Religion

Quick: Name the Four Gospels. How about the Ten Commandments? The Four Noble Truths of Buddhism? Seven Catholic Sacraments? Hello? Anybody? America purports to be a religious nation, yet what we know about religion is, well, sinful. Stephen Prothero, head of Boston University's religion department, says it's time to teach religion in America - not devotion but religion. Prothero and others have found a shocking lack of knowledge about the religions to which Americans purport to belong, bested only by their ignorance of religions to which they don't belong.

American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers and the Making of a Nation By Jon Meacham Newsweek editor Meacham asserts at the start of this treatise on religion and its role in the nation's development: "If totalitarianism was the great problem of the 20th century, then extremism is so far the great problem of the 21st century." Meacham's discussion, while compelling when focused on the Founding Fathers and the middle ground that they sought in their dealings with faith and freedom, falters when he discusses later presidents and their religious views.

Ellwood "Bunky" Bartlett - Mega Millions lottery winner, Wiccan high priest, recently retired accountant - would like to clear up a few misconceptions about his plans for a "witch school." Yes, he'd like to start a pagan seminary. But no, it's not going to be some sort of Hogwarts-on-the-Patapsco, with precocious adolescents running around in wizard hats and casting spells. Bartlett instead envisions the place as sort of a yeshiva for all faiths, a "church" that's less about God - or gods, if you prefer - and more about spirituality, nature and healing.

You've probably heard by now that Mitt Romney has a Mormon problem. It seems every pollster of note has published a poll showing that many Americans consider Mr. Romney's membership in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints - commonly called the Mormon Church - a potential deal-breaker. John F. Kennedy faced a similar challenge as he campaigned to become the first president who was a member of the Roman Catholic Church. Many are encouraging Mr. Romney, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts, to borrow several pages from the JFK playbook - especially the speech he delivered to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association in September 1960.

BOSTON -- He's not exactly a profile in courage. After all, Pete Stark has represented his liberal district near San Francisco for more than 30 years. It's unlikely that he'll be tarred and feathered or sent packing for admitting that he's, well, a godless politician. Nevertheless, last week, Mr. Stark broke a political taboo. He became the first member of Congress to say publicly that he doesn't believe in "a supreme being." Some described the admission as "coming out of the closet." Others rued the fact that God was not on his side.

When Mitt Romney speaks on religion tonight, it is people like the Rev. Jason Poling he is going to have to reach. Though he has de-emphasized politics since becoming pastor of the evangelical New Hope Community Church in Pikesville five years ago, Poling has been an active Republican for much of his life. And he has a major problem with the former Massachusetts governor now running for that party's presidential nomination: Romney is a Mormon. "Mormonism is not a Christian religion," Poling says succinctly.

WASHINGTON -- Trying to revive evangelical support for his presidential candidacy, Mitt Romney linked questions about his Mormon faith yesterday to fears about President John F. Kennedy's Catholicism but refused to answer specific criticism of his religion. A speech by Romney, heavily promoted by his campaign, was only the latest indication of the influential role that religion is playing in the 2008 presidential contest. Both parties are wooing religious voters - a pivotal group in the 2004 election - and issues linked to religion have marked the campaign, from the intense debate over how to respond to Islamic fundamentalism to rumors about the Muslim background of Democratic contender Sen. Barack Obama.

GORHAM, N.H. -- George W. Bush said yesterday that as president he would make moral values and discipline a focus of the nation's schools."Our children must be educated in reading and writing, but also in right and wrong," the Republican presidential candidate said. "Our schools should not cultivate confusion. They must cultivate conscience."The Texas governor decried what he described as the notion that all ideas have equal validity, saying, "We must tell our children, with conviction and confidence, that the authors of the Holocaust were evil men and the authors of the Constitution were good ones, that the right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness is not a personal opinion but an eternal truth."

In the beginning was the punching nun puppet. Customers bought it and Mark Pahlow said to himself: This is good. So the punching nun begat the glow-in-the-dark statue of Mary and the plush computer voodoo doll and the Hindu lunch boxes. Not to mention the Amish and rabbi punching puppets.And business is good.Pahlow's company, Archie McPhee, is hardly the only place to find less-than-reverent religious merchandise. Elsewhere in the world people are selling a plastic golf ball with a plastic angel inside (to protect, no doubt, from an ungodly slice)

"Lead Us Into Temptation: The Triumph of American Materialism," by James B. Twitchell. Columbia University Press. 336 pages. $24.95.James B. Twitchell has a job that could exist only in today's America: teaching English and advertising at the University of Florida. And, with his earlier books, "Adcult USA" and "Carnival Culture," he became the nation's leading dissector and defender of commercial culture.Perhaps because he's searching for something new to say, Twitchell's latest work, "Lead Us Into Temptation," is really two books in one. The best parts are an entertaining and insightful history of American commercialism, from the emergence of advertising in newspapers and magazines, radio and television, to the development of the supermarket, packaged products such as Wonder Bread and mass marketing of expensive luxury items of all kinds.

It was the kind of story that cried out to be told. Or so Terry Mattingly thought. It was 1982, and a little-known punk band from Ireland was touring U.S. colleges for the first time, rattling from town to town in an old panel truck. Mattingly, then a music writer for a small Illinois paper, was intrigued by the chorus from a song on their new album. The lyrics were, of all things, in Latin - gloria in te domine, gloria exultate - and appeared to have been taken from an ancient Mass. In two days he spent with the band, Mattingly, a journalist who now lives in Glen Burnie, persuaded the lead singer to speak about his faith.

I don't always agree with Leonard Pitts Jr.'s stand on the issues, but I have to agree with his position on the subject of religion ("What's driving people away from religion?" Commentary, March 16). I am 66 years of age and have been a born-again Christian since I was 18. I am more than concerned by the decline of the Christian faith in this country. And I am also willing to admit that, as Christians, much of that decline is our own fault. Many of us castigate the idea of gay marriage and at the same time we have a divorce rate that borders on horrendous.

We are losing our religion. That, with apologies to R.E.M., is the startling conclusion of a new study, the American Religious Identification Survey, conducted by researchers at Trinity College of Hartford, Conn. The poll of more than 54,000 American adults found a sharp erosion in the number of people claiming religious affiliation. A few highlights: The number of people who call themselves Christian is 76 percent, down 10 percentage points since 1990. Thirty percent of married couples did not have a religious ceremony.

Starring and written by Bill Maher. Directed by Larry Charles. Released by Lionsgate. $29.95. Rated R. *** (3 STARS) dvds When President Barack Obama said in his inaugural address that "We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers," satirist Bill Maher and others fitting into the latter category must have been pleased to be included. As Maher (Real Time with Bill Maher, Politically Incorrect) claims in Religulous, his feature-length documentary from 2008, a "hidden minority" of 16 percent of Americans consider themselves "nonreligious."

Sunday Morning is turning 30, and the CBS mainstay is celebrating this weekend. If you have never seen the program - and sometimes it is the best thing on TV all weekend - think of it as an upbeat newsmagazine with a feel for humor and culture. Sunday, they will be looking at the way the world - including technology, popular culture and religion - has changed since the show made its debut three decades ago with Charles Kuralt as host. These days, it's the forever-in-bow ties Charles Osgood at the helm.

Comedian Bill Maher brings his disarmingly direct humor to the topic of religion in Religulous. The results are often as surprising as they are funny. Maher is the most straightforward of our top comics, even among those like Jon Stewart who regularly offer running commentary. Stewart, in his own smart, humane and up-to-the-minute way, is today what P.J. Corkery said Johnny Carson was for earlier generations: "The Village Explainer" (borrowed from Gertrude Stein), meeting with his audience nightly to provide some realistic ballast in an increasingly unsteady world.

When it became known in late 1976 that the Plains Baptist Church had a 12-year-old policy on its books that excluded "blacks and other civil rights agitators" from worshiping there, its most prominent member - soon-to-be-president Jimmy Carter - rejected calls that he resign from the parish. "I can't resign as an American citizen because there's still discrimination," he said at the time. "And I don't intend to resign from my own church because there's discrimination." Thirty-two years later, a string of incidents involving presidential contenders, pastors and churches illustrates how tricky the navigation of religious terrain continues to be for political candidates.

Shakespeare, a guy who knew a thing or two about reeling in an audience, wrote, "The tongues of dying men enforce attention like deep harmony." Four hundred years later, last words are apparently no less compelling. Millions of people tuned into a dying professor's last lecture on YouTube, and millions more bought the book based on it. Tuesdays With Morrie, similarly stocked with deathbed life lessons, became a publishing phenomenon a few years back. And dozens of anthologies, both online and in print, compile final utterances of the famous and infamous.

Worlds at War The 2,500 Year Struggle Between East and West By Anthony Pagden Random House / 640 pages / $29.95 In 1526, after the defeat of Louis II of Hungary by Suleyman I, the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto observed that "two suns" now illuminated the globe. Engaged in a struggle that began in the age of antiquity, and continued with the crusade of Pope Urban II in 1095, two rulers, Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor in the Christian West, and Suleyman "The Magnificent," sultan of the Ottoman Empire in the Muslim East, vied for supremacy in "the inhabited world."

Ethnic divisions extend beyond black and white The brouhaha about the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's controversial remarks fails to take into account some fundamentally troubling aspects of America's racial wars and religious hang-ups ("Politics hit the pulpit," March 24). Many blacks and whites seem to be caught in a time warp about race and religion, and ignore the changing demographics of today's America: the growing number of Hispanic, Asian and Arab Americans, the waves of immigrants who have no ax to grind with either blacks or whites, and the rising numbers of people from all different religions of the world, including many who belong to no organized religion and may be agnostics or atheists.