November, 2005 (Vol. 21, No. 1)

Australians are taking a page from American politics, judging by the way the nation’s two political parties are courting religious voters. The Australian Christian quarterly Zadok Perspectives (Spring) reports that as the Federal election approaches, John Howard of the Liberal Party and politicians from the opposing Labor Party have made pitches for the conservative Christian vote, making special appearances at Hillsong, a prominent megachurch outside of Sydney.

The more liberal Labor party has surprised political observers in its attempt to catch up with the Liberals in “connecting with that they see as a significant voting block in contemporary Australian society where many of the old loyalties have changed including religious and political sentiments and alliances.“ The old political/religious patterns that grouped Catholics under the Labor right, the Uniting Church and the Australian Council of Churches (ACC) with the Labor left, and the rank and file Anglicans and others spread somewhere between Labor and Liberal, have faded away.

Today, Catholics don‘t vote as a bloc, and the declining Uniting Church and ACC have lost their political clout to large and growing churches with their own networks. The new players are the conservative Protestants, who have started such organizations as Family First, Saltshakers and the Christian Lobby. The latter group has gained 6000 members since 2000, an impressive number considering that the established parties have just 20,000 members.

While some of the evangelicals are involved in liberal causes such as Aboriginal rights, the rise of conservative think tanks, such as the Lyon Forum and the Tasman Institute, are pulling conservative Christians rightward in support of John Howard. Writer Peter Corney acknowledges that the outspoken evangelical Christianity of George Bush is having an impact among Australian Christians, but also cites culture wars and a concern over moral values that are native to Australia.

(Zadok Perspectives, P.O. Box 2182, Fitzroy 3065, NSW, Australia;www.zadok.org.au)

Traditional college chaplaincy programs are making room for “peer ministry,” which consists of college students who help their fellow students on spiritual matters, reports the New York Times (Oct. 15).

Modeled on campus resident assistants who help their fellow students with day-to-day life, peer ministers add a spiritual dimension to their work and are more often appointed by the campus ministry rather than the university administration. Even religious schools are recognizing that professional staffs of campus ministers can only go so far and value the way peer ministers can relate more to students’ problems and questions on religious matters, especially as the importance of peers has steadily grown among young adults..

At some colleges, specific religious groups run peer ministries, while at religious colleges the ministry may be based on one tradition but are also ecumenical in spirit and open to any student. Hillel, a Jewish student organization, runs several peer-minister-style programs, seeing it as a way to help students discover their Jewish identity.

Catholics value the way peer ministers can supplement many incoming students’ lack of Catholic education. The added help provided by peer ministers tends to shift the role of campus ministers and clerics, making them freer to concentrate on administration and sacramental life. However, some peer ministry programs allow students to give sermons and perform other clergy tasks, thus grooming a new generation of leaders.

There is growing interest and even involvement among educators in adding the practices of contemplation and meditation to the college curriculum, reports the Chronicle of Higher Education (Oct. 21).

Contemplative practices are now found in a range of college courses and programs–from economics to art history and music. As neuroscience has recently discovered the mental and physical benefits of meditation, professors are using contemplative practices as a form of “mental hygiene” for students. Beyond that, some educators believe that meditation can help students achieve insight and “enlightenment” in the learning process, writes John Gravois.

Leading the way in promoting the use of meditation in curriculum is the Northampton, Mass.-based Center for the Contemplative Mind in Society, which has recently teamed up with the American Council of Learned Societies to give out fellowships for professors wanting to integrate contemplative components into their curricula.

Integrating contemplation into classroom curricula takes very different forms. An economics professor at Emory University has drawn up a syllabus requiring students to meditate on pictures of poor people, while the University of Michigan School of Music uses contemplative practices in their jazz program to stimulate creativity. While some critics have charged that this development amounts to bringing spirituality and “pseudoscience” into the classroom, most students have given these exercises positive reviews.

Hurricane Katrina revealed the efficiency of churches and other congregations in their role as “first responders” in the midst of local, state and national government delays and stalemates in providing relief.

The swift response of congregations was noted by newspapers across the U.S. and Britain, with the New York Times headlining an article, “A New Meaning for `Organized Religion:’ It Helps The Needy Quickly.” One observer noted that churches became first responders because “they’re already there. They represent a focal point in the community.” But Katrina served as something of a watershed event in the lives of many churches in the U.S., writes Eric Swanson in Advance, the e-newsletter of the Leadership Network.

He writes that “A line was drawn in the sand. Churches had to declare, with respect to helping those outside the church, whether they were `in’ or they were `out.’ There was no neutral ground. There was no time for debate and rhetoric…” But it appears that the decision to respond did not happen solely on a congregational basis.

In Houston, for example, a coalition of the faith community led by several pastors called for immediate action, leading “tens of thousands in Houston churches” to get involved in relief work. The Christian Century (October 18) reports that some Gulf Coast church leaders and government officials–emboldened by the large role that houses of worship assumed after the storms–are saying they want congregations to do even more. One pastor said “We have seen a paradigm shift. In America since the 1930s or `40s, we’ve thought the government is going to do it. Now we realize the church is going to have to do it.”

(http://www.pursuantgroup.com/leadnet.advance/oct05s2a.htm)

As suicide bombing has become a principle means of terrorism, specialists are trying to second-guess those who perpetrate such violence. But how predictable is terrorism, especially when it is motivated by religion?

There is no one answer to that question as social scientists approach this new field. Science & Theology News (October) reports that researchers’ attempts to understand suicidal terror have “revived a controversial theory of `altruistic suicide,’ the act of killing oneself so that one’s community might live.” This would suggest that suicide terrorism is more a phenomenon of group psychology and group behavior than “fundamentalist” religious beliefs. This theory turns the focus on how religious beliefs and practices can generate extreme forms of altruism.

University of Nevada political scientist Leonard Weinberg and Israeli terrorism expert Ami Pedahzur found from their research among Palestinian suicide bombers from 1993-2002 that people who commit such acts are strongly integrated into a social group and are concerned with the group attaining its goals; they tend to have a strong religious background with more religious education than others.

A June, 2005 University of Michigan study related religious background, group socialization and suicide terrorism even more directly, writes Mike Martin. Sociologist Jeremy Ginges found that mosque attendance was closely correlated with involvement in suicide attacks. Such “collective rituals” may help create the altruism needed to give up one’s life for the group. Ginges also found that faith alone does not make a terrorist; personal devotion and belief in Islam was unrelated to terrorism.

Meanwhile, the use of suicidal terrorism by al Queda lacks the instrumental and rational components that would make it very strategic or “altruistic,” according to historian Faisal Devji. Al-Queda’s use of violence is superficial to its purposes and is likely to be short-lived, he added at a recent lecture in New York. Devji, who was speaking at a lecture at the New School for Social Research attended by RW, said that al-Queda is unlike earlier kinds of Islamic fundamentalism and Islam in general in that it has no coherent political program and lacks the control and instrumentality to have much intended effects besides its own symbolic actions.

In studying Osama bin Laden‘s writings and statements, Devji finds an emphasis on “ethical practice” rather than strategic or instrumental action that has a discernable end. This tendency can be seen in London bomber Mohammad Sidique Khan‘s reference to his suicide bombing as being an “ethical act. “Even al-Queda’s call for the establishment of the caliphate is not a defined plan since bin Laden and his second-in-command Ayman al-Zawahiri can not agree on its location.

One of the reasons al-Queda is so violent is because it is inherently unstable due to its ethical orientation. Such instability means that the movement could soon “tip over” into something non-violent Devji, who is author of the new book Landscapes of the Jihad, added that al-Queda‘s ethical and mystical orientation puts it on the periphery of an already fragmented Islamic world. In fact, al-Queda‘s teachings are increasingly spread through mystical Sufi networks far from its Middle Eastern base.

(Science & Theology News, P.O. Box 5065, Brentwood, TN 37024-5065)