Wednesday Miscellanies

A couple of weeks of end-of-semester grading, capped off by a quick trip to Houston to attend a conference, has kept me away from the blogosphere for awhile.

I've been jotting down lots of blog-worthy items over the past few days, though. Here are a few of them:

- I spent this past weekend at The Woodlands United Methodist Church near Houston. I was there for the annual AFTE Christmas Conference for John Wesley Fellows, which is a gathering of evangelical Wesleyan scholars and graduate students who are committed to the renewal of the Wesleyan tradition in the UMC. We were the guests of the  Rev. Ed Robb III, who is the chairman of the board at AFTE and senior pastor at the Woodlands UMC. My participation in the John Wesley Fellowship program has been one of the most rewarding of my graduate student career, and I was reminded of just why that is the case when Dr. Robb recounted the story of how AFTE came into being. At our gathering on Friday evening, Dec. 11th, he described AFTE's dual focus as, "A deep concern for spiritual renewal in the United Methodist Church, and a conviction that such renewal results from solid theology." I couldn't agree more.

- President Obama's acceptance speech for the Noble Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway, has gotten a lot of attention. David Brooks of the New York Times believes it cements a foreign policy approach emblematic of Niebuhrian Christian realism. The Washington Post's Kathleen Parker calls Obama's speech his "most presidential," and describes it as "a triumphant expression of American values and character." My question: Assuming there is a point where Christian discipleship and American values diverge, what is that point?

- The United Methodist Council of Bishops has issued a pastoral letter entitled, "God's Renewed Creation: A Call to Hope and Action." Here's a link from my own bishop's website where you can download the letter. Its subjects include pandemic poverty & disease, environmental degradation, and the proliferation of weapons & violence. I haven't read the letter yet but look forward to doing so over the Christmas holiday.

- A thought on doctrine in the UMC: It's not that the Church simply has disagreements on doctrine. It's much more dysfunctional than that. The real problem is that we don't even know how to have a conversation about the place of doctrine in the life of the Church.

- Yesterday I was diagnosed with ulnar neuropathy. It's highly uncomfortable. And it's apparently gonna take some physical therapy. Ulnar neuropathy is a common ailment of serious bicycle riders. Of course, I haven't been on a bicycle in years. It's also a common ailment of serious laptop users. My doctor said she calls it "graduate student syndrome." Blech.

Teleprompting prayers

There are two kinds of preachers in the world: those who write out their pastoral prayers beforehand, and those who pray extemporaneously.

Ok, so that's a bit of an oversimplification. But I've found that people (both pastors and laity) can have strong opinions one way or the other.

Those who think all prayers should be offered without preparation often argue that the Holy Spirit works best 'in the moment,' and that preachers should open their hearts to pray on behalf of the congregation in the way the Spirit directs them in a particular worship setting.

On the other hand, those who believe in written prayers tend to emphasize that the Holy Spirit works just as effectively through the kind of careful discernment that goes on in the pastor's study, as the prayer is being written with the confession, petition, praise and thanksgiving of the congregation in mind. (I also recently heard a preacher cite Matthew 6:7-15 as an argument against extemporaneous prayer, although I think that is a bad reading of that text.)

In my own ministry, I've done both. Recently, in fact. During our Holy Week services, I used a lot of written prayers, simply because there are beautiful ones out there related to the great moments of Palm Sunday, Maundy Thursday, Good Friday, and Easter. Because they use images and allusions from Scripture in such beautifully poetic fashion, I find that offering liturgical prayers in specific seasons of the Christian year can express the church's praise and thanksgiving better than I could ever hope to do.

But my standard practice for pastoral prayers week in and week out is to pray extemporaneously. I do that in part because my congregation pauses in the middle of worship to offer individual witnesses of praise and to lift up prayer concerns. I write notes about those testimonies of praise and prayer during the service and then incorporate them into my prayer. I have found that this allows me to pray a prayer that is more fully of the whole congregation. And it also ensures that the pastoral prayer speaks to the particular joys, thanksgivings, concerns, and petitions of the church in that given week.

I've been thinking about the issue of how we pray in worship since I read a column on Barack Obama's use of a teleprompter by the Washington Post's Michael Gerson. In his column, Gerson pushes back on those who deride Obama's dependence on the teleprompter, arguing that the "careful sorting of ideas and priorities" that written remarks reflect, whether at news conferences or in full-length speeches, is an essential part of the craft of governing.

Gerson is a former presidential speechwriter, of course. So he is hardly unbiased. But what about introducing the teleprompter to church? Sermons, even pastoral prayers, could be scrolled down a couple of screens set at covenient angles in front of the pulpit! And then we could have the best of both worlds - the appearence of extemporaneous eloquence with the grounding of a carefully crafted text.

How is it that nobody's doing this yet??

Obama: Our first Gen-X President

On Tuesday, Barack Obama will be inaugurated as our nation's 44th president. Born on August 4, 1961, he's just 47 years old. He will be the first African-American president in the history of the U.S., the significance of which is touched on poignantly by Bishop Woodie White in his annual birthday letter to Martin Luther King, Jr.

In my new United Methodist Reporter column, I ask the question, "Is Obama our first Gen-X president?" I believe the answer to that question is yes. It is true that in I have written about my skepticism of considering Obama a full X'er in the past - both here and here. But I've changed my mind.

In one sense, the Baby Boomer generation is a demographic reality. Between 1946 and 1964, the number of live births per 1,000 people in the U.S. population spiked. The U.S. Census Bureau considers those years to be the parameters on the Baby Boomers for that very reason.

But in another sense, a generation is a cultural concept that does not bend readily to hard statistical parameters. As I have argued elsewhere, a generation is ultimately defined by shared experience. And in that sense, Obama is very much a Gen X'er.

For instance, the Boomer experience is defined in so many ways by the period from the mid-1950s through the 1960s: in national politics from JFK (the dashing hero) to Nixon (the dark villain), in the Civil Rights struggle from Brown v. Board of Education to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., in 'revolutions' from music styles to attitudes toward sex and gender, with all of it overshadowed by the geo-political tensions associated with the struggle against communism - the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and (most pointedly for the Boomers' enduring generational personality) Vietnam.

Obama is too young to have been affected firsthand by any of these Boomer experiences. Instead, his personality was shaped by a specifically Generation X childhood: growing up in an era of increased globalization, the shrinking world (in terms of travel, education, and religious pluralism, in addition to the economy), the rapid advance in communications technologies (cable television, evolution of the telephone, various audio and video recording devices, and the personal computer), the race and gender issues of a post-Civil Rights and post-sexual revolution period, and the reality of increased instances of divorce and broken homes, families with two parents working outside the home, and the image of the 'latchkey kid.' He was not, of course, affected by all of these in equal measure. Some of the features of Gen X upbringing were more a fixture in the 1980s (when I mostly grew up) than the 1970s (when Obama mostly grew up). But his life was touched by many of them. And in my book, that makes him an X'er.

Two points to note about this, and both of them have to do with the way Obama himself is changing the definition of Generation X. The first is the date. Noted Gen-X author Jeff Gordinier suggests in X Saves the World that Generation X should be dated from around 1961 because of the birthdates of Slackers filmmaker Richard Linklater (b.1960) and novelist Douglas Coupland (b. 1961). I've always thought Coupland deserved front rank in terms of who defines Generation X because he wrote the novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture that firmly entrenched the term in pop culture. With Obama's birthdate also in 1961, it seems reasonable to consider the question of Generation X's beginning date settled.

The second point is around how Obama is trying to give a certain characteristic Gen X'ers share a greater prominence. If one of the iconic images of Baby Boomers is that of 1960's protest (a mass event involving lots of angry young people chanting things), then the iconic image of Generation X has to be what I am doing right now: sitting alone in my living room, trying to make a difference but doing so in a more individual and less 'partisan' manner. In lots of ways, it seems like Gen X'ers are less partisan people in general, and the technological isolation that we experience has made us hungry for community (though in more localized and less 'mass' ways than our predecessors). That, in my mind, is a lot of what Obama represents. We've all heard his message about 'change,' and I usually take that to be transcending the partisan rancor of his Boomer predecessors. If you haven't read his memoir - Dreams from My Father - you should. It is a book about a deeply personal journey whose early life was shaped by many of the forces that X'ers have typically struggled with, and I would argue that it is also a book about searching for community. It's Gen X through and through.

Will he be up to the task? No way to tell for sure, but I suspect he will be. E.J. Dionne and David Brooks were on NPR yesterday evening talking about meeting with him recently, and both the liberal Dionne and the conservative Brooks spoke in very complementary terms about his demeanor, knowledge of issues, and approach to meeting with people from both sides of the aisle.

An election day story

Gertrude Baines voted for Barack Obama yesterday, just like more than 63 million other Americans. No big deal, right?

Well, it's no big deal except that Gertrude is 114 years old.

She's the third-oldest person in the world, born during the presidency of Grover Cleveland. An African-American, Gertrude is actually the daughter of freed slaves. The significance of her vote, perhaps more than any other cast in the nation yesterday, should not escape us.

The Los Angeles Times tells the story of Gertrude's vote in this story. Check it out. Great stuff.

My Obama problem

The presidential election is less than two weeks away, and I still don't know who I am voting for - or even whether I'll be voting. I've struggled with whether to bring this up in a public way on my blog. But a civic forum at Duke Divinity School a couple of nights ago convinced me that I should, and so I am asking for your help.

Please read the following with an open mind (even if you don't agree with me on the issue in question). And if you can help me to reason through this, I would greatly appreciate it. Let me also say that I am revealing a lot more of my political views than I would normally do in so public a setting, so please take that into account if you choose to respond.

My Obama problem is with the issue of abortion. I am a pro-vita Christian, which means that I am ardently pro-life in all of the social/moral issues that tend to confront us. (In this blog post last year, I proposed the term 'pro-vita' as a way to identify those Christians who are both anti-abortion and anti-death penalty, issues that typically divide liberals and conservatives. I would also add an extreme reluctance to engage in war, which I understand to be the very minimum in Jesus' admonition, "Blessed are the peacemakers." Maybe that just makes me Catholic. Whatever.)

During my time as a student at Vanderbilt Divinity School, I was converted to the anti-death penalty position and demonstrated publicly against it in Nashville. I have been generally pro-life on the abortion issue for many years, but during my time at Duke, this fairly passive pro-life position has been transformed so that I view the abortion issue as indicative of the whole Christian view on the sanctity of life (That is, I tend to think that Christians who rather blithely describe themselves as pro-choice are either: a) unreflective regarding the doctrine of creation; or b) simply inconsistent in their Christian self-understanding due usually to an idolatrous loyalty to the radical privatization of American individualism and the consumerist commodification of all things, including babies).

For what it's worth, I am grateful to both Vanderbilt and Duke for the impacts they have had on me regarding issues of life, and I think it the particular ways they influenced me are a testament to those schools' particular strengths.

Here's how I understand my Obama problem. As a Christian, I see one of the greatest duties of politics as the amelioration of suffering for the citizens of the body politic. (A more optimistic view might say that politics should promote the flourishing of life, but my understanding of the pervasiveness of sin is too great to allow me to make such a statement.) At this point in history, it seems like the Democrats are poised to be much more effective than the Republicans at this task. For one, I think the legacy of the Bush administration (and the complicity of the pre-2006 Republican Congress in its policies) discredits the Republican Party generally. And secondly, I find the McCain/Palin campaign's proposals to help us recover (from war, from economic disaster, from environmental degradation) to be fairly unconvincing.

On the contrary, I think the Democrats are more in touch with some of our pressing problems, including healthcare, the environment, the economy, and U.S. relationships with other nations. Plus, I like Obama. True, I wish he had more national political experience. But I think he reasons well (one of the greatest political skills required of a president), and I think he will surround himself with those who can help make up for some of his areas of inexperience (e.g., his selection of Joe Biden to bolster his understanding of foreign policy). You can go down the list of issues, and in this election at least, I will check off with the Democrats on just about every issue - save one.

But that one is a big one. Depending on whether you go with the CDC or the Guttmacher Institute figures, there are between 850,000 and 1.3 million abortions in the United States each year. And if you regard each one of those abortions as the taking of human life in a way that transgresses the law of love as given to us by Christ, then the issue of abortion looms at least as large as any other single political issue. At the civic forum at Duke earlier this week, one of the professors present said that the interaction between secular politics and the church should work to make both spheres more aware of the outcast and marginalized among us, to the end that they are seen as human beings. I tend to agree with that statement, especially as it relates to the most marginalized persons among us - those in the womb, who are so defenseless that they cannot even cry out in anguish.

The reason this becomes a very pressing issue in this election has everything to do with the Supreme Court. The Court's two oldest members are among its most liberal - John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If they retire in the next four years (and it seems almost certain that Stevens will), and they are replaced with conservatives, it could be mean the end of Roe v. Wade and the return of the moral debate around abortion to state legislatures, where it belongs. There the witness of Christians can actually make a difference in the fight for life (in the legal realm).

[On the likelihood of the next president having the opportunity to appoint several justices to the Supreme Court, see this NY Times editorial. The Times is clearly not where I am on the issue of Roe v. Wade, but I agree with it on the point that the next president may have a significant impact on the direction of the court for years to come. For the record, the attitude of the most conservative justices on the Court on the issue habeas corpus has been extremely troubling to me, as we have seen in the legal twilight zone surrounding the Guantanamo Bay detention facility. In June, the Court upheld habeas corpus for enemy combatants, indicating that it viewed the right to habeas corpus to be universal rather than just confined to U.S. citizens. I agree with that opinion, the passage of which - admittedly - was dependent upon the Court's liberal members.]

In the prospect of judicial appointments lies the real issue, for me, because Obama would probably be the most ardently pro-choice president we have ever had. (For a general op-ed piece on Obama's extreme pro-choice position, see this Michael Gerson column.) Obama's role opposing the Born-Alive Act in the Illinois State Legislature in 2002 and 2003 is generally well-known, but if you aren't aware of it, read this good article written by Robert George and Yuval Levin. It is a shocking story, told with factual detail.

George and Levin explain Obama's opposition to the proposed Born-Alive Act while he was a state senator in Illinois:

"As his original 2002 statements [in the Illinois State Legislature] make clear, [Obama] sought to defeat the Born-Alive Act because he recognized that it bears at least implicitly on the larger question of abortion in America. He seemed to realize that the logical implication of protecting the child born alive after an attempted abortion is that abortion involves taking the life of a child in the womb, and that acknowledging that, even at the extreme margins of the practice of abortion, could put the legitimacy of abortion itself in question. Therefore, Obama chose to defend the widest possible scope for legal abortion by building a fence around it, even if that meant permitting a child who survives an abortion to be left to die without even being afforded basic comfort care."

John McCain might well replace Justices Stevens and Ginsburg with judges who would rightly see Roe v. Wade as a perversion of the U.S. Constitution (though I admit that is not a foregone conclusion). Obama, on the other hand, would almost certainly replace them with justices at least as liberal as they are. That means that the 2008-2012 period stands as particularly monumental in the history of the abortion issue in this country. And if you think the saving of so many human lives is of paramount importance, that has to impact how you view this election.

And that's what has got me in a quandry. I welcome your comments (and advice).

What (or who) is driving history?

The presidential campaign season has become an all-consuming affair for many in this country (and particularly for the national media). We were distracted by the Beijing Olympics for awhile, but now that those have passed and the Democratic and Republican National Conventions have redirected our attention, it seems that all eyes are trained on the issue of who our next president will be.

I have friends who are wholehearted Obama supporters and friends who are wholehearted McCain supporters. My own column work and blogging makes me interested in the genre of op-ed writing, so I read a lot of columnists from both the liberal and conservative persuasions as well. (Come to think of it, that would make for an interesting blog post in and of itself: Who are the best op-ed columnists out there?). Inevitably, as we draw closer to the election, the extremist tendency in everyone's views seems to get dialed up.

And here's what gets me about the points of view that I hear in person and read in print -- in the polarized atmosphere of the campaign season, people on both the left and the right tend to view their own party's candidate through rose-colored glasses while seeing the other's side's guy as a laughable, almost-inconceivably bad choice for president. In the process, the Democrats think a President Obama would restore dignity to the Oval Office, repair our damaged reputation overseas, bring in universal healthcare, balance the budget, end the war, and rewrite the tax code to be more just. Meanwhile, Republicans thing a President McCain would reform the damaged Republican party, enable true bipartisan legislative work, protect us from Islamic extremism, face down a resurgent Russia, keep spending low and taxes lower, and make government less intrusive. As the expectations of each side for its candidate get higher, the demonization of the other side gets more intense.

I had a conversation with a good friend today who reminded me of a frequent refrain in the work of John Howard Yoder: The real force driving the world is not the United States of America; it is not freedom & democracy; it is not capitalism; and it is certainly not Barack Obama or John McCain. It is, rather, Jesus Christ. And the body politic that Jesus leads is no nation-state. It is the church.

I don't want to suggest that your vote is not important. And I don't think it is inconsequential that Obama might make a serious difference in the healthcare crisis in this country, or that a McCain appointment to the Supreme Court might bring us one step closer to ending the abortion holocaust in this country. But it is vitally necessary that Christians put this presidential campaign into the proper perspective.

In He Came Preaching Peace (1985), Yoder writes,

"[T]he primacy of Christians' loyalty will show in our sense of ultimate values. In the minds of many serious people, what really matters about human history is the creation of institutions which will create and distribute material abundance, and will guarantee human rights. This is what we read about in the history books. These things do matter. And generally Christians do much to help achieve them. But what matters most, the real reason that God lets time go on, is his calling together of his own people through the witness of the gospel. Not buildlng and protecting a bigger and better democracy, but building the church is God's purpose; not the defeat of communism, or of hunger, but the proclamation of his kingdom and the welding of all kinds of men and women into one new body is what we are here for. Kings and empires have come and gone in times past and shall continue to come and go until the day of Christ's appearing. For Christians to seek any government's interest - even the security and power of peaceable and freedom-loving democracy - at the cost of the lives and security of our brothers and sisters around the world, would be selfishness and idolatry, however much glorified by patriotic preachers and poets.

"Not only in Abraham's time was it a testing of faith to be called by God to abandon all else out of loyalty to that 'city whose builder and maker is God' (Hebrews 11:10). Even more today, when nationalism has become a religion for millions, will the true depth and reality of the Christian profession of church people be tested when they must choose between their earthly and their eternal loyalties.

"What is our allegiance? It is to that people 'elect from every nation, yet one o'er all the earth.' Our nationality? Christian."

Obama: Gen X or not?

In some ways, it's an interesting question. Obama was born in 1961, which by most calculations is at the tail end of the Baby Boom generation.

Susan Ferrechio wrote an article in the Washington D.C. Examiner presenting the point of view that Obama is, indeed, the first Generation X presidential candidate. I actually have a neat connection to this article - I was interviewed for it! And while I'm not 100% sold on the idea that Obama is an X'er, I do find some of Ferrechio's points to be persuasive.

In my own writing on the parameters and characteristics of Generation X (which you can read here, for example), I have suggested that Gen-X really starts at about 1965 and goes until 1982. That allows its beginning to match up with the end of the baby boom (which is, in some sense, a measurable demographic characteristic). But Generation X itself is really more of a cultural concept than a statistical category, so any parameters of its beginning and ending are going to be inexact (Ferrechio, for instance, defines Gen-X as those born between 1961 and 1981, which allows her to include Obama in it).

One way of thinking about Obama's place in Generation X it is to look at his two chief rivals for the presidency - Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, and now John McCain in the general election. In some ways, those two are quintessential Baby Boomers from the political left and political right. Clinton swung left after her mid-1960s flirtation with Barry Goldwater; together with husband Bill, she epitomizes the New Democrat of the Baby Boom generation, who consolidated the political and cultural gains of the 1960s and 70s and then moved to the center (particularly on economics) as a strategy to get elected.

McCain, on the other hand, was one of the young men who marched off to Vietnam and had his life determinatively shaped in the process. Regardless of his reputation as a maverick (and his advocacy for such non-conservative policies as campaign finance reform), McCain is more or less a Baby Boomer Republican whose career was largely influenced by Reagan conservatism (i.e., free market economics and a hawkish foreign policy).

As I point out in an earlier blog post, Obama has the distinction of growing up too late to be affected by Vietnam in his formative years. And he was too young for his personality to be forged in the crucible of the Civil Rights struggle as well. His rhetoric is heavy on the language of 'change', even if it's not always clear what he means by that. And he places emphasis on wanting to get past the very partisan divisiveness that the Boomer left and right have been embroiled in for the past several years. So in many ways, Obama's candidacy signals a cultural shift, even if he belongs chronologically to the last few years of the Baby Boomer generation.

A lot of this is just a matter of interpretation. As with all cultural notions, there aren't really any statistics to employ. I'll admit that, if Obama wins in November, his very presidency will undoubtedly have a big impact on how Generation X is defined. At any rate, it's good food for thought during while the Democratic National Convention is going on.

Obama as the Democratic nominee

As the results come in for the final Democratic primaries of the season, CNN is projecting that Barack Obama is going to have enough delegates to push him over the top in the race for the Democratic nomination. That means that Senator Obama is, in fact, the presumptive nominee from the Democratic Party for president of the United States. That, in and of itself, is a hugely historic moment. Whether you consider yourself a Democrat, a Republican, or something else, the fact that Senator Obama is going to be the nominee for president in the general election is (as Wolf Blitzer just mentioned) an example of "history unfolding" in our nation's long political story.

This blog is called Gen-X Rising, and it purports to comment on issues concerning Gen-X'ers and their connections to faith, church, and community. One of the CNN commentators made a really interesting comment just a few minutes ago when he compared Sen. Obama to recent presidential candidates like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and George W. Bush. He identified all those guys as 'Baby Boomers' and he said something to the effect that "Obama is something different. He comes after all those guys." The commentator pointed to all the questions about the Vietnam war that have followed those other candidates throughout the years, and he suggested that, because such a question does not apply to Obama (who was too young for Vietnam), he is in another category. This commentator did not mention Generation X, but that is the group he was presumably talking about.

That leads to a question: Is Barack Obama a Baby Boomer or a Gen-X'er?

Most estimates of the years that encompass the Baby Boomers look at those people born from around 1946 to 1964/1965. Unlike the difference between Generation X and the Millennial Generation (which is purely based on a distinction of perceived cultural separation and the standard measure of 18 to 20 years for a generation), the Baby Boomer generation is actually based on demographics. When American G.I.'s returned from World War II, there was a sharp increase in the number of births in this country (a trend that probably had as much to do with the end of the Great Depression as it did with the end of World War II). And that trend continued until the mid-1960s (when divorce rates increased and widespread contraception had an impact on the birth rate).

Barack Obama was born on August 4, 1961. That means that, by any measure I've ever seen of the generational boundaries, he is a Baby Boomer. He's a very late Baby Boomer, and he is certainly a Boomer who was too young to be affected by the military draft or by Vietnam. But he's still clearly a Boomer.

Then again, there's something that seems really Gen-X about him. I think this is what the commentator on CNN was picking up on. There is something about Obama that doesn't seem to fit with the Clintons, Bushes, and Gores of the political world. Whether it's his race, his personal history, the crowds he attracts, or his "Change we can believe in" message, there's just something that just seems to identify Sen. Obama with Gen-X'ers (and even Millennials).

In exactly this way, I think this quality of Obama marks him as a transitional figure in the history of the United States. It is, in some ways, similar to the role that Bill Clinton played in 1992. At that time, you had a Greatest Generation figure (and World War II veteran) - George Bush the elder - as the sitting president. He had followed a generationally similar figure in Ronald Reagan. But Bill Clinton was not from the Greatest Generation; he was clearly a Baby Boomer. And the country's choice of him over Bush was a sign of the passing of the torch, in a generational sense. When Clinton was elected over Bush, the leadership of the country had passed from the generation that won World War II to the Boomers.

Now here is Obama. Like I said, he is still a Baby Boomer. But look at the clear cultural differences between he and Hillary Clinton (and especially John McCain). Chronologically, he is a Baby Boomer. But influentially, he is Gen-X'er and Millennial through and through. And so I think this night marks something significant in the history of the country. In terms of presidential politics, the Baby Boomers didn't even last a generation (just 16 years, assuming Obama can beat McCain in November). Now it is time for the Generation X'ers to lead.

(God help us.)

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[Update: If you'd like to read CNN's next day report on Obama capturing enough delegates to secure the nomination, you can read it here.]

A brother in Christ

In an earlier post, I commented on various ways in which religion intersects with the lives and candidacies of various Democrats and Republicans running for president. There, I mentioned a particular e-mail getting passed around about Sen. Barack Obama. My understanding is that there are actually various versions of this e-mail, but the gist of it is that Sen. Obama may be a closet Muslim and that his church in Chicago advocates a dangerous version of black power.

This all seemed to me like it must be a bunch of hooey, so I started trying to do a little investigating. And I was helped by the fact that my brother - an Episcopal priest - actually attended Sen. Obama's church, Trinity United Church of Christ, last summer. When I mentioned the scurrilous e-mail to him, my brother told me that he had actually used his visit in a sermon. If you'd like to read it, the sermon can be accessed here.

Sen. Obama also did an interview with Christianity Today recently, in which he addresses the e-mail slanders and speaks frankly about his Christian faith. For anyone who believes that one's faith relates to one's character in a deep way (and I do), it is a helpful interview.

This is not an endorsement of Obama's candidacy. I just think that the type of attacks that go on in high-stakes national politics are ugly, and the attacks Obama has been receiving are probably the ugliest of this campaign so far. (If you'd like a good analysis of those attacks, including some recent comments by Bill Clinton, check out Bob Herbert's NY Times column here.) When you see people saying things designed to appeal to our most base nature, it calls for people of good will to speak out.

Plus, Sen. Obama is our brother in Christ. Just like Gov. Mike Huckabee is our brother in Christ, and Sen. Hillary Clinton is our sister in Christ, and so on. We can and should criticize these people for the policy positions we think are wrong, but we should not abide accusations of secret heretical belief that have no basis. It's cruel, and it's wrong. And it is exactly what the e-mail campaign against Obama amounts to.

I don't want to sound too overboard here, but I think this issue boils down to the following: No Christian should accuse another of heresy or apostasy without a solid reason for doing so. And if accusation is made, it should be done publicly and through appropriate ecclesiastical channels. Now the originator(s) of the religious slanders on Obama may not be Christians, but there have been plenty of Christians passing them around as a way to sow doubt in other voters' minds. That's just as wrong as making the accusations in the first place. We should take care to treat one another as brothers and sisters in Christ.