First up from the God machine is an interesting poll gauging support for “faith-based” funding among the one constituency that’s supposed to support it most.
Half of the nation’s evangelical Christians do not support government funding of faith-based organizations, a survey shows.
New data released Wednesday (Oct. 25) from the Baylor Religion Survey show that 50 percent of evangelicals, and 65 percent of the total population, think federal funding of religious organizations is inappropriate. Twenty-six percent of the total respondents surveyed said they agree with such funding.
That’s rather surprising. The conventional wisdom, particularly in the White House, is that evangelicals are anxious to see the government finance ministries’ work. Indeed, it’s almost a foregone conclusion — whenever Bush speaks before a religious audience, he touts his (alleged) commitment to funding faith-based groups as proof that he’s one of them.
But a poll like this one suggests otherwise. It also hints at one of the reasons the president’s faith-based scheme struggled to make progress in Congress during Bush’s first term — it had plenty of critics, and lacked key allies. After all, if religious minorities didn’t like it, and civil libertarians didn’t like it, and constitutional scholars said it was legally dubious, and half of the evangelical community rejects the very idea, you start to get the sense the only real supporters of the White House faith-based initiative are actually in the White House.
For that matter, thanks to David Kuo, we know that the Bush gang wasn’t all that committed to the project anyway, and simply saw the initiative as a political gimmick. No wonder the whole thing flopped.
Next up is an item from Newsweek on folks on the opposite end of the theological spectrum.
The magazine ran a brief profile of Sam Harris, whom Newsweek describes as “an unlikely infidel.”
But as infidels go, Harris is an astonishingly successful one. The son of a Jewish mother and a Quaker father, he has written one of two books currently on The New York Times best-seller list that debunk belief in God, any belief in God, as irrational at best and destructive to human society at worst.
This week “Letter to a Christian Nation” sits at 6 on the hard-cover nonfiction list, up from 11 from last week; the other, Richard Dawkins’s “The God Delusion,” is number 8, up from 12. In spite of his appearance, Harris is very angry, and “Letter” is a readable, exhortatory screed, a response to all the Scripture-quoting e-mail he received from Christians who read his first book. Religion, he writes in “Letter,” is “obscene” — not just repellent, but “utterly repellent.”
Maybe this book-selling trivia, but two of the top eight non-fiction books in the United States are paeans to atheism? Has this ever happened before? Maybe Bush is sparking a secularist backlash … or maybe atheists like to read a lot.
And finally, by way of Carpetbagger regular M.W., we learn of a fascinating — if not a little bizarre — theatrical production in NYC.
In 2004, some members of the experimental theatre group Les Freres Corbusier went to see a production in Los Angeles of a show called “Hollywood Hell House.”
The show, which featured such well-known comedians as Bill Maher and Sarah Silverman, was a satirical take on the haunted tours given by some Evangelical churches around the country in an attempt to make people avoid the temptations of sin.
“We were sort of astounded by the source material … and we couldn’t believe that this was being used as a tool for conversion,” said Alex Timbers, Corbusier’s artistic director and the director of “Hell House.”
“But we felt that the way that the Los Angeles people had presented the show was not really helpful in making any sort of argument or allowing the audience to choose. It was done with such derision and broad sketch comedy performance style that it was impossible to separate the critique from the actual production.”
Two years later, the group is putting on a “Hell House” of their own. The difference comes with the way the show is being presented. In a performing arts space near the waterfront in Brooklyn, Les Freres Corbusier has chosen to present “Hell House” with nary an ironic wink, even consulting with the material’s original author, Keenan Roberts, in an effort to hew as closely to the source material as possible.
The result is something almost unthinkable in an area of New York where black-rimmed glasses and edgy T-shirts are a much more common accessory than a cross: a straightforward representation of a controversial Evangelical conversion method performed by a secular theatre group.
“Our goal was to do the show as a sociological artifact, presented objectively as evangelicals would do it,” said Aaron Lemon-Strauss, the show’s producer.
The show is apparently not for the feint of heart — at least seven people have reportedly fainted while taking tours.