Month: December 2005

We did Rick Warren’s “Purpose-Driven Life” program at our church a year or so back. It was interesting, though there were some definitely un-Episcopalian sorts of things, and Rick, though personable on the videos, didn’t seem like the guy I’d want up in my own pulpit.

And, frankly, the whole idea of mega-churches, as epitomized, it seems, by Warren’s Saddleback Church in south Orange County, California, give me the willies. Whether its their slickness, the apparent populist shallowness (“Fundamentalism Lite!”) of their theology, or echoes of the churches in Stranger in a Strange Land, I cannot imagine going to a church of 30,000-plus congregants.

All that said — this “New Yorker” article on Warren and Saddleback is … interesting.

DOF rightly takes Bill O’Reilly to task over — well, his Bill O’Reillyness.

Watching Bill O’Reilly talking-points memo this evening, he was mad at a Florida newspaper that blasphemed (or so he thought) the Virgin Mary.

The newspaper printed an editorial which took the side of a teacher in a Catholic grade school who was fired for being pregnant and unmarried. They concluded by asking if Jesus would have fired the woman, noting; “…after all, His own mother once found herself pregnant and unmarried.”

“How could they insult Mary like that?!” demanded O?Reilly. “And the elite media didn’t even cover it! If they’d insulted Islam, it would have been front-page news!” He went on to say the paper was either anti-Christian or ignorant of Christian doctrine, and that “…either is unacceptable – don?t buy their paper.”

Calm down, Bill.

I didn’t know that being knowledgeable of Christian doctrine was, in fact, a criterion for being a worthwhile newspaper. Live and learn.

But if so, and if that extends to talking heads and pundits such as Bill O’Reilly, “You gotta a lot of ‘splainin’ to do, Lucy.” Because, to some degree, the paper is right — Mary did find herself pregnant and unmarried. Her fiancée was ready to break things off, but was going to do so quietly so as not to shame her (or set her up for a stoning). Nevertheless, Mary was almost certainly tut-tutted over by the local folks, along with Joseph (whether folks thought that she’d been sleeping around on him, or that they’d jumped the gun before marriage). Had he been a rabbi at the local temple, yes, he’d probably been fired.

To answer both the paper and O’Reilly, though, Jesus (positing his agreement that unwed motherhood was behavior not to be codoned) would probably have looked at the school administration and said, calmly, “The person among you who has not done anything that could get his or her ass fired from this school if it were known, you step right up and sign the termination papers. I’ll just sit here and watch you while you do it. Looking you in the eye the entire time.”

And to the teacher, he would have said, “Now go, and sin no more.”

Jesus wasn’t about letting folks off the hook — just about letting them know (a) there was a way off the hook, and (b) they couldn’t get off the hook by being self-righteous about others’ hookedness.

To be sure, I’m inclined to side with the school in this case, as a private employer and as an educational institution that espouses and teaches a certain moral philosophy, . If they believe that this sort of behavior does, indeed, constitute immoral behavior that might send a bad lesson to their pupils, then that’s their prerogative. It’s not really different from business conduct policies that go beyond the strict letter of the law. I might or might not agree with it, but folk don’t generally ask me to approve of their moral stands before they’re allowed to act on them (which, on the balance, is probably a good thing).

I just hope, for the sake of the Fellow they all (one assumes) expect to look in the eye one of these days, that the school administrators have been as determinedly forgiving and non-hypocritical as they’ve been determined to act in this matter. And one might offer the same hope toward Bill O’Reilly.