I'm Used To Christians Not Being Allow To Proselytize in Muslim Countries

I'm Used To Christians Not Being Allow To Proselytize in Muslim Countries

I'm just not used to it being in the United States. From the June 18, 2009 San Jose Mercury-News:

DETROIT — A federal judge today denied an evangelical Christian group's request for permission to hand out literature on sidewalks at an Arab festival in the heart of the Detroit area's Middle Eastern community.

U.S. District Judge Nancy Edmunds denied Anaheim, Calif.-based Arabic Christian Perspective's request for a temporary restraining order.

The group describes itself in its court filing as "a national ministry established for the purpose of proclaiming the Holy Gospel of Jesus Christ to Muslims ... (that) travels around the country attending and distributing Christian literature at Muslim festivals and mosques."

A lawyer for the group said it would seek a permanent injunction against the city of Dearborn.

"It's not over," said Robert J. Muise of the Thomas More Law Center, an Ann Arbor-based Christian rights advocacy group.

Another lawyer on the case said the Dearborn officials action could be part of what he described as a broader Muslim legal attack on critics of Islam in our "Judeo-Christian nation."

"Muslims are using the courts in this country to stop our free speech rights," said William J. Becker Jr., a Los Angeles attorney who has represented a number of prominent critics of Islam.

The 14th annual Dearborn Arab International Festival is expected to draw hundreds of thousands of visitors Friday through Sunday to the city that has the Detroit area's greatest concentration of Arab-Americans.

Wow. How many parts of the First Amendment can this judge violate at once?

1. Public streets can't be used for a protected form of free speech.

2. And this is a violation of the freedom of religious exercise clause, since proselytizing is a fundamental part of the Christian faith.

3. And arguably a violation of religious establishment clause, since it would appear that there is a distinct penalty assessed against a particular religion.

And what makes this especially silly is that even by progressive notions of not offending, this doesn't make sense. A lot of Arab-Americans are Christians; that's one of the reasons that a lot of them came here. I have attended church with Arab-Americans in the past, and I know that they aren't particularly unique.

UPDATE: Professor Volokh in email points out that the restrictions in question are content-neutral; at this point, there is no evidence that Christians are being especially disfavored. I confess that I am a bit sensitive on this subject, simply because Islam is favored by the left (because they have imagined that Bush was making war on Islam), and Christianity an especially disfavored religion for the left (because we won't get with the program on homosexuality, abortion, and Gaea worship).

And while it is true that prohibiting leafleting does not preclude other available means of expressing an opinion--it is also true that the ACLU doesn't seem to ever recognize the validity of this approach when it comes to something like virtual child pornography, where they argued that because the law was overbroad, and therefore might apply to some serious artistic works, that therefore the law was unconstitutional. (There were no alternatives in making a film that wouldn't run afoul of the law?) I mean, you don't have to burn a flag to express your opinion, do you? According to the ACLU, alternate means of expressing an opinion just aren't adequate. (Except, of course, when wearing a T-shirt might offend homosexuals--then you have to shut up--at least, according to Judge Stephen Reinhardt, who is married to the ACLU of Southern California's director.)

I also find the notion that leafleting can be forbidden because of crowd control issues--but going out into the crowd to talk to people isn't--is absurd. Go into a crowd and start talking to people about something as emotional as religion, and I suspect that it is going to produce some pretty heated discussions--which will slow the flow of traffic. Leaflets, on the other hand, get stuffed into a pocket, producing no real change in traffic flow.

This street festival is supposedly different from a public street because there's some sort of public event being carried on. Somehow, I'm hard pressed to see how this makes it equivalent to a courthouse, a legislative body, a jail, or one of the other places where government is ordinarily granted additional power to restrict speech because they are performing a landlord function. Considering that the Supreme Court ruled in the Pruneyard decision that a private property owner may not exclude persons gathering signatures in a shopping center, because this is a form of public forum, it is hard to see how the government has authority to prohibit leafleting on public streets.

I'm Not Quite Sure That I Believe This

I'm Not Quite Sure That I Believe This

But it is California, where religious freedom at times only seems to extend to non-Judeo-Christian beliefs:

A San Diego pastor says county officials have told him he needs a permit to host a weekly Bible study in his home.

Pastor David Jones and his wife, Mary, were hosting the weekly study near their church, when they say they were visited by a county code enforcement officer. According to Dean Broyles, an attorney for the Joneses, the county official asked the pastor if they hosted a regular weekly meeting in their home, and if they prayed and said "Amen" and "Praise the Lord" at those meetings.

After replying in the affirmative to those inquiries, a subsequent citation notified the couple they were in violation of county regulations, should stop "religious assembly," and needed to apply for a "major use" permit to continue the gatherings -- a process that could cost several thousands of dollars.

Jones, his wife, and their attorney, Dean Broyles, were interviewed on the Fox News Channel. Broyles says the couple's rights have been violated.

"The government may not prohibit the free exercise of religion," says the attorney. "And I believe that our Founding Fathers would roll over in their graves if they saw that here in the year 2009 that a pastor and his wife are being told that they can't have a simple Bible study in their own home."

The article says that about 15 people attend this Bible study weekly--which would hardly seem to be enough traffic to justify permission from county government. (I could see if hundreds of people were showing every week in a residential neighborhood that there might be a legitimate question about a use permit.)

Maybe there is something else going on here that might explain the demand for a use permit. But if this is really just 15 people showing up every week, it doesn't make sense to require a use permit. Perhaps they should tell the county that they are getting together for an orgy--then there would be no question about it, since promiscuous sex is the one behavior that California government regards as fully protected.

Something Good That Comes From Television

Something Good That Comes From Television

Well, there are actually a number of good things that come from television, but I'm in a foul mood about an instrument that largely works for the benefit of ideologies built around emotion. So I was pleased to see this February 3, 2009 Time article that explains how a little girl finally was freed from continual rape:

Nujood Ali is just 10 years old — and was, until recently, the youngest known divorced person in the world.
Slender with thick hair and a shy smile, Ali made headlines in Yemen last April when she walked out on a man more than three times her age, to whom her father had married her off. It was an act driven by terror and despair. (See the top 10 crime stories of 2008.)
Nujood's ordeal began last February, when the family gathered to celebrate her wedding to a motorcycle deliveryman in his 30s. She first set eyes on the groom when she took her marriage vows. After spending her wedding night with her parents and 15 brothers and sisters, Nujood was taken by her new husband to his family village, where, she says, he beat and raped her every night. After two nightmarish months he allowed her to visit her parents, who rebuffed her pleas to end the marriage.
Nujood finally found her moment to escape one day, when her mother gave her a few pennies and sent her out to buy bread. Instead she took a bus to the center of the capital, Sanaa — a city of 3 million people — where she hailed a taxi and asked to be taken to the courthouse. She had never been inside a courtroom but had once seen one on television, she says, and knew it was a place where people went for help. There she sat silently on a bench, uncertain as to what to do, while crowds of people scurried past, scarcely glancing at the quiet child. It was only once the courthouse emptied during the lunch recess that the judge noticed her and asked why she was there. "I came for a divorce," she told him. Horrified, he took her to his house to play with his 8-year-old daughter, and granted the divorce two days later.

And this wasn't an anomaly, but a recurring problem of a certain religion:

Despite Yemen's laws against child marriage, about 52% of Yemen's girls marry before the age of 18, often as the second or third wives of far older men. Worldwide, child marriage has been slow to change, according to UNICEF's "State of the World's Children" report released last month. About 49% of South Asian women in their early 20s were married before the age of 18, according to statistics gathered by UNICEF, which links early marriage to high rates of infant death and maternal mortality in very poor countries. "Often families marry off girls very young because they want to protect them, not realizing the dangers they face," says Stella Schumacher, a UNICEF child-protection specialist in New York. "It requires a change of social norms. Legislation is not enough."

Something that a lot of people don't know--indeed, I didn't know, until reading Rodney Stark's The Rise of Christianity--is that Christianity made a very fundamental change to the status of women, by discouraging child marriage. Roman law allowed girls as young as 12 to be married (and this is a time when 12 year olds were still little girls--puberty arrived much later because of poor nutrition), and the law was frequently ignored. And these weren't "let's have the ceremony and well wait for sex until you grow up" marriages. Christianity strongly disapproved of this early and forced marriage, to the emotional and physical benefit of young women.

Interview with Rodney Stark

I recently mentioned a book by sociologist Rodney Stark about the factors that caused the growth of Christianity in the Roman Empire. A reader pointed me to this interview with Stark with a publication called Our Sunday Visitor (which I've never heard of before). There's a few interesting exchanges in the interview about that book--and some that are rather more broad:

The received tradition is that many Christians were martyred. Yet you say that blood witnesses were few.

RS: There’s a consensus among historians that the numbers weren’t large at all, and that we may know the name of just about every single martyr. The Romans decided to attack the movement from the top. This would have worked with other religions because there was no bottom to paganism. Paganism was really temples on a shopping mall, and people were very casual about which ones they patronized. If the Romans knocked off the chief priest and took away government subsidy, a pagan temple would fold up.

So the empire went after Christianity the same way, thinking, “If we butcher the bishops, things will take care of themselves.” Of course, it didn’t work because there were 92 guys waiting in line to be bishop. That’s what you get with a mass movement.

Does this minimize the traditional notion that “the blood of the martyrs is the seed of the Church”?

RS: Not at all. One thing about religious truths is that we have to take them on faith, and faith needs reassurance. What’s more reassuring than noticing that some other people, whom you admire, are so certain that it’s all true that they’re willing to go the ultimate mile?

...

Even Christian historians tend to discount stories of the miraculous and minimize the veracity of early Church documents. Yet you accept the record to a remarkable degree.

RS: People in the patristics field recently were hammering me for naively accepting early accounts. One woman in particular mentioned the early Church’s rules against abortion and female infanticide. She said that I didn’t seem to understand that these prohibitions served all kinds of polemical purposes. Well, of course I know that, but I guess I’m so naive as to believe that groups that constantly hammer against something are more opposed to it than groups that, in their official writings, say that the same thing is laudable and wonderful and that we ought to do it.

From Plato and Aristotle on, the classical philosophers were advocating abortion. And infanticide was fine with them, too. Of course there were Christians who didn’t obey, just like there are Mormons who chew tobacco. But the fact of the matter is: most of them don’t. The same thing applies here.

And as for miracles: listen, people do get healed—spontaneously and, it would seem, miraculously. There’s not a physician on earth who would deny that. What is the agency? I don’t know. But to deny that people in tabernacles around the United States are getting healed is simply wrong. There’s no reason to deny that these things happen just because we don’t share the definitions put on them by the people of another time or place.

Somebody at Harvard Divinity School might say, “That wasn’t a miracle. It was a spontaneous remission.” “Spontaneous remission” is the way the experts say, “We don’t have the slightest idea what happened.” The most hard-nosed scientist has no reason to doubt that miracles took place in the early Church. The opinions of the village atheist are as fundamentalist as anything any Baptist ever believed.

...

Does it concern you today that blood sports and violent movies are on the upswing, and that abortion and infanticide are back in force?

RS: It doesn’t surprise me. It offends me. For more than a century we managed to have a period of considerable public decency. Now, maybe we’re sliding back to what’s more typical. I blame the courts, which say we can’t censor anything but religion. The fact of the matter is, when I was a kid, there were rules about what you could and couldn’t put in the mail or show in the movies.

Some of the rules may have been a bit much, but where do you stop? Where do you put your limits? If you don’t set them pretty tight, pretty soon they’re blowing people’s heads off. It’s not, for example, that people didn’t get killed in movies in the forties, but there wasn’t this enormous immorality. Evil was to be punished before the movie was over. And they didn’t show all this gratuitous gore. There are people who get turned on by this stuff, and we are helping to build monsters.

You say that Christianity succeeded in part because of its high moral standards. Today, however, many churches are lowering the bar to make religion more popular. How would you analyze their efforts?

RS: They’re death wishes. People value religion on the basis of cost, and they don’t value the cheapest ones the most. Religions that ask nothing get nothing. You’ve got a choice: you can be a church or a country club. If you’re going to be a church, you’d better offer religion on Sunday. If you’re not, you’d better build a golf course, because you’re not going to get away with being a country club with no golf course. That’s what happened to the Episcopalians, Methodists, Congregationalists, Unitarians and, indeed, to some sectors of Catholicism.

The Church in Europe

No, that's not an oxymoron. This article from the July 14, 2007 Wall Street Journal tells us that after decades of decline, Christianity seems to be making a modest comeback:

Late last year, a Swedish hotel guest named Stefan Jansson grew upset when he found a Bible in his room. He fired off an email to the hotel chain, saying the presence of the Christian scriptures was "boring and stupefying." This spring, the Scandic chain, Scandinavia's biggest, ordered the New Testaments removed.

In a country where barely 3% of the population goes to church each week, the affair seemed just another step in Christian Europe's long march toward secularism. Then something odd happened: A national furor erupted. A conservative bishop announced a boycott. A leftist radical who became a devout Christian and talk-show host denounced the biblical purge in newspaper columns and on television. A young evangelical Christian organized an electronic letter-writing campaign, asking Scandic: Why are you removing Bibles but not pay-porn on your TVs?

Scandic, which had started keeping its Bibles behind the front desk, put the New Testament back in guest rooms.

"Sweden is not as secular as we thought," says Christer Sturmark, head of Sweden's Humanist Association, a noisy assembly of nonbelievers to which the Bible-protesting hotel guest belongs.

After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.

God's tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians debating a hot question: Why? Part of the reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants. Christian and Muslim newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment. At the same time, anxiety over immigration, globalization and cutbacks to social-welfare systems has eroded people's contentment in the here-and-now, prodding some to seek firmer ground in the spiritual.

The rest of the article suggests that the ending of state establishments of religion might have something to do with it--which is consistent with an emerging view among historians of Colonial America that the dramatic increase in church membership after the Revolution might have been provoked by the disestablishment of the Anglican Church.

As it happens, I'm reading a very interesting book at the moment by Rodney Stark, a sociology professor at the University of Washington: The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries (Harper San Francisco, 1997). Stark argues that the traditional view--that Constantine's making Christianity the official state religion is what caused the Roman Empire to turn Christian--is backward. He points to data that suggests that Constantine made Christianity the state religion because Christians had become a dominant force within the Roman Empire. Why? Because demographics is destiny.

Stark uses traditional sociological statistical methods and some very clever use of both data from the classical period, and such things as archaeological counts of churches in various Roman cities, to argue that Christianity grew at a rate comparable to the rise of Mormonism in modern America (about 43% per decade). I'm not sure what the reaction of sociologists was to his clever use of data from a period when demographic data in the modern sense really doesn't exist. Did they react with disgust? Or were they impressed that he managed to find anything to work with at all, like Mark Twain's comment about a dog walking on its hind legs? It didn't do it very well, but that it did it at all was rather impressive.

Stark argues that there were several reasons for this dramatic increase, and there's no need to look for any miraculous explanations. In brief (and not doing justice to how Stark uses the data, as well as primary and secondary sources):

1. Early Christians, because they utterly rejected infanticide, abortion, birth control, and non-vaginal intercourse, had extraordinary birth rates--and eventually outreproduced the pagans. (The parallels to today, where conservatives are outreproducing liberals in America, and Muslims are outreproducing non-Muslim Europe--should be obvious.)

• Roman fathers had the right to leave any deformed or weak male child--and any female--in the wild to die. Females were effectively worthless, and as a result, adult males outnumbered adult females by an extraordinary margin.
• Abortion was widespread in the Roman Empire (often at the insistence of the husband or father of the pregnant woman), and frequently led to death or sterility.
• Roman birth control, while not spectacularly effective, did exist.
• The selfishness of pagan society, as well as the widespread use of anal and oral sex--and of male prostitutes--meant that much of the reproductive potential of Roman society was not being used to produce children.

All of these factors meant that Christians were reproducing like rabbits, while the pagan part of the Empire was actually declining in population at the time that Christianity appeared.

2. While it may shock a lot of feminists, Christianity attracted women in very large numbers because of the dramatically higher status that they held relative to both the pagan Romans, and the Jews. One little horrifying example of the difference--and how it played a part in probably increasing Christian birth rates, and the willingness of Christian women to get pregnant: marriages between adult Roman men and little girls (under the age of puberty) were not simply contracted, but consummated--with often significant physical damage to the girls.

By comparison, Christians delayed marriage until about 18. Considering that puberty probably came later in classical times than today (because of nutritional deficiencies), this meant that Christian women were less likely to be damaged by sexual intercourse, and less likely to be traumatized by it as well.

3. Because Christianity gave women a higher status, it attracted them in large numbers--and it would appear that a fair number of pagan Romans became Christians because of their wives.

I haven't finished reading the book, and there's quite a bit there that I haven't summarized. I wouldn't exactly call it a popular read, but for a book with tables of Pearson Products, it's not bad.

Let me emphasize that while I am an historian, I really can't tell you how reliable Stark's history or sociological analysis is. I don't see anything obviously wrong, but this is way outside my period. As my Ancient Middle East professor once put it, "Everything after the fall of Rome to me is current events."

UPDATE: A reader points me to this article about how Roman use of a relatively rare plant as an abortifacient (a drug that induces abortion) eventually drove the plant into extinction! And just because it's "natural" doesn't make it safe. When I lived in the Bay Area, Marin County's hopelessly New Age crowd was using a variety of similar drugs as "natural" ways to induce abortions--with occasional deaths and often quite severe health consequences.

Religious Adherents Map

I posted a map few days ago that showed the percentage of the population by county that showed up as members of 149 religious denominations that participated in a 2000 survey.



I received a number of thoughtful and interesting comments.

One reader points out that:

I wouldn't say that religious adherence in LA is concentrated in South Central. Much of what I believe you see in that map, are special factors for LDS and Catholics. Ask any active LDS member, and he will tell you immediately that he is LDS. If he isn't an active member, he probably has already moved somewhere else.

Catholic churches tend to have a strong ethnic affinity, and it is a serious matter for anyone raised Catholic to say that they are not, even if they are only weakly affiliated. If you ask a Mexican his religion, he will certainly answer Catholic even if he only goes to mass twice a year. If you ask a Chicago Pole or someone of Irish ancestry from the East coast, you are likely to get that same answer.

You can see the brown regions in SW areas which are definitely Mexican, and in Louisiana. You can also see it in the Slavic Catholic rust belt.

The situation in the upper midwest is interesting. Historically, Sunday go-to-church is the principal part of community for people who spend 6 days a week on scattered and relatively isolated farms. I suspect that it still is, and that even for the urbanized and more loosely affiliated, they still would claim to be affiliated.

I've seen the claim made that Catholic churches tend to record everyone that has ever been affiliated with a particular parish--even if that person hasn't shown up in years. I also understand that Mormon churches tend to keep people "on the books" long after that person may have stopped attending, or perhaps even actively left.

Another reader observes:

I look at the map of religious density and see white over here in eastern NC. I know that has to be wrong. What it makes me guess is that we are swamped with a zillion small denominations -- Original Free Will Baptist Church being different from the Free Will Baptists, and there are at least two flavors of Missionary Baptist, etc. I bet they were not included in the survey. Makes me wonder to what extent this might be true in other places as well.

Yup, there's probably some truth to that. Why do I suddenly think of the sequence in Monty Python's Life of Brian with the multiplicity of anti-Roman groups:

"The Judean People's Front", "The People's Front of Judea", and (with only one member) "The Popular Front of Judea". According to the DVD commentary, this part of the story is a satire on the multiplication of ineffectual left-wing parties in Britain during the 1970s: these revolutionary groups would splinter every few weeks, and be angrier at each other than they were at the British government.

But heck, there are times it is only a slight exaggeration of the current situation involving Muslims in that part of the world!

Another reader came to the same conclusion about another surprisingly low density part of the map:

What's with the hole in south Ohio/east Kentucky/west West Virginia? That's mostly rural, semi-southern area that ought to be redder - like east Tennessee/west North Carolina.

What's with the very distinct brown streak across central Illinois and south Iowa?

I suspect this map of having a lot of artifacts, due to the vagaries of self-reporting. The study reports numbers provided by "149 religious bodies"; but what about all the independent churches? Some sects are notably unorganized and fissile - their members would be omitted.

That could explain that hole, perhaps - a lot of crossroads pentecostal churches?

Indeed. I get the impression that church attendance in Horseshoe Bend, near where I live, is actually pretty high--but there are three churches in town: Catholic; Lutheran; and a community church that probably isn't affiliated with any of those 149 organizations.

There is indeed a distinct low density streak across central Illinois and south Iowa. I wonder if Amish were represented? There's a lot of them in that area--and some of them are offshoots, such as the oddly named "Amish Mennonites."

Oh, while searching through the web, I found what seems like the ultimate oxymoron: a blog called "Amish America." People that don't drive cars because they are too newfangled of an invention probably aren't using the Internet. Wait a moment, while I imagine an Amish Internet--probably uses heliograph signaling for packet transmission, achieving burst rates of five bits/minute. By, at this rate, you could download a 320x240 resolution picture before the Second Coming!