On Friday, Pastor Robert Jeffress of the 10,000-member First Baptist Church of Dallas took the podium at the Values Voter Summit to introduce and endorse Rick Perry.

Gov. Perry, said Pastor Jeffress, is a leader with “a strong commitment to biblical values” who defunded Planned Parenthood, that “slaughterhouse for the unborn.” He contrasted Perry with an unnamed rival.

“Do we want a candidate who is a conservative out of convenience or one who is a conservative out of deep conviction? Do we want a candidate who is a good, moral person or one who is a born-again follower of the Lord Jesus Christ?”

Perry thanked Jeffress for this “very powerful introduction” and congratulated him for having “hit it out of the park.”

By then, however, the pastor, having rounded the bases, was expatiating to an attentive press corps.

“Mormonism is not Christianity,” Pastor Jeffress asserted. Rather, Mormonism is a “cult.” The Mormons “embraced another gospel, the Book of Mormon, and that is why they have never been considered by evangelical Christians to be part of the Christian family.” In essence, Romney may be a good man, but he is not a Christian.

Saturday, Bill Bennett appeared. “Do not give voice to bigotry,” said Bennett. “I would say to Pastor Jeffress: You stepped on and obscured the words of Perry. … You did Perry no good.”

Romney took the podium to speak of America’s “heritage of religious faith and tolerance” and denounced those who would inject “poisonous language” into the political debate.

“Speaking of hitting it out of the park,” Romney began, “how about that Bill Bennett?”

The Perry campaign separated itself from the pastor’s comment about a cult. Yet Jeffress had expressed that view four years ago when Romney was running. In August, he partnered with Perry at “The Response.” His introducing of the governor had been cleared by the Perry campaign.

Hence, this episode was no accident.

As Bennett’s blast was being reported, this writer was in a green room with Pastor Jeffress, who was not backing off an inch.

Evangelicals have the same right to support fellow evangelicals as women did to support Hillary Clinton, said Jeffress. And a candidate’s religion is a valid concern, for what a person believes about God and man and morality and immorality will influence not only how he lives his life but the decisions he will make as president.

The view that Mormonism is a “theological cult” is not “bigotry,” said Jeffress, but the official position of the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant denomination and, after Catholicism, the largest denomination in the United States.

Why is Mormonism a cult?

Because, Jeffress explained, whereas Christ, God himself, is the founder of Christianity, Joseph Smith, a 19th-century American, was the father of Mormonism. And the Book of Mormon is not biblical revelation.

The political problem arises with the word cult. To most of us, it conjures up the Rev. Jim Jones ordering up the Kool-Aid in his Jonestown encampment or Branch Davidians burning to death in Waco.

Mormonism, however, is America’s fourth-largest religion and among its fastest-growing ones. In the leadership of the nation it is well-represented. If one judges a religious faith by the precept of Christ himself — “By their fruits shall ye know them” — it has produced more than its share of healthy and happy children and families and good and productive citizens.

The Romneys appear to be the very model of an American family.

Nevertheless, politically, this is no minor matter.

Herman Cain, rising star in the GOP firmament, has said Romney cannot be elected, as his Mormonism would kill him in the South. Pressed Sunday on what Pastor Jeffress had said, Cain said, “I am not going to do an analysis of Mormonism versus Christianity.”

“Mormonism versus Christianity”?

Romney’s faith may be the reason — though he is far out in front in New Hampshire — he has been unable to expand his Southern base.

In the candidates poll at the Values Voter Summit, Romney ran sixth with just 4 percent, while Ron Paul got 37 percent, Cain got 23 percent and Perry and Michele Bachmann each got 8 percent.

With the Iowa caucuses three months off and Romney’s being the man to beat, Mitt is likely to replace Perry as the “pinata” in the debates.

Social and moral issues — such as gay rights and abortion, where Romney’s views have evolved since he ran against Teddy Kennedy — seem certain to emerge as surrogates for the religious question.

In 2007, Romney gave an eloquent defense of his faith and the values by which he has lived his life. Today he would prefer to keep focused on his business acumen and how to create jobs in a private sector that employs 85 percent of Americans, where his credentials are matched only by Cain’s.

It is a good bet Mitt’s rivals are not going to accommodate him.

It takes a high IQ to evade the obvious, so it is not surprising that the intelligentsia are out in force, decrying those who criticize this calculated insult.

What may surprise some people is that the American taxpayer is currently financing a trip to the Middle East by the imam who is pushing this project, so that he can raise the money to build it. The State Department is subsidizing his travel.

The big talking point is that this is an issue about “religious freedom” and that Muslims have a “right” to build a mosque where they choose. But those who oppose this project are not claiming that there is no legal right to build a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center.

If anybody did, it would be a matter for the courts to decide — and they would undoubtedly say that it is not illegal to build a mosque near the site of the World Trade Center attack.

The intelligentsia and others who are wrapping themselves in the Constitution are fighting a phony war against a straw man. Why create a false issue, except to evade the real issue?

Our betters are telling us that we need to be more “tolerant” and more “sensitive” to the feelings of Muslims. But if we are supposed to be sensitive to Muslims, why are Muslims not supposed to be sensitive to the feelings of millions of Americans, for whom 9/11 was the biggest national trauma since Pearl Harbor?

It would not be illegal for Japanese Americans to build a massive shinto shrine next to Pearl Harbor. But, in all these years, they have never sought to do it.

When Catholic authorities in Poland were planning to build an institution for nuns, years ago, and someone pointed out that it would be near the site of a concentration camp that carried out genocide, the Pope intervened to stop it.

He didn’t say that the Catholic Church had a legal right to build there, as it undoubtedly did. Instead, he respected the painful feelings of other people. And he certainly did not denounce those who called attention to the concentration camp.

There is no question that Muslims have a right to build a mosque where they chose to. The real question is why they chose that particular location, in a country that covers more than 3 million square miles.

If we all did everything that we have a legal right to do, we could not even survive as individuals, much less as a society. So the question is whether those who are planning a Ground Zero mosque want to be part of American society or just to see how much they can get away with in American society?

Can anyone in his right mind believe that this was intended to show solidarity with Americans, rather than solidarity with those who attacked America? Does anyone imagine that the Middle East nations, including Iran, from whom financial contributions will be solicited, want to promote reconciliation between Americans and Muslims?

That the President of the United States has joined the chorus of those calling the Ground Zero mosque a religious freedom issue tells us a lot about the moral dry rot that is undermining this country from within.

In this, as in other things, Barack Obama is not so much the cause of our decline but the culmination of it. He had many predecessors and many contemporaries who represent the same mindset and the same malaise.

There are people for whom moral preening has become a way of life. They are out in force denouncing critics of the Ground Zero mosque.

There are others for whom a citizen of the world affectation puts them one-up on those of us who are grateful to be Americans, and to enjoy a freedom that is all too rare in other countries around the world, even at this late date in human history.

They think the United States is somehow on trial, and needs to prove itself to others by bending over backwards. But bending over backwards does not win friends. It loses respect, including self-respect.

Do the Muslims in Egypt (a country that imprisons people for sodomy), who listened with rapt and admiring attention as Barack Obama confidently discoursed on the meaning of their “tolerant” religion, know that immediately before he left D.C. for Cairo he had issued a proclamation declaring June “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month”?

Had Osama Bin Laden wanted to discredit Obama in the eyes of global Muslims, he should have junked his own insane gibberish and simply read from Obama’s LGBT proclamation: “My Administration has partnered with the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender community to advance a wide range of initiatives. At the international level, I have joined efforts at the United Nations to decriminalize homosexuality around the world.”

So much for the sodomy laws of Islamic countries.

Naturally, Obama didn’t say a word in his Cairo speech about this delicate matter. These are valued “allies,” after all. He even pandered a bit to Islam’s dim view of rotten Western mores, lamenting the Internet’s child-corrupting “offensive sexuality.”

Would that be the same offensive sexuality designed to corrupt kids on display in your omnivorously perverse proclamation? His proclamation speaks of LGBT “youth” and the “harassment” they face, as if America is teeming with 16-year-olds who have gotten sex-change operations in brave defiance of their peers, as if it is the president’s duty to encourage teens in bisexual explorations.

At any rate, the media purred over the “credibility” that Obama enjoys in the Muslim world. If so, it is a credibility based on either cluelessness or cynicism: perhaps Muslims don’t know about Obama’s turbo-secularism, or, if they do, they just don’t care, figuring that they at least share a common enemy –Christianity.

Obama announced once again, gratuitously and absurdly, that America is not “at war” with Islam. When was Bush at war with Islam? As I recall, Bush spent much of his time after 9/11 making unconvincing cooing noises about the “moderation” of Muslims and assigned Karen Hughes to push this PC propaganda in the Middle East.

Okay, Obama is not at war with Islam, but he is very much in a culture war with Christianity, denying rights to pro-life doctors and nurses at home even as he promises greater respect to Muslims abroad.

His Cairo speech contained a familiar assortment of jaw-dropping whoppers and jumbled half-truths. The White House proudly announced that this syncretistic stream of deceptions will be translated into a dozen languages.

Does Mark Penn feel vindicated this morning? Remember Hillary’s sly formulation, no doubt picked up from Penn, that “as far as she knew” Obama wasn’t a Muslim, not long after she dispatched Bill and Chelsea to ham it up as Christians with Joel Osteen in Texas? Obama, working hard to impress his audience yesterday, conformed perfectly to Penn’s image of him, saying that he hails from “generations of Muslims,” and that he “spent several years” immersed in Indonesian Muslim culture where “he heard the call of the azaan at the break of dawn and at the fall of dusk.”

The more non-Western a religion is, the more Obama cottons to it. Ever the critic of the West, Obama declared casually that Islam made possible “Europe’s renaissance and enlightenment.”

America, he argued, has learned a lot from it too: “Islam has always been part of America’s story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco.” He didn’t bother to mention that Muslim pirates were also some of the first ones to wage war against America, thus making the Treaty of Tripoli necessary.

Obama added that “when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same holy Quran that one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, kept in his personal library.” Too bad he didn’t mention that Jefferson had purchased it in order to understand the tactics of the Muslim pirates.

Obama’s glib solipsism is bottomless. Whether telling Catholics at Notre Dame what Christianity means or Muslims in Cairo what Islam means, he simply substitutes his narcissistic liberalism for the subject at hand; all religious roads lead back not to God but to him.

by Alain de Botton

It’s been clear for a while, at least since the collapse of Lehman Brothers last fall, that what we have to fear above all is hope itself. Attempts to trust that the worst is over and to stop frightening ourselves seem doomed to propel us into yet worse disappointment. We are not only unhappy, but—believing calm and happiness to be the norm—unhappy that we’re unhappy.

It’s time to recognize how odd and counterproductive is the optimism on which we have grown up. For the last 200 years, despite occasional shocks, the Western world has been dominated by a belief in progress, based on its extraordinary scientific and entrepreneurial achievements. But from a broader historical perspective, this optimism is an anomaly. Humans have spent the greater part of their existence drawing a curious comfort from expecting the worst. In the West, lessons in pessimism derive from two sources: Roman Stoic philosophy and Christianity. It may be time to remind ourselves of a few of their lessons—not to add to our misery but to alleviate our injured surprise and sorrow.

The Roman philosopher Seneca should be the author of the hour. Living in a time of continuous financial and political upheaval under the emperor Nero, Seneca interpreted philosophy as a discipline to keep us calm against a backdrop of continuous danger. His consolation was of the stiffest, darkest sort: “You say: ‘I did not think it would happen.’ Do you think there is anything that will not happen, when you know that it is possible to happen, when you see that it has already happened?” Seneca tried to calm the sense of injustice in his readers by reminding them, in AD 62, that natural and man-made disasters would always be part of their lives, however sophisticated and safe they thought they had become.

If we do not dwell on the risk of sudden calamity, in the markets and otherwise, and end up paying a price for our innocence, it is because reality comprises two cruelly confusing characteristics: on the one hand, continuity and reliability lasting across decades; on the other, unheralded cataclysms. We find ourselves divided between a plausible expectation that tomorrow will be much like today and the possibility that we will meet with an appalling event after which nothing will ever be the same. It is because we have such powerful incentives to neglect the second scenario that Seneca asked us to remember that our fate is forever in the hands of the Goddess of Fortune. This goddess can scatter gifts, and then, with terrifying speed, make a 50-year-old company disappear into a worthless asset, or let a balance sheet be destroyed by an evaporation of demand.

Because we are hurt most by what we do not expect, and because we must expect everything—“There is nothing which Fortune does not dare”—we must, argued Seneca, keep in mind at all times the possibility of dire events. No one should make an investment, undertake to run a company, sit on a board, or leave money in a bank without an awareness, which Seneca would have wished to be neither gruesome nor unnecessarily dramatic, of the darkest possibilities.

Secure in our financial prowess, we have for too long thought of ourselves as masters of our destiny. We have trusted in mathematical geniuses who promised us “risk management” and derivatives so complex that we didn’t dare to look inside. Such trust could not be further from a Stoic mind-set. We must, stressed Seneca, expand our sense of what may at any time go wrong in our lives: “Nothing ought to be unexpected by us. Our minds should be sent forward in advance to meet all the problems, and we should consider not what is wont to happen, but what can happen. What is man? A vessel that the slightest shaking, the slightest toss will break. A body weak and fragile.”

Christianity only reinforced the Stoic message. It pointed out that all human beings find it easy to imagine perfection, but that it’s a problem—indeed a sin—to suppose that such perfection can ever occur on earth. Nothing human can ever be free of blemishes. There cannot be an end to boom and bust.

We have tended to cast such gloomy messages aside. The modern bourgeois philosophy pins its hopes firmly on two great presumed ingredients of happiness: love and work (more specifically, a healthy bonus). But a vast unthinking cruelty lies discreetly coiled within this magnanimous assurance that everyone will discover satisfaction here. It isn’t that love and work are invariably incapable of delivering fulfillment—only that they almost never do for too long. And when an exception is misrepresented as a rule, our individual misfortunes, instead of seeming inevitable, weigh down on us like curses. In denying the natural place reserved in the human lot for longing and disaster, this philosophy denies us the possibility of collective consolation for our fractious marriages, our unexploited ambitions, and our exploded portfolios, and condemns us instead to solitary feelings of shame and persecution for having stubbornly failed to make more of ourselves.

We should instead remember the great pessimistic voices of history, of which I cherish two in particular. One is Seneca: “What need is there to weep over parts of life? The whole of it calls for tears.” The other is the French moralist Chamfort: “A man should swallow a toad every morning to be sure of not meeting with anything more revolting in the day ahead.”

The movie treatment of his novel, “Angels and Demons,” is cleaning up at the box office this week. The sequel to “The DaVinci Code,” due out in November, might buoy the publishing industry through the recession. And if you want to understand the state of American religion, you need to understand why so many people love Dan Brown.

It isn’t just that he knows how to keep the pages turning. That’s what it takes to sell a million novels. But if you want to sell a 100 million, you need to preach as well as entertain — to present a fiction that can be read as fact, and that promises to unlock the secrets of history, the universe and God along the way.

Brown is explicit about this mission. He isn’t a serious novelist, but he’s a deadly serious writer: His thrilling plots, he’s said, are there to make the books’ didacticism go down easy, so that readers don’t realize till the end “how much they are learning along the way.” He’s working in the same genre as Harlan Coben and James Patterson, but his real competitors are ideologues like Ayn Rand, and spiritual gurus like Eckhart Tolle and Deepak Chopra. He’s writing thrillers, but he’s selling a theology.

Brown’s message has been called anti-Catholic, but that’s only part of the story. True, his depiction of the Roman Church’s past constitutes a greatest hits of anti-Catholicism, with slurs invented by 19th-century Protestants jostling for space alongside libels fabricated by 20th-century Wiccans. (If he targeted Judaism or Islam this way, one suspects that no publisher would touch him.)

But Brown doesn’t have the soul of a true-believing Enemy of the Faith. Deep down, he has a fondness for the ordinary, well-meaning sort of Catholic, his libels against their ancestors notwithstanding. He’s even sympathetic to the religious yearnings of his Catholic villains — including, yes, the murderous albino monks.

This explains why both “The Da Vinci Code” and “Angels and Demons” end with a big anti-Catholic reveal (Jesus had kids with Mary Magdalene! That terrorist plot against the Vatican was actually launched by an archconservative priest!) followed by a big cover-up. A small elect (Tom Hanks and company, in the movies) gets to know what really happened, but the mass of believers remain in the dark, lest their spiritual questing be derailed by disillusionment and scandal. Having dismissed Catholicism’s truth claims and demonized its most sincere defenders, Brown pats believers on the head and bids them go on fingering their rosary beads.

In the Brownian worldview, all religions — even Roman Catholicism — have the potential to be wonderful, so long as we can get over the idea that any one of them might be particularly true. It’s a message perfectly tailored for 21st-century America, where the most important religious trend is neither swelling unbelief nor rising fundamentalism, but the emergence of a generalized “religiousness” detached from the claims of any specific faith tradition.

The polls that show more Americans abandoning organized religion don’t suggest a dramatic uptick in atheism: They reveal the growth of do-it-yourself spirituality, with traditional religion’s dogmas and moral requirements shorn away. The same trend is at work within organized faiths as well, where both liberal and conservative believers often encounter a God who’s too busy validating their particular version of the American Dream to raise a peep about, say, how much money they’re making or how many times they’ve been married.

These are Dan Brown’s kind of readers. Piggybacking on the fascination with lost gospels and alternative Christianities, he serves up a Jesus who’s a thoroughly modern sort of messiah — sexy, worldly, and Goddess-worshiping, with a wife and kids, a house in the Galilean suburbs, and no delusions about his own divinity.

But the success of this message — which also shows up in the work of Brown’s many thriller-writing imitators — can’t be separated from its dishonesty. The “secret” history of Christendom that unspools in “The Da Vinci Code” is false from start to finish. The lost gospels are real enough, but they neither confirm the portrait of Christ that Brown is peddling — they’re far, far weirder than that — nor provide a persuasive alternative to the New Testament account. The Jesus of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John — jealous, demanding, apocalyptic — may not be congenial to contemporary sensibilities, but he’s the only historically-plausible Jesus there is.

For millions of readers, Brown’s novels have helped smooth over the tension between ancient Christianity and modern American faith. But the tension endures. You can have Jesus or Dan Brown. But you can’t have both.

by Julia Duin

President Obama is distancing himself from the National Day of Prayer by nixing a formal early morning service and not attending a large Catholic prayer breakfast the next morning.

All Mr. Obama will do for the National Day of Prayer, which is Thursday, is sign a proclamation honoring the day, which originated in 1952 when Congress set aside the first Thursday in May for the observance.

For the past eight years, President George W. Bush invited selected Christian and Jewish leaders to the White House East Room, where he typically would give a short speech and several leaders offered prayers.

Obama White House press secretary Robert Gibbs said Tuesday that the president is simply reverting back to pre-Bush administration practice.

“Prayer is something the president does every day,” he said. “We’re doing a proclamation, which I know that many administrations in the past have done.”

Pressed by reporters as to the lack of a formal ceremony, Mr. Gibbs said the proclamation was Mr. Obama’s choice.

“That’s the way the president will publicly observe National Prayer Day – privately, he’ll pray as he does every day,” Mr. Gibbs said.

Shirley Dobson, chairwoman of the National Day of Prayer Committee, said the group was “disappointed in the lack of participation by the Obama administration.”

“At this time in our country’s history, we would hope our president would recognize more fully the importance of prayer,” said Mrs. Dobson, who occupied a prominent seat in the front row for the ceremonies during the Bush administration.

Although the annual East Room events started with Mr. Bush, President Reagan hosted a Rose Garden event in 1982 and President George H.W. Bush scheduled a breakfast in 1989.

President Clinton did not host any special observances, according to the National Day of Prayer task force.

Some evangelicals said they were not surprised by Mr. Obama’s decision.

“For those of us who have our doubts about Obama’s faith, no, we did not expect him to have the service,” said Wendy Wright, president of Concerned Women for America. “But as president, he should put his own lack of faith aside and live up to the office.”

Referencing a remark the president made at a recent press conference in Turkey that Americans “do not consider ourselves a Christian nation,” she added: “That was projecting his own beliefs, but not reflecting what the majority of Americans feel. It’s almost like Obama is trying to remake America into his own image. This is not a rejection of Shirley Dobson; it’s a rejection of the concept that America is a spiritual nation and its foundation is Judeo-Christian.”

David Brody, White House correspondent for the Christian Broadcasting Network, said in a column that, “within the conservative evangelical community, there was never any real expectation that the White House would hold an event.”

However, the White House did host an April 9 Passover Seder for family and friends – the first time a president has hosted that Jewish religious meal.

But the president passed up the fifth annual National Catholic Prayer Breakfast, scheduled for the Washington Hilton and expected to have 1,300 participants.

Joe Cella, a spokesman for the effort, said the White House never asked for Mr. Obama to attend.

Mr. Bush did ask to come and always made a few brief remarks. But the new president, Mr. Cella said, would not have been allowed to speak because of a 2004 directive from the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops saying that public figures who have taken positions opposing Catholic doctrine should not be publicly honored.

“We’d host him graciously, but we’d not give him a platform to speak,” Mr. Cella said.

All major presidential candidates were invited to attend last year, he added, but none responded.

For this year’s prayer breakfast, Catholic members of the administration have been invited. They include Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, Housing and Urban Development Secretary Shaun Donovan and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

None has responded, Mr. Cella said.

The keynote speech will be given by Archbishop Raymond Burke, the former St. Louis prelate who now heads the Signatura, the Vatican’s top court. He has recommended that pro-choice Catholic politicians such as Mrs. Sebelius not be allowed to receive Communion.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia is scheduled to speak.

Despite the White House snub, National Day of Prayer ceremonies are still slated from 9 a.m. to noon in the Cannon House Office Building on Capitol Hill. Speakers include former NFL all-pro running back Shaun Alexander and Dick Eastman of Every Home for Christ.

An estimated 40,000 coordinators and volunteers will host locally organized events nationwide at courthouses, state capitols, city halls, parks and school flagpoles.

Nathan Diament, an Orthodox Jewish leader who has attended National Day of Prayer events in the East Room, said co-religionists should not find fault with the president.

“While some will no doubt criticize the Obama White House for this decision, we think that is inappropriate,” he said, “and, moreover, not in keeping with the purpose of the observance which is to unify Americans through a national moment of reflection and aspiration to higher purposes.”

Last fall, the Wisconsin-based Freedom From Religion Foundation sued Mrs. Dobson and the Bush administration over the National Day of Prayer.

The lawsuit, which has been changed to name Mr. Obama and Mr. Gibbs, the press secretary, says state governors and the U.S. government should not follow task-force directives on themes, wording, prayers and Scriptures for the event.