Dark Knight of the soul

For many years, Marc Newman used a simple test when asking college students if they thought some actions were always right and others were always wrong – slavery.

Then something strange happened in his philosophy of communication classes. Students began arguing that slavery might be acceptable in certain cultures and under certain conditions. Besides, who were they to judge others?

So here's a new question. What if you had two ferries and each contained a bomb. One ferry is full of criminals, while the other contains ordinary citizens and, there's a catch, each contains a remote control that can trigger the other boat's bomb. Then there is this sick Joker who vows that he will destroy both, if one doesn't destroy the other.

Wouldn't it be moral for the good guys to destroy the bad guys?

This is, of course, a soul-wrenching scene in "The Dark Knight," the Batman sequel that is soaring toward the $500 million dollar mark at the U.S. box office.

"The audience is torn between these two choices and that's the point," said Newman, who teaches courses on the rhetoric of film at Regent University in Virginia Beach, Va. "You want to see good triumph over evil, somehow. But just look how far these movies have to ratchet up the nature of these violent acts so that the whole audience can agree that they're evil."

Newman believes that one reason that consumers are paying – over and over – to see this dark, distressing movie is that they are drawn to its depiction of a culture in which violence has become senseless, random and all but unstoppable.

In one nihilistic sermon, the villain with a death-mask smirk tells the powers that be, "Do I really look like a guy with a plan? You know what I am? I am a dog chasing cars. I wouldn't know what to do with one if I caught it. I just do things." Later, he proclaims: "Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order and everything becomes chaos. I am an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It?s fair."

This note of despair fits the times. Thus, the movie strikes a chord.

"We see in 'The Dark Knight a fictional expression of our own world gone mad," argues Newman, at his MovieMinistry.com website. "Under interrogation, The Joker rejects the idea that his is some alien ideology. Providing his analysis of the bastions of rules and laws – the police department – The Joker explains, 'You see, their morals, their code, it's a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They're only as good as the world allows them to be. I'll show you. When the chips are down, these civilized people, they'll eat each other. See, I'm not a monster ... I'm just ahead of the curve.' "

The question religious believers have to ask, he said, is "whether The Joker is right."

Newman is not alone in hailing "The Dark Knight" as – like it or not – a must-see epic for clergy and others who want to keep their fingers on the cultural pulse. But there are strong voices of dissent.

"No movie I've ever seen has been so emotionally disturbing and spiritually oppressive," warned Brian Fitzpatrick of Human Events. While some claim that the movie's tale of good and evil contains essentially "conservative" values, he argued that it "showcases violence, betrayal and sadism in the name of frivolous entertainment. The movie is morally corrupt."

The key to this tension, noted Newman, is that "The Dark Knight" leaves viewers yearning for its anti-hero – Batman is aware of his own flaws and mixed motives – to find a way to remain true to his personal vow to defend the innocent, even if that means bending society's rules.

As this movie lurches to its conclusion, it becomes clear that the Joker has only one goal and that is to strip Batman of his moral convictions, to shatter his belief that good can defeat evil without being corrupted.

This implies that some kind of moral absolutes do exist.

"But we are left," Newman added, "with an important question: Where does Batman get his convictions about what is right and what is wrong? He has a moral vision, but where did it come from? That isn't in the movie. There are no answers there."

Preaching to a tempting choir

The YouTube era has produced a few Catholic stars, priests whose performances have inspired scores of web surfers to pass along emails full of grief or glee.

Who can forget "The Barney Blessing," with the priest who traded his vestments for a purple dinosaur suit before the final prayer of a Halloween Mass? Then there was the trendy priest whose loopy dance to the altar, accompanied by trumpets and drums, inspired comparisons to Prince Ali's arrival in the Disney classic "Aladdin."

But these were tiny tremors compared with the online earthquake that followed Father Michael Pfleger's sermon in which he pretended to be Hillary Clinton, sobbing because of her losses to Sen. Barack Obama.

"She just always thought that, 'This is mine. I'm Bill's wife. I'm white,' " said the priest, speaking at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. "Then out of nowhere came, 'Hey, I'm Barack Obama.' And she said, 'Oh damn, where did you come from? I'm white. I'm entitled. There's a black man stealing my show.' ''

It's natural to watch these cyber spectacles while muttering, "What were they thinking?" The answer is quite simple, according to Father John F. Kavanaugh of St. Louis University. Like many preachers before them, they fell for the temptation to "preach to the choir," their listeners who already agreed with them.

"You're supposed to be a messenger. You're supposed to be the person who brings people the Good News," said the Jesuit, author of "Following Christ in a Consumer Culture" and other books on faith and ethics. "But instead of being the mediator, you can end up putting the focus on yourself. You can become the message and, before you know it, people can start basing their faith on you instead of God."

Catholic priests, of course, are not alone in this temptation. There are plenty of other preachers, in this media-saturated age, who act like stand-up comedians or performers in their own faith-based reality shows. Many big churches have been known to tremble when a skilled communicator leaves the pulpit.

The Pfleger case, said Kavanaugh, is particularly sad after his decades of service at St. Sabina's on Chicago's South Side.

The sandy-haired, blue-eyed priest has helped build a thriving, predominately black parish and parochial school. Pfleger has clashed with gang leaders as well as bishops, while adopting two African-American sons and leading campaigns against alcohol, cocaine, cigarettes and other addictions. He has been hailed as a spectacular preacher, especially on the sin of racism, in an era in which Catholics are not known for their pulpit skills.

The problem is that success leads to unique temptations.

Father Pfleger and clergy who make similar mistakes are not "crazy persons. But they do have problems of their own," stressed Kavanaugh, writing in America, a Catholic weekly. "They are the problems of the preacher. ... I know there are few moments to compare with the affection and approval of parishioners after Mass, especially if you have been helpful in strengthening their faith. But the most distressing moment for me was the one homily I gave that evoked applause. Of course, it was gratifying; but it was disturbing. What was the applause for?"

It's easy for preachers to keep telling the faithful what they want to hear, he said. Preachers must be self-critical and become aware of when they avoid some tough subjects or choose to soften a message, in order not to offend. The flip side of this is when preachers decide to pound away on popular subjects and easy targets, seeking to please people who are already in the pews.

One way for priests to regain perspective, said the Jesuit, would be reading – in the pulpit – classic sermons by the saints or popular Christian writers that focus on timeless issues. Another way to keep from "defanging the Gospel" is to confront a congregation with the undiluted words of a sermon by Jesus, as written in scripture.

"Whether you are preaching to liberals or conservatives, it's hard to tell people truths that they don't want to hear," said Kavanaugh. "It's hard to tell people to love their enemies. It's hard to tell people to repent of their sins and to forgive others. ... If your people are smiling and applauding all of the time – all of the time – that's when warning flags need to go up."

Sex, sin and surveys

It's becoming more and more dangerous for preachers to use the words "sex" and "sin" in the same sentence.

Consider this question: Is sex outside of marriage a sin?

Say "yes" and millions of believers who are sitting in pews will say "amen." But that same affirmation of centuries of doctrine will offend just as many believers and nonbelievers, giving them an easy excuse to avoid congregations they believe are old fashioned and intolerant.

"We have to recognize that our historic positions on sexual issues are becoming incredibly distasteful to more people in this culture and especially to our media and popular culture," said Ed Stetzer, director of the Southern Baptist Convention's LifeWay Research team.

"The whole 'Hate the sin, love the sinner' thing – people are not getting that anymore. People do not believe that we mean that."

Right now, the gay-marriage issue is making headlines. But for millions of traditional believers in Christianity, Judaism, Islam and many other faiths, this issue is linked to a question rooted in religious doctrine, not modern politics. In a spring LifeWay survey, researchers asked: "Do you believe homosexual behavior is a sin?"

The results showed a culture torn in half, with 48 percent of American adults saying that homosexual acts are sinful and 45 percent disagreeing. Considering the margin for error, this is a virtual tie.

The numbers were radically different in different pews, with only 39 percent of Roman Catholics believing that homosexual acts are sinful, as opposed to 61 percent of Protestants and 79 percent of those who identified as evangelical, "born again" or fundamentalist Christians.

A similar pattern emerged from a hot-button question in the latest results reported from the U.S. Religious Landscape Survey conducted by the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. Researchers in this massive effort asked participants which of the following statements "comes closer to your own views – even if neither is exactly right. 1 – Homosexuality is a way of life that should be accepted by society, OR 2 – Homosexuality is a way of life that should be discouraged by society."

The question was not stated in strictly political or religious terms. However, with that powerful, more official word "discouraged" in the question, 50 percent of the adults surveyed said that "homosexuality" in general, as opposed to homosexual behavior, should be accepted by society.

Once again, there were sharp differences in various religious groups, with 79 percent of American Jews, 58 percent of Catholics and 56 percent of mainline Protestants calling for acceptance of homosexuality. Meanwhile, only 39 percent of the members of historically black churches, 27 percent of Muslims and 26 percent of the evangelical Protestants affirmed the public acceptance of homosexuality.

These numbers are evidence of great change in the religious and moral views of many Americans, yet they also point toward familiar tensions between traditionalists and progressives. The Pew Forum survey, for example, again demonstrated a reality seen in recent elections. Americans who frequently attend worship services and say that religion is very important in their lives continue to take more conservative stands on hot moral issues in public life.

What about people outside the pews? That is where another set of statistics will prove especially distressing to clergy who sincerely want to defend what Stetzer called the ancient "one man, one woman, one lifetime" doctrine of marriage.

In the LifeWay survey, 32 percent of American adults said that their decision to visit or join a congregation would be "negatively affected" if it taught that homosexual behavior is sin. That number rose to 49 percent among the "unchurched," people who rarely or never attend worship.

The issue of homosexuality does not, of course, stand alone, said Stetzer. It's getting harder for religious leaders to maintain consistent teachings about other acts and conditions that traditional forms of religion have, for centuries, considered sin. This affects preaching on premarital sex, divorce, cohabitation and adultery.

"Ultimately, the modern church has failed to proclaim and explain a biblical ethic of sexuality," he said. "We also need to admit that the church has failed to live out the ethic that it's claiming to be advocating. If we are going to say that we stand for the sanctity of marriage, then we – in our churches and in our homes – are going to have to live out the sanctity of marriage."

The roots of King's dream

The telephone rang after midnight and sleep was not an option for the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., after he answered it.

It was late 1956. Years later, King quoted that hellish voice: "Nigger, we are tired of you and your mess now. And if you aren't out of this town in three days, we are going to blow your brains out and blow up your house."

King ended up in the kitchen, meditating on the mystery of evil and worrying about his family. He began praying out loud, voicing his feelings of weakness, frustration and fear. Soon, he fell into a waking dream in which God gave him comfort and courage. He glimpsed the future.

The next day, King told reporters: "I had a vision."

This became a touchstone event and shaped one of his signature themes. But the wording had changed by the time King reached the Lincoln Memorial on Aug. 28, 1963.  By then the voice of the Civil Rights Movement was crying out: "I have a dream."

Four decades later, this speech may be the only exposure that millions of young Americans have ever had to King's preaching and writing, said Drew Hansen, author of "The Dream," a new book that offers an in-depth analysis of the history and content of the speech.

This is sadly limited view of a complex man and his times, said the 30-year-old Seattle lawyer. But many who watch or read this speech may be inspired to learn more. After all, that is what happened to Hansen during a Yale Law School class on civil rights. He dug deeper and what he found was both inspiring and sobering.

"It's easy to focus on this speech and King's victories and all those barriers that fell back in the days when things were so bad," said Hansen, an evangelical Christian who graduated from Harvard and also studied theology at Oxford University.

"Focusing on this speech alone is certainly a lot easier than meditating on all of the barriers that remain. ... But still, this is a wonderful place to start as we give King the homage that is his due as a preacher, public philosopher, field general and prophet."

It is crucial to grasp the context. Hansen noted that King traveled about 275,000 miles and delivered at least 350 speeches during the year of the March on Washington. Witnesses said he worked on the text up to the last minute, literally marking out passages and scribbling in others as he sat waiting to speak.

Hansen's book includes material from rough drafts prepared by aides as well as a side-by-side comparison of the text as King wrote it and then delivered it. This includes detailed descriptions of the preacher's vocal inflections and use of dramatic pauses and repeated sentence constructions that let his listeners to respond to his words like skilled jazz musicians.

"King knew how to read his audience," said Hansen. "That had been part of his training since he was a little boy in his daddy's church. This address was a case of a talented preacher getting caught up in a call-and-response experience, not just with the audience in front of him, but with the whole nation. "That's why these words touched people then and they touch people now."

It was supposed to have been a political speech. Yet nearly every significant metaphor in it can be traced to a biblical source, noted Hansen. Growing up in black Baptist churches, King had been baptized in the words, grammar and imagery of the King James Bible. This provided a solid foundation as he spoke to African Americans and, ironically, to white Protestants in the Deep South. King knew that the Bible had authority –authority to inspire and to judge.

This is what King turned to as he faced the nation. The entire "I have a dream" section of the speech was not in his written text.

"He wrote a political address," said Hansen. "It's not that other people wrote a political address for him. King's own draft was nothing like a sermon. But the speech he actually delivered was not dominated by that kind of political language. He left lots of that out and everything he added was rooted in biblical images and themes. That changed everything."

Plagiarism and the pulpit

One thing great preachers enjoy about traveling is that they can hear other people preach. But the American orator A.J. Gordon received a shock during an 1876 visit to England. Sitting anonymously in a church, he realized that the sermon sounded extremely familiar – because he wrote it.

"The man in the pulpit was reading it verbatim without saying a word about the source. After the service, Gordon introduced himself and we can just imagine the pastor's reaction," said the Rev. Scott Gibson, director of the Center for Preaching at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary outside Boston.

Perhaps the pastor read one of Gordon's books or found the sermon in a journal. He might have lifted it from a major newspaper, because it was common in those days for sermons to be published in Monday editions.

But the preacher never thought the author would cross the Atlantic and land in one of his own pews, said Gibson, who is studying the history of plagiarism in preaching. It has always been hard for an offender to believe that a church member has read the telltale source or that a visitor with an excellent memory happened to be sitting in the right place at the wrong time.

"This is not a new problem," said Gibson. "Some people think the World Wide Web came along and suddenly you had thousands of pastors copying other people's sermons with a few clicks of a mouse. But there has always been a lot of laziness out there.

"Preachers get busy and they run out of time and then they just plain steal."

The temptations are timeless, but the Internet has raised waves of new ethical questions.

In his study, Gibson defines "plagiarism" as preaching someone else's sermon research or content without giving public credit for it. But is it plagiarism to use an outline or text the pastor has legally obtained – even purchased – from one of the thousands of preaching sites that have sprung up online? Is it acceptable to use a respected site such as SermonNotes.com without telling the congregation? What about quoting from the anonymous inspirational stories that arrive daily in everypastor's email? Is it wrong if a megachurch pastor has support staff members who do "ghost" work as researchers and writers? Does a preacher have to reveal each and every source of inspiration?

"It's hard to footnote sermons," said the Rev. Haddon Robinson, an internationally known teacher of preaching in Dallas and Denver before arriving at Gordon-Conwell. "There's no way to make people in the pews understand all of the sources you are using, especially if they're highly academic sources. I don't think anyone expects preachers to stand up there and quote all of their reference books and commentaries by name."

But all preachers read and hear stories and insights that they want to share with their flocks. It makes a sermon more colorful to feature a quotation by an author " who simply says something better than you can," said Robinson. Attributing direct quotes also adds authority, especially when quoting figures such as Martin Luther, C.S. Lewis or Billy Graham.

This is safe territory.

The danger is when pastors appropriate entire outlines or sermon texts and claim them as their own. Perhaps the strongest temptation is to personalize anecdotes that happened to other people. But it only takes seconds, noted Gibson, for a preacher to cite the source of a story or to say something like, "I heard a great sermon on this biblical text by pastor so and so and I want to share some of his insights with you." Some pastors add additional references in the Sunday bulletin or in study pages on the church website.

It's easy for preachers to play it straight, said Gibson. The question is whether many congregations have become so mesmerized that they will overlook plagiarism.

"Some people get so caught up in the experience of hearing that great preacher," he said. "It's not so much the content. It's his persona. It may not matter to them that he is using someone else's sermons. What you hear people say is, 'He's our preacher and it doesn't matter what he's doing. Let's move on.' "Some churches today just don't care."

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."