This Week in God

August 25, 2007

First up from The God Machine this week is a report out of Louisiana about the role of churches in the event of a disaster that leads to martial law.

Could martial law ever become a reality in America? Some fear any nuclear, biological or chemical attack on U.S. soil might trigger just that. KSLA News 12 has discovered that the clergy would help the government with potentially their biggest problem: Us….

If martial law were enacted here at home, like depicted in the movie “The Siege”, easing public fears and quelling dissent would be critical. And that’s exactly what the ‘Clergy Response Team’ helped accomplish in the wake of Katrina.

Dr. Durell Tuberville serves as chaplain for the Shreveport Fire Department and the Caddo Sheriff’s Office. Tuberville said of the clergy team’s mission, “the primary thing that we say to anybody is, ‘let’s cooperate and get this thing over with and then we’ll settle the differences once the crisis is over.'”

That sounds … disconcerting. It’s wise to plan ahead and make arrangements for crisis management, but in a martial law situation, the notion that a “Clergy Response Team” would have vague, untested, consequence-free powers, and that everone would “settle the differences” later, doesn’t sound like a recipe for success. Consider this paragraph:

For the clergy team, one of the biggest tools that they will have in helping calm the public down or to obey the law is the bible itself, specifically Romans 13. Dr. Tuberville elaborated, “because the government’s established by the Lord, you know. And, that’s what we believe in the Christian faith. That’s what’s stated in the scripture.”

So, in the event a catastrophe, ministries would have sweeping powers to use Scripture to “calm the public down”? Ministers who falsely believe the government is “established by the Lord” would be given unchecked authority in U.S. communities?

Sounds like the kind of scenario that deserves a little follow-up.

Other items from the God Machine this week:

* The pastor of a very conservative, fundamentalist Christian church in Kansas is already under investigation by the IRS, but vowed this week to continue intervening in political campaigns, regardless of the law. “We will continue regardless of what the IRS does,” said Rev. Mark Holick, pastor of Spirit One Christian Center. “We will continue to obey the Lord.”

* AU: “The Roundtable on Religion and Social Welfare Policy reports that Indiana has nixed a ‘novel chaplaincy program’ that supplied religious leaders to counsel employees of the state’s Family and Social Services Administration (FSSA). FSSA spokesman Marcus Barlow said the state agency discontinued the pilot program, which cost taxpayers $100,000, because it failed to install chaplains in each of the state’s 92 counties.”

* The 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that a public elementary school in Missouri cannot legally distribute Bible to students. The Falwell-founded Liberty Counsel represented the district.

* And the NYT highlighted an interesting controversy in South Florida:

The new public school at 2620 Hollywood Boulevard stands out despite its plain gray facade. Called the Ben Gamla Charter School, it is run by an Orthodox rabbi, serves kosher lunches and concentrates on teaching Hebrew.

About 400 students started classes at Ben Gamla this week amid caustic debate over whether a public school can teach Hebrew without touching Judaism and the unconstitutional side of the church-state divide. The conflict intensified Wednesday, when the Broward County School Board ordered Ben Gamla to suspend Hebrew lessons because its curriculum — the third proposed by the school — referred to a Web site that mentioned religion.

Opponents say that it is impossible to teach Hebrew — and aspects of Jewish culture — outside a religious context, and that Ben Gamla, billed as the nation’s first Hebrew-English charter school, violates one of its paramount legal and political boundaries.

But supporters say the school is no different from hundreds of others around the country with dual-language programs, whose popularity has soared in ethnically diverse states like Florida.

As charter schools become more common, questions like these will continue to pop up. The courts will inevitably have to start establishing some guidelines.

Regarding the teaching of Hebrew at the school in South Florida, I say that it’s preposterous to suggest that the Hebrew language can only be taught in the context of Judaism. Before the rise of modern Hebrew, there may have been an argument as such, but nowadays, Hebrew exists as a secular language. Frankly, if Hebrew is a religion-only language based upon its roots, shouldn’t Latin also be considered a religious idiom? Yet there are numerous schools around the country (and, no, not just private ones) that offer classes in Latin. Where’s the outcry there?

  • Good post Morbo. How many public schools are named for religious figures like Ben Gamla? Is there a Jesus Christ High aka PS 123? I know there is an “arabic” charter school in New York, It seems that the public schools try to do too much. The downside of multiculturalism.

  • I don’t really believe that our schools have to be areligious, in the sense that any mention of any religion is verboten. The curriculum was denied because there was a reference to a website? That seems pretty weak to me. Context is everything, but telling students about a website if they want to read more about a particular subject does not seem violative of the Constitution. Remember, the Constitution says that state actors cannot act so as to establish a religion – I don’t think mentioning a website or discussing different religions does that. Of course, you’re going to have teachers and school districts that will take advantage of that so it needs to be monitored (thankfully – shout out – by groups like AUSCS) but in theory I don’t have a problem with a religion class that would touch on concepts of history, philosophy, values – not teaching them per se but teaching about them in the context of history and religion – is a great idea if done right.

  • Marshal-Law Clergy: a recipe for countless mini-Inquisitions if I ever saw one. this has Christian Jihad written all over it….

    Pardon the pun—but someone needs to take Mark Holick’s pitchfork away from him, and frag him in the abdomen with it. To an extreme depth, if possible….

    But as for the Gamla school the proponents are absolutely correct in saying that Hebrew—in its historical concept—is a language intertwined with Judaism theological concepts. Just as Farsi is peppered with numerous words unique to Islam, japanese with Shintoism, and pretty much all Western languages with Christian-centric terms. In this particular instance, I have to err on the side of the school; the suggestion that a language cannot be taught because a support souce references religion is, in this writer’s opinion, an overt act of inpeding speech itself. We become the bipedal Napoleon of Orwell’s “Animal Farm;” we further the notion that a public education can bear no mention whatsoever of religion, when some of the core events of the world’s history is, perhaps to a fault, based on religious connotations.

    Removing all traces of religiosity from a public education denies a student all access to Gilgamesh, and the panteons of Athens, Rome, the Aztecs, the Norse, and the ancient Druidic civilizations of England. High school students would be denied English Lit, because of the forced exorcism of Shakespeare and Chaucer. If we cannot discuss religion, or the reasons behind it, then we cannot discuss the colonies at Jamestown and Plymouth. We cannot teach the barbarisms of religious extremism, therefore we cannot teach the foundational causes of a vast portion of the world’s historical wrongs against itself.

    And you better not even think about having a Social Studies textbook with a picture of an Amish buggy in it, or mention of the Chinese efforts to legislate reincarnation into a criminal act.

    Hey—here’s a novel concept. Given the depth of Catholicism found in Spanish…and French…and English—and given the maniacal devotions to Lutheranism found in the German language—maybe we should outlaw the teaching of these languages, as well. We can scrap ancient Egyptian and Latin for the same reasons….

  • Er, what’s not religious about kosher lunches? God designs menus? I think “culture” is often a code word for religion.

    I just think we shouldn’t teach idiocy in public schools.

  • Just so it’s known that in MO whenever the Bible starts being given out…around here it means Evangelicals…not Catholic or any other “Christian” religion but the fanatical “born again” anti-science and civil law(religious law is above civil law) Christians, and I don’t know why that is but around here they seem to be the group obsessed with teaching religion in school in stead of leaving it in the home and churches. You see, it doesn’t matter if you’re a “Christian”, if you’re not a “born again” Christian you are going to hell anyway.

  • Homer at # 3 says teaching about religions would be OK if “done right”. I would agree with that except how would it be “done right”. When my kids were younger ( a lot) we went to a Unitarian Church. Mainly because we were living in Kansas and one of the teachers asked the kids each Monday if they had been at Sunday School. Only my kids didn’t raise their hands. Wait a minute…wrong story! That story is about finding the Unitarian Church but I wanted to mention the book and program they used for a certain age group…probably Juinor High. The book was called the “Church around the Corner”. And it discussed various religions and then took the kids to visit some of the other chrches. This is the way I would like to see religion taught…all churches, all religions get a chapter or paragraph and a vist…no (can’t spell the word I want)…no propaganda just the basic facts and let kids think…I know that’s hard….To fill you in on the first story I didn’t finish…my daughter decided she had to go to Sunday School so started going to the church where her public school teacher also taught Sunday School….after a number of months going to this ( Methodist) church…she came home to say they were studying Noah and the Ark….and after thinking about that for a short time…she said ” I don’t believe that” and so we found a Unitarian church.

  • All considerations about religion and public schools should be made keeping in mind that the right-wing fundamentalists FULLY intend to make America a Christian nation under religious rule, not Constitutional law. It’s a stated goal and seriously began about 25 years ago with a concerted effort to pack school boards with fundamentalists that was largely successful in many parts of the country.

    The idea of combining religion with government programs to “calm people down” after disasters really spooks me. I can see it now. Those nuthead preachers will thump their Bibles and shout at their captive audiences that this disaster is God’s punishment for their sins, and the only way to be saved from sure death is to surrender to religion. Then everybody’ll die anyway. Sooner or later.

    There’s no reason why church staff can’t be available during disasters for those who find comfort in religion, but damned if I’d want to be in their unasked for presence during a disaster, focused on sin rather than emergency plans.

    Let them hole up in their churches and be available to those who want to flee there. Just keep them out of everybody’s face.

  • I see no difficulty in creating a secular Hebrew-English bilingual school. The majority of schools in Israel are non-religious Hebrew-speaking schools They do learn the Bible, but as literature, not as religious doctrine – the majority of Jews in Israel are secular.

    As for kosher lunches – there’s also no conflict between the existence of kosher food and no religious context. You don’t learn from eating.

    I went to a Kosher scout camp, Kunatah, in Narrowsburg, NY. They had a kosher meal, a Jewish chapel as well as Christian, Muslim troops used the camp – the Muslim kids need kosher food as well, to avoid all taint of pig), a Rabbi as well as Catholic and Protestant chaplains, and a full regular scout camp program of merit badge classes in various activity areas (Waterfront, nature lodge, Scout Skills, Handicraft Lodge). There was no religious content in the camp program – there was just an availability of religious services for those who wanted to attend.

    Talking to current Scout leaders, the camp has basically ceased to function as a normal Scout camp. In an effort to attract religious Jews, who were not joining the Scouts, they added Jewish content to the program – which drove away the vast majority of kids who went to the camp. Out of perhaps 1000-1500 kids over the course of the summer, there were half a dozen Jewish troops and a similar number of Muslim troops that needed kosher food. Say, 200 kids total. The rest – well, a lot of them went because the food was better than at the non-kosher camps. Also, our lake wasn’t silted up. (To the tune of “Oklahoma”: Aquehonga, where the s**t goes flying through the trees/ Where the lake is muddy and the food is cruddy and the staff wears dirty BVD’s – a ditty about another Scout camp in the area).

    Now, the camp is only open to Scouts for 2 weeks instead of 6 or 8, and very few non-religious kids attend.

  • What about the Arabic language school in NY where the principal wore a pro-radical Islamic shirt. How can schools be stopped from training terrorists? Teach respect. How about teaching real American history in public schools — that would be a first in a long time.

    Speaking of real history — Dr. Falwell didn’t found Liberty Counsel.

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