The BBC has interesting pictures of Russian criminal tattoos. Many are anti-Communist and some anti-Semitic; some feature the word “Bog”, which means “God” but is also an acronym for “I shall rob again”. Number five is actually an icon of the Virgin Mary tattooed on someone’s chest, apparently for talismanic purposes. The pictures are from Danzig Baldaev’s new Russian Criminal Tattoo Encyclopaedia.
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The law requiring a daily act of Christian worship in English (sic – laws are different in other parts of the UK) schools is under question by chief education inspector David Bell. Asks Bell:
How many people in this country, apart from schoolchildren, are required to attend daily worship?
But changing the law with bring to an end to a great British tradition – of hypocrisy. The fact is that most schools ignore the law, and have done so for years. As someone who went to school in the 1970s and 1980s I was lucky enough to see the decline first-hand. First, the hymns were dropped, as increasing numbers of kids could manage (or were inclined) only to mumble through the unfamiliar and obscure words – while a few would even stand defiantly with their mouths closed. One time the Headmaster of my high school (a well-meaning Evangelical) called a special assembly (causing panic and the widespread flushing away of contraband) to berate pupils for not saying the Lord’s Prayer, leaving the final “Amen” in particular sounding very ropey, to no effect. Assemblies changed from worship to evangelism, but bringing in various bishops and evangelists to preach to us failed to turn the tide. Indeed, guitar-wielding Evangelicals and camp clergymen tended to evoke mainly laughter. What’s more, it was quite clear to us that only a minority of the staff were actually religious themselves, and often the assembly would have no religious content if a non-pious teacher was leading it. One time a staff member even ended his talk with “right. Oh, do you want a prayer? Nah…”
Meanwhile, the number of students whose parents exercised their right not to have their kids take part in the assembly on religious grounds increased. Making a lone Jehovah’s Witness stand outside the room was bad enough, but when several students from ethnic minorities were excluded the whole idea of the “school assembly” became a rather distasteful joke.
Teacher friends tell me that school assemblies today tend to consist of general moralising rather than religious worship or indoctrination, although a local religious figure might be invited in to chat from time to time. A few Christian Religious Studies teachers use the event as a bully pulpit (1), but they tend to annoy the other teachers as much as the children.
It’s an interesting fact that a country that has compulsory religious education and an established church is actually a lot less religious than the USA.
******
(1) A friend of mine who teaches recalls seeing a teacher eating cornflakes at the school assembly. He then told the pupils: “If you told your parents that I was eating cornflakes here today, they wouldn’t believe you. That’s just like the disciples telling people after the Resurrection, but it was true”. I don’t think even Josh MacDowell has tried this Argument from Cornflakes.
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Released after 18 years in prison for revealing to his fellow Israelis and the rest of the world that Israel possessed nukes, Mordechai Vanunu announced that
he had been treated harshly because of his conversion to Christianity and he no longer had any secrets to publish.
The latter seems likely – the Israeli restrictions placed on him would only punish him after he revealed something new, and Israel would hardly risk that if he knew anything important. One would like to see some evidence that his harsh treatment was down to his religion (and he’s not just claiming abuse by anti-Christian guards, but something more systematic), but his identification as a Christian does highlight the existence of Christian Israelis beyond the Israeli Arab minority.
According to a Jerusalem Post report from last year (discussed by Caspari) there are
7,000 “Jewish converts to Christianity” in Israel, half of whom are Russian.
Also:
250,000 Jews have embraced Jesus over the last 25 years.
This first figure seems rather low. Russians make up a sixth of the Israeli population, and a good number of these are either religious or nominal Orthodox Christians with some Jewish ancestry, who have decided to take advantage of the Law of Return to move away from Russia (often helped by Christian Zionists keen to move Jews to the country where God wants them to be, like it or not); many others are Roman Catholic, in part prompting the recent creation of a Hebrew-language Roman Catholic bishop. Israel, worried about the birth rate of Israeli Arabs, turned a blind eye to the religious backgrounds of many of these Russians, but according to the ultra-Orthodox Shas party, the Russians are
hundreds of thousands of Gentiles flooding the land with pork, prostitution, impurity and filth.
Although there are Israeli Jewish members of other Christian denominations (Vanunu is Anglican), most of the rest are Messianic Jews, who worship Jesus in a Jewish idiom and keep Jewish traditions. Although hated by the likes of Shas and disliked by many other religious Jews, their Christian Zionist beliefs make them at least partly acceptable, and Israeli Messianic Jews enjoy freedom of religion.
As for non-Israeli Jewish converts to other religions, despite the Russian experience these are not eligible for automatic Israeli citizenship; the Falashamura of Ethiopia have only recently been admitted, and other individuals have had problems. There is also anti-missionary legislation: in 1977 a law was passed making it an offence to provide an advantage to someone to facilitate their conversion; a harsher law proposed in 1998 failed to get through.
Meanwhile, Palestinian refugees refused entry back into Israel proper remain more than a little annoyed that converts to Judaism (including 80 indigenous Peruvians rushed through in 2002) are allowed to live in Israel while they remain in exile…
UPDATE (24 April): I’ve just learnt that Thursday’s Maariv newspaper ran with the headline in Hebrew “Mordecai Notzri”, meaning “Mordecai – Christian”, and showed Vanunu with two Anglican clerics. This headline does not appear the English language edition and so it would seem that the Vanunu case is being used to bash Israeli Jews who are Christian. It also suggests that Vanunu’s accusation should not be dimissed out of hand.
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The Saraya wal Mujahideen, one of the groups fighting the US in Fallujah, have a new strategy (well, new for this particular group, anyway) for striking a blow against the occupiers: er, attacking other Iraqis:
The group threatened to destroy churches in return for U.S. attacks on mosques, assassinate or kidnap priests, and target Christians if killing of Muslims did not stop.
Luckily, Bush’s people have all the tact needed to ensure the Islamic fundamentalists do not get widespread support: a
March 3 letter, which Bush-Cheney Campaign Chairman Marc Racicot sent to new campaign charter members in Florida, lauded the Republican president for “leading a global crusade against terrorism”.
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Alabama Justice Roy Moore is to present the keynote address at a prayer breakfast to “honor Israel and Pray for the Peace of Jerusalem”, according to a press release carried by ASSIST Ministries. This is not the New York event discussed back in March, but a Memphis-based affair that has been going on for 23 years. The release tells us that Moore is
this amazing man, this faithful servant of America, who regularly hears from the God of the Ten Commandments.
(Some may be hoping that God of the Ten Commandments tells him to run against Bush, as rumoured)
The organiser is Ed McAteer, a Memphis businessman with longstanding influence in the Christian Right. McAteer’s gushing over Moore is not surprising, given that Moore (along with Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee) had pushed for him to be US Ambassador to Israel in 2001. McAteer explains that
The principal purpose of our breakfast is to show our unconditional love and solidarity with Israel and the Jewish People.
Well, not quite so unconditional, it turns out. One of the attendees will be Herbert Zweibon, Jewish head of Americans for a Safe Israel. In a statement reported by Ekklesia today, Zweibon complains that
In order to shore up his flagging political fortunes, Israel’s Prime Minister has betrayed the Zionist principles on which he served the nation as general and on which he ran for public office.
That’s right: Sharon is just too damn liberal. It doesn’t matter that he’s managed to get Bush to reverse 35 years of US policy on Israel, to support settlements in the West Bank and to reject the right of Palestinian refugees from Israel proper to return to their homes. The fact is that even talking about any sort of compromise is blasphemy: God has a particular plan for Israeli Jews, and any Jew who fails to go along with that plan, whether anti-Zionist, “soft-Zionist”, conservative or even (as in Sharon’s case) reactionary is a traitor. Israelis have a religious duty to expand Israel to its Biblical dimensions, and whatever bloodshed this may cause on either side is beside the point. Forget “blessed are the peacemakers”: holy war is inevitable, and at the end of it all those Jews still alive will see Jesus return and will convert. And Israel doesn’t need to worry, because, as LaHaye and Jenkins describe it, Jesus will dispatch all Israel’s enemies – including horses:
Men and women soldiers and horses seemed to explode where they stood…It was as if the very words of the Lord had superheated their blood, causing it to burst through their veins and skin…Even as they struggled, their own flesh dissolved, their eyes melted and their tongues disintegrated
(As an aside, Bush’s backing for Sharon’s plan does back up the view of those, such as The Revealer, who have said that Bush is less apocalyptic than some have suggested)
As well as various Israeli diplomatic figures, the breakfast in Memphis will bring together Christian Zionists such as Adrian Rogers, Gary Bauer, Thomas Ed Steele, and Bill McCartney (founder of the Promise Keepers), all of whom are vehemently against either a Palestinian state or equal rights for Palestinians in a bi-national state.
The event will also be graced by Holocaust survivor. I’m sure that none of the Christian Zionists will be tactless enough to say what I know many of them think: that the Holocaust was God’s punishment for the Jews’ rejection of Jesus, before He restored them to Israel.
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While the most-reported foreign Christian groups in Iraq concentrate on annoying local Eastern Christians in lieu of not being able to convert many Muslims, it’s refreshing to read about a Christian group with another agenda. Christian Peacemaker Teams is an international concern based in Chicago, and brings together Mennonite, Quaker and Brethren traditions in volunteer “violence reduction” activities and assisting groups such as Doctors Without Borders. Oddly, the mainstream media seems to be ignoring them, despite the fact that their members were eyewitnesses to the latest incursion into Fallujah. As reported by Ekklesia:
Christian peacemakers in Iraq have reported harrowing scenes including the killing of women and children by US forces following an overnight humanitarian mission to Fallujah…Marine snipers were “shooting at anyone who moves”.
The report includes accounts of a hospital being taken over as a military base, cluster bomb injuries and an ambulance coming under attack from US snipers as it tried to reach a woman in labour. However, according to a second report, the CPT is now moving out to Amman:
CPT’s “most trusted Iraqi partners” have urged the team to leave, saying that the current situation will make it impossible for the team to engage in normal, honest engagements with Iraqis or fulfill their mission to deter violence.
They have also suggested that CPT’s presence might actually endanger their local Iraqi partners in the emerging violent chaos.
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A man named Kurt Kuersteiner is offering $500 to anyone who can provide him with the rare African-American edition of Jack T. Chick’s tract “A Demon’s Nightmare”. According to a Reuters report (read via Religion News Blog):
Since the Chick collecting base is still in its infancy, it’s a great opportunity to get in on the ground floor, Kuersteiner said.
Chick, of course, is both an icon of American popular culture and an appalling religious bigot. His early works contained villainous hooked-nosed communists and evolutionists, although he later dropped the anti-Semitism in favour of attacking Catholics, about whom he wove elaborate conspiracy theories with the help of an alleged renegade Catholic priest called Alberto Rivera. His other targets have included liberal Christians, Muslims, Hindus, homosexuals and really just about any form of religion, cultural expression or scientific theory that is not in full agreement with Fundamentalist Christianity, and as such are part of a satanic conspiracy. He has also provided a platform for the likes of Rebecca Brown, a mentally disturbed individual obsessed with demons, witches and the evils of vegetarianism.
What many Americans might not be aware of is his global reach. His tracts and comics are sold in Africa (1); I’ve also seen them in Jerusalem and quite frequently in London, especially in Pentecostal churches. As it happens, I once met Jack Chick’s British importer, an ancient and personable Scot who runs a Christian bookshop in Edinburgh. He was very pleased when I bought a whole bundle of Chick’s “Crusaders” comics, and told me that Chick’s previous importer had fallen out with Chick because they thought he was too liberal in his depiction of women. To the right of Chick is a very scary place to be…
Chick has also recently made a movie about Jesus, but unlike Mel’s effort it has gone straight to DVD, no doubt because of the Jesuits and homosexuals who control Hollywood…
(1) Paul Gifford, Christianity and Politics in Doe’s Liberia, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, pp. 105 n. 16, 269 n. 105
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The Washington Times gets Medieval (well, Late Antique to be more precise) on John Kerry:
Bishops have been denying Communion to politicians since A.D. 390, when Ambrose, the archbishop of Milan, excommunicated Roman Emperor Theodosius I for killing 7,000 unarmed Greeks during a tax rebellion.
The Times fails to add that Ambrose and Theodosius had earlier clashed over the Emperor’s decree that a synagogue in Callinicum should be rebuilt at Christian expense just because a Christian mob had burnt it down. However, it does note that
Theodosius had to endure a ceremony of public penance before Ambrose agreed to accept him back into the church.
Meanwhile, Archbishop O’Malley told the Boston Globe (quoted via Christianity Today) that
a Catholic politician who holds a public, prochoice position should not be receiving Communion and should on their own volition refrain from doing so. The church presumes that each person is receiving in good faith. It is not our policy to deny Communion. It is up to the individual.
So we won’t be seeing Kerry standing barefoot in the snow for three days outside the Archbishop’s Residence.
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The Washington Post reports on several controversies over Indian history and religion: James W. Laine’s book on the 17th century Hindu king Shivaji; Paul Courtright’s 1985 book on the god Ganesha, which waxes Freudian over his trunk; and Wendy Doniger’s alleged “eroticised” view of Hinduism. All three scholars have faced threats and, in Doniger’s case, a thrown egg. The article introduces “New Jersey entrepreneur” Rajiv Malhotra, who brought Courtright’s old book to the attention of Hindus, and “former Microsoft engineer” Sankrant Sanu, whose critique of Doniger’s entry on Hinduism in Encarta apparently led to the article being replaced.
Encarta has tinkered with its entries in the past to suit its audiences (giving differnt accounts of Waterloo for British and French readerships; asking genocide scholar Helen Fein and Armenian expert Ronald Grigor Suny to revise material disliked by the Turkish government), but Sanu’s deconstruction of Doniger’s article, in which he compares her approach with how other religious traditions are treated by Encarta, is actually very strong. The new article for Encarta was, it seems, written by Arvind Sharma, Birks Chair of Comparative Religion at McGill University and previously Infinity Foundation Visiting Professor of Indic Studies at Harvard University, although Doniger insists that: “I wrote it and someone named Sharma did not” (a perplexing point the Post does not elaborate on – Malhotra suggests that she means that her article was spiked because of her race, but the Post‘s wording is unclear).
The Infinity Foundation (formerly the Educational Council on Indic Traditions) was founded by Malhotra, and according to its website it exists “to promote East-West dialogue and a proper understanding of the Indian civilizational experience in the world, particularly in the United States and India”. In an interview, Malhotra argued that
The Buddhists have good scholars, themselves practising Buddhists, who teach the Buddhist religion…But Hinduism, Sikhism or Jainism are too often taught by Americans who themselves believe in other thought systems! This is even considered desirable in the name of ‘objectivity’, while the same arms-length rule does not apply to Christianity for instance, which is taught by Christians and even preachers.
A profile of the IF by Pankai Jain notes that it prefers “to be called an Indic think-tank, rather than a Hindu organization”, and concludes that:
From almost a one-man show, Rajiv Malhotra has succeeded in attracting many like-minded men and women as advisors to his foundation. The readership of the essays written by Rajiv Malhotra and many of the IF advisors on Sulekha [an e-zine] ranges into five figures. It is interesting to note how awareness about these issues has steadily increased with the Sulekha audience as evidenced by their comments; it is a sign of the growing intellectual impact of IF on the Indian diaspora. It is important to note that most of those readers are not related to IF except through reading on the Internet, and yet their views seem to resonate very well with the essays. One is left amazed to see a telecom entrepreneur constructing an influential Indic think-tank.
Malhotra has written numerous articles, in which he takes aim at Doniger’s scholarship and those who have been influenced by her. In response to his criticisms, Doniger tells the Post that
Malhotra’s ignorant writings have stirred up more passionate emotions in Internet subscribers who know even less than Malhotra does, who do not read books at all…And these people have reacted with violence. I therefore hold him indirectly responsible.
However, Malhotra can hardly be put in the same bracket as the Hindu nationalist Hindutva. Malhotra is on record as being against the Hindutva:
They have been devoid of rigorous scholarship and serious think tanks…There is often a certain crudeness in many of their leaders…They have a general disregard for complex arguments that don’t seem to deliver immediate payoffs. This issue is related to an overall anti-intellectualism that seems to have prevailed through much of the history of the RSS. This has made them intellectually inbred, and many of their people come across like sycophants. Their geriatric leaders are out of touch with today’s modernity, youth culture, and global perspective…VHP has no right to taint the name of Hinduism in making its choices, as though they were acting on behalf of all Hindus, whereas they did not even get elected by a majority of Hindus to represent them.
On the other hand, Malhotra is primarily an apologist for his religion, meaning he has a somewhat different perspective from, say, Edward Said or many other critics of Western scholarship of the east. Sulekha has provided right of reply to those he has attacked, and has published a defence of Doniger.
UPDATE (3 May): Malhotra has produced a strongly-worded response to the Post article.
PS – thanks to those who left comments. To clarify, I use the word “apologist” in a neutral sense. I suppose the word now has a popular nuance of “make excuses for” or “defend something that shouldn’t be defended”, which was not what I meant at all. What I meant was that Malhotra, like the late Edward Said, wants the main religious tradition of his original homeland to be treated accurately. However, unlike Said vis-a-vis Islam, Malhotra is an adherent of the religion he writes about, a positionality which should be remembered when reading his (often polemical) articles. But I take the point that he does not (to my knowledge) spend time writing articles about how his religion is “the truth”, which is the main activity of a religious apologist.
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Courtesy of the website of the British newspaper The Guardian, where you can see an interesting photo-essay showing how Good Friday is commemorated around the world. However, the pic from the “Holy Land” shows neither the Via Dolorosa nor either of the two sites that are venerated as Golgotha. Instead, we have, er…this:
A Christian woman prays inside the Church of the Nativity in the West Bank city of Bethlehem. Some believe the church to be Jesus Christ’s final resting place.
Bethlehem? Nativity?? “Final resting place”??? John 11:35!
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