The play is part of Tinderbox Theatre’s True North series of three new dramas about life in Northern Ireland today.

The play presents a complex picture of the life and career of MLA Patricia Williamson – who belongs to a party suspiciously like the DUP – and her relationship with her son Jamie, who fled Northern Ireland a decade ago, literally driven out by parents who saw his homosexuality as sin.

A focal point in the production is the homophobic murder of a young Catholic man by Lithuanian workers in Patricia’s constituency. Speaking at a charity ball the day before the funeral, Patricia refuses to condemn the murder and says that the man’s homosexuality (not his murder) is a failing for which all of society is responsible.

Patricia’s speech reflects a view that is common enough among conservative Christians. The logic flows something like this:

1. the bible says homosexuality is sin,

2. God does not bless people or countries that allow or condone wilful sinning,

3. therefore legislators should make laws against and speak out against homosexuality,

4. this will be ‘better’ for the homosexual, especially if he/she can get therapy and overcome this sin,

5. this will all please God, and he will bless the country again.

The play also explores tensions within the DUP-like party that erupt in reaction to Patricia’s outburst. She has a young political advisor who, while clearly sharing Patricia’s loathing of homosexuality, is horrified by the speech. It is the advisor’s job to manage the damage that Patricia’s speech could cause among the party’s more moderate supporters.

Last night I took part in a post-production discussion of the play with playwright Colin Bell and Ciaran McQuillan, Tinderbox’s Outreach Director.

Bell explained that he wrote the play in part to explore how far (or not) Northern Ireland had come in its treatment of LGBT people. He also said he had been fascinated by the Iris Robinson affair, and her condemnatory comments about LGBT people on the Stephen Nolan show.

Bell said that he knew people who expressed similar views to Iris while growing up in Northern Ireland. From my own academic research, I know that these views are indeed present within the DUP and among some conservative Christians in Northern Ireland.

For example, as the Rev. Ian Paisley was being pushed out as moderator of his Free Presbyterian Church, a group called ‘Concerned Free Presbyterians’ set up a website to rally the voices of criticism.

Although the Concerned Free Presbyterians website has now been taken down, at the time about half of the complaints were that Paisley, as Northern Ireland’s First Minister, would have to support rights for the LGBT community, including funding the gay pride parade. The other half of the complaints were about the immorality of sharing power with the ‘unrepentant terrorists’ of Sinn Fein.

That said, not all conservative or evangelical Christians would share the views on homosexuality presented in the play. Rather, there is a spectrum of beliefs among evangelicals about homosexuality.

For instance, I have heard arguments within evangelicalism both in Northern Ireland and in North America to the effect that Christians’ treatment of LGBT people today is like Christians’ treatment of slaves in days gone by. The say that the Bible was wrongly used to justify slavery, and that the Bible is being wrongly used today to justify discrimination against LGBT people.

Eliminating discrimination against LGBT people is presented as a logical outworking of the gospel because God takes sides with the marginalised.

When challenged that this view is ‘unbiblical,’ I have heard more liberal evangelicals argue that some of the bible passages translated into English reflect the prejudices of their translators. So, for example, the strong condemnations of the apostle Paul are really meant to be referring to paedophilia rather than homosexuality.

But even without going into biblical scholarship, we can observe the surprisingly irenic position taken by the Evangelical Alliance in the Republic of Ireland, which supports the proposed civil partnership bill.

I’m not a biblical scholar so I’m not in a position to evaluate the validity of all of these arguments. But I think that in Northern Ireland and elsewhere, social prejudice and institutionalised discrimination against LGBT people won’t be fully overcome without leadership on the part of Christians, or people from other religions, whose holy books have been used to justify their marginalisation.

‘Really?’ I asked. ‘Are you sure it’s not from a Sociological Association?’ She replied, ‘No. And they were saying bad things about Glenn Beck.’ That’s when the penny dropped: the letter must be from Sojourners, the American Christian group whose leader – Rev. Jim Wallis – has borne the brunt of some fervent criticism by Beck.

In the US, of course, ‘socialism’ can be a term of derision and European social democracy is viewed with some suspicion.

So if someone receives a letter in the post from Sojourners and immediately labels it ‘socialist,’ it appears that Beck’s message is doing a pretty good job getting through.

Beck tells his viewers that people who call themselves ‘progressives’ are really ‘socialists’ and, it seems, that those who disagree with his interpretation of faith and politics are out to destroy truth, justice and the American Way.

Back in April, I blogged about Beck’s employer, Fox News, and its funding of a research and internet campaign against Christian pastors like Wallis.

Beck was at it again this past week after Sojourners, concerned at what they see as a lack of civility in public political debate in the US, launched a ‘Truth and Civility Election Watch.’ The next day on his show, Beck said that Wallis was ‘dangerous’ and was leading America to ‘mass death.’ In his words,

That’s why Jim Wallis is so dangerous. All the preachers that surround the president, they are progressives and they are big government progressives. When you combine church and state, and you take a — you take a big government and you combine it with the church, to get people to do the things that the state wants you to do, it always ends in mass death.

As Wallis writes on the Huffington Post,

Last Thursday, I asked you to take up the challenge and say, "I disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler." When the next day Glenn Beck told his audience that I was "dangerous," mischaracterized what I believe, and then took that mischaracterization and said that it "always leads to mass death," my first desire was not to be civil. When his next step was to leap to the Nazi corruption of churches in Germany, and to suggest that I and "progressive Christians" were like the Nazis, I got angry.

‘I disagree with you, but I’m pretty sure you’re not Hitler’ is a slogan I first heard on Jon Stewart’s comedy news programme, the Daily Show.

In part a response to Beck’s ‘Restoring Honor’ rally in Washington on the anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s ‘I have a dream’ speech, and the enthusiasm whipped up at various ‘Tea Parties,’ the Daily Show crew is hosting a ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ in Washington on October 30, 2010.

On the same day, Stewart’s satirically conservative alter-ego, Stephen Colbert of the Colbert Report, will host the ‘March to Keep Fear Alive.’

Stewart and Colbert’s counter-rallies are being promoted with characteristic humour, but the intent is quite serious. One method of delegitimizing someone who you perceive to have too much power is to entice people to laugh at him.

At the same time, Beck’s comments are particularly insulting because one of the groups that resisted Nazism in Germany was the confessing church. There is a good argument to be made that prominent confessing church pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer would share many of the convictions of today’s ‘social justice’ Christians.

In his book on Bonhoeffer, Religionless Christianity: Dietrich Bonhoeffer in Troubled Times, (T&T Clark, 2008) religion scholar Jeffrey C. Pugh argues both implicitly and explicitly that it is the type of religion and politics that someone like Beck promotes – a ‘Christian America’ that is allied to a particular political party and favours foreign military interventions – that should be viewed with suspicion. Pugh writes (p. 128-9),

For those who are inclined to make Bonhoeffer’s actions normative then they should be prepared to follow Bonhoeffer to the Golgatha he walked. … This necessitates painful and difficult questions for those who use Bonhoeffer as an example for action in the beginning of what promises to be a long and generational struggle in contemporary times, ‘the war on terror.’ It is called a war because those who have the most interest in keeping it going need the rhetoric of war to marshal persons to give their lives. But on all sides the underlying issues are not dealt with at all, thus ensuring that attack will be met with attack, and blood revenge, if we cannot bring ourselves to act in different ways, will become the driving force for the foreseeable future. …

I exist within the current, but quickly fading, empire of America (there will be others after us) and as far as I can tell there is little to no Christian witness that would indicate we are prepared to enter into the absence of God that Bonhoeffer experienced later in his life. To take this step would necessitate looking without self-deception at the behaviour of deceitfulness and lies that has corrupted political life in America. It would mean telling the truth about what colonial behaviour looks like to a culture that not only refuses to hear it, but works overtime at denying that there is a truth in anything other than America never has its own interests at heart when it acts. We only desire to help others achieve the blessings of liberty.

Pugh doesn’t say or imply that political opponents should normally be viewed with the same suspicion as totalitarian regimes. But the fact that both sides in this American ‘debate’ identify with the ‘good guys’ of history, such as Martin Luther King Jr and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, concerns me.

This can, or already has, slipped all-to-easily into a politics of ‘us and them’ rather than a politics of the common good.

I had to smile at Johnson’s characterisation of my review,

This might be the most neutral, purely descriptive book review I have ever read. It is certainly descriptively accurate.

That’s a fair assessment of the review. Johnson reminded me of an incident back when I was a sportswriter at the Bangor Daily News in Maine, USA.

I was asked to fill in for an Arts and Entertainment writer by reviewing a musical theatre production, written and produced by locals. I thought the play was terrible, but I couldn’t bring myself to be overly critical.

After all, Bangor, Maine, is a city of about 30,000 (only slightly bigger than Ballymena), and the people involved had obviously put their hearts and souls into the production. They weren’t professionals performing on Broadway, after all. What could anyone possibly gain by me writing a scathing review?

The day after my review appeared, someone wrote a letter to the editor complaining that it was ‘A Review that Wasn’t a Review.’ Like Johnson, he had a fair point!

But the reason for my neutrality on Selmanovic’s book is not that I think that it is a terrible book. On the contrary, I think it is moving, insightful, well-written and could even be inspiring for some people. But Johnson asks,

How well do you think that it will accomplish its aim, which is to encourage people of different religious backgrounds to “love each other well,” despite their differences? I would like to think that if we could get people to read the book and participate in discussion groups as outlined at the end of the book, progress could be made on resolving inter-group conflict.

I also would like to think that ‘discussion groups’ could lead to progress, but the problem is, evidence for this is thin. I do think it can happen on a small-scale, and have seen examples of this among Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland.

But to answer Johnson, I simply don’t know if the discussion and interaction that Selmanovic advocates will ultimately have a long-term impact in the lives of more than a few people.

Of course, Selmanovic provides evidence of this from his own life, telling stories about himself and others who have overcome prejudices.

Further, some academic research confirms that carefully managed ‘inter group contact’ can lead to a moderation of attitudes. Indeed, Northern Ireland’s Community Relations Council is pretty much based on the theory that promoting ‘cross community’ contact will help to resolve inter-group conflict.

Watching from Ireland, I’ve been struck by the way that the debate about the Islamic cultural centre, proposed to be two blocks from Ground Zero, has been framed in such a confrontational way.

Even the phrase ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ seems to me deliberately misleading and inflammatory. Both politicians and people in the media have used this language to frame the debate.

I think that this use of language can – and may already have done – a lot of harm to the productive, grassroots work that Selmanovic and others like him are involved in.

Selmanovic is based in New York City, at Faith House Manhattan, and has on his own blog entered the ‘Ground Zero Mosque’ debate.

So finally, to try and answer Johnson’s question: I simply don’t know if what Selmanovic promotes will inspire others and work for everybody. But I think there’s more hope in his grassroots approach than in the confrontational public discourses currently on display in New York City.

(Photo from Selmanovic’s blog. He has it captioned: ‘All I need to know about Christianity I learned from the KKK?’)

The guests were some of the usual suspects: Non-Subscribing Presbyterian  minister Rev. Chris Hudson, who supports civil partnerships, and  Traditional Unionist Voice’s David Vance, who does not.

One point that went unchallenged at the time by any caller was Vance’s claim that the liberalisation of the mainline churches in the United States had been the direct cause of their numerical decline relative to conservative, evangelical churches.

Vance argued that churches which supported gay marriage, civil partnerships, and/or any other seemingly liberal measures had paid for it by seeing people leaving them in their droves for churches that preached what Vance would consider the ‘true’ gospel.

The trouble is, sociological research doesn’t support this claim.

A comprehensive study by American sociologists Andrew Greeley and Michael Hout, published as a book, The Truth About Conservative Christians: What They Think and What They Believe (University of Chicago Press, 2006), draws on an extensive range of survey data to refute this ‘common sense’ argument. They write (p. 103-104):

The Conservatives, it is said, have a strong appeal for American Protestants because of their emphasis on traditional evangelical teachings. The Mainline clergy have sent their flocks elsewhere by some combination of liberal politics and ‘feel good’ religion. … the growth of the Conservative denominations represents a reaction against ‘excessive liberalism’ in which people raised in Mainline denominations register displeasure with the (supposed) liberal ethos of Mainline Protestantism by leaving to join denominations that emphasize the Conservative beliefs they share.

But Greeley and Hout are able to demonstrate that up to 70% of the growth of conservative churches (and the relative decline of the mainline churches) can be explained by higher birth rates among women in conservative denominations (p. 105).

That’s right: people aren’t switching their allegiance from the mainline to the conservative churches. Rather, the mainline Christians just aren’t having as many kids as the conservatives.

Sociologist Jim Wellman’s later study of churches in the Pacific Northwest of the United States, Evangelical vs. Liberal (Oxford University Press, 2008), lends further support to the demographic explanation.

Quite apart from pointing out that Vance’s claim just doesn’t hold up to sociological scrutiny, I think it’s important to interrogate the instrumentalist assumption behind what he said.

Vance seemed to be saying that churches should oppose civil partnerships because if they did not, they would see a direct drop in their membership.

So should churches be trying to please the most people so they don’t lose members, or should they rather be trying to do what is right?

Of course, Hudson and Vance disagree vehemently about what is right for churches to say and do around the issue of civil partnerships. It would be better if their ethical arguments were not clouded by false claims about religious demographics in the United States.

Beck identifies himself with Christian America, and is a self-proclaimed guardian of what he perceives to be America’s Christian values. Last month, it was revealed that Beck’s staff is now ‘funding opposition research and internet attack campaigns’ against Christian pastors who disagree with his vision of America.

Last month, Beck said that any church that talks about "social or economic justice" is not of Christ but is instead spreading Nazi or communist propaganda, and that his listeners should leave those churches. His actual words were,

"I’m begging you, your right to religion and freedom to exercise religion and read all of the passages of the Bible as you want to read them and as your church wants to preach them . . . are going to come under the ropes in the next year. … I beg you, look for the words ‘social justice’ or ‘economic justice’ on your church Web site. If you find it, run as fast as you can. Social justice and economic justice, they are code words. Now, am I advising people to leave their church? Yes!"

Beck’s main target has been Sojourners’ Jim Wallis, an outspoken pastor and author who is a friend of President Obama.Wallis’ 2006 book, God’s Politics: Why the American Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get it, was a critique of the way economically conservative and moralistic Christians have made inroads in the Republican Party, essentially taking over Christian discourses in the American public sphere.

In this book, Wallis called American Christians to consider Jesus’ messages of social and economic justice. Wallis sees Jesus as critiquing those who abused political, religious, and military power in order to protect their own interests. Wallis has also been a critic of the US’s huge military budget and the invasion of Iraq. He has said that the Democratic Party should not shy away from claiming its Christian heritage and employing Christian discourses to justify its social and economic policies.

In an open letter to Beck, Wallis offered to engage in public dialogue about social justice. He wrote,

Christians can have different views of the role of government but still agree that social justice is crucial. Very few who believe that are “Marxists.” And while we all preach empowerment to live out the gospel, we don’t think the meaning of social justice should be reduced to just private charity. Biblical justice also involves changing structures, institutions, systems, and policies; as well as changing hearts to be more generous. So there is still a lot to talk about here.

Beck’s response? To get his staff digging for dirt on Wallis, apparently, as he said on his radio show,

So Jim, I just wanted to pass this on to you.  In my time I will respond — my time, well, kind of like God’s time, might be a day, might be a week to you, I’m not sure. But I’m going to get to it in my time, not your time. So you go ahead and you continue to do your protest thing, and that’s great. I love it. But just know — the hammer is coming, because little do you know, for eight weeks, we’ve been compiling information on you, your cute little organization, and all the other cute little people that are with you. And when the hammer comes, it’s going to be hammering hard and all through the night, over and over…

Over the last month, Beck has gone on the offensive, airing clips and recordings of Wallis – some widely out of context, such as an exchange between Wallis and Dorothy Day (who Beck clearly hadn’t heard of) in which he accused both of being ‘Marxists.’

Here’s how Wallis responded on his blog,

But what really made me mad was when Glenn Beck called Dorothy Day a “Marxist” and went after us both with guilt by association. Guilty again. I couldn’t be more proud of that association. It was clear that Beck had never heard of her, so somebody really needs to tell him that Dorothy Day is regarded as a modern saint in the Catholic Church and is already in the process of canonization—before he puts her up on his blackboard.  Beck recounted a conversation I had with Dorothy as a new young convert to Christianity. She was in her eighties and asked me if I had been a radical student in my early years as she had been. “Yeah,” Beck recorded me saying. And if I had been attracted to Marxism, as she had. “Yeah” I said again. Gotcha! Beck said. They’re both Marxists! What he left out was the next lines of our conversation that I still remember and, of course, were on the same tape he abruptly cut off. “And now, you’re a Catholic?” Dorothy Day asked me. “Well, now I’m a Christian,” I said. “You’re not a Catholic?” she chided. I lamely responded that “some of my best friends” were Catholic, and Dorothy smiled. We were sharing our conversion stories from secular radicalism and Marxism to Jesus Christ and his gospel of love and justice. Glenn Beck just left that part out, as he often leaves stuff out or just makes up stuff and puts it in.

Wallis and others like him are claiming that stopping the oppression of the poor is the central message of Jesus and the Hebrew prophets. Jesus and the Hebrew prophets didn’t blame the poor for their poverty, rather they saw how the policies of the powerful were self-serving, and exploited those who were not born with the economic or political power to challenge them.

I think that people like Beck believe that if people are poor, it is their own fault. Therefore, for people like Beck it is a Christian duty not to devise governmental policies designed to lift them out of poverty, or to provide them with basic healthcare that they do not deserve.

For Wallis, it is ‘true religion,’ as the Book of James says, for Christians to align their interests with those who were not benefitting from unfair economic, political and religious systems.

Beck is saying that this isn’t a part of the gospel at all. Or maybe Beck is saying that the American system is already fair and just – which is probably even a scarier thought, because the US has one of the widest gaps between rich and poor in the industrialised world.

What is it about American Christianity that so many people seem to agree with Glenn Beck?

(The first image, of Glenn Beck, is taken from the Sojourners website and its campaign for Christians to ‘tell Glenn Beck I’m a social justice Christian.’)

This has, of course, prompted outrage from the expected quarters in the US, where there is a significant minority that believes that atheism and secularism will be the downfall of the country. USA Today quotes the chairman of a group called In God We Trust, who claims:

It is one thing for the Administration to meet with groups of varying viewpoints, but it is quite another for a senior official to sit down with activists representing some of the most hate-filled, anti-religious groups in the nation.

Betty Klinck, the writer of the article, poses the following question, which has prompted some interesting comments (many reflecting the usual extreme positions of either side):

DO YOU THINK meeting with atheists reflects poorly on the Obama administration or is this a logical step? Does the Secular Coalition for America represent "hate-filled" organizations or do they make valid points?

In my School’s recent surveys of faith on the island of Ireland, one of the more surprising results was that atheists were keen to participate in the online layperson’s survey, responding disproportionately to their numbers in the general population.

Almost uniformly, they complained that atheists are discriminated against in the public spheres both in the Republic and in Northern Ireland. Many feel that they could hurt their social and job prospects by ‘coming out’ as atheists, and that their concerns (especially about religion’s public role) are not taken seriously by policy makers or by their religious fellow citizens.

If atheists feel ignored, marginalised and discriminated against, they may be more likely to retreat into the extreme positions or use the extreme language of which they are at times accused. This past week, even Richard Dawkins had to moderate his own blog because he felt that many of those who were posting on it had become too ‘muddied with thoughtless abusiveness.’

There has been much controversy on the media reporting of this incident – even the minimalist account of it which BBC presenter William Crawley posted on his blog raised some hackles.

This leads me to ask:

If atheists are really marginalised in the public sphere, does this contribute to public debate that is more abusive than civil – ultimately hindering our ability to create societies where people of all faiths and none can live harmoniously together?

Many Americans believe they have the best health care system in the world. That’s what the Republicans have said, although they also have said that the system is broken. Then there is Fox News, whose presenters continually shout about how horrible ‘socialised’ health care is in the UK or Canada.

Many Americans who support the Republican Party think about health care in moral terms. They think that Obama’s health care plan will provide services to people who are too lazy to work, and that this is deeply immoral. Many Americans see this as a Christian position. I know because I have talked with people who hold these views. I have heard them quote a verse in Proverbs that says that if a man won’t work, he shouldn’t eat.

The problem is that the present health care system in the US doesn’t even provide for people who will work. This past summer, my husband and I rented an apartment in the southern US from a couple of retirement age. The man, who had a university degree and worked hard his whole life, had diabetes. He had taken a 35-hour-per-week job for the city, which according to the city council guidelines, was part-time. This meant that he didn’t have a very good insurance plan. He was essentially working full-time to pay for his medication, which he ordered off the internet from Canada.

To me, it is deeply immoral that something like this has happened to a kind and hardworking man.

I can think of many other cases like this, some involving members of my own family. In light of that, amazes me that conservative Republicans have been able to co-opt the ‘Christian’ and moral debate about health care.

On the Huffington Post, Sojourners’ Jim Wallis has offered alternative moral and theological perspectives on the healthcare debate. Contrasting the Democrats efforts with those of George W. Bush, he laments the high cost of military spending and adds,

… the tax cuts that George Bush pushed through Congress overwhelmingly benefited the richest people in America–virtually all analysts agree with that fact. But many Americans haven’t really calculated that the cost of those tax cuts for the rich was literally double what health-care reform is projected to cost. Double. … How does that square with the biblical emphasis on the priority of the poor? There is simply no way to justify the habitual behavior of the current Republican party’s clear preference for the rich over everybody else.

Wallis ends his post by asking,

Anyone care to provide a theological foundation for the Republican policy preferences for the rich and for war? I would really like to see it.

Sadly, the Republicans have little need to theologically justify their preferences for the rich and for war. This is because so many of their supporters are caught up with arguments about the immorality of the poor individuals who just might benefit from health care reform.

God bless America …