Subject: IWG Inquirer Religious Liberty/Diversity letter
From: Interfaith Working Group <[email-masked]>
Date: Sun, 12 Jul 1998 23:19:15 -0400 (EDT)

July 5, 1998

The Philadelphia Inquirer
PO Box 8263
Phila., PA 19101

Dear Editors:
	We are always happy to see accurate portrayals of
religious diversity in the media, but Mary Rourk's July
5 article could not be called accurate in that she
oversimplified the past and present and ignored the
possibilities for the future.
	Rourk does not understand how religiously diverse
this country is.  She ig-nores Unitarian-Universalists,
Quakers, Anabaptists, the Universal Fellowship of
Metropolitan Community Churches and Unity Fellowship
Churches; and makes no distinction between the various
movements in Judaism, or the various denominations from
liberal to conservative calling themselves
Presbyterian, Lutheran or Baptist.  A Philadelphia
Yellow Pages can show anyone how religiously diverse we
are. 
	Rourk concentrates on a membership decline in
"liberal Protestant chur-ches," but the president of
"the second-largest evangelical seminary in the
country" is not going to be unbiased. Conservatives
have claimed that this decline is due to an acceptance
of equality for sexual minorities and women, but
congregations that have wholeheartedly embraced
equality rather than merely "addressing" these issues
are doing well, as is the Universal Fellowship of
Metropolitan Community Churches, which has a primary
outreach to sexual minorities.   
	Most opinion polls have also indicated a steadily-
rising acceptance for equality in society as a whole
which runs counter to a the trend in conservative
Christian churches.  Rourk ignores the very real
possibility that such controversies will arise in those
churches, too. The web page of the Council on Biblical
Manhood and Womanhood (backed by many of the same
Religious Right leaders as the Promise Keepers) has a
story about Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois
(called "one of the nation's largest and most
influential churches") adopting an "egalitarian" gender
policy.  And recently there was an expulsion of a
Southern Baptist congregation for its favorable
policies toward sexual minorities.
	We were very surprised that Rourk did not mention
the obvious tension between a steady increase in
religious diversity and the rise in power of
conservative Christian organizations that want to
entangle church and state and refer to the United
States as a "Christian nation." This is seen especially
in the majority vote in the House of Representatives
for an amendment to religious freedom and recent
comments by legislators about homosexuality and the
Bible.   
	Our religious liberty will be preserved and our
religious diversification will continue only if we
preserve our constitutional protections of free
exercise of religion, the ban on establishment of
official religion, and equal protection under the law
regardless of our own religious beliefs or others'
religious beliefs about us.

Sincerely,
Barbara Purdom     Christopher Purdom
Interfaith Working Group Coordinators

The above letter went out on IWG letterhead listing 15 congregations and
organizations and 58 clergy from 15 religious traditions. If you are in 
the general Philadelphia area and represent a congregation or religious 
organization or are clergy, let us know if you want to be added - all faiths 
are welcome. We will also be happy to help start similar organizations in 
other areas.

-- 

Interfaith Working Group                Religious organizations, congregations
[email-masked]                      and clergy supporting gay rights,
http://www.libertynet.org/iwg/          reproductive freedom, and the 
215-235-3050                            separation of church and state.