TOP STORY: THE YEAR IN REVIEW: The year in religion: A time to build up, a time to break down

c. 1996 Religion News Service UNDATED _ In the world of religion and ethics, 1996 was a time of mending ties and breaking them, of bridges built and churches burned and safety nets unraveling for the poor. Deep fissures _ social and sexual, ethnic and racial, political and theological _ tore at the fabric of […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

UNDATED _ In the world of religion and ethics, 1996 was a time of mending ties and breaking them, of bridges built and churches burned and safety nets unraveling for the poor.

Deep fissures _ social and sexual, ethnic and racial, political and theological _ tore at the fabric of religious and civil institutions in the United States and around the world, sometimes spilling over into violence, bloodshed and chaos.


And many religious people responded with efforts at rebuilding, reconciling and renewing society.

For religious activists, it was a year of contention as the religious right and the religious left struggled to make their beliefs a factor in the presidential election and the nation’s public policy at home and abroad.

For those yearning for religious unity and reconciliation, it was a time of mixed results.

Looking at the year’s events through the lens of faith and morality, there was no dominant event, no single top story. Rather, 1996 was a blending of themes, discordant and harmonious, daunting and hopeful. Here is a rundown, in capsule form, of the year’s major developments.

CHURCHES BURNED AND REBUILT

No event symbolized the theme of breaking and mending more than the dozens of church arsons that captured the nation’s attention in late spring, many of them targeting African-American congregations in the rural South.

But an outpouring of concern and compassion from the nation’s religious, business and political leaders helped douse the flames of hatred. Quakers and Mennonites, along with groups such as Habitat for Humanity, led interfaith work parties South to aid in the physical rebuilding of the burned churches.

The National Council of Churches and its member communions, along with the Southern Baptist Convention, the Christian Coalition, Promise Keepers, and Jewish and Muslim organizations raised millions of dollars for the rebuilding effort, soliciting cash and building materials from congregations and a responsive business community.

The federal government, too, lent its weight: President Clinton denounced the burnings, hearings were held on Republican-controlled Capitol Hill, and federal law enforcement agencies stepped up their investigations of the incidents.


Indeed, the call for racial reconciliation became a prominent theme of such diverse groups as the National Council of Churches, composed of 33 Protestant and Orthodox denominations, and the more evangelical Promise Keepers, the fast-growing Christian men’s movement.

RELIGIOUS AND ETHNIC VIOLENCE

Abroad, strife and violence continued to plague Africa, Asia and the Middle East, pitting adherents of rival religions and dueling ethnic groups against one another.

In Algeria, seven French Roman Catholic Trappist monks were kidnapped and brutally slain by Islamic fundamentalists as part of a four-year old war that has cost an estimated 60,000 lives. But even as he faced death, Dom Christian de Cherge, abbot of the Trappist monastery, penned a note that could be a paradigm for interreligious harmony:”I don’t see … how I could rejoice if the (Muslim) people I love were indiscriminately accused of my murder. It would be too high a price to pay for what will be called, perhaps, `the grace of martyrdom,’ to owe this to an Algerian … especially if he said that he is acting in fidelity to what he believes to be Islam.” Bishop Carlos Filipe Ximenes Belo of East Timor received the Nobel Peace Prize in December, sharing it with human rights activist Jose Ramos Horta. Belo, in his Nobel address, said it is”high time that the guns of war are silenced”in the Indonesian-occupied territory of East Timor. Indonesia is the world’s largest Muslim nation and animosities run deep with the mostly Christian Timorese.

In the United States, President Clinton in November appointed a 20-member interfaith panel to study and make policy recommendations on the problem of religious persecution around the world.

A TIDE OF REFUGEES

Less eloquently than the murdered Catholic abbot but no less ardently, humanitarian workers, from religious and secular aid agencies across the theological and ideological spectrum in the United States, Canada, and Europe as well as Africa, struggled throughout the year to feed the bodies and preach reconciliation to the souls of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan and Burundian refugees. The refugees, most displaced in the brutal genocide in Rwanda in 1994, continue to be used as pawns _ intimidated by Hutu militants and targeted by Tutsi rebels _ in the human catastrophe of the Great Lakes region of sub-Sahara Africa.

MIDEAST PEACE UNRAVELS

In Israel, the fragile peace process that sought to ease, if not end, decades of hostility between Israelis and Palestinians began to unravel, in part as a result of the hardline policies of newly elected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.


The opening of an archaeological tunnel near Jerusalem’s Muslim quarter by Israeli authorities sparked outrage among Palestinians in September, and led to the most violent Israeli-Palestinian confrontations since the 1967 Six-Day War. And Netanyahu’s decision to allow more Jewish settlements near Hebron further exacerbated differences.

Polls show American Jews continue to support Netanyahu, although some of that support is eroding as ultra-Orthodox Jews in Israel _ a key part of Netanyahu’s coalition government _ press for a change in Israeli law that would invalidate conversions performed by non-Orthodox rabbis.

RELIGIOUS DIFFERENCES

Christians-Jewish relations _ positive and negative _ made headlines in the United States in 1996.

In April, delegates to the United Methodist Church’s General Conference adopted a far-reaching statement affirming that”God has continued _ and continues today _ to work through Judaism and the Jewish people”and recognizing that like Christianity, Judaism is”bound to God”through a biblical covenant that is”eternally valid.” But in June, the Southern Baptist Convention took the opposite tack. At the denomination’s June meeting, Southern Baptists approved a resolution calling for a new emphasis on converting Jews to Christianity. Jews were outraged, calling the resolution a throwback to the days of Christian triumphalism, while Baptists insisted they were merely following the evangelical dictates of their faith.

RELIGIOUS UNITY

Efforts to mend centuries-old internal divisions highlighted the Protestant world.

At a historic meeting in October of the bishops of the Episcopal Church and the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, leaders of the two denominations thrashed out details of a plan for full communion that would allow Episcopalians and Lutherans to share clergy and conduct joint worship services. The proposal will be brought to their combined membership of 8 million in the coming year.

Similar efforts bore fruit in Europe in September when leaders of 10 denominations signed the Porvoo Agreement in Trondheim, Norway, linking British Anglicans with Scandinavian and Baltic Lutherans in full communion.


Another major church unity effort, the Consultation on Christian Unity (COCU) also made strides toward implementing its”Church of Christ Uniting”proposal that would bring nine denominations, including three historic African-American bodies, into closer unity through the mutual recognition of one another’s ministries.

But divisions still run deep among the many branches of Christianity. In a widely watched meeting in early December, Archbishop of Canterbury George Carey and Pope John Paul II made no progress in overcoming differences _ especially on the authority of the pope _ that have kept the two churches apart for centuries.

Divisions also surfaced within Catholicism. Reformers calling for women’s ordination and a married priesthood have launched petition campaigns in more than a half-dozen nations, promising a pilgrimage to Rome in 1997 to press for change. In the United States, Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., made headlines in March when he promised to excommunicate church members in his diocese who belong to any of a dozen mostly progressive groups whose ideas he considers incompatible with church teachings.

AMERICAN ISLAM

American Muslims continued to find a place in the mainstream of American religious and political life in 1996. For the first time, the White House hosted a reception in February marking Eid al-fitr, the Muslim feast that signals the end of the holy month of Ramadan. At the reception, Hillary Rodham Clinton pronounced Islam a member of the nation’s family of religions.

HOMOSEXUALITY

The volatile question of the place of gays and lesbians in church and society divided religious bodies as much as it did the wider society.

In the most dramatic symbol of the division, retired Episcopal Bishop Walter Righter was tried _ and ultimately acquitted _ on charges of heresy for ordaining a non-celibate gay man to the church’s diaconate.


Four congregations in the American Baptist Churches of the U.S.A. denomination were expelled from the church because of their pro-gay stands.

Homosexuality dominated the United Methodist Church’s General Conference in April. Although the 8.6 million-member denomination _ the nation’s second largest _ maintained its stand opposing homosexuality as”incompatible”with Christian teaching, a group of 15 United Methodist bishops, declaring it was”time to break the silence,”called on the church to admit gays and lesbians into the church’s ordained ministry.

In the secular arena, the gay issue dominated the debate over moral and ethical issues, fueled by a U.S. Supreme Court ruling that Colorado’s Amendment Two, which barred localities from making laws protecting homosexuals from discrimination, was unconstitutional.

Prompted by fears that Hawaii would legalize same-sex marriage, Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act after impassioned debate. At the same time, it narrowly defeated a proposal that would extend employment anti-bias laws to gays and lesbians.

On Dec. 4, Honolulu Circuit Court Judge Kevin S.C. Chang ordered Hawaii officials to stop denying marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Chang’s ruling and the promise by state officials to appeal ensures that the issue will remain in the forefront of religious and secular advocacy groups as well as the nation’s legislatures and courts.

ABORTION

The decades-long debate over legal abortion continued to tear at church and society. But there were far fewer violent confrontations over abortion in 1996 than in previous years and the Supreme Court continued to reject challenges to the Freedom of Access to Clinics law, which appears to have dampened anti-abortion protests at clinics.


Most prominent in the year’s abortion battles was the effort, led by Protestant religious conservatives and the Roman Catholic bishops, to outlaw a controversial late-term abortion procedure called by its opponents”partial birth abortion.”President Clinton vetoed the measure, on grounds that it did not include an exception to protect the health of the mother. Efforts to overturn the veto failed.

RELIGIOUS ACTIVISTS, RIGHT AND LEFT

Among the leaders of the anti-abortion effort was the conservative Christian Coalition, founded by religious broadcaster Pat Robertson. The Coalition solidified its influence on the Republican Party in 1996, shaping the GOP platform and forming an uneasy alliance with Republican Presidential candidate Bob Dole.

But beset by a negative public image and challenged by new groups on the religious left such as the evangelical-led Call to Renewal and the interreligious Interfaith Alliance, the Christian Coalition failed to fully deliver in the general election.

Although Clinton won the race against Dole, the president alienated many of his strongest religious supporters in the mainline Protestant, progressive evangelical, Roman Catholic and Jewish communities by signing welfare reform legislation these groups believe will unduly harm the poorest of the poor in American society.

PASSAGES

The year was also a time of transitions, of bridges built between the past and the future, and bridges crossed between life and death.

The recurring illness of Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa focused the world’s attention not only on the fragility of life but also on the endurance of the human spirit in the face of illness and adversity.


For Orthodoxy in America, a unique era came to an end as Archbishop Iakovos, the leader of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of North and South America, was succeed by Archbishop Spyridon, the first American-born prelate to head the church in the United States.

Another transition involved television preacher Robert H. Schuller, whose”Hour of Power”TV program is one of the most popular religious broadcasts, tapped his son, Robert A. Schuller, as his successor at Crystal Cathedral Ministries.

Roman Catholic Cardinal Joseph L. Bernardin of Chicago, the pragmatic prophet who for a decade was one of the nation’s most influential religious leaders, offerred, in his last months, the ultimate symbol of tearing down the walls between people as he took the lead in organizing the Catholic Common Ground project, an effort to bring together Catholics of sharply different views on a host of issues troubling the church in an effort to forge some kind of dialogue if not agreement or consensus.

And as the inoperable cancer that would claim his life slowly tightened its grip on him, Bernardin embraced death as what he called”a friend,”while eloquently affirming the value of life. In one of his last acts, he penned a letter to the U.S. Supreme Court urging it to reject efforts to make assisted suicide for the terminally ill a legal right.”I am at the end of my earthly life,”Bernardin wrote the justices.”There is much that I have contemplated these last few months of my illness, but as one who is dying I have especially come to appreciate the gift of life.”

END ANDERSON

Donate to Support Independent Journalism!

Donate Now!