Would you like some religion with your brie?
“Huffington Post” and “religion” may sound like an oxymoron, but the two are attempting to go together. The liberal blogspot – which regularly features Bill “Religulus” Maher – announced on February 24 that the website was launching HuffPo Religion. Founder Arianna Huffington touted it as being, “a section featuring a wide-ranging discussion about religion, spirituality, and the ways they influence our lives.”
While that may have been the intention, in reality HuffPost Religion’s discussions are based on promoting the liberal agenda toward religion.
Editor of HuffPo Religion, Paul Raushenbush, also explained the purpose of the new site in his article, “Dear Religious (And Sane) America.” He wrote, “HuffPost Religion will provide a more accurate representation of the wide range of concerns held by religious people, and dispel the myth that religious people have only one stance on the controversial issues of the day such as health care, immigration, abortion and gay rights.”
Fittingly, on the day it was launched, Sister Joan Chittister was one of the featured columnists. Though a Catholic nun, Chittister is known for agitating for women to become priests, and she couldn’t resist writing about it in her blog post.
“Churches that cling to sexism in the name of God will find themselves ignored on other issues. Young women will begin to wonder how it is that churches that teach equality are the last bastions of sexism in the modern world.”
But Chittister’s agenda is more ambitious than that, and she didn’t even give a backward glance to Christian humility. “Finally, theology itself, in the light of evolution, will need to be rethought, revised and reshaped to honor a God big enough to believe in, a God beyond the maker of a child's heaven and more an impelling force than the laws of those who take literalism as the measure of the spiritual life.”
Finished with Chittister, the reader could move on to “Harvard Prof Questions Origins of Religion,” or “Religion, Politics and Africa’s Homophobic Fears.” And it wouldn’t be the Huffington Post if it didn’t look to celebrities for wisdom. Accordingly, readers could also peruse Elton John’s interview with Parade, in which he declared that Jesus was a gay man.
Of course, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” had to be included. Author Brad Hirschfield explained “religious influence is not the same as religious coercion, and what policies are dictated by one's faith can range from denial of a gay person's right to serve to it being a religious mandate to assure an openly gay soldier's right to serve. Ultimately though such theological debate is a distraction from the only thing upon which policymakers should be focusing.”
Only time will tell if HuffPo Religion will be a success. But if its inauguration is an indicator, it will entertainin us with left-coast ideas on faith for as long as it lasts.
