The Very Rev. Ted Turner speaks

Once again, the Very Rev. Ted Turner has bravely stepped forward to blaze new trails for peace, love and religious tolerance.

And all the people said: Say what?

"I was looking at this woman and I was trying to figure out what was on her forehead," said the founder of the Cable News Network, during a retirement party for anchorman Bernard Shaw. Looking around, Turner realized it was Ash Wednesday and several other Catholics were standing nearby.

"What are you, a bunch of Jesus freaks?", he asked. "You ought to be working for Fox."

There was nothing particularly shocking about the latest statement from the vice chairman of AOL Time Warner, Inc. After all, the Mouth of the South has previously said that Christianity is "for losers," pro-lifers are Bozos and the pope is a Polish idiot. Perhaps he was shocked to see signs of Lenten repentance in his newsroom and he was caught off guard.

But the key to this story came when Turner responded to the latest howls of outrage from his critics. "I apologize to all Christians for my comment about Catholics wearing ashes on their foreheads," he said. "I do not believe in any form of prejudice or discrimination, especially religious intolerance."

If his recent sermons are to be taken seriously, Turner is openly campaigning for the role of religious leader and prophet. By holding himself up as an advocate of religious tolerance, he also is implying that his enemies are the true advocates of religious intolerance.

Turner spoke at length on this topic last fall in a highly confessional address to more than 1,000 rabbis, swamis, monks, ministers and other spiritual leaders at the United Nations. Of course, the media leader did more than speak at the Millennium World Peace Summit of Religious and Spiritual Leaders -- he helped create it.

As a boy, stressed Turner, he had wanted to be a Christian missionary. But now, he said, he understands that missionaries are the enemies of truth and tolerance.

"Instead of all these different gods," he said, "maybe there's one God who manifests himself and reveals himself in different ways to different people. How about that? ... Basically, the major religions which have survived today don't have blood sacrifice and they don't have hatred behind them. Those which have done the best are the ones that are built on love."

Thus, he concluded: "It's time to get rid of hatred. It's time to get rid of prejudice. It's time to have love and respect and tolerance for each other."

Turner doesn't consider himself anti-religious. He is merely opposed to religious groups that he believes are intolerant of other faith groups. Turner believes he is not anti-Christian. He is opposed to Christians who still believe that Jesus is the only path to salvation. And Turner is not anti-Catholic, per se. He financially supports Catholics who oppose their church's teachings on messy, personal subjects such as sex and salvation.

And Turner is not alone in seeing direct links between missionaries and hate groups, between evangelism and violence.

As part of a global United Religions Initiative, California Episcopal Bishop William Swing has said that in order for "religions to pursue peace among each other, there will have to be a godly cease-fire, a temporary truce where the absolute, exclusive claims of each will be honored, but an agreed-upon neutrality will be exercised in terms of proselytizing, condemning, murdering or dominating. These will not be tolerated in the United Religions zone."

Critics who think Turner and his allies are anti-religious crusaders are not seeing the big picture, said Mary Jo Anderson, a contributing editor at the Catholic journal Crisis. There's a reason Turner is so critical of religious groups that he believes are mired in the past. He is convinced that he is helping create the religion of the future.

"Ted Turner has a kind of vision," she said. "He sees a world in which everyone is free to live the way Western man lives, with three TVs, two BMWs and one child. He believes man is evolving spiritually, as well as physically. ... He is absolutely sure that he is going to be a leader in what happens next."

Lieberman takes faith-based leap

It's the question haunting the U.S. Capitol: Does changing lives have anything to do with saving souls?

If the answer is "yes," then the Beltway powers that be will have trouble sharing tax dollars with faith-based charities. Truth is, America is packed with groups that offer radically different maps describing how souls get to heaven or hell.

Many of these true believers don't like each other much and there are swarms of secularists who distrust all of them. If the U.S. government starts writing checks to the God squad -- better make that the squads of the gods -- then things will get real tense, real quick.

So be it, says Sen. Joe Lieberman. This tension could be good for America.

"Too often, people assume faith-based initiatives inevitably mean entanglement, establishment and ultimately theocracy," he said, in a recent Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life. "That need not be the case. We are not calling for ... government endorsement of any one religion, or government favoritism for religious groups over non-religious groups." The goal, he said, is ending "favoritism of non-religious over religious groups."

But how many Americans who have yearned for a revival of faith in the public square will say "Amen!" when their tax dollars flow into the budgets of controversial religious groups? Will the religious right tolerate pluralism?

As the saying goes: Be careful what you pray for, because you may get it. Catholics will build new halfway houses, but so will Scientologists. Southern Baptists will operate counseling programs on teen sex, but so will the Unification Church. Jewish groups will open centers for the elderly, but so will the Nation of Islam.

The challenge, said Lieberman, will be to craft laws that judge faith-based programs on their deeds, not the doctrines that inspire them. It might help to assume that religious people have the same rights as non-religious people. They should be judged according to their works, not their words.

"If a non-religious group seeking federal aid meets the program criteria, produces proven results, and does not violate civil rights or other laws, it will not matter that they may have unconventional views on unrelated issues," he said. "Shouldn't the same standard apply to programs run by religious groups as well?

"In fact, it would in my view be problematic on First Amendment grounds to discriminate against faith-based groups for their particular beliefs."

It was easy to find a larger agenda in this speech, especially after Lieberman's historic role as the first Jew to receive a major-party nomination to be vice president. The Washington Post bluntly noted that this step toward supporting President Bush's faith-based initiative has placed him "in a more conservative position than many other Democrats -- especially many of those considering a bid for the presidency."

Lieberman even said that evangelistic groups should even be allowed to compete for social service grants, as long as the government money is not directly used to fund campaigns to win converts.

This is where the fire will fall, if and when Lieberman and other political progressives dare to support legislation that pours government funds into aggressively faith-based programs. Combat will immediately commence between armies of lawyers, clergy and politicians focusing on the meaning of words such as "sin," "repentance" and "evangelism."

After all, some faith groups insist that all paths to God are right and anyone who says otherwise is wrong. Others want the freedom to proclaim that only their faith knows the way to heaven. These days, one man's "evangelism" is another man's "proselytizing," and one man's "proselytizing" is another's "hate crime." Will the religious left tolerate free speech?

Hopefully, said Lieberman, disagreements over religious words will not prevent new opportunities for people of faith to change more lives through their good works.

"If the proper protections are in place," he said, "and the money can't be used for proselytizing, and there are secular alternatives for beneficiaries to opt to, and no one is coerced, what in the end is the harm? Does society have more to fear from a rehabilitated drug addict who has broken his habit through a faith-based treatment than the untreated, unrehabilitated drug addict?"

Looking for a new god? A fresh creed?

When it comes to answering life's big questions, the World Wide Web offers more research options than you can wiggle a mouse at.

Trying to find the right used car? Doing homework to find an appropriate college for your firstborn child? Are you a cat person or a dog person? What breed?

Perhaps you wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you need a new god or a fresh creed. Are you a liberal Protestant kind of person or a Hindu person, a Baptist or a Scientologist, a Reform Jew or a Neo-Pagan?

Want to find out? Then go to www.SelectSmart.com/RELIGION/ and click your way through Curt and Lorie Anderson's new and improved "Belief System Selector" site that covers two dozen world religions. Then you can tell them how happy or furious you are about the results. But don't ask about their religious ties. You can ask, but they won't tell.

"People have accused us of being part of every imaginable religious group in the world," said Curt Anderson. "A lot of people accuse of being members of their religion, only they think that we've totally messed it up. Or they feel really threatened and they think that what we believe must be the total opposite of what they believe."

Lorie Anderson interjected: "Some people say, 'You must be Scientologists.' Other people think we're a Buddhist front. ... A lot of people think we're Unitarians. It seems that if you go through and click on answers randomly, the test almost always tells you that you're a Unitarian Universalist. Of course, maybe that says something about Unitarians."

Cue the rim shot. One patron even claimed to have received a mixed test score of "100 percent Unitarian-Universalist" and "100 percent Jehovah's Witness." Sure enough, the writer emailed them the old joke: "You know what you get when you cross a Jehovah's Witness with a Unitarian? Someone who knocks on doors for no apparent reason."

The Andersons created SelectSmart.com three years ago, combining her social work and psychology skills with his experience in marketing and advertising. Their Ashland, Ore., home base is near the California border, which means they live in one of America's most complex regions, when it comes to religion and, of course, technology.

So far, they have written or endorsed 200 "selector" programs to help people make choices affecting everything from hobbies to careers, from vacation spots to romance. The site includes links to nearly 2,000 other tests written by volunteers. At the peak of the campaign season, their presidential-candidate selector was receiving 80,000 visitors a day.

Since making its debut last August, the religion selector has been attracting 7,000 users a day and the site now includes advanced quizzes to help Fundamentalists, Jews, Gnostics, agnostics, Pagans, Muslims and others further refine their options. The site includes scores of links to official Web sites representing the various churches, movements and traditions.

Lorie Anderson said she worked on the religion quiz off and on for at least six months and has continued to fine-tune her text, based on user feedback. The goal was to find issues that united the faiths -- creation, evil, salvation, suffering -- in order to provide some structure. Then she had to pinpoint doctrinal differences in order to sift through the users and pin on some theological labels.

The results often yield strange bedfellows. Orthodox Jews, for example, have more in common with Muslims than with Reform Jews. Liberal Protestants have more in common with pagans than with evangelical Protestants. Liberal Quakers resemble Hindus, while orthodox Quakers may hang out with the Mormons.

The test still isn't perfect. In particular, the Andersons have struggled to break the Christian doctrine of the Trinity down into bites of computer data. Is God a "corporeal spirit (has a body)" or an "incorporeal spirit"?

"That's a tough one," said Curt Anderson. "Christians believe that Jesus had a body, yet God the Father does not. Yet they're both in the Trinity. ... We're still working on that one."

"Right," said his wife. "Words mean a whole lot when you start trying to describe who or what God is or isn't. ... When it comes to words, religious people get really picky."

Kosovo mourns on All Soul's Day

For generations, Serbs have visited the graves of their ancestors on All Soul's Day to mourn, pray and give thanks for the ties that bind.

But the refugees in a Brezovica hostel had a problem last week, as they prepared to make dangerous trips to cemeteries elsewhere in Kosovo. When they requested an armed escort, a KFOR official said the timing just wasn't right. Couldn't they do their rites some other day?

The NATO officers didn't get it. The Orthodox Serbs who practice their faith had to observe All Soul's Day on All Soul's Day, because this precedes Lent. NATO is powerful, but not powerful enough to reschedule Lent, Holy Week and Pascha, which is Easter in the West.

Nevertheless, the terrorists who put about 500 pounds of explosives in a drainage pipe under the road to Gracanica knew the power of centuries of unbroken tradition. They knew thousands of Serbs would risk returning to Kosovo on Feb. 16, to the blood-soaked land called the "Jerusalem of Serbia" and its 1,300 churches, monasteries and holy sites.

"We cannot know what was in the mind of the bomber, but it is likely that this happened on All Soul's Day for a reason," said Father Irinej Dobrijevic, of the Serbian Orthodox office in Washington, D.C. "We do know this. ... Religion is not the true cause of the violence. Religious leaders are actually a moderating influence in Kosovo. Yet it is also clear that religious groups have been the victims of much of the worst violence there."

So someone pushed a remote-control button and shredded a bus full of parents and children, seconds after armored troop vehicles leading the convoy rolled past. Thus, there were another dozen deaths to mourn on All Soul's Day.

Surely this pleased ethnic Albanian extremists, since it demonstrated once again how dangerous it is for Serbs to remain in Kosovo. And the blast certainly provided encouragement to Serbian extremists with ties to former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, since they believe all Albanians should be driven out of Kosovo.

The mourners were the religious leaders who remain caught in the middle, those who have long sought a multiethnic Kosovo.

"I have almost lost my voice from shouting to the international community that something must be done to stop the violence against all the people of Kosovo," said Orthodox Bishop Artemije Radosavljevic, speaking through a translator last week to students in George Mason University's Program on Peacemaking Policy.

Anyone truly seeking peace, he said, would recognize the symbolic role of religion in the Balkans and seek negotiations involving Christian and Muslim leaders.

Yet interfaith talks could only be held with the protection of NATO forces. After all, clergy who tried to travel to such meetings would be risking their lives. No one would be in greater danger, stressed Artemije, than moderate Albanian leaders -- Muslims and Christians -- who openly advocate peace, nonviolence and a multiethnic Kosovo.

The bishop of Kosovo knows what he's talking about. Artemije is used to drawing sniper fire -- literally and politically. Radicals in Milosevic's neo-Communist regime once called him a traitor to the Serbian people. When Serbian army units swept through Kosovo, he sought justice for ethnic Albanian refugees. While living in what amounts to a NATO protectorate, Artemije has pleaded for protection of Serbs who are refugees in a land that, theoretically, remains part of Serbia.

Nearly all of the 200,000 Serbs in Kosovo have fled, with a remnant living in guarded ghettos. During the past 20 months, Artemije has seen nearly 100 of his parishes, monasteries, shrines and graveyards damaged or destroyed. Many were ancient and irreplaceable. There have been no arrests or trials after these crimes.

This shepherd needs a military escort just to pay pastoral visits to his flock. Now, the All Soul's Day bombing has demonstrated that armed vehicles are not enough.

During his latest U.S. visit, Artemije was repeatedly asked what he thought NATO forces should do. "I am not a military strategist," he said. "I am a bishop. ... But the voices of religious leaders in Kosovo are not being heard very often, and when they are heard, they are not respected."

Praying with the digital natives

It's hard to move into a new office without spending some time exploring the past.

Digging into a 20-year-old box, Drew University evangelism professor Leonard Sweet time-warped back to his Ph.D. studies as he dug through layers of onion-skin paper smudged with real ink and an ancient substance called "Wite-Out."

"I went from being an archeologist to, as I dug deeper, a paleontologist. I found carbon paper. This thing need to be carbon dated, it was so old," he said, speaking at a global forum for leaders from 150 Christian campuses. "I looked at this and I said, 'Sweet! This is from a defunct civilization.' But you know what? It was from MY civilization. I'm a Gutenberg person. ... My world was shaped by the book."

Now that world has passed away, even if the rulers of many fortresses haven't noticed.

Sweet believes there is one fact of life that clergy and religious educators must learn -- pronto. If they refuse to do so, he said, they will have as much success as someone who tries to make "a credit-card call from a rotary telephone." Here is that fact: "If you are born before 1962, you are an immigrant. If you are born after 1962, you are a native."

Calendar age isn't everything, Sweet conceded. It's theoretically possible to be a 70-year-old native or a 20-year-old immigrant, in the land of digital dialogues and postmodern parables. But immigrants who want to leap from the old "Carpe Diem" world into what he called the culture of "Carpe Manana," must be open to learning languages, customs and skills from the natives.

"I am an immigrant," he said. "I am having Ellis Island experiences every day."

While trained in church history, Sweet is best known for his attempts to peer into the future of the church. He draws rave reviews as a speaker in both liberal mainline and evangelical gatherings, while writing waves of books with trendy titles such as "Quantum Spirituality" and his futuristic trilogy "SoulSalsa," "AquaChurch" and "SoulTsunami."

The history of education has included three landmark events, said Sweet, speaking in Orlando last week to leaders of the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities. These were the creation of the Greek alphabet, the invention of the printing press and the arrival of the World Wide Web. Colleges and seminaries can handle the first two, but most are doing little to face the implications of that third shift, other than buying hardware and software. They have re-wired their campuses, but not their brains.

Immigrants lead these institutions and many have replaced their rose-tinted glasses with "black-out shades," said Sweet. Nevertheless, they know the natives are restless.

When seeking answers to big questions, the natives don't want to sit in orderly rows and sing tiny sets of hymn verses interspersed with bulletin-board announcements, all of which precede a long lecture called a sermon. When they sing, they prefer flowing songs that seem to last forever while they stand enraptured in an atmosphere of worship.

They are not pew people. What they want, said Sweet, is faith, and even education, that is "experiential," "participatory," "image-based" and "connective." They want a faith that is timeless and timely, at the same time. They want truth that touches all of their senses.

This will be traumatic for leaders of America's aging mainstream religious groups, said Sweet. They feel comfortable with people with blue hair, "unless it shows up on a 16-year-old kid." Many worship in sanctuaries containing images of a Savior with pierced hands and feet, yet they panic when young people show up who "look like they fell out of a tackle box."

Truth is, these natives are swimming in information, but they lack perspective, he said. They don't need the help or permission of authority figures to find their own information about politics, technology, morality and even religion.

That is when the immigrants must be willing to listen carefully to their questions, said Sweet. The natives have information, but many are asking, "Now, what do I do with it? How do I test what is good and what is bad information? How do I turn that information into knowledge and then that knowledge into wisdom?"

The Late Great Planet Hollywood

The book was a global phenomenon and inspired sequel after sequel until millions rallied around the apocalyptic cry, "Don't be left behind!"

True believers handed copies to friends and warned strangers about the Second Coming. Evangelists said the books would convict sinners. It would have made a great movie, except that William E. Blackstone's "Jesus Is Coming" came out in 1878, before Hollywood was born.

"These books were very, very popular. ... They gave evangelists a new weapon in the war for souls," said Baptist historian Timothy Weber, author of "Living in the Shadow of the Second Coming: American Premillennialism, 1875-1982."

"If you read the sermons from back then, it's clear that the great revival preachers were using the same kinds of lines. They were saying, 'Christ could return before I finish this very sentence! Are you ready? What will happen to you if your loved ones vanish into heaven?' ... You heard this all across America. They were saying, 'Don't be left behind!' "

Today, these apocalyptic visions are alive and well, as the thriller "Left Behind" by Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins leaps from mall bookstores into movie theaters. The first eight books in the planned 12-book opus have sold 25 million copies, with audio and kids editions selling 11 million more.

The movie -- produced for a mere $17 million -- blends snippets of "Independence Day" warfare and Bible conference plot twists. Secular critics are slamming it, with the Washington Post calling the film a "blundering cringefest." Some Christians have cautiously called it a small step forward for religious entertainment. Truth is, parts of "Left Behind" are so bad it could become a hip classic, a fundamentalist "Rocky Horror Picture Show."

One thing is certain: the 700 churches and businesses that invested $3,000 each to help Cloud Ten Pictures distribute the movie did so in an attempt to win converts.

Belief in the Second Coming of Christ is an ancient doctrine. But in the 19th Century, John Nelson Darby, Blackstone and other "premillennial dispensationalists" began dividing world history into a complicated series of covenants and "dispensations." They believed Jesus would "rapture" believers up into heaven before a seven-year time of tribulation, followed by an apocalyptic battle between good and evil and Christ's victorious return. This "rapture" concept was especially popular with evangelists.

"Until then," explained Weber, "all preachers really had was the threat of unexpected death, the whole idea of asking, 'If you died tonight, would you be ready to meet God?' Well, that's serious business, but people get used to the idea that they might die. ... The idea of a mysterious, secret rapture took things to a completely different level. How do you debate that?"

After grasping this central image, many converts graduate into a labyrinthine school of prophecy built on highly literal interpretations of the Book of Revelation, Daniel and other mysterious Bible passages. This approach infuriates traditional scholars, yet has long intrigued spiritual seekers -- especially in the age of mass media and paperback theology. In the 1970s, Hal Lindsey and Carole C. Carlson built a publishing empire on "The Late Great Planet Earth," one of the biggest non-fiction hits of that decade.

Dispensationalism has it all. It offers a doctrinal system that claims to address everything from Y2K to OPEC, from Darwin to the United Nations, from Russian nuclear strategy to how many Israeli jets can land on the head of a pin. It also packs an emotional punch. Adults raised in homes steeped in this worldview always have childhood stories to tell about frightening moments when they asked: Where is everybody? Have I been left behind?

These images make sense when fleshed out in sermons and books that provide lengthy passages to explain complicated historical references and obscure symbols. But outsiders will struggle to read between the pictures in "Left Behind: The Movie."

"This may turn into a tribal ritual for people who have already bought into this whole system" of beliefs, said Weber. "You have to wonder if this movie will work as evangelism, in this day and age. ... There's going to be a lot of head scratching going on out there in movie theaters."

Learning to preach in fog

The question was so simple that Haddon Robinson wasn't sure he had heard it correctly.

"What is Christmas?", asked the man in the next airplane seat, once he learned that he was chatting with a seminary professor. The businessman thought he knew, since he was an ordinary American who had grown up surrounded by old movies and television specials. Then he asked, "What is Easter?" That led to, "What do you mean by 'resurrection?' " Robinson described the biblical accounts of God raising Jesus from the dead.

"This man said to me, 'Do all Christians believe that?' I said, 'All Christians should believe that,' " said Robinson. "Then he said, 'That's interesting. I think I knew about Christmas. But I didn't really know about Easter.' "

This puzzled Robinson, but later something clicked. Some Christmas hymns have made it into popular culture and almost everyone hears snippets of the story year after year. But where -- via mall, multiplex and mini-satellite dish -- would anyone soak up Easter images? For millions of viewers the resurrection is what happens at the end of "The Matrix."

If missionaries came to America, they would immediately spot the dominant role played by mass media and, especially, visual entertainment media. They would study the moral and religious messages in mass media, seeking insights into the lives of potential converts. This is how missionaries think. But this is not how religious educators think and, thus, few clergy are taught to think like missionaries.

Robinson has been studying these issues since the mid-1950s, during his doctoral work in communications at the University of Illinois. Today, he is a distinguished professor at Gordon-Conwell Theological outside Boston and, in 1996, received national media attention when Baylor University named him one of the top 12 preachers in the English-speaking world.

Effective speakers study the forces that shape the people to whom they speak, said Robinson. Today, that means taking visual media seriously.

"Television is omnipresent," he said, in a sermon that swept from oral traditions and clay-tablet libraries to satellites and computer networks. "The way in which people get ideas, the way in which they shape their ideals, comes not because they read books, but because they see it, they visualize it. It's on television. ...

"That has shaped the way we think. ... It affects the way that we preach. It affects the heart and core of communication."

Robinson preached that sermon exactly 10 years ago, while serving as president of Denver Seminary. Little has changed. Robinson said that he knows of no seminary that requires future ministers to take a single course on how mass media affect American life.

If anything, the situation has gotten worse, he said. While the ecclesiastical elites ignore the subject, megachurches often uncritically embrace virtually every new technology. Many churches are adding expensive digital equipment in their sanctuaries and leaping into multimedia music, drama, humor and sermons illustrated with movie and TV clips. Clergy quickly discover that they're expected to use this gear in every service. The audience demands it.

"The pastor is thinking, 'Now that I have all of this stuff, where can I throw it in?'," said Robinson. "All of a sudden, rather than thinking of the most effective way to communicate a message, you're thinking about all that money you've spent. ...You're thinking about media, where before you were thinking about your message."

Robinson's advice to preachers, young and old, is that they worry less about using mass media and more about learning what is shaping the souls of their listeners. Today, every flock includes many listeners who understand little or nothing about the Bible or basic doctrines. In fact, he said, their heads and hearts are full of conflicting images and values, the result of years of spiritual channel surfing.

This was already true a decade ago. Robinson said that preachers must realize that they work in a hostile technological environment, one that "communicates with images. It doesn't come out and argue. It just simply shows you pictures, day after day after day after day. Before you realize it, in the basement of your mind, you discover that you have shifted your values and many times you've lost your faith."

The offering-plate rules

The pastor preferred to spend the moments just before the main Sunday service in prayer.

But the two men who knocked on his door were leaders in his conservative church, and they insisted that their mission was urgent. What they said ended up in one of the stacks of congregational case studies that put flesh on the sobering statistics inside John and Sylvia Ronsvalle's "Behind the Stained Glass Windows: Money Dynamics in the Church."

"We want you to stop talking about inviting other people into this church," said one of the men. "There are too many new people now. We don't know half the people who come here and there are new people in leadership positions." If the pastor kept preaching evangelistic sermons, then they vowed to leave -- creating a financial crisis that would threaten the church mortgage.

They wanted their church to stay the same. That's what they were paying for.

"It's hard to understand, but we know that some people don't want their churches to grow," said Sylvia Ronsvalle, who, with her husband John, leads empty tomb, inc., in Champaign, Ill. For two decades they have worked in hands-on ministry to the poor, while also operating a small think-tank (www.emptytomb.org) that analyzes 30-plus years worth of data on giving in religious institutions, both liberal and conservative.

"Some people may not even want other members of their church to give more money and support new ministries," she added. "It's sad, but it's true. There are lots of people out there who can't see past the doors of their own church."

Right now, church workers all across America are mailing annual statements covering donations. Here is one of the unwritten laws: 20 percent of the members give up to 80 percent of the annual budget. In most cases, 50 percent or more give little or nothing. Studying these rather utilitarian issues, said the Ronsvalles, quickly leads to other questions. Why are so many content to see their congregations limp along when it comes to evangelism, missions and benevolence work? Why do people give what they give?

The answers are rarely comforting.

* Some people make major donations in order to control the institution that frames life's major transitions. As the old saying goes, people want a church when it comes time to "hatch, match and dispatch" family members. Some act as if they are purchasing shares in a beautiful building for these events and, as every clergy person knows, they care deeply about what that building looks like.

* Many people view their offerings as payment for services rendered by the staff and clergy. Perhaps they want witty and practical sermons that please their intellects or emotions. They expect clergy to visit them in the hospital and offer pastoral counseling -- for free -- in times of crisis. Youth pastors must heal and entertain their sons and daughters, answering awkward questions feared by parents.

* Others are buying a culture. For some members, this may be classical-quality, or even cable-television quality, music or drama. Some use the church as a social club, or the focus of ethnic identity. The church and its clergy may even be expected to carry water for a powerful family's favorite social causes, either liberal or conservative.

* Finally, the Ronsvalles' research shows that many church members sincerely see giving as a matter of faith, the natural result of gratitude and a biblical vision. The question that haunts empty tomb, inc., is how to help clergy conquer their fears of challenging members to share with others, especially in an age of plenty. Right now, charitable giving in some denominations has fallen to levels lower than in the Great Depression.

"There are people out there who are sinners and they aren't going to obey God and his Word. They're just not going to give the way they should, even though they sit in church week after week," said John Ronsvalle. "They may think the church doesn't need them to give or maybe they just don't see the need to, quote, spend their money on what the church has to offer, unquote. ...

"The question is whether they want to love other people, in the name of Jesus. In the end, that is what they have to want to invest in -- the hearts and lives of others."

Boil Ashcroft in holy oil

Hours before taking his U.S. Senate oath, John Ashcroft knelt before his elderly father.

The Rev. J. Robert Ashcroft sat on a deep couch, while others stood to lay hands on his son's head in an ancient dedication rite. The frail Pentecostal patriarch -- whose journey included studies at New York University and the presidency of a liberal arts college in the Ozarks -- began swinging his arms, trying to get up. Ashcroft later wrote that he urged his father to stay seated.

"John," he replied, "I'm not struggling to stand, I'm struggling to kneel."

Evoking another biblical symbol, the father anointed his son's forehead with oil. In place of the traditional olive oil, someone provided vegetable oil.

The father gave his son a final blessing and then died the next day.

Media gossips offered a twisted take on this scene last week. Here's the Washington Post's spin on one of the holiest moments in the senator's life.

"Clinton White House wags have dubbed controversial attorney general nominee John Ashcroft 'The Crisco Kid'," said the "Reliable Sources" column. "We phoned the folks at Proctor & Gamble ... to ask their reaction to Ashcroft's unorthodox use of the product." A spokesperson said, "Crisco is a great moisturizer for dry skin, and people have used it as a lubricant. ... (We) prefer that people cook with it."

Cue the laugh track. Obviously, Ashcroft's supporters have not been amused as his faith has been dissected and ridiculed in the public square. But they should not have been surprised, said theologian Gabriel Fackre, of the liberal United Church of Christ.

Cruel things happen when the poetry of faith gets jammed into political headlines. Some of Ashcroft's enemies would rather talk about holy oil, speaking in tongues and Bob Jones than about his work in the U.S. Senate, the National Governors' Association, the National Association of Attorneys General or at Yale and the University of Chicago.

"Ashcroft's critics didn't like it when he told people at Bob Jones University that here in America we can say, 'We have no king but Jesus,' " said Fackre. "Of course, when he said that, he was echoing the words of the early Christians who declared that 'Jesus is Lord' and refused to say that 'Caesar is Lord.'

"So far, so good. But the problem is that when someone like John Ashcroft says that, he also feeds ammunition to all his critics who say that he wants to wed that Christian confession to his own political agenda."

Truth is, two different conversations need to take place about legal and religious issues in public life. The first is rooted in the public's right to expect officials to follow what Fackre called "universally discernible norms" of law and moral conduct. It's one thing to say the president is sinning. It's something else to say he is lying, stealing or cheating.

But Christians may "conduct a second conversation with a president who professes to be a believer," said Fackre, writing in Christianity Today. "This conversation draws upon biblical teachings to which both parties give allegiance, such as matters of repentance and forgiveness, the grace of God, Christian vocation and its responsibilities, the temptations that come with power, and the like."

Americans may be confused about all this, since these "two conversations" overlapped so often during the Clinton era that they created a bitter cacophony.

Some conservatives unintentionally aided Clinton by acting as if he could be impeached for bad theology. Clinton's team then accused his critics of neopuritanism, noted Fackre, even if their calls for his resignation were clearly part of a doctrinal debate between an evangelical president and other born-again believers. And through it all, Clinton used emotional religious language to respond to waves of legal accusations, skillfully suggesting that repentance and pastoral counseling equaled public accountability and justice.

It was a mess. Now, the war of words over Ashcroft is blurring these lines again.

"I do not know his soul," said Fackre. "But John Ashcroft must realize that the religious words he speaks to other Christians will sound totally different when his critics turn around and use them against him. This may not be fair, but that's the reality of it."