While Doctors without Borders was struggling to get anesthetics for amputations into Haiti, an Albuquerque group queued up aid of their own sort: 600 solar powered talking Bibles. Even now, food, water, and medicine are having trouble reaching Haitians because of damaged transportation facilities and supply lines, but the missionary group says some of their Bibles are on the way.

I first read about the solar powered Bibles after a friend forwarded an article from an Australian news source — the point being that half way around the world people found the story controversial enough to be newsworthy. Why?  Because it is morally troubling, even for many Christians. According to the gospel writer, Jesus says “I was hungry and you gave me bread,” not “I was hungry and you gave me Bibles.” How can anyone see pictures of crushed buildings, blood covered children, and people begging for food, and think of it as an opportunity to win converts?

Like many others, I read about the solar Bible effort with a sense of disgust. But as a former Evangelical believer, I also read about it with some sympathy for the people packing the boxes. There is no doubt in my mind that they think what they are doing is kind and good. I would bet my psychology license that their behavior is driven by genuine concern for the people of Haiti. I simply believe also that the Evangelical mindset has tremendous power to co-opt and redirect a believer’s moral priorities and compassion.One of the most pernicious attributes of ideology, whether secular or religious is its power to disconnect true believers from moral emotions like empathy, shame, and guilt. In fact, what often happens is that the ideology repurposes both these emotions and the rest of a believer’s moral machinery in the service of the ideology itself.  Let me explain.

Under ordinary circumstances and with normal brain development, certain moral instincts are built into us.  Universally, for example, we have an aversion to the thought of babies being burned for the pleasure of adults. We have some general notion that stealing is wrong. We value honesty.

Research in brain science is showing that moral reasoning and behavior is driven by a set of inborn emotions — empathy, shame, guilt, disgust, righteous indignation, moral pride — and that these in turn drive moral reasoning and behavior.  These emotions, along with specialized circuitry for analyzing morally relevant situations (and some pre-set defaults) are shared by our whole species. Why? Because they allow us to live in community with each other.

We humans are social creatures. To use the technical term, we are “social information specialists.” Our primary resource is information, and we mostly get it from each other.  Without the ability to cooperate and share knowledge we’d all still be in the Stone Age — or the tree tops. The only way we thrive in the long run is if we support the well-being of our community and, as we are starting to recognize, the broader web of life. That is what morality lets us do. It helps us to treat the wellbeing of others as if it were our own — because in a peculiar way it is.

For this reason, empathy or compassion is at the very center of most religious and secular wisdom traditions — usually in some form of the Golden Rule. Often the best means we have of guessing what another sentient being wants or needs is by projecting ourselves into their situation: How would I feel? What would I want? What would make me happy?

This is where a viral ideology like Evangelicalism can hook in and take advantage of our moral make-up. First, it can diminish empathy by downplaying the importance of here and now suffering. Second it can make something other than a person’s apparent needs (like food or anesthetics) seem critically important. Third, it can re-direct our mother-bear instincts away from protecting vulnerable individuals and toward protecting the ideology itself. Believers may come to feel more protective of their religion than they are of actual human beings.

1. Diminishing suffering: Evangelical Christianity downplays the horrors of suffering in several ways and sometimes even glorifies it.

a. Bible-believing Christians are taught that this world is just a prelude to the next – the one that really matters.  Suffering is part of God’s plan, because it surrounds us, so it must be.  Mother Theresa, for example, is said to have told a man in pain that Jesus was kissing him.

b. Because God is described as fair, there is a heightened tendency for believers to fall into the “just world hypothesis” to think that people deserve what they get. This can lead to a pattern of blaming victims for their own misfortune: pregnant teens shouldn’t have been having sex, rape victims should dress differently, poor people should work harder.

c. In the Bible, when God intervenes he often does miracles that affect a few people rather than responding to the suffering of the many. A few blind receive their sight, one lame man stands up and walks. This teaches people to focus on the “miraculous” exception rather than the pattern. Believers can praise God for saving a handful of orphans, neglecting the tens of thousands He just created.

d. In the central story of traditional Christianity, Jesus was born to be a human sacrifice; his ministry was just a prelude to Golgotha.  Suffering, rather than something to be fought against, is seen as redemptive. The human race is saved by torture.

2. Redirecting focus: Economists say that religions create “goods” which then have “scarcities” that people desire and compete for — God’s favor, for example, or sacred space, or a certain status during the afterlife, and Evangelicalism offers several great examples of this.

a.  Evangelicals prize salvation–a “personal relationship with Jesus,” and the promise of heaven—so it is natural that when they are being altruistic, this is what they want for others. For someone who is salvation focused, the best thing he or she can do is to save someone’s soul. If feeding people wins converts, fine.  But if you have to choose between food and Bibles, only one saves people from eternal torture.

b. In particularly evangelistic denominations, even children are taught that God wants them to be “fishers of men.” Think Jesus Camp. A Buddhist might get a feeling of virtue or self esteem from pursuing compassion, mindfulness and simplicity; for some Christians, this same satisfaction comes from a convincing others to become believers.

c. Rather than being defined by service, generosity, or other consensually valued character qualities and activities, virtue can get re-defined as a life of Bible study, church attendance and prayer and/or sexual abstinence. These behaviors may become more highly valued than the qualities that normally make someone a “decent human being” a “good colleague” or a “great neighbor.”

3. Self-perpetuation: Religions that focus on recruiting and keeping believers – on marketing and on defense of the ideology — often out-compete those that don’t. This is why Muslim countries are arguing in the United Nations that religions as entities have human rights — including the right to be protected against criticism.

a. The most evangelical forms of Christianity gain mind-share by turning the whole congregation into a sales force with divine sanction. Individual members may support missionaries or may pack up their families to go seek converts in foreign countries. Populations that are seen as vulnerable to conversion — poor people, uneducated people, families in crisis, youth in transition — are targeted for intensive missionary efforts.

b. Christians are encouraged to give money to the church. One successful Seattle mega church has two or three offerings in a single Sunday for different causes. Another cites (twists?) scripture to make the case that God wants believers to give first and foremost to their home church, and only to believers.

c. Rhetoric like “The War on Christmas,”  “The War on Easter,” “Activist Atheists,” and “Jihad” keep believers under a perennial sense of seige. Stories of martyrs are read to children — while Christianity’s bloody history is largely ignored.

d. Even though Christianity is the largest religion in the world, commentators and pastors lament the decline of the faith and the loss of young people. They raise the specter of Christianity becoming shrunken and marginalized within a generation.

The heart of Evangelicalism may be thought to lie in two Bible verses, both of which are taken to be perfect words from God, essentially dictated by God to the authors.  One is John 3:16, the most memorized verse in the Bible “For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son,[a] that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life.” This verse is paired with one called Great Commission: “Therefore go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in[a] the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit.” (Matthew 28:19NIV)

Contrast this with the verse that is the center of faith for many modernist Christians, what is called the Great Commandment.  When asked what was the greatest commandment in the Torah, the writer of Matthew tells us that Jesus replied “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets.” (Matthew 22:37-40)

Both evangelicals and modernists call themselves Christians, or followers of Jesus, but the two preceding paragraphs define two different religions. As much as Evangelicals argue to the contrary, they are in conflict. Only one of these religions sends missionaries pretending to be aid workers into Afghanistan, putting other aid workers at risk. The other sees this as immoral. Only one of them sets up recruiting clubs on grade school campuses. The other sees this as immoral. Only one of these religions uses money, time, and cargo space to send Bibles to people in need of anesthetics.

I consider World Vision to be at the better end of the Evangelical spectrum based on a ratio of humanitarian aid to proselytizing. But even World Vision goes out of their way to downplay their mission: bearing witness to the saving power of Jesus Christ. In the wake of the Haiti disaster, ads on the internet showed bandaged children with a banner that said, “Save a Life.” A banner that said, “Save a Soul,” might have been equally in keeping with their statement of faith.

World Vision shares the Church’s commitment to disciple followers of Jesus Christ who bear witness to the Gospel by life, deed, word and sign, with the goal of encouraging people to respond to the Gospel. We do this through the life of service that we lead, the deeds of Christian love we perform, the words that we share about our faith and the signs of prayers answered as we visibly and concretely improve the lives of others. (emphasis theirs).

Would World Vision’s Evangelical donors, volunteers, and staff put their energy into disaster relief and poverty programs if they weren’t on a mission to disciple followers? Who can say. At least they do a tremendous amount of good by any measure.

At the uglier end of the spectrum is a Seattle mega-church that claims almost 20,000 members, Mars Hill, founded by Calvinist celebrity Mark Driscoll. In the wake of the Asian tsunami several years back their website advised members to 1. Pray for people in the disaster zone.  2. Give to Mars Hill church.  3. Give to our church building enterprise in India. Five years later, their opportunism, meaning willingness to co-opt the compassionate impulse and redirect it into church growth is more sophisticated but unabated. In the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, Mars Hill directs members to a site called Churches Helping Churches. “Who will help the Church?” it asks.

“Rebuilding local churches helps address the practical and spiritual needs of a country, one person, one neighborhood, and one community at a time. We need to help the church of Jesus Christ as our first priority in areas hit with human catastrophe. I challenge all thoughtful, biblically-minded Christians to find a single instance of the New Testament church filling the plates of the “general population” poor.”

You can be assured that in Haiti, none of the money will go to the Catholic churches that have functioned traditionally as community centers among Haiti’s poor and that are pictured in ruins on the website’s banner. No, the money will go to Evangelical missions seeking converts among the Catholics. (Oh, btw, the site features another front page action item: Follow Mark Driscoll on Twitter.)

Is the founder of Mars Hill and of the Churches helping Churches site a crass self-promoter? Perhaps, but I suspect that he genuinely believes he is doing good, even maximizing good, by turning suffering into fundraising for his brand of beliefism. The crass self-promotion may be a quality of his belief system, not his person.  Physicist Steven Weinberg once said, “With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.”

Weinberg’s statement may simplify overmuch, but it contains a kernel of truth. For genuinely decent people to engage in systematic acts of harm, even for them to take milk from the mouths of babes as it were (like Mars Hill does), something has to override their moral sensibilities.

Fear has the power to do this, but so does ideology.  For solar powered Bibles or church-building to win out over food and medicine requires a religion that values conversion over compassion. But when we see this phenomenon at its worst, it is because a devoted leader in the thrall of a viral ideology has mastered some reverse alchemy that turns the precious gold of empathy into the lead of opportunism.

It appears that televangelist Pat Robertson is in the thrall of Satan, according to spiritual warriors, Drs. Valerie Tarico and Marlene Winell.  “It’s the only possible explanation,” said Tarico. “How else can we make sense of his repeated attempts to humiliate both God and Christianity in the wake of recent natural disasters.”

Tarico spotted what she saw as a suspicious pattern after Robertson’s recent remarks about Haiti. As people lay dying in the rubble of Tuesday’s tragic earthquake and nations around the world scrambled disaster experts, Robertson spoke to the Christian Broadcasting Network’s “The 700 Club:” ”Something happened a long time ago in Haiti, and people might not want to talk about it,” “They were under the heel of the French. You know, Napoleon III, or whatever. And they got together and swore a pact to the Devil. They said, we will serve you if you’ll get us free from the French. True story. And so, the Devil said, okay it’s a deal.” Robertson summed it up: “Ever since, they have been cursed by one thing after the other.”

“Christians aren’t perfect, just forgiven,” said Tarico. “When Robertson blamed the Katrina disaster on God, and said He was punishing those black people for the sins of their gay neighbors, I thought it might just be human error. All we like sheep have gone astray, you know.  Let he who is without sin cast the first stone. But suddenly, when I read Robertson’s remarks about Haiti, it was like a light blazed down from heaven and a voice spoke saying, ‘Behold, the Father of Lies.’ I picked up the phone and called the only person more familiar with these problems than I am, Dr. Marlene Winell. She confirmed my worst fears.”We spoke with Dr. Winell in her Bay Area office. “Demons need a host, and they can jump from one person to another,” she explained. “We know this because Jesus cast demons out of a possessed man and into a herd of pigs. The pigs drowned themselves, the same kind of self-destructive behavior we are seeing in Mr. Robertson. It is possible that he was infected at or around the funeral of Dr. Jerry Falwell. In hindsight we can see that Dr. Falwell was possessed by a similar — possibly the same — demon.”

Back in 2001, when the U.S. was reeling from the Twin Tower bombings, Falwell horrified Christians around the world by blaming the disaster on gays and woman who have had abortions. “The abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked,” Falwell said on The 700 Club television show. “And when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad. I really believe that the pagans, and the abortionists, and the feminists, and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who have tried to secularize America. I point the finger in their face and say, ‘You helped this happen.’”

Could this be the work of any old run-of-the-mill demon?  “I doubt it,” said Winell. “Those remarks were broadcast to an enormous audience.  Probably tens of thousands of people were turned off of Christianity and the Christian God. I think this is a media strategy organized by Satan himself. We’re talking about Beelzebub. The guy is a marketing genius. This is the snake that sold Adam and Eve an apple in trade for paradise.”

Winell went on to remind us that “Sarah Palin, as a prominent Christian could easily have been possessed by Satan, like Roberts, but she is very aware of spiritual warfare. She had the foresight to have an African Minister pray over her for protection against witchcraft.  Now would be the time for Palin to help Robertson. With her connections, she could arrange an exorcism and then get him the same protection treatment.” **

Our reporter pointed out that similar comments have been made by Islamic leaders about natural disasters: “A Saudi professor at Al-Imam University said the devastating tsunami that killed over 150,000 people was Allah’s punishment for homosexuality and fornication at Christmastime.”These great tragedies and collective punishments that are wiping out villages, towns, cities, and even entire countries are Allah’s punishments of the people of these countries, even if they are Muslims,” said sheik Fawzan Al-Fawzan.”

Both Tarico and Winell saw this as confirmation of their hypothesis. To quote Tarico, “Anyone who listens to Reverend Hagee knows that Muslim leaders are controlled by Satan himself. And now you tell me they have been using words that are virtually identical to those of Falwell and Robertson?! Fawzan Al… It sounds a lot like Falwell, doesn’t it. Look no further.”

**Friends of Sarah Palin interested in helping Pat Robertson and defending the honor of Christianity can post this article on her wall.

December 21st is winter solstice, the shortest day of the year, which makes the twenty-second the first day of more sun! Let me spell that out. Beginning this week we’re on a path toward “sun breaks” and dry sidewalks, a time when people will take off their fleeces for long enough to wash them, a time that pet poop will dry out enough that your kids can scoop it off the lawn. Anyone who thinks that winter solstice couldn’t possibly have spawned the rich array of celebrations that we now call Yule and Christmas and Diwali and Hanukkah and Kwanzaa never lived in Seattle.

Solstice means that within a few weeks the days will be perceptibly longer. It means that by mid- January, it will be easier to see the ice I’m scraping off the windshield with my battered health insurance card. It means that crocuses will come up through the grass if I hurry and get some bulbs planted, and the chickens will start laying again. It means that my crazy friends Sarah and Lee who bicycle to work in the dark and rain soon will be able to bicycle in just rain! Now that’s something to celebrate.

But even as I look forward to spring, I can’t help but think that mid-winter, in some ways, shows the human spirit at its best. Remarkably, we’ve managed to take our darkest days and turn them into some of our brightest. Without the lights and parties, December in Seattle would be a time for hibernation. (We Seattle-ites complain now about getting fat and sluggish from things like too many shrimp cocktails, or glasses of wine, or chocolate truffles. But think about how much more bear-like we’d get if all we did was huddle in bed with Netflix and Costco-sized bags of Sun Chips). Bear bodies aside, hibernation would mean missing out on one of the best times of the year.That is because the darkness of this season forces us to look into ourselves and our relationships for beauty and delight. Summer’s pleasures can make us lazy. But now, the garden is soggy with fallen leaves and plants that look like wilted lettuce. The grassy soccer fields are mud-wallows. The street trees are sticks, and hanging flower baskets are gone. The mountain trails are slick and nasty cold making high meadows inaccessible. With the outside world a grey shadow of itself, life becomes what we make it.

And so, make it we do. We seek out those we love. We bask in who loves us. We indulge our most superficial material impulses. We have more sex. And we ask ourselves what matters. It is no accident that many of the celebrations around solstice are embedded in spiritual traditions that invite us to examine not only our relationships with each other but our relationship to the universe and the Great Unknown. Many of us enter the new year, with its promise of new life, by making promises of our own: renewed commitments to be better parents or friends, re-engage in a spiritual quest, launch a new project, or simply take better care of ourselves.

Since the time our ancestors shifted from being hunter-gatherers to being farmers, humans have been bound to an agricultural calendar and cycle of hard work. During the spring, summer and fall, most of the time was consumed with creating food and shelter. In the bleak wastelands of winter, though — in the lull between planting seasons — came a time to laugh and sing and ask big questions. These days, few of us work the fields, but the rhythm of the year still shapes our lives and the sun on our faces still is one of life’s joys.

I wish the media hype-meisters would realize that most of us aren’t interested in squabbling about labels or who owns which dates or rituals, or who copied who when it comes to our celebrations. Most of us just aren’t inspired to spend this season staking out territory.

For one thing, all of our mid-winter celebrations emerged from earlier traditions that honored the cycle of the seasons: Christmas incorporates ancient rituals from Yule and Saturnalia. December 25th was chosen to celebrate the birth of Jesus because it was already celebrated as the birthday of dying and rising gods and of the sun. And if Kwanzaa and Hanukkah don’t owe part of their form and focus to the Christian celebration, then I’ll eat my pagan Santa hat. That we borrow from each other and build new on top of old foundations doesn’t make any of these traditions less powerful or delightful or sacred.

More importantly, we’re not interested in squabbling over turf because this season is about celebrating what we all have in common. In Seattle, one thing we share is a craving for the sun. But there’s far more than that: The value we place on love. Our delight in giving to each other. Our yearning for wonder. Our longing for fresh beginnings. I personally don’t care which tradition people call on at solstice time, as long as they keep those lights burning.

From Huffington Post:

It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. – Charles Darwin

Last week, as I was driving a carload of middle-schoolers to a movie, the kids started talking about their teachers. I couldn’t help overhearing, “…He’s a great science teacher, but he doesn’t believe in evolution.”  Two days later, a friend reported that his 15-year-old daughter had just returned from a junior government retreat. “They argued the pros and cons of teaching intelligent design in schools, and she said there were some very compelling arguments on the pro side.” When I repeated the story at the dinner table later, my own daughter mentioned a school-mate who feels conflicted about his biology curriculum because his family doesn’t believe in evolution.

Charles Darwin published his world-changing work, On the Origin of Species, 150 years ago this week. What he proposed was breathtakingly simple. It can be reduced to three parts: variability, heritability, and differential survival. Variability means simply that creatures are different from each other, even within a species. Heritability means that those differences are in part handed down from parent to child. Differential survival means that not all of us live to produce the same number of offspring, and that those who have more offspring are better represented in future generations. Once you concede these three points, evolution becomes inevitable.

Even so, for 150 straight years, fearful Abrahamic literalists have been trying to deny the facts about natural selection or at least to keep them away from young minds. Reality threatens their belief that the earth was created in six days and then re-created in an ancient flood (young earth creationism), or their belief that it evolved but was tweaked regularly according to some divine blueprint (intelligent design). More to the point, reality threatens their belief that we — stinky, mean, bipedal-primates-with-bad-backs who love and hate and make cool stuff and then destroy it — are the pinnacle of creation and center of the universe.

Generations of scientists have subjected Darwin’s theory to tests that weren’t possible back in 1859. These include  computerized reassembly of fossils, radio carbon dating, core samples of geological layers, DNA sequencing, even laboratory experiments that create distinct bacterial species out of a single ancestor.  Mountains of evidence have confirmed that, with some adjustments, Darwin was right. Today our understanding of natural selection provides the foundation for the life sciences — genetics, biology, biotechnology, medicine, animal husbandry, and more.

And yet unbelievably, some religionists still labor to create the illusion of confusion. Unfortunately, this forces them to cast aspersions on the whole scientific enterprise. They love the fruits of science in the form of mammography and cell phones and airplanes. But they reject the obligations of the scientific method, which say that before making truth claims you must ask the questions that could show you wrong. And they are deeply suspicious of scientists themselves (Why would scientists keep getting the answers so wrong unless they were deliberately trying to undermine faith?). Oh, what a tangled web we weave when first we labor to deceive ourselves.

If nothing else, creationist efforts to undermine science and science education should teach us something about our species, about our impressive capacity for delusion. Given enough motivation and community support, we humans seem to have an almost boundless ability to cling to a story regardless of the evidence.  Without religion, there would be no such thing as a “good science teacher who doesn’t believe in evolution.”  But given the right ideological filter, this paradoxical teacher becomes perfectly possible.

We all are prone to confirmation bias, a tendency to seek information in support of what we already believe, disregarding any contradictions. Religious orthodoxy over the centuries has refined confirmation bias into an art form called “apologetics.” Apologists start with a set of handed down conclusions and then reason backwards from there, drawing in logic and evidence only as these support their foregone conclusion.

These people, in my mind, worship an idol with clay feet. They don’t worship a power that is actually great enough to create the intricacies of the natural world, but rather a golden calf called the inerrant Bible or the inerrant Koran (Call it bibliolatry — text worship. In an age of widespread literacy and printing presses, what better golden calf than a literally perfect book?). They don’t trust that all truth is God’s truth, and that nature really does have something to say about her creator. They minimize the fallibility of our ancestors who wrote and assembled our sacred texts and church leaders who interpret them. Consequently, they don’t see that they have made a god in the image of man.

When it comes to Darwin’s theory, some of the most sophisticated apologists in the country are housed in a Seattle institution called the Discovery Institute. They use the language of science to undermine the work of science. That may be why, in one of the most secular parts of the country, we can find teachers who think that disbelief in evolution is somehow compatible with the obligations of the scientific process.

The creationists will be shown to be on the wrong side of history, but in the meantime, they have the power to do serious harm. In the service of their idol, they undermine the cutting edge education and research that have let us attain our current cultural/technological nexus. In doing so they also undermine our ability to innovate and solve the great challenges we now face: climate change, population pressures, weapons of mass destruction, and resource depletion.

When Darwin first noticed evolution, it flew in the face of everything he, as a Christian, had been raised to believe. It flew in the face of his theological training. It flew in the face of his beloved wife Emma’s devout faith. And so, working almost alone, he spent twenty painstaking years assembling logic and evidence before he finally went public with his suspicions. Through all that time, he had the integrity to follow the evidence where it might lead and ultimately the courage to challenge the apologists.  Those of us who care about the future of our species cannot afford to do any less.

From Huffington Post

Seattle was still reeling from the cold blooded execution of a police officer on Halloween, when the news hit on Sunday that four more officers were dead. Monday, as I was trying to weave my way through a city swarming with blue cars and uniforms, and drenched with anxiety and grief, I couldn’t help wondering about how an erratic serial criminal like Maurice Clemmons ends up on the streets. And since Clemmons had his sentence commuted by Mike Huckabee, an Arkansas governor and presidential hopeful who has made fundamentalist religion the center of his politics and public life, I couldn’t help wondering if religion played a part.

It turns out that, in fact, religion may have played several different roles in the tragedy, just as it did in the recent slaughter at Fort Hood. This time, though, Islam had nothing to do with it. At Fort Hood, fundamentalist Christianity created an adversarial, proselytizing, holy war atmosphere, while Islam released the trigger lock. In the Seattle killings, Christianity stands as the one theological ingredient in the lethal brew.  It consumed the mind of the killer, who possibly had apocalyptic delusions. A Seattle Times headline today quoted his uncle: “He was all about money… suddenly, he was all about God.”

One of the challenges in identifying and responding effectively to religious delusions is that we all have been taught to turn off our critical faculties when people spout dogma. In Religulous, Bill Maher put a wild-eyed actor on the streets of London to recite the tenets of Scientology. He sounded like a paranoid schizophrenic. But when those same ideas are touted by Tom Cruise, polite society smiles and nods, and no one makes a move to get him meds.

When it comes to their own religion, moderate people of faith often defer publicly to even the wildest fellow believers. Most mainline Christians maintain downcast eyes while fundamentalists rant about demons and witchcraft and spiritual warfare. Mainstream Muslims are painfully quiet about terrorism in the name of God.  The Rick Warrens and Joel Olsteens of the world go mute when the book of Psalms is used to invoke God as a celestial hit man against Mikey Weinstein (Military Religious Freedom Foundation) or Barack Obama.   Christian Science lobbyists make straight-faced attempts to get “prayer treatments” paid for by any national health plan, and somehow lawmakers maintain straight faces.

Social psychologists have pointed out that we humans often fall prey to a “similar-to-me” bias. When assessing job applicants for example, we give higher ratings to people who are like us in superficial and irrelevant ways:  people who went to the same school, who look like us, who cheer the same sports team, or who share our religion. The same may be true of applicants for penal clemency.

What role did religion play in how other people responded to Clemmons, in the “system breakdown” that cost four people their lives? Let’s look at just Mike Huckabee’s role. Was Huckabee influenced to pardon Clemmons because of their shared Christian belief? We cannot read Huckabee’s mind, but we do know that Clemmons certainly played that card, pointing out his Christian upbringing and telling Huckabee that he was praying that Huckabee would grant him clemency.  This approach would make sense given Huckabee’s reputation.  Per Joe Conason at Salon, “Huckabee granted mercy to prisoners whom he chanced to meet, to prisoners who had personal connections to him or his family, and especially to prisoners who were vouchsafed to him by the pastors he had befriended during his years as a Baptist minister and denominational leader.”

Mike Huckabee’s Christianity is the same kind I grew up in: Evangelical  fundamentalism. One of the core aspects of Evangelicalism is that if you are saved, the past is wiped clean. The worst murderer can go to heaven as long as he accepts Jesus as his savior through a deathbed conversion. The most thoughtful, compassionate Buddhist will be tortured in hell. It’s all about being born again. Once you are born again, you are a new man in Christ.

In general, biblical literalists like Huckabee (sometimes called “Rebiblicans”) talk about being tough on criminals. But an appeal from a fellow believer can complicate the tough-on-crime thing. Christians seek to be god-like in their behavior, which can take you in the direction of advocating the mortal equivalent of eternal punishment — or in the direction of a pardon, especially for those who claim the blood of Jesus (which is, after all, the only way any of us can demonstrate real repentance.) As one Huckabee fan said, “I cannot in good conscience condemn Huckabee for this. He was doing what Jesus would want done. You know forgiveness.”

Forgiveness is one thing. Religiously motivated ignorance is another. Ironically, neither of the two biblical approaches to immorality (blanket condemnation or blanket forgiveness) is a particularly good fit for the real world complexities that lead to murder. The one ignores how much each of us is a mixed package of genetics and life experiences, hopes and fears, failings and strivings, growth and continuity.  The other ignores — well, actually, it ignores the same package.

In psychology, there is an old adage: “The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.” There’s no such thing as a clean slate. That is not to say that people can’t change.  But it is to say that the past is relevant, and that change usually is an evolutionary, incremental, complex process. People can and do have transformative, born again experiences. These occur in small counter-cultural cults like Scientology as well as Christianity. (See Jim and  Flo Siegelman’s excellent book, Snapping.) But what can toggle in one direction can toggle in the other. The kind of clean slate that evangelicals and career criminals are looking for is, in my mind, a dangerous fantasy.

Would Huckabee have been so forgiving if Clemmons was a Wiccan or an atheist or a Muslim?  That depends on how much he was driven by his Evangelicalism. Evangelicals of Huckabee’s sort think that morality comes from Christianity. That is why they are passionate about taking “dominion” and ruling the country according to biblical principles. They ignore the fact that the lowest crime rates and teen pregnancies in the world are in the nations that also happen to have the lowest rates of religious belief.  They ignore the fact that the lowest rates of divorce and teen pregnancy in the U.S.A. are in the least religious regions.  Despite all evidence to the contrary, they think that the problems we face as a nation are caused by our increasing godlessness.

Conversely, in their estimation, a born-again Christian can be counted on to be a good person, to run an ethical business, or to make good decisions about war. That is why evangelical businesses often display a Jesus fish or another Evangelical symbol. It is their way of saying this business can be trusted. It is also why, for many Evangelicals, it is irrelevant that G.W.  Bush or Sarah Palin might know little about foreign policy. That they know Jesus is enough.

I for one am weary of ignorance posing as righteousness and tribalism posing as compassion. We will never know for sure if either played a role in Huckabee’s decision to commute the sentence of Maurice Clemmons, but we shouldn’t have to even wonder. Clemency decisions should be based on the best evidence available. It is long past time for articles like this one to become irrelevant.

Since it’s election season, for those of you who are interested in the politics of the religious right or of Washington State, I’ve included a second brief article below this one, a post from the Daily Kos entitled: Don’t Make Our Mistake. It’s about local Washington politics and a new stealth strategy that involves changing seats to “nonpartisan” before running Religious Right candidates in liberal areas.

The most controversial check I write each year is the one that goes to a small nonprofit called Project Prevention. Project Prevention pays drug addicts and chronic alcoholics to get permanent or long term birth control. Director Barbara Harris founded the Project after adopting not one or two but four drug addicted babies from the same mother. She watched them scream and writhe inconsolably, backs arched and hands clenched, and she said, “Enough.”

Reproductive rights organizations that I support like Planned Parenthood and NARAL don’t approve of Barbara’s work. It operates in a bioethical gray zone that makes them uncomfortable, and should. Here is their reasoning: Payment has the power to manipulate people into decisions they will regret. An addict may be desperate enough for a fix that she’d sell her soul let alone her ability to reproduce.

I think they are right. Addiction does make people that desperate, and a decision born of desperation is a decision coerced. Consequently, addiction pits two things I cherish against each other. One of them is reproductive freedom. I believe passionately that parenthood is one of the richest, most spiritual dimensions of life, and that we collectively should neither obligate nor restrict it without overwhelming cause.

I also believe is that childhood is a precious trust, and we should bring children into this world only if we are prepared to honor that trust –to give them a decent shot at flourishing. Under the wrong circumstances childhood can be a living hell. And that is far more likely to be the case when children are the unintended product of unprotected sex, with the judgment of involved parties clouded by addiction.

When our ancestors had no control over fertility, childbearing wasn’t a moral decision. But now it is. I tell my children that we are responsible for what we have control over; power and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. Contraception is one of humanity’s newfound powers. So it is that contraceptives bring a new dimension of moral decision making to the human race. And as someone who has influence over another person’s reproductive decisions through my charitable giving, I end up having to weigh moral questions.

In my experience, we encounter moral dilemmas most often when two good things or two bad things are pitted against each other. It’s easy to say that childhood health is a good thing or to say that personal freedom is a good thing. But which matters more – the freedom of women to reproduce as they choose, or the right of children to have a healthy start in life?

As a woman, I am utterly grateful that my culture, U.S. Laws, scientific advances and financial privilege, gave me a high level of reproductive freedom. I had the freedom to defer childbearing—to go to school, travel, and heal my childhood wounds first. I had the freedom to abort an unhealthy fetus. I had the freedom, finally, to bring two chosen daughters into a solid marriage with a bounty of love and life experiences to share. When I think of my own life, I value reproductive freedom a lot—for people I love like my daughters, but also for people I’ve never met.

But is it the needs of women or children that go most to the core for me? Mercifully, they often are aligned. Still, how do I weigh them when they come into conflict?

One way I get insight into my own hierarchy of values is by looking at what I do. Throughout my adult life, my most compelling efforts (grad school, work, volunteering, giving, writing) have been about making room for a little more delight and a little less pain in this world. To me more reproductive freedom and fewer addicted babies both matter because they serve this end. But if I look closely at my own history, one of these values trumps the other. The lettering I painstakingly stuck on my car as a young therapist said, “Children deserve to be planned for and chosen.” Years later, I was instantly smitten with a quirky warm political co-conspirator, Patricia, who declared that she was pro-choice because, “All babies deserve to have their toes kissed.”

My checks to Project Prevention fit a pattern—they tell me that over all these years, my values—in this area, at least—haven’t changed. All babies do deserve to have their toes kissed, and their knees and elbows and unclenched hands. It is a bonus that, from the sound of things, most of Project Prevention’s efforts—inspired by Barbara’s babies—are giving women healthy (new) beginnings in life too.

Don’t Make Our Mistake!

Last year voters in King County Washington (aka Seattle and surroundings) were faced with a charter amendment making all county races nonpartisan. Liberals like me, sick of elected who cared more about the party than the people, voted for it in droves, and it passed. I thought — dimwit that I am — that people would be forced to vote on issues rather than tribal loyalties. Turns out the whole thing was a right wing ploy that is being propagated across the country.

It is only in liberal districts, where an “R” after your name on the ballot has become a badge of shame, that these lovely populist initiatives are springing up. (King County is one of the most liberal places in the country.) The ploy was so transparent in one North Carolina municipality that the Justice Department refused to approve the move to “nonpartisan” appointments. Then the Right countered by crowing that Blacks were too stupid to vote without partisan labels. Turns out maybe we’re all too stupid to vote without labels.

In King County, as soon as the initiative passed, the same people who funded the initiative put up a stealth Religious Right candidate for county exec. Susan Hutchison was on the board of the creationist Discovery Institute for ten years. She has a multi-year relationship with the Washington Policy Center, a haven for free market fundamentalists. (At their recent gala she stood up and crowed about reagonomist Steve Moore who then crowed about Fox News and teabagging.) She gave money to Mike Huckabee over John McCain. At a governor’s prayer breakfast before she announced her candidacy, she exhorted electeds to use their bully pulpit to trumpet the path to salvation. AAAND It looks like she is may win in a county that is wildly at odds with her values.

So who duped me? The campaign to make races nonpartisan was kicked off by a developer named George Rowley who spent 70k of his money to sucker us. He was joined by two wireless magnates – Bruce McCaw and John Stanton. Together Stanton and Rowley provided $313,000, over 80% of the money spent by — get this — “Citizens for Independent Government.” Gee. I’m a citizen for independent government…

The Hutchison campaign just happens to be run out of a house owned by McCaw’s company. And low and behold, he and his wife have put almost 30K into her campaign and attack ads against her progressive Democrat opponent, Dow Constantine. Stanton and his wife are in for 3,200 to Hutchison, and it looks like George Rowley, through a group called Eastside Business Alliance, is in for another 28k give or take.

Here’s the brilliant part of their tactic. Because the race is “non-partisan” and Susan Hutchison calls herself a “non-partisan” and a “moderate” the local papers refuse to call her out for the Religious Right mainliner that she actually is. Her whole campaign strategy has been to be a tabula rasa onto which voters could project their desires for a fresh face and a new approach. (Since Dems were in power in King County when the economy crashed, they were responsible, don’t ya know.) Funny, snotty renegade media is finally kicking in to spread the word about the Palin wannabe who is inches away from the County Exec seat, (here, here, and here — don’t miss the last 5 sec on the kid one and the elephant one.) But it may be too late. Why didn’t I clue in when Republican candidate for governor Dino Rossi refused to put Republican as his party last year?!

Spread the word. This ploy, called “going stealth,” may be coming to a liberal locality near you!

One thing I learned not long after finishing my Spanish degree was — never volunteer to translate anything into a language you don’t dream in. I was visiting Flores, Guatemala, and offered to help a small art collective. In response, they handed me some fliers to translate from English to Spanish. I had that four year degree, you know, so I did — with embarrassing results. My sentences were grammatically correct, and the words even meant what I thought they meant. But no native speaker ever would have said things quite that way, and someone had to tactfully tell me so. I still wince at the memory, at my own naiveté and hubris.

Takeaway for political candidates: If you’re not a Christian, don’t even try to speak Evangelese. There are subtleties of sequence and jargon that are invisible to outsiders, but violating them even slightly is a dead giveaway that you are a sham. Refer to someone as “a good person,” for example, and it’s all over. You might as well be that poor American spy who shifted his fork to his right hand after cutting the meat.

Not convinced? Listen to a real Evangelical for a few moments. Susan Hutchison is a Religious Right candidate in King County, Washington. Shortly before beginning her run, she gave the keynote at a prayer breakfast for elected officials. In it, she recounts a conversation with Oxford biologist Richard Dawkins and talks about her own faith. Any five minute segment of the talk would say convincingly to other Evangelicals, Susan isn’t one of those lukewarm (aka modernist mainline) Christians. She is one of us. Take a few minutes to watch, and then ask yourself:

1. Would I have thought to invoke the frightening words “age of the activist atheists,” knowing that atheists are more reviled than gays and Muslims?
2. Would I have described sharing my religious beliefs as “giving a little testimony?”
3. Would I have said Richard Dawkins reacted to “the name of Jesus” (At the Name of Jesus ever knee shall bow… ) rather than the whole dismaying event?
4. Would it have occurred to me that one could be a confirmed Lutheran but not be a Christian until a specific born again experience?
5. Would I have known to tell a story about God telling me or another person to do something — with wonderful results?
6. Would I have mentioned that I was praying for my opponents like the author of Matthew recommends? “Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you …” Matthew 5:44
7. Would I have honed in on belief as the center of Christianity, with doubt as something to be prayed away? “I believe, help me in my unbelief.”
8. Would I have called the Bible “the Word of God”?
9. Would I have conveyed with confidence that the highest purpose of public service is as platform for winning the world to Jesus (Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel.)
10. Would I have avoided the word religion throughout my talk?

If you didn’t know these were insider language and narrative templates , you’re not an insider.

Susan Hutchison is the Real Deal, which is virtually impossible to fake. All the same, if you want the Evangelical/born again forty-ish percent of the public to find you appealing, there are a few turns of phrase that are worth incorporating into your campaign vocabulary. Don’t try using these to establish your spiritual bona fides. (Unless you are born again, you have none. See good person, above. There is no such thing. All we like sheep have gone astray.) Instead, use evangelical or biblical turns of phrase in a secular context. They will sound appealingly familiar to a born again audience — without you pretending to be something you aren’t. For example, here are a few sample phrases you might borrow from Hutchison.

1. Refer to “my heart”:
   a. Evangelical examples: asking Jesus into your heart, God is speaking to your heart.
   b. Secular use: I feel in my heart, I know in my heart no matter how hard it may be, we need to provide basic medical care for every child in this country.
2. Say you felt “called” or were led to do something.
   a. Evangelical examples: God called me to move to Seattle, to take up the ministry, to put John 3:16 on my eyeblacks. Richard Dawkins and I have been brought together.
   b. Secular use: I felt called to take up the cause of health care for all.
3. Use the word “personal” liberally.
   a. Evangelical example: I needed a personal faith. You aren’t really a Christian until you have a personal relationship with Jesus.
   b. Secular use: I have a personal relationship to the people in that nursing home.
4. Use the phrase “all the world.”
   a. Evangelical example: Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature.
   b. Secular use: Whether we treat health care as a basic human right will have ripple effects flow into all the world.
5. Talk about events that “changed your life forever.”
   a. Evangelical example: Accepting Jesus as my personal savior changed my life forever.
   b. Secular use: Sitting with that dying child changed my life forever.

Hutchison herself makes a mistake or two about insider/outsider language in her story about Richard Dawkins at Windsor Castle. In her version, he asks a question and she gives a little testimony about God revealing himself through Jesus. (Tangentially, Dawkins recalls the conversation being about GW, not Jesus.) In the story, Dawkins says that his books give people permission to “deny their faith.” This is a very Evangelical turn of phrase. Also, Hutchison quotes Dawkins as saying she became “tawdry and base” when she said “the word Jesus”. Unlikely. An atheist scientist is more likely to react negatively to her whole plug for special (biblical) revelation rather than the “name of Jesus,” but in fundamentalist theology it is “the name of Jesus” that demons can’t bear. Most likely, Hutchison projected an Evangelical phrase into Dawkins’ mouth. Like my attempt to translate into Spanish, her attempt at translation probably was shaped by her native tongue.

It’s easy go awry when you’re trying to speak someone else’s language, and secular folks frequently make mistakes when trying to build bridges with Evangelical believers. Here are a few examples of seemingly insider words that instead are actually negative triggers for many Evangelicals.

1. Calling Christianity a religion. It isn’t. It’s a relationship.
2. Referring to Jesus as a good man. He wasn’t. He was God.
3. Using the word “tolerance.” It’s a bad word that means you are a moral relativist.
4. Mentioning priests or bishops. Way too Catholic. Evangelicals call them ministers or pastors or preachers.
5. Using the words interfaith, or spirituality. Those are words for wusses and imply spiritual weakness.

If you want to get serious about understanding Evangelical language and the role it plays in politics, I recommend David Domke’s book, The God Strategy. You also can find funny or serious lists of insider language online.

But I want to make a more important point. For those of you who watched the video, take a cue from Hutchison’s grace, poise, and relentless equanimity. Mean spirited jabs, visible frustration or righteous indignation rarely rallies people to your side. Susan Hutchison talks about the enemies of her God — Dan Barker, activist atheists, and Richard Dawkins — with zero verbal edge, all the while maintaining the same smile that is there when she talks about God answering prayers. It’s what made her well loved as an anchor woman, and it may very well win her an election among people who actually disagree with her core values. In the end, the biggest part of people feeling connected with you is whether you come across as likeable. That is what all of the insider/outsider language analysis really is about. If people identify with you and find you trustworthy — if thinking about you makes them feel warm and happy — they’re going to put their own best spin on whatever you may say.

On October 2 and 3, the Seattle Times  included an AP articles about the recent quake in Sumatra, along with a “how to help” list. Top of that list was World Vision International.

What the articles failed to mention and many donors fail to realize, is that World Vision is an Evangelical Christian organization with a mission that includes “serving as a witness to the gospel of Jesus Christ.” Perhaps the best known program of World Vision is their child sponsorships. As an Evangelical college student, I sponsored a child in India. I even got and sent a few letters, and it felt great knowing that thanks to my modest, manageable donations he could afford to attend a Christian school in his area.

World Vision explicitly states on their website that they “do not proselytize or work with those who insist on proselytism. Proselytism takes place whenever assistance is offered on condition that people must listen or respond to a message or as an inducement to leave one and join another part of the Christian church.” The organization ascribes to Red Cross standards prohibiting conversion activities. But consider the next paragraph from their website:

At the same time, World Vision shares the Church’s commitment to disciple  followers of Jesus Christ who bear witness to the Gospel by life, deed, word and  sign, with the goal of encouraging people to respond to the Gospel. We do this  through the life of service that we lead, the deeds of Christian love we  perform, the words that we share about our faith and the signs of prayers answered as we visibly and concretely improve the lives of others.”

People in disaster zones and small children, the two primary populations served by World Vision, both are particularly vulnerable, and so particularly vulnerable to influence. It’s great that World Vision doesn’t take an “or else” approach to aid: listen to our message or else go hungry. Not all missionary organizations adhere to this ethical boundary. But to deny the conversion pressures of money and medical care or education is naïve. Consider the plight of Hindu parents who have a choice between a bare local school or a Christian school that provides paper, pencils, and books. All over the world, vast differences in power and resources say to desperate people: Christians have what you need; Jesus is the answer. The World Vision mission, in its own understated way, acknowledges this.

Does this make World Vision a bad investment? It depends on your own values, on whether their mission of encouraging people to respond to the Gospel is also yours. Make no mistake. In evangelical circles, the word “witness” is code for seeking converts, and “Gospel” means salvation by the sacrificial death of Jesus Christ. If that is a message you want carried to the world by kind, competent, compassionate aid organization, World Vision may be your ticket. If it’s just the competent, compassionate aid that you care about, then you’re likely better off sending your money to an organization further down the list. Try Mercy Corps, for example, or Doctors without Borders or that standard bearer, the Red Cross itself.

A couple of years back, I dragged my agnostic husband, Brian, to a Calvinist megachurch. Calvinist means God preselected a few humans for salvation and the rest for eternal torture. We sat there for an hour, goats among the sheep. Brian’s  reaction? “That was the best indie rock I’ve heard in a long time!”

Christians have a love-hate relationship with popular music. I came of age during a hate phase.  Rock was diabolical.  In my generation, Alice Cooper, missionary kid, played out his parents’ fears about rock music, chopping up baby dolls and  screeching about necrophilia while dressed as a 17th Century witch. Having postured on the enemy side of a fantastical spiritual war that supposedly encompasses us all, he now attends an evangelical mega in Scottsdale, Arizona.

In his youth, Alice had to choose between edgy rock and Jesus. By contrast, my nephew (raised by the same woman who raised me on Swan Lake — my mom) spent his teen years consuming a steady diet of Christian heavy metal. Mom’s complaints were focused on aesthetics. Matthew’s beloved “screamers” were distasteful, but not dangerous. Heavy metal had been co-opted. Instead of sketching daggers and bones dripping with stylized blood like secular metal fans, Matt could draw hearts and crosses dripping with stylized blood — and that was ok.

In Christianity, music is cement for faith. It can put people in that otherworldly frame of mind needed for repentance and conversion. It can call people to action and bind them to each other. It can evoke submission or ecstasy. Even the traditional interweaving of music and liturgy transforms passive observers into active worshipers.

The problem for fundies is that music can call people into the playful, sexual or political dimensions of social life. Young Christians are enticed to be “unequally yoked” with non-Christian band members, compatriots, or even lovers. At least that’s what a lot of parents and ministers worry about. That’s why in the long run it makes sense to co-opt pop music, whether it’s heavy metal or the folk tunes or medieval love songs that provided melodies for now-traditional hymns. Some ministers still try to guard young people from rock or hip hop music. But others work to “melt your face off” with a band that screams about Jesus.

Either way, I think they are right about the risk of secular music. Music can be a path out of insularity.  Not by itself, of course.  But music creates links to a whole wide world of human activities and ideas. For former fundies, it can also help with the healing process. When you’ve had your child-mind warped by scary songs liked “I Wish We’d all Been Ready” or when you’ve spent Sunday mornings swaying to “I’m a Pentecostal” or you’re dulcet tones were trained on “Saved by the Blood,” it can help to start feeding your brain some alternatives.

During the summer I sent out email to a few friends and online ex-Christians saying I was going to put together a playlist for recovering fundies. Seventy-three song titles came back at me —everything from Gershwin to Nine Inch Nails.

“Now what do I do?” I asked my daughter. “They won’t all fit in an article.”

“Just list mine,” she said, as if the solution was perfectly obvious.

So here are the top ten picks of a 14 year old (whose musical tastes, as will be apparent, were shaped by her dad more than her peers).

1. Blasphemous Rumours, Depeche Mode

2. Losing My Religion, REM

3.Jesus’ Brother Bob, Arrogant Worms

4. Stairway to Heaven, Led Zeppelin

5. One Tin Soldier, Coven

6. Cathedral, Cosby, Stills & Nash

7. Heaven’s Here on Earth, Tracy Chapman

8. Freewill, Rush

9. Everybody Knows, Leonard Cohen

10. One of Us, Joan Osborne

Oh, and of course, Imagine.” It goes without saying.

The other sixty three one hundred and seventeen can be found at www.spaces.live.com/awaypoint.

Valerie Tarico, Ph.D. is a psychologist in Seattle, Washington. She is the author of

What’s the point?

1. Evangelicals are constantly mischaracterizing non-theists. We need to listen and not preach.

2. There is some common ground of concern here for many of us, especially in the area of the ethical practices of religions that seek to convert.

3. We need to measure our responses against reality. Some of our typical talking points aren’t very impressive, so we might consider retiring or reworking them.

4. I want to build a bridge. Dr. Tarico is very open to that kind of dialog.

Dr. Valerie Tarico is a former evangelical who now describes herself as a spiritual nontheist. Her book The Dark Side distills her moral and rational critique of Evangelical teachings. Tarico is a graduate of Wheaton College. She obtained a Ph.D. in Counseling Psychology from the University of Iowa before completing postdoctoral studies at the University of Washington. She writes regularly for the Huffington Post and hosts a monthly series on SCAN TV Seattle: Moral Politics – Christianity in the Public Square. Last year Tarico founded WisdomCommons.org, an interactive website with quotes, stories and poems from around the world all promoting shared ethical values. Her essays about society, faith, and family life can be found at Awaypoint.

Dr. Tarico, welcome to the Internet Monk.com interview.

1. Tell the Internet Monk.com audience the basic story of how and why you left evangelicalism. I’m particularly interested in any significant books or authors that were part of that journey.

Hmm. Books and authors. I think I ended up falling from faith mostly in spite of the books I was reading to shore up my faith! I grew up in a non-denominational Bible church, and my relationship with Jesus was at the very center of who I was. In high school I was proud to stump my biology teacher with ideas from the Creation Research Society, and when I arrived at Wheaton College I think I was more devout and conservative than the school was. (I mean, they let post-millennialists and Lutherans in the door.)

Even so, I would say that from adolescence on I struggled to fend off moral and rational contradictions in my faith, evolving more and more idiosyncratic ways of holding the pieces together. In particular, I couldn’t understand how I was going to be blissfully, perfectly happy — indifferent to the fact that other people were experiencing eternal anguish.

The final straw came while I was completing a doctoral internship at Children’s Hospital in Seattle. My job was to provide psychological consultation to kids and families on the medical units. I was working with kids who were dying of cancer or enduring horrible, frightening treatments in order to survive it. As I listened to the explanations offered by people who believed in an all powerful, loving, perfectly good interventionist God, it seemed to me these “justifications” were comforting, but they didn’t make things just. I re-read The Problem of Pain, and the resident rabbi offered Why Bad Things Happen to Good People. Both rang hollow.

Finally I said to God, “I’m not making excuses for you anymore.” And suddenly it felt like I had been holding my God concept together for so long with duct tape and bailing wire that all I had left was tape and wire. So I walked away. I didn’t really re-engage with Christianity in any systematic way until it became clear about five years ago that Biblical ideas were dictating social policy — and killing people.

2. Anti-theists (or non-theists) of various kinds are now making their numbers and voice heard in the public square. What are two or three of the primary myths/truths about non-theism that people of traditional religious faiths are going to have to get rid of and/or adjust to in the future?

Well, first of all let me say that not all nontheists are anti-theists. Most nonbelievers are simply not interested in religion. Many see it as a benign force that contributes to stable moral communities. Those who are vocally outspoken against supernaturalism are a minority. I think this is important to emphasize because the silent majority is, well, silent and so not noticed.

Humanists who join inter-spiritual dialogue or nonbelieving parents who are busy reading bedtime stories and making cookies for school bake sales don’t tend to make their voices heard on these issues. Mostly they just want to be left in peace — to not have Christians witnessing to their kids or interfering with their medical decisions.

The myth I am confronted with most frequently is that non-Christians (especially those who have left the faith) are indifferent to morality or they reject the gift of salvation because they don’t want to be morally accountable. Because Christians self-perceive as a city on a hill, a light shining in the darkness, they assume they have the moral high ground. Some think that there is no basis for morality apart from the Bible and a redemptive relationship with Jesus. So what they fail to recognize is that much of the critique of Christianity is a moral critique, and much of the outrage is moral outrage.

Another myth is that non-theists broadly and anti-theists particularly have little interest in spirituality. In my experience many are profoundly concerned with issues not only of morality but also of meaning and unity and wonder: the small humble delights that that makes life a joy to live, the willingness to give yourself to something bigger than yourself, the beauties of love.

3. How do you feel about the high profile of atheists like Dawkins, Harris and Hitchens who consistently oppose religion of any kind as an unquestionable evil? Is there any feeling in the non-theist community that they are being portrayed as “fundamentalists” as well?

Those guys definitely are anti-theists and taboo breakers to boot, which makes people love to hate them. (“The Missionary Position”?) But I think they change the dialogue in important ways. To cite a provocative example, Dawkins has said that religious indoctrination of children is child abuse. In reality, all education of children is indoctrination at some level. Every parent or teacher has to wrestle with the balance of top-down mind control vs open inquiry.

But if we push past knee-jerk reactions to Dawkins’ assertion, he raises a serious moral question for believers: Is Christian indoctrination abusive more often than people like to think? Psychologist Marlene Winell, who specializes in recovery from fundamentalism, would say yes with three exclamation points.

I personally find the “fundamentalist” label a bit of an eye roller when applied to Dawkins or Harris. It’s childish. “You stink.” “No, you stink.” The word fundamentalism has a specific history and meaning. It is about having a core set of dogma-based assertions that are nonnegotiable, and historically these fundamentals are the central tenets of Christian orthodoxy. It’s not a synonym for strident or uncompromising.

A quick glance around any department store will give you an idea of how easily we humans confuse the quality of packaging with quality of contents. The same is true for communications. In my experience, Dawkins et al are more nuanced and thoughtful in their actual analysis than what the public reaction would suggest, and I wonder how many of their critics have actually read them versus reacting to their posture.

Other atheist and agnostic writers love to define themselves by saying, “I’m not like those guys.” It’s a way of positioning as a moderate and gaining access to an audience that feels conflicted about the role of religion in society. Tangentially, I think that within Christianity, people often fail to recognize theological fundamentalism if it is wrapped in rock music and skateboard art or in warm, loving community.

4. Setting aside the obvious issue of breaking the law, at what point does an evangelical parent, in the religious training of their own children, cross the line into what you consider the abuse of that child?

Imagine you work in a mental health center and a woman says to you, “My husband says he loves me unconditionally and if I don’t love him back he is going to torture me to death as slowly as he can.” Some theologies are inherently abusive.

When I was a teenager my youth group showed a movie called “A Thief in the Night” about the rapture, and a few years back, churches were creating “hell houses” for Halloween. In both cases, the blood and gore and implied violence were meant to be shocking and emotionally traumatic — all justified morally because shock and trauma right now are better than having people tortured forever. But a therapist like Marlene Winell, who I mentioned before, routinely sees people who developed panic disorder or chronic depression and anxiety in reaction to hell and rapture threats.

Because of my writing I sometimes receive stories that make me as a mom want to cry. One child became hysterical whenever he called out and his parents didn’t answer because he thought they’d been taken. Another repeatedly prayed the prayer of salvation — never sure that it had “taken,” until she ultimately became distraught and suicidal.

I wonder how many children in the coming up generation were traumatized by being exposed to Mel Gibson’s blood orgy, The Passion. My mom’s old church took a busload including pre-adolescents — kids who largely had been sheltered from Hollywood violence and had no way to have hardened themselves against it. If it wasn’t a religious theme, the parents themselves would have thought it abusive.

Here’s the challenge, though: Causing trauma isn’t necessarily abusive. I had my appendix removed when I was five, and it was absolutely terrifying because I was in pain and tied to a hospital bed and left alone. But I don’t think of it as abusive because it was necessary. Is scaring people into salvation necessary or abusive? When you intentionally cause harm or trauma in order to prevent a greater harm, it’s not enough to be well intentioned. You also have to be right. And if you’re not, the rest of society has a responsibility to weigh whether you are causing trauma unnecessarily—especially when those being harmed are children.

5. When you see a church spending large amounts of money on children’s ministries and activities, do you believe this is ethical or unethical? Why?

If you heard that Scientologists were spending large amounts of money on outreach to kids would you believe this was ethical or unethical? What if they offered a subsidized summer camp to inner city kids like Child Evangelism Fellowship does? What if they had a storefront alcohol-free bar for underage skateboarders like City Church does in Ballard, Washington? What if they had teenage tutors slipping colorful invitation cards to kids in public middle schools like Foursquare Church does in Seattle?

Children are hard wired to be credulous, to believe what they are told by adults who have authority over them and who nurture them. It’s the only efficient way for them to pick up all the information they need. They can’t afford to question and test when we tell them stoves burn you or cars squish you, so they’re built to trust us. Because they are vulnerable in this way, we have a particular responsibility not to exploit or abuse that trust. If you believe the exclusive salvific claims of Christian orthodoxy, then the end justifies the means. That, I think is at the heart of children’s ministries. But it’s only fair to admit that children are being offered metaphorical candy – and the ultimate goal of conversion isn’t always up front. One Jewish neighbor sent her daughter to a playful, wholesome outreach ministry at a local mega church because she thought “nondenominational” meant interfaith.

6. I’m sure that you’ve got a good response to the frequent evangelical contention that non-theists have no morals. What do you say? (And what is the mistake evangelicals are making with that objection?)

I’m kind of embarrassed for people who say this, because it means they know so little about morality and about child development. Morality doesn’t come from religion. Healthy human children come into the world primed to become moral members of society, just like they come into the world primed to acquire language. Moral emotions like empathy, shame, guilt and disgust begin to emerge during the toddler years regardless of a child’s culture or religion.

A toddler may pat an injured peer or offer a grubby toy to an adult who is distressed. A preschooler may hide behind a couch to cover a transgression. As a child’s brain develops, moral emotions are joined by moral reasoning. By age five or six, kids have a large moral vocabulary and can argue long and loud about fairness.

Research is just starting to show how our moral emotions and reasoning are guided by powerful moral instincts. I think these instincts are the reason that across secular and moral traditions we humans share some basic agreements about goodness. The golden rule appears in some form or another in every ethical system. Sometimes it emphasizes proactively doing good. Sometimes it is only about avoiding harm. Sometimes it applies to even the smallest sentient creature, sometimes only to males of a single religion, but it’s there.

For the last year and a half I’ve been working on a project called the Wisdom Commons, an interactive website that gathers quotes and stories and poetry from many traditions as a way to “elevate and celebrate our shared moral core.”

7. Why would any evangelical want to read your book, The Dark Side?

Well, I have at least two siblings who would tell you that I’m a pawn of Satan, and you shouldn’t read it! On the other hand, several Christian friends read and provided feedback on the manuscript. Their perspective is that God doesn’t need us to cover for him or to hide from complicated realities.

I am a non-theist and my conclusions follow my thinking, but The Dark Side is less a challenge to Christianity than to bibliolatry. I was taught, and still believe, that to worship human decisions and creations is idolatry. So in terms of whether someone would want to read this text, I would ask: Do you really worship God or are you getting caught by the worship of traditions and texts? Which do you twist to fit the other? When your deepest best understandings of Love and Truth bump up against creeds and canons, which win out? Given that there are human handprints all over evangelical practices and teachings, how much time have you spent learning to spot them?

In reality, this kind of analysis and critique is very much in keeping with the Christian tradition. The writers of the Old Testament took the Akkadian and Sumerian traditions and asked themselves, Which pieces are merely human? What is our best guess about the divine realities that lie beyond? They gleaned and wrestled and kept some fragments of the earlier stories and said, “This is our best understanding of what is Real and what is Good and how to live in moral community with each other.” The writers of the New Testament look at what the Torah had become and saw idolatry.

Again, they gleaned and culled in light of how they understood Jesus and then offered their best understanding of God and goodness. Same with the Protestant Reformation. The reformers scraped away at obviously human encrustations like indulgences and cult of saints until they came to what they thought was the heart of the revelation. I think that the deepest challenge of the spiritual quest is not to defend the answers of our spiritual ancestors but to do as they did — to dig and scrape and take ourselves into that uncomfortable space where growth happens.

8. How would you handle it if your child became a Bible toting member of Campus Crusade for Christ? In the same vein, how should evangelicals respond if their child takes the anti-theist road?

It would be hard. My daughters are both passionate about making the world a kinder place — primarily for weird animals like sharks and manatees and kakapos and factory chickens. But more recently they got wonderfully caught up in microcredit (through Kiva.org) and started directing their birthday money toward humans. I’d be grieved to see their passion and compassion channeled by an ideology.

My biggest grief would be if one joined a religious organization that discouraged deep loving relationships with outsiders, including family. An elderly couple I met at a humanist gathering are not allowed to see their evangelical grandchildren because they are retired scientists with a secular world view.

When my younger brother came out as gay, it pitted my mom’s theological fundamentalism against her love for her son. Love won out. That is what I aspire to, and it is what is would hope for any parent in a similar situation.

9. Christian apologetics and cultural communication today have taken several major turns since your days citing creationists to Wheaton profs. For example, Tim Keller, a PCA pastor in Manhattan, has earned a broad hearing from the culture in his book “The Reason for God.” Keller is not Josh McDowell, it’s safe to say. Younger evangelicals are anti-culture war and many were pro-Obama. Many evangelicals accept evolution, although quietly, and many more distrust “Creation science.” Do any of the changes in apologetic methods and approaches since your loss of faith interest you when you are portraying evangelicals in print or speech?

You are right. Many of the conditions that pushed me to join the public dialogue have shifted, and when I engage secular audience I quite often bring up these changes. I love it that evangelicals like Jim Wallis are complicating that dialogue from a social standpoint, and a new generation of evangelical ministers like Rob Bell are complicating the dialogue theologically.

I see the theological dialogue as most important. Unless we understand that our theological agreements are provisional and open to growth, social change is just a matter of Christianity fluctuating in response to social conditions. There have been many times in history when the balance shifted between personal /doctrinal purity and compassion/love. Then conditions change and the pendulum swings back, in part because bibliolatry and what I call ancestor worship keeps people from growing beyond the understanding of the Bible’s authors and the councils that decided the creeds and canon. My hope is that we will come to understand our spiritual heritage and our own minds well enough that the cruelties perpetrated in the name of God become a part of history.
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I’d like to thank Dr. Tarico for her time and effort in helping all of us understand this new relationship between evangelicals and non-theists. I know the vast majority of my audience is appreciative as well. Hopefully, we will hear from Dr. Tarico again as some of these issues emerge in other contexts.