Filtering by Category: Religious Freedom,Justice
Prayer and religious leaders have been left out of New York City’s official ceremonies observing the 10th anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Dr. Joel C. Hunter, senior pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed, and John Kieffer, Atheists of Florida, have a respectful discussion on the issue.
“Most people, who call America home, are people of faith. Why would a public event of national remembrance and healing intentionally omit that which would be the greatest consolation to most people? Do you remember our nation’s first response to 9/11? Our nation’s churches were full to overflowing! And entire communities of faith were engaged in responding to the needs that resulted from the tragedy. Are the 9/11 ceremonies a reflection of government officials or of the people they are supposed to represent?”
THE WASHINGTON POST ASKS: A bill legalizing same-sex marriage for couples in New York State is at a standstill over the issue of exemptions for religious organizations and individuals. The reach of these religious protections is wide-ranging -from whether Catholic adoption agencies may reject same-sex couples, to the right of religious caterers to refuse services for gay weddings. In New York State’s Marriage Equality Act, should there be exemptions for religion? What should happen when equal rights for gay citizens and the right to religious free exercise clash? READ DR. HUNTER'S RESPONSE.
• Interfaith Dialogue, Religious Freedom •
With attacks on Christians already increasing in the Middle East, the populist uprising in Egypt has triggered fears among some that the region's largest non-Muslim population - Egypt's 7 million Coptic Christians - could be at risk.
Copt leaders in the United States said they are terrified that a new Egyptian government with a strong Islamic fundamentalist bent would persecute Christians. They are quietly lobbying the Obama administration to do more to protect Christians in Muslim countries and are holding prayer vigils and fasts such as one that ends Wednesday evening at Copt churches around the country, including four in the Washington area.
"The current situation for the Copts stinks, but [longtime Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak is the best of the worst for us," said the Rev. Paul Girguis of St. Mark Coptic Orthodox Church in Fairfax County, which has about 3,000 members. "If Muslim extremists take over, the focus will be extreme persecution against Copts. Some people even predict genocide."
Some major U.S. Christian figures, including well-known evangelical leaders and representatives of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, declined to publicly discuss the situation in Egypt, saying they wanted to avoid bringing dangerous attention to the country's Christians by appearing to complain or to advocate for some particular political outcome.
Their trepidation stems from repeated attacks on churches in Iraq, where hundreds of thousands of Christians have fled in recent years, and from the New Year's Day bombing of a Coptic church in Egypt that killed almost two dozen worshipers and wounded nearly 100. The Coptic church is one of the oldest Christian communities in the world and is based in Egypt.
"Egypt is the bellwether because its Christian community is so large and is the strongest in the Middle East," said Paul Marshall, a global religious freedom expert and a fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute. "What happens to Christians in Egypt is very significant. Everyone is watching."
But not all American faith leaders are bracing for the worst. Joel Hunter, an evangelical pastor of a Florida megachurch and a frequent adviser to President Obama, said he's hearing a lot of optimism from Egyptian Christians who believe the uprising will lead to more freedom and religious liberty.
Many younger Christians in the United States also see the protests as something to celebrate, Hunter said, and older, more politically conservative Christians tend to be more skeptical of Islam generally and are worried about how a new Egyptian government will treat Israel.
So far, the protests have focused on jobs, free speech and democratic elections, not religion, so it's unclear what the end of Mubarak's rule would mean for religious minorities. But in recent years, Iraq has lost about half its historical Christian population because of persecution, and Christians have been leaving Iran and Lebanon in lesser numbers.
After last month's bombing of the Coptic church in Alexandria, Pope Benedict XVI publicly urged the Egyptian government and other leaders in the region to protect religious minorities. Egypt's foreign ministry spokesman said the pope's comments were "an unacceptable interference" in the country's internal affairs, and Egypt withdrew its ambassador to the Vatican in response.
Some U.S. Christian leaders said the situation in Egypt might put the issue of religious persecution abroad back on the radar of American Christians. A decade ago the freedom of Christians to worship in places such as Sudan was a top agenda item for American Christians, evangelicals in particular. But experts said this week that wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have absorbed people's attention.
At a congressional hearing last month about the persecution of Christians in the Middle East, Christian leaders urged the administration to lean harder on Egypt's leaders to investigate violence against religious minorities and to lay out a clear strategy in Iraq for their protection.
A 2009 survey by the nonprofit Pew Forum measured governmental and societal restrictions on religion and found that a number of the world's least tolerant countries are Muslim-majority. The list included Iran, Egypt, Indonesia and Pakistan, as well as India, which is majority Hindu. Concerns include bans on public preaching and conversion and the lack of prosecution for religion-based violence.
Some advocates for religious freedom note that moderate Muslims and non-majority Muslims also suffer attacks and that the problem is extremism, not Islam.
• Interfaith Dialogue, Religious Freedom •
MURFREESBORO, Tenn. -- Islam is suddenly on trial in a booming Nashville suburb, where opponents of a new mosque have spent six days in court trying to link it to what they claim is a conspiracy to take over America by imposing restrictive religious rule.
The hearing is supposed to be about whether Rutherford County officials violated Tennessee's open meetings law when they approved the mosque's site plan. Instead, plaintiff's attorney Joe Brandon Jr. has used it as a forum to question whether the world's second-biggest faith even qualifies as a religion, and to push a theory that American Muslims want to replace the Constitution with extremist Islamic law.
"Do you want to know about a direct connection between the Islamic Center and Shariah law, a.k.a. terrorism?" Brandon asked one witness in a typical line of questioning.
Brandon has repeatedly conflated a moderate version of Shariah with its most extreme manifestations, suggesting that all Muslims must adhere to those interpretations.
At one point, he asked whether Rutherford County Commissioner Gary Farley supported hanging a whip in his house as a warning to his wife and then beating her with it, something Brandon claimed was part of "Shariah religion."
The commissioner protested that he would never beat his wife.
County attorney Jim Cope objected to the question, saying, "This is a circus." The rhetoric has conjured up comparisons to another culture clash that played out in a Tennessee courtroom a hundred miles and nearly a century away from Murfreesboro, a college city of 100,000 that is among the fastest-growing communities in the country. In 1925, the world watched as evolution came under attack at the Scopes monkey trial in Dayton, Tenn.
Chancellor Robert Corlew has consistently given the plaintiffs leeway to present testimony by nonexperts and documents that they cannot prove are legitimate, saying he reserves the right to strike things from the record later.
Corlew, who holds an elected office, has given little explanation for why he has allowed the testimony to stray so far afield.
Since it is not a jury trial, the judge can ultimately disregard anything he deems irrelevant. Several attorneys suggested he may want the plaintiffs, three residents who object to how the mosque came about, to feel they were able to have their say.
That could explain why Corlew has allowed Brandon to repeatedly question witnesses about whether Islam is a legitimate religion - even after the Department of Justicestepped in with a brief stating that it was.
When Farley, the commissioner, told Brandon the federal government defined Islam as a religion, Brandon responded, "Are you one of those people who believes everything the government says? Are you aware the government once said it was OK to own slaves?"
Other faiths have risen to the defense of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro. The newly formed Interfaith Coalition on Mosques, which is composed of prominent Catholics, Jews, Muslims, and Southern Baptists and other Protestants, has filed a brief in the case.
It's good for the mosque's opponents to get their day in court - testimony is to resume Friday - said the Rev. Joel Hunter, an evanglical megachurch pastor and coalition member.
But it's "really out there" to question whether Islam is a religion, said Hunter, who leads a Longwood, Fla., congregation called Northland, A Church Distributed.
Seeking to prove that the mosque has terrorist leanings, witnesses have pointed out that board member Mosaad Rowash previously had pro-Hamas postings on his MySpace page, something the mosque's leaders have not denied. The U.S. government considers Hamas, a Palestinian Islamic political party with an armed wing that has attacked Israel, a terrorist organization.
The political views of Rowash - who hasn't been called to testify and hasn't commented publicly - and other board members are "totally irrelevant," said Deborah Lauter, the director of civil rights for the Jewish Anti-Defamation League, which sponsors the interfaith coalition.
If all of the members of the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro were public cheerleaders for Hamas, it would still be illegal to discriminate against them because the First Amendment protects freedom of worship, she said.
Even the group that provided the information on Rowash, the Washington-based Investigative Project on Terrorism, doesn't claim that the MySpace postings prove anything about the Islamic Center of Murfreesboro or its members.
Managing director Ray Locker said the Washington group provided the information about Rowash to a Tennessee resident who sent an inquiry about the mosque. He said how such information is used is beyond his group's control.
"We don't consider all Muslims to be terrorists," he said. "The vast majority of American Muslims just want to worship freely, just like members of other religions."
That wasn't the message of witness Frank Gaffney, the president and founder of the Washington-based Center for Security Policy and a former deputy assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan administration.
While acknowledging he was not an expert on Shariah law, Gaffney testified that Shariah, and by extension the new mosque, poses a threat to America.
Shariah isn't really law, at least not law as a universally recognized, codified body of rules and rights, the way Americans have come to know it. Shariah is a set of core principles that most Muslims recognize as well as a series of rulings from religious scholars.
It's some of those rulings, such as stoning a woman to death for committing adultery, that many non-Muslim Americans find reprehensible. But many Muslims, in America and around the world, are equally horrified by them, said Mohammad Fadel, an assistant professor of law at the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and an expert on Islamic law.
The mosque project has had problems outside court as well. A sign at the construction site was spray-painted with the words "Not Welcome" and torn in half, and federal investigators have offered a $20,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in what they say was the arson of a dump truck on the grounds.
Hunter, the Florida pastor, said he studied American history in college and knows that what is happening to Muslims today has happened to other groups in the past.
"Every minority - and Islam is very much a minority in this country right now - has had to struggle for equal rights," he said. "Islam is facing that now and we will not rest until they have equal rights with other religions."
FIND THIS ARTICLE AT: http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2010/11/11/general-us-rel-islam-on-trial_8098629.html?boxes=Homepagebusinessnews
• Interfaith Dialogue, Peace, Religious Freedom •
The National Association of Evangelicals, the nation's largest evangelical umbrella group, is urging a Florida church to call off a planned Quran burning scheduled for September 11. Here's the NAE's statement:
NAE Urges Cancellation of Planned Qu’ran Burning
The National Association of Evangelicals (NAE) encourages increased understanding and reconciliation between those of different faiths and backgrounds, and it laments efforts that work against a just and peaceful society. The plans recently announced by a Florida group to burn copies of the Qu’ran on September 11 show disrespect for our Muslim neighbors and would exacerbate tensions between Christians and Muslims throughout the world. The NAE urges the cancellation of the burning.
NAE President Leith Anderson said, “It sounds like the proposed Qu’ran burning is rooted in revenge. Yet the Bible says that Christians should ‘make sure that nobody pays back wrong for wrong, but always try to be kind to each other and to everyone else’ (1 Thessalonians 5:15).”
In 1996 the NAE addressed religious persecution saying that “If people are to fulfill the obligations of conscience, history teaches the urgent need to foster respect and protection for the right of all persons to practice their faith.” [i] In the same resolution, the NAE pledged to “address religious persecution carried out by our Christian brothers and sisters whenever this occurs around the world.”
The NAE calls on its members to cultivate relationships of trust and respect with our neighbors of other faiths. God created human beings in his image, and therefore all should be treated with dignity and respect. The proposed burning of Qu’rans would be profoundly offensive to Muslims worldwide, just as Christians would be insulted by the burning of Bibles. Such an act would escalate tensions between members of the two faiths in the United States and around the world.
“We have to recognize that fighting fire with fire only builds a bigger fire,” said Joel Hunter, Senior Pastor of Northland, A Church Distributed, in Orlando, Fla., and member of the NAE Board of Directors. “Love is the water that will eventually quench the destruction.”
Anderson said, “The most powerful statement by the organizers of the planned September 11th bonfire would be to call it off in the name and love of Jesus Christ.”
FIND THIS ARTICLE AT: http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2010/07/30/national-association-of-evangelicals-denounces-churchs-quran-burning-event/
Dr. Joel C. Hunter and Annie Laurie Gaylor of the Freedom From Religion Foundation discuss this issue on WNYC's (NPR) The Takeaway.
The crisis of biblical proportions in Haiti has brought out the full spectrum of the faithful to offer emergency aid. Now, a start-up group of progressive Protestants is launching itself with a campaign to erase Haiti's debts so the crippled nation can focus on rebuilding.
The New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good -- led by marquee activists, academics, seminar profs and pastors such as Rev. Richard Cizik -- was originally going to launch later this month but stepped up to the publicity megaphone to call attention to Haiti's need beyond emergency relief. Their release says, "We believe that Jesus calls us to work together to set free those who are held captive by debt."
You remember Cizik from headlines in 2008, when the long-time head of governmental affairs for the National Association of Evangelicals resigned under fire for hinting support for gay unions in a radio interview.
Evidently, Jesus doesn't call people who disagree about the Bible to work together on issues. Cizik's outspoken concern for global climate change issues had already made him a target with big name conservatives such as Focus on the Family founder James Dobson. But, in recent years, the e-word (evangelical) banner, once owned by Christians with conservative views on politics, economics and biblical morality, has become a flag flown by any Protestant with a social justice focus and a contemporary focus on the Gospel.
Partnership executive director Rev. Steven Martin, formerly with Partnership co-founder David Gushee's group, Evangelicals for Human Rights, says they didn't want to wait to campaign for debt forgiveness. Although two thirds of Haiti's debt, held by other governments and major institutions such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, has been forgiven already, the remaining billions could cost Haiti as much as $50 million a year to service. That's money Haiti needs for rebuilding, says Martin.
Their release quotes Gushee calling the Partnership, "a new way to bear witness to the love of God in Jesus Christ. We have yearned to offer a better model for how Christians address public issues; to be known for always standing up for those whom God loves but the world or the church often mistreat or neglect."
Don't look for Dobson or any other megawatt megachurch conservatives (with the exception of Rev. Joel Hunter, of Northland Church in Orlando, who also serves on President Obama's Council for Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships) on the list of signators.
The Partnership's website's includes its stands -- often written with highly nuanced phrasing -- on hot issues such reproductive rights, gay marriage and environmentalism. For example:
We stand against the collapse of marriage and for stronger family life. We are involved in efforts to strengthen the fading institution of marriage and thereby protecting and enhancing the well-being of children. We do not believe that denigrating the dignity and denying the human rights of gays and lesbians is a legitimate part of a "pro-family" Christian agenda, and will work to reform Christian attitudes and treatment of lesbian and gay people.
This time, no one's going to shove Cizik out the door for saying so.
Find this article at: http://www.usatoday.com/topics/post/Events+and+Awards/In-depth+Coverage/Haiti+Earthquake/16364.blog/1
Dr. Joel C. Hunter is the Pastor of Community Benefit at Action Church, a multi-site congregation based in Winter Park and his one-minute daily devotionals can be heard worldwide on Z88 radio. He is the Chairman of the Central Florida Pledge campaign; a call to action for residents of Central Florida who are tired of hateful discourse and want to create a safe and inclusive community for all. The pledge asks residents to commit to treating all people with kindness and respect, especially those with whom they disagree. To learn more: https://www.centralfloridapledge.com/
He is a nationally and internationally known advocate for the poor, the marginalized, and those dealing with disabilities. He served a three-year term as the Chairman of Central Florida’s Commission on Homelessness. And, after 32 years as the senior pastor of Longwood, Florida’s Northland Church’s congregation of 20,000, he spent five years leading a non-profit in networking with churches and local charities to locate available resources and benefit the struggling in our community. Orlando Magazine highlighted his efforts naming him as the #1 most powerful voice for philanthropy and community engagement. And listed him among “Orlando’s 50 Most Powerful” six years in a row.
Approaching today’s challenges in a biblical and balanced manner, Dr. Hunter is neither partisan nor politically oriented, but often relates to public officials in a pastoral role; he served as a spiritual advisor to President Obama during his eight years in office.
Dr. Hunter has served in leadership roles of the World Evangelical Alliance, serving more than 600 million evangelicals, and the National Association of Evangelicals, serving more than 40 denominations and thousands of churches.
Married for 53 years to his wife, Becky, he is the father of three sons, grandfather of seven, and great-grandfather of two.
