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Pope Benedict XVI, like you didn't know that

Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to the United States has provoked an examination of the relationship between Roman Catholics and evangelical Christians, who share a similar social agenda. Southern Baptist scholar, author and commentator Al Mohler points respectfully to the continuing, seemingly insoluble doctrinal differences between the two faith traditions, and Christianity Today emphasizes the common ground, in two representative stories.

Pentecostals such as myself are part of the evangelical fold, of course, but many of us have had more extensive interaction with Catholic believers than the typical evangelical because of the Charismatic movement’s origins in Catholic as well as Protestant churches. Granted, you’ll find Pentecostal churches that are virulently anti-Catholic, but I believe they’re becoming more rare as Pentecostals are exposed to the breadth of their faith through television and major conferences.

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Green Mountain Grrrlz

Three weeks after I got married, I found myself in a desperate place. On my knees in prayer, begging God to make me love my husband. I figured I’d just made the biggest mistake of my life. Maybe there was still a chance to pull through.

Don’t get me wrong: There was nothing wrong with my husband. He was kind, attentive, a good listener, a considerate lover. Really, I had no idea why he loved me so much, and that was part of the problem. My disbelief, rooted somehow in deep feelings of rejection, caused me to test that love in obnoxious ways.

This is an intensely personal column, so if that’s not your thing, consider this fair warning. One subject that continually comes up every time I post Bible Girl are comments concerning same-sex attraction, along with epithets directed my way such as “lezbo.” That's probably because not long after I launched Bible Girl, I wrote a column about my struggle with same-sex attraction as a teenager and young adult, and for better or worse this column has been identified with that subject ever since.

I left many things unsaid in that early column. To be honest, I was kinda chicken. I had just enough fortitude to say what I did -- that Jesus Christ had “delivered” me from a struggle with same-sex attraction -- but no more. Since the subject and the accusations won’t go away, I’m gonna tell it: Just how this transformation occurred.

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JohnMcCain.com

Two news articles in recent days have shed light on an enigma: John McCain’s Christian faith. Andrea Billups’ story in the Washington Times -- despite its inadvertently funny lede, which appears to have caught multiple people sleeping at the copy desk -- will do nothing to boost evangelical Christians’ comfort level with McCain. For evangelicals, all the candidate has going for him is that he’s anti-abortion in a race where the other candidates aren’t. Another story posted on the Associated Baptist Press Web site offers the most detail to date about McCain’s relationship with his church, North Phoenix Baptist, and pastor, the Reverend Dan Yeary. And this too will stoke suspicion about McCain’s faith, not confidence.

Wonder why evangelicals haven’t cottoned to McCain? Here are four reasons why -- and they’re less about his tepid opposition to gay marriage than a deeper concern that his Christian faith isn’t the guiding force of his life. If it isn’t the guiding force, the thinking goes, it’s an add-on, a malleable, negotiable thing, and it can’t be trusted.

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Bishop T.D. Jakes

On his recently launched blog, Bishop T.D. Jakes of Dallas has responded sharply to a story by CNN correspondent John Blake that dismisses Jakes as a “prosperity pastor” who has shunned the message of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.

“Prosperity pastors such as Bishop T.D. Jakes have become the most popular preachers in the black church,” Blake writes. “They’ve also become brands. They’ve built megachurches and business empires with the prosperity message.”

Blake contrasts black preachers such as Jakes, Creflo Dollar and Dr. Frederick K. Price with “prophetic” ministers such as the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who “often enrage people because they proclaim God’s judgment on nations.” The money preachers fill the pews, Blake writes, but prophetic pastors don’t because of their challenging message. These ministers, he says, are the ones who embody the message of King.

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Bible Girl was all ready to wax indignant about the prospect of children being ripped from their mothers, and then I read about the bed. Which is to say: the bed in the temple in Eldorado, where dirty old men got their freak on with underage virgins.

Yep, right about then all my sympathy went out the window, and I realized that the sick culture of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints needs to be busted up, deprogrammed, prosecuted, whatever.

I don’t think polygamy is the ultimate sin, as repugnant to modern sensibilities as it is. It has existed in many cultures through the millennia, including among the ancient Jews. But it’s clear to me that this sect’s practice of polygamy is motivated by plain old freakiness. Teenage virgin brides don’t complain, don’t make demands and can’t relate to their much older husbands as peers. They’re just sperm receptacles.

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Wow. You mean it takes all that?

OK, so maybe I’m naïve, but that was my thought when I read Dennis Rodman’s account of sex with Madonna, which you’ll find in his 1997 autobiography, Bad as I Wanna Be. No, I don’t remember the details -- if you really want ‘em, Rodman’s book can be obtained for the princely sum of a penny on Amazon -- I just recall that the whole scenario was complicated and laborious and about as sexy as assembling particleboard furniture in the dark.

Seems as if the Like-a-Virgin lady needed a whole lot of preliminaries just to get started, and I thought, man, she must really be jaded about sex. Well, on second thought, it was Dennis Rodman.

Never mind why I was paging through that book looking for the sex scene in the first place. My little epiphany -- that a lot of folks in our licentious society are really, really bored with sex -- stuck with me over the years, and I started taking mental notes and compiling lists of cultural signposts, stuff I kept hearing about in the media and in conversations with friends:

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Bishop T.D. Jakes

Dallas’ Bishop T.D. Jakes has launched his own blog, and he steps right into the fray with a lengthy post about the Reverend Jeremiah Wright controversy. True to form, Jakes avoids political hard lines and instead gives insights designed to provoke the consciences of blacks as well as whites. He does think the Wright controversy is an attempt by the media to discredit Barack Obama, and he offers high praise for the candidate’s speech on race and its result -- that it got everyone talking about this difficult, perilous subject.

Jakes notes that Wright’s “infamous sermon” -- not sure exactly which one he’s referring to -- “sounded angry.” He notes that many blacks “feel left without true vindication,” but “we are not monolithic, and all blacks do not all agree with him…” The bishop observes what I have seen in my mostly black church circle: Every preacher and spiritual leader I know is wrestling with how to respond in 2008 to the lingering effects of this country’s racist past and the anger and resentment that still exist.

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Thanks to a few incendiary soundbites, recordings of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright’s sermons are circulating among church people, making their way from hand to hand and e-mail to iPod. A politically active young man in my church gave my husband a copy of the full message from which the infamous phrase “America’s chickens are coming home to roost” had been ripped, and from there the CD found its way to me.

I listened to the September 16, 2001, sermon a few times and chewed on the preacher’s words in context. The furor over Wright’s statements has spread far and wide; you usually won’t find Pentecostals spending much time delving into the messages of a theologically liberal United Church of Christ pastor, but we were curious to see if this man deserves all of the harsh criticism that’s been directed his way. My conclusion: He doesn’t. Many black Christians -- and surely some white ones too -- see the controversy over Wright as a desperate attempt to derail and discredit Barack Obama’s candidacy. I heard this from Democrats and Republicans alike.

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Rev. Jeremiah Wright will be honored by Texas Christian University's Brite Divinity School on March 28.

These were his spiritual sons, men he’d ordained into ministry and sent into a hateful world. And now they’d turned their backs on him.

Bishop Charles Harrison Mason, a Southern holy man, the son of freed slaves, had shared the platform with white and black preachers in the darkest years of Jim Crow. Mason knew that the gospel he preached allowed no provision for hatred or prejudice; these were sins that damned a soul to hell.

He suffered for this gospel. Mason was beaten and thrown in jail; the FBI maintained a file on him because of his interracial practices and pacifism. History provides only the scantiest details about Mason, the black Pentecostal apostle who founded the Church of God in Christ. His followers were drawn from the lowest strata of society, laborers, domestics and dirt farmers who desperately needed a miracle-working Jesus for everything from food to freedom. Theirs was largely an oral tradition.

We do know that many of the white ministers Mason had ordained pulled away from their black brothers to form the Assemblies of God.

One remarkable fact is noted in the history books. At the Assembly of God’s first convention in Hot Springs in 1914, Mason was invited to preach. He did that and more -- offering his blessing on the new, all-white organization, which would later become the largest Pentecostal denomination in the world. The division of black from white is starkly evident today: The Church of God in Christ is overwhelmingly black, and the Assemblies of God are predominantly white.

I think of Mason when I consider the words and deeds of a much more ordinary man of God: Barack Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

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Trinity United Church of Christ

Barack Obama with the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., in a now-famous photo taken three years ago

There were the “Cocktail Christians”: the Lutherans in my Wisconsin hometown who did their sacred rites on Sunday morning and tipped multiple martinis Sunday night. Punch in; punch out. That was their version of the Christian faith, performed to the tune of dirgelike hymns and clinking cocktail glasses.

Another one of my mother’s pet phrases was “All this and Jesus too.” These were the folks who celebrated their own wonderfulness -- their wealth, their health, their beauty -- and tacked on a few props for Jesus when things were really sweet.

My mom was altogether different, a righteous Democrat wrapped around a core of abstemious fundamentalist. She told me how, at 18, she’d watched Martin Luther King Jr. on television and concluded, right there in her all-white neighborhood on the South Side of Milwaukee, that he was right and everyone else was wrong. She shook a pale finger in her parents’ faces and pronounced them racists.

She hauled me to Vietnam War protests when I was a kid and taped an anti-war poster to my bedroom door. Later on, she’d work the phone at a crisis pregnancy hotline. All of this left a deep impression on me.

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“Why are you doing these stories?”

She looked me in the eye and spoke slowly. Her lunch sat untouched in front of her.

“Why do you care?”

I struggled to find words. It’s my job to ask questions, but this woman wanted answers. For years, she said, many people had known about Pastor Sherman Allen’s practice of beating women with a paddle as a twisted form of spiritual discipline. (For a full report, see the February 21 Dallas Observer cover story, “The Reverend Spanky.”) Allen was so smart, so “spiritual,” so friendly when that’s the side of his character he wanted people to see, that dozens of women got entangled with him. She was one of them.

When she told her story to her Christian friends and leaders of her former denomination, the Church of God in Christ, she says she was treated like she was crazy.

She knows it’s hard for outsiders to understand, as many of the comments to my Bible Girl columns on Allen demonstrate. “He may be a sicko, but what kind of adult idiot allows someone to paddle them?” goes a typical comment.

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Brian Harkin

Barack Obama at Reunion Arena, February 20

It’s a beautiful thing, this vision of black and white together.

A couple of burly white guys let my black friends cut in line. Children of different hues swapped electronic gadgets and hung on their mommies, and the conversation ranged free and easy among Barack Obama supporters of all colors and persuasions -- white, black, Latino, gay -- as we waited for three hours to be seated in Reunion Arena for last week’s rally.

The line of 15,000 or so snaked this way and that, winding through concrete arches where I watched a rainbow swarm of cheaters try to cut in front of us amidst the confusion. A lot of them managed to ooze in front, but I didn’t hear a single cuss word fly. (OK, I admit my pastor’s wife had to shame me into keeping my place in line.)

I did hear a lot of the usual conspiracy-theory claptrap, which never ceases to annoy me -- about Katrina, the wicked oil companies, fear-mongering as an election tactic. But this was a happy, upbeat crowd. I couldn’t have picked a fight if I tried.

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Pastor Sherman Allen portrayed his marriage to first wife Edwina Cunningham as a sort of fairytale, with his wife in the role of a needy Cinderella and he as the prince who rescued her from material and emotional poverty. When Edwina died in 2003 of complications from scleroderma, a skin disease, Allen even penned a book titled For Better or For Worst describing what the couple went through while she was in declining health. But former members of Fort Worth’s Shiloh Institutional Church of God in Christ and family friends describe a different kind of relationship behind the scenes.

One family friend had some good things to say about Allen, the subject of last week's cover story in the paper version of Unfair Park -- and, of course, a fixture on Unfair Park. He spoke admiringly of Allen’s down-to-earth manner -- how the preacher would meet him at the door in a V-neck undershirt and boxer shorts, and how a person’s race made no difference to him. The source admired Allen’s Tuesday-night Bible studies, where the pastor dug into the Scriptures in depth. “It was biblically and doctrinally sound,” the source says. “He broke it down verse by verse, word by word.” He much preferred those sessions to Sunday mornings, where the preaching and teaching always revolved around “money, money, money.”

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Sherman Allen sure is ... um ... interesting.

The rumors floated around for years in the local Pentecostal church scene (and, on Unfair Park, for that matter). But Your Bible Girl's got the inside story: Pastor Sherman Allen’s strange affinities for crystal balls, voodoo and butt-whuppings. In this week’s cover story in the paper version of Unfair Park, we examine Allen's past in the voodoo-influenced Spiritualist church, his rise to prominence in the Church of God in Christ and the 20 years of allegations that the embattled pastor of Shiloh Institutional Church in Fort Worth paddled and sexually abused young women.

Though many men and women of conscience complained about Allen’s behavior over the years, their attempts to stop Allen came screeching to a halt at Bishop J. Neaul Haynes of Dallas, Allen’s overseer in the Church of God in Christ who know everything and did nothing. Bible Girl also reports on the most recent lawsuit filed against Allen, as well as some really freaky stuff that makes her blush. Oh, and been missing Bible Girl? Look for the brand-new Bible Girl blog, coming soon to the Observer's home page. --Julie Lyons

Is Church of God in Christ Presiding Bishop Charles E. Blake soft on homosexuality and too cozy with loose-living celebrities? Is he taking his denomination -- the biggest Pentecostal body in the United States -- far away from its roots as a “holiness” church?

Or is he ushering in much-needed modernizations and establishing a greater national profile for a storied organization that essentially birthed the black gospel scene, set the standard for black preaching and made exuberant worship -- including dancing -- the norm in Pentecostal and charismatic churches today?

These questions are on the minds of many of the leaders and delegates who will gather in Memphis this week for the Church of God in Christ’s week-long Holy Convocation -- which, this year, also serves to celebrate the denomination’s 100th anniversary.

A group of COGIC leaders, including a former presiding bishop, Chandler D. Owens of Marietta, Georgia, is vying to unseat Blake at the convocation, and while some of these leaders cite a constitutional crisis as the main reason for their opposition to Blake, behind the scenes the debate revolves around homosexuality and COGIC’s identity and heritage as a church with strict standards for morality.

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