Religion edition: ‘Empty minds’ and empty prayers

This week, Brayton’s bag includes hapless Olympic archers and attempts at divine intervention with gas prices.

Christianity ‘empties the mind’

The New York Times has an article about Kisik Lee, the Korean-born coach of the U.S. Olympic archery team. Lee is a born-again Christian who is being accused of pressuring those on the team to convert to Christianity. My favorite line from the article:

To be an effective archer, Lee said, athletes must learn to clear their heads and focus. “If you are Christian,” he said, “then people can have that kind of empty mind.”

Hey, he said it, not me. The punchline: despite the fact that 3 of the 5 archers on the American team have converted to Christianity and were meeting with Lee every morning for prayer and worship, none of them won a medal in Beijing. Keep working on that empty mind thing, guys.

Prayer increases gas prices

Speaking of prayer, Raw Story reports on a guy named Rocky Twyman who is going around the country leading prayers at gas stations to bring down gas prices.

Recently, to celebrate a drop in the average price of gasoline to $3.80 a gallon, Twyman led a group meeting at their inaugural Washington service station, singing a version of “We Shall Overcome” whose words were changed to “We’ll have to lower gas prices.”

I wish I was making that up. Twyman actually claims that the “prayers at the pump” that he organized in San Francisco and Washington D.C. are responsible for bringing down gas prices recently. There’s just one little problem with that: if you look at the actual prices relative to when those prayers took place, you’ll see that gas prices actually went up afterwards. The Skeptico blog has a chart showing the dates of those prayer rallies, the cost of gas at the time and the trends since then.

When they held the first prayer rally in D.C. on April 23rd, the average gas price in that city was about $3.56 a gallon. After that date prices rose steadily until peaking at more than $4.30 a gallon in mid-June. They’re still nearly 30 cents higher today than they were the day they started praying in April. When they held the first prayer rally in San Francisco on April 25th, the average price in that city was $3.98 a gallon. They had a second prayer rally on May 28th when the average price was $4.13 a gallon. After that day, prices rose sharply and peaked at $4.61 a gallon through most of June and July. Today those prices are still nearly 20 cents higher than they were when Twyman started his prayer rallies. Praise the lord!

Could this be a message from God?

Americans for Prosperity, an industry front group that specializes in global warming denial, was planning to hold two townhall meetings in Florida to tell people how absurd global warming is. Unfortunately, those meetings had to be postponed due to Hurricane Fay hitting land in Florida. Perhaps someone should tell them that even the Bush administration recognizes that global warming is increasing the intensity of tropical storms and hurricanes. Not that anyone should need the Bush administration’s agreement to recognize the obvious. As my friend Chris Mooney pointed out in his recent book Storm World, hurricanes are essentially machines driven by heat. Make the oceans warmer and you feed more fuel to the machine and get more energy out as a result. Anyone with a basic high school education should be able to understand this.

The cross in the dirt story

At the televised forum hosted by prominent evangelical leader Rick Warren at his Saddleback Church in California, John McCain told a story about one of the guards at the Hanoi Hilton where he was held prisoner giving him the inspiration to endure his ordeal:

It was Christmas day, we were allowed to stand outside of our cell for a few minutes, and those days we were not allowed to see or communicate with each other although we certainly did. And I was standing outside for my few minutes, outside my cell. He came walking up. He stood there for a minute and with his sandal on the dirt in the courtyard he drew a cross and he stood there and a minute later, he rubbed it out and walked away. For a minute there, there was just two Christians worshiping together. I’ll never forget that moment…

The blogosphere erupted the next day with doubts about the veracity of this story. Some pointed out that this story is remarkably similar to a story told about (but not by) Alexander Solzhenitsyn and his time in a Soviet gulag. Others then noted that the story has long been a staple of Christian apologetics going back to the early days of the church, suggesting that it’s really just a mythological archetype. Could it be that McCain is taking a stock story and applying it to himself?

Andrew Sullivan has been dogged in his examination of the issue and he points out several more relevant facts. First, that despite his current claim that this moment was a pivotal turning point in his time as a POW, allowing him the faith and strength to survive, McCain had never bothered to mention it prior to his first run for president in 2000. And when he did mention it in 2000, he told it as if it was about someone else, not himself. Here is the text of a speech he gave in 2000 (the same speech, by the way, where he called Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell “agents of intolerance”):

Many years ago a scared American prisoner of war in Vietnam was tied in torture ropes by his tormentors and left alone in an empty room to suffer through the night. Later in the evening a guard he had never spoken to entered the room and silently loosened the ropes to relieve his suffering. Just before morning, that same guard came back and re-tightened the ropes before his less humanitarian comrades returned. He never said a word to the grateful prisoner, but some months later, on a Christmas morning, as the prisoner stood alone in the prison courtyard, the same good Samaritan walked up to him and stood next to him for a few moments. Then with his sandal, the guard drew a cross in the dirt. Both prisoner and guard both stood wordlessly there for a minute or two, venerating the cross, until the guard rubbed it out and walked away.

It’s possible, of course, that he was using a rhetorical device here by referring to himself in the third person, but why? Surely the story would have been more powerful if he made clear that he was the prisoner in the story, as he does now. There is also the fact that McCain wrote a 12,000 word article for the US News and World Report in 1973 about his time as a prisoner, and while he mentions the importance of religion to the prisoners and tells another story about the kindness of a guard loosening his ropes for a bit, this far more important story goes unmentioned. Sounds like someone is bearing false witness.

Another one bites the dust

Yet another prominent evangelical leader has been caught cheating on his wife and resigned in disgrace. This time it’s Todd Bentley, the tattooed and pierced pentecostal preacher who has been leading a revival attracting hundreds of thousands of people to Lakeland, Florida for faith fake healing. After his wife filed for divorce, this message appeared on his ministry website announcing his resignation:

We wish to acknowledge, however, that since our last statement from the Fresh Fire Board of Directors, we have discovered new information revealing that Todd Bentley has entered into an unhealthy relationship on an emotional level with a female member of his staff. In light of this new information and in consultation with his leaders and advisors, Todd Bentley has agreed to step down from his position on the Board of Directors and to refrain from all public ministry for a season to receive counsel in his personal life.

An “unhealthy relationship on an emotional level.” Translation: they were knocking boots. Emotionally. The reaction from his followers was no doubt a sign of the times: “Whew, at least it was with a woman.” Ted Haggard to the white courtesy phone.