Author Archives: Fred Yi

Hinduism and Modern India

Posted on by

 

FRED DE SAM LAZARO, correspondent: India has long lured spiritual tourists from the West, as a place to escape the modern world. But over the past two decades, India itself has tightly embraced that modern world, at least in urban areas where the large and growing middle-class lives. The Gupta family has seen much prosperity in recent years. They enjoy most of life’s material conveniences in their New Delhi home. As is common in Hindu households, this one has an altar. Each day Bhavana Gupta places a puja or food offering to Lord Krishna, one of Hinduism’s most widely worshipped deities. The daily worship habits and rituals have been passed down for generations in this family. For Bhavana and Deepak Gupta, who runs a photo supplies business, these have changed little.

BHAVANA GUPTA (through translator): Before anything else, I pray. Then I go every day to the temple before eating anything. I first go there, pray over there. Then I have breakfast.

DEEPAK GUPTA (through translator): I have the same routine. I get ready. Then go to temple. We pray to be shielded from all of life’s problems—for marriages, for children, in business decisions. Everything we do is after invoking the blessings.

DE SAM LAZARO: There are regular prayers in the home, shared with their three children and his mother, in India’s joint family tradition. The Guptas, however, do worry about the growing influences on their children from the ubiquitous advertising on billboards, on the Internet, on television, influences that they say are already altering the traditionally rigid and hierarchical parent-child relationship.

DEEPAK GUPTA (through translator): They don’t listen to their parents. A few years ago, children used to fear their parents.

BHAVANA GUPTA (through translator): They more treat us like friends now. They argue with us.

DEEPAK GUPTA (through translator): All the designer labels are coming to India. We used to get slippers for 20 rupees. Now they want 600-rupee brand-name ones.

DE SAM LAZARO: It’s exactly that kind of angst that may be driving the market for a media antidote: religious-based satellite television channels. Pramod Joshi leads one of several such enterprises, called Aastha, which means faith or devotion.

PRAMOD JOSHI (CEO, Aastha TV): The mission of the Aastha channel is to take the Indian culture, the Indian heritage, the social and spiritual culture of India to the world.

DE SAM LAZARO: Aastha provides round-the-clock programming, a variety of preachers from Hinduism and closely related South Asian traditions like Sikhism and Jainism. They invoke the ancient scriptures, conduct meditation and yoga and programs reminiscent of evangelical Protestant tent revivals. Most of these gurus pay to get on the channel.

Pramod Joshi, CEO, Aastha TV(speaking to Pramod Joshi): How many people do you think you reach?

JOSHI: I think in India we reach to at least 250 million viewers.

DE SAM LAZARO: Two hundred and fifty million viewers?

JOSHI: Yes.

DE SAM LAZARO: The huge market has lured advertisers, and Aastha’s stock has performed well on the Bombay exchange. As editors and producers package Aastha’s content, the goal is to distinguish it from the commercial Hollywood- and Bollywood-inspired fare on other channels.

KISHORE PUTHRAN (General Manager, Aastha TV): There are programs that show a lot of divorce or extramarital affairs and things that way. But that’s actually not a fact in India, so our network, on the contrary, is actually showing you, okay, this is India. This is the religion, these are our values, and this is how we live.

DE SAM LAZARO: India is a tradition-bound, generally conservative society, but exactly what religion is has never really been clearly defined, says sociologist Ashis Nandy.

ASHIS NANDY: Though we call Hinduism, Islam, Buddhism, Sikhism religions, in South Asia and, I would suspect, even in East Asia they were not religions in the Western sense. There is no word in any Indian language which is a synonym of religion.

DE SAM LAZARO: Instead, Nandy says religious practice is localized and individualized in India, particularly in the predominant Hinduism, which has no centralized leadership. Hindus profess faith in one creator, Brahma, as part of a trinity with Vishnu, the protector, and Shiva, the destroyer of evil, shown in this Aastha channel animation. They are manifest in countless deities and forms. People can and often do choose a personal god or gods informed by family or village traditions, personal experience, or even word of mouth. The pantheon can sometimes transcend what to Westerners might seem firmly drawn lines between religious faiths.

NANDY: A friend of mine did a survey. According to census, only one percent of the citizens of Chennai are Christian. He asked them who is your personal god, and 10 percent said Jesus Christ was their personal god—one percent Christian; 10 percent have Jesus Christ as their personal god. They don’t see any contradiction, and that’s the way religion is.

DE SAM LAZARO: Gradually, he says, technology—mostly the Internet and television—may help forge a sharper sense of religious identity.

Ashis Nandy, sociologistNANDY: Traditionally, the South Asian faiths depended not on belief systems like modern Christianity does, but on religious practices. What you did was important, not what you believed. Nobody asked you do you really believe in Krishna, do you really believe in Ram? I suspect that, like the channel Aastha, the modern versions of faith will gradually begin to make inroads into the culture of religion in this society.

DE SAM LAZARO: Back in the Gupta household, the religion channels are on regularly, though only one member, the matriarch, pays much attention to what for her is a service that brings the temple and age-old traditions into her home.

SHEELA RANI GUPTA (through translator): We have a deal. There are certain times I will watch my religious programs. When they’re over, they are relieved. Now they can have the TV.

DE SAM LAZARO: Her granddaughters, Siddhi and Riddhi Gupta, however, will have little to do with channels like Aastha.

(speaking to the Gupta daughters): Do you ever watch any of the religion channels, either of you?

SIDDHI GUPTA: No.

DE SAM LAZARO: Why not?

SIDDHI GUPTA: At times it’s okay watching religion. I’m not a very TV watcher. I just watch English movies, and that’s also really rare.

DE SAM LAZARO: For their part, parents Deepak and Bhavana Gupta may worry about children arguing too much, about unhealthy outside influences. Yet they also enjoy the upside—a new intellectual engagement with their two teenage daughters. One example: The children question the Hindu practice of paying priests to perform prayer services for their intentions, akin to a Roman Catholic tradition of paying a priest to say masses.

DEEPAK GUPTA (through translator): They’re more practical in their approach.

BHAVANA GUPTA (through translator): We think: we’re going to the temple, let’s give the priest 500 rupees to have him do a good prayer service for us. Now the younger generation, they ask, why?

SIDDHI GUPTA: I don’t think that’s the way to show God that you believe in him. God doesn’t want us to give money. He actually wants us to do something. Why don’t we give that money to charity and stuff? There are millions of programs, NGOs going on to save child labor.

BHAVANA GUPTA (through translator): Sometimes I really feel proud with my elder daughter. I know in myself she is right.

DE SAM LAZARO: There may be clashes over material goods and acquisitions like all middle-class teenagers have with parents. But this family sees no clash between modernity and Hinduism which, they say, is inherently eclectic and tolerant. The next generation won’t abandon Hindu traditions, they say, but rather tailor them to meet their own individual needs.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly, this is Fred de Sam Lazaro, in New Delhi.

Haiti Earthquake

Posted on by

 

BOB ABERNETHY, host: The world is mobilizing to respond to Haiti’s needs after its devastating earthquake. President Obama pledged a $100 million US effort in aid and recovery:

President Barack Obama: ” To the people of Haiti we say clearly, and with conviction, you will not be forsaken. You will not be forgotten.”

Faith-based groups across the spectrum organized to raise money and send in supplies.  Many religious agencies already had humanitarian teams on the ground and were trying to coordinate rescue efforts and emergency medical help.  Churches and church-run hospitals, schools, and orphanages are among the buildings that are now rubble. Many US religious groups are still trying to locate staff, missionaries, and short-term workers. Among the confirmed dead, the Roman Catholic Archbishop of Port-au-Prince, Joseph Mioht.

Here in the US, there have been many special prayer services and vigils for the victims. Pastors and spiritual counselors tried to offer comfort to grieving Haitian Americans.  Several religious groups are working to bring injured and displaced Haitians here. The vast majority of Haiti’s population is Christian.

Because of the many Haitians in the US and Haiti’s proximity to the US, and because of the overwhelming needs, all over this country there are people with personal connections to the tragedy. Kim Lawton, our managing editor, has grandparents who were missionaries in Haiti and parents who did short-term mission work there.

haiti-gospel-mission2KIM LAWTON, managing editor: My grandparents spent a large part of their retirement years working in Haiti as missionaries. They helped found a mission called the Haiti Gospel Mission. They built schools and churches, worked on agricultural projects, dug clean water wells, and helped set up a medical clinic, and this has been a really difficult week for them. My grandparents — they’re in their 90s now, they live in western New York –they’ve been trying to watch this unfold on TV, and just to see this place that they poured so much of their own time and money and love into, and just to see that in ruins has been very difficult. My grandmother told me she can’t sleep at night because she’s been so worried about the people she knows down there — missionaries, Haitians.

ABERNETHY: Could they get through to anybody?

LAWTON: Well, a lot of this week was spent trying to, indeed, make contact with some people. They were able to make contact. We, our family was able to  with missionaries who live in the house that my grandparents helped build. It’s about 15 miles outside of Port-au-Prince, and they say the medical clinic there has been overwhelmed by injured people from Port-au-Prince, as well as the surrounding area, making their way to them. They’re running low on medicines. They’re running low on fuel, and they’re uncertain about the future. My parents were short-term missionaries with the Free Methodist Church, and they stayed on the Free Methodist compound in Port-au-Prince at a guest house. This week we heard that the guest house has collapsed, and it appears that several missionaries, American missionaries, were lost, as well as many Haitian workers.

ABERNETHY: And what was going on in your family is replicated in thousands, many, many thousands of other families all over the country.

LAWTON: Well, exactly, and that really struck me this week as I’ve been talking with people. You have Haitian Americans so worried about their own families and homes and people back in Haiti, and you have so many people in the religious community here — many churches, but other non-Christian groups as well, have gone down there. I think Haiti’s one of the top destinations for short-term humanitarian and missionary work precisely because of all the needs there, so you have so many people. I heard stories of short-term teams from across the country who are in Haiti or  just there or just back from there. I’ve been there, you know. I was there as a kid with my grandparents, as an adult, and I think that when you have that personal connection, you’ve been there, you know people there, this tragedy is no longer just a TV story, you know, sad faces on TV. It’s people you know, you may have helped, or places you’ve been.

ABERNETHY: And all those personal connections are probably behind the enormous amount of money that has been raised very quickly for relief.

LAWTON: Exactly. I’m sure that’s part of it. So many people really do have a real concern about what’s going on down there. Of course, the problem is what to do with the money, because logistics are so bad. Things are in such chaos.

ABERNETHY: And in spite of all that you do read and hear that some people are talking about the long-term future as being one that can be fairly bright, perhaps as a result of having to start all over again.

LAWTON: I’ve heard that.

ABERNETHY: President Bill Clinton, for instance.

LAWTON: Right, yes, and others have mentioned, you know, problems were so bad, systematic dysfunction there, that maybe this is a good opportunity to start from scratch. But, you know, frankly, people I’ve been talking to this week aren’t thinking about rebuilding. They’re thinking about their family members in Haiti who are lost, loved ones who are missing. They’re thinking about survival and just grieving the incredible losses that have been suffered.

ABERNETHY: Kim Lawton, many thanks.

Remembering Martin Luther King Jr.

Posted on by

Watch Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly managing editor Kim Lawton’s January 13, 2010 interview about Martin Luther King Jr. with Cheryl Sanders, professor of Christian ethics at Howard University School of Divinity and senior pastor at Third Street Church of God in Washington, DC:

 

Wall Street and Values

Posted on by

 

BOB ABERNETHY, host: As public outrage continues over Wall Street’s plans to pay multimillion-dollar bonuses to its top executives and traders, President Obama called such bonuses “obscene” and proposed a new tax on the country’s largest banks.  Meanwhile, the heads of the four largest investment banks were the first witnesses before a bipartisan commission investigating the causes of last year’s financial crisis.

A new book out this week called “Rediscovering Values” urges moral as well as economic reforms. Its author is Rev. Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine. Jim, welcome. As you look back at the causes of the so-called Great Recession, what are the most important ones that you see?

REV. JIM WALLIS: Well, I’m talking about rediscovering values on Wall Street, Main Street, and our street. We can’t just look at Wall Street. We’ve got to start personally, and so we talk about families and choices and local churches and what we can do in our lives, our neighborhoods, our communities.

ABERNETHY: I want to get into that, but first of all, the causes. Who’s to blame?

"Rediscovering Values" by Jim WallisWALLIS: Well, I think we all have to look in the mirror here. These new maxims — greed is good, it’s all about me, I want it now — we see that on Wall Street. We see these bonuses that are being announced this week are really, I think, a sin of biblical proportions, clueless about what’s happening in a place like my hometown of Detroit where there’s thirty percent unemployment. But also my Depression-era parents didn’t spend money they didn’t have for things they don’t need. So I’m seeing a whole reevaluation going on. Underneath this economic crisis there is a values crisis, and I’m hearing a conversation, already in this first week, around the country about how we need a moral recovery to go along with the economic recovery.

ABERNETHY: And in that moral recovery, talk about some of the things that other people have talked about, as well as you, which is the huge gap between the richest and the poorest.

WALLIS: You’re exactly right, and, indeed, I learned that the two peak moments of the great gaps were the year before the Great Depression and now the year before this Great Recession, when things get so divided it breaks social contracts and covenants, and things begin to unravel and spin out of control. We trusted the Invisible Hand, you know, of Adam Smith, the market, to make sure things turned out alright. But the Invisible Hand let go of the common good, so I’m saying values like “enough is enough,” it’s “we’re in this together.”

ABERNETHY: So we consume less, we conserve more.

WALLIS: And we find each other. Don’t keep up with the Joneses; make sure the Joneses are okay. That’s a very different kind of conversation. So I see a new kind of “let’s learn from this.” A crisis gives us a chance to reset some things, so I see that happening. I’m talking to community organizers, Wall Street people, pastors. We’re having dialogues around the country. This is the beginning of a new conversation. You know, this is a chance to learn from our mistakes and find a moral compass for a new economy.

ABERNETHY: So you want individuals and families to be more responsible about their use of money, going into debt, that kind of thing. But it’s also going to take, if what you want is going to come about, it’s going to take massive change in government policy, right?

WALLIS: You’re exactly right. Right. This is a structural crisis and a spiritual crisis.

ABERNETHY: And so how is that going to come about?

WALLIS: Well, we need new financial regulations, a real holding Wall Street accountable here. You know, [my wife] Joy and I just fired Bank of America, because they had all this money, and we gave them grace, you know, in the meltdown, and now they are extending no grace to people who are being foreclosed upon. There is more money in these bonuses, these bank bonuses, than would be needed to resolve the foreclosure crisis. So the banks say they’re too big to fail, I’m saying make them smaller, so a lot of people could move their money. There’s even a website, moveyourmoney.info. You move your money to community banks that are serving the community, I think that’s a practical thing that people can do. It empowers people. Congregations, denominations could move the Methodist $15 billion pension fund. That gets Wall Street’s attention.

ABERNETHY: It is said that the high salaries that are paid on Wall Street, and to CEOs generally, and to a lot of performers and athletes, that these encourage people to work harder and that if you don’t pay them somebody is going to go someplace else. Are you really, are you proposing then a tax on everybody, not just Wall Street, but a big tax on people who are making above a certain amount of money?

WALLIS: You know …

ABERNETHY: A bigger tax, I should say.

WALLIS: At some point you cross a line, and they’ve crossed some lines here. I mean, to go from a ratio of CEO salaries to average workers of 30 to one, which is what it was thirty years ago, to now 615 to one, come on, I mean, we’ve crossed some lines here, and so we have to — Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian economist, said when you’ve got no moral framework for the market, no ethical sensibility, the market devours other sectors and finally devours itself. Gandhi said the seven deadly sins are wealth without work — two of them — and commerce without morality. So we’ve crossed some lines here. How do we come back to some of our most basic, oldest virtues here? And I’m hearing conversations on Wall Street and right in my own hometown of Detroit that say, “We’ve lost our way here, let’s try and find it again.” And I think, yeah, some structural accountability, but also some spiritual transformation at the level of our family life and time with kids and all the rest. That’s what’s coming out of this. I think that could be redemptive.

ABERNETHY: Jim Wallis of Sojourners magazine, many thanks.

WALLIS: Great to see you again.

Forest Monks

Posted on by

 

LUCKY SEVERSON, correspondent: This ragtag parade in northwest Thailand, in the area known as the Golden Triangle, is a celebration of sorts, but it also has a very serious purpose, and one that has had dangerous consequences.

(speaking to Thai man): How was he killed?

PIPOB UDOMITTIPONG: He was stabbed to death.

SEVERSON: You think that he was killed because of his environmental work?

UDOMITTIPONG: Of course, definitely.

SEVERSON: Why?

UDOMITTIPONG: Because there was no other reason. He’s such a nice man. If you meet in person, he’s a very amicable man. He has no enemies whatsoever.

Pipob UdomittipongSEVERSON: What was so unusual about the killing was that the victim held a position of great respect in Thai society. The victim was a Buddhist monk, an environmental activist.

Susan Darlington is writing a book about Thailand’s environmental Buddhism.

PROFESSOR SUSAN DARLINGTON (Hampshire College): There were 18 human rights and environmental activists who were assassinated in Thailand in a three-year period, none of whose murders were solved. So somebody was feeling threatened and had the power to push back and try to send perhaps warnings or to stop these people altogether.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa is a noted Buddhist scholar who has written over a hundred books. He claims he knows who was pushing back against the monks who were trying to protect the forests: international corporations with financial ties to some corrupt generals in the Thai military.

SULAK SIVARAKSA (International Network of Engaged Buddhists): Unfortunately the big loggers, in cooperation with generals, they don’t care. They cut the trees, and the monks protested, and they even arrested monks. Not before in history that monks had been arrested.

Professor Susan Darlington, Hampshire CollegeSEVERSON: Darlington is a professor of anthropology and Asian studies at Hampshire College in Massachusetts. She says it wasn’t until the late 1980s, after whole forests had vanished, that monks became activists.

(speaking to Professor Darlington): We’re talking about whole forests, clear cutting?

DARLINGTON: Clear cutting to either get the logs—the teak forests were going at a rapid rate, other hardwoods—or cutting down forest to make room for intensive agriculture.

SEVERSON: The forests went away, and the animals, too, and then in 1988 catastrophic floods caused people to reevaluate what they had been told was progress.

DARLINGTON: Up to three hundred people were killed from the floods, and most experts pointed to this and said the flooding would not have occurred if there hadn’t been such severe deforestation.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa founded the International Network of Engaged Buddhists. He says Buddhism’s views of the environment are both moral and spiritual.

SIVARAKSA: Buddhism believes that we are all interrelated, not only among human beings but to all sentient beings, including animals, nature, the river, the trees, the clouds, the sun, the moon, we all related. We are brothers and sisters. So if you harm any of these you harm yourself.

Senior monk AnekDARLINGTON: Buddhists’ primary motivation, primary goal is to end suffering, and destruction of the environment causes suffering on many levels. Therefore as monks it is part of our role to make people aware of this and to undertake actions to prevent this and to protect the forests that still exists.

SEVERSON: To protect to the forests, one monk did something radical, just as they are doing here now. He started tying orange robes around trees, in effect ordaining the trees.

DARLINGTON: He was called crazy, and a national newspapers called for him to disrobe from the sangha [community or order], that this was not appropriate behavior for a monk, he’s misusing the religion. But meanwhile other monks began to do tree ordinations as well. “You can’t ordain a tree. What does that mean?” So people started debating, what does it mean to ordain a tree?

SEVERSON: To the monks, it meant making the forests sacred, off limits to exploitation. The idea has caught on with some villagers, like these. The forests rangers with the guns are not official rangers. They’re volunteers who patrol the mountainside looking for timber poachers. Senior monk Anek took us to an area near his village that was clear-cut in the dark of the night. August 21st there was a forest here. August 22nd it was gone. Three acres of prized hardwood disappeared overnight. Anek says he doesn’t think monks’ robes wrapped around trees would have prevented this.

INTERPRETER (translating senior Buddhist monk Anek): He says it might not deter them because they are investors from outside, they have no respect for the culture, they have no respect for the tradition. He’s saying that he feels sad because it took them many years to preserve this.

SEVERSON: Anek says he still gets threats for ordaining trees but not as many as before and not as severe. He doesn’t think this area was clear cut for the trees, but instead for the land, which foreign companies are using for huge farming operations, like the tangerine plantations that stretch for miles along rolling hills that were once covered with pristine forests. Unfortunately for the locals, the companies are hiring cheap labor from nearby Burma. So they’re losing the land and their ability to live off it. In the middle of the plantations there is a Buddhist monastery that acts as a buffer against development. The senior monk here is also an environmental activist. His name is Abbot Kittisap.

(speaking to Buddhist abbot): But you’re not fearful?

Because of his activism, and because he is testifying in the trial of the murdered monk who was his friend, Abbot Kittsop has 24-hour-a-day police protection, the gentlemen you see here. The abbot says he is still fearful for his safety, but his conscience keeps him going. Even though it’s been four years since the controversial killing, no one has been convicted of the crime, and recently the chief investigator confirmed many people’s suspicions when he accused the police of tampering with the evidence. Many here don’t think justice will ever be served, but Susan Darlington says that doesn’t mean the monks have not made progress. The Thai government, for instance, has cracked down on illegal logging.

DARLINGTON: I think the role of Buddhism in protecting the environment has come a long way. These monks really do, they put a moral standard into the environmental movement that makes people really stop and think. It brings a spiritual element to it.

SEVERSON: Others like Sulak say spirituality also requires action.

SIVARAKSA: Spirituality is not merely personal contemplation, not only meditation, that you feel peaceful and then you feel “I’m alright, Jack.” I think that’s is dangerous. It’s escapism.

SEVERSON: Sulak Sivaraksa, who received the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize, says many Westerners and many Buddhists alike do not understand the meaning of engaged Buddhism.

SIVARAKSA: In fact, meditation only helps you to be peaceful. But you must also confront social suffering as well as your own personal suffering, and people suffer now because of the environment.

SEVERSON: The generals and the developers still have the upper hand, but the battle for the land, and the hearts and mind of the people is not over. Ordinary people are now beating a drum for the monks.

For Religion & Ethics Newsweekly, I’m Lucky Severson north of Chang Mai, Thailand.

Muslims and Security

Posted on by

 

BOB ABERNETHY, anchor: In the wake of the failed Christmas Day airplane bombing, the Obama Administration took new steps this week to improve airline security. President Obama ordered US agencies to move faster and more accurately to prevent future terrorist attacks. He said while the vast majority of Muslims reject al-Qaeda, the US must develop a strategy that addresses the challenges posed by lone recruits. Under new TSA [Transportation Security Administration] procedures, passengers traveling from 14 nations, most of them predominantly Muslim, are facing enhanced screenings. Many American Muslim groups say while they are concerned about security, they are still worried that their community is being unfairly targeted by what they call “religious profiling.”

Joining me is Salam Al-Marayati, executive director of the Muslim Public Affairs Council in Los Angeles. Mr. Marayati, welcome. What’s the matter with tougher airline security?

SALAM AL-MARAYATI: Nothing wrong with tougher airline security, but when we stigmatize and profile a population, that divides our country, making it more difficult to counter the threat. We have to be united against extremism and united against hate.

ABERNETHY: Well, for instance, are head scarves a problem? Shouldn’t—and certainly somebody who, a lone guy gets on an airplane and pays cash for a one way ticket, shouldn’t those things raise alarms?

AL-MARAYATI: There’s a difference between behavior profiling and religious profiling. If someone buys a one-way ticket with cash only without baggage, flying from Africa or Asia to the United States, of course that should raise suspicions. But going after women with head scarves is ineffective.

ABERNETHY: So are you saying that you and other Muslim leaders come down more on the side of individual freedom that you do on security?

AL-MARAYATI: No I think we have to have both. If you are going to stigmatize or isolate a population, that feeds into radicalization. Part of the radicalization problem is when a community feels isolated, and when one person—and we’re talking about now the concern over lone wolves or lone recruits, if that person feels desperate, depressed, then he becomes prey for extremist recruiters, and we should do anything and everything to help accelerate integration of Muslims into American society.

ABERNETHY: After the Christmas Day near-disaster in the air near Detroit, and some other recent events, too, do you sense a growing backlash against Muslims in this country?

AL-MARAYATI: There’s a rise of the mob mentality. You read the comments on a number of stories, you get the emails, you get the phone calls, and I feel, unfortunately, that the level of hostility against Islam and Muslims is at an all-time high, and I’m very concerned.

ABERNETHY: Many Americans think that Muslims leaders in this country and in the Middle East should be doing a lot more to combat and condemn the interpretation of Islam that is so popular among many young radical extremists. Do you agree with that?

AL-MARAYATI: Well, I think that we as Muslims have done a lot in terms of the message against extremism. Our problem is that we have not been able to develop an effective way to get the message out. We don’t have the capacity in terms of public relations, if you will, in terms of making our message of moderation more newsworthy than the sensationalist message of extremism.

ABERNETHY: Do you think there is a role for the Unites States government in combating the ideology of radical Islam?

AL-MARAYATI: The Unites States government will not be able to defeat ideology of radicalism. It needs the Muslim American community in partnership, for those people unfortunately who are being recruited by extremists, they don’t regard the United States government as an authority, but they regard Muslim leaders as authorities. So it is our task, Muslims, who will help win the victory against radicalism and extremism

ABERNETHY: Many thanks to Salam Al-Marayati of the Muslim Public Affairs Council.

AL-MARAYATI: Thank you.

Reverse Missionaries

Posted on by

 

BETTY ROLLIN, correspondent: The music—the joy—the hats! All are in evidence every Sunday morning at the Victory Temple in Bowie, Maryland, one of 400 Redeemed Christian Churches of God in North America. Today’s sermon by Pastor Bayo Adeyokunnu is about money.

PASTOR BAYO ADEYOKUNNU (Victory Temple in Bowie, Maryland): You must have a savings account, no matter how much you are making, and this can come through so many areas: money market, mutual funds, savings accounts, 401K…Amen.

ROLLIN: Congregant Theresa Norton, a school teacher, used to attend a Catholic church. She prefers this church’s emphasis on the Bible and on practical matters as well.

THERESA NORTON: I’m really making money because of what the pastor is always telling us. You know, even if you have your job that you’re doing, you need to have something by the side.

ROLLIN: Like all of the pastors of the Redeemed Church, Pastor Adeyokunnu has great ambitions for his church.

Pastor Bayo Adeyokunnu, Victory Temple in Bowie, MarylandPASTOR ADEYOKUNNU: Our goal is to do everything possible to win souls for the kingdom of God. After they are won then we teach them, we disciple them how to make a living, how to benefit the society, how to make a difference within their community.

ROLLIN: And the Victory Temple’s goal is to grow. They’ve already established 15 churches in this part of Maryland, mostly attended by their fellow Africans. A good start, they say.

PASTOR ADEYOKUNNU: We want to start churches, if possible, like Starbucks.

ROLLIN: Like Starbucks?

PASTOR ADEYOKUNNU: This Bowie church is located in the African-American community, so we are trying to attract people within this community, and very soon we are going to reach out to the whites within the neighborhood.

ROLLIN: You will be reaching out to whites as well.

post0a-reversemissionariesPASTOR ADEYOKUNNU: Yes, ma’am.

ROLLIN: Why do you want to do that?

PASTOR ADEYOKUNNU: Because Christ died for everybody.

PASTOR ENOCH ADEBOYE: (General Overseer, Redeemed Christian Church of God, speaking at service in Floyd, Texas) Oh Lord God Almighty, heal this nation. Heal America. Bless America. Defend America.

ROLLIN: So speaks the revered and powerful leader of the global church, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, a former math professor in Nigeria. Called the General Overseer, Adeboye is the man in charge. He sees his role as restoring Christianity and morality to America and the rest of the world. One of his emissaries, who attended this yearly meeting of pastors, is Daniel Ajayi-Adeniran. His assignment is church expansion.

PASTOR DANIEL AJAYI-ADENIRAN: In every household there will be at least one member of Redeemed Christian Church of God in the whole world.

ROLLIN: Every family in America?

PASTOR AJAYI-ADENIRAN: In the whole world. Not only in America, in the entire universe.

ROLLIN: And Who is telling you this? Who is setting these goals?

PASTOR AJAYI-ADENIRAN: It is our leader, the General Overseer.

Pastor Daniel Ajayi-AdeniranROLLIN: And who is setting his goals?

PASTOR AJAYI-ADENIRAN: God.

ROLLIN: And they believe it was God who directed Pastor Enoch Adeboye to gather in this remote place northeast of Dallas. Here at headquarters in Floyd, Texas, population 220, the church has bought 550 acres of land. Plans include building a school, perhaps a college, and an auditorium that will seat 20,000 people.

PASTOR AJAYI-ADENIRAN: I believe God takes special interest in this country. God will not allow America to drown, to be destroyed, because this country has been a great helper, a blessing to the entire universe, including people like me.

ROLLIN: But you think we are drowning now?

PASTOR AJAYI-ADENIRAN: Yes. There is no family value anymore. Before it used to be family values, but it is no more. Our teenagers, they just doing whatever they like. No fear of God.

ROLLIN: So you are helping us?

PASTOR AJAYI-ADENIRAN: We are working together for God’s will to come to pass, and we will do our best.

ROLLIN: Dana Robert is a professor of world Christianity and mission theology at Boston University. She attributes the remarkable growth of the Redeemed Christian Church of God to a demographic shift in Christianity worldwide.

Professor Dana RobertPROFESSOR DANA ROBERT (Boston University School of Theology): Now there are over 450 million Christians in Africa. A century ago, there were only eight million, so the huge growth of Christianity in Africa and Latin America and parts of Asia means that when they come here they think of themselves as missionaries.

ROLLIN: Professor Robert says immigrants have always brought their religions with them, but few have expanded as much as Nigerians have.

PROF. ROBERT: They come from a huge, overcrowded English-speaking country, so they can land with their feet on the ground and get up and running with outreach, churches, building schools, building homes very quickly. They don’t have the language barrier that a lot of the other immigrants have when they get to the United States.

ROLLIN: In addition, Professor Robert says, people are attracted to the Pentecostal style of worship.

PROF. ROBERT: Pentecostalism has swept all over the world in the last several decades, so the immediacy of the supernatural, the emotional worship style, the focus on lifestyle and holiness—these are things that American churches has gotten soft on.

ROLLIN: Speaking in tongues which is a way of praying and, some say, a sign of God’s grace also has an appeal.

PROF. ROBERT: You enter not quite an altered state of consciousness but you’re suspending your rational mind and just letting your tongue loose. By releasing your conscious mind, it lets mystery flow into you.

ROLLIN: Nigerians also emphasize healing as a part of their service.

PASTOR AJAYI-ADENIRAN: I believe in the healing power of God. I don’t use medication. If for any reason I’m sick, I don’t go to hospital. I pray to my God because he created me. God manufactured me. If anything is wrong with me he knows how to repair and fix me up.

ROLLIN: Like many conservative Christian churches, when it comes to issues like homosexuality the Redeemed Church believes the Bible forbids it.

PASTOR AJAYI-ADENIRAN: It is spelled out in the scripture. When God created Adam, he created Eve for Adam. He would have created another Adam, man. But he created Adam, a man, and Eve, a woman.

ROLLIN: The church believes that homosexuality, as well as other kinds of behavior they consider immoral, is the work of the devil.

PROF. ROBERT: It’s a paradox that these are such highly educated people, but their substratum of African traditional religion has a very vigorous spiritual life of spirits, evil spirits, ancestors. Things that are perceived as evil or negative have to be vigorously fought in the church, and that’s consistent with African traditional religion.

ROLLIN: Professor Robert says that the most negative reaction to African churches comes from African Americans.

PROF. ROBERT: So you see you get Africans coming in with no racial chip on their shoulder living alongside and competing with African Americans who’ve got the weight of their communal history that in some respects is dragging them down, and there’s tension right on the ground.

ROLLIN: Numbers matter, and there’s no doubt that the number of Redeemed Christian Churches of God has grown, and clearly the leaders have the desire, the energy, and the money to keep growing. But so far they are mainly reaching fellow Africans, so their challenge is to reach beyond their base.

For Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly I’m Betty Rollin in Floyd, Texas.