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Presbyterian Church of America targets yuppies
Don't be misled by the Washington Times headline, "Church opens just for yuppies." Thirty percent of the congregation at Grace DC aren't urban professionals under the age of 30. But the church has been created to draw this demographic, the Times reports, as part of a Presbyterian Church of America campaign "to begin a network of hip, theologically conservative churches for young urban professionals in the hearts of America's cities."

"It's part of a movement to plant churches in cosmopolitan, world-class cities," Stephen Um, pastor of CityLife Church in Boston, told reporter Julia Duin. "We reach out primarily to post-everything professional urbanites and bohemians."

Such a trend is very encouraging. Most churches, after all, turn away rich young white folks at the door.

More on Dean and religion
Weblog is loath to regularly quote the latest religion comments from the presidential campaigns, but some of these comments are so remarkable that we can't just let them go by, buried in other news dispatches. And it's not like Weblog has some kind of obsession with Dean: it's just that it's his religious comments that are getting quoted; mainly because they're so remarkable.

Take, for instance, Dean's comments on Friday, criticizing President Bush for taking religious values into account in opposing embryonic stem-cell research.

"I think we ought to make scientific decisions, not theological and theoretical decisions," he told a town hall meeting in Rochester, New Hampshire. "I think that what the president did on stem-cell research was based on his religious beliefs, and I think that is wrong."

Several news outlets noted that Bush didn't make his decision to limit embryonic stem-cell research on religious values alone (and it should be noted that he hasn't limited research on stem cells from adults). In his August 2001 address outlining the limitations, Bush said he consulted "scientists, scholars, bioethicists, religious leaders, doctors, researchers, members of Congress, my Cabinet and my friends." He added, "I also believe human life is a sacred gift from our Creator. I worry about a culture that devalues life, and believe as your president I have an important obligation to foster and encourage respect for life in America and throughout the world."

Is Dean saying that such belief is wrong? To act on such a belief is wrong?

Fortunately, there was a follow-up question to Dean's remark, as a reporter asked the candidate the difference between the Bush's stem-cell decision and Dean's decision to support same-sex civil unions in Vermont. (Just three days earlier, Dean had said that his Christian beliefs had influenced his decision.)

"I would differentiate it from my support of civil unions because I didn't deprive anybody of anything by supporting civil unions," he said. "That was really a choice that had to do with, many people would say, morality or ethics. That's a different thing, I think, than applying your religious beliefs, with the result of depriving people really, literally, in some cases, a very long disease-free life as opposed to one that has significant complications."

Okay. So morality and ethics are okay, so long as they're divorced from religious belief? Eh? The difference between moral conviction and religious belief is that religious belief deprives people of something? Huh?

And does Dean really believe that embryonic stem-cell research is equivalent to "a very long disease-free life"? If so, he needs to read the newspapers more often.

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January (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48