eChurch Blog

The European Union is currently financing a pluridisciplinary research project on Religion and Society called “RELIGARE“. The stated purpose of the project is to “to explore adequate policy responses to religious diversity”.

It is no wonder that the militantly atheistic European Humanist Federation (EHF) have seized the opportunity and addressed a memorandum to the RELIGARE researchers through which they hope to influence the outcome of the project. According to them, the best answer to religious diversity is “secularism”, by which term they mean the complete elimination of religion from the public sphere.

In response to the EHF pamphlet the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians has from its side submitted a paper to the RELIGARE research team, providing a brief analysis of EHF’s radical and aggressive agenda. It comes to the conclusion that the atheist ideology “by its very nature must be intolerant. While religions like Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, etc. which make propositions of their own, leave ample room for their followers to encounter with tolerance all those who do not happen to share their beliefs, such attitude is not possible for atheists, whose sole mission is to fight against the religion of others.”

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The uncomfortable reality for the Middle East’s Christians, whose communities date back to the first centuries of the faith, is that the authoritarian regimes challenged by the Arab Spring often protected them against any Muslim hostility.

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Evangelical Protestant leaders who live in the Global South (sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, Latin America and most of Asia) generally are optimistic about the prospects for evangelicalism in their countries. But those who live in the Global North (Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand) tend to be more pessimistic.

Seven-in-ten evangelical leaders who live in the Global South (71%) expect that five years from now the state of evangelicalism in their countries will be better than it is today. But a majority of evangelical leaders in the Global North expect that the state of evangelicalism in their countries will either stay about the same (21%) or worsen (33%) over the next five years.

In addition, most leaders in the Global South (58%) say that evangelical Christians are gaining influence on life in their countries. By contrast, most leaders in the Global North (66%) say that, in the societies in which they live, evangelicals are losing influence. U.S. evangelical leaders are especially downbeat about the prospects for evangelical Christianity in their society; 82% say evangelicals are losing influence in the United States today, while only 17% think evangelicals are gaining influence.

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The survey finds nearly unanimous agreement among the global evangelical leaders on some key beliefs, such as that Christianity is the one, true faith leading to eternal life. They also hold traditional views on family and social issues. For example, more than nine-in-ten say abortion is usually wrong (45%) or always wrong (51%). About eight-in-ten say that society should discourage homosexuality (84%) and that men should serve as the religious leaders in the marriage and family (79%).

Virtually all the leaders surveyed (98%) also agree that the Bible is the word of God. But they are almost evenly divided between those who say the Bible should be read literally, word for word (50%), and those who do not think that everything in the Bible should be taken literally (48%). They are similarly split on whether it is necessary to believe in God in order to be a moral person (49% yes, 49% no), and whether drinking alcohol is compatible with being a good evangelical (42% yes, 52% no).

In a number of ways, leaders in the Global South are more conservative than those in the Global North. For instance, leaders in the Global South are more likely than those in the Global North to read the Bible literally (58% vs. 40%) and to favor making the Bible the official law of the land in their countries (58% vs. 28%).  More evangelical leaders in the Global South than in the Global North take the position that abortion is always wrong (59% vs. 41%), and more say that a wife must always obey her husband (67% vs. 39%). Leaders in the Global South are also much more inclined than those in the Global North to say that consuming alcohol is incompatible with being a good evangelical (75% vs. 23%).

Overall, evangelical leaders around the world view secularism, consumerism and popular culture as the greatest threats they face today. More of the leaders express concern about these aspects of modern life than express concern about other religions, internal disagreements among evangelicals or government restrictions on religion.

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Previous post here.

Alison McKenna of the charity tribunal rules that the charity has not identified any errors of law in the decision not to allow it to discriminate against same-sex adoption couples

….continue

Catholic Care are never going to win this legal battle. Bear in mind that over the weekend Trevor Phillips - Chairman of the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) – singled them out in an interview, as an example of a religious organisation that has to obey the anti-discrimination laws, because they’re a charity offering a public service.

This was the headline title of a Telegraph piece over the weekend.

MI5 labelled the Archbishop of Canterbury a subversive over anti-Thatcher campaigns

Richard Bartholomew does a nice job of putting this all in perspective for us and notes the holes in the article, and wonders if this old information is being dredged up for David Cameron’s benefit.

Or perhaps it’s a coincidence that this smearing article ran so quickly after Williams attack on the coalition government.

The Russian Orthodox Church is preparing for a reform of its liturgical language, and a draft document on the role of Church Slavonic in modern church life has been circulated among dioceses and is available for discussion on the internet.

“Church Slavonic is a very important means to keep unity and traditions inside the Church. But on the other hand, understanding of liturgical texts written in Church Slavonic may be simplified,” a senior Church official, Archimandrite Kirill, said on Monday.

“It is proposed that more complicated words from Church Slavonic be replaced with simpler ones from the same language, and that syntactic constructions be made easier,” he said.

“The general tendency is to make the message that the Church is carrying to modern society more transparent and understandable. This is the process of adaptation inside the Church Slavonic language,” said Kirill, who is a deputy head of the Church’s education committee.

The changes in particular stipulate that “zhivot,” which translates from Church Slavonic to “life” but means “stomach” in modern Russian, will be replaced with the standard Russian word “zhizn,” and some Greek words will be replaced with their Russian equivalents.

The current Church Slavonic used in services is derived from Old Church Slavonic developed by Sts. Cyril and Methodius in the 9th century. The older language’s pronunciation and orthography were adapted, and some words were replaced with newer ones.

The Russian Orthodox Church is the largest among Eastern Orthodox churches and the world’s second largest Christian church after the Roman Catholic Church.

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A few links I found interesting for one reason or another:

CIFWatch – The Great Methodist BDS Hijack

Biased BBC – The wrong sort of diversity

1964 – Is Interest in Catholicism falling online?

Outside the Asylum – The lost discipline of logic

The New Oxonian – Lament of a Soft-Shell Anti-American Atheist

British Religion in Numbers – Membership of Groups

A Grain of Sand – Environmentalist Syncretism

The Catechesis of Caroline – Worth £280 million of taxpayers’ money?

Christian Medical Fellowship – The Collapse of Southern Cross – is capitalism crushing care and compassion?

ListVerse – Top ten Unbearable Phobias

Just to let you know that a story doing the rounds this weekend – and still featuring as number one in “most shared” over at the BBC – is total tosh.

Headlines blazed “Jerusalem rabbis condemn dog to death by stoning” and derivatives thereof.

The story goes something like:

A Jewish rabbinical court condemned to death by stoning a stray dog it feared was the reincarnation of a lawyer who insulted its judges

The paper that originally carried the story – Ma’ariv – has apologised and issued a clarification saying:

“On 3rd June 2011 we published an item headlined “Meah Shearim: A Bet Din (religious court) instructed that a dog be stoned”. In the article it was reported that a complaint was made to the police by the Israeli animal protection society against the Rabbinical Court for Monetary Matters in Jerusalem. The article also brought a categorical denial of this accusation from the head of the court, Rabbi Yehoshua Levin. The Rabbi said, amongst other things “There is no basis for cruelty to animals, not in Halacha (Jewish religious law) and not in logic.” According to him, workers from the municipal authority collected the dog from the court. The headline of the article did not reflect the full story and we apologize to the court and its members for the distress caused.”

Life in Israel and Harry’s Place have all the details.