Month of mystery, ‘faith’ without ‘fruit’
By Bill Knight | 4th December 2007
December is a wonderful month of mystery, a time with a lot of religious holidays and secular good will to others, but a time of tension, friction and foolishness, too. Some of the most outlandish foolishness seems to come from the Bush administration’s Bureau of Prisons and - in a bit of bipartisan boobery - Presidential candidates from the Democratic Party as well as the GOP.
It’s unsettling to see federal intervention continue to prohibit prisoners from reading many religion books; it’s annoying to see people vying for the White House proclaim their spirituality yet ignore Scriptures’ teachings.
Of course, besides Christmas - which dominates the culture in commercial as well as religious terms - December has Hanukkah (for eight days and nights early in the month), Bodhi Day Dec. 8 (when Buddhists mark the day when Prince Gautama attained enlightenment), Islam’s Hajj pilgrimage (concluding with Eid el Adha on Dec. 20), Yule/Litha (ancient days to celebrate energy poured into the service of life, the “rebirth” of the sun, and the winter-born king [somewhat appropriated by the early Christian church in dating Jesus’ birthday], still celebrating by some Christians, Wiccans and neo-pagans on Dec. 21), Zarathosht Diso Dec. 26 (the Zoroastrian anniversary of the death of their prophet Zarathushtra), and Kwaanza (the mostly secular African-American holiday to celebrate family, community and culture, marked from Dec. 26-Jan. 1, 2008).
December is more than three months since the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) prohibited prisoners from reading 99 percent of the books about religion and church, having drawn up a list of “acceptable” texts - and having drawn the ire of a couple of upstate New York inmates who filed a class-action lawsuit. Plaintiffs including Protestant Christian John Okon, Jewish Moshe Milstein, and Muslim Douglas Kelly note that the BOP banned “When Bad Things Happen to Good People” by Rabbi Harold Kushner, books by Robert Schuller (the televangelist familiar from Sunday morning shows), Protestant theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Hebrew theologian Moses Maimonides (the centuries-old “Code of Jewish Law”), and best-selling author and mega-church pastor Rick Warren (”A Purpose-Driven Life”)
At stake are the already-limited First-Amendment rights prisoners retain. Obviously, penitentiaries strictly limit the rights to Assemble, but they maintain remnants of the freedoms of Speech, Press, the right to ask for a redress of Grievances, and, until now, Religion. Before this charge against prison chapels, chaplains screened books, mostly to filter out hate literature - much of it white-supremacist screeds purporting to be Christian, but some of it extremist tracts from other faiths.
The justification - as in many of the more onerous changes in society since 2001 - is the war on terror generally, and a 2004 U.S. Department of Justice report on religious services for Muslims in particular.
“The presence of extremist chaplains, contractors or volunteers in the BOP’s correctional facilities can pose a threat to institutional security and could implicate national security if inmates are encouraged to commit terrorist acts against the United States,” the report said.
Now, instead of relying on people of faith working in prisons to remove inappropriate publications for reasons of common sense and safety, bureaucrats in the federal government are defining what’s suitable for different faiths. The government purge is institutionalized as the BOP’s Standardized Chapel Library Project, which lists titles for 19 religious groups. For some, the number of permitted books and audio-video items is more than 300, while other lists are severely cut. A list for “Other Religions” for example, contains only two books - both on Christian Science. Catholic and Protestant Christian lists are among the longest. The Jewish list is shorter with 134 items, although separately Messianic Judaism gets 60. Separate lists are maintained for Islam and the Nation of Islam.
“We would have hoped that our prisons would be well-stocked with books advising how to live ethically, religiously and morally,” said evangelical Christian advocate Jeremy Gunn, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s program on Freedom of Religion and Belief.
Religion can be a meaningful route to rehabilitate federal inmates - many of whom are incarcerated for drug or other nonviolent offenses.
Elsewhere in the public realm, the Presidential campaign treats religion as all form and little content. In forum after forum, some twit newscaster attempts an ambush question and asks someone about their faith, and the candidates dutifully play along. OK, they’re devout, they attend, they believe, and so on. But what do these self-described Christians specifically plan to do about what the New Testament calls its works of mercy: feeding the hungry, giving drink to the thirsty, clothing the naked, housing the homeless, visiting prisoners, visiting the sick, etc.?
* Fifty-nine percent of 23 major U.S. cities reported an increase in requests for emergency shelter for families last year, according to the U.S. Conference of Mayors.
* More than 35 million Americans live in hunger, including more than 12 million kids, according to the faith-based Bread for the world.
* “Giving drink to the thirsty”? The country’s water supply is at risk from local contaminants and global warming alike.
* “Most inmates had scant opportunities for work, training education, treatment or counseling because of taxpayer resistance to increasing spending on prison rehabilitation programs,” reports Human Rights Watch.
“The question is not ‘What do each of these candidates tell us about how religious they are’,” writes Catholic Sister Joan Chittister. “The question is: ‘What do each of these candidates plan to do to make the corporal works of mercy a living sign of the (faith)?’ ”
It’s difficult to be disappointed without being a scold, which is a step or a stumble from the intolerance practiced by extremists wearing beards and birkas or ties and toupees. It helps to hope that the universal yearning for More - shown in the presence of the Golden Rule in all faiths - or the logic of common sense will help devotion overcome intolerance. Reform might start small, with open libraries for prisoners, and end up big, with national leadership so comfortable with their faith that it’s unnecessary to force it on others, any month of the year.
Bill Knight is an award-winning journalist who teaches at Western Illinois University. Contact him at bill.knight@hotmail.com.