole industrialized-commercialized complex that is modern life."

This happened for many reasons. The Puritan revolution in England played a major role, with its rejection of anything Catholic. Many liturgical and cultural traditions were weakened and never fully recovered, even if they were later celebrated by writers such as Charles Dickens. This had a major impact in the American colonies, where Christmas celebrations were frowned upon or in some cases banned.

At the same time, explosive growth of English cities during the industrial revolution uprooted millions of ordinary people, breaking centuries of ties binding families to churches, land, farms, shops and kin, said Walsh. Quaint traditions that united villages were hard to move to slums in London, Birmingham and Manchester. And what about New York City and the American frontier?

Modern suburbs do not have a church in a public square at the center of town. Most don't have a public square at all and the true community center is the shopping mall. While many people complain that lawyers and activists have "taken Christ out of Christmas," the truth is more complex than that. The reality is that almost everyone is skipping the 12-day Christmas season, including church people.

There is no time. There is no place. There is no season.

That could change, said Walsh.

"Whatever resistance there is going to be to what is happening to Christmas will be totally centered on people in churches, churches on both the left and the right," he said. "People in the middle are going to just go with the cultural flow. But out on the wings -- where people are really worried about the economics of all of this or the loss of all the beautiful worship traditions -- that's where Christmas might survive."

There's power in the words

White House scribe Michael Gerson's telephone rang with a vengeance after the 2003 State of the Union address and its claim that there is "power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people."

In the age of Google, it was easy to connect this with the gospel hymn "Power in the Blood," which says there is "power, wonder-working power, in the precious blood of the Lamb." Soon, journalists were calling Gerson's West Wing office asking him to underline all the evangelical "code words" hidden in major speeches.

"They're not code words. They're our culture. ... They are literary allusions understood by millions of Americans," Gerson told 24 journalists at a recent Ethics and Public Policy Center seminar in Key West, Fla. "It's not a strategy. It's just the way that I write and the president likes it."

George W. Bush is not speaking in an unknown tongue.

Anyone who studies what presidents -- from George Washington to Bill Clinton -- have said in times of triumph and tragedy knows that faith language is normal. If anything, said Gerson, today's imagery has become more nuanced. It's hard to imagine Bush delivering anything resembling Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1942 address warning that the Nazis yearned to spread their "pagan religion" worldwide, replacing the "Holy Bible and the Cross of Mercy" with the "swastika and the naked sword."

The historical patterns are easy to find. In addition to literary allusions, said Gerson, presidents have consistently used religious language when:

* Offering words of comfort. Presidents cannot face the nation after shocking tragedies and say that "death is the end, life is meaningless and the universe is a vast, empty, echoing void," said Gerson. Instead, they use words similar to Bush's remarks after the space shuttle disaster: "The same Creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today. The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to Earth; yet we can pray that all are safely home."

* Praising the influence of faith on efforts to promote justice. Thus, in a 2003 speech on Goree Island, Senegal, Bush bluntly described America's sinful history of slavery. But he added: "In America, enslaved Africans learned the story of the exodus from Egypt and set their own hearts on a promised land of freedom. Enslaved Africans discovered a suffering Savior and found he was more like themselves than their masters."

* Asking citizens to help their neighbors. For Bush, this "faith-based rhetoric" has been closely connected with "compassionate conservatism" and his efforts to allow religious groups to find niches within wider government programs to help the needy.

* Alluding to divine providence in national life. Here, the rhetorical bar has been set especially high by Abraham Lincoln, who insisted that Americans can hope to be on God's side, but cannot claim that God is fighting on their side.

Presidents use religious language in wartime, said Gerson. Nevertheless, critics of the war in Iraq have attacked Bush's consistent use of these words: "Freedom is not America's gift to the world. It is almighty God's gift to all humanity."

The president wrote those words, noted Gerson. Working together, they have tried to emphasize that Bush rejects what scholars call "American exceptionalism" -- the belief that America is uniquely God's instrument in history. The president's stance is best expressed in the 2003 State of the Union address, said Gerson.

"We Americans have faith in ourselves, but not in ourselves alone," said Bush. "We do not claim to know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of history."

Those anxious to criticize how the Bush White House has used religious language should dig into the speeches of Woodrow Wilson, the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan and many other American leaders, said Gerson. Would critics prefer Republicans to limit themselves to the libertarian logic of big business?

"As a writer, I think this attitude would flatten political rhetoric and make it less moving and interesting," he said. "But even more, I think the reality here is that scrubbing public discourse of religious ideas would remove one of the main sources of social justice in our history."

Santa Claus vs. St. Nicholas?

We see the headlines every two or three years during the holidays.

A pastor preaches on the true meaning of Christmas, warning about sins of selfishness and materialism. Then, in a moment of candor, disaster strikes.

This time the dateline was Santa Fe Springs, Calif. Local newspapers, followed by national wire services, reported that Father Ruben Rocha of St. Pius X Catholic School did something shocking during a Mass for students in kindergarten through third grade. He told the children that there is no Santa Claus.

The church hierarchy sprang into action.

"There's a time and place for everything, and this was not the time or the place or the age group to be talking about the true meaning of Christmas, at least in terms that young children cannot understand," Tod Tamberg, spokesman for the Archdiocese of Los Angeles, told the media.

Father Rocha apologized in writing to parents. Few details of his sermon are known beyond reports that, in response to a child's question, he said that parents eat the milk and cookies left for Santa.

As a public service to cautious clergy, it might help to review the few options available to those considering discussing the spiritual and commercial versions of Christmas with children. Santa is hard to avoid.

Nevertheless, remaining silent is the first option. Many clergy and parents do not choose silence because it affirms the schizophrenic, secular-sacred Christmas split.

The second option is to nix Santa, right up front. Beliefnet.com columnist Frederica Mathewes-Green has offered blunt reasons for why Christian parents should -- gently -- reject the Santa Claus scenario.

"First, it's a big fat lie," she said. "What kind of an example are you setting here? How stupid are your kids going to feel when they realize they fell for this? What else of what you taught them are they going to doubt?"

Wait, she's just getting started: "The Santa myth teaches kids ingratitude. ... They learn that goodies magically appear and don't cost anybody anything. Their role in life is just to open packages and enjoy. It also teaches greed. We may say piously that we want our children to develop just and generous virtues, but filling them with images of a toy-wielding potentate with a lifetime pass on eToys will knock all that flatter than Kansas."

There is a third option for tradition-loving clergy and parents and, truth be told, I have never read a headline about a pastor being nailed for using it.

Call it the St. Nicholas option. It is especially easy for believers in Catholic, Orthodox or Anglican churches that emphasize the lives of the saints. The goal is to teach children about the 4th century bishop known as St. Nicholas of Myra, while noting that elements of his story later helped inspire the secular story of Santa Claus.

According to church tradition, he was born into wealth and gave his inheritance to the poor. The most famous story about the bishop is captured in the Charity of St. Nicholas icon. It shows him visiting a poor family at night, carrying a bag of gold. The father could not provide dowries for his daughters, which meant they could not marry. Nicholas rescued them from ruin by dropping gold coins through a window.

These gifts fell into their stockings, which had been hung up to dry. The rest, as they say, is history.

The feast of St. Nicholas falls on Dec. 6 and, in parts of the world, remains a day for gift giving and alms for the poor. It is also a good time to discuss the pre-Christmas season of Advent or, in Eastern tradition, Nativity Lent.

The message to children is simple. Yes, there is a real St. Nicholas. But he is not what Christmas is all about.

Playing the St. Nicholas card is the best option, but it is not without its risks, said Father Nicholas Bargoot, an Eastern Orthodox priest here in South Florida.

"With all the commercialism that surrounds us, we still have to be careful when we make that link that we do not to tarnish the reality of St. Nicholas and who he is," he said. "It is still easy for young children to be confused. I mean, what is St. Nicholas doing at the mall?"

Oy Joy! Merry Chrismukkah

At first it seemed normal to Michelle Gompertz to be sitting in an Indian restaurant listing to Kenny G recordings of pop Christmas carols.

Then she grew disoriented. This Indian restaurant was in New Deli. She was surrounded by Hindu culture, but nobody thought twice about listening to the same holiday saxophone Muzak that would be playing in American shopping malls.

"I knew that Christmas was everywhere. But it really hit me," said Gompertz, the daughter of a United Church of Christ pastor in Indiana. "I remember thinking, 'Where are we? What season is this, anyway?' "

She remembered that scene after she married a Jewish New Yorker and started planning holiday festivities in the San Francisco Bay area. It seemed like all of their close friends shared a common bond -- one spouse was Christian and the other Jewish.

What kind of decorations should they use? What songs were they supposed to sing and what songs were they supposed to avoid? When you live in one of America's 2.5 million Jewish-Christian households, what season is this?

"Everybody knows that what you're supposed to say is 'Happy Holidays' and leave it at that," said Ron Gompertz. "But when you're in an interfaith family it's more than that. It's kind of Hanukkah and it's kind of Christmas.

"When I was a kid we tried calling it 'Hanumas.' On 'Seinfeld' they came up with 'Festivas,' but that wasn't right either."

Then Ron and Michelle Gompertz watched the 2003 episode of the hip teen soap "The O.C." in which anti-hero Seth Cohen explained the holiday ground rules in his interfaith family. This was a season about having it all -- all the parties, all the gifts, all the music. And the name of this season was "Chrismukkah."

"All you had to do was say that two or three times -- Chrismukkah -- and it just sounded right," said Ron Gompertz, who now lives in Montana with his wife and daughter.

The Gompertz clan made some cards for family and friends and claimed the rights to the www.Chrismukkah.com domain. This year, they hired a designer and jumped into the marketplace with "Oy Joy" and "Merry Mazeltov" cards and gifts, with images ranging from an Orthodox Jewish Santa to a reindeer with antlers that hold menorah candles.

What precisely is "Chrismukkah"? Their press materials call it a secular, "hybrid holiday" that begins with the eight-day Hanukkah season and extends through Christmas. This year, the Jewish "Festival of Lights" begins at sundown on Dec. 7.

The Chrismukkah franchise is not alone. A company called MixedBlessing has marketed interfaith cards for 15 years and Hallmark Cards Inc. now has four holiday offerings blending Jewish and Christian themes. A typical American Greetings Corp. "Merry Hanukkah" card shows a Jewish Santa inspiring his sleigh team with the cry: "On Isaac! On Izzy! On Eli! On Abe! On Levi! On Morty! On Shlomo! On Gabe!"

The problem with the "Oy to the World" punch lines is that, for many Jewish and Christian leaders, interfaith marriage isn't funny. During the past generation or so, nearly half of American Jews have married outside the faith. About a third of the children of intermarried couples are being raised as Jews.

A new statement from the U.S. Catholic-Jewish Consultation Committee bluntly urges these parents to raise their children in one faith or the other. Attempting to raise children "simultaneously as both 'Jewish' and 'Catholic' ... can only lead to violation of the integrity of both religious traditions, at best, and, at worst, to syncretism," it said.

The problem for mixed-marriage families such as his, said Rod Gompertz, is that "The Holidays" have already been sliced, diced and secularized in the public square. Embracing "Chrismukkah" merely goes one step further and "recognizes the state of mind that we are already living in," he said.

For millions of ordinary Americans, this is a season about Frosty the Snowman, shopping bags, Bing Crosby, twinkle lights and the whole mass-media experience. Thus, "Chrismukkah" isn't religious. It isn't the real Christmas or the real Hanukkah, he said.

"How are we supposed to balance what are actually fundamentally incompatible holidays? Our solution is to focus on the fun parts that we can enjoy without getting into all that theology."

Define 'evangelical' -- please

Ask Americans to rank the world's most influential evangelicals and the Rev. Billy Graham will lead the list.

So you might assume that the world's most famous evangelist has an easy answer for this tricky political question: "What does the word 'evangelical' mean?" If you assumed this, you would be wrong. In fact, Graham once bounced that question right back at me.

"Actually, that's a question I'd like to ask somebody, too," he said, during a 1987 interview in his mountainside home office in Montreat, N.C. This oft-abused term has "become blurred. ... You go all the way from the extreme fundamentalists to the extreme liberals and, somewhere in between, there are the evangelicals."

Wait a minute, I said. If Billy Graham doesn't know what "evangelical" means, then who does? Graham agreed that this is a problem for journalists and historians. One man's "evangelical" is another's "fundamentalist."

This was true in 1976 when a Southern Baptist named Jimmy Carter shocked the press by saying he was "born again." It's just as true today, as Beltway insiders dissect those Nov. 2 exit polls saying that 23 percent of the voters in the presidential election called themselves "evangelicals" or "born again Christians."

Establishment pundits agree that armies of "evangelical" voters have returned an "evangelical" president to the White House to pursue an "evangelical" agenda -- whatever that means.

Long ago, Graham stressed that this term must be understood in doctrinal terms, if it is to be understood at all. He finally defined an "evangelical" as someone who believes all the doctrines in the ancient Nicene Creed. Graham stressed the centrality of the resurrection and the belief that salvation is through Jesus, alone.

"I think there are evangelicals in the Roman Catholic Church, and the Eastern Orthodox churches," he said.

The journalism Bible basically agrees. The Associated Press Stylebook notes that "evangelical" once served as an adjective. Today it is a noun, referring to a "category of doctrinally conservative Christians. They emphasize the need for a definite, adult commitment or conversion to faith in Christ. ... Evangelicals stress both doctrinal absolutes and vigorous efforts to win others to belief."

The problem is trying to agree on the "doctrinal absolutes" that define evangelicals. Yet journalists must wrestle with this issue in order to grasp what happened, and what did not happen, on Nov. 2, according to pollster George Barna.

A new survey by the Barna Group claims that "born again Christians" -- who cast 53 percent of the votes in this election -- backed George W. Bush by a 62 to 38 percent margin. Meanwhile, "evangelical" voters backed Bush by an 85 to 15 percent margin.

What's the difference? In Barna's system, all "evangelicals" are "born again Christians," but not vice versa. In his polls, true "evangelicals" are a mere 7 percent of the voting population, while other "born again Christians" make up an addition 31 percent.

The difference between these groups is crucial for those studying the politics of social issues such as abortion and same-sex marriage.

For Barna, evangelicals affirm that "faith is very important in their lives today; believe they have a personal responsibility to share their religious beliefs about Christ with non-Christians; believe that Satan exists; believe that eternal salvation is possible only through grace, not works; believe that Jesus Christ lived a sinless life on earth; and describe God as the all-knowing, all-powerful, perfect deity who created the universe and still rules it today."

"Born again" Christians are those who believe they have "made a personal commitment to Jesus Christ that is still important" in their lives and that they will go to heaven because they have confessed their sins and "accepted Jesus Christ" as savior.

Thus, "evangelicals" are defined by specific doctrines. "Born again" Christians are defined by personal, often vague, spiritual experiences and feelings.

This can affect what happens in voting booths.

"In my experience," said Barna, "journalists use 'born again' and 'evangelical' interchangeably. ... As for assigning conservative perspectives to either the born again or evangelical segments, keep in mind that the born again constituency is evenly divided between Democrats and Republicans, and many of the social views of that group have more in common with atheists and agnostics than they do with the more conservative evangelical constituency."

Red, blue and green (tea)

One perk of covering a White House race from day one is that early-bird journalists snag lots of one-on-one time with the candidate.

Thus, Candy Crowley of CNN found herself sitting with John Kerry in a super-ordinary coffee shop in Dubuque, Iowa. The veteran political correspondent ordered coffee.

The senator, from Massachusetts, ordered green tea.

The waitress, from Iowa, was puzzled.

"I advised the senator that he would need to carry his own green tea in Iowa and probably several other states, as well," quipped Crowley, speaking at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches in South Florida.

Yes, it's time for "post mortems" on 2004. So far, said Crowley, the experts insist the race was decided by -- take your pick -- the 22 percent of the voters that yearned for "moral values" or the 23 percent that were white evangelical Christians.

Crowley grew up in the Midwest and she thinks she can tell red zones from blue zones. Democrats have cornered the green-tea crowd, she said. Republicans are winning what Capital Beltway insiders now call the "Applebee's vote." This schism may have as much to do with cappuccinos and chainsaws as with the New York Times and the Southern Baptist Convention.

Faith played a major role, but it's simplistic to say that religious people voted for President George W. Bush and secularists for Kerry, said Crowley. The religious left has its own moral and spiritual beliefs and it will, in future elections, find ways to express them in the public square.

It would also be inaccurate to claim that evangelicals marched into voting booths and seized control. Bush won 52 percent of Catholic voters, facing a Catholic candidate, and 59 percent of the overall Protestant vote. The New York Times noted that the president, in four years, raised his share of the Jewish vote from 19 to 25 percent, winning two-thirds of the Orthodox Jewish votes.

The elites just didn't get it. "Somewhere along the line, all of us missed this moral-values thing," said Crowley.

This will be painful for journalists to hear. It is one thing, after decades of dissecting media-bias statistics, to know that armies of religious conservatives believe American newsrooms are packed with God-forsaken libertines. It will be harder for journalists to admit that they are blind to important stories.

Nevertheless, it's time to face the facts, said Roy Peter Clark, senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla.

"I am now taking seriously the theory that we mainstream journalists are different from mainstream America. 'Different' is too pale a word. We are alienated. We may live in the same country, but we treat each other like aliens," he said, in an essay called "Confessions of an Alienated Journalist."

"The churched people who embrace Bush, in spite of a bumbling war and a stumbling economy, are more than alien to me. They are invisible. ... My blind spots blot out half of America. And that makes me less of a citizen, and less of a journalist."

As a Catholic progressive, Clark said he finds it hard to hear "moral values" without thinking of "showy piety and patriotism, with more than a dash of racism and homophobia." He knows all about "Queer Eye for the Straight Guy" and Bubba the Love Sponge. How come so many other Americans know what it means to be "evangelical," "charismatic" and "born again" and feel at home at church suppers?

Right now, there needs to be "more self-doubt in the journalistic system, as opposed to arrogance," said Clark, reached at his office. "We need to be able to say that we don't know it all and that we need to learn. We need to take a step back."

Most of all, said Crowley, journalists and blue-zone leaders must grasp that many parents feel threatened by the "coarsening" of American culture. They feel attacked.

"It's like they are saying, 'I was made to feel like a freak because I go to church' or 'I was made to feel like I was an idiot because I believe in God,' " she said. "They're telling us, 'I want my family safe and I want to be able to teach my children what I believe is true.'

Can Christians vote 'no'?

Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre is opposed to abortion and the rise of what Pope John Paul II has called the "culture of death."

But this does not mean that he backed President Bush.

The University of Notre Dame scholar is concerned about health care and fair wages. But this doesn't mean that he marched into a voting booth and picked Sen. John Kerry. During a year in which religion and politics constantly made headlines, MacIntyre published an essay that frayed nerves on the religious left and right.

"When offered a choice between two politically intolerable alternatives, it is important to choose neither," he said, writing for the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture. "When that choice is presented in rival arguments and debates that exclude from public consideration any other set of possibilities, it becomes a duty to withdraw ... so as to resist the imposition of this false choice by those who have arrogated to themselves the power of framing the alternatives."

While some argue that good citizens must vote, MacIntyre said that the only vote worth casting in 2004 was "a vote that no one will be able to cast, a vote against a system that presents one with a choice between Bush's conservatism and Kerry's liberalism, those two partners in ideological debate, both of whom need the other as a target."

These are fighting words for many politicos.

Late in the 2004 race, some religious activists spoke out against "single-issue voting," a phrase often used to condemn those who cast votes based on a politician's stance on abortion. Other activists said MacIntyre and other writers who advocated political abstinence were naive and irresponsible for focusing on so many issues.

In one of his "BreakPoint" radio commentaries, evangelical apologist Charles Colson said Christians must vote in order to take part in God's work in this culture. In this case, Colson was specifically rejecting the views of historian Mark Noll of Wheaton College in Wheaton, Ill.

Colson said that some Christians seem to yearn for a return to the past, when fundamentalists retreated from politics rather than face the temptation to sin through compromise. Is this retreat what Noll and others seek?

"That position is dead wrong and damaging to democracy," said Colson. "It's the utopian notion which assumes divine perfection in fallen humans. His assumption that we can support only candidates who have perfect scores according to our reading of the Bible makes me wonder how he votes at all. And if that9s the standard, all of us should stop voting."

Obviously, Noll disagrees, arguing that it is not wrong to seek consistency on faith-based issues. Here is his short list -- race, taxes, trade, health care, religious freedom, the international rule of law and "life issues," such as defense of the unborn.

"Each of these issues has a strong moral dimension. My position on each is related to how I understand the traditional Christian faith that grounds my existence," writes Noll, author of "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind." Yet neither the Democrats nor the Republics have made "a serious effort to consider this particular combination of concerns or even anything remotely resembling it."

MacIntyre agrees and cannot imagine embracing either major party, right now.

"Try to promote the pro-life case ... within the Democratic Party and you will at best go unheard and at worst be shouted down," he said. "Try to advance the case for economic justice ... within the Republican Party and you will be laughed out of court."

The philosopher has, in recent weeks, declined to defend his essay or to state how a Bush win or a Kerry win might affect his political views.

One thing is certain: religious believers will face similar choices again, or worse. It's hard to imagine how the religious left can compromise on abortion or same-sex unions. It's hard to imagine how the religious right will cope with the rise of cultural progressives such as Rudy Giuliani and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

"I don't feel that I need to elaborate on what I have written at this time," said MacIntyre. "Besides, I plan to write about this subject again at greater length. These issues are not going away because I do not believe that major parties have the right answers. I also don't believe they are asking the right questions."

After the Baptist baptism bus tour

They are some of America's most infamous religious statistics and conservatives have been known to quote them with glee.

The United Churches of Christ lost 14.8 percent of its members during the 1990s.

The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) was down 11.6 percent. The United Methodist Church fell 6.7 percent and the Episcopal Church another 5.3 percent. But there was nothing earth shattering in the Glenmary Research Center's 2000 data. The Protestant mainline has been fading for a generation.

The Southern Baptist Convention's new leader knows all that.

The Rev. Bobby Welch also knows that his flock's totals have crept higher in recent years. But he isn't gloating. He's worried about the fine print in the baptism pages of the North American Mission Board's "Strategic Planning Indicators."

"The last thing I would want to do is put down what people call the church-growth movement," said Welch. "We've got a lot of fine people doing fine work and we have some fine churches out there that are growing. But I do think that sometimes we forget that just because we have church growth doesn't mean we're growing the church.

"Sometimes, we get so focused on filling up our church buildings that we forgot to ask if we're winning any new people for the Lord."

This is the way Welch talks when he starts wrapping his soft northern Alabama accent around the scriptures, statistics and theories linked to his favorite topic -- evangelism. But the veteran pastor of the First Baptist Church of Daytona Beach, Fla., doesn't talk much about the kinds of large-scale evangelistic projects that grab media attention. His passion is for quieter forms of one-on-one persuasion that have a steady impact on church life.

That's why he cares that the number of baptisms has declined in Southern Baptist churches four consecutive years. What is just as disturbing, said Welch, is that the SBC's baptism rate had been parked on a statistical plateau since 1951 -- averaging 384,000 a year while the nation's population boomed.

Immediately after his June election as president, Welch announced a high-profile project to promote evangelism efforts from coast to coast and beyond. He got himself a star-spangled bus and set out on a 25-day, 20,000-mile marathon to visit each of the 48 contiguous states and, by airplane, Alaska and Hawaii.

The goal is to baptize 1 million people between June of 2005 and June of 2006, which would require a jump of 600,000-plus over last year's total of 377,357. The purpose of the bus tour was to get people to take this challenge seriously, he said, during a post-tour visit to South Florida.

Part of the problem, he said, is that too many Southern Baptists are camped inside their big, safe, healthy churches and think this is enough. Most of them believe that the church is supposed to win converts -- sort of.

"Not all evangelicals are evangelistic," said Welch. "They say they believe in evangelism, but they don't get out and do it."

The denomination's baptism statistics reveal other sobering truths. After the age of 11, it becomes increasingly difficult to win converts -- even among children in church families. Also, only 40 percent of the adults baptized into Southern Baptist congregations are true converts. The rest were already members of other Christian flocks.

Welch describes this in blunt language: "What that means is that we're not reaching the pagan pool. ... We're just rearranging the furniture inside the church."

Christians have all kinds of excuses for why they don't talk to other people about faith and forgiveness, heaven and hell, he said. It's easy to say that modern Americans believe that "soul winning" is rude and intolerant or that all religions are paths that lead to the same eternal destination. Truth is, some people don't want to talk with real people who are facing real problems in the real world, he said.

"It's no harder to talk to people about Jesus today than it ever has been," he said. "The problem is that we've been frightened away from even trying. We've become content to wag our finger at the world and tell it how sorry it is and how good we are, instead of telling people about the grace of God. We've got to get over that."

W. Bush -- theological Rorschach test

In Iowa, some United Methodists want the president and vice president tossed out of their church for "chargeable offenses" against its doctrines on justice and peace.

"Our hope is that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney will recognize the sinfulness of their actions, sincerely repent for what they have done and move on to change their ways," say leaders of the liberal TheyMustRepent.com network. "Although we recognize the improbability of that outcome, we believe that with God all things are possible."

Meet President Bush -- theological Rorschach test.

Throughout this campaign, Catholics have debated Sen. John Kerry's claim to his place at the Communion rail. The Democrat has drawn both criticism and applause in pulpits and pews while wrestling with the specifics of his Catholic heritage.

Bush has been caught in a different vise. If he affirms specific beliefs, secularists and liberal believers call him a fundamentalist. If he declines to be specific, critics ask what he is hiding. Is he a fundamentalist, a born-again Christian, an ordinary megachurch evangelical or some other brand of believer?

The New York Times Magazine says the president's faith is irrational and dangerously simplistic. That's the word from journalist Ron Suskind, whose acidic Oct. 17 profile ignited fresh debates about religion and the White House. According to critics in this camp, Bush thinks he's on a mission from God and, thus, has the same black-and-white moral worldview as al Qaeda. The result is an American version of the conflict "raging across much of the world: a battle between modernists and fundamentalists, pragmatists and true believers, reason and religion."

Not all progressives agree.

Jeff Sharlet, co-author of "Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible," says it's nonsense to call Bush a fundamentalist. The president rarely digs into biblical details, at least not publicly, and lacks the rigid literalism at the heart of true fundamentalism. Instead, he talks about following his "instincts," his "gut" and his "heart" when he makes big decisions.

"Believing, it seems, is more important to the president than the substance of his belief," argues Sharlet, in an essay called "Our magical president" at TheRevealer.org.

The key to Bush is his belief that "if you believe you can do something, you can," he said. This "gentle disdain for perceived reality" is a kind of faith in faith itself. What many critics miss and what most of "Bush's more orthodox Christian supporters seem to dodge, is that this is not Christian doctrine by any definition. It is, in fact, a key element of the broad, heterodox movement known as New Age religion."

Meanwhile, one of America's top evangelical historians has decided he cannot step into a voting booth and endorse either candidate. This is news in some circles because Mark Noll teaches at Wheaton College, Billy Graham's alma mater.

"Seven issues seem to me to be paramount at the national level: race, the value of life, taxes, trade, medicine, religious freedom and the international rule of law," said Noll, writing in the Christian Century.

"Each of these issues has a strong moral dimension. My position on each is related to how I understand the traditional Christian faith. ... Yet neither of the major parties is making a serious effort to consider this particular combination of concerns or even anything remotely resembling it."

Another evangelical says Bush deserves special attention because he has gone out of his way to find favor with religious conservatives. Whatever Bush has said about the conversion experience that saved him from his wicked, alcoholic past, the available evidence about the rest of his life "raises questions about whether Bush is really a Christian at all," according to Ayelish McGarvey, in the American Prospect.

The president rarely goes to church, has little interest in evangelism, has a history of nasty campaign tactics, flip-flopped on the tough issue of embryonic stem-cell research, lacks humility about his mistakes and has edited the Bible down to a convenient set of commandments she calls "evangelical agitprop."

"I'm no Kerry fan. I mean, I don't think he's a very good Catholic," said McGarvey. "But if Catholics can dissect Kerry, point by point, then I think it's more than appropriate for evangelicals to do the same for Bush. What does it say about us if we're afraid to do that?"