But it’s not just Catholic religious life taking a numerical hit. Catholics in general are declining as well; from 2000-2010, active Catholics declined by 5%. In Buffalo, New York, Catholic numbers have dropped by somewhere between 19% and 35%, depending on who’s doing the numbers. The mainline Protestant decline has been well-documented. Meanwhile, Mormon numbers have increased by 50% in the US since 2000.

It’s easy to say that conservative churches grow, while liberal churches decline, and in broad strokes that’s been shown to be true. But it’s not very precise. For churches can be more or less ‘conservative’ in life and doctrine but modern in what passes for liturgy (as is the case with many megachurches), and more or less ‘liberal’ in life and doctrine but traditional in liturgy (thinking here of certain ELCA or Episcopalian churches).

The temptation is to be “relevant,” either in terms of worship or in term of doctrine. And there lies the way of spiritual dessication. For the gospel challenges, confronts, and converts culture. When a church acculturates in doctrine, it has nothing distinctive to say, and those who stay are there to get affirmed, not saved. When a church acculturates in terms of worship, it may grow in terms of numbers for a little while, but Christian growth is often lacking in serious depth. Willow Creek discovered precisely that a few years ago in a searching, searing self-study.

What to do? A certain subset of evangelicals is counseling caving in the culture wars, whether Rachel Held Evans (with particular reference to the marriage amendment in NC, which won overwhelmingly) or Tony Jones (an ‘emergent’ Christian who came out in support of gay relationships a few years ago). It’s true that conservative rhetoric has often been less than charitable, and it’s also true that there’s a lot to be said about how the Church and the gospel might relate to culture and politics. But what Held Evans and Jones and others seem to be counseling (it’s tough to tell, because they usually do more complaining and criticizing than offering up positively what they really think and advocate) is a fundamental change in how Christians think about sexuality for the sake of the gospel.

But bending to the mores of the times seldom works. Better to hold fast to classic Christian convictions and remember Calvin’s dictum that “What can be truly said can be fittingly said.” For Christian faith isn’t something that adapts to culture in essentials; rather, the gospel confronts and converts culture (cf. the book of Acts). As Dean William Inge once said, “If you marry the spirit of your generation, you’ll be a widow in the next.”

One of the challenges, of course, is to find support for such research agendas when national or state agencies are the primary source of funding. But Rasmussen also made clear that there are analogous intellectual topographies to those we usually think of mapping, like national boundaries and geographical features. We run into ideological understandings of history that are anachronistic in a similar way, looking for the history of a particular idea or construction that is uniquely contemporary, and did not exist in the same way in the past.

Some natural questions follow: what “nations” are missing from our maps today (mental and otherwise) that were there in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? Just how different might a more accurate intellectual as well as spatial topography of the early modern period look?

In some ways these are impossible questions. How can you know what you don’t know? But the basic methodological point is valuable, and a first step toward reorienting and recontextualizing such historical study: the way things are now are not the way they always were, and the way people think today are not the way they always thought. This is in part what John Thompson is pointing to when he discusses reading Scripture “with the dead” as a way of eliciting this cognitive dissonance. He hopes that “reading old commentaries will also evoke the strangeness of the past, even the Christian past…. We should hope to find writers in the past who argue with us, and with all our contemporaries.”

Take a look at the following and think about the implications of some of these considerations as you see nations, empires, and city-states pop in and out of existence between 1000 AD and 2003 AD.

Since then Hunter has become the spiritual advisor to Obama, a job that apparently entails furrowing a concerned brow and turning the other cheek when the President takes yet another position that is antithetical to his professed faith.

Hunter told The Associated Press that Obama called him before ABC News broadcast his same-sex marriage endorsement and he says he told the president he disagreed with his interpretation of what the Bible says about marriage. Everything was fine, though, since the president reassured him that he would protect the religious freedom of churches who oppose gay marriage. You know, because Obama has been great about protecting religious freedom.

Hunter says the announcement makes it harder for him to support Obama—but he’ll continue to do so. Of course he will. Obama may be the most pro-abortion, anti-marriage President in history but Hunter knows that if he doesn’t support him he might not be invited to give the benediction at the Democratic National Convention.

I hope to get the chance to meet Rev. Huntrer some day because I want to ask him a serious question, “What exactly does President Obama have to do to lose your support? If supporting the slaughter of the unborn, betraying the institution of marriage, and trampling religious liberty is not enough, what exactly would it take?”

In the wake of a New York court ruling that says it’s not illegal to “merely” view online child pornography, child advocates are urging Internet-savvy federal prosecutors to take over these kinds of cases as two state lawmakers rush to fix the law.

Must Baptism Precede Church Membership? Of course!
9Marks, Jonathan Leeman

The fact that I hear more and more people asking this question these days suggests that people have lost track of what a local church is, what church membership is, as well as what baptism represents. I tried to briefly answer those questions in previous posts. Let me try to answer this question with a story. Let’s call this story…

Marchers in Rome protest Italy’s allowing abortion
Associated Press

A few thousand people opposed to Italy’s 1978 law allowing abortion have marched through the Italian capital in a protest drawing people from around the world, including Americans and Poles.

Unions That Divide: Churches Split Over Gay Marriage
New York Times, Laurie Goodstein

Mr. Obama’s declaration last week that he supports same-sex marriage prompted ministers around the country to take to their pulpits on Sunday and preach on the issue. But in the clash over homosexuality, the battle lines do not simply pit ministers against secular advocates for gay rights. Religion is on both sides in this conflict. The battle is actually church versus church, minister versus minister, and Scripture versus Scripture.

I, too, wanted to write about something that is important to me, though it could draw ire from Meggie and her ilk. So here it goes: This past Saturday was the fourth anniversary of the passing of Irena Kryzanowska Sendler, who died in Warsaw, Poland, at the age of 98. In most ways and like most of ours, her life was unremarkable. However, during World War II, Ms. Sendler, a Roman Catholic, worked in the Warsaw ghetto. She was a social worker at the beginning of the German occupation of Poland in 1939, and volunteered to go into the ghetto to inspect for typhus. The Nazis feared that typhus and other diseases would spread outside of the ghetto (the Nazis considered all Jews to be disease carriers).

She did have an ulterior motive to taking on this difficult and dangerous work. Ms. Sendler created a network of rescuers who smuggled Jewish infants and children out of the ghetto. Some were rescued by being in packages; others were carried out in coffins. Still others were carried out in burlap bags, or hidden under the floorboards of ambulances. Large dogs would ride in the ambulances and trucks, and those dogs were trained to bark wildly when Nazi soldiers approached the vehicles. The barking of the dogs, of course, covered up any noise from the children. Over time, she and her colleagues were able to save at least 2,500 children.

She was eventually caught. As a result, she was punished and beaten severely. Her feet, legs, and arms were broken by the Nazis, and she was sentenced to death. However, she did survive the end of the war. Ms. Sendler kept scrupulous records of the children she had saved by leaving the records buried in a glass jar under a tree in her back yard. After World War II, she tried to reunite the saved children with their parents. However, most parents had been killed in the Nazi death camp at Treblinka.

As promised, here is the controversial part: She was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. As you know, one has to be living in order to receive the Nobel Prize for Peace. For 2007, she lost to former Vice President Albert Gore for his “work” (slideshow?) on global warming. Then in 2008, the Nobel Peace Prize committee gave the award to President Barack Hussein Obama, just weeks after his inauguration, for his work on hope and change, and his contributions to world peace. Ms. Sendler died later that year.

Shortly before her death, she was honored by Poland for her heroic efforts. In a letter to the Polish Senate, she wrote: “Every child saved with my help and the help of all the wonderful secret messengers, who today are no longer living, is the justification of my existence on this earth, and not a title to glory.” (Emphasis added). In the United States, this past weekend, we celebrated Mother’s Day. It is particularly fitting to remember the bravery and desperation of the Jewish mothers trapped in the Warsaw ghetto, who gave their children to total strangers with no guarantee of their children’s safety.

Peace to the memory of Irena Kryzanowska Sendler. I suspect that she did more for world peace by working in the squalid Warsaw ghetto some seventy years ago than the other two could or will ever do during their lifetimes. There, I said it.

On May 8, 2012, the court of appeals of New York (New York State’s highest court) found that viewing child pornography is not a crime in New York. (Yes, they really did!) In this case, a college professor had more than one hundred illegal images on his computer at the college. Unfortunately for James D. Kent, an assistant professor of public administration, he did not completely dodge the legal bullet, as the court of appeals upheld the conviction of other counts against him. Professor Kent said, at his sentencing, that he “abhorred” child pornography and contended that someone else at the college must have placed the images on his computer. In August 2009, he was sentenced to one to three in the state penitentiary.

The issue before the court of appeals was whether access to and viewing images on the internet is the same as possessing the images, and whether possession of such images required procurement of those images or other affirmative acts. The court of appeals essentially found that viewing an image is not the same as possessing the image. Writing for the majority, Senior Judge Carmen Beauchamp Ciparick stated:

Merely viewing Web images of child pornography does not, absent other proof, constitute either possession or procurement within the meaning of our Penal Law. . . . Rather, some affirmative act is required (printing, saving, downloading, etc.) to show that defendant in fact exercised dominion and control over the images that were on his screen. To hold otherwise, would extend the reach of [state law] to conduct — viewing — that our Legislature has not deemed criminal.

Read the full appeals court ruling here (but please note that the description of some material contained therein is quite graphic):

Judge Victoria A. Graffeo wrote, in her concurring opinion, that:

[T]he purposeful viewing of child pornography on the internet is now legal in New York. A person can view hundreds of these images, or watch hours of real-time videos of children subjected to sexual encounters, and as long as those images are not downloaded, printed or further distributed, such conduct is not proscribed.

And so we see that Judge Graffeo fully understood the implications of the majority opinion, even though she has issued a concurrence to the majority opinion. Even though Professor Kent’s images were cached by someone on his work computer, it now appears that until the legislature changes the criminal law, viewing child porn is not a crime in New York. So for now, there is a new dawn of freedom for pedophiles in New York under evolving standards of decency (or perhaps I should say devolving standards of decency). I am reminded of the teaching by the prophet Isaiah, where we read in Isaiah 5:20, “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil, who put darkness for light and light for darkness, who put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter.” For as Jesus warns us in His Sermon on the Mount, “If then the light within you is darkness, how great is that darkness!”

Dutch ‘distaste’ at revelation that royals were baptized as Mormons by proxy

By Andreas Havinga

Utrecht, The Netherlands, 11 May (ENInews)–There is public criticism in the Netherlands of the Mormon practice of baptism by proxy after a Dutch newspaper revealed 9 May that several members of the royal family were posthumously “baptized” into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, colloquially known as the Mormon church.

The daily newspaper Trouw quoted unpublished documents in the Mormon church’s global genealogical database that show the late Queen Juliana, her husband Prince Bernhard and Queen Beatrix’ late husband Prince Claus were all baptized as Mormons after their deaths.

Mormons believe the proxy baptism ritual allows deceased people from other religions to enter the afterlife. The church has urged Mormons only to posthumously baptize their own ancestors.

However, last February, Jewish and Hindu groups reacted with anger at revelations that Jewish Holocaust victim Anne Frank, Indian independence leader Mahatma Gandhi and the parents of Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal had been baptized Mormons by proxy.

Some Dutch parliamentarians are calling on Home Affairs Minister Liesbeth Spies to counsel regional government archives against cooperating with the Mormon church, Trouw reported 10 May.

The denomination has made an offer to the country’s 12 provinces to digitally scan all their births, marriages and deaths records for use on computers, free of charge. However, the aim of this is to collect more names to baptize by proxy, Trouw said.

Parliamentarian Anja Hazekamp has tabled parliamentary questions, asking the home affairs minister how cooperation with the Mormon church for cost-cutting ends can be reconciled with the right to privacy.

Archivists too are debating whether financial or ethical concerns should prevail. The province of Gelderland has agreed to have the Mormon church digitalize its archives, but Utrecht has refused and Overijssel has doubts.

The Mormon Church in the Netherlands will examine the possibility of setting up a register of people who do not want to be posthumously baptized, spokesman Hans Boom told the public broadcaster NOS on 10 May.

At present, it is not possible for the Mormon Church to guarantee someone that they will not be posthumously baptized, he said.

Boom told the NOS that he will discuss the opt-out scheme with the denomination’s global leadership in the United States. The baptism of Prince Claus took place two years after his death in 2002, at a Mormon temple in Brazil. This may have been done by “over-enthusiastic members,” Boom told Trouw, adding it was a “gesture of love.”

Prominent Dutch theologian Huub Oosterhuis, who preached at Prince Claus’ funeral, called the posthumous baptism of the Dutch royals “tasteless.”

The Mormon Church in the Netherlands on its website republished on 9 May an earlier statement, dated 21 February 2012, in which it rejected baptism by proxy of Holocaust victims.

The statement concludes: “It worries us when someone deliberately violates the church’s policy, whereby something that should be seen as an offering of love and respect, gives rise to conflict.”

In an 11 May editorial, Trouw points out that the Mormon practice of posthumous baptism is well-known and that Mormons are not violating any rules in accessing publicly available data. “Privacy rules are formally only for the living.” However, “it would be good if those of us who are alive are already given the opportunity of registering somewhere that under no circumstance will this posthumous act of charity be appreciated.”

Furthermore, public authorities can be expected to digitalize their files themselves. “It would demonstrate good trusteeship and respect for deceased citizens if public records are not handed over in their entirety to organizations that want to use them for other purposes.”

The Dutch government’s information service has not reacted to the newspaper revelation of the Mormon baptisms of members of the royal family.

The church says there are about 9,000 Mormons in the Netherlands. The only Mormon temple in the country is in Zoetermeer, near The Hague. [copyright ENI used by permission]

This Sunday is the last that I and thousands of other parishioners will worship at the Sanctuary of The Falls Church in Virginia. Earlier this year, a judge ruled that despite the fact that The Falls Church is older than the Episcopal diocese, and that over 90 percent of the church parishioners voted to leave the Episcopal diocese, the Falls Church—and six other Anglican churches—would be required to turn over its buildings, facilities, and financial assets to the Episcopal Church.

While the court ruling still seems unreal, the language is stark and its execution imminent. In short order, the deed to the sanctuary will be signed over to the Episcopal diocese, and the church property and most of the financial assets—from computers to communion silver, and including tithes given by parishioners earmarked for non-diocese ministries—will be transferred to their ownership. After this Sunday, the congregation will meet in various school gymnasiums—a few weeks at a middle school, followed by a month at a high school – as the schools are able to accommodate, and until a more permanent home can be found.

Not ending on a pessimistic note, she points to the redemptive elements occasioned by this excruciatingly painful process and loss of the physical property:

If leadership lessons are best transmitted through example, our congregation has been schooled by a Rector and vestry that have met confusion with prayer, opposition with courage, attacks with humility, setbacks with grace, and uncertainty with faith. There is an undeniable intensification of the fervency of prayer and worship, reflecting a keenly felt need for divine guidance, wisdom, and charity.

I am grateful for the stand taken by this parish, as well as others including The Truro Church in Fairfax. I am also grateful for the posture of hope felt in Cherie’s words, for it is evidence of God’s grace and protection against seeds of bitterness that the evil one is attempting to sow. All of this reminds me of a particular verse of the hymn “The Church’s One Foundation,” which I have sung since childhood and which I have included below. This Sunday I will be praying for you, Cherie, Rector Yates, the faithful flock of The Falls Church, and the six other parishes as you end one season and begin another.

Though with a scornful wonder
Men see her sore oppressed,
By schisms rent asunder,
By heresies distressed:
Yet saints their watch are keeping,
Their cry goes up, “How long?”
And soon the night of weeping
Shall be the morn of song!