US: Religion? We don' need no steenkeeng religion!

The Jugglers for Jesus. That's what did it for me.

In the middle of the Terri Schiavo circus, two people showed up at the Hospice of the Pinellas Suncoast and said that God told them to come to Florida and juggle for Jesus and Terri Schiavo. The Schiavo case was a big deal here long before Glenn Beck's newly national voice helped make it bigtime. When it started, I was on the side of life. After all, if her eyes could track the balloon, then there had to be somethng there. And didn't we owe her the benefit of the doubt? I know and respect people who know her brother, and they respect him. So much for the communitive properties of respect.

I was wrong. Glenn Beck was wrong. And the Jugglers for Jesus were really, really wrong. The circus ignored the seventy-one other families in the Hospice, looking for dignity in their last days. And it ignored the pain of their families, who had to run a security gauntlet to get in. The circus caused a local elementary school to close because of security fears. If Glenn Beck would have said, "Guys move it up the road half a mile," that's all it would have taken. But winning was more important than anything else. Winning and power.

So perhaps I shouldn't be surprised at a survey released this week in which the percentage of people who answered "None" when asked to identify their religion nearly doubled, from 8.2 percent to 15 percent. (For the record, "None" does not equal atheist. Only .7 percent of the respondents claim to be atheist.)

Should anyone be surprised by this? Look at what's happened since 1990. Almost every televangelist in the business has had a problem of one sort or another. Their responses, while typically shrouded in tears, have appeared insincere and self-indulgent.

When two generations of priests, decided that celebacy didn't apply to teenaged boys, the Catholic church not only covered it up, but one of its Cardinals proposed excommunication for accusers, even if their accusations were true.

Then there's the little matter of Islamic fundamentalists flying airplanes into buildings. It's not as big a scale, but when television stations refuse to air Saving Private Ryan because of the cursing, things have gone too far.

For the record, until recently, I have been Catholic. I was Catholic by choice, having studied the theology and found it to support the vast majority of my core beliefs. Donna Payant aside, my support for the death penalty is almost gone because of prayerful reflection. But against this backdrop, and given some events in my church recently, I am technically not aligned with any specific religion right now. So I understand why people would say "None."

Religion has been important. Commercials speaking of and featuring Beyonce's dancing ass don't belong on commercials in childrens' programming. The civil rights movement was largely sparked by religion. And you'd be hard pressed to say organizations like the Salvation Army and Catholic Charities are detrimental.

But religion has also become heavy-handed, proud, and arrogant. It's more concerned with what happens in the bedroom than what happens in the boardroom, or what happens when people lose their hope. In many cases, it's more interested in condemning abortion than it is in helping a woman who chose abortion to bind her wounds and live her life in the best possible way going forward.

A man--a minister--named Steve Brown has said that Christianity works best when it's not in power. Maybe this is a blessing, rather than a curse.