Universal Life Church

An unprecedented number of Saudi Arabian women are pressuring the government to repeal the ban on women driving, which has long been imposed on them by religious authorities who follow a strict interpretation of Islamic teachings and beliefs. At least fifty women risked arrest last Friday when they got in cars and began driving as a challenge to the ban, which in some cases has even restricted access to medical treatment for both women and men. Most voices on the issue appear to be supportive, yet there are still some traditionalists and cultural relativists who have criticized efforts at reform.

The protest is the largest of its kind in over two decades, and comes only weeks after a woman was arrested for posting a video of herself driving on Youtube. Manal al-Sherif spent nine days in jail before being released on the condition that she would never drive or participate in the Women2Drive campaign. The last time such a protest was held was 1990, when forty-seven women were arrested and severely punished for getting in cars and driving to protest the ban. Protestors are not stopping at driving rights, however—they are calling on the Saudi government, a strict theocracy in which the monarchy derives much of its authority from fundamentalist clerics, to reform women’s overall transportation and mobility rights. (To put things in perspective, Saudi women are not even allowed to ride bicycles.)

Already, the demonstration has been compared with other social justice movements. Some have drawn parallels with the nonviolent protests of the United States civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, as well as the first-wave feminist movement of 19^th-century America. In addition, the demonstrations have been compared with what many have started calling the “Arab spring”, a resurgence of democratic activism in the Middle East driven largely by social media and social networking technology, since demonstrators have turned to the Web to mobilize likeminded people. The fact that al-Sherif used Youtube as a tool of protest, and that the Women2Drive campaign has its own Facebook page, shows the vital role social media have played in changing religious beliefs about women’s rights, sex roles, and gender identity in places like Saudi Arabia.

The driving ban has proved potentially detrimental to the health of both women and men. Incidentally, al-Sherif’s video protest was not just a statement of principle—she was actually driving to hospital to receive emergency treatment for advanced vitamin D deficiency resulting from lack of sunlight, due most likely to another restriction on women’s freedoms—the wearing of the full Islamic veil, which consists of an abaya and niqab. In another incident in 2003, a woman named Saba Abu Lisan transported at least seven people to hospital in her father’s Mercedes Benz after they were critically wounded in a suicide bombing at a Riyadh housing compound. According to Somayya Jabarti of Arab News, the woman’s actions saved at least one life. In light of these stories, it is hard to imagine supporting a law which potentially puts people’s lives in jeopardy.

Of course, there are always naysayers in any social justice cause, and women’s right to drive is no exception. Some traditionalists argue that women should depend on men to supervise them and take care of them because women are intellectually and physically inferior. If the driving ban is lifted, they worry, they will start abandoning the full veil, which is a sign of modesty. The natural response is: of course. That is the point. If women are allowed to drive to hospital, they might actually be able to receive treatment for the vitamin D deficiency they suffer from wearing the veil, and if they are allowed to abandon the veil, the rate of vitamin D deficiency among Saudi women would probably plummet. In other words, abandoning such customs might actually be good for a woman’s health.

In addition to the traditionalist argument, cultural relativists argue that right and wrong are relative to cultural context. The problem with this view is that it logically undermines itself. It is impossible to say that there is no right or wrong, except for the statement that there is no right or wrong, without contradicting oneself and saying that there is a right and wrong. Besides, it might be argued that relativism itself is an imperialist belief being imposed on other cultures—many of which do not share this belief—as the only truth. In addition, all humans share certain basic physical traits despite cultural context. If a woman is suffering from vitamin D deficiency (or if a person is injured in a bombing, for that matter), it matters little what culture she lives in: her health will diminish, and she will suffer as a consequence, in basically the same way as a woman from Seattle or Stockholm. In such cases, the social benefits of a custom are not relative to cultural context, but are subject to universal laws of physics, chemistry, and biology. It is hard to imagine how a society can benefit from a woman wasting away from vitamin D deficiency, or a bomb victim bleeding to death.

Reforming Saudi Arabia’s laws on women’s mobility rights will be a daunting challenge. The monarchy’s ties to religious fundamentalism go back at least to the middle 18^th century with an alliance between Prince Muhammad Ibn Saud and Muslim cleric Muhammad ibn Abd-al-Wahhab, a decision which forged a close symbiotic relationship between political and religious rule. The influence of religious fundamentalism in Saudi politics was strengthened even more with the arrival of radical Egyptian Salafis in the 1960s. Puritanical beliefs are woven into the country’s politics.

Despite the stranglehold religious fundamentalism has on politics in the kingdom, there are signs that Saudi royals are open to reform. Princess Amira Al-Taweel is already backing the Women2Drive campaign and has promised to participate in a women’s revolution of sorts, while King Abdullah, has shown a similarly favourable attitude: since ascending the throne in 2006, the first woman minister has been appointed and women have been granted permission to travel abroad without a male guardian (granted the police are notified), start a business without hiring a male manager, and join their male colleagues in the lecture halls at the newly-opened Abdullah University of Science and Technology. In fact, a cleric was dismissed for issuing a fatwa against the ruling. So, while women have far to go in this conservative desert kingdom, there are encouraging signs that change is afoot, and that the “Arab spring” is now also a women’s revolution.

Sources:

Arab News

The Huffington Post

Women’s Views on News

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A group of lawmakers and progressive religious leaders have put pressure on U.S. president Barack Obama to end federal funding for faith-based charities that hire and fire on the basis of religion. Religious conservatives, however, are urging the president to keep the policy in place in order to protect their “freedom” to discriminate against people who share different views. The dispute only underscores the widening rift between separationists on one hand, and their theocratic opponents on the other. It also forces one to consider whether discrimination is a “freedom” that should be accommodated.

The policy was originally put in place by George W. Bush in 2002 in an attempt to accommodate faith-based charities that employ only those people who share the same religious views. Driving the decision was an effort to appear more “faith-friendly”, and the belief that religious organizations that discriminate should not be turned down by the government. Obama pledged during his presidential campaign to repeal the policy, but critics of the policy have argued that he has broken his promise. Representative Bobby Scott, D-Va., is sponsoring legislation to repeal the policy, but other advocates of reform have argued that the easiest route to repeal would be through an executive order made by the president himself.

Religious conservatives have in turn criticized attempts at repeal. One conservative critic is Michele Combs, spokeswoman for the right-wing evangelical group The Christian Coalition. “We will do whatever we can to make sure this stays”, Combs tells Lauren Markoe of USA Today, adding, “[t]hat’s our freedom…to hire and fire people of our faith”. At first the mere mention of the word freedom might make people nod their heads blindly, but upon closer inspection, it makes little sense to protect such a policy as a “freedom”. If the point of a freedom is to bestow liberties on individuals, protecting the Bush policy on religion-based hiring and firing defeats this purpose, because it means supporting through federal funding an organization that denies individuals liberties. Besides faith groups would still have the freedom to practice religious discrimination if the policy were repealed—they simply would not receive federal funding. Others have expressed similar concerns. “Tax dollars should not be used to discriminate”, said Rabbi David Saperstein, director of the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism, to Markoe. The main point is that the government is potentially violating two constitutional amendments by providing funding to faith-based groups that practice religious discrimination: the First Amendment, which bars state legislation of religion, and the Fourteenth Amendment, which requires equal treatment of all citizens.

The dispute over the policy also underscores the marked ideological differences between religious conservatives and religious progressives. Even though religion is important to both, conservative groups (such as the Christian Coalition) seem, at least, to support more theocratic government policies, whereas progressive groups (such as the ecumenical, interfaith Universal Life Church Monastery) seem to support strict church-state separation, even with respect to the influence their own religion might have on government affairs. For the former, religion is a highly imposing public display, whereas for the latter, it is a private affair.

One thing that has not been mentioned yet, however, is why the government provides funding to any faith-based organizations in the first place. One might call this a constitutional violation, since it might be construed as government endorsement of religion. At the very least, one would think, if the state provides funding to faith-based groups, it should give equal attention and resources to secular ones.

Perhaps Obama will heed the voices of people like Scott and Saperstein and repeal the Bush-era policy once and for all, since it essentially amounts to state funding for discriminatory practices, even if indirectly. It is always cause for alarm when a government sends the message that it is okay to isolate, alienate, or reject others on the basis of creed, especially when that government, in its own foundational documents, purports to support ideals of liberty and equal treatment under the law. This is the position of the ULC Monastery, which holds that we are all children of the same universe, regardless of creed. Obama already knows the promise he made during his campaign, and undoubtedly he is aware of the views of most progressives regarding the policy, so, for the time being, we will have to wait patiently and see what he decides.

Source:

USA Today

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U.S. president Barack Obama’s announcement ordering the Department of Defense to stop defending the Defense of Marriage Act, and the current effort underway in New York State to legalize same-sex marriage, are just two recent signs that attitudes toward same-sex marriage are changing in the United States. However, this newfound tolerance may not be without historical precedent. Recently, the ULC Monastery unearthed an article from The Nation on a book by historian John Boswell about sacramental same-sex marriage in the early Christian church. Contrary to popular opinion, the church may not have always been so averse to the idea, and Boswell attempts to make this point in his book.

In his 1994 book, entitled Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe, Boswell looks at the institution of marriage in the late classical and early medieval periods, making the argument that the early church probably did recognize unions of romantic love and commitment between members of the same sex. Bruce Holsinger, who wrote the review, points out that Boswell discovered a remarkable eighty manuscripts describing the ceremony, which reached its full flowering as an “office” by the twelfth century. He quotes Boswell as saying that the ceremony typically involved “the burning of candles, the placing of the two parties’ hands on the Gospel, the joining of their right hands, the binding of their hands . . . with the priest’s stole, an introductory litany . . . crowning, the Lord’s Prayer, Communion, a kiss, and sometimes circling around the altar”. These ceremonies, he argues, were remarkably similar to heterosexual marriage ceremonies, suggesting the two were on equal footing.

Boswell follows a rigorous methodology, as Holsinger asserts: he does not dive impetuously into his thesis, but starts with a comparative study on the “vocabulary of love and marriage” in the modern and premodern West, and considers the influence of the classical world and classical views of love on medieval institutions. He eventually describes the ceremonies and compares these with their heterosexual counterparts, gradually building up his argument that the church made room for both within the institution of sacramental marriage. He also explains that modern conceptions of “gay” or “marriage” would have been alien to ancient and premodern peoples, showing a commitment to avoiding anachronisms. On top of this, Boswell includes several addenda almost 100 pages long at the end of his book in which he provides numerous examples of the early documents he uncovered during his research.

Boswell’s book did have its critics, but Holsinger questions the fairness of their accusations. One potential criticism is that these ceremonies were just blood-brotherhood rituals, or tribal or familial alliances, but Holsinger quote Boswell as challenging this contention: “The same-sex union ceremony makes no mention—in any of its varieties in any language—of tribal, clan, or family loyalty or union: it is unmistakably a voluntary, emotional union of two persons”. Moreover, he points out, marriage was largely a property arrangement during this period, so the fact that descriptions of these ceremonies are almost entirely devoid of references to tribal or familial alliances strengthens the claim that they were the most romantic of unions. Another criticism Boswell anticipates and refutes is that such unions were probably not erotic. Holsinger quotes him as saying, “few people married for erotic fulfillment” anyway; therefore, he implies, it is unfair to dismiss the same-sex wedding hypothesis simply because it is not explicitly sexual—neither were descriptions of heterosexual weddings, yet newlywed heterosexuals still ended up consummating their love for one another.

Same-Sex Unions raises some interesting questions. According to Holsinger, Boswell’s

descriptions of same-sex ceremonies involve mostly men, prompting one to ask, where are all the lesbians? Why are they so rare and elusive? One explanation is that such ceremonies drew on a phallocentric Greco-Roman legacy of “male bonding”, in which relationships between men and men are elevated above relationships between men and women out of a belief that men, and thus male company, are superior to women. This is the diametrical opposite of the view that gay men are more comfortable with femininity, and defy stereotypes about manhood—an attempt, perhaps, to co-opt male homosexuality and distort its purpose in order to justify patriarchy. (One wonders why the church is not still employing this bizarrely contrived “male sexual brotherhood” tactic to stress male authority—perhaps because they have to stress heterosexual authority too.)

Another question the book raises is why the Roman Catholic Church (or any other Christian denomination for that matter) should embrace homosexuality initially only to reject it as an abomination in later ages. A possible answer is that, as the centuries progressed, the church developed a more patriarchal power structure sustained by rigid sex roles which required men to dominate women sexually, economically, and politically, and things like same-sex affection and women priests only frustrate this effort. (Obviously the role of a priest who has taken a vow of celibacy will be to wield political and social, not sexual, control, and he will expect his male lay members to be more magisterial with women in intimate matters.)

These are just hypotheses, and there are without a doubt many others, but they force us to ruminate on how and why the church should have abandoned such a progressive and rational attitude about the meaning and purpose of love, sex, and marriage.

Given the growing acceptance of heteronormative sexual practices, one might think the modern-day Roman Catholic Church would embrace homosexuality in order to market itself and gain good publicity. We might imagine flocks of outcasts returning once more to the ranks of the church, seeking shelter under its wings and in turn lending support to a gradually crumbling social mechanism. But why should we? The church refuses to ordain women as priests, so why should we expect it to recognize same-sex unions any time soon?  While it welcomes adherent in order to maintain social control, it also maintains that control through rules and proscriptions on people’s lifestyles. It is nice to envision some sort of iconoclastic revolution shattering the foundations of the ecclesiastical hierarchy, but it is just as easy to envision it fading, like some superannuated grandfather of morals, into obsolescence. At the same time, though, we must acknowledge that there are many good things about the church—it is basically one of the world’s biggest charities—but, indeed, it is for this very reason that we should expect it to reverse its current policy on the ordination of women and the officiation of same-sex unions.

Sources:

Boswell, John. (1994). Same-sex unions in premodern Europe. New York: Villard.

Holsinger, Bruce. (1994). Dearly Beloved [Review of the book Same-Sex Unions in

Premodern Europe]. Retrieved from http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/pwh/bosrev-

holsinger.html

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You’ve probably heard about the growing popularity of retail weddings and other alternative wedding ceremonies, but what about performing a wedding on a racecourse? That’s exactly what one minister in the Universal Life Church did in the U.S. state of California. Such quirky occasions are fun and creative, but they also raise questions in the minds of new ministers about how to perform a legal wedding ceremony.

The wedding was held at the Stockton 99 Raceway in the California town of Stockton. There, Kelly Collins was married to Richard Reese, the raceway’s caretaker, by Universal Life church minister Wayne Pierce, who also happens to be the raceway’s announcer. Collins and Reese exchanged wedding vows in front of about 4,000 racing fans prior to the Southwest Tour Late Models 150-lap main events. Adding to the nontraditional nature of the venue, Pierce gave Reese an equally nontraditional word of wisdom: “[m]arriage is not like Burger King; you won’t always get it your way”. Truer words were never spoken.

Many ministers would like to perform such nontraditional wedding ceremonies, but are unsure how to go about doing so. What are the legal requirements? What are the logistics? The latter depends on the venue—whether it’s a racecourse, a Home Depot store, or a skydive—but the former can easily be answered with a few pieces of advice. Despite some obstacles facing wedding officiants in places like Michigan and Washington, DC, almost all U.S. states recognize weddings performed by priests, ministers, or pastors ordained online. (Visit the ULC Monastery’s marriage laws Web page to find out more about laws in Michigan, Washington, and similar places.) It is always wise to check with your local county clerk to make sure that weddings performed by priests ordained online are legal in your local jurisdiction. In addition, a legal ordination credential might be required as proof of ordination in order to perform weddings in some situations.

Of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg. If you have general concerns about the legality of online ordination or how to officiate a wedding ceremony, perform a baptism, or perform a funeral legally, or what documents and materials are needed to conduct your service, you can find more information and online resources by visiting the ULC Monastery’s Web pages on wedding training and legal officiation. Additionally, you may find answers to your questions and exchange helpful ideas by joining the church’s social network for ministers or Facebook discussion forum.

Deciding to get ordained online and become a priest in order to solemnize weddings for friends and family inevitably poses some challenges, but hopefully some guidance and resources will help smooth out the rough patches, as it were, in your new ministry. With a little bit of effort and determination, anybody should be able to perform the most outlandish weddings imaginable. Why stop at a racecourse wedding? Why not dream big and imagine performing a space-station wedding? Most likely, someday such visions will come to fruition anyway.

Send us your personal stories: have you ever performed an outrageous or nontraditional wedding ceremony like the one performed by Pierce at the Stockton 99 Raceway? Perhaps yours was even more unusual. What did you have to do to prepare?

Source:

Recordnet.com

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There has been a great deal of talk recently about whether or not more religious people are happier than less religious people. One study suggests that belief in God may reduce stress, while another theory, called the security hypothesis, suggests that people cling to faith out of a desperate need for economic security. Now, after reviewing the literature on the subject, one psychologist has suggested that it is not religion, but conformity, that makes people happy.

The studies linking religion with greater happiness were reviewed by evolutionary psychologist Nigel Barber, who compared happiness in different countries. Most of the studies linking religion and happiness, he notes, have been conducted in the United States, where the majority of people are still religious (although this is changing); these studies do not reflect a religion-happiness link other places, such as northern Europe, where the majority are secular. While there is a positive correlation between religiosity and happiness in the United States, there is no such correlation in other countries, such as the Netherlands and Denmark. In these countries, the secular majority are actually just as happy as the religious minority.

The fact that the religion-happiness link shows up in the U.S., but not northern Europe, suggests that the link is not universal. According to a recent analysis, the top ten happiest countries in the world were mostly in northern Europe, with Canada and Australia also included. Most of the countries listed were less religious than the United States, which did not even make the top ten. Assuming the reliability of the data, it would follow that, globally-speaking, religion does not necessarily increase happiness—in fact, the happiest places in the world are often relatively secular.

How do we explain these findings? First we must find a common denominator—the one thing that makes people happier in every situation. Barber believes this is conformity, or the prestige and privilege attached to being a member of the mainstream. According to this hypothesis, more religious Americans are happier than less religious Americans not because of anything inherent about religion itself, but rather because religiosity, specifically evangelical Christianity, is the norm in the United States; conversely, more secular Danes might be happier than less secular Danes not because of anything inherent about secularism, but rather because secularism is the norm in Denmark. In either case, Barber suggests, people are happier not because they are religious or secular, but because they conform to the norm. He notes that this is consistent with research indicating that members of minority groups often suffer more from high blood-pressure—an indicator of stress—as well as depression and other disorders.

Perhaps the most revealing thing about Barber’s hypothesis is not that secular people tend to be as happy as religious people, but that, in either case, it seems to be conformity that makes people happy. While sometimes conformity has its benefits, other times it is just a popularity contest, and it is unfortunate that people should feel the need to be like everybody else just to feel accepted and be happy—after all, a thing is not right or wrong just because it is popular. The position of the Universal Life Church Monastery is that all groups have something to contribute, and we would never learn from one another if we were all the same.

Share your thoughts as a priest, pastor, or minister in a nondenominational online ministry. Do you think it is religion, or a sense of belonging, that makes people happy?

Sources:

24/7 Wall Street

Psychology Today

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