The Hour Is Near

The End of Christian America

The percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 points in the past two decades. How that statistic explains who we are now—and what, as a nation, we are about to become.

By Jon Meacham | NEWSWEEK

It was a small detail, a point of comparison buried in the fifth paragraph on the 17th page of a 24-page summary of the 2009 American Religious Identification Survey. But as R. Albert Mohler Jr.—president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, one of the largest on earth—read over the document after its release in March, he was struck by a single sentence. For a believer like Mohler—a starched, unflinchingly conservative Christian, steeped in the theology of his particular province of the faith, devoted to producing ministers who will preach the inerrancy of the Bible and the Gospel of Jesus Christ as the only means to eternal life—the central news of the survey was troubling enough: the number of Americans who claim no religious affiliation has nearly doubled since 1990, rising from 8 to 15 percent. Then came the point he could not get out of his mind: while the unaffiliated have historically been concentrated in the Pacific Northwest, the report said, “this pattern has now changed, and the Northeast emerged in 2008 as the new stronghold of the religiously unidentified.” As Mohler saw it, the historic foundation of America’s religious culture was cracking.

“That really hit me hard,” he told me last week. “The Northwest was never as religious, never as congregationalized, as the Northeast, which was the foundation, the home base, of American religion. To lose New England struck me as momentous.” Turning the report over in his mind, Mohler posted a despairing online column on the eve of Holy Week lamenting the decline—and, by implication, the imminent fall—of an America shaped and suffused by Christianity. “A remarkable culture-shift has taken place around us,” Mohler wrote. “The most basic contours of American culture have been radically altered. The so-called Judeo-Christian consensus of the last millennium has given way to a post-modern, post-Christian, post-Western cultural crisis which threatens the very heart of our culture.” When Mohler and I spoke in the days after he wrote this, he had grown even gloomier. “Clearly, there is a new narrative, a post-Christian narrative, that is animating large portions of this society,” he said from his office on campus in Louisville, Ky.

 There it was, an old term with new urgency: post-Christian. This is not to say that the Christian God is dead, but that he is less of a force in American politics and culture than at any other time in recent memory. To the surprise of liberals who fear the advent of an evangelical theocracy and to the dismay of religious conservatives who long to see their faith more fully expressed in public life, Christians are now making up a declining percentage of the American population.

According to the American Religious Identification Survey that got Mohler’s attention, the percentage of self-identified Christians has fallen 10 percentage points since 1990, from 86 to 76 percent. The Jewish population is 1.2 percent; the Muslim, 0.6 percent. A separate Pew Forum poll echoed the ARIS finding, reporting that the percentage of people who say they are unaffiliated with any particular faith has doubled in recent years, to 16 percent; in terms of voting, this group grew from 5 percent in 1988 to 12 percent in 2008—roughly the same percentage of the electorate as African-Americans. (Seventy-five percent of unaffiliated voters chose Barack Obama, a Christian.) Meanwhile, the number of people willing to describe themselves as atheist or agnostic has increased about fourfold from 1990 to 2009, from 1 million to about 3.6 million. (That is about double the number of, say, Episcopalians in the United States.)

While we remain a nation decisively shaped by religious faith, our politics and our culture are, in the main, less influenced by movements and arguments of an explicitly Christian character than they were even five years ago. I think this is a good thing—good for our political culture, which, as the American Founders saw, is complex and charged enough without attempting to compel or coerce religious belief or observance. It is good for Christianity, too, in that many Christians are rediscovering the virtues of a separation of church and state that protects what Roger Williams, who founded Rhode Island as a haven for religious dissenters, called “the garden of the church” from “the wilderness of the world.” As crucial as religion has been and is to the life of the nation, America’s unifying force has never been a specific faith, but a commitment to freedom—not least freedom of conscience. At our best, we single religion out for neither particular help nor particular harm; we have historically treated faith-based arguments as one element among many in the republican sphere of debate and decision. The decline and fall of the modern religious right’s notion of a Christian America creates a calmer political environment and, for many believers, may help open the way for a more theologically serious religious life.

Let’s be clear: while the percentage of Christians may be shrinking, rumors of the death of Christianity are greatly exaggerated. Being less Christian does not necessarily mean that America is post-Christian. A third of Americans say they are born again; this figure, along with the decline of politically moderate-to liberal mainline Protestants, led the ARIS authors to note that “these trends … suggest a movement towards more conservative beliefs and particularly to a more ‘evangelical’ outlook among Christians.” With rising numbers of Hispanic immigrants bolstering the Roman Catholic Church in America, and given the popularity of Pentecostalism, a rapidly growing Christian milieu in the United States and globally, there is no doubt that the nation remains vibrantly religious—far more so, for instance, than Europe.

Still, in the new NEWSWEEK Poll, fewer people now think of the United States as a “Christian nation” than did so when George W. Bush was president (62 percent in 2009 versus 69 percent in 2008). Two thirds of the public (68 percent) now say religion is “losing influence” in American society, while just 19 percent say religion’s influence is on the rise. The proportion of Americans who think religion “can answer all or most of today’s problems” is now at a historic low of 48 percent. During the Bush 43 and Clinton years, that figure never dropped below 58 percent.

Many conservative Christians believe they have lost the battles over issues such as abortion, school prayer and even same-sex marriage, and that the country has now entered a post-Christian phase. Christopher Hitchens —a friend and possibly the most charming provocateur you will ever meet—wrote a hugely popular atheist tract a few years ago, “God Is Not Great.” As an observant (if deeply flawed) Episcopalian, I disagree with many of Hitchens’s arguments—I do not think it is productive to dismiss religious belief as superstitious and wrong—but he is a man of rigorous intellectual honesty who, on a recent journey to Texas, reported hearing evangelical mutterings about the advent of a “post-Christian” America.

To be post-Christian has meant different things at different times. In 1886, The Atlantic Monthly described George Eliot as “post-Christian,” using the term as a synonym for atheist or agnostic. The broader—and, for our purposes, most relevant—definition is that “post-Christian” characterizes a period of time that follows the decline of the importance of Christianity in a region or society. This use of the phrase first appeared in the 1929 book “America Set Free” by the German philosopher Hermann Keyserling.

The term was popularized during what scholars call the “death of God” movement of the mid-1960s—a movement that is, in its way, still in motion. Drawing from Nietzsche’s 19th-century declaration that “God is dead,” a group of Protestant theologians held that, essentially, Christianity would have to survive without an orthodox understanding of God. Tom Altizer, a religion professor at Emory University, was a key member of the Godless Christianity movement, and he traces its intellectual roots first to Kierkegaard and then to Nietzsche. For Altizer, a post-Christian era is one in which “both Christianity and religion itself are unshackled from their previous historical grounds.” In 1992 the critic Harold Bloom published a book titled “The American Religion: The Emergence of the Post-Christian Nation.” In it he cites William James’s definition of religion in “The Varieties of Religious Experience”: “Religion … shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they consider the divine.”

Which is precisely what most troubles Mohler. “The post-Christian narrative is radically different; it offers spirituality, however defined, without binding authority,” he told me. “It is based on an understanding of history that presumes a less tolerant past and a more tolerant future, with the present as an important transitional step.” The present, in this sense, is less about the death of God and more about the birth of many gods. The rising numbers of religiously unaffiliated Americans are people more apt to call themselves “spiritual” rather than “religious.” (In the new NEWSWEEK Poll, 30 percent describe themselves this way, up from 24 percent in 2005.)

Roughly put, the Christian narrative is the story of humankind as chronicled in the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament—the drama of creation, fall and redemption. The orthodox tend to try to live their lives in accordance with the general behavioral principles of the Bible (or at least the principles they find there of which they approve) and anticipate the ultimate judgment of God—a judgment that could well determine whether they spend eternity in heaven or in hell.

What, then, does it mean to talk of “Christian America”? Evangelical Christians have long believed that the United States should be a nation whose political life is based upon and governed by their interpretation of biblical and theological principles. If the church believes drinking to be a sin, for instance, then the laws of the state should ban the consumption of alcohol. If the church believes the theory of evolution conflicts with a literal reading of the Book of Genesis, then the public schools should tailor their lessons accordingly. If the church believes abortion should be outlawed, then the legislatures and courts of the land should follow suit. The intensity of feeling about how Christian the nation should be has ebbed and flowed since Jamestown; there is, as the Bible says, no thing new under the sun. For more than 40 years, the debate that began with the Supreme Court’s decision to end mandatory school prayer in 1962 (and accelerated with the Roe v. Wade ruling 11 years later) may not have been novel, but it has been ferocious. Fearing the coming of a Europe-like secular state, the right longed to engineer a return to what it believed was a Christian America of yore.

But that project has failed, at least for now. In Texas, authorities have decided to side with science, not theology, in a dispute over the teaching of evolution. The terrible economic times have not led to an increase in church attendance. In Iowa last Friday, the state Supreme Court ruled against a ban on same-sex marriage, a defeat for religious conservatives. Such evidence is what has believers fretting about the possibility of an age dominated by a newly muscular secularism. “The moral teachings of Christianity have exerted an incalculable influence on Western civilization,” Mohler says. “As those moral teachings fade into cultural memory, a secularized morality takes their place. Once Christianity is abandoned by a significant portion of the population, the moral landscape necessarily changes. For the better part of the 20th century, the nations of Western Europe led the way in the abandonment of Christian commitments. Christian moral reflexes and moral principles gave way to the loosening grip of a Christian memory. Now even that Christian memory is absent from the lives of millions.”

Religious doubt and diversity have, however, always been quintessentially American. Alexis de Tocqueville said that “the religious atmosphere of the country was the first thing that struck me on arrival in the United States,” but he also discovered a “great depth of doubt and indifference” to faith. Jefferson had earlier captured the essence of the American spirit about religion when he observed that his statute for religious freedom in Virginia was “meant to comprehend, within the mantle of its protection, the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination”—and those of no faith whatever. The American culture of religious liberty helped create a busy free market of faith: by disestablishing churches, the nation made religion more popular, not less.

America, then, is not a post-religious society—and cannot be as long as there are people in it, for faith is an intrinsic human impulse. The belief in an order or a reality beyond time and space is ancient and enduring. “All men,” said Homer, “need the gods.” The essential political and cultural question is to what extent those gods—or, more accurately, a particular generation’s understanding of those gods—should determine the nature of life in a given time and place.

If we apply an Augustinian test of nationhood to ourselves, we find that liberty, not religion, is what holds us together. In “The City of God,” Augustine —converted sinner and bishop of Hippo—said that a nation should be defined as “a multitude of rational beings in common agreement as to the objects of their love.” What we value most highly—what we collectively love most—is thus the central test of the social contract.

Judging from the broad shape of American life in the first decade of the 21st century, we value individual freedom and free (or largely free) enterprise, and tend to lean toward libertarianism on issues of personal morality. The foundational documents are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, not the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament (though there are undeniable connections between them). This way of life is far different from what many overtly conservative Christians would like. But that is the power of the republican system engineered by James Madison at the end of the 18th century: that America would survive in direct relation to its ability to check extremism and preserve maximum personal liberty. Religious believers should welcome this; freedom for one sect means freedom for all sects. As John F. Kennedy said in his address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in 1960: “For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew—or a Quaker—or a Unitarian—or a Baptist … Today I may be the victim—but tomorrow it may be you—until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped.”

Religion has been a factor in American life and politics from the beginning. Anglican observance was compulsory at Jamestown, and the Puritans of New England were explicitly hoping to found a New Jerusalem. But coerced belief is no belief at all; it is tyranny. “I commend that man, whether Jew, or Turk, or Papist, or whoever, that steers no otherwise than his conscience dares,” said Roger Williams.

By the time of the American founding, men like Jefferson and Madison saw the virtue in guaranteeing liberty of conscience, and one of the young republic’s signal achievements was to create a context in which religion and politics mixed but church and state did not. The Founders’ insight was that one might as well try to build a wall between economics and politics as between religion and politics, since both are about what people feel and how they see the world. Let the religious take their stand in the arena of politics and ideas on their own, and fight for their views on equal footing with all other interests. American public life is neither wholly secular nor wholly religious but an ever-fluid mix of the two. History suggests that trouble tends to come when one of these forces grows too powerful in proportion to the other.

Political victories are therefore intrinsically transitory. In the middle of the 19th century, the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney argued that “the great business of the church is to reform the world—to put away every kind of sin”; Christians, he said, are “bound to exert their influence to secure a legislation that is in accordance with the law of God.”

Worldly success tends to mark the beginning of the end for the overtly religious in politics. Prohibition was initially seen as a great moral victory, but its failure and ultimate repeal show that a movement should always be careful what it wishes for: in America, the will of the broad whole tends to win out over even the most devoted of narrower interests.

As the 20th century wore on, Christians found themselves in the relatively uncontroversial position of opposing “godless communism,” and the fervor of the Prohibition and Scopes-trial era seemed to fade a bit. Issues of personal morality, not international politics, would lay the foundations for the campaign for Christian America that we know as the rise of the religious right. The phenomenon of divorce in the 1960s and the Roe decision in 1973 were critical, and Jimmy Carter’s born-again faith brought evangelical Christianity to the mainstream in 1976.

Growing up in Atlanta in the ’60s and ’70s, Joe Scarborough, the commentator and former Republican congressman, felt the fears of his evangelical parents and their friends—fears that helped build support for the politically conservative Christian America movement. “The great anxiety in Middle America was that we were under siege—my parents would see kids walking down the street who were Boy Scouts three years earlier suddenly looking like hippies, and they were scared,” Scarborough says. “Culturally, it was October 2001 for a decade. For a decade. And once our parents realized we weren’t going to disappear into dope and radicalism, the pressure came off. That’s the world we’re in now—parents of boomers who would not drink a glass of wine 30 years ago are now kicking back with vodka. In a way, they’ve been liberated.”

And they have learned that politics does not hold all the answers—a lesson that, along with a certain relief from the anxieties of the cultural upheavals of the ’60s and ’70s, has tended to curb religiously inspired political zeal. “The worst fault of evangelicals in terms of politics over the last 30 years has been an incredible naiveté about politics and politicians and parties,” says Mohler. “They invested far too much hope in a political solution to what are transpolitical issues and problems. If we were in a situation that were more European, where the parties differed mostly on traditional political issues rather than moral ones, or if there were more parties, then we would probably have a very different picture. But when abortion and a moral understanding of the human good became associated with one party, Christians had few options politically.”

When that party failed to deliver—and it did fail—some in the movement responded by retreating into radicalism, convinced of the wickedness and venality of the political universe that dealt them defeat after defeat. (The same thing happened to many liberals after 1968: infuriated by the conservative mood of the country, the left reacted angrily and moved ever leftward.)

The columnist Cal Thomas was an early figure in the Moral Majority who came to see the Christian American movement as fatally flawed in theological terms. “No country can be truly ‘Christian’,” Thomas says. “Only people can. God is above all nations, and, in fact, Isaiah says that ‘All nations are to him a drop in the bucket and less than nothing’.” Thinking back across the decades, Thomas recalls the hope—and the failure. “We were going through organizing like-minded people to ‘return’ America to a time of greater morality. Of course, this was to be done through politicians who had a difficult time imposing morality on themselves!”

Experience shows that religious authorities can themselves be corrupted by proximity to political power. A quarter century ago, three scholars who are also evangelical Christians—Mark A. Noll, Nathan O. Hatch and George M. Marsden—published an important but too-little-known book, “The Search for Christian America.” In it they argued that Christianity’s claims transcend any political order. Christians, they wrote, “should not have illusions about the nature of human governments. Ultimately they belong to what Augustine calls ‘the city of the world,’ in which self-interest rules … all governments can be brutal killers.”

Their view tracks with that of the Psalmist, who said, “Put not thy trust in princes,” and there is much New Testament evidence to support a vision of faith and politics in which the church is truest to its core mission when it is the farthest from the entanglements of power. The Jesus of the Gospels resolutely refuses to use the means of this world—either the clash of arms or the passions of politics—to further his ends. After the miracle of the loaves and fishes, the dazzled throng thought they had found their earthly messiah. “When Jesus therefore perceived that they would come and take him by force, to make him a king, he departed again into a mountain himself alone.” When one of his followers slices off the ear of one of the arresting party in Gethsemane, Jesus says, “Put up thy sword.” Later, before Pilate, he says, “My kingdom is not of this world: if my kingdom were of this world, then would my servants fight.” The preponderance of lessons from the Gospels and from the rest of the New Testament suggests that earthly power is transitory and corrupting, and that the followers of Jesus should be more attentive to matters spiritual than political.

As always with the Bible, however, there are passages that complicate the picture. The author of Hebrews says believers are “strangers and exiles on the earth” and that “For here we have no lasting city, but seek the city which is to come.” In Romans the apostle Paul advises: “Do not be conformed to this world.” The Second Vatican Council cited these words of Pius XII: the Catholic Church’s “divine Founder, Jesus Christ, has not given it any mandate or fixed any end of the cultural order. The goal which Christ assigns to it is strictly religious … The Church can never lose sight of the strictly religious, supernatural goal.”

As an archbishop of Canterbury once said, though, it is a mistake to think that God is chiefly or even largely concerned with religion. “I hate the sound of your solemn assemblies,” the Lord says in Amos. Religion is not only about worshipping your God but about doing godly things, and a central message of the Gospels is the duty of the Christian to transform, as best one can, reality through works of love. “Being in the world and not of it remains our charge,” says Mohler. “The church is an eternal presence in a fallen, temporal world—but we are to have influence. The Sermon on the Mount is about what we are to do—but it does not come with a political handbook.”

How to balance concern for the garden of the church with the moral imperatives to make gentle the life of the world is one of the most perplexing questions facing the church. “We have important obligations to do whatever we can, including through the use of political means, to help our neighbors—promoting just laws, good order, peace, education and opportunity,” wrote Noll, Hatch and Marsden. “Nonetheless we should recognize that as we work for the relatively better in ‘the city of the world,’ our successes will be just that—relative. In the last analysis the church declares that the solutions offered by the nations of the world are always transitory solutions, themselves in need of reform.”

Back in Louisville, preparing for Easter, Al Mohler keeps vigil over the culture. Last week he posted a column titled “Does Your Pastor Believe in God?,” one on abortion and assisted suicide and another on the coming wave of pastors. “Jesus Christ promised that the very gates of Hell would not prevail against his church,” Mohler wrote. “This new generation of young pastors intends to push back against hell in bold and visionary ministry. Expect to see the sparks fly.” On the telephone with me, he added: “What we are seeing now is the evidence of a pattern that began a very long time ago of intellectual and cultural and political changes in thought and mind. The conditions have changed. Hard to pinpoint where, but whatever came after the Enlightenment was going to be very different than what came before.” And what comes next here, with the ranks of professing Christians in decline, is going to be different, too.

Abortion Rising

Abortion Kills More Black Americans Than the Seven Leading Causes of Death Combined, says CDC

VCN Reports:

Abortion kills more black Americans than the seven leading causes of death combined, according to data collected by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for 2005, the latest year for which the abortion numbers are available.

 

Abortion killed at least 203,991 blacks in the 36 states and two cities (New York City and the District of Columbia) that reported abortions by race in 2005, according to the CDC.  During that same year, according to the CDC, a total of 198,385 blacks nationwide died from heart disease, cancer, strokes, accidents, diabetes, homicide, and chronic lower respiratory diseases combined.  These were the seven leading causes of death for black Americans that year. 

A total of 49 jurisdictions reported their abortion numbers for 2005 to the CDC. These included all 50 states–except California, Louisiana, and New Hampshire–and New York City and the District of Columbia.  Of these 49 jurisdiction, only 36 states plus New York City and the District of Columbia reported the number of abortions by race. 

 
Among the large states not reporting abortions by race–and thus where the number of blacks killed by abortions is not included in the national total of 203,991–are California, Florida, Illinois and the rest of New York state outside of New York City.
 
According to the CDC, the total of 203,991 blacks killed by abortion in 2005 also does not include those aborted by ”private physicians’ procedures.” 
 
Every year since 1969, the CDC has amassed abortion data by state or area of occurrence, requesting information each year from the 50 states, the District of Columbia, and New York City. The CDC attempts to collect data on abortions by the age, race and marital status of  the women who undergo them as well as the type of abortion procedure.

 
However, the “CDC is not a regulatory agency,” Senior Press Officer Karen Hunter told CNSNews.com. “So while we are required by Congress to collect this information, states are not required to provide any data to the CDC, including abortion surveillance.”
 
In 2005, a total of 820,151 legal abortions were performed in the 49 jurisdication that reported abortions to the CDC, according to the “Abortion Surveillance” report, which is published in the CDC’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, or MMWR, for Nov. 28, 2008. (Scroll up to top of report) 
 
The report states, “Approximately 1 in 5 U.S. pregnancies have ended in abortion,” and also notes some limitations on the data: “The overall number, ratio, and rate of abortions are conservative estimates; the total numbers of legal induced abortions provided by central health agencies and reported to the CDC for 2005 were probably lower than the numbers actually performed.”

 

In Table 9 of the report, it states that there were 203,991 blacks killed by abortion, which comprises 35.5 percent of all abortions reported for that year.

Rev. Clenard H. Childress, Jr., founder of BlackGenocide.org, told CNSNews.com that according to numbers gleaned from statistics provided by the Guttmacher Institute, a pro-abortion group, 1,784 blacks are aborted each day. Also, he notes on his Web sitethat three out of five African-American women will obtain an abortion. 
 
Childress said the information and sources on his Web site have never been challenged by abortion-access supporters. ”This is because they can see that themselves, and they know them probably to be far worse than we’re reporting. The facts come from the pro-abort/pro-choice community,” he said.
 
“You want to go to a reliable source where people can’t dismiss what you’re saying,” Childress said. 
 
“Yet the Congressional Black Caucus, NAACP, Urban League, and the National Action Committee of Al Sharpton fail abysmally to report not only the decimation but the health ramifications which are questionably very pertinent and provable,” said Childress.  
 
“It would be one thing if we were talking about something hypothetically, but these are actual empirical proofs. … We simply want the health issues of abortion to be discussed,” Childress added.
 
Susan Cohen, director of government affairs at the Guttmacher Institute, said that black women are not inordinately targeted. 
 
It is the high number of unintended pregnancies among black women that explains the disproportionate number of black abortions, she stated in a policy analysis, “Abortion and Women of Color: The Bigger Picture (2008),” which was provided to CNSNews.com by Guttmacher Institute spokeswoman Rebecca Wind.

While acknowledging that the abortion rate for blacks in the United States is “almost 5 times that for white women,” Cohen concluded in her analysis, “these higher unintended pregnancy rates (among African American women) reflect the particular difficulties that many women in minority communities face in accessing high-quality contraceptive services and in using their chosen method of birth control consistently and effectively over long periods of time.”
 
“Because black women experience so many more unintended pregnancies than any other group–sharply disproportionate to their numbers in the general population–they are more likely to seek out and obtain abortion services than any other group,” said Cohen.  
 
 When asked to comment on this report, Dr. Freda Bush, an obstetrician and gynecologist in private practice in Jackson, Miss., told CNSNews.com that she found the explanation for the high rate of black abortions “disingenuous.”
 
“I would just like for them to explain why there’s such a significant proportion of their clinics that are located in minority communities,” said Bush, who is black. “So if you’ll notice, I did not mention that as a factor when I talked to you [earlier], so I was not accusing them of anything.  
 
“I was just pointing out the fact that we have more, but since they brought it up, I would like for them to explain where their clinics are located, and why their clinics are located in that area,” she added.
 
“I would also like for an explanation of why their founder, Margaret Sanger, who was a known eugenist, also had a Negro project, and an explanation if that was not directed at the ‘undesirables,’” said Bush. ”So, I’m not accusing them of anything. I would just like an explanation for the practices that they have continued.”
 
Dr. Alveda King, niece of slain civil rights leader Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., is a pro-life activist. In August 2007 she told a meeting of Priests for Life that abortionists “plant their killing centers in minority neighborhoods and prey upon women who think they have no hope.”  
 
“The great irony,” she said, “is that abortion has done what the Klan only dreamed of.” 

Source: Karen Schuberg, CNS News

Of these 36 states, Georgia reported the largest number of abortions–18,325–among African Americans.  Idaho and Montana reported the fewest, 16 and 17 respectively.

Did You Know That She Once Taught…?!

Pamela Anderson teaches
Sunday school

Next professional project? Producing cartoon ‘Striperella’

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© 2009 WorldNetDaily.com

 

 Pamela Anderson has retired from acting, but the former “Baywatch” star and pinup girl claims she is now teaching Sunday school at a church near her home in Malibu.”I’m having fun hanging out with my kids and teaching Sunday school,” she mentioned backstage at a recent awards show.

Anderson was one of the first celebrities to pose nude for People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, which uses the photos for publicity and fund-raising purposes. And, she makes it clear she hasn’t abandoned a lifestyle on the edge. Her latest project? Producing a new animated series with Stan Lee called “Striperella.”

She also confirmed that she will be making a cameo appearance in “Baywatch: The Movie.”

At 35, Anderson quit acting last year after being diagnosed with hepatitis C – which she claims she caught from her ex-husband Tommy Lee. She is reportedly engaged to bad-boy singer Kid Rock.

She’s also got a new political cause beside PETA. She expects to be called soon to testify before Congress in favor of a bill that would force disclosure of illnesses like hepatitis C between husbands and wives.

“I was the wife of someone who was too embarrassed to disclose it,” she explains.

Anderson has yet to undergo any serious treatments, relying on homeopathic methods. She still hasn’t told her children, Brandon, 6, and Dylan, 4, about her condition.

Something Wicked?!

LA Times reports:

By Steven Zeitchik and Rachel Abramowitz

Brittany Murphy remembered as hard-working but fragile

The actress, found dead on Sunday, kept a busy schedule even as she acknowledged health issues. Film companies are weighing how to market her latest projects, including ‘Something Wicked.’

One of the first things Brittany Murphy did when she showed up on the Oregon set of her indie thriller “Something Wicked” last June was acknowledge — and apologize for — her weight.

“I met her on the first day she arrived [on set] in Eugene with her husband,” said Scott Chambers, a principal at Chambers Productions and an executive producer on the picture. “She looked ill, as much as 10 pounds underweight, and she’s a small person to begin with. She easily could have made an excuse not to come to work, but she didn’t. She said, ‘I’ve got to get better, but I want to do this part.’ “

A day after the death of the 32-year-old actress, people in the film business on Monday described a woman who continued to work tirelessly even as her star-wattage dimmed somewhat and health issues began to take their toll.

Murphy spent about three weeks shooting her role as a psychiatrist in “Something Wicked,” a mystery thriller about a teenage couple experiencing eerie supernatural phenomena. Chambers noted that though the part was not physically demanding — most of the scenes took place in an office setting — he was nonetheless struck by Murphy’s commitment to her part given her fragile state.

Murphy’s work on “Wicked” came on the heels of another picture, a thriller called “Abandoned,” and she would follow it up this fall with a lead part in “The Caller,” the now-infamous Puerto Rico-based set where she turned up to work on the thriller but eventually parted ways with filmmakers last month, amid reports she was fired. She was also preparing to shoot a romantic comedy called “Shrinking Charlotte” in early 2010; that film may not go forward without her.

The abundance of projects showed that, while Murphy was not landing the sort of plum roles she nabbed earlier in the decade in movies such as “Just Married” and “8 Mile,” she was still working at a breakneck pace, particularly in smaller movies that often require a name star to land financing.

However, the vulnerability that had always been part of her charm seemed more pronounced in recent months.

Shawn Levy, who directed Murphy in the 2003 hit “Just Married,” said that, back then, “so much about her fragility reminded me of a bird — a fragile, pretty bird. She was really raw emotionally in life and in work.”

In those days, however, Murphy also had a “boisterous youth” that “matched up with Ashton [Kutcher], who had a similarly raucous energy,” Levy said. She was thin, but “I don’t remember it ever being an issue. I don’t remember her being preoccupied with it.”

On Sunday morning, Murphy’s mother, Sharon, discovered her daughter collapsed in the shower of the home the actress shared with her husband, screenwriter Simon Monjack. The writer told “Access Hollywood” on Monday that Murphy’s mother “went into the bathroom because she had been in there a long time. Her mom screamed for me and I ran. Then called 911.”

Murphy was taken to Cedars-Sinai hospital. She was pronounced dead at 10:04 a.m.

On Monday, the Los Angeles County Coroner’s office deferred a final decision on the actress’ death, pending a toxicology report, for as much as six weeks. Los Angeles Police Department officials, however, said an initial investigation yielded no evidence of a crime. Sources close to the investigation did say that Murphy showed signs of severe internal bleeding.

Even after Murphy’s death, her busy schedule means that a number of her films could make their way to the multiplex — or at least the DVD aisle — in the coming months, giving fans an almost eerie, post-mortem view of the star.

“Wicked” has nearly completed postproduction. The movie, which does not have a theatrical distributor yet, could be ready for screening at festivals and for buyers as early as the spring, though Chambers said the family’s wishes on the timing could be taken into account and result in screening postponements.

“Abandoned,” in which Murphy stars as a woman with a history of psychiatric issues who engages in a frantic search for her missing boyfriend (Dean Cain), is in a similar state of postproduction and is seeking theatrical distribution.

Meanwhile, Murphy films that have been completed continue to hover. “Across the Hall,” a micro-budget thriller that earned a small theatrical release this month, will be released on DVD by Image Entertainment on Jan. 19. A representative for Image said that the company was weighing how to market the film in the wake of Murphy’s death.

Her most recent high-profile project was supposed to be “The Expendables,” the Sylvester Stallone action picture that Lionsgate is scheduled to release in August. Murphy had been cast in the film, but her part was written out of the script before she could shoot any footage.

Nephilim’s Finest uses Gospel Sensualism?!?!?

HM Magazine reports:

Tonex gets Grammy nomination

If you’ve never seen this guy sing before, you don’t know what a voice can do. Imagine Smokey Robinson, Little Richard, Prince and Michael Jackson all rolled into one

The Grammy nod is the latest accolade for TONEX’s “Unspoken” album. The New York Times called it “… a vibrant admixture of secular and spiritual. … Sometimes he’s channeling Babyface’s sensualism (”Glorex”), sometimes he’s a funk eccentric in the Prince mold (”When I Call”), but always faith is near. …” It’s also been named “Top Gospel CD of 2009″ by amazon.com. “Bring It,” another single from “Unspoken,” was featured during CBS March Madness 2009 and on “MLB Tonight”.

TONEX is a visionary artist who has built his career by pushing the envelope of what’s regarded as “Gospel Music.” His music couches raw, honest lyrics in cutting-edge mainstream-music production techniques — then delivers it all via a four-octave vocal range that’s the envy of singers of all genres. L. Michael Gipson of Soul Tracks calls TONEX “… arguably the most multi-talented composer, arranger, producer and male singer gospel music has birthed in the last quarter century.”

TONEX shares his Grammy nomination with The Foreign Exchange, Robert Glasper & Bilal, India Arie & Dobet Gnahore, Eric Roberson, and Ben O’Neill & Michelle Thompson. The 52nd Annual GRAMMY Awards will be held on Sunday, January 31, 2010, at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, California.

Crazy World: Out Of Your Control?! What?!

Jesus-Era House Uncovered

NAZARETH, Israel (Dec. 21) — Days before Christmas, archaeologists on Monday unveiled what they said were the remains of the first dwelling in Nazareth that can be dated back to the time of Jesus — a find that could shed new light on what the hamlet was like during the period the New Testament says Jesus lived there as a boy.

The dwelling and older discoveries of nearby tombs in burial caves suggest that Nazareth was an out-of-the-way hamlet of about 50 houses on a patch of about four acres. It was evidently populated by Jews of modest means who kept camouflaged grottos to hide from Roman invaders, said archaeologist Yardena Alexandre, excavations director at the Israel Antiquities Authority,
Based on clay and chalk shards found at the site, the dwelling appeared to house a “simple Jewish family,” Alexandre added, as workers at the site carefully chipped away at mud with small pickaxes to reveal stone walls.

Nazareth holds a cherished place in Christianity. It is the town where Christian tradition says Jesus grew up and where an angel told Mary she would bear the child of God.

“This may well have been a place that Jesus and his contemporaries were familiar with,” Alexandre said. A young Jesus may have played around the house with his cousins and friends, she said. “It’s a logical suggestion.”

The discovery so close to Christmas has pleased local Christians.

“They say if the people do not speak, the stones will speak,” said a smiling Father Jack Karam of the nearby Basilica of the Annunciation, the site where Christian tradition says Mary received the angel’s word.

Alexandre’s team found remains of a wall, a hideout, a courtyard and a water system that appeared to collect water from the roof and supply it to the home. The discovery was made when builders dug up the courtyard of a former convent to make room for a new Christian center, just yards away from the Basilica.

It is not clear how big the dwelling is. Alexandre’s team has uncovered about 900 square feet of the house, but it may have been for an extended family and could be much larger, she said.

Alexandre said her team also found a camouflaged entry way into a grotto, which she believes was used by Jews at the time to hide from Roman soldiers who were battling Jewish rebels for control of the area.

The grotto would have hidden about six people for a few hours, she said.

However, Roman soldiers did not end up battling Nazareth’s Jews because the hamlet had little strategic value at the time. The Roman army was more interested in larger towns and strategic hilltop communities, she said.

Alexandre said similar camouflaged grottos were found in other ancient Jewish communities of the lower Galilee such as the nearby Biblical village of Cana, which did witness battle between Jews and Romans.

At the site, Alexandre told reporters that archaeologists also found clay and chalk vessels which were likely used by Galilean Jews of the time. The scientists concluded a Jewish family lived there because of the chalk, which was used by Jews at the time to ensure the purity of the food and water kept inside the vessels.

The shards also date back to the time of Jesus, which includes the late Hellenic, early Roman period that ranges from about 100 B.C. to 100 A.D., Alexandre said.

The absence of any remains of glass vessels or imported products suggested the family who lived in the dwelling were “simple,” but Alexandre said the remains did not indicate whether they were traders or farmers.

The only other artifacts that archaeologists have found in the Nazareth area from the time of Jesus are ancient burial caves outside the hamlet, providing a rough idea of the village’s population at the time, Alexandre said.

Work is now taking place to clear newer ruins built above the dwelling, which will be preserved. The dwelling will become a part of a new international Christian center being constructed close to the site and funded by a French Roman Catholic group, said Marc Hodara of the Chemin Neuf Community overseeing construction.

Alexandre said limited space and population density in Nazareth means it is unlikely that archaeologists can carry out any further excavations in the area, leaving this dwelling to tell the story of what Jesus’ boyhood home may have looked like.

The discovery at “this time, this period, is very interesting, especially as a Christian,” Karam said. “For me it is a great gift.”

Mother of Nephilim Host Uses Child for the Sake of Money

MTV: Lil Wayne has come a long way since he was in school, and he’s got the crib to prove it. In an exclusive preview from Wayne and DJ Scoob Doo’s forthcoming behind-the-scenes DVD, “The Nino Brown Story, Pt. 2″ (the follow-up to 2008’s part one), we get a look at Wayne’s home and hear him reflecting on his past.

In the clip, Wayne talks about his early days as a rapper. “I was still in school after I dropped my first solo album,” he said. “After I dropped Tha Block Is Hot, I was still in school. It was platinum and I was still in school.”

Wayne was literally riding the success of his 1999 debut album, with a brand-new Mercedes-Benz drop-top two-seater with a Kompressor engine. He said that many of the people in his neighborhood didn’t know such a car existed, and thought he’d had it made especially for him. But his good fortune did not end there, as he got a call from Cash Money label head Baby one evening, asking him to come to his house: ” ‘Yo shawty, come to the crib,’ ” Wayne recalled him saying. Wayne said he went to Baby’s house and was told to go to the back, where the tarp was taken off of a BMW two-seater, a gift from the label.

In the clip, Wayne also recalls that his mother ordered him to leave school. “My mom, she made me quit,” he said. ” ‘Look, I’m going to let you quit, but them b—-s better get you a tutor!’ “ Wayne said, mimicking his mother’s voice. He said he called up Baby to make it happen.

” ‘Yo B, my momma said I have to get me a tutor.’ I had the tutor the next day,” he recalled. ” ‘You gotta go at 9, shorty,’ ” Baby said.

FYI- Lil Wayne’s mom has her own reality show coming out soon that is geared to speak into the lives of others.