When is Christmas, anyway?

For those who follow Christian traditions, Christmas begins when the darkness of Christmas Eve yields to bright midnight candles and the Mass of the Angels or the Feast of the Nativity of Our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. The Christmas season then lasts 12 days, ending with Epiphany on Jan. 6.

But things aren't that simple in modern America, the land of the free and the home of the malls. For millions of us, today's Christmas begins when "Feliz Navidad" beer ads start interrupting National Football League broadcasts and Holiday movies surge into cable-TV schedules previously crowded with Halloween zombie marathons.

Or perhaps the season begins with those Christmas church bazaars around Thanksgiving. Then again, many begin saluting friends with "Merry Christmas!" about the time public institutions start holding Holiday parties and seasonal concerts -- in the early days of December.

In other words, it's getting harder and harder for Christians who try to practice their faith to answer what was once a simple question: When is Christmas?

"Unfortunately, most Americans -- especially evangelical Protestants -- have so distanced themselves from any awareness of the Christian calendar that their decisions about that kind of question have been handed over to the culture," said the Rev. Russell D. Moore, dean of the School of Theology at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Ky.

Many evangelicals fear the "cold formalism" that they associate with churches that follow the liturgical calendar and the end result, he said, is "no sense of what happens when in the Christian year, at all." Thus, instead of celebrating ancient feasts such as Epiphany, Pentecost and the Transfiguration, far too many American church calendars are limited to Christmas and Easter, along with cultural festivities such as Mother's Day, the Fourth of July, Halloween, Thanksgiving and the Super Bowl.

In Baptist life, the faithful once knew that Christmas was near when their church choirs pulled out all the stops, hired some outside musicians and performed a semi-classical "Christmas cantata" or a few selections from G.F. Handel's "Messiah." As recently as the 1960s, these cantatas were usually staged the Sunday before Christmas. These days, the Christmas concerts are creeping forward in December church bulletins, closer and closer to Thanksgiving. Ditto for all of those special children's programs and official church Christmas parties.

"I've been watching to see when pastors schedule their Christmas sermon series and when music directors start inserting Christmas songs into their services," said Moore. "The question these days is whether Christmas will even last until Christmas. ...

"All of this is being driven by travel, family events and what's happening all around us. Right now, our churches are running about two weeks behind the culture."

If that's the case, then church leaders who truly want to get in sync need to pay closer attention to our culture's highest Christmas authority -- the National Retail Federation. It's press release projecting holiday sales numbers is "the official starter's gun" that unleashes the madness, said Washington Post reporter Hank Stuever, author of "Tinsel: A Search for America's Christmas Present." This year, that statement was released on Oct. 6 and the official verdict was "average," or about $465.6 billion in sales.

"Once those numbers come out, that's when you know -- there's no stopping it. Here comes Christmas, whether you're ready or not," he said.

Stuever said that from his outsider perspective, as a lapsed Catholic, it's obvious that many clergy are "still paying a lot of lot of lip service" to Jesus being the "reason for the season and all that. I understand what they're saying, but surely they can see all of the materialism that's on display out in their parking lots and in their pews. ... Once Christmas gets rolling, everyone just goes bonkers and it's hard to claim otherwise."

This year, he added, it will be especially interesting to see how many leaders in "all of those big-box churches" cancel their Sunday morning services instead of daring to clash with family Christmas tree rites in American homes.

Moore stressed that he will be in his Highview Baptist pulpit on Christmas morning and, here's the key, his children know why.

"To even think that we have come to the point where we do not worship on the Lord's Day because it is Christmas is, to me, absolutely absurd. Where's the logic in that? What are people thinking?"

Baptists in an age without safe labels

Journalists have been known to jump to premature conclusions if a denomination has the word "Southern" in its name. Consider this paragraph in an MSNBC.com report about efforts by Southern Baptist researchers to shed light on the pros and cons of changing the name of America's largest non-Catholic flock. Southern Baptist Convention leaders have been discussing this prickly issue off and on for a generation.

This new LifeWay Research survey was conducted, noted MSNBC, after SBC leaders created a task force to "consider the impact of the convention's name on the denomination, which has been associated with such polarizing political figures as the Rev. Jerry Falwell, convicted Watergate conspirator-turned-Baptist minister Charles Colson and television evangelist Pat Robertson. Just this month, a Southern Baptist church in Kentucky voted to ban interracial couples, a controversial decision the pastor later overturned."

Alas, this ban on interracial couples had been approved by a Baptist church that happens to be located in the South -- not an actual Southern Baptist church. There is a difference. The tiny Gulnare Free Will Baptist Church quickly overturned its decision. MSNBC editors corrected their error, as well.

Nevertheless, this journalistic train wreck perfectly symbolized the cultural baggage that has become attached to that awkward and now inaccurate "Southern" label.

Truth is, it's getting harder and harder to pin simple labels on Southern Baptists and other religious believers. This reality is especially important in an age in which Americans are increasingly hostile to labels.

"The trend you just can't miss is the continuing rise of the non-categorized, the non-labeled forms of Protestantism," said Ed Stetzer, president of LifeWay Research. "You used to be able to look at religion in America and you could put most people into their appointed categories. Now we are seeing more people who just don't want to be put into a category or they don't want to stay put."

It will be impossible, he said, for Southern Baptist leaders to downplay some of the negative numbers in this survey -- numbers that are sure to make headlines. For example, while 53 percent of Americans reported having a favorable impression of Southern Baptists, 40 percent of those polled said their impressions were negative. The SBC's image was especially bad in the West (44 percent) and in the Southern Bible Belt (40 percent).

One eyebrow-raising number in the survey is that, in terms of favorable impressions, Roman Catholics (59 percent) fared better in the South than Southern Baptists (52 percent). Southern Baptists, ironically, fared better in regions in which they have had a lower profile, such as the Northeast and Midwest.

The news was also sobering on a question focusing on the convention's name and its evangelistic efforts. LifeWay researchers asked: "When I see (fill in denominational affiliation) in the name of a church, I assume it is not for me." Nationwide, 35 percent of those polled "strongly agreed" that a Southern Baptist congregation would not be a good fit for them -- higher than for Catholics (33 percent), generic "Baptists" (29 percent), Methodists (26 percent) and "community" or nondenominational churches (20 percent).

In other words, the mere presence of the word "Southern" cost SBC congregations six percentage points in head-to-head comparisons with other Baptists. In another question linked to decisions to visit or join a church, only 10 percent of those polled said that knowing a "church was Southern Baptist" would have a positive impact.

Meanwhile, the SBC fared worst among Americans who rarely attend church, Hispanics, many urbanites and young Americans. In all, only 17 percent of Protestant adults agreed that knowing a congregation was Southern Baptist would have a positive impact when it came time to decide whether to visit or join. The number among non-Protestant adults was a mere 2 percent.

The clear evidence that nondenominational churches -- churches without labels -- fared significantly better than Southern Baptist churches was especially significant, said Stetzer.

"People increasingly see religion in terms of silos and categories," he said. "It seems that they look at churches and then quickly decide, 'That one's for me' or they decide, 'That one's not for me.' ... The irony is that they will find many of the same beliefs in nondenominational evangelical churches that they find in our Southern Baptist churches -- but people don't know that.

"It seems that people will give a church a fair shot, but only if the label doesn't scare them."

Helping the young stick to faith

At first, there didn't seem to be much an 80-something grandmother could do to help her church's college freshmen wrestle with the trials and temptations of their first weeks away at college. After all, she knew very little about Facebook, YouTube, online homework, smartphones or texting, let alone "sexting."

She did, however, know how to write letters. So that is what she did, writing personal letters to each student to let them know that she was praying for them, wishing them the best as they searched for a college church and looking forward to seeing them at Thanksgiving and Christmas.

According to church members, the "students sought her out and rushed to give her hugs and to say, 'Thank you,' whenever they came home," said Kara E. Powell, who teaches at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and directs the Fuller Youth Institute.

However, another church member later stressed that the researcher had not heard the whole story. "Instead of writing one letter and that was that, she had actually written a letter to each of the students every week," said Powell.

This was one of the most striking stories that the seminary professor heard while doing follow-up work for the Youth Institute's six-year College Transition Project, which followed 500 Christian young people as they jumped from high school to college.

The goal was to find strategies for parents and religious leaders who wanted to help teens develop a personal faith that would "stick" when tested. The research was released earlier this year in a book entitled "Sticky Faith: Everyday ideas to build lasting faith in your kids," written by Powell and another Fuller colleague, Chap Clark.

The letter-writing grandmother, said Powell, was an example of one major lesson discovered during this process. After years of "segregating" teens off into their own niche, age-specific worship services and programs, there is evidence that young believers also profit from intergenerational contacts, conversations and mentoring projects with senior adults. Young people are also more likely to retain their faith if they helped teach the faith to the very young.

Right up front, the researchers admitted that the young people in this study had higher than average grade-point averages, were more likely to have been raised in unbroken homes and had grown up in churches large enough to employ youth ministers. That was the point.

Nevertheless, some of the results were sobering.

* When studies are combined, it appears that 40 to 50 percent of "churched" young people will abandon their faith -- at least during the college years.

* Only one in seven young people in the Fuller study felt they were ready for the personal, moral challenges of college.

* Events in the first two weeks establish patterns for many college careers, especially those linked to alcohol, sex and involvement in religious activities.

The finding that will inspire, or trouble, many parents, according to Powell and Clark, is that the faith practiced by most young people is rooted in the beliefs, values and choices that they see practiced in their own homes. If young people see their parents praying, it's more likely that they will pray. If they hear their parents weaving faith into the joys and trials of daily life, it's more likely that this behavior will "stick."

It's one thing to talk to children, said Powell. It's something else to find ways to truly communicate -- two-way communication -- with the young about faith, doubt, temptation and forgiveness. Breakthroughs can take place while discussing everything from homework to movies, from a parent's confessions about mistakes in the past to a child's hints about his or her hopes for the future.

"We are not saying that it will help if you lecture to your children about faith," she said. Instead, the goal is for "every parent to be a student of what their children love and, whether its sports or movies or who knows what, to be able to engage their children on that topic. You have to ask, 'What is my child passionate about?' You also have to be honest and let your children know what you're passionate about.

"Then you have to ask how you can bring faith into those conversations so that you can share your faith journeys. There is no way to force this. If it isn't happening naturally, the kids are going to know it."

God in the Gallup details

Decade after decade, the Gallup Organization reported some of the most familiar numbers in American religion. More than 90 percent of Americans said, "yes" when asked if they believe in God -- a number has changed little since the 1940s. Nearly 80 percent insisted they are "Christians," in some sense of that word. How many claimed to have attended a worship service in the previous week or so? That number hovered between 41 and 46 percent.

These are the kinds of numbers religious leaders love to quote when trying to intimidate politicians, educators, journalists and Hollywood producers.

Nevertheless, these poll numbers consistently failed to impress one significant authority -- George Gallup Jr.

"We revere the Bible, but don't read it," warned the famous pollster, in an address to the Evangelical Press Association. "We believe the Ten Commandments to be valid rules for living, although we can't name them. We believe in God, but this God is a totally affirming one, not a demanding one. He does not command our total allegiance. We have other gods before him."

The bottom line, he said, in an interview after that 1990 address, is that most American believers simply "want the fruits of religion, but not the obligations."

Gallup didn't enjoy punching holes in comforting statistics, in part because he sincerely believed that religious faith played a powerful, and for many decades overlooked, role in American life. This conviction was both professional and personal, since Gallup seriously considered becoming an Episcopal priest and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in religion at Princeton University before joining the family business.

Thus, while his father forever linked the Gallup name with political polling, George Gallup Jr. added a new goal for the firm's research -- probing the links between religious life and public life. Gallup retired in 2004 and died on Nov. 21 at the age of 81, after a one-year battle with cancer.

The key to Gallup's legacy is that he built on the basic religious questions his father and other researchers included in polls during the 1940s and '50s, said political scientist John C. Green of the University of Akron, who is known for his research into American politics and religious life. Instead of merely asking questions about religious affiliations, Gallup advocated a more systematic approach that focused attention on religious beliefs, attitudes and even behaviors.

"You got the sense that, however valuable those general numbers were in earlier polls, he was showing that you could experiment and try to find the realities inside all those numbers," said Green. The earlier Gallup numbers were "valuable because some of them went back so far into the mid-20th century. Then, George Gallup Jr. showed everyone that you could go beyond that general approach and dedicate entire surveys to religious questions."

By the end of his career, it was common to see a variety of researchers -- at the Pew Forum, LifeWay Research, the Barna Group and elsewhere -- focusing their work on highly specialized surveys targeting religious issues and trends. In 1977, Gallup himself helped found the Princeton Religion Research Center, in part to produce materials that would help clergy be more effective.

The basic problem, Gallup told me in 2004, is that far too many clergy "simply fail to take discipleship seriously. They assume that because people say they believe something, that this means they will live out those beliefs in daily life."

This shows up in the building blocks of faith, he added. Many clergy, for example, assume that people in their flocks understand simple Bible references. Many assume that people in their pews understand the truth claims of other religions. Many clergy are naive enough to believe that postmodern believers will -- without being challenged -- confess their sins and change the behaviors that cause havoc in their lives.

Far too many pastors, he lamented, seem afraid to ask tough questions.

"America is a churched nation, for the most part. Most Americans are either going to church or they used to go to church," said Gallup. "At some point we need to start focusing more attention on what is happening or not happening in those churches. ... Are our people learning the basics? Is their faith making a difference in their lives? Is their faith attractive to other people?

"These are the kinds of questions we must be willing to ask."

That changing God lobby in DC

Believe it or not, politicians used to be able to assume that when the U.S. Catholic bishops spoke on an issue, that meant that the nation's Catholics had spoken. That was so mid-20th century.

Before long, Catholic liberals -- backed by Playboy's Hugh Hefner and others -- would dare to create a pro-abortion-rights group called Catholics for Free Choice.

Before long, American Catholics would become so divided that traditionalists felt the need to form a group called Priests for Life.

Catholics were not the only believers rocked by the earthquakes of the 1960s and '70s. Evangelicals ventured out into the public square, inspired first by a born-again Democrat from Georgia and then by the Hollywood Republican who promised to defeat him. The Protestant mainline declined and then splintered. Pluralism and globalization tested old coalitions and inspired old ones.

All of this caused radical changes in the nation's capital. The number of organizations engaged in advocacy work linked to religious issues has increased fivefold in four decades -- from 37 in 1970 to at least 211 today.

"No matter how small the group, everyone feels the need to open an office in Washington, D.C., so that their voices can be heard," said political scientist Allen D. Hertzke of the University of Oklahoma, lead researcher for a new study of religious advocacy groups conducted by the Pew Forum for Religion and Public Life. "All of this is evidence of the growing pluralism on the American scene and the fact that religion is playing an even more prominent role in our politics."

According to this survey, Catholics of one stripe or another are behind one out of five (19 percent) of advocacy groups with offices in Washington, D.C., and evangelical Protestants support almost as many (18 percent). While 12 percent of these groups are Jewish, only 8 percent represent the old Protestant mainline. In fact, Muslims support 17 advocacy groups, while the historic mainline churches now have 16.

Hertzke said it's significant that the largest category -- one quarter of the groups studied -- consists either of interfaith groups or organizations that work on religious issues that involve believers in multiple faith traditions. Nearly two-thirds of these groups work on both domestic and foreign issues.

While one church-state lawyer's "advocacy" is often another's "lobbying," 82 percent of the groups in the Pew Forum study operate as nonprofit, tax-exempt organizations. Thus, they focus most of their work on public policy issues broadly defined, as opposed to specific legislation or candidates.

However, the survey's broad definition of "religious advocacy" included "attempts to influence, or urge the public to influence, specific legislation, whether the legislation is before a legislative body, such as the U.S. Congress or any state legislature, or before the public as a referendum, ballot initiative, constitutional amendment or similar measure." It also included "efforts to affect public policy, such as activities aimed at the White House and federal agencies, litigation designed to advance policy goals, and education or mobilization of religious constituencies on particular issues."

It was easy to describe the groups doing this work in the years after World War II. They were "largely denominational," explained Hertzke, each representing a specific body of believers -- Catholics, Jews, Baptists or mainline Protestants, such as Episcopalians, Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans and others.

By the start of the 1970s, evangelicals were gaining power through the growth of nondenominational groups, educational institutions and media ministries. Then Roe v. Wade changed the shape of American politics -- especially for evangelicals and traditional Catholics. Meanwhile, President Jimmy Carter inspired some Baptists and infuriated others. The ground was moving.

Many of the advocacy groups launched during this period were ecumenical or interfaith, uniting liberal and conservative believers on opposite sides of hot-button social issues. At the same time, some historic churches began to splinter.

In the '90s, religious activism went global in a world transformed by the fall of Soviet Union, digital communications and growing Third World concerns about poverty, human rights, AIDS and religious liberty. Meanwhile, the face of religion in American began to grow more complex before and after 9/11.

"There has definitely been a globalization of religious advocacy work, with all of these trends and issues making their way back to Washington," said Hertzke. As a result, "ecumenical and interfaith work is now normal. We all live and work in the same world, now. Everything is connected."

And with your spirit, once again

There is nothing new about church leaders arguing about worship, including whether the rites have become too casual or superficial. Take St. John Chrysostom, for example, who complained about the irreverence he saw in the churches of Constantinople. Back in the old days, he said, people knew what it meant to solemnly observe the holy mysteries. Alas, some believers seemed to be going through the motions -- in the 4th century.

The archbishop urged his flock: "When I say, 'Peace be unto you,' and you say, 'And with your spirit,' say it not with the voice only, but also with the mind; not in mouth only, but in understanding also."

Some of those words will sound familiar for Catholics who have tuned into the fierce debates surrounding the historic changes that arrive in their sanctuaries on Sunday, Nov. 27, the first day of Advent. This is when, after eight years of work by a global commission of bishops, American Catholics will begin using a new English translation of the Novus Ordo Mass that, four decades ago, was approved by the Second Vatican Council.

Critics say this new translation is too rigid and predict mass confusion in the pews. Supporters insist that its complex and poetic cadences more accurately reflect the Latin source text and will bring American Catholics into harmony with Catholics worldwide who use similar translations in their own languages.

No one disputes the sweeping nature of the changes, said Anthony Esolen, who teaches English at Providence College. So far, he has written 90,000 words of commentary on the Latin text and this new translation for the Magnificat Roman Missal Companion.

The bottom line: Rome ordered a new English translation of "every prayer said at every Mass for every day of the year and every purpose for which a Mass may be said," he said. Worshipers should prepare for many phrases that will sound both new and old.

"These prayers are theological and scriptural poems," he explained. "Everything in the Latin is built on scriptural language and images. ... Once you see all of these verbatim words of scripture, the argument of how to do the translation is essentially over. All of these clear references to scripture needed to be in the new translation. You don't have much of a choice."

Once of the most obvious changes comes at the beginning, when the priest faces his congregation and says, "The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all." In shorter versions of this invocation, the priest will either say, "Grace to you and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ" or "The Lord be with you."

After 40 years of responding with "And also with you," American Catholics will now reply using the ancient phrase, "And with your spirit" -- which is "et cum spiritu tuo" in Latin.

This new translation goes downhill from there, according to Bishop Donald Trautman of Erie, Pa., former chair of the U.S. bishops' liturgy commission.

"When the bishops at the Second Vatican Council made the historic decision that the liturgy of the church should be in the vernacular, there was no mention of sacred language or vocabulary," he argued, in a much-quoted analysis for the progressive magazine U.S. Catholic.

"The council's intent was pastoral -- to have the liturgy of the church prayed in living languages. Translated liturgical texts should be reverent, noble, inspiring and uplifting, but that does not mean archaic, remote or incomprehensible. While the translated texts of the new Missal must be accurate and faithful to the Latin original, they must also be intelligible, proclaimable and grammatically correct. Regrettably the new translation fails in this regard."

The Vatican's instructions to the translators, said Esolen, did stress that "pompous and superfluous language must be avoided." However, this doesn't mean that the poetic touches found in the Latin -- such as "venerable hands of the Lord," "immaculate victim," "consubstantial," "it is truly right and just," "the Powers of heaven" and many others -- will repel modern worshipers.

Pious language, he added, can have a holy purpose. After all, it's possible that if Catholics are never asked to turn to God and "use words like 'beg,' 'implore' or even 'pray,' there's a good chance they will forget how to 'beg,' 'implore' and even to 'pray.' "

Education wars among Georgia Baptists

When it comes to higher education, Georgia Baptists are of two minds these days. On Oct. 21, the trustees of Shorter University in Rome, Ga., approved a covenant requiring faculty and staff to support the "mission of Shorter University as a Christ-centered institution affiliated with the Georgia Baptist Convention." Then they asked employees to "reject as acceptable all sexual activity not in agreement with the Bible, including, but not limited to, premarital sex, adultery and homosexuality."

A fortnight latter, Baptists learned about a "fall update" email from leaders at Mercer University in Macon, Ga., announcing a policy extending health care and other benefits to the "domestic partners" of faculty and staff, regardless of sexual orientation.

The Georgia Baptist Convention cut its historic ties to Mercer in 2005. Now, the school's strategic shift brings it "into line with other leading private universities ... including Emory, Duke, Vanderbilt, Wake Forest, Tulane, Furman, Rollins, Elon and Stetson," noted Mercer President Bill Underwood, in a statement quoted at EthicsDaily.com, a progressive Baptist website. "It is also consistent with our established policy of not discriminating against employees based on sexual orientation."

While this divide may shock outsiders, these decisions are "totally logical" in light of trends in Baptist life and higher education, stressed Lutheran scholar Robert Benne of Roanoke (Va.) College, author of "Quality with Soul: How Six Premier Colleges and Universities Keep Faith with Their Religious Traditions."

"These schools are headed in opposite directions because their leaders want them to become radically different kinds of institutions," he said. Shorter wants to "become a 'Christian' university in terms of its approach to education and campus life. ... Mercer is trying to become what its leaders see as an elite institution, the kind of place where if you tried to talk about 'Christian education' the faculty would raise all holy hell."

In some ways, these Baptist conflicts resemble those among educators in other religious groups, he said. For example, many American Catholic colleges and universities have become highly secularized, while their leaders insist that they remain rooted in "Catholic" values or some specific educational tradition, such as the legacy of the Jesuits. Meanwhile, a few other Catholic schools publicly stress their loyalty to the Vatican.

With that in mind, it's significant that Mercer's Internet homepage states: "Founded by early 19th century Baptists, Mercer -- while no longer formally affiliated with the Baptist denomination -- remains committed to an educational environment that embraces intellectual and religious freedom while affirming values that arise from a Judeo-Christian understanding of the world."

Benne noted that few well-known schools can accurately be labeled "fundamentalist," as would be the case with the independent Bob Jones University in South Carolina. Meanwhile, most conflicts in Southern Baptist academia involve debates about accepting some explicitly "Christian" approach to education, often referred to as the "integration of faith and learning."

Thus, it's symbolic that Mercer leaders openly say they want to go the other direction, following in the footsteps of universities such as Vanderbilt and Duke, and historically Baptist institutions such as Furman and Wake Forest. The Mercer student handbook, for example, contains no moral code covering student conduct on premarital sex, adultery and homosexuality.

At this point, Shorter accepts non-Christian students. However, Benne said Shorter's new doctrinal and lifestyle code for faculty and staff suggests that it will soon ask its students to sign a similar covenant of faith and moral conduct. If so, covenants of this kind are common on Christian campuses, including famous liberal arts schools such as Wheaton College, Calvin College, Biola University and numerous other members of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities (the global network in which I teach).

Many of these schools retain ties to the denominations that founded them, but they are reach out to recruit other evangelicals or traditional Christians as students, faculty and staff. Some of these schools now openly appeal to Catholics, as well.

The problem for many Baptist academics, stressed Benne, is that they place such a strong emphasis on "soul freedom" and the "priesthood of every believer" that they struggle to find ways to separate themselves from the "lukewarm people who are not really committed to the their school's vision."

The result is a perfect Baptist Catch 22.

"How do you defend specific doctrines and convictions," he said, "without daring to list these specifics, which means you have committed the sin of having a creed?"

Bishops change course on religious liberty

When it comes to changing course, ecclesiastical bureaucracies are like giant oceangoing vessels that struggle to turn quickly when obstacles appear in their paths. It took time, but the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has made a sea change in how it works on religious freedom issues.

Faced with what they see as dangerous trends in the Obama administration, the bishops recently announced the creation of their own Ad Hoc Committee for Religious Liberty. The goal is to address church-state trends that in recent decades have primarily been attacked by Protestant conservatives.

Anyone seeking the source of this development in American religion -- including recent blasts at the White House by the archbishops of New York and Los Angeles -- needs to study a 2009 Georgetown University speech by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. It received relatively little attention at that time.

"Our human rights agenda for the 21st century is to make human rights a human reality and the first step is to see human rights in a broad context," she said, speaking on a campus known for its leadership on the Catholic left. "To fulfill their potential, people must be free to choose laws and leaders; to share and access information, to speak, criticize and debate. They must be free to worship, associate and to love in the way that they choose."

Conservatives cried foul, noting that the secretary of state had raised gay rights -- the right for all to "love in the way that they choose" -- to the same level as freedoms explicitly articulated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. They also noticed that she mentioned a narrow right "to worship" instead of using more expansive terms such as religious "freedom" or "liberty."

"Religious freedom, rightly understood, cannot be reduced to freedom of worship," argued George Weigel, a Catholic conservative best known for his authorized biography of the late Pope John Paul II.

"Religious freedom includes the right to preach and evangelize, to make religiously informed moral arguments in the public square and to conduct the affairs of one's religious community without undue interference from the state. If religious freedom only involves the freedom to worship, then ... there is 'religious freedom' in Saudi Arabia, where Bibles and evangelism are forbidden but expatriate Filipino laborers can attend Mass in the U.S. embassy compound in Riyadh."

Nearly two years later, this list of concerns looms over a blunt letter (.pdf) from New York Archbishop Timothy Dolan to President Barack Obama, one inspired by Obama administration attempts to overturn the national Defense of Marriage Act.

America's bishops "cannot be silent ... when federal steps harmful to marriage, the laws defending it, and religious freedom continue apace," claimed Dolan, who now leads the USCCB. It is especially unfair, he added, to "equate opposition to redefining marriage with either intentional or willfully ignorant racial discrimination, as your Administration insists on doing."

Dolan was even more frank in a letter (.pdf) to the U.S. bishops, claiming that the Justice Department is undercutting "our ancient Catholic belief, rooted in the teachings of Jesus and also the Jewish Scriptures." If this doctrine continues to be "labeled as a form of bigotry," he argued, this will surely "lead to new challenges to our liberties."

In addition to clashes on same-sex marriage, Dolan listed other concerns, including Health and Human Services regulations requiring all private health insurance to cover birth control and so-called "morning-after pills." Critics claim that the religious exception would protect few religious institutions, including colleges, and would leave insurers or individuals with moral objections completely vulnerable. The Justice Department, in recent Supreme Court proceedings, also questioned the need for the "ministerial exception" that allows religious groups to hire, and fire, ministers and staff members without government interference.

According to Los Angeles Archbishop Jose Gomez, "We are slowly losing our sense of religious liberty" in modern America.

"There is much evidence to suggest that our society no longer values the public role of religion or recognizes the importance of religious freedom as a basic right," he argued, in an essay for the journal First Things. Instead, "our courts and government agencies increasingly treat the right to hold and express religious beliefs as only one of many private lifestyle options. And, they observe, this right is often 'trumped' in the face of challenges from competing rights or interests deemed to be more important."

God and The New York Times, once again

When it comes to the daily news, the recently retired editor of The New York Times has decided there is news and then there is news about religion and social issues.

When covering debates on politics, it's crucial for Times journalists to be balanced and fair to stakeholders on both sides. But when it comes to matters of moral and social issues, Bill Keller argues that it's only natural for scribes in the world's most powerful newsroom to view events through what he considers a liberal, intellectual and tolerant lens.

"We're liberal in the sense that ... liberal arts schools are liberal," Keller noted, during a recent dialogue recorded at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum. "We're an urban newspaper. ... We write about evolution as a fact. We don't give equal time to Creationism."

Moderator Evan Smith, editor of the Texas Tribune, jokingly shushed his guest and added: "You may not be in the right state for that."

Keller continued: "We are liberal in the sense that we are open-minded, sort of tolerant, urban. Our wedding page includes -- and did even before New York had a gay marriage law -- included gay unions. So we're liberal in that sense of the word, I guess. Socially liberal."

Asked directly if the Times slants its coverage to favor "Democrats and liberals," he added: "Aside from the liberal values, sort of social values thing that I talked about, no, I don't think that it does."

The bottom line: Keller insists that the newspaper he ran for eight years is playing it straight in its political coverage.

However, he admitted it has an urban, liberal bias when it comes to stories about social issues. And what are America's hot-button social issues? Any list would include sex, salvation, abortion, euthanasia, gay rights, cloning and a few other sensitive matters that are inevitably linked to religion. That's all.

Keller's Austin remarks were the latest in a series of candid comments in which the man who has called himself a "crashed Catholic" has jabbed at his newspaper's critics, especially political conservatives and religious traditionalists.

Shortly before stepping down as editor, he wrote a column insisting that religious believers -- evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics, in particular -- should face strict scrutiny when running for higher office. After all, he argued, if a candidate believes "space aliens dwell among us," shouldn't voters know if these kinds of beliefs will shape future policies?

In another recent essay, Keller flashed back to an earlier national debate about the integrity of the Times and its commitment to journalistic balance, fairness and accuracy. It was in 2004 that the newspaper's first "public editor" wrote a column that ran under the headline "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?" Then, in his first sentence, Daniel Okrent bluntly stated: "Of course it is."

Discussions of this column continue to this day. The key to that earlier piece, noted Keller, was its admission that the Times' outlook is "steeped in the mores of a big, rambunctious city," which means that it tends to be "skeptical of dogma, secular, cosmopolitan."

This socially liberal worldview does have its weaknesses when it comes to covering news outside zip codes close to Manhattan.

"Okrent rightly scolded us for sometimes seeming to look down our urban noses at the churchgoing, the gun-owning and the unlettered," noted Keller. "Respect is a prerequisite for understanding. But he did not mean that we subscribe to any political doctrine or are foot soldiers in any cause. (Anyone who thinks we go easy on liberals should ask Eliot Spitzer or David Paterson or Charles Rangel or...)."

As for the future, the newspaper's new executive editor has carefully offered her own opinion on the worldview of the newsroom she leads. In an interview with current Times public editor Arthur S. Brisbane, Jill Abramson joined Keller in stressing that it's crucial to remain unbiased -- when covering politics.

"I sometimes try not only to remind myself but my colleagues that the way we view an issue in New York is not necessarily the way it is viewed in the rest of America," she said. "I am pretty scrupulous about when we apply our investigative firepower to politicians, that we not do it in a way that favors one way of thinking or one party over the other. I think the mandate is to keep the paper straight."