"The Week In Religion," apparently, was a serious, ecumenical program on early American TV. Not to be confused with The Daily Show's "This Week in God," which is anything but serious. If you want ecumenical, thoughtful, and serious, I suggest you check out Krista Tippett's "Speaking of Faith" on American public radio. BBC World Service mines a similar vein in its weekly "Heart and Soul." Finally, the Washington Post and Newsweek collaborate on an excellent website dedicated to matters of religion, ethics, and belief in "On Faith."
For me, this week's news in religion reinforced my conviction that we need to be vigilant against the creeping influence - no, make that galloping influence - of fundamentalists and what in saner, less politically correct times might simply have been called religious "kooks." And I'm not talking about Islam. It's Christianity that has me worried.
His Holiness and the Holocaust Denier
I'll begin with Pope Benedict XVI and his decision to bring a rather tiny minority of ultra-conservative renegade bishops, priests, and their followers back into the arms of the Catholic Church. Other than some misguided desire for inclusiveness, it's hard to credit anything other than the Pope's sympathizing with their ideas as his motivation. I can't imagine that there was any groundswell of support among mainstream Catholics to bring in people who believe that the Holocaust was invented.
One of the "rehabilitated" bishops, Briton Richard Williamson, believes that the available evidence
is hugely against six million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler ... Between 200,000-300,000 perished in Nazi concentration camps, but not one of them by gassing in a gas chamber. I believe there were no gas chambers.
Jewish groups are up in arms, justifiably so. But what do you expect from an infallible pontiff whose "one-sided" (according to impartial observers) decision to confer sainthood on priests and nuns killed by the Republican (anti-Franco) side in Spain's Civil War caused riots in 2007? He's the same man who weighed in for the candidate of his choice in 2004, when he instructed American Catholics to vote for George W. Bush. Did I mention infallibility?
In his May 2005 Harper's article "Feeling the hate with the National Religious Broadcasters," noted author Chris Hedges wrote:
I can't help but recall the words of my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. James Luther Adams, who told us that when we were his age, and he was then close to eighty, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."
He gave us that warning twenty-five years ago, when Pat Robertson and other prominent evangelists began speaking of a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all major American institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government, so as to transform the United States into a global Christian empire. At the time, it was hard to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously. But fascism, Adams warned, would not return wearing swastikas and brown shirts. Its ideological inheritors would cloak themselves in the language of the Bible; they would come carrying crosses and chanting the Pledge of Allegiance.
I won't go as far as to accuse the Pope of latent fascistic tendencies (there is that perennially pesky matter of his membership in the Hitler Youth...), but my point is this: what is he up to? Surely the Catholic Church isn't so hard up for bishops that it needs to scour the ranks of the Holocaust deniers?
Scientology: The Embrace of the Far Right
One "religion" (or, as the US State Department likes to call it, a "belief system") that apparently appeals to Holocaust deniers in Belgium is Scientology. On Friday evening, the public French-language network RTBF broadcast a disturbing expose on Scientology's efforts to influence Belgians (and other Europeans, via the large EU presence in Brussels).
Using a series of cover companies, the Scientologists have entered the world of management training as a way to spread founder (prophet?) Ron Hubbard's gospel. The program showed several unwitting employees whose firms had sent them to courses that sounded like anodyne professional development programs. Belgium's Flanders regional government has even expended in excess of $1 million, paying Scientology-related firms for IT training.
But most disturbing was the accommodation between Scientology and the far-right Flemish white supremacist party, the Vlaams Belang. This party, though disdained by mainstream "democratic" parties in Belgium, has nevertheless succeeded in getting its candidates elected to local and regional office. And several of these officials have deemed it expedient to work with Scientology on "public interest" programs like its anti-drug crusade.
Brussels is important to the "Church" of Scientology, where it has established its International Office for Public Affairs and Human Rights, dedicated to "Defending Religious Freedom." Belgium may not be, in the view of the Scientologists, as antagonistic as neighboring France and Germany, where the authorities call the "church" a sect. Sect - the kind of thing that Jim Jones had going in Guyana, the sort of thing that calls for deprogramming.
Belgium, as documented in the State Department's International Religious Freedom Report for 2008, has some misgivings about Scientology:
Readers may differ on whether Scientology is a religion or simply a way to package Hubbard's fervid science fiction scribblings into scriptural form. But do we need the US Government to expend scarce State Department resources documenting the travails of its followers in democratic countries like Belgium, France, and Germany?
For that matter, will the Church of Scientology continue to benefit from the services of an Ambassador-At-Large for International Religious Freedom, whose office oversees the preparation of those 180 or so annual reports, from countries as varied in their interpretation of religious freedom as Sweden and Saudi Arabia?
Will the US Commission for International Religious Freedom (USCIRF) continue to fret about "the travails of the Church of Scientology" in its testimony to Congress? Well, I guess so. US Government activism on behalf of religious freedom - religions and "belief systems" - is mandated by the International Religious Freedom Act, which just marked its tenth anniversary late last year.
For my money, I'd prefer to let the Scientologists fund their own legal defense, out of the alleged $300 million profit they rake in annually from their sale of "Hubbard Electrometers" and voluminous literature. So if the Ambassador-At-Large has to prioritize, I'd say maybe he should focus in on countries where practicing a minority religion - like Christianity - can get you executed. Where it really matters.
Let the Belgians, French, and Germans deal with the Scientologists - and their allies in the extreme right - in their own democratic, legal, way. It's their sovereign right.