Because of a recent federal court ruling that upheld a city policy of not allowing religious services in public schools, dozens of congregations throughout New York have been told that they must move; next Sunday will be the last time they will be allowed to rent space in schools for services. […]

Opponents say that the congregations are violating the separation of church and state, causing confusion among children who attend the schools, and that they are trying to impose their beliefs on others in a city known for its religious and cultural diversity.

No group, religious or not, deserves subsidized rent on the public dime. Costs need to be covered, rental rates should be fair, and selection impartial. Tenants are also well advised to be aboveboard about their activities. If these conditions are met, Via Meadia High would welcome everyone from the Knights of Columbus and Rotary Club to the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster. So should any New York public school.

The church ban is madness. It’s also shortsighted: religious congregations are irreplaceable community assets. They help local residents build stronger families, promote charity, and strengthen community involvement—all of which, not incidentally, are good foundations for student performance in school.

This is a terrible sign for the future of New York. It’s part of an utterly misguided attempt to cleanse any trace of religion from public life. The state senate and assembly will soon be debating the issue. Let us hope cooler heads and less blinkered viewpoints prevail.

And as one state after another votes in gay marriage there are still writers who obsess about the terrible Christianist danger — the fundie revolution waiting to sweep all the secular humanists off to the reeducation camps. We’ve scoffed at these fears more than once.

But maybe we’ve been unfair to our friends in the MSM. Maybe they simply don’t know what a true theocracy looks like. A new BBC report from Uganda, where a controversial anti-homosexuality bill has just been reintroduced, could help enlighten them.

While the bill has been watered down from it’s original version (homosexuality will no longer be punishable by death), it still goes well beyond what any reasonable modern society, religious or secular, would allow. Not only are homosexual acts still illegal; the bill would also require friends and neighbors to report suspected homosexuals to the authorities. The convicted would face life in prison, in addition to various forms of public harassment. The legislator who introduced the bill evidently rues the fact that the death penalty is no longer in play, admitting to NPR his desire “to kill every last gay person.”

This, friends, is what real theocracy looks like—and there is nothing like that on the table here.  The past century has seen a shift in American politics towards more openness and individual freedom, both economically and socially. It would take much more than the election of a Mormon president to change that. Critics in the Times and elsewhere should take a deep breath and focus their energy on actual problems rather than shallow fantasies and will o’ the wisps.

It’s as foolish for the left to hyperventilate about the dominionist danger as it is for the right to get its knickers in a twist over alleged Muslim plots to impose Sharia.  America has a lot of problems these days; the imposition of theocracy — whether Catholic, evangelical, dominionist, Islamic, Jewish, Zoroastrian — isn’t one of them.

Fortunately, some writers on the left are also trying to help the overwrought and the panic stricken calm down.  Michael Kazin, for example, co-editor of Dissent, understands that the “Christianists” aren’t taking over tomorrow, and writing in The New Republic, he offers an obituary for the Christian Right:

[W]hatever their influence on the Republican primary, the Christian Right is fighting a losing battle with the rest of the country—above all, when it comes to abortion  and same-sex marriage, the issues they care most about. A strong majority of Americans backs abortion in the early months of a pregnancy. If elected president, it’s exceedingly unlikely that Romney would ever sign legislation that could lead to the indictment of millions of women and tens of thousands of physicians for fetal murder. Last fall, even voters in Mississippi soundly rejected a bill that might have done just that.

Meanwhile, support for gay rights is rising, quite swiftly. Same-sex marriage tops fifty percent in some recent polls, and the remarkably placid response to New York’s recent legalization of the practice will make it easier for other states to follow suit. With over two-thirds of Americans now endorsing the end of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, the debate on that once controversial issue is now a matter for historians to analyze.

Some of the changes in American morals and mores are good and some are troubling, but Kazin is basically right: America is becoming much more of a live-and-let-live society.  The public likes values and for the most part it likes religion, but one of the values that Americans care about is tolerance.

I’ve said it before and I say it again: The Handmaid’s Tale is not coming to a country near you.

Even as estimates for the bombings in Kano rose from 150 to up to 250, new attacks left churches burning in one part of the northern Bauchi state, while 11 people were killed and 12 injured in a separate incident, also in Bauchi.

Most of the dead in the recent church attacks across the country are said to belong to the Igbo people.  The Igbo are a southern, mostly Christian Nigerian group of an estimated 27 to 30 million people.  An earlier attempt at secession by the Igbo led to the establishment of Biafra, a breakaway government that was crushed in the bloody Nigerian civil war.  Since then, the Igbo (a traditionally mobile and enterprising people) have fanned out across Nigeria and the world; their presence in the North is often resented by native Muslim groups. Boko Haram has ordered all Christians to leave the North and the church bombings and other attacks seem to be part of a concerted effort to stampede them into flight.

For their part, some Igbo in their southeastern Nigeria homeland are beginning to retaliate. Chika Unigwe writes in the Guardian about the news she is getting from the Igbo heartland in former Biafra:

An Igbo group, Ogbunigwe Ndigbo, gave all northern Muslims in the region two weeks to leave or face their wrath. In Lokpanta, where my mother is from, the Muslim Hausa community – which settled there many years ago – were seen leaving in truckloads.

The Hausa are the leading Muslim people in most of the North, and as refugees from the South come North with tales of violence and fear, anger will grow.  Boko Haram appears to hope that a series of reciprocal acts of violence and ethnic cleansing will escalate, leading to a crisis that ultimately divides the country. Presumably Boko Haram would try to use that crisis to get control of the North and impose its own radical and extreme views on Muslims in the country.

Worse, the government seems hopelessly, helplessly overmatched at this point.  A suspect was arrested in the case of the Christmas church bombings; within 24 hours the suspect somehow managed to escape, still handcuffed, from his guards.  There are widespread suspicions, right up to President Goodluck Jonathan himself, that members of the security forces and the military (historically strongholds of northern influence) are secretly helping Boko Haram.

Treason might not be to blame; the Nigerian government is one of the world’s most corrupt organizations, and it is perfectly possible that prisoner escapes can be arranged if the right palms are crossed. But whether it has been hollowed out by secret terrorist sympathizers or simply eaten away by conventional corruption, Nigeria does not seem able to do much about its worst security threat in a generation. Muddle at the top; violence at the grassroots; religion, ethnicity and oil revenue in a toxic brew: Nigeria is not in a good place.

A lot of people only care about Nigerian politics when oil is involved. At the moment, production is not under threat. But while violence in the oil patch can have a direct and disturbing effect on world oil prices, the increasing stress on Nigeria’s somewhat fragile and artificial national unity ia more serious in the long run. If the center doesn’t hold in Nigeria, few sub-Saharan countries divided by language, religion and ethnicity have much hope of hanging together. If ethnically charged religious violence begins to spread in Nigeria, wider confrontations across the volatile Christian-Muslim divide across Africa cannot be ruled out.

At the moment, the Nigerian center looks distressingly weak.

Theologically, this is a tricky question.  On the one hand, a serious monotheist has to accept that everything that happens is God’s will at some level.  From that perspective it is hard to argue that Mr. Tebow is winning games against God’s will.

More profoundly, it’s not at all clear, either from scripture or theology that God rewards those he loves with successful careers and public victories on earth.  That certainly isn’t how things worked out for Jesus, and a great many of God’s favorites seem to have gone through some rough times. The Bible tells us repeatedly that God has a special love for the poor and many of us know from personal experience that it is through our defeats and our failures that we have come closest to God.

A truly advanced Christian would be as thankful for the interceptions and failed plays as well as he was for the touchdowns.  All presumably are manifestations of the divine will, and the faithful should strive to be grateful in and out of season.

But Mr. Tebow is a young athlete not an old monk, and Via Meadia is inclined to be indulgent. A man who bears witness that true manhood consists in acknowledging your dependence on a higher power and that even rich and famous athletes need to regulate their conduct by something other than their own wishes and whims is someone to respect.

And for those who twist themselves into knots of chagrin over Mr. Tebow’s habit of public prayer, we advise some deep breathing and calm reflection. Mr. Tebow is not forcing anyone to join him in these moments of devotion; supporters of his opponents remain free to invoke divine assistance for their own cause.  And as a role model for youth, an athlete who neither beats women nor takes drugs seems, well, not too bad.

About Mr. Tebow’s skills as a quarterback or his chances for a championship ring, Via Meadia has nothing to say.

He warned his audience that Boko Haram, the pseudo-Islamic fanatical sect that believes all modern knowledge should be banned, has sympathizers within the Nigerian government itself, including the military and the police. The sect has stunned Nigeria by demanding that all Christians leave the historically Muslim north, killing hundreds of people to back up its threats.

President Jonathan has his own reasons to play up the threat. The government’s decision to drop fuel subsidies has Muslims and Christians enraged across the country; for many ordinary people, cheap gas is the only benefit they ever see out of the country’s vast oil wealth. Many believe that generations of Nigerian politicians, not excluding the current rulers, have grown rich on oil money and corruption. President Jonathan would just as soon Nigerians change the subject, and civil war is even more interesting than the price of gas.

Also, as a Christian whose succession to the presidency is seen by many Muslim northerners as a violation of the compromise by which Christians and Muslims rotate the presidency (Jonathan’s Muslim predecessor Umaru Yar’Adua died before completing his term and many Muslims think Jonathan, vice president at the time, should not have run for a full term on his own), Jonathan needs to keep the base happy.  Boko Haram’s attacks have frightened and enraged Christians across the divided country; Jonathan needs to show that he cares or the reaction could get out of control.

Yet it would be wrong to dismiss President Jonathan as an alarmist. There are Muslims in Nigeria who have nothing but contempt for Boko Haram’s ignorance and fanaticism, but who are genuinely worried that power is slipping out of the north’s hands. Since the Biafran War the Christian population of Nigeria has exploded, with many practitioners of traditional African religions embracing Christianity.  (At independence there were about twice as many Muslims as Christians in Nigeria. Today the numbers are roughly even.) Meanwhile, the oil rich south has developed faster than the north, and the more entrepreneurial and globally savvy southern Nigerians are moving ahead faster than the more conservative north.

For most of its history, Nigeria has been dominated by the north. That era may be ending, and this is what makes Boko Haram such a problem. Many northerners who care nothing about Boko Haram’s eccentric theology feel threatened by the power shift to the increasingly Christian south. Poorly educated young men with a sense of grievance and few economic prospects are the fuel for civil war; both northern and southern Nigeria are rich in this combustible human material. Mix ethnic and religious tensions in with economic competition, and you get a situation where a small match can set off a huge fire.

Boko Haram aims to be that match. In Nigeria today, religion is hot.

Gombe is the capital of Gombe state, one of Nigeria’s smallest and least populated states with about two million people. Like most states in northern Nigeria, it was historically a Muslim-majority state with strong links to pre-British Islamic emirates, but Gombe also has a large and active Christian population.  When sharia law was introduced, there was more resistance in Gombe than in some other parts of the north, and sharia has been restricted to those parts of the state where Muslims are in the majority. The religious tension, as is often the case, has ethnic and economic overtones as well.  There are predominantly Christian tribes who resent the historic power of the leading Islamic tribes and traditional authorities, there are Christian ‘immigrants’ from the south, and in some cases Muslims perceive their positions of power as threatened given the gradual tilt of power in the country toward the more developed, oil rich and increasingly Christian south.

One church attack in Gombe is not necessarily news in a country where religious, ethnic and plain old fashioned criminal violence is depressingly common.  But I have met a number of Nigerian Christians over the years, and in a country in which even the Anglicans are militant, religious hostility can spread. The Gombe shooting may or may not be related to Boko Haram, a fanatical sect which capitalizes on the credulity, insecurity and ignorance of troubled souls and has ordered all Christians to leave the north.  But Christians in Nigeria are both angry and worried about what looks to many of them like a trend of rising extremist attacks.

Nigeria has about one fourth of sub-Saharan Africa’s population and is one of the world’s major oil producers.  Its population is young and restless, and its governance is appalling. It bears watching.

Nigeria had been spending 1.2 trillion naira ($7.3 billion) a year—about a quarter of all government spending in the 2012 budget—to keep petroleum products within reach of its deeply poor population of 167 million people. […]

Many of the 70% of Nigerians who live on less than $2 a day, however, view the subsidy as the only windfall the nation’s poor have enjoyed from the more-than-two-million barrels of oil the nation exports daily.

Nigeria’s top two labor unions called for “strikes, street demonstrations and mass protests across the country,” starting Tuesday, according to a statement quoted by Vanguard, a newspaper based in the commercial capital, Lagos.

Nigeria may be one of Goldman Sach’s “Next Eleven” developing economies, but it remains a laggard. It lacks the consistent stability, good governance and civic infrastructure to maximize its potential. It suffers from a combustible mixture of youth (the median age is 19.2), endemic poverty, acrimonious (recent) history, rapid  population growth, ethnic rivalries, linguistic divides, limited education and hot religion. Throwing fuel on the fire, so to speak, is dangerous.

Sporadic but fierce violence is a staple of Nigerian society. The oil-rich Niger Delta is infamous for kidnappings, militancy and human rights violations. Even more worrying is Nigeria’s religious violence. Annual death tolls are in the low thousands, and incitements and reprisals are common among Muslims and Christians alike. Boko Haram, a pseudo-Islamic sect, may be the most fearsome combatant,  charged with church bombings, mass prison breaks and indiscriminate slaughter.

Nigeria is riven with stark divisions: rich and poor, Christian and Muslim, 250 distinct ethnic groups and double the number of languages. But Nigerians have long been united in their universal dependence on cheap gas. Now that this commonality has become yet another source of conflict, President Goodluck Jonathan will need more than just his first name to navigate Nigeria through the New Year.

Today, Robert George, the man dubbed by the New York Times as “The Conservative-Christian Big Thinker“, and Jennifer Bryson, a colleague at Princeton’s Witherspoon Institute, published an open letter decrying the campaign against the show:

[T]he vast majority of our Muslim fellow citizens are indeed ordinary folks. They are good people and good Americans. They share our fundamental moral values and our commitments to democratic institutions and civil and religious liberty. They do not promote hatred of Christians and Jews and have no desire to establish an Islamic theocracy. They are as appalled as we are at the rhetoric and conduct of those of their religion who do promote hatred and who seek to undermine democratic freedoms.

Please know that in our pro-life, pro-family, and pro-freedom work at the Witherspoon Institute, we have found strong partners and allies in many Muslims. They have joined with us in promoting respect for human life in all stages and conditions; in upholding the virtues of modesty and chastity; in fighting the plagues of pornography and marital infidelity; and in working to protect religious freedom and the rights of conscience both at home and abroad.

Of course, there are violent extremists and enemies of freedom who act in the name of Islam—no question about that. They preach anti-Semitism in its vilest forms and seek domination. They have no respect for the dignity and equality of women or for religious and civil liberty. One of us (Dr. Bryson) has first-hand experience in confronting them: she spent two years serving our country as a United States Department of Defense interrogator at Guantanamo. Like you, both of us believe that Islamist terrorists and radicals must be resolutely opposed and defeated. But it is important to recognize that this is a view we and you share with the overwhelming majority of American Muslims…Their moral values are our moral values—and yours.

All too often, the media and partisan polemicists reduce religions and their adherents to their worst caricatures. Voices like George’s and Bryson’s put the lie to such portrayals. Read the whole letter and reflect on the role that strong religious convictions have had historically and still have today in promoting ideals of religious tolerance and freedom here in the US.

Religious tensions in Nigeria are rising after a wave of church bombings and other attacks, for many of which Boko Haram claims responsibility.  Nigerian Christian leaders have warned that Christians will defend themselves if attacks continue; there have also been incidents in which Christians have attacked and massacred Muslims.

Nigeria has already had one brutal civil war since obtaining independence from Great Britain.  The Biafran War caused up to three million deaths out of a total Nigerian population of about 60 million at the time.

A new civil war could well be much worse.  Nigeria’s global importance has grown with its oil reserves, and a conflict that saw the mostly Christian (oil rich and more developed) south against the mostly Muslim north could draw in radicals and extremists and generate new sects and new terror groups across the volatile and shifting Christian-Muslim line in Africa.

Any sign that large numbers of Christians were moving south and Muslims north in Nigeria would be worrisome.  In a country where many people are desperately poor and cannot easily uproot themselves, people would move only if they feared for their lives.

The fanatics of Boko Haram (the name means ‘western knowledge is prohibited by God’) may hope to spark this kind of wider conflict.  Let us hope it fails, and wish the authorities in Nigeria every success as they seek to defend people of all faiths and ethnic backgrounds.

Nigeria has a history of avoiding catastrophe, but the appearance of a well organized and apparently well funded terror group like Boko Haram is worrying. Via Meadia will be keeping an eye on this.