Both the 7.6 million United Methodist Church and 2 million member Presbyterian Church (USA) will ponder anti-Israel divestment at their governing conventions later this year.   Specifically targeted are 3 firms that ostensibly profit from the “occupation:” Caterpillar, Motorola, and Hewlett-Packard.

Perhaps with this battle in mind, Friends of Sabeel-North America (FOSNA), a chief anti-Israel advocate among churches, has hired a Presbyterian minister as its new organizer to reach a “wider Christian audience.”  Sabeel’s describes his goal as addressing the “increasing awareness among American Christians and the Palestinian Christian community and the principles required for a ‘just peace’ between Israel and Palestine.”

In other words, the organizer will rally U.S. Christians initially for anti-Israel divestment and more ultimately against any special U.S. friendship for Israel, with the final goal of deconstructing Israel as a primarily Jewish democracy.

The new Sabeel organizer is the Rev. Donald Wagner, who recently served at Eastern Mennonite University in Virginia.   He previously headed Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding, which seeks to disengage U.S. evangelicals from their traditional pro-Israel stance.  In the 1980s he headed the Palestine Human Rights Campaign.   Seemingly Rev. Wagner combines Mainline Protestant, evangelical and Anabaptist connections that will greatly enhance his anti-Israel work.

Mainline Protestant elites have been anti-Israel since the 1967 war.  They identify Israel as a Western, pro-U.S. power and colonialist victimizer, against which faithful Christians must labor under a Liberation Theology theme.  In contrast, evangelicals remain the largest pro-Israel demographic in America.  But increasingly the Evangelical Left is persuading evangelical elites (especially in academia and missions groups) who are anxious to disassociate from the Religious Right to identify with purportedly oppressed Palestinians.  And Anabaptists, such as Mennonites and Brethren, are pacifists and traditionally few in number.  But both left-leaning Mainline Protestants and evangelicals increasingly embrace the Anabaptist tradition to justify their contempt for America and its “empire.”

The Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center in Jerusalem understandably wants to deploy FOSNA as its U.S. arm to appeal to all these key American religious constituencies.  Rev. Wagner seems ideal for the task.  ”I am very pleased to have Don leading FOSNA’s programs,” explained Sabeel founder and chief the Rev. Naim Ateek, who is a Palestinian Anglican clergy.  “He demonstrated long ago his passion for justice for oppressed Palestinians, and he has been committed ever since.”

British Chief Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks visited with Pope Benedict XVI last month in Rome and defended Europe’s Judeo-Christian heritage, including the “religious roots of the market economy and of democratic capitalism.”   In a speech there, he urged that Jews and Christians to work together to “help Europe recover its soul.”

Separately, in a speech to the British House of Lords, Sacks denounced increasing persecution of Christians by radical Islam, warning that the “fate of Christians in the Middle East today is the litmus test of the Arab Spring.”  In Rome and in London, he was more outspoken than are many of Europe’s often muted church officials, who typically fear to defend their faith, their culture, or their persecuted brethren.

“If Europe loses the Judeo-Christian heritage that gave it its historic identity and its greatest achievements in literature, art, music, education, politics, and economics, it will lose its identity and its greatness,” Sacks warned during his Rome speech.  “When a civilization loses its faith, it loses its future. When it recovers its faith, it recovers its future. For the sake of our children … we – Jews and Christians, side-by-side – must renew our faith and its prophetic voice.”

Sacks admired and was encouraged by the warm response the Pope received during his 2010 visit to mostly non-religious Britain, when “everyone was amazed that the interest was so acute and so widespread.” The Chief Rabbi’s visit to Rome clearly was an attempt to strengthen Jewish and Christian voices in defense of historic Western cultural, political and economic principles.

Unlike left-leaning church officials in the West who simplistically equate free markets with sterile materialism, Sacks offered a more balanced perspective.  He critiqued Europe’s secularism and materialism while pointing out that biblical religion created the foundations of prosperous market economies.  “When Europe recovers its soul, it will recover its wealth-creating energies,” he said.  “But first it must remember: humanity was not created to serve markets. Markets were created to serve humankind.”   In contrast, the Religious Left, both in Europe and America, prefers to believe that markets are innately wicked and must be usurped by coercive national and international regulation.

Of course, much of the Religious Left is itself deeply materialist, preoccupied by the redistribution of wealth but unconcerned about the transcendence and timeless principles that facilitate justice and prosperity.  But appropriately for a spiritual leader, Sacks pointed to the primacy of the “soul” of Europe.

“We are very concerned obviously with the soul of Europe, I mean Europe was built on Judeo-Christian foundations, even the market was built on Judeo-Christian foundations,” Sacks told Vatican Radio.  In his Rome speech, he described the West’s democracy and prosperity relying on biblical understandings of “dignity of the human individual,” respect for property rights and labor, job creation over charity, and creation of wealth so as to become “partners with God in the work of creation.”   He noted that ancient rabbis “favored markets and competition because they generate wealth, lower prices, increase choice, reduced absolute levels of poverty, and extend humanity’s control over the environment, narrowing the extent to which we are the passive victims of circumstance and fate.”

Last month’s United Nations’ climate change summit in Durban, South Africa generated plenty of its own hot air. But it mercifully failed to commit to any meaningful successor to the already failed Kyoto Treaty.

Of course, UN bureaucrats still proclaimed success. After all, one more international conference had generated reams of paperwork, likely cost millions of dollars, and provided another sumptuous setting and continued deep purpose for professional diplomatic busybodies.

But global warming activists, including the Religious Left, discerned the disappointing reality. Their crusade to stymie global economic growth through apocalyptic warnings of a climate catastrophe has lost steam and credibility.

“The global family is now in a perilous race against the clock on climate change,” complained a worried Church World Service, the $83 million dollar relief arm of the National Council of Churches that gets nearly half its funding from the U.S. government. “The lack of necessary action is mortgaging the lives of millions of people in developing nations,” it claimed, sternly warning this failure “threatens the future of the earth.”

Actually, the cooling of the global warming crusade is a great deliverance for “people in developing nations” whom the Religious Left claims to champion.  Climate change inspired restrictions, intending to prevent any expansion of carbon producing industry, would effectively keep poor nations poor.  Environmental extremists, motivated by apocalyptic scare scenarios, always believe the planet is facing disaster absent vast reductions of human activity.  For them, animals and inanimate objects always are more important than improving standards of living for people.

Church World Service accurately and with frustration observed that the Durban summit “once again dangerously postpones meaningful action.” Durban paid lip service to continuing still unfulfilled Kyoto goals. And countless billions were theoretically pledged in international transfer payments without any specific means for their collection. Durban’s homage to global warming was as ethereal and gaseous as the atmosphere itself.

Usually having boundless faith in the UN and international diplomatic forums, the Religious Left perceptively realized the Durban summit was a flop.  Supposedly a new climate agreement will be attained by 2015 and enacted by 2020. But the deadline may as well be 2120. “Church World Service is concerned that the negotiators have pushed decisive action many years ahead,” the federally funded relief activists bewailed. “In view of the history of negotiations and current practice, it is not at all certain that even this longer term process will be successful.” Right.

Emblematic of the Religious Left’s melt-down is a recently vandalized “gay” Nativity scene at a Claremont, California United Methodist Church.  This scene on the avant garde church lawn, under a star of Bethlehem, included an opposite sex couple, and two same-sex couples, with a sign declaring “Christ is Born.”

Naturally a protest against the vandalism was scheduled in what one indignant community member described as an otherwise “progressive college town.”  According to The Los Angeles Times, Claremont United Methodist Church’s previous Nativity displays have not “shied away from controversial topics, including a scene of war in the Middle East, a mother and baby in prison and a depiction of the U.S./Mexico border fence.”  Another Nativity scene portrayed a homeless family.

“Christ’s birth in a stable had a lot to do with poverty and being marginalized,” Pastor Sharon Rhodes-Wickett explained to The Times. “What this church has tried to do through these scenes is say, ‘What would that look like today?’”

Deconstructing the founding historical event of Christianity, at Christmas time no less, to advocate for various multiculturalist political causes is typical of today’s Religious Left.  For it, the Incarnation of God in Jesus Christ is insufficient.  So the significance must be amplified by an anti-war statement or a blast against U.S. immigration policy.

United Methodism in Claremont, California and throughout the West Coast, so faithfully progressive, has been imploding for over 40 years.  All the radical inclusivity apparently got too boring even for true leftist believers. More significantly, the Religious Left has evinced a national melt-down over this last year that potentially bodes well for the future of American religion.

The rush to embrace Occupy Wall Street was ultimately discrediting to the Religious Left.  Actual Occupiers nationally probably never numbered beyond the thousands or perhaps low ten thousands.  It was primarily a fad for recent college graduates in between jobs, heralded by aging baby boomers in the media nostalgic over the now ancient protest movements of the 1960s.  Protesters of 45 years ago at least had grand causes.  The Occupiers offered only ennui and resentment.  Ultimately, few Americans, especially church-going ones, identified with whiney complaints from bedraggled campers despoiling parks and disrupting traffic. But Religious Left elites, from Sojourners chief Jim Wallis to Episcopal Church Presiding Bishop Katherine Jefferts Schori, could not help themselves from spiritually blessing the Occupation as a virtual Second Coming.

The equally fervid embrace by religious elites of Big Government and the entitlement Welfare State during the Summer 2011 federal debt ceiling crisis will also prove discrediting.  In July, representatives of the National Association of Evangelicals, National Council of Churches, Jim Wallis’ Sojourners and U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops formed a “Circle of Protection” ostensibly around the needy but actually around the engorged federal bureaucracy.  They decried in the name of most American church members any limits on spending for social welfare or entitlement programs, by implication backing higher taxes and military cuts as the only morally acceptable remedy for burgeoning debt.  Their meeting with President Obama clearly aligned them with the White House and against Congressional Republicans.  Such partisanship aside, no realistic American believes the debt crisis can be addressed without serious limits on growth by entitlement and social welfare spending.   Equating true faith with unlimited Big Government will be remembered unfavorably by history and by American church goers.

The multiculturalist Left wants to dilute Christmas into a vacuous, stern celebration of Winter, divorced from culture and religion.  Not content with banning crèches, trees and carols, anti-Christmas zealots are often even threatened by Santa Claus.  The transcendent authority behind Christmas, even in its commercialized form, is an unwanted challenge to the Left’s preference for all authority vested in the state and its secular clerisy.

Fox News has delighted in lampooning the ongoing absurdities of the “War on Christmas,” which sometimes even include banning green and red from classrooms.  The American Family Association, a para-church group, has also challenged the anti-Christmas campaign by affirming companies that affirm Christmas.

Naturally the Religious Left is troubled by this defense of Christmas, especially by Fox News or conservative Christians, both of whom it despises.  So the Religious Left has decided that the cultural defenders of Christmas are instead betraying Christmas by actually promoting commercialism.

“The Fox News Christmas proffers the constant drumbeat of war, the reliance on military solutions to every conflict, the demonizing of our enemies, and the gospel of American dominance,” insists Evangelical Left activist Jim Wallis of Sojourners at his most rhetorically lugubrious.

A colleague of Wallis at Sojourners has even labeled Fox News the “Headquarters of the Lord’s Resistance Army against the War on Christmas.”

Although this colleague noted that anti-Christmas crusaders were even warring against the display of Poinsettias,  Wallis is still blind with rage against his least favorite cable network:  “The Fox News Christmas heralds the steady promotion of consumerism, the defense of wealth and power, the adulation of money and markets, and the regular belittling or attacking of efforts to overcome poverty.”

Wow, who knew that Christmas, as supposedly defined by Fox News, is so cosmically evil?

Wallis claims that Fox is leveraging its “War on Christmas” campaign to discredit “atheists, agnostics, liberals, leftists, progressives, and separation of church and state zealots — i.e. Democrats.”  The long-time activist for leftist causes, and recipient of George Soros philanthropy, has his own politicized definition of Christmas.  Jesus was born in an “occupied country” under an “imperial power,” adding “political context” to the Christmas season.  “In Jesus Christ, God hits the streets,” Wallis announces.  “That Jesus was born poor…radically defines the social context…and clearly reveals the real meaning of Christmas.” Wallis rejoices that Jesus will “end our warring ways.”

The National Council of Churches (NCC), which still hasn’t figured out it sided with the wrong side during the Cold War, recently visited the isolated communist outpost of Cuba.   And the NCC discerned the major problems between Cuba and the U.S. are America’s fault, specifically the trade embargo and the U.S. imprisonment of five Castroite spies.

Tut-tutting over all the “challenges” that divide the U.S. and Cuba, the NCC’s general secretary lamented:  “And hanging over all of this is the U.S, embargo/blockade and the imprisonment of the Cuban Five, both of which our American churches have forcefully condemned.” Preaching in the Episcopal Church cathedral in Havana, the Rev. Michael Kinnamon regretted “continued U.S. animosity toward Cuba.”

More accurately, the U.S. sustains “animosity” against the 52 year old tyranny that has impoverished and imprisoned the Cuban people.  But the NCC, like most of the Religious Left, has never been able fully to differentiate the tawdry remnant of the dictatorship Fidel Castro built from the people it oppresses.  The only oppressor meriting NCC condemnation is the U.S.    The NCC delegation met with Cuban President Raul Castro, brother of the founding tyrant.  No doubt there were plenty of hugs.

The NCC’s November junket to Cuba included the Presiding Bishop of the U.S. Episcopal Church, along with a United Methodist bishop, top officers of the Presbyterian Church (USA), the President the United Church of Christ and a Greek Orthodox bishop, among others.

At a press conference in Cuba, Kinnamon admitted Cuba-U.S. relations “are complicated in an election year.” And he boasted that “since 1968 the position of the NCC (on normalization) has been strong and consistent, taken out of our faith position of reconciliation.”  The NCC stance for U.S. diplomatic and trade ties to Cuba might be defensible if it were willing to espouse human rights for Cuba. But even during some of Fidel Castro’s worse repression of religion, the NCC has remained largely silent.  Indeed, Castro’s dictatorship was across the decades virtually the only repressive regime in Latin America the NCC would not condemn.  Only rightist repression has ever seriously merited the NCC’s concern.

Although apparently not mentioning the plight of any religious dissidents who suffer in Cuba, the NCC delegation did loudly protest the U.S. captivity of the “Cuban Five” intelligence operatives arrested in 1998. The spies, employed at the U.S. Key West Naval Air Station, were transmitting data on U.S. military activities to Castro’s regime and were also monitoring anti-Castro émigré groups in Florida.  Cuba’s 1996 shoot down over international waters of a “Brothers to the Rescue” plane, killing two, originally prompted U.S. surveillance of the “Cuban Five,” who were believed to have facilitated the shoot-down.

In a news release, the NCC nonchalantly complained the “Cuban Five” were imprisoned “even though” they were merely “monitoring the activities of Cuban expatriate counterrevolutionaries plotting against the Cuban government.”  Evidently spying on anti-Castro activists is one form of espionage the NCC is willing to back. Kinnamon complained:  “They should not have been tried.”  Evidently medals and first class tickets home would have been more appropriate, to the NCC chief’s way of thinking. He and the rest of the NCC group met with the heroic wives of the “Cuban Five.”  Kinnamon announced:  “We ache with them for this situation that weighs so heavily.”

Hoping to excite liberal Baptists with leftist political activism and resentment over the “strident” i.e. “conservative” Southern Baptist Convention, Jimmy Carter hosted a New Baptist Covenant II (NBCII) jamboree in Atlanta in November, with satellite meetings across the nation.

Only about 250 people showed up on each of several days of NBCII at Second-Ponce de Leon Baptist Church in Atlanta, according to Associated Baptist Press. “We had hoped for a larger attendance,” admitted one organizer.

The first New Baptist Covenant gathering had attracted over 15,000 in 2008.  Organizers of NBCII reportedly hoped more than 30,000 would participate nationwide this time.

My colleague Jeff Walton attended a satellite gathering at a large Washington, D.C. Baptist church, where all of 5 or 6 people sat in a cavernous sanctuary watching Jimmy Carter appear on a giant screen.  Apparently a 300 seat Philadelphia church was nearly as empty.  There were 9 satellite stations for liberal Baptists to gather and watch the former president, along with Welfare State champion Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund and liberal evangelist Tony Campolo, former spiritual counselor to President Bill Clinton.

Famously prominent at his Baptist Church in Plains, Georgia, Carter has for many years condemned the theological and political conservatism of the Southern Baptist Convention.  He has even loudly and publicly “resigned” several times from it, even though only congregations and not individuals are members of the Convention.

Although touted as one of America’s first evangelical presidents, Carter’s theology and politics more closely resemble the stances of declining, leftist-dominated Mainline Protestant denominations.   Arguing that the relatively robust, 16-million member Southern Baptist Convention should become more like the spiraling Episcopal Church is difficult, of course.  But Carter rarely shies from Don Quixote causes.

Speaking at the Atlanta church in an interview format with PBS religion journalist Bob Abernathy, Carter recalled his Carter Center’s admirable work in nearly eradicating the guinea worm parasite in Third World nations.  But Carter quickly got political, praising Occupy Wall Street and bemoaning the “division in the country between the rich and powerful” and the less privileged.   “The powerful people who control government have to be reminded from the bottom that things need to change,” Carter announced, according to my colleague, whose accounts are here and here.  One Carter solution: “I think tax rates ought to be raised for the top 1 percent.”

Already excited about Cornel West’s joining her faculty, New York’s Union Seminary president Serene Jones enthusiastically announced that her campus will continue to cheerlead for the Wall Street Occupiers after their abrupt ouster from Zuccotti Park.

“At Union Theological Seminary, we stand in full solidarity with the protestors,” announced Serene Jones in her Huffington Post column. “Questioning the status quo, as well as defying entrenched authority, is one of The Bible’s most powerful themes, especially as it is revealed through the example of Jesus Christ.”

Union was once one of America’s most prestigious Mainline Protestant seminaries.  Early in the 20^th century, if not before, it bracingly sided with liberalism against traditional theology.  John D. Rockefeller, Jr., himself a devout liberal Baptist enthusiast for the Social Gospel, lavished patronage on Union.  Its faculty once hosted nationally renowned thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr.  But already in the 1930’s a visiting German student, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, found Union’s watered down, social justice Protestantism to be languid.  The future anti-Hitler conspirator looked to Harlem’s black churches for more vibrant faith.

In recent years, as liberal Protestantism has imploded, Union has lost its prestige and struggled with finances.  Capturing religious leftist Cornel West from Princeton University certainly is a coup.  And touting Wall Street occupiers maybe will revivify Union, which like other leftist institutions, has yearned for an energizing cause ever since the Vietnam War.

Union’s president explained in HuffPo that “flying banners is fine” but not sufficient in these dire times.  So Union trained 45 students to act as round the clock “protest chaplains” for Wall Street Occupiers, “be they anarchist, capitalist, or no “ist” at all.”  Student activists were put through an “activist drill” that included a “seminar on non-violent resistance, a course on the legal rights of occupiers, and training on how to be pastoral presence in the midst of chaos.”

Jones noted that “so far” no Union students have been arrested or suffered physical harm.  She wondered if this will change after the November 17 ouster of the Occupation from the Zuccotti Park.  “I’m fearful the protests may turn ugly,” she confessed.  “But my heart also leaps as I envision every student at Union Theological Seminary as a budding Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who will have the fearless spiritual discipline of staying present.”

Stephen Sizer, author of "Christian Zionism: Roadmap to Armageddon"

Certain that U.S. support for Israel depends on pro-Israel American evangelicals, the Religious and Evangelical Left are targeting evangelicals with their latest arguments for discrediting Israel.

This week, “Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding” (EMEU) convened at a San Francisco Presbyterian church to hash out their latest anti-Israel strategies.  Ostensibly the problem as they identify it is that too many U.S. evangelicals are wedded to Old Testament promises of a perpetual Promised Land for the Jews.  Anti-Israel activists like to showcase besieged Middle East Christians as arguments against a Jewish Israel, as though Judaism rather than radical Islam were their chief threat.  They also like to portray Christian Zionists as motivated by apocalyptic end-times scenarios.

Church of England priest Stephen Sizer, author of Christian Zionism: Roadmap to Armageddon, was an advertised featured speaker at the EMEU conference.  So too was Tom Getman, a former official with World Vision, a global evangelical relief group, and former staffer to the late liberal Republican Senator Mark Hatfield.  Earlier this fall, Getman helped introduce a Washington preview for a new anti-Israel film aimed at evangelicals called “Little Town of Bethlehem.”  The film highlights anti-“occupation” Palestinian activist Sami Awad, whose Holy Land Trust advocates resistance to Israeli power through non-violence.  Also featured is a former Israeli Defense Force helicopter pilot who renounced his military work because of potential harm to Palestinian civilians.  This ostensible call to pacifism is powerfully appealing to left-leaning evangelicals who already think world peace demands a disarmed America.

Also promoting the film is Lynne Hybels, wife of Chicago-area Willow Creek megachurch pastor Bill Hybels.  She praised “Little Town of Bethlehem” in a September Huffington Post column.  “Nonviolent revolutions overthrew the British in India and the violent defenders of apartheid in South Africa,” she enthused. “It shaped the Civil Rights movement in the US. Of the thirteen nonviolent revolutions in communist nations that occurred in 1989-90 only one failed–in China.”  Hybels, who is also affiliated with Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding, hopes that non-violence can similarly bring down Israeli power.  She boasted that she and her pastor husband had recently screened the film in their own home, helping to create a “new kind of global conversation.”

“Little Town of Bethlehem” follows in the wake of “With God On Our Side,” a more rambunctious frontal assault on Christian Zionism featuring, among others, Rev. Sizer and evangelical Wheaton University Professor Gary Burge, who is also affiliated with “Evangelicals for Middle East Understanding.”  In an EMEU video promo, Burge recalled large audiences at his evangelical campus for both films. And he declared “momentum is on our side,” as he cited evangelical publishers now willing to criticize Israel.  He also cited Jimmy Carter as an “evangelical Christian” who has helpfully promoted a new, more anti-Israel perspective. Burge likewise praised Palestinian Anglican cleric Naim Ateek of the notoriously anti-Israel, Jerusalem-based Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center.

Egged on by a supportive video from Robert Redford, the Religious Left rallied with environmentalists on Sunday afternoon outside the White House to oppose the Keystone XLL pipeline from Canada. This ostensibly sinister pipeline would carry tar sands oil from Alberta, Canada to Texas oil refineries.

More oil for America?!  Texas oil refineries!?  More jobs in the oil sector?!  Naturally the Religious Left, which hates oil (while still depending on it as much as everybody else) and hates Texas even more, is enraged.

The half million member United Methodist Women eagerly backed the tar sands pipeline protest in Washington, D.C., while also sending an investigator to Alberta, Canada to inspect the origins of the supposed evil.   A traditional icon for this group, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, herself a Methodist woman, has said she is “inclined” to support the pipeline.

More and cheaper oil disrupts the Left’s fantasy of reliance on wind mills and solar panels.  And the possibility that a prairie dog or stretch of sod might be disrupted by pipeline construction far more disturbs the Religious Left than does a future of less and more expensive energy.

Activists hoped for 15,000 to converge on Lafayette Park across the street from the White House to let President Obama know what they really think about the tar sands oil pipeline.  Reportedly about 10,000 showed up.  As rally cheer leader Rose Marie Berger of Sojourners explained beforehand:  “Go to church.  Then take the gospel to the White House.”

Does the Gospel counsel against more oil for America?  The answer is yes for Berger, a leftist Catholic social justice activist and poet whose record, according to her bio, includes “numerous arrests for nonviolent civil disobedience.”  Maybe stopping tar sands oil, and defending the “millions of people and wildlife who will be negatively affected by its presence,” merits one more arrest.

In her Sojourners appeal for demonstrators, Berger plaintively cited the pipeline developer’s previous oil spills and the prospect of “poorly paid” pipeline jobs, as well as “clear-cutting boreal forests, breaking indigenous treaties, irreversibly damaging water quality, and introducing toxic waste into the food chain affecting human health.” If the Religious and Environmental Left had existed 300 years ago, America would never have been settled, which probably would have been just fine with them, though the “indigenous” peoples already here slaughtered wildlife and burned down forests in their own struggle for survival.

In truth, people everywhere, who by definition are polluters and consumers, are a threat to the earth, whose purity is far more important to the Left than is corrupt humanity.  The opponents of the tar sands pipeline would probably prefer that oil not be drilled anywhere, especially in or near America.  But the short term consequence of their goals would be even more oil drilled far more messily in places like Nigeria and Angola, and then expensively dragged through hundreds of miles of ocean by belching oil tankers.  Who will speak for the aggrieved, violated sea life, not to mention the countless millions in third world nations who live amid oil production and far less environmental regulation?

Berger breathlessly quoted a NASA “climate scientist” who was arrested in a previous protest and who apocalyptically warns that tar sands oil essentially means “game over” in terms of “disastrous global climate impacts.”  Berger herself concluded:  “This pipeline is a climate killer.”  It’s quite amazing that a single pipeline should be so potent.  Perhaps more in danger than the earth’s climate is the apocalyptic Global Warming movement, which has essentially melted down to mostly just hot air.  In a recession wracked world economy, few nations are deeply interested in further indulging the Global Warming alarmists, whose scare scenarios continue to unravel upon reflection and study.

The Canadian Evangelical Left has blocked former President George W. Bush from speaking at evangelical Tyndale University in Toronto, deriding him as a virtual war criminal.

An online petition by faculty and students, fueled by reporting by the Toronto Star, evidently ensured the event’s cancellation last month.  One Tyndale professor, in his own anti-Bush op-ed, implicitly accused the former president of “blasphemy” and “heresy’ for daring to have employed scriptural language in citations of dreaded American exceptionalism during his administration.

“As no one has been convicted, I do not label anyone a war criminal,” disingenuously wrote Professor Arthur Paul Boers through clenched teeth.  “Yet George W. Bush ought to be investigated and held to account for: wrongful abduction and imprisonment without trial; employment of torture; tens of thousands of civilian casualties in Iraq (conservative estimates total 100,000); other civilian deaths in Afghanistan and Pakistan; invading Iraq on mistaken if not fraudulently deceptive grounds; gross human rights abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere; and greater instability around the globe.”

Having himself lived in the U.S. shortly after 9-11, Professor Boers experienced first –hand America’s “fear and hatred” that was “couched in Christian terms” under Bush. The poor professor even toned down his Canadian accent, apparently lest all the American hate turn against him.  It’s likelier that nobody minded his accent but quite a few Americans were offended by his snotty tone towards their country, if his op-ed is any example.

“I saw during the Bush years in the U.S. that most Christians chose to remain silent in the face of pretty serious abuses of power and distortions of faith,” Boers afterwards told The Huffington Post.  “For me silence is not an option.”

But Boers’ snottiness evidently is not isolated at Tyndale.  A petition demanded a “full apology” from the university’s president, who admitted Bush is a “lightning rod figure,” for the effrontery in having invited Bush. The petitioners intemperately indignantly explained:  “We believe that no amount of new money can justify profiting from a former figurehead whose policies led to the murder of thousands of innocent civilians while invoking the name of Jesus.”

The Bush event was not even to have been on campus but at the Toronto Hilton and sponsored by a billionaire patron of the school.   Apparently Bush went ahead and spoke at another event, at the same hotel, sponsored by the same billionaire, and attended by some school employees. But Tyndale University College and Seminary itself seemingly was preserved from direct tarnish by the angel of death from America.

Franky Schaeffer is the son of the late, highly influential evangelical thinker Francis Schaeffer, who helped shape the modern conservative evangelical movement. The son boasts he was himself a co-founder of the Religious Right. But he since has denounced Christianity as “stupid,” writes bitter tell-all books about his parents, and ferociously attacks conservative religionists as the virtual root cause of all American evils.

A blogger for The Huffington Post, young Schaeffer is now faulting religious conservatives for facilitating Wall Street greed. He’s imploring the Wall Street Occupiers to “protest the root source of America’s tilt to the far unregulated corporate right.” For Schaeffer, the next logical step is to demonstrate “outside mega churches, Evangelical publishing houses, [and] religious organizations that lead the ‘moral’ crusades against women and gays and all the rest.”

Will the Wall Street Occupiers heed Schaeffer’s frenzied call and next park their tents, blankets and anti-capitalist placards in the parking lots of suburban mega churches? It seems unlikely. But Schaeffer’s demand fits with the crazy Left’s sometime fixation on demonizing opponents based on class and religion.

Thirty years ago, young Schaeffer joined his father in critique of the secular Left. Today, he faults religious conservatives for the “insanity and corruption” that plagues America. In 2008, he endorsed Barack Obama and publicly demanded John McCain renounce his ostensibly “hate-filled supporters.”  More recently, he’s slammed Obama’s critics as “racists.” All the energy he once channeled into what he derides as “fundamentalist” Christianity is now furiously focused against all the perceived representatives of his parents’ faith.

In his recent appeal to the Wall Street occupiers, Schaeffer accused “Evangelical fundamentalism” of enabling the sinister top 1 percent’s “rape” of the remaining 99 percent. According to his mythology, perhaps based on Thomas Frank’s 2005 book What’s the Matter with Kansas?: How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, evangelicals’ delusional focus on “values” issues beguiles them into voting against their own supposed economic self-interest. Their “bogus (and hate-driven) ‘morality’ litmus tests of spurious red herring ‘issues’ from abortion to school prayer and gay rights” inveigles clueless evangelicals to vote for Republicans “serving only billionaires instead of the rest of us.”

Ecumenically, Schaeffer also tars Roman Catholics as likewise “fundamentalists” who have “delegitimized the US Government and thus undercut its ability to tax, spend and regulate.” So Catholic bishops, like evangelical mega churches, have also tricked their followers into voting against their “own class and self-interest.” Naturally, Schaeffer prefers not to acknowledge that traditional Christians and other people of faith, unlike the dialectic Left, do not typically identify by “class interest.” In contrast with the Left’s materialist obsession, religious believers view the world through the prism of their faith. Not as naïve as Schaeffer insists, traditional religionists have noticed that the supposed champions of their “class” not only disparage their faith’s morals, they also want further to marginalize faith through Big Government’s constant expansion. While people of faith prioritize churches, families, private charities, and private business, the Left pushes for centralization of power in the coercive and unelected federal bureaucracy.

More revealing of his own politics than of the purported beliefs of his targets, Schaeffer explained that “fundamentalists” had stigmatized government as “evil” and “satanic” because it allows abortion and gay rights. Accordingly, these otherwise progressive “God-fearing folks will always vote for less government and less regulation because ‘the government’ is evil.”  These fools equate Wall Street with “freedom” and government with “tyranny.”  Incoherently, Schaeffer also surmised that Evangelical and Catholic “fundamentalists,” in keeping with their Puritan witch-burning and Spanish Inquisition heritage, seek “fusion of state power and religion through the reestablishment of the ‘Christian America’ idea of  ‘American Exceptionalism.’” So they apparently think government is both “satanic” and ordained by God, in Schaeffer’s telling.

The mangy “occupiers” of Wall Street, with their bracingly radical demands for open borders, abolishing credit rating agencies, and outlawing private health insurance, are uttering what many Religious Left zealots only quietly pray for but don’t dare publicly to proclaim.

Religious Left icon Jim Wallis has announced he will conduct a visitation to the occupiers presumably to bestow his blessing and, he doubtless hopes, to receive their homage.  “The Occupy Wall Street protests make some people nervous, while others scratch their heads, and more than a few grab their sleeping bags and join in,” Wallis carefully noted in his Sojourners.  Himself a former rambunctious street activist who now aims for respectability among middle class church goers, Wallis almost certainly would like to bring a sleeping bag.

Professing to not yet fully understand the movement, Wallis still rhapsodized about “Occupy Wall Street:”

“When they stand with the poor, they stand with Jesus.

When they stand with the hungry, they stand with Jesus.

When they stand for those without a job or a home, they stand with Jesus.

When they are peaceful, nonviolent, and love their neighbors (even the ones they don’t agree with and who don’t agree with them), they are walking as Jesus walked.

When they talk about holding banks and corporations accountable, they sound like Jesus and the biblical prophets before him who all spoke about holding the wealthy and powerful accountable.”

Wallis concluded:  “The Occupiers’ desire for change and willingness to take action to do something about it should be an inspiration to us all.”   He’s going to Wall Street himself to ”visit” with the demonstrators because they are “carrying on the most interesting conversation going on in that city — or any other — right now.”  Undoubtedly Wallis will share his subsequent impartial analysis with his Sojourners readers afterwards.  As to Wallis’ comparisons of Jesus to “Occupy Wall Street,” he never cited any specific instances of the Savior demanding the state coercively redistribute wealth.

A prominent Wallis acolyte is pacifist Evangelical Left activist Shane Claiborne, who likened the Wall Street Occupiers to St. Francis of Assisi, whose feast day is this week.  “One of the quotes attributed to Francis is a simple and poignant critique of our world, just as it was to his: ‘The more stuff we have the more clubs we need to protect it,’” Claiborne wrote for The Huffington Post.  “It does make you wonder if he’d be on Wall Street protesting today.”  Setting up the usual stereotypes about conservative religionists in contrast with St. Francis, Claiborne complained:  “We’ve seen Christian extremists burn the Quran, blow up abortion clinics, bless bombs, baptize Wall Street, and hold signs that say ‘God hates fags.’”  Note that Claiborne, like Wallis and most on the Religious Left, will never deploy such harsh verbiage against even al Qaeda aligned Islamists.  They evidently aren’t as threatening as conservative Christians.

Just in time for the impending United Nations vote on Palestinian statehood, two prominent Evangelical Left thinkers and activists released their public salvo against Christian Zionism this week, called:  “An Open Letter to America’s Christian Zionists.”  They denounced American Christian Zionism as “sinful” and evidently want these sinners to repent at the altar by touting Palestinian statehood.  They also warn of possible divine, even nuclear, judgment upon Israel if it doesn’t accommodate the Palestinians.

The two letter writers were David Gushee and Glen Stassen of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good. Gushee teaches at Mercer University and authored the “Evangelical Climate Initiative” in 2006 and the “Evangelical Declaration against Torture” in 2007, both key exertions to shift evangelicals politically leftward. Gushee also heads Evangelicals for Human Rights, whose nearly exclusive “human rights” concern is U.S. “torture.”

Stassen is a prominent pseudo-pacifist at Fuller Seminary in California, who famously claimed during the 2004 presidential election that abortions had increased under George W. Bush. “Economic policy and abortion are not separate issues,” he then intoned, repeating a Democratic Party talking point that Big Government was the right remedy for abortion.  This claim of higher abortion under Bush was later shown to rely on incomplete data.  Stassen serves on the board of Jim Wallis’ Sojourners.

Disengaging evangelicals from their conservative political habits is a chief goal for the Evangelical Left. But revealingly, Gushee and Stassen also implicitly criticized the U.S. under President Obama for opposing the Palestinian statehood demand. They complained of “nonexistent” progress towards peace, which they blame on “Israeli settlements (actually, planned cities and towns on occupied Palestinian land) [that] are eating away at the territory that would belong to any viable Palestinian state.” Having themselves recently led 50 seminary students to the West Bank, they acerbically noted:  “A visitor to the increasingly encircled and truncated Palestinian territories can see these facts on the ground with his own eyes if he is willing to look.”

In their public letter to “Christian Brothers and Sisters,” Gushee and Stassen accused Israel of “renouncing” its commitment to an eventual Palestinian state due to sinister “ideological rather than pragmatic factors” centered on the “belief that Israel deserves the entirety of the land and that Palestinians have no legitimate claim on any part of it.”  They identify this problematic assertion as something called “Zionism,” which is especially “powerful” when “religiously motivated” because God is then presumed to have granted Israel “’title’ to every square inch of the land.”  Ominously, they fretted that Israel’s “religious” Jewish Zionists are growing in numbers.  But Gushee and Stassen targeted their letter not at Jews but at “American evangelical-fundamentalist Christian Zionism,” whose intransigence helps explain “why the United States stands almost alone in the world community in supporting Israeli policies which our international friends generally find intolerable if not immoral and illegal.”  Clearly, Gushee and Stassen prefer America behave more like Europe.

Gushee and Stassen issued their “j’accuse” against Christian Zionists for countenancing the “theft of Palestinian land and oppression of Palestinian people,” fueling “violence” and violating America’s “commitment to universal human rights.” They implored Christian Zionists to recant for the “sake of God, humanity, the United States, and, yes, Israel itself, the Land and People we both love.”  Partly they disputed the belief of some Christians that God promised Israel to the Jews by affirming Abraham as the father also of Christians and Muslims.  And they pointed out that the ancient Hebrews always shared Israel with other peoples.  They asserted that God’s promise of Israel to the Hebrews had “conditionality” based on “moral performance.”  Hence, “Israel’s remaining in the land depends on Israel’s now doing justice to Palestinians and making peace with its Arab neighbors that surround Israel.”  Citing Rome’s destruction of ancient Jerusalem, Gushee and Stassen implored:  “Do you not fear that it could happen again?”

Of course, the Religious Left commemorated the decade anniversary of 9-11 with the usual apologies for America and Christianity while carefully avoiding critique of the virulent Islamist hatred behind the attacks.  Many of the Religious Left events were blandly multi-faith, recalling satirist Florence King’s sardonic comment that the last interesting interfaith summit was the St. Batholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572.

At the Methodist Building on Capitol Hill, a retired United Methodist bishop bewailed America’s seeking to “eliminate enemies in Iraq and Afghanistan.”  He complained of fear and “hate,” but not apparently as it related to 9-11’s killers but instead to Americans who treat President Obama “poorly.”  A Muslim chaplain told of his multi-faith “Caravan of Reconciliation” touring America to denounce “anti-Islam sentiment” and “discouraging anti-Sharia legislative efforts.”  (See full report here.)

Left-wing Catholic group Pax Christi hosted its 9-11 commemoration at Catholic University in Washington, D.C. by featuring Evangelical Left activist Jim Wallis, whom Pax Christi introduced as “one of our nation’s most prophetic and eloquent religious leaders.”  Wallis bemoaned a “total decade of war that took more innocent lives than victims of 9/11.” He complained: “We had a possibility for reflection, but it alluded us because our leaders said, ‘We will erase your vulnerability through our superior force and power.’” (See this report here.)

Soon afterwards, Wallis sped to New York, where he convened a 9-11 press conference at Ground Zero with the World Evangelical Fellowship to denounce supposedly widespread anti-Muslim prejudice in America.  “America must be a safe place for all our citizens in all their diversity,” Wallis pronounced, evidently more worried about anti-Muslim American bigots than about Islamist terrorists. World Evangelical Alliance (WEA) chief Geoffrey Tunnicliffe also warned:  “We have seen increasing fear, insecurity, profiling and racism” in America.  (See full report here.)

At Duke University’s Divinity School in North Carolina, an interfaith 9-11 commemorative panel featured a Muslim chaplain who recalled 9-11 as a “very disturbing wakeup call” for American Muslims.  Previously, they could “practice their religion and blend in,” but now they are “grieving over lost dreams that they lost in 9/11.”  Nobody seemed to grieve as openly for the past and future victims of radical Islam. A Buddhist chaplain speculated that a Buddhist U.S. president perhaps would have shunned war after 9-11.  Duke’s Christian chapel chaplain regretted that Americans needed to believe they could eliminate evil by going to war and “put all rights and wrongs on bin Laden and military leaders.”  (See report here.)

More thoughtfully, Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, convened its own 9-11 remembrance panel featuring theological minds from America’s largest Protestant communion, the 16 million-member Southern Baptist Convention.  Seminary President Al Mohler regretted U.S. inaction towards Islamist terrorism prior to 9-11. “We had already been warned…We had witnessed the U.S.S. Cole…Osama bin Laden had threatened us already…We had been filtering out too much.”  He also noted that after 9-11 the word “evil” reemerged, having previously “been banished by postmodern relativism, by political correctness, by a sort of humanism, by perhaps an American triumphalism…”  Mohler warned:  “We are now culturally and intellectually disarmed in this country to have a discussion about Islam” due to relativism.

In 2004, the Presbyterian Church (USA) touted solidarity with Palestinians by endorsing a “phased, selective divestment” from firms doing business with Israel.  Church elites had underestimated the negative public response, both from American Jews and from more temperate Presbyterians.  After a campaign to revoke divestment, including a feisty luncheon appearance by former CIA Director James Woolsey, the denomination’s 2006 General Assembly revoked divestment.

But the church’s anti-Israel boll weevils won’t accept “no” for an answer.  A PCUSA so-called Mission Responsibility Through Investment (MRTI) committee is now recommending a new, more selective anti-Israel divestment targeting Hewlett-Packard, Caterpillar, and Motorola.  Next year’s General Assembly will vote up or down on behalf of the about 2 million member denomination, which has already lost over a million members thanks to clueless church elites.

Naturally, PCUSA elites are not advocating any special sanctions aimed at Iran, North Korea, Sudan or any truly loathsome regimes whose crimes include persecution of Christians.  Israel remains the only serious target of their chronic ire.

“It has been seven years since the General Assembly named [Caterpillar] as a company for possible divestment,” rejoiced the Israel Palestine Mission Network, an anti-Israel caucus group within the PCUSA seeking a “just peace in Palestine.”  The Network’s spokesperson declared:  “I think it is tremendous, and high time that this action be taken. I am proud and happy that MRTI has finally taken this important step.”  This Network thinks Presbyterian divestment from Caterpillar and 2 other firms will help remedy “injustices being routinely inflicted upon Palestinians as collective punishment in the West Bank and Gaza” by Israel.  A beaten down Israel supposedly will fulfill prophesy promising that “swords will be beaten into plowshares in Israel and Palestine so that all God’s people may dwell together as brothers and sisters in peace.”

More likely, enhanced international pressure on Israel, if effective, would only embolden further Palestinian radicalism and accelerate demands for even greater concessions.  The ultimate end-game for anti-Israel diehards is the deconstruction of Israel as a meaningful Jewish democracy.   Whether all anti-Israel, PCUSA “peace” activists fully understand this ultimate goal is an open question.  Radical church activists who undermine pro-Western regimes have a decades-long tradition of facilitating even greater conflict and the enthronement of tyranny. In these sad scenarios, such “swords,” rather than becoming “plowshares,” often weaponize into even wide instruments of mass destruction.

Much of official Washington, D.C., including the president, will attend the National Cathedral’s series of interfaith events on September 11 called “A Call to Compassion.”  Unlike the New York 9-11 commemoration, which is excluding all clergy and formal prayers, the D.C. events at least acknowledge America’s spirituality.

The National Cathedral is facing either bad luck or divine displeasure; recent earthquake damage and a collapsing crane have forced the cathedral to move its 9-11 events to a nearby synagogue and the Kennedy Center, with a spokesman explaining the cathedral is going “on the road.” More seriously, the National Cathedral’s seeming view of America’s religious demographic is skewed from reality. Secular elites, and their Religious Left fellow travellers, love to imagine that America is multi-culturally, evenly divided among Christians, Muslims, Buddhist and Hindus, with some allowance for Jews.  Most surveys show about 75 to 80 percent of Americans identifying as Christian, about 2 percent as Jewish, under 1 percent as Muslim, and fewer as Hindu and Buddhist. (Some Muslim groups claim that Muslims don’t answer polls and that their actual numbers are closer to 2 percent.) About one third of Americans identify as evangelical Christian.

Apparently the National Cathedral will not include any evangelicals or non-Episcopalian Protestants in its “A Call to Compassion” 9-11 remembrance. It reportedly will include the president of the Islamic Society of North America and a Muslim musician, along with a Buddhist nun, a Hindu priest, a rabbi, and a Roman Catholic bishop. The National Cathedral is an Episcopal church that styles itself as “spiritual home for the nation.”  It is often the stage for great civic pageants, such as Ronald Reagan’s funeral, and the post 9-11 prayer service featuring evangelist Billy Graham in one of his last major national appearances. Both were attended by all of America’s living presidents, except Nancy Reagan represented her ailing husband at the 9-11 service. The post-9-11 event included a wide range of Christian clergy as well as a rabbi and imam. Graham, then already an octogenarian with over 50 years of public life that included ties to every president dating to Truman, masterfully preached a moving sermon that was inclusive yet still deeply Christian. As America’s most prominent clergyman, he showed that even dreaded evangelicals can behave at great national events.

The National Cathedral seemingly believes that such an important public event can only be entrusted primarily to clerics of its own dwindling Episcopal denomination. Over the last 40 years, America’s population increased by 50 percent, while the Episcopal Church’s membership declined by 50 percent.  But the shriveling communion still has many beautiful buildings and enough well-heeled, WASPs with trust funds who can maintain them.   The nearly all Anglo white denomination is among the least diverse in the nation.  But according to the National Cathedral, “A Call to Compassion” will emphasize “diversity.”  By “diversity,” they seem primarily to mean the Islamic Society of North America, whose own radical ties and controversies call into question its claims to represent most American Muslims.

Richard Cizik, former vice president for governmental affairs of the National Association of Evangelicals

If the Evangelical Left had its way, former Vice President Dick Cheney would be forced to wear a scarlet “T” on his  chest.  The “T” stands for “torture,” of course.

In the wake of Cheney’s unapologetic new memoir, former National Association of Evangelicals’ chief lobbyist Richard Cizik has issued an angry public letter to Cheney declaring: “Shame on you!”

Cizik is mostly upset that Cheney “authorized” the waterboarding of three al-Qaeda operatives involved in 9-11’s mass murder and other global terror.   The waterboarding occurred in 2002 and 2003.   Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri remain in prison, seemingly alive and healthy, awaiting trials.

Whether or not waterboarding or other enhanced interrogation techniques such as sleep deprivation qualify as “torture” is debated of course.   But even accepting the Religious Left’s worst case definition, does the waterboarding of three al Qaeda killers 8 and 9 years ago merit ongoing obsession?

To hear Richard Cizik is to think that the unpleasant initial incarceration of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri qualifies among modernity’s worst atrocities.   Perhaps more temperate religious minds would understand that there has been other, greater suffering in the world over the last decade that may merit at least as much agitation and grief, much less “shame.”

Cizik lost his long-time job representing National Association of Evangelicals several years ago. He afterwards was rescued by the Open Society Institute of George Soros, whom Cizik hailed as his own “King Cyrus,” the biblical Persian monarch who rescued the Hebrews from captivity.  Now Cizik heads the Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, apparently funded by left-wing philanthropy to help shift traditionally conservative evangelicals leftwards. “Torture” by the U.S., but not by any other government, has been a chief Evangelical Left focus since 9-11.

The Religious Left, serenely safe in its mostly middle class protective cocoon within the U.S., likes to imagine that global violence and suffering would end, if only America behaved better. This better behavior largely involves unilaterally disarming, responding to terror and aggression with apologies and dialogue, and paying out larger amounts in foreign aid, preferably to repressive enemy states, in atonement for unspecified past national sins.

A domestic version of this remedy would seek the elimination of crime by emptying all prisons, closing police agencies, and quadrupling the welfare state, with hopes that murder, rape, robbery and burglary then would happily recede in the face of such good will.

The Religious Left plans to commemorate the impending 9-11 tenth anniversary with its usual demands that America simply stop defending itself and instead listen more cordially to our justifiably aggrieved enemies. One of the more esoteric, and popular voices, of the Evangelical Left is Philadelphia “Simple Way” pacifist activist Shane Claiborne. Joining with his patron, ice cream mogul Ben Cohen of “Ben and Jerry’s,” Claiborne plans to host a 90-minute “variety show” to air “questions of violence and militarism… and sharing stories of reconciliation and grace.” The “multimedia presentation” will include other “artists and storytellers.” Will it include sock puppets?  Will there be paper mache mounted skulls, which have adorned anti-war protests for decades?

Claiborne is a leading younger voice for increasingly popular neo-Anabaptists who erroneously insist that faithful Christianity demands complete pacifism. He authored the 2008 book Jesus for President that apocalyptically likened America to the Roman Empire, the Third Reich, and the Anti-Christ. Oddly, repressive and militaristic police states around the world never seem to merit these unflattering comparisons. Not even Saddam Hussein’s murderous reign is portrayed so darkly.

And Saddam Hussein’s Iraq should be very familiar to Claiborne.  As he boasted in a recent column for Jim Wallis’ Sojourners, he was in Baghdad in 2003 with the notorious Christian peacemaking teams. They were focused on ostensibly protecting Iraq from America’s “shock-and-awe” attack.  Of course, they were not interested in protecting Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, who killed far more Iraqis than America ever did.  Claiborne recalled an Iraqi doctor, confronted by a wounded child, confronting Claiborne:  “Has your country lost its imagination?”

Maybe more imaginative dreamers could have explained how better to remove a despot like Saddam, who had already slain hundreds of thousands of his own people and was perfectly willing to slaughter many more. But anti-war pacifists are never willing to suggest plausible alternatives for the real world. Instead, they prefer the illusions of their own moral posturing. “In a country that is going bankrupt as it continues to spend $250,000 a minute on war… it is clear that it is time to re-imagine things,” Claiborne recently penned, explaining his upcoming “Jesus, Bombs, & Ice Cream” extravaganza.

Four Alabama bishops are opposing Alabama’s new law against facilitating illegal immigration.  In their litigation, they align with similar lawsuits from the Obama Administration and the American Civil Liberties Union, which apparently also dispute the rights of states to act against illegal immigration.

Even The New York Times, in an August 13 article, seemed a little surprised by the religious forces against Alabama’s new immigration law.

The 4 religious litigants are two Catholic bishops, an Episcopal bishop, and a United Methodist bishop.   Perhaps their moral case would be stronger if they explained what legal efforts against illegal immigration are acceptable.    But in fact, many religious opponents of immigration law enforcement oppose any meaningful restrictions on immigration.  The Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops, along with the United Methodist Church’s Council of Bishops, has virtually called for unrestricted immigration as a Christian mandate.

Just as the Religious Left demands an unlimited federal Welfare and Entitlement State with a cornucopia of benefits for all U.S. persons, so they largely insist these fathomless benefits also must be open to any global person who can reach U.S. shores.

Last year, the Episcopal Church’s bishops, meeting in Arizona in implicit protest against that state’s anti-illegal immigration law, indignantly declared:  “We categorically reject efforts to criminalize undocumented migrants and immigrants, and deplore the separation of families and the unnecessary incarceration of undocumented workers. Since, as we are convinced, it is natural to seek gainful employment to sustain oneself and one’s family, we cannot agree that the efforts of undocumented workers to feed and shelter their households through honest labor are criminal.”

In other words, virtually no immigration should be illegal, except for, as they grudgingly, admitted:  “drug traffickers,” “terrorists,” and undefined “other criminals.”  Otherwise, apparently, the doors must remain wide open at all times, as “our gracious welcome of immigrants, documented or undocumented, is a reflection of God’s grace poured out on us and on all.”

The United Methodist bishops were even more adamant, declaring in 2010 that “welcoming the sojourner is so vital to the expression of Christian faith that to engage in this form of hospitality is to participate in our own salvation.”  Protestants traditionally believe in salvation by faith, but the Methodist bishops seemed to propose salvation by immigration activism, insisting “we experience redemptive liberation through relationships with migrants in our communities.”  These Methodist bishops reluctantly admitted that “all nations have the right to secure their borders” while deriding U.S. border control as “militarization.”  They further intoned:   “The solidarity we share through Christ eliminates the boundaries and barriers which exclude and isolate.”