Since attacks, religion's importance is showing more gains than church attendance. Gallup is reporting that while America has seen an increase in church attendance since September 11, it hasn't been a dramatic one (video | text). A poll conducted September. 21 and 22 asked those surveyed if they had attended church or synagogue in the last seven days. Forty-seven percent said they had. But this isn't a dramatic rise. The percentage of those saying "yes" has floated around 40 to 45 percent for the last two years. In both February and March of this year, 41 percent said they had been to services in the previous week.
While more Americans are not necessarily going to church or synagogue, Gallup shows that religion has become important in more lives since the attacks. In a poll conducted September 21 and 22, 64 percent said religion is "very important" to them. This is the highest percentage in the survey since 1965. In recent years, the percentage has been in the high 50s and topped out at 62 percent in 1998.
In August, Dayna Curry, 29, and Heather Mercer, 24, were arrested along with four Germans, two Australians, and 16 Afghans when the ruling Taliban shut down the aid organization Shelter Now. Their trial began last month but was suspended September 11. According to the Associated Press, the eight foreign workers if convicted, face penalties ranging from expulsion to death.
The New York Times reports: "Presumably to counter a rash of recent stories about the pope's worsening health, Vatican officials suddenly invited the 60 reporters traveling with him this week to file one by one to the front of the plane, sit next to him for a minute, say hello, and have a photo taken."
The pope, 81, has spent the week in Armenia and Kazakhistan delivering prayers and a message of tolerance. He ended the tour yesterday with a speech in Yerevan in which he called for the international community to make "a choice between good and evil, darkness and light, humanity and inhumanity, truth and falsehood."
A spared chapel stirs talk of miracle | St. Paul's Chapel, Manhattan's oldest public building, doesn't even have a broken window after attack on neighboring World Trade Center (The Boston Globe)
Religion and politics after the attack:
It's not about religion | Don't be so quick to blame religion for warfare (Vincent Carroll, National Review Online)
Talibans and the Pope's concern | We do not think religion has anything to do with the current world crisis. But the Pope does. (Vanguard, Lagos)
Is God on our side? Or is he on theirs? | It becomes too easy to bless our causes with unqualified divine approbation only to find ourselves made over in the likeness of those enemies who have injured us (John J. Thatamanil, Los Angeles Times)
God wills it? No, God doesn't | Must we define this conflict in the cosmic—and self-justifying—language of good versus evil? (James Carroll, The Boston Globe)
Which God blesses America? | Have we created a convenient God in our own image or discovered the one who is there? (Joe Marek, The Orlando Sentinel)
Faith and the secular state | The West needs to overcome its insistence that the nation-state must be secular to be legitimate (Lamin Sanneh, The New York Times)
Church-state separation | Now more than ever, America is well served by those who say that government must not be the tool of any one religion, or even of any group of religions (The Capital Times, Madison, Wisconsin)
Televangelist, fundamentalists believe their strict morality is the only answer | If there is a "holy war" in the world today, it is not between Islam and Christianity, nor Afghanistan and the United States. It is between secularism and religious fundamentalism in all its forms (Don Lattin, San Francisco Chronicle)
Forgiving Falwell | As a country that's more tolerant and forgiving then ever, it's only fair to take him at his word (The Daily News, Los Angeles)
Pat Robertson's gold | What, pray tell, does the Good Lord make of Pat Robertson's gold-mining venture in Liberia with Charles Taylor, international pariah and one of the most ruthless, greedy and terror-producing heads of state in all of sub-Saharan Africa? (Colbert I. King, The Washington Post)
Non-believers would get equal space on Ringgold public walls | After the City Council approved displaying framed copies of the Ten Commandments and the Lord's Prayer, they will now hang empty frames "for those who believe in nothing." (Atlanta Journal-Constitution)
Also: Georgia town posts Ten Commandments | Councilman not worried about offending non-Christians because "because we don't have any of them here." (Associated Press)
Lifehouse's Wade lets his faith speak for itself | Lead singer Jason Wade deliberately writes his songs so nonbelievers will be comfortable but devout worshipers can apply the lyrics to their faith (Boston Herald)
Play changed author's views on religion | Playwright David Rambo said his play on a power struggle within a Southern Baptist church changed his negative ideas about organized religion. (The Cincinnati Post)
Twenty years ago, Republicans, Democrats, evangelicals, gay activists, and African leaders joined forces to combat AIDS. Will their legacy survive today’s partisanship?
One formed me. The other entertained me.
Twenty years ago, Republicans, Democrats, evangelicals, gay activists, and African leaders joined forces to combat AIDS. Will their legacy survive today’s partisanship?
Instructions for publishers.
