The plaintiff is Keith Cressman. The statue is “Sacred Rain Arrow” sculpture by the late artist Allan Houser. The question that is likely to come up in the trial is whether or not the statue is religious. Or rather, do people perceive the statue as religious?

It’s a tricky question. Consider the secular Christmas display. Our culture has already decided that Santa Clause is secular, even though his full name is “Saint Nicholas” and he has a distincly religious backstory. St. Nick stands next to the Christmas tree, originally a Christian symbol with possible roots back to pre-christian midwinter festivals.

Are these secular symbols? Religious symbols? It really comes down to the viewer, and that’s the problem that Cressman has. Can he convince the next batch of judges that the image will lead people to think he approves of beliefs like “God and nature are one, that other deities exist, or that ‘animals, plants, rocks, and other natural phenomena” have souls or spirits.”

The appeals court decided that the answer would have to wait until the next phase of the litigation. The dissenting judge disagreed, and noted that Cressman had made no argument:

He [Cressman] asserts that the license plate promotes ‘pantheism, panentheism, polytheism, and/or animism,’ all of which are antithetical to his religious beliefs. However, he has not alleged facts from which we can reasonably infer that others are likely to make the same series of connections. … Cressman’s allegation that others are likely to perceive an ideological message based upon the image—as opposed to a historical or cultural message—lacks facial plausibility.

My guess is that with a name like “Sacred Rain Dance,” Cressman won’t have any problem convincing the court. Certainly the curator of Allen Houser’s estate, David Rettig, isn’t doing Oklahoma any favors:

“We were just pretty miffed to see that it would be controversial.” Rettig said that Cressman seemed to think that the statue depicted some kind of “pagan ritual” but that was a misinterpretation of Houser’s work, but “that’s certainly not the intent of it.”

“Allan, in his work, believed in a single great spirit,” Rettig continued. “[Cressman's] trying to parallel this imagery with something from greek mythology or some multi-theist culture.” Rettig pointed out that a Catholic church even once commissioned a Houser piece entitled “prayer” to memorialize a deceased church member.

So not polytheism but monotheism. But still religious, and not Cressman’s religion. If Rettig thinks he rebutting Cressman’s argument, he’s failing.

“How do you make abortion funny?” That was a key question mulled at a major conservative gathering Friday on how to make social conservatism appealing to young people, after an election where Republicans got trounced in the battle for millennial voters (who are are moving even further and further away from the Christian-right on marriage and other issues).

Abortion has to be made funny, the thinking goes, because funny sells on social media, and that’s where one goes to court young people. “You can engage with sarcasm, it’s hard with the abortion issue, but you have to,” said Students for Life president Kristan Hawkins at a breakout panel at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington today on how to win millennial voters. “Unfortunately we have to, because this is the generation that we’ve been dealt.”

The old guard, including the religious right, is not going to budge on the main planks of the party platform: no abortion, no gay marriage, no health care. But those policies are exactly the thing that would need to be nuanced if the GOP has any hope of attracting large numbers of young voters.

Since I’ve been politically aware, the Republicans have simply avoided dealing with this issue. When I was in college, a Republican recruiter basically told me that they had to wait for young adults to graduate and get their first paycheck. Once they saw the withholdings, they’d run to the party that promised lower taxes. This strategy has apparently not worked.

Now the solution is snark. If you can get Republicans on twitter and let them tell jokes, then you can bring in the young folk. Will it work? More fundamentally, can the party of unacknowledged irony be funny?

Travis Korson, the grass-roots director of the Virginia chapter, suggested framing marriage as an economic issue. “Gay marriage undermines that basic family unit,” he said, and that, in turn, hurts the economy.”

That’s funny, in a car wreck sort of way. It’s the same blinkered approach that the GOP has been taking towards gay marriage since the beginning. But the idea that a gay family will somehow not be an economic unit the way that a heterosexual couple will doesn’t make sense. Korson here cannot get beyond his own prejudices to frame an actual argument.

Maybe the old adage is right: only the truth is funny. But the GOP can’t acknowledge the truth.

This gulf means that challenges from creationists often require some side discussion just to establish what’s going on in the creationist’s head. What, for example, is the thought process behind this church sign:

…. what? Is this just a joke about the “female species”? Evolution does require reproduction, so you gotta have both male and female.

Sometimes the creationist theories are so bizarre that you have to wonder if they’ve thought things through or if they just grabbed onto the first idea that sounded good. Consider this image, taken from Conservapedia on June 15th, on the Post-Diluvian Diaspora (AKA the migration of animals from Mt. Ararat after the Flood):

Please tell me there’s some way of interpreting this other than “the smaller animals got launched by an erupting volcano.” That’s a day when it really sucked to be an Australian marsupial.

But according to Raw Story, he’s still trying to show us his bona fides.

During an announcement of the signing of the so-called “Merry Christmas Bill,” Texas Gov. Rick Perry and state Senator Robert Nichols (R-Jacksonville) said Thursday that freedom from religion was not included in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

“I’m proud we are standing up for religious freedom in our state,” Perry said. “Freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion.”

I don’t know if it’s Raw Story or Perry’s administration, but the press conference seems to boil down to that one line: Freedom of religion doesn’t mean freedom from religion.

“I think it was Thomas Jefferson who said the price of liberty is eternal vigilance,” Nichols remarked. “One of those freedoms is the freedom of speech, freedom of expression, and as the governor was saying the Constitution refers to the freedom of religion, not the freedom from religion.”

Catch phrases work best when you don’t overuse them. Anyway, what’s in the law that Perry is trumpeting? Here’s the core of H.B. 308:

(a) A school district educate students about the history of traditional winter celebrations, and allow students and district staff to offer traditional greetings regarding the celebrations, including:
(1) “Merry Christmas”;
(2) “Happy Hanukkah”; and
(3) “happy holidays.”
(b) Except as provided by Subsection (c), a school district may display on school property scenes or symbols associated with traditional winter celebrations, including a menorah or a Christmas image such as a nativity scene or Christmas tree, if the display includes a scene or symbol of:
(1) more than one religion; or
(2) one religion and at least one secular scene or symbol.
(c) A display relating to a traditional winter celebration may not include a message that encourages adherence to a particular religious belief.

This is not particularly controversial. It’s basically what the civil libertarians have been advocating for decades: the government, including the schools, cannot promote any religion, even when it is the religion of the majority. However, space can be set aside for religious expression so long as all religions and secular institutions can take part.

So what was all that chest thumping about?

Todd Bentley is in a league of his own. I’m convinced that fringe lunatics are embarrassed by Todd Bentley. Somewhere in the shriveled lump that is his heart, Fred Phelps is ashamed to be part of the same religion as Todd Bentley.

This is from Bentley’s latest email blast seeking to raise money for his ministry in Uganda. He tells the story of a recent healing:

They brought a woman that had been to all the witch doctors and all the magic soothsayers and whatever she could do to get healed because she had breast cancer. The doctors could do nothing to help her. So she went to the witch doctors and she got involved in all the magic. She said, “I just want to be healed.” She was a notable woman of government. Everybody knew who this woman was, and they knew she had cancer.

After they failed to get her healed, medically and witchcraft, she needed to have surgery to remove one breast. They totally removed one breast from cancer. She was in the crowd that night with maybe six or seven thousand people. As she was standing in the crowd, the power of God came all over her and she grew a brand new breast. They brought her onto the platform and I had never seen anything like this in my life.

This woman was weeping and crying and screaming and jumping up and down. She was excited. The people were like, “What happened to this woman? Is this possible?” Right after that, they brought two more people onto the platform. The woman was born without the parts that a woman needs, and the man as well because of a cancerous tumor. Both of them were instantly healed. This man and woman both received a reproductive miracle in their body. All the reproductive organs and parts grew back in the meeting at the same time that this woman’s breast came back.

The next day when I showed up, all the witch doctors and all the people that believed in witchcraft showed up at the meeting because they said, “We need to meet the white man that has power to make breasts grow.”

“God came all over her …”

… I’m just gonna let you fill in your own joke here. Try not to get us kicked off of Patheos.

Annual baptisms in Southern Baptist churches have declined by 100,000 in the last 12 years, last year dropping to the smallest number in 64 years.

LifeWay Christian Resources of the Southern Baptist Convention released figures June 5 reporting 314,959 baptisms in 2012, down 18,385 – or 5.5 percent – from 2011.

Total membership of 15,872,404 marked the sixth straight year of statistical decline for the nation’s second-largest faith group behind Roman Catholics. Membership dropped by 105,000 – two-thirds of a percent. Weekly worship attendance, meanwhile, fell below 6 million to 5,966,735, down 3 percent.

This continues the trend that Christine Wicker wrote about in The Fall of the Evangelical Nation. Actually, she argued that it is worse than it appears. The attendance is exaggerated and baptisms mainly recycle members from one church to another. While we found Wicker’s thesis somewhat dicey when it first came out, the core of it seems to be playing out as she predicted.

The folks at Wartburg Watch agree:

Many leaders quietly admit that the numbers are worse than reported. Most insiders agree that the number of SBC members is actually around 8+ million. The Baptists have a penchant for leaving members on church rolls for years, even after members leave a church. They also double and triple count some of them as they hop from church to church.

Even the gold numeric standard of most SBC churches, baptisms, has questionable application as a measure of new converts. Some Baptist churches rebaptize those who were sprinkled or baptized as children as well as those who were baptized in “suspect” Baptist churches. [...]

It is important to realize that this decline in numbers have occurred since the Conservative Resurgence and the increased influence of Calvinism within the SBC. Both of those movements were supposed to be the salvation of the SBC.Yet, this decline is continuing, in spite of an increased emphasis on church planting. So what is going on?

There are no shortage of answers to that question. ABP lists several, mostly the boogeymen of the right: factionalism, self-interest and loss of zeal. As in every conservative movement, when problems occur the solution is to unify and recommit. The movement can never fail, it can only be failed.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Jocobs is fretting about the “Leviathan spirit,” which seems to be a demonic entity. The vimeo page references Job 41, ignoring the fact that God seems to be describing a real creature that He has defeated rather than a spiritual entity.

Jacobs goes on to link the Leviathan spirit to Native American spirit worship, particularly the use of the crocodile totem. Then she gets even more dodgy:

If you have in your bloodline any animus, any Native American blood, for instance — not all Native Americans worshiped the serpent or crocodile, many did — but you might want to renounce that and repent for the generational iniquity. If you are — perhaps you’re Mexican and you might have indigenous blood in you or Mayan blood — those who have Aztec blood in any way, you need to repent for the sin of animism before you begin to deal with this spirit.

We’re reaching back now to the Inquisition, when it was decided that having Jewish blood led to heresy.

Jacobs and the rest of the New Apostolic Reformation crowd are really starting to disturb me.

Whatever else has come from “print on demand” publishing, it’s done no favors for cover art

Umm .. why, exactly? I guess that the GOP wants to consolidate and energize its base, because I can’t see the conservative Evangelicals going elsewhere.

The man they’ve picked to do it is Chad Connelly, “a consultant and motivational speaker who, until this weekend, was the chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party.” The Connelly pick shows that the GOP has no interest in the moderate-to-progressive side of the evangelical family. Steve M. at No More Mister Nice Blog reminds us that Connelly is the author of Freedom Tide, 80 pages of conservative Christian boilerplate. Among other things, it attacks the idea of separation of church and state, and specifically the idea that any of the founders ever intended such a thing:

The debate about our founders’ intentions and where we stand today makes us question: what changed and when? William James, the father of modern psychology, said, “There is nothing so absurd, but if you repeat it enough, people will believe it.” Adolf Hitler, like James, recognized the power of repetition in getting people to believe lies. “The ultimate Hitlerian propaganda technique is the principle of the big lie. Hitler declared ‘…that the very greatness of the lie is a factor in getting it believed … a great lie is more effective than a small one…’ In brief, the bigger the lie, the more likely it will be believed by the masses.”

This is the same thing that got Christine O’Donnell laughed at, only stepped up to Godwin level. Conservative frequently treat the Constitution the same way they treat the Bible. They want to prooftext, and it you can’t prooftext then it’s not in the document. The idea of a body of legal precedent and Constitutional interpretation is just as foreign to them as the Talmud.

The ironic thing is that Connelly is he’s another conservative who has bought into the Communist Plan for Revolution, which was supposedly a document describing the secret marxist plans to bring about revolution that was discovered in 1919. He paraphrases a bit of it:

First of all, corrupt the young, get them away from religion, get them interested in sex, make them superficial, and destroy their ruggedness. Get control of all means of publicity. Get people’s minds off of the government by focusing their attention on athletics, sexy books, plays, and other trivialities. Divide the people into hostile groups by constantly harping on controversial matters of no importance. Destroy the people’s faith in their natural leaders by holding their leaders up to ridicule and contempt.

The problem is that this is one of the most transparent hoaxes in modern history. Naturally, Snopes is all over it, but you don’t really need them if you understand a bit about communism. Communism, and I’m assuming that Connelly actually means marxism, is supposed to come into being through the ire of the working classes. The last thing a marxist revolutionary wants is for the proletariat to be distracted by pop culture, which is surely as much an opiate of the masses as religion. You want them paying attention to the government and getting angry about fundamental issues of economics and inequality so that they’ll man the barricades when the time comes.

This is just a list of right wing pet peeves lumped together and blamed on the great satan of the conservatives, communism. Maybe Connelly thinks that if he keeps repeating it over and over again people will come to believe it. I think there’s a name for that tactic …

I don’t think the life of Christian faith is fundamentally “rational,” by which I mean it cannot be captured fully by our rational faculties. I have long felt that a God who can be comfortably captured in our minds is no God at all. I see our sense of what is rational as often more the problem than the solution. I am not for one minute saying “reason doesn’t matter.” I am using reason as I write this. I read and write books. I mean only that the life of the mind has its place as an aspect of the life of faith, not its dominant component.

In other words, I belief that faith in a true God is necessarily trans-rational (not anti-rational) and mystical. I try to remember that as I work through intellectual challenges–and I mean “work through,” not avoid.

From Religion in American History, Michael Altman considers Tanya Luhrmann’s book on evangelical Christians at prayer, When God Talks Back. He quotes from her interview with Terry Gross:

To be clear, I am not arguing that belief is not important to Christians. It is obviously important. But secular Americans often think that the most important thing to understand about religion is why people believe in God, because we think that belief precedes action and explains choice. That’s part of our folk model of the mind: that belief comes first.

And that was not really what I saw after my years spending time in evangelical churches. I saw that people went to church to experience joy and to learn how to have more of it. These days I find that it is more helpful to think about faith as the questions people choose to focus on, rather than the propositions observers think they must hold.

If you can sidestep the problem of belief — and the related politics, which can be so distracting — it is easier to see that the evangelical view of the world is full of joy. God is good. The world is good. Things will be good, even if they don’t seem good now. That’s what draws people to church. It is understandably hard for secular observers to sidestep the problem of belief. But it is worth appreciating that in belief is the reach for joy, and the reason many people go to church in the first place.

Meanwhile, out neighbor Kevin Miller at Hellbound, muses a bit on the meaning of the word fundamentalist. He hits on way of looking at the issue of atheist fundamentalism and goes all post-modern on us:

However, I think fundamentalist atheism differs from other forms of fundamentalism in one key regard: rather than a reaction against modernity, it seems to be more of a reaction against post-modernity–the idea that there could be more than one plausible explanation for reality, and that perhaps even our perception of reality is itself a social construction, always in need of revision. (Of course, many Christians resist this idea as well.)

People like Dawkins talk about moving people toward an evidence-based view of the world. But what qualifies as evidence? That determination can only be made by referencing your worldview. For example, a Christian may accept a personal revelation gained through prayer as evidence of God’s existence. Someone of Dawkins’ ilk will dismiss such “evidence” as nothing more than a psychological projection. Same phenomena, different explanation, because according to each worldview, certain lines of inquiry or explanation are necessarily excluded.

I’ve tried mixing and matching these article in different ways, and none seem any better than any other. I put them forward as large blocks of text. I hope the connection is obvious.

My first reaction is to chortle. Since antiquity one of the major Christian goals is to make Christianity “rational,” whether that meant bringing into accord with greek philosophy or with evidence and reason. It’s amusing to see so many Christians say, “Well, that didn’t work …”

While I think there is a shrewd recognition of exactly how human belief is actually formed in Luhrmann’s thesis, I’m a bit skeptical as to how far it goes. Despite people like Miller and Enns, I’ve never heard an argument between Christians that ends, “If that’s your inner witness then we’ll just have to agree to disagree.”

Christians argue amongst themselves about the nature of God, which is supposedly trans-rational. They use evidence from scripture and reason from established theological principles. They are happy to use rational arguments to convince people, including atheists and each other. This claim that the nature and existence of God is somehow walled off because it is beyond reason looks like a strategic retreat to subjectivity rather than a principled stand for post-modernism.

At the Smithsonian’s “The Future is Here” conference, Thomas Dolby and Buzz Aldrin preform a duet of “She Blinded Me with Science.” It’s some kind of pop culture triumph.