"You can't preach the Bible without preaching the hatred of God."–Pastor Fred Phelps

The U.S. Supreme Court's decision to hear Snyder v. Phelps, a case dealing with anti-gay protests at the funerals of American soldiers, is stirring up debate over whether the privacy rights of grieving families trumps the free speech rights of demonstrators.

The case arose after members of the anti-gay Westboro Baptist Church picketed the Maryland funeral of Marine Lance Cpl. Matthew Snyder, who was killed in combat in Iraq on March 3, 2006. As part of their protests, church members held up signs during Snyder's funeral which stated, among other things, "God Hates the USA/Thank God for 9/11," "Fag Troops," "Priests Rape Boys," and "Thank God for Dead Soldiers."

Understandably grief-stricken and outraged over Westboro's theatrics, Snyder's father, Albert, filed suit against Westboro Baptist Church and was awarded more than $10 million in damages. That amount was later thrown out by a federal appeals court, which ruled that Westboro's signs could not reasonably be understood to be referring directly to Snyder and his son, who was not gay. As distasteful as Phelps' rhetoric might be, stated the court, it constituted protected speech that focused on issues of national debate.

Distasteful is a mild description of Westboro's anti-gay protests. For example, during staged protests over Memorial Day weekend at Arlington National Cemetery, members of Phelps' group sing "God Hates America" to the tune of "God Bless America" and hold signs that read "God is America's terror," "Thank God for dead soldiers" and "You're going to hell."

Phelps and his Westboro congregants have become old pros at staging these funeral protests. In fact, since 1991 (according to its website), Westboro's members have carried out 42,840 demonstrations at homosexual parades and other events, including more than 200 military funerals of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Insisting that God is killing American soldiers in order to punish America for its openness to homosexuality, church members have proclaimed, "You turned the country over to fags, these soldiers are coming home in body bags."

As morally repugnant and unpatriotic as Westboro's protests might be, they have nonetheless managed to garner a great deal of publicity–something Phelps, who started the Topeka, Kansas-based church in 1955, clearly loves. Consisting mainly of Phelps and his extended family, Westboro Baptist Church became infamous in 1991 for its "God Hates Fags" message, which is also the name of its website. As the website explains, "By the time a person reaches the state of hard core, defiant, unrepentant, homosexual lifestyle, God has washed His hands of that person. God does not hate them because they are homosexuals; they are homosexuals because God hates them."

Yet it wasn't until the controversial death of Mathew Shepard in 1998 that Westboro attained a level of public notoriety. Shepard, a 21-year-old Wyoming college student, was brutally beaten and left for dead, reportedly because he was gay. Westboro members picketed Shepard's funeral and the murder trial of the men who had killed him with signs stating that Shepard was in hell for being gay.

However, Westboro not only condemns those who are openly homosexual but also those who do not speak out against homosexuality. For example, accusing Chief Justice William Rehnquist of not protecting the United States against homosexuality, they picketed his September 2005 funeral with signs reading "Judge in Hell."

In fact, Westboro sees nearly every national disaster and act of human depravity as God punishing America for its stance on "fags"–and they go so far as to thank God for these tragedies. They insist that the Space Shuttle Columbia crashed as a way to punish the U.S., NASA and the astronauts for not using their position to speak out against homosexuality. They offered prayers of thanksgiving after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and even traveled to New York City to protest rescue efforts, mock victims and urge that those who were still alive should be left there to die. They also praised the devastation resulting from the tsunami in Asia and Hurricane Katrina as God's way of punishing those who have let the "fags" take over the world. Most recently, church members protested the District of Columbia's decision to approve gay marriage. Margie Phelps, Fred's daughter, said she is spewing the "righteous, perfect hate of God." Gay marriage, she said, "will be the final straw. This nation will have passed the final line with God and this will be destroyed."

There may be some who see the members of Westboro Baptist Church as representative of Christianity, but they have little to do with true Christianity. As Jesus Christ proclaimed, "You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, love your enemies, bless those who curse you, do good to those who hate you, and pray for those who spitefully use you and persecute you."

In rejecting Christ's admonitions, Westboro has chosen instead to focus its efforts on spreading hate. Their actions are deplorable, particularly their protests at military funerals. However, whether such tasteless protests are illegal and outside the protection of the First Amendment is another matter altogether–and one that has given rise to a national furor.

Forty-one states have now passed laws limiting demonstrations at funerals. On a national level, federal legislation essentially bars free speech demonstrations within certain distances of cemeteries. This over-reaching law bans "any picketing, any speech, the display of any banner, flag or the distribution of any handbill, pamphlet," etc., at funerals. What this means is that any citizen even engaged in such nondisruptive expression as carrying an American flag while mourning the death of a slain soldier could also be in violation of the law. Moreover, anyone violating this law would face up to a $100,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

Still, it must be remembered that James Madison, who authored the First Amendment, noted that the purpose of the Amendment was to protect the minority against the majority. And as Madison knew very well, the minority is often made up of extremists who have nothing better to do than foster hate through speech–albeit constitutionally protected speech.

Simply put, tolerance toward the speech of people like Phelps shows that freedom still survives in America. Robust free speech–even of the extreme variety–in the open marketplace of ideas is one of the few hopes we have as citizens, and it is something we must protect. As the great French dissident and writer Voltaire once observed, "I may disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it."

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute and author of The Change Manifesto. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

John W. Whitehead's weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact marketing@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

"It's Ash Wednesday," she glared.

"Oh, yes of course!" I apologized. I may have added that I was Lutheran and was on her team. She kept glaring. Maybe she was a staunch Catholic, and viewed my Lutheran people as The First Defectors.

Still, I left feeling elated, knowing there was at least one other Christian in the theater department. One person who was bold enough to say, "Screw you, nihilist bucket-o-blood theater majors! From dust you came and to dust you shall return!"

Growing up Lutheran, we didn't give up things for Lent. We just thought sobering thoughts. When I reached adulthood, I joined a non-denominational church, threw off the old liturgy and embraced total formless freedom in Christ. I immersed myself in God's love, disappeared into long rock worship sets, attended healing conference and hung out with Jesus. It was awesome, as my hippie pastor said.

But as I got older, I started to miss the liturgy. (Besides, the non-denom did have a liturgy: 45 minutes of rock music, followed by a 45-minute sermon. It's still a liturgy.) I wanted less spectatorship and more participation. I wanted to recite the creed. Most of all, I wanted to take communion every week. I would gladly cut 25 minutes out of a 45-minute sermon to make room for communion. So many of those 45-minute sermons only had 20 minutes of content anyway.

Two years ago my husband and I landed at an Episcopal church. We observe the liturgy and the church year. The rectors wear robes and swing the incense ball. We read the appointed scriptures and the pastor preaches on the appointed text. (It's not all scheduled stuff: the Holy Spirit shows up, we pray for each other and watch God heal, and God's doing something at our little parish.) Church isn't always an earth-shattering experience. Sometimes the hymns are dull, dull, DULL! But for some reason, maybe it's the Age, or maybe it's my age, the liturgy is working on me.

I started observing Lent a couple of years ago. Lent is the forty days before Easter when we honor the forty days Jesus fasted in the wilderness, and we do this by giving up or adding something to our life. (I'm not really sure how they count the forty days of Lent. I think they skip Saturdays and government holidays.) In any event, I decided to go with the liturgical flow and see how Lent would work on me.

This year I gave up facebook and twitter. It was a selfish move, really. I was getting too many updates and the notifications were clogging my email In Box. And facebook sent me four emails for every single event that occurred on facebook. That was getting insane. Besides, I didn't have time to trade useless factoids or Farmville animals or Monty Python dead parrots. I've already blocked Mafia Wars for cryin out loud. Anyway, I needed to spend that time on important things, like writing, my husband and God. Facebook and twitter had to go.

The first thing I did with all that free time was to catch up with 30 Rock on Hulu, play online scrabble with a friend, and check craigslist for a used IKEA day bed. I also thought about the things I was supposed to do with my free time. (In my defense, my husband was busy updating his status on facebook. All he gave up for Lent was Tostitos Lime Chips.)

Time with God still eluded me, or maybe I eluded time with God. Nature abhors a vacuum, and maybe my human nature abhors silence. But I know better. Whenever I've spent time alone with God, I've loved it. I've even gone on a few silent retreats. The first hour is always excruciating, but by the time the weekend is over, I kinda don't want to start talking. I like the silence. Well, Lent is not yet over and I hope that I can master some time alone with God.

But there's something else I feel called to abstain from: righteous anger. When it comes to Fight or Flight, I get my dukes up. I recently kicked a BMW SUV when it knowingly barreled through a crosswalk I was walking in. Yeah, it slowed down, saw me, and then sped up and right through. (The license plate was GRNYMAE. If you know Granny Mae, warn her never to drive through Pasadena. I'm looking for her.) But even if the driver was jerk, it's not a good idea to attack a moving piece of machinery.

It's easy to make a vague promise like "turning the other cheek." That is until God gives you a specific person to whom you should turn the other cheek. I recently got a specific person. Our dog. Well, Wally doesn't want to be my dog; he wants to be my husband's dog. He's a 9-month old corgi, and corgis are stubborn. In the past month and a half, Wally has decided he needs to push me out of the pack. Because as far as I can tell, Wally has decided to hate me.

My husband says that's not true. Wally is a dog; he's not capable of feeling human emotions like hatred.

"Well," I reply, "What would you call it if the dog you've been feeding and walking and praising and loving on, decides to growl whenever you come near? If he lavishes affection on complete strangers but ignores you? If when you try to pet him he recoils at your touch?"

"That's because he picks up on your anger and he sees it as a threat," Larry surmised.

"I thought you said he doesn't feel human emotions!"

Larry suggested I praise him and treat him even more. But that's what I had been doing all along! Besides, someone told me that dogs can interpret your kindness as weakness, and then try to push you out of the pack! And the Dog Whisperer said I needed to act like The Boss. Which Wally interprets as threatening. (There are other mobius strips of rationale in the Dog Training world. Like: "Don't punish a dog. They don't remember what they did five seconds ago." VS: "If you punish a dog, the dog will remember that about you and be scared of you." Which is it? The dog remembers or the dog doesn't remember?! The dog wants me to be nice or the dog wants me to be tough? Which because I can't figure it out!! I can't win. I am a wimp or a threat!)

This insanity sent me into fits of righteous apoplectic anger. Which in turn sent my husband recoiling from me as well. So everyone hated me. I wanted to hate everyone right back. Which made me hate myself. If there is anything I am utterly ashamed of about myself, it is my anger. Anger wasn't modeled well in my household. My father got angry at everything, and when he cursed it felt like I was getting battery acid thrown in my face. Needless to say I don't like getting angry. But people get angry. And I'm a fighter. So when I get angry, it feels like it swallows everything else in my life. I hate it and then I hate me.

Amazing the amount of drama and self-loathing launched over a dog. Whom apparently does or does not remember.

The dog did get me thinking about God, in a palindrome kind of way. I wondered how God must have felt when I complained he was neglecting me, or when he brought something good my way and I feared it was a trap. I shuddered to remember the times I recoiled from God altogether. And yet God never banished me to the proverbial service porch, as I had done to our dog, or squirted me with a spiritual squirt gun, as I was told to do to the dog to stop bad behavior. (Come to think of it, maybe God had leveled me with his cosmic squirt gun. Exhibit A: The year 2003. See Opening chapter of Angry Conversations with God.)

Two weeks ago, before my relationship with Wally hit its nadir, we attended the Ash Wednesday service at church. It was my first Ash Wednesday service. I'd never had ashes spread across my forehead. It took me by surprise when the pressure of my pastor's thumb on my forehead and the words whispered to me made me cry.

"From dust you came, and to dust you shall return."

To dust I will return. I will not be here forever. It felt like a sobering call to duty; to go out into God's world and do what he's called me to do. Go out and live a big story, as Don Miller says. Do something bold and risky and remarkable. Like blessing Granny Mae when she sideswipes me in her car. Or continuing to love a dog that isn't loving me back. Or something even scarier I haven't begun to imagine.

But I couldn't possibly do those things. I wasn't capable! I was the jerk in my own story!

The other part of the sentence came to mind: From dust I came. I thought of Psalm 103: "As a father has compassion on his children, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him; for he knows how we are formed, he remembers that we are dust." He has compassion because he knows how weak we are.

If only I could extend that compassion to Granny Mae, or to our dog. Or to myself when I get angry.

My husband scheduled a private session with a trainer at PetSmart. I resented it. I had cleared my Lenten schedule to do important things like write (and watch Hulu). How could I take time to see a private dog trainer?

But I went. Well, I protested by spending the day at the library, and met Larry and Wally at the last minute. I was shocked when Wally greeted me with a wagging tail. The trainer said it was because we were meeting on neutral ground, where we'd had no history of acrimony. "Wait until we get back home," I muttered.

She asked me to remember how much I loved Wally up until a month and a half ago. It was hard not to remember how much I'd loved him. If I'd never loved him I wouldn't be so upset over it.

"You can get that happy relationship back," she promised me. "Just forget what happened before." I didn't believe her. I didn't think Wally would forget. I didn't think I could forget. Or maybe I couldn't forgive. Or maybe I couldn't get over my emotions.

In one hour, she identified Larry's and my behaviors that sent Wally the wrong message. She told me what to do instead: to react to his growl by staying confident and calm. (Really, squirting him with a water bottle made him more scared? Who knew?) She taught me a new bonding game to play with the dog (Really? So "Let's Get Ready To Rumble" encouraged competition not bonding? Who Knew?)

I tried her suggestions at home. Wally did react differently. He learned the game quickly, and just like he had up until January, he began running toward me instead of away. I didn't want to get overly excited, this would take some time. But Wally had begun to change, and so had I.

Not long after that, we discovered Wally had some smelly open sores on his tail. He'd gotten some flea bites and just chewed his skin raw. We trimmed back his fur, applied antiseptic and anti-itch cream, and then Larry snapped on the "Cone of Shame" to prevent him from biting. It really is a shaming cone. Wally hung his head, tucked his tail and sunk into a corner. I came over and sat down next to him. "There, there Wally. We aren't going to kick you out of the pack. Don't be ashamed of your weakness. We love you even more."

He crawled up into my lap, sighed, and plopped his head across my legs. I sat there petting him for a long while, until he drifted off to sleep.

Susan Isaacs is a writer, actor, and comedienne with TV and film credits including Planes Trains & Automobiles, Scrooged, Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, My Name Is Earl and more. She is an alumnus of The Groundlings Sunday Company and the author of Angry Conversations With God: A Snarky But Authentic Spiritual Memoir.

I’ve said it several times already (click here and then here), I am really not that interested in what American religious broadcasters or even articulate American academics have to say about the role that God or the spirits did or didn’t play in causing the hellish earthquake that rocked Port-au-Prince and the surrounding area.

What matters to me are the voices of people in various faith groups — in Haiti.

At the very least, we need to be hearing from (a) the leaders of the Catholic Church, (b) voodoo leaders who fuse their beliefs with Catholicism, (c) voodoo leaders who are not active Catholics and (d) believers in Haiti’s growing Protestant churches, especially in the charismatics and Pentecostal churches. I totally realize that it’s simplistic to settle for this quartet of faith groups when trying to describe a land as complex as Haiti. More on these four groups in a moment.

I’ve been waiting for a story that tried to capture some of the tensions that exist in that land. Finally, there was this blunt headline in the Los Angeles Times: “Voodoo practitioners have an age-old take on the devastation, which their Christian neighbors chalk up to just such beliefs.”

You can see one of the problems that reporter Joe Mozingo faced, right there in the headline. Who are these “Christian neighbors”?

The complex reality arrives in the anecdotes that set the scene:

The night was filled with voices, murmuring then gathering together then rising into hymns and chants that carried far in the balmy air. This was the time for God and for spirits.

On a road next to the central cemetery, residents of a small slum were lying on mattresses and pieces of cardboard set out on the broken pavement. A woman started to hum a Christian song, and soon rallied a chorus, singing and dancing and clapping for rhythm.

“Kem kontan Jesus renmem, aleluya,” they sang — joyously, not mournfully. “I’m so happy Jesus loves me. Hallelujah.”

Farther down the road, two voodoo priestesses sat down on buckets with another group. They made the sign of the cross and started a Catholic hymn, before splashing some rum on the ground to reach out to the gede, the spirits of the dead.

“We are thanking you that we are here,” said Marie Michele Louis, a priestess, called a manbo here. “We are thanking all the spirits of Africa. We are not afraid to serve the spirits of Guinea.”

So the believers singing the joyful hymn are the “Christian neighbors,” while those singing the Catholic hymn are not Christians? This is certainly a case where the headline does not do justice to the material provided by the reporter.

So keep reading:

In Haiti, the spiritual world is omnipresent, a raucous realm where voodoo, folklore, superstition, Protestant and Catholic faiths compete, clash and sometimes converge. When the earth shakes no one talks about fault lines and tectonic plates. Instead, there are many otherworldly explanations of why the earthquake hit and the aftershocks go on here, from the biblical to the superstitious to the conspiratorial.

The devastation Jan. 12 has also widened a rift that has been growing since U.S. missionaries began coming to Haiti in the 1800s: Evangelical Christians blame voodoo for bringing on this ruin, claiming it is satanic. Voodoo priests counter that the Christians are exploiting the catastrophe to convert people and raise money.

So here is the basic split — Haitian Protestants with ties to America vs. the voodoo culture and its deep roots on the island. The basic theological question, stated from a Christian point of view, is this: Is it wrong in the eyes of God to worship “the spirits” or to worship with them?

Mozingo attempts to offer some background:

Voodoo has a pantheon of these spirits, the lwa, which evolved from the beliefs slaves brought from Africa in the 17th and 18th centuries. When they were taught by priests in the French colony, they saw the lwa as similar to the Catholic saints, if not actually the saints themselves, and appropriated certain Catholic rituals and liturgy. Followers believe in God as the almighty power, but find his underlings to be more accessible.

“We are like good neighbors with Catholics,” Louis said. “They just tell us to pray, they don’t tell us we’re evil.”

So this voodoo leader — one person, remember — sees the local Catholics as good neighbors and the Protestants as bad neighbors.

The Times then states the bottom line quite clearly:

The Roman Catholic Church does not endorse voodoo, and many Catholics avoid it, but it has not combated it as the Protestant faiths have.

Even under constant assault from Christians, voodoo and traditional folklore have retained deep roots, particularly in the slums and countryside. A man might casually mention that another man carrying a heavy load on a cart is a zombie, or that vampires are killing children in the night. …

But sorcery, including endless rumors of human sacrifice, is what has given voodoo a sinister reputation around the world, which practitioners, intellectuals and foreign anthropologists have been trying to change for decades. And it’s why the daily American Airlines flights between Miami and Port-au-Prince are filled with Christian missionaries.

Read on, please. This is a complex and, at times, truly nasty story. For example, note the anti-Catholic dances that some missionaries performed with a notorious and bloody dictator.

As I stated at the beginning of this post, I find it hard to believe that there is any one set “voodoo teaching” on anything and, at the very least, there must be differences between those who practice their Catholic faith, blended with voodoo, and the voodoo believers who have been influenced by the surrounding culture, but are not truly practicing Catholics. I have always been impressed with the diverse, complicated views one can find in pagan groups. This is not creedal territory.

Readers also desperately need to hear from some voice of authority who can state the official Catholic teachings on voodoo. Then this needs to be contrasted with the reality, which is the fact that Catholic leaders clearly do not oppose the voodoo culture to the same degree as the Protestants, especially the Pentecostal believers.

By the way, I find it hard to believe that all of these evangelical/Pentecostal believers have precisely the same point of view, when the time comes to proclaim that the earthquake was literally the act of a jealous and angry God. Surely there are variations on that side of the church aisle. It’s time to listen to some Haitians in those pulpits.

To wrap it up, this story breaks some important new ground — primarily by listening to Haitians and taking seriously what they say. There is power in the simple observation of what is happening there.

But now we need some additional facts. I know that the Catholic leadership in Haiti has been decimated. Who can speak with authority on these issues? Has Rome ever addressed the status of voodoo in this heavily Catholic land?

Meanwhile, is anyone there — Protestant or even conservative Catholic — saying that the Catholic Church has been judged for its compromises with voodoo? It would not surprise me if some people were claiming that, in a land so tense and traumatized. For example, what are Catholics saying who are active in the charismatic renewal movement? Just asking.

There is much, much more ground to cover on these issues and, surely, there is more to this story than evil evangelicals vs. loving Catholics and their voodoo neighbors who just want to be left alone.

I hope that the Times stays on the story and that other news organizations join them.

Professor Terry Mattingly writes the nationally syndicated On Religion column for the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C., which is sent to about 350 newspapers in North America. He's also a regular contributor at GetReligion.org and the author of the book Pop Goes Religion: Faith in Popular Culture.

Click here to join Terry Matting on the talk show Steve Brown Etc.

"The essence of Government is power; and power, lodged as it must be in human hands, will ever be liable to abuse."– James Madison

Over the course of his first year in office, Barack Obama has shown himself to be a skillful and savvy politician, saying the things Americans want to hear while stealthily and inexorably moving forward the government's agenda of centralized power. For example, in one breath, Obama pays lip service to the need for greater transparency in government, while in another, he issues an executive order that will result in even more government secrecy.

He is aided in this Machiavellian mindset by a trusting populace inclined to take him at his word and a mainstream media seemingly loath to criticize him or scrutinize his actions too closely. A perfect example of this is the media's relative lack of scrutiny over Obama's recent transformation of Executive Order (EO) 12425 from a document that constitutionally limits the International Criminal Police Organization's (Interpol) activities domestically to one that establishes it as an autonomous police agency within the U.S.

Those who have voiced their concerns about this domestic empowerment of Interpol by President Obama–and that's exactly what it is–have been soundly criticized for fomenting political hysteria. But there is legitimate cause for concern. This presidential directive could undermine civil liberties and render the Fourth Amendment null and void.

First, some background on EO 12425. Issued by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, EO 12425 recognized Interpol as an international organization with certain privileges and immunities afforded to foreign diplomats. However, Reagan structured his executive order to ensure that Interpol, like every other law enforcement agency in this country, was accountable to the rule of law.

Aided by some crafty legal editing, Obama has manipulated Reagan's directive in such a way as to remove those restrictions so that Interpol now stands apart from domestic law enforcement agencies, its actions and records effectively immune from legal scrutiny. It was a shrewd move on Obama's part, so shrouded in a legal parsing of semicolons and redactions that it is barely comprehensible to the average citizen (unless you happen to have a few attorneys on hand who can sift through the historical record to make sense of the changes). But when you compile all the changes, the amended text of the Executive Order reads:

Property and assets of international organizations, wherever located and by whomsoever held, shall be immune from search, unless such immunity be expressly waived, and from confiscation. The archives of international organizations shall be inviolable.

The key here is the word "inviolable," which means that Interpol assets, records and other property are no longer subject to the search and seizure provisions of the Fourth Amendment, nor are they subject to public scrutiny under the Freedom of Information Act.

It should come as little surprise that when the White House issued the amended executive order on December 17, 2009, it issued no press releases and thus generated little in the way of media attention. It must be said, however, that had George W. Bush attempted to slip something like this through a week before Christmas, he would have and should have been soundly lambasted by the media.

Frankly, we should be hearing more about Obama's EO 12425–from the White House, from Congress, from the media. In fact, Congress should be holding hearings on the ramifications of allowing Interpol to operate with complete autonomy outside the strictures of the Constitution and above the rule of law in this country.

Operating in 188 countries, Interpol supposedly deals with crimes that overlap various countries such as terrorism, organized crime, war crimes, piracy, drug trafficking, child pornography and genocide. The agency maintains a bureau in each member country and channels information and requests to the appropriate law enforcement agency in each country. It also works closely with international tribunals, such as the International Criminal Court, to locate and detain alleged fugitives.

In the U.S., Interpol is headquartered at the Justice Department in Washington, DC, one of the most powerful of the government agencies and the one responsible for overseeing all law enforcement within America. All law enforcement agencies that fall under the jurisdiction of the Justice Department, including the FBI and the Drug Enforcement Agency, are subject to the rigorous safeguards of the Constitution, the Bill of Rights and the laws passed by Congress.

These safeguards no longer apply to Interpol, whose records cannot be obtained through FOIA requests–which act as an important safeguard against governmental abuse–nor are they subject to investigation by other federal agencies or the courts (unless Interpol itself consents).

It's hard to know exactly what the fallout from this executive order will be, but the ramifications for the American people could be ominous. For instance, if Interpol engages in illegal and/or unconstitutional activities against American citizens, it will be impossible for U.S. citizens to obtain information–via subpoena or other commonly used legal methods–regarding its records or activities.

Additionally, any information shared by the FBI or other American intelligence agencies with Interpol could also be exempt from FOIA and Fourth Amendment protections. At this point, the rule of law breaks down completely. American intelligence and police agencies, when and if they share information, would also be above the law.

This could also pave the way for a global police state–one in which information made available to Interpol by American agencies can and most likely will be shared with global police agencies around the world. In other words, foreign intelligence agencies could eventually spy on Americans.

Clearly, there are enough concerns about the impact of EO 12425 on our civil liberties to warrant further discussion. It must be remembered that James Madison, the "father" of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights and the fourth president of the United States, advised that we should "take alarm at the first experiment upon our liberties."

Whether or not you consider President Obama's Interpol executive order to be cause for alarm, one must agree that this is far from the first experiment on our liberties. In fact, we've seen all this before. It's Bush redux. Slowly, more Americans are waking up to the fact that civil liberties violations that began under the Bush presidency are continuing under the Obama presidency.

Even the ACLU, which embraced Obama a mere year ago, has recently condemned his record on civil liberties. "We're increasingly disappointed and alarmed by the current administration's stance on accountability for torture," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's National Security Project, during a conference call with reporters. "On every front, the [Obama] administration is actively obstructing accountability. This administration is shielding Bush administration officials from civil liability, criminal investigation and even public scrutiny for their role in authorizing torture."

The bigger danger, however, is that a shift toward authoritarianism is underway and only small pockets of Americans realize it. Certainly, the mainstream media is not reporting on it, nor do they primarily function as watchdogs, guarding against encroachments of our rights. Yet it is unmistakable–we have been creeping towards fascism for some time now, as Bertram Gross foretold some thirty years ago. Writing in his insightful book Friendly Fascism, he predicted, "The new fascism will be colored by national and cultural heritage, ethnic and religious composition, formal structure, and geopolitical environment." He continues:

Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of creeping fascism. In America, it would be supermodern and multi-ethnic–as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards, and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile. As a warning against its cosmetic façade, subtle manipulation, and velvet gloves, I call it friendly fascism. What scares me most is its subtle appeal.

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute and author of The Change Manifesto. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

John W. Whitehead's weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact marketing@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

I can’t think of a statement that better sums up much of the problem inside the church in our time. Where once liberal theology ravaged the older churches of the so-called mainline denominations, and the fruit of this ravaging and bitter fruit is now self-evident, much of the same emphasis can now be clearly found in our more evangelical churches. Note what Niebuhr’s quote sets forward as the problem:

1. We have a God without wrath

Regardless of how we understand the doctrine of hell, and the early church was not of one mind about the nature or even the duration of hell, the wrath of God was believed and embraced as a fearful reality. While it is true that we passed through a time in American church history where preaching God’s wrath was often done very badly the end result has been that we have come to the exact opposite extreme. Most modern churches never mention the danger of God's wrath because they do not preach a God who is truly holy. Today one almost never hears about warnings of judgment to come. We have built churches for “seekers” and this idea of wrath is one truth we do not want to tell these seekers lest they stop attending before we reach them and get them to join us. It is just poor taste to talk about the wrath of God, even given the need for correction of past abuse.

2. We have added to the notion that men are without sin

The typical evangelical church still believes in sin, at least in some ill-defined sense. Some fundamentalists still preach about it, often crassly. But the simple fact is this—psychological descriptions of our basic human problem have replaced biblical ones. We do not talk about sin but of human mistakes and failures. We do not want to harm the self-image of the person at all costs, which may be the only true sin left today. The results are that we avoid the sinfulness of man like a plague.

3. We have a kingdom without judgment

I rarely hear us talk about the kingdom of God, which is the “big idea” in the Scripture. We talk about coming to Jesus, but not to a Jesus who is Lord. We talk about receiving the gift of eternal life, or getting a free pass to heaven when we die, but almost never about the kingdom of God in which Christ expects our obedience and judges us, through his severe mercy for sure, because we are his people. Judgment of Christians is almost totally absent in the church. Without sin and judgment we can now approve of all manner of moral misbehavior without thinking twice. The important concept today is not Christ's Lordship but his tolerance and ours.

4. We have a Christ without a cross

Paul says that he determined to know nothing while he was among the Corinthians but “Christ and him as crucified.” We speak about Christ for sure but we speak of him as the “answer” to our need (not our sin specifically) and we dwell on grace, but not a grace that comes through a bloody, awful cross. The “offense” of the cross has been removed altogether in many modern churches. Many new churches have removed the sign of the cross for good reason—they do not preach the message of the cross so why keep the sign?

I edited a 1996 book titled: The Coming Evangelical Crisis (Moody Press). Sometimes I am asked, because of my missional-ecumenism which began to develop around 1994-95, if I still believe the basic message of that earlier book. My answer is always yes. This seems to surprise some but it is the truth. Now, I do not agree with every solitary solution found in this edited volume (I didn't agree with every one of them in 1996 since I did not write much of the book personally) but I do agree with the analysis given therein and the dire warnings the book was built upon.

The Coming Evangelical Crisis asked what evangelical Christianity would look like in twenty-five years if it followed the patterns of the present (1996). Well, we are now fourteen years removed from that question. All the evidence says that the questions I posed as editor, and addressed by the fourteen writers at that time, have been answered in a way that shows we are moving along toward the answer that we all feared at the time. There is a significant drift away from core confessional Christian faith among evangelicals. We have lost our way and evangelicalism, at least as we’ve known it, is in deep, deep trouble.

I am more sanguine about this problem now than I was back in 1996. I am also more hopeful. What has changed for me is that now I see a glimmer of change on the horizon. This glimmer is not, however, coming through the old wine found in the older (revivalistic) wineskins. It is being discovered in ancient-future contexts where Catholic, Orthodox and evangelical Christians are together pursuing the one faith, a faith which really does believe in the Christ who died for real sinners on a real cross outside a real city in real history. This faith is less concerned with polemical skirmishes about how we got into this “crisis” and much more concerned with going back before we can really go forward. I will say much more about this movement during 2010, especially as my book comes out in April and I begin to talk a lot more about missional-ecumenism.

John H. Armstrong is founder and president of ACT 3, a ministry for the advancement of the Christian Tradition in the third millennium. He is a former pastor and church-planter, of more than twenty years, the author/editor of eight books, and the author of hundreds of magazine, journal, and Web based articles. John has served as the editor-in-chief of ACT 3 Review: A Journal for Faith, Church and Culture since its origin in 1992. But most importantly, he is our go-to professional religionist.

But the story was mixed-up from the very beginning: the rulers were brought down and the humble were lifted up. God used the unqualified and the scandalous in his plan to enter the world; and the proud missed it.

I have to be careful not to miss it myself, and for that I need to get down into the story: understand the culture and circumstances into which Jesus arrived. It took a scholar, a sermon, and a movie to do that for me.

First the scholar: N.T. Wright’s study guide, Luke for Everyone, brought to life the setting and circumstances into which Jesus was born, in a way I’d missed all these years.

We all know Israel was occupied by Rome and longed for Messiah to liberate them. But the Jews were divided on how it would happen. The Sadducees didn’t really believe in an afterlife, so the best was to cooperate with the Roman authorities. If a messiah were to come, he’d compromise to keep peace. Peace was a kind of liberation, wasn’t it? They had their token throne, and Herod sat on it. That was as messiah-y as they were gonna get. Their eyes were on the house of Herod. Boy, were they off.

The Essenes gave up on the world, went out to live in the desert in community. Like the hippies. They ate bugs, took enemas to purify themselves, and hoped Messiah would arrive via some transcendent experience. They were partly right. But it’s a good thing they didn’t have telescopes to see Hale Bopp, or it could have gone terribly awry.

Then there were the Pharisees. God promised a Messiah, and God didn’t lie. If Messiah hadn’t come, it was Israel’s fault. If only Israel would obey the law God had given, then Messiah would come! So they did whatever it took to get messiah to come: even if it meant bludgeoning the people into obeying. Oh, we love to hate the Pharisees, don’t we? They were the whitewashed tombs; they got Jesus killed. But they were true believers, weren’t they? They hadn’t forgotten God’s promise. We love to peg our modern day Pharisees, too: the bible thumpers, the fundamentalists, the people who flame out everyone else as a heretic. But be careful whom you call a Pharisee. As Pastor Matt Chandler said at Right Now Conference in November: "Liberal hippies versus old white guys. I've never seen the Christian world so polarized by secondary idiot issues." Besides, God didn’t arrive in the camp of the compromisers, the hippies or the fundies. He went thatta way, and none of them were looking.

Jesus showed up in some cow town, in the womb of an unmarried teenager. If Jesus arrived today, what would his mom look like? A Hispanic girl in the barrio? A dropout in Appalachia? The girl “Precious?” I wouldn’t have noticed. Or believed it.

It took a movie, “The Nativity Story” (2006) to see it more clearly. Mary’s parents were good solid people, but they were nobodies. The actress who played Elizabeth was over fifty; imagine her getting pregnant sans in-vitro? The actress who played Mary was 15. Okay so she went and got pregnant the next year, but at least she didn’t parade it all over Entertainment Tonight like some other single-mom celebs. But I digress.

The movie showed the characters’ humanity, too. Joseph was heartbroken over Mary’s ‘infidelity’ but he was a good guy: he wouldn’t have seen her stoned for it. And when an angel revealed the truth in a dream, he didn’t write it off as bad lamb the night before. He trusted it; he trusted Mary. I watched that relationship blossom on screen, in the midst of very difficult, even dangerous circumstances.

Into those circumstances a teenage girl, maybe 8th or 9th grade today, hid out at her cousin’s. Maybe she was unsure how Elizabeth would react. Maybe Elizabeth was unsure herself. But when Mary walked in, Elizabeth’s baby kicked and Elizabeth was filled with the Holy Spirit. Then Mary broke into song. Imagine an episode of Glee.

Mary: I'm bursting with God-news;
I'm dancing the song of my Savior God.
God took one good look at me, and look what happened—
I'm the most fortunate woman on earth!
What God has done for me will never be forgotten,
the God whose very name is holy, set apart from all others.
His mercy flows in wave after wave
on those who are in awe before him.
He bared his arm and showed his strength,
scattered the bluffing braggarts.
He knocked tyrants off their high horses,
pulled victims out of the mud.
The starving poor sat down to a banquet;
the callous rich were left out in the cold.
He embraced his chosen child, Israel;
he remembered and piled on the mercies, piled them high.
It's exactly what he promised,
beginning with Abraham and right up to now.
– From The Message

But were perils ahead, and the movie showed through every one; the difficult journey to Jerusalem; the escape to Egypt, and of course the inglorious birth – not in a Gainsborough pastoral but in a cold dark cave; and no one to marvel at Jesus’ arrival, save a few dirty barn animals, some migrant workers and three tarot card readers.

It took a sermon to help me realize that last point. Last Advent, I visited my sister’s church. Her pastor used to be a Buddhist and even ran a dojo in California – where else? (Hey I can say that, I’m Californian). He came to faith in Christ but never lost compassion for the seekers he met all those years. He was quick to remind us who the wise men were. They were astrologers! They were reading horoscopes, my dear devout friends, and that’s how God spoke to them! In the stars! Their methods were wrong, we cry. But their hearts were right, God cries back.

If Jesus were born today, would God reveal it to you and me? Or would we be so sure of our scriptural purity or cultural relevance; so busy arguing secondary idiotic issues, that God would move on to Miss Eugenia the palm reader? Would Juan, the illegal-immigrant grape picker, be the only guy available to come marvel?

But hold on, it’s a happy story! Before we despair over how blind and unlike God we are: remember that’s why Christ came. Because scriptural knowledge and cultural relevance won’t make us any more like God. That’s why God became like us. Because he could; because he wanted to.

Preach it, Linus:

Susan Isaacs is a writer, actor, and comedienne with TV and film credits including Planes Trains & Automobiles, Scrooged, Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, My Name Is Earl and more. She is an alumnus of The Groundlings Sunday Company and the author of Angry Conversations With God: A Snarky But Authentic Spiritual Memoir.

Click here to listen to Susan's appearance on Steve Brown Etc.

Here we go again.

Is it a mainstream news story that the beleaguered social-events staff at the White House sent out an invitation card for the First Family’s second Hanakkah party (not the first, the second party) that referred to it as a “holiday reception”? And does this have anything whatsoever to do with the strained relations between liberal Democrats and, believe it or not, Jewish voters (see “Catholic voters”)?

In other words, is this a real story because it’s somehow linked to politics, as opposed to some secondary subject, like, you know, religion?

Well, here’s the top of the breathless New York Times report:

At the first Hanukkah party in the Obama White House, a Jewish student choir will sing in sweet harmony, the two young children of a soldier deployed in Iraq will light a 19th-century silver menorah from Prague and President Obama and his wife, Michelle, will greet more than 500 guests in a celebration that is expected to spill from the State Room to the East Room.

But to the dismay of some administration officials, the plans for next week’s party — one of the hottest holiday events for the nation’s Jewish elite — have been overtaken by feverish debate over the size of the guest list, the language on the invitations and what this says (or does not say) about Mr. Obama’s relationship with Jews.

President George W. Bush, who began the tradition of White House Hanukkah parties, invited 600 people to his last party, administration officials say. But rumors spread wildly, first in the Israeli press and then locally, that President Bush had invited 800 people and that the Obamas were planning to invite only 400. (Administration officials say they have invited 550 people.) The invitations have also caused some consternation because they make no mention of Hanukkah, inviting guests to “a holiday reception” on Dec. 16.

Oh well. Whatever. Nevermind.

As for me, I am of the same opinion as Rabbi Levi Shemtov, who is helping the White House kitchens go kosher for the events.

“This is all one big overblown latke,” the rabbi said. “I feel that we need to save our communal kvetching in reserve for when it’s more called for and really matters,” he continued.

What a concept. Now, the rabbi does raise another issue. What really matters this time of year? To state the matter very bluntly: Why is Hanukkah such a big deal, anyway? Through the years I have heard some very interesting discussions among Jews — left, center and Orthodox — about another questions that follows that one. Let me dare to state it this way: Is making a big, big deal out of Hanukkah an attack on Jewish tradition or a salute to it?

This question stirs up some deep emotions, as I discovered years ago while writing for The Rocky Mountain News (may it rest in peace). Here’s the top of a column about the whole affair:

It was a simple, if mischievous, way to open one of those holiday stories that religion reporters write year after year: “It’s beginning to look a lot like Hanukkah.”

The rest of my story focused on the history of Hanukkah and the modern trends that have turned this minor holiday into one of Judaism’s most important dates.

The telephone began ringing with a vengeance. Some devout Jews never made it past the first sentence and thought I was siding with those who promote Hanukkah as a “Jewish Christmas.” Others thought the whole article attacked anyone who wanted to hitch a ride on the train that merchants and bureaucrats call “The Holidays.”

The first group of callers stressed the message and traditions of the eight-day “Festival of Lights.” … The latter emphasized the reality of what it has become. Today, Hanukkah is alight with irony.

The bottom line: How many Jews want to keep a distinctively Jewish spark alive in this season, as opposed to marching to the mall with everyone else?

You see, Hanukkah is not the Jewish Christmas. It’s also not a major holiday built on a narrow focus on, oh, civil rights and religious liberty. Whenever I have talked to traditional Jewish leaders, they have explained that the message of this minor, but highly symbolic, holiday is its emphasis that Jews must defend the purity of their faith, rather than heed the siren call of the dominant culture.

Needless to say, that’s an ironic and troubling message in the age of Hanukkah bushes and children pleading for taller and taller stacks of presents. The real Hanukkah is much more complex than that. Grimace, if you will, but sing along with the inevitable, “Maccabees are Coming to Town.”

You’d best be a Jew, or suffer your fate.
It does no good to assimilate.
Maccabees are coming to town.
They know if you’re Assyrian.

They know if you dig Greeks.
They see you on the temple mount, consorting with Hellenistic freaks.

You see, with its emphasis on the political implications of this terribly important holiday, the Times report never gets around to discussing what Hanukkah is or why it is supposed to matter. Perhaps we have reached the stage where the actual meaning of the event is irrelevant. If so, that’s sad and, yes, ironic.

Meanwhile, someone at the Times has plunged into this complex and sticky subject. That would be David Brooks. Check out his column on “The Hanukkah Story.” It’s appropriately disturbing.

And for our Jewish readers, may you have a blessed, meaningful Hanukkah season that is free of conflicts between synagogue and state (or synagogue and the mall, for that matter).

Professor Terry Mattingly writes the nationally syndicated On Religion column for the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C., which is sent to about 350 newspapers in North America. He's also a regular contributor at GetReligion.org and the author of the book Pop Goes Religion: Faith in Popular Culture.

Some of you might remember this cartoon from August 3, 2009. This is the way it should have been drawn. This is what nakedpastor.com is about.

(If you're on the front page of the site, click the title of this post to see the cartoon.)

nakedpastor is David Hayward. David is an artist trapped in a pastor's body. Go to nakedpastor.com for more cartoons, blog posts, art and insight from a pastor who's stark naked honest about church life.

Say you want a revolution.
We better get on right away.
Well you get on your feet
And out on the street.
–John Lennon, "Power to the People"

The ominous rise of the surveillance state continues unabated. With each passing day, hope fades that the Obama administration will diverge from George W. Bush's erection of a police state.

The government's treatment of Elliot Madison is a case in point. Madison, a 41-year-old self-styled anarchist and social worker, was arrested on September 24, 2009, and charged with violating a federal anti-rioting law. Madison allegedly listened to a police scanner (which, according to the New York Times, is legal) and blogged about it on Twitter to help fellow protesters avoid law enforcement at the G-20 summit taking place in Pittsburgh that same month. (Ironically, just months earlier, the U.S. government called Twitter a boon to democracy after Iranian protesters used it to organize anti-government rallies.)

One week later, agents with the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force raided Madison's Brooklyn home, seizing computers, books and papers, along with other assorted items, including his marriage license, Buffy the Vampire Slayer DVDs and a needlepoint depiction of Lenin. The list of what was taken stretches for pages.

All of this over a few Tweets? After all, Madison's tactics are fairly common these days. Monitoring police communications and movements during protests is one of the few means average citizens have in attempting to level the playing field against the pervasive surveillance tools of law enforcement agencies.

The police possess all manner of invasive and coercive technological devices at their disposal, which they used on protesters at the G-20 summit in Pittsburgh. As the New York Times reported, during the protest, "heavily armed police officers reacted to the anti-globalization protesters with tear gas, sonic weapons, rubber bullets and mass arrests." Sound cannons–which are suspected of causing damage to eardrums and perhaps even fatal aneurysms–were also used to disperse protesters.

Unfortunately, as Ryan Singel writes for Wired, "The federal anti-rioting statute is serious business, and is seemingly easy to violate. For instance, it is a felony 'to organize, promote, encourage, participate in, or carry on a riot; or […] to aid or abet any person in inciting or participating in […] a riot.' By that token, simply telling a person fleeing cops with batons which way to run makes you a felon. One wonders how the Southern Christian Leadership Council and Martin Luther King, Jr. would have fared under that law, when he was in a Birmingham jail, writing letters urging people to support the direct-action program of sit-ins and marches. Those protesters were later attacked by police using dogs and fire hoses on the orders of Birmingham Sheriff Bull Connor."

Similarly, John Lennon could have been charged under this law for his "Power to the People" lyrics, which urged people to take to the streets and start a revolution. Truth be told, I could just as easily be charged under this vague law for the many commentaries I've written over the years urging Americans to take to the streets as well to stand and fight for their rights.

The point is that it no longer matters what your particular gripe is, whether you're an anarchist, a tree hugger, a Tea Party protester, or something else altogether. The government is sending a clear message that Elliot Madison is not the exception but the rule: this is what happens to people who disagree with the government and act on it. They are targeted, tracked, placed under surveillance and, if they happen to violate any arcane laws, made examples of.

The U.S. government is an expert when it comes to spying on its citizens. Information is being covertly collected about every aspect of our lives and is being secretly sifted and analyzed in vast data storage facilities, far from the gaze of public scrutiny. The highly secretive National Security Agency (NSA), for instance, possesses unprecedented powers to spy on our communications. Since 9/11, the telecommunications industry has worked with the NSA to allow the agency to screen data for key names and words, giving it the power to monitor email, texts and calls for "suspicious activity." Its data centers elsewhere examine credit card activity, parking tickets, bookstore visits and other activity to establish patterns and monitor citizens' behavior.

As the intelligence services cast their nets ever-wider in an attempt to shore-up their watch lists and look for suspicious activity, it's destroying our constitutional rights to privacy. And police tactics are eradicating our First Amendment rights to peacefully assemble, protest and speak our minds.

Moreover, what was once considered a peaceful protester is now, because of government paranoia, considered an extremist. A report produced by the Department of Homeland Security in April 2009 cast a wide net in its classification of "extremists" to include those on the right– such as those who "reject federal authority in favor of state or local authority" and oppose issues like abortion or immigration–and left-leaning "extremists" such as animal and environmental rights groups and anarchists. Furthermore, the report uses the labels "terrorist" and "extremist" interchangeably. In other words, when citizens such as Elliot Madison voice what the government considers to be extremist viewpoints, that is tantamount to being a terrorist.

Unfortunately, it's not just the federal government that Americans need to worry about. State police agencies are also getting in on the action. Earlier this year, it was revealed that the Maryland State Police had been conducting extensive surveillance on activists who were considered "terrorists." Among these, People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals were reportedly considered a security threat due to concerns that they might disrupt the circus; consumers fighting a 72% electricity rate were looked at with suspicion; the DC Anti-War Network, which opposes the Iraq War, "was designated a white supremacist group, without explanation"; and among the possible wrongs committed by Amnesty International, a well-known human rights group, was the so-called crime of "civil rights."

Clearly, freedom of thought and conscience are at serious risk today from federal and state agencies intent on suppressing actions they deem to be a threat to the status quo. It all adds up to an Orwellian government that would like nothing better than to dictate what we can think, read and believe. The thought police are not that far away.

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute and author of The Change Manifesto. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

John W. Whitehead's weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact marketing@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

How do you get rejected by eharmony? Start by telling the truth.

Two and a half years ago, I decided I needed to get over my ex. It had been five months since we broke up, and he managed to meet someone the following week. So I did something I swore I would never do. I tried internet dating.

Five years ago, internet dating felt like a realm reserved for the desperate. Mail-order brides, ex-nuns with facial hair, obese IT nerds who live alternate lives online as robo-cut Japanese animé heroes.

But today we do so much over the internet: banking, shopping, heck these days I prefer email to talking on the phone. So, I caved. Why not just try internet dating? At least I'll be able to see who's out there.

Or not.

I started by taking the eHarmony personality profile which matches you to, as they put it: a highly select group with whom you share things like character, intellect, passion … and up to 24 other dimensions. Dimensions being a new way to market the human character. And eHarmony has discovered 24 of 'em!

So I took the test. There were hundreds of questions. Some were hard to answer. Like, I had to choose between:

I like spending week nights alone OR

I'm attracted to black men.

What if I'd like to spend a week night alone with a black man?

So, 45 minutes and 100s of questions later, I identified my 24-dimensional personality. And they rejected me. eHarmony REJECTED ME! Come on, I didn't get even ONE of the 24 dimensions right?

That's because you're unique, a friend comforted me. As if being 41 and still single didn't tell me that already?

My roommate said eHarmony rejected a percentage to weed out "crazy people."

I wondered how she knew this.

Alright, so maybe it was the way I answered some of the questions.

Like, do you go through mood swings?

I'm a woman. We do that every month.

Or, Does life sometimes seem meaningless?

Yeah, I'm over thirty.

Even if you're not going through a heart-wrenching breakup … which I was … If you're honest, you'd be a liar NOT to answer yes. A liar or incredibly shallow. Now, whenever I see those perky couples on eHarmony ads? I think to myself, they're shallow. Shallow liars.

Then I tried this internet dating site another friend told me about, called Christian Café.

Who emailed me? Men in drag, magician outfits, a guy who looked like Santa Claus on a bender. Then a woman instant-messaged me because she was going through a crisis and needed a "Christian sister" to talk to. She begged to talk to me on the phone. I gave her my work number. My office gave her my cell number. I still get calls from Iowa. I just don't answer them.

I tried Match.com. Lots of interesting, successful, men with mojo. But none of them shared my religious faith. I already tried dating men outside my faith. At best, the guy says, "that's great for you." And doing the spiritual life alone got really lonely. So, I knew I needed a man with my faith. But all the church boys had NO mojo WHATSOEVER. I was screwed. Finally I got matched with this Christian man who owned a vending machine company. Five seconds into our first phone call, puts his 8-year-old son on the line. "Hi I'm Skippy, do you like iguanas?" I had to hold a conversation with the kid for seven minutes.

Then I got an email from some church boy who worked in film. He seemed fun, but in our first phone call, he talked about his friends like I already knew them.

Film: Charlie's having a hard time because Thelma just died.

Me: Who's Thelma?

Film: Charlie's Mom.

Me: Who's Charlie?

Film: My college roommate. He worked at the White Castle on I-85? Hey, can I read you my screenplay?

I let my membership to match.com expire.

Several month later, Christian Café sent me ten free days to try to get me to come back. In those ten free days I saw the same guys on line. Not only the men from months before, I recognized men I'd seen them at every singles group in Southern California for the last 15 years. Men with handles like ShiningArmor, Heart4JesusNYou, MisterRight. I know Mister Right. He went to my church in the 1980s. I never got more than four words out of him. And there he is, Mister Right. He's been on Christian Café for 2 years. How sad is that, to flip back every few months and see that no one wants Mister Right?

I took the eharmony profile again. And, I got rejected, again. This time I asked my roommate how she knew they rejected people they thought were "crazy."

Roommate: They rejected me. They said some of my answers were contradictory.

Susan: That's not because you're crazy, that's because you're an artist.

Roommate: Well, to eharmony, crazy and artist are the same thing.

Susan: Fine. I'd rather be crazy and interesting, than sane and dull.

Roommate: I'd rather be crazy and interesting. And married.

Several months later, I tried match.com again. I saw this one guy's profile, said he was 43, a Christian and worked in the arts. We emailed. He was hot to meet me, but kept having to go out of the country on business. He seemed cool, but some of his pictures looked a little narcissistic. I saw him at a distance at this wealthy church on Mulholland Drive. A friend dragged me there, I swear. But there he was, the guy from the profile. He kept flipping his hair and checking out the high school aged 'babes.' He never emailed me back. Maybe he'd seen me at a distance too, and decided I was too old, since I was out of high school.

Christian Café kept stalking me, luring me in with ten free days, then five. Then four. Every time, I saw the same men. Two years later, Mister Right was still up for grabs.

Third time I took the eHarmony profile, I passed. But had just had an endoscopy and was drugged on Percoset. I got matched with Percoset addicts. I let that expire.

Christian café sent me three free days. While online some "Christian brother" in Arkansas instant messaged me, "if you were a hot dog, would you eat yourself?"

I tried eHarmony again. This time I lied, and said I always thought life was full of meaning. I got matched with nice Christian mojo-free men who worked in the air force or computer sales. Men who were never brave enough to admit that, sometimes life sucks and doesn't make sense.

A 45-year old Indian physics professor named Sanjee wanted to fast track me. That means, skip the multiple choice questions and go right to the dowry requirements. I said no, I wanted to go through the multiple choice first. He didn't have his picture posted, but all his must haves/can't stands were about beauty: must have a woman who is considered very attractive. Must have a woman who is in excellent physical shape. Can't stand a woman who is overweight. Can't stand a woman who is not extremely attractive. Finally we got to the open questions, but before he could ask me about the size of my dowry, I asked him why it was so important that his partner be so attractive but he didn't have his picture posted. So, he posted his picture. It was a long shot of a man sitting on top of a Coleman cooler in a weedy back yard. He looked about 60. He stared off in a strange direction, like a Civil War daguerreotype. Maybe he was legally blind.

The others I got matched with looked into the camera but had creepy vacant eyes, like the church had stolen their spontaneity. So, that was it for me and eHarmony. I figured this kind of matching works for people in the fly-over states who chose their jobs because a college counselor told them they'd like it. People whose answers will always be the same at any given moment. Not us crazy artist types who see life as full of contradictions. And anyway, I couldn't look for a mate like I was shopping for a car: at the end of the day you're supposed to pick one. No thanks, I'd rather walk than drive the wrong car.

Right before Christmas, Christian Café offered me two free days. Nothing like making the holidays even more depressing than trying to find a guy on a Christian website that guarantees men with no 'nads. It found a profile of a guy who was a writer. On a lark I emailed him, gave him my real email address. In the two days I was online for free, never heard from him. But I did get an email from this other cute guy. But he was 26. My last boyfriend taught me never to date someone so young I could have been his babysitter.

About a week or so later, Writer Guy emailed me at my real email address. Over the next four days we emailed each other back and forth a lot. He was my kind of spiritual, he was smart, and mature. He'd even worked as a journalist for Christian magazines.

Susan: How was it working for Christians?

Writer Guy: Think "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind." I'd like to have most of it erased.

Ooh, he was funny too.

Susan: So are you not into church at all?

Writer Guy: I don't often recognize God there. But I do find Him in simple things, with people who get what love and grace are all about.

I'd never heard my own thoughts articulated so well. When he said it, I was sure I was hearing an echo of something I hadn't yet said.

Writer: Susan. I'd like to meet you.

Wow. A guy who actually asks you out.

Susan: I'm free after Friday.

Writer Guy: Shit, I leave for Seattle on Thursday, for two weeks.

He said "shit." I was smitten.

In those two weeks, my lizard brain emerged from its sleep and spoke: Susan, this is The One. He's The One. And I knew it was true.

But then I met him. He was SO NOT The One. He was smaller and skinner and nervous. He wore clogs and had longish wild hair, which he kept running his fingers through. He slouched down into the café sofa as he talked. I admit I liked what he was talking about. He my attention for two hours.

The next time he asked me out, he was less guarded, more fun. He seemed taller, sexier. The third date, I noticed the earring in his ear looked good against his "not so wild hair." It turned out he liked Monty Python and Emma Thompson. He had watched the Dylan documentary five times. And he let it slip out that he owned a vinyl copy of the Beatles Bootleg Christmas album. I started to recognize the smart, funny, mature guy I'd met in emails. It was like watching someone's face emerge in a Polaroid. I started to feel all squishy inside. Butterflies under my belt buckle. If he continued to "show up" he might end up being, you know, The One. But I once thought that about my last two boyfriends. And BOY was I wrong on both counts.

I saw Writer Guy for several months, and he got smarter, funnier, sexier, and more like Jesus every day. He was also full of contradictions. But they passed him on eHarmony the first go. They have way more women on eharmony than men. Maybe they lower the bar for the guys.

Eight months later, Writer Guy and I got married. My lizard brain was right. He's The One. When my friends ask how we met, I tell them: on website I wouldn't recommend to any crazy, creative woman I cared about. Unless she's looking for "Mister Right."


PS: February 4, 2009 Update. I appeared on a Fox morning show, "Mornings with Mike And Juliet." When I said on camera that I was rejected by eHarmony three times, the official eHarmony psychologist asked me if I was a complex thinker and saw the grays, and the nuances in life.

Of course I did. Creative artists probably see too much nuance and complexity.

He told me that was why i got rejected. eHarmony's core belief is that people get along if they think alike. They match people based on statistical probability that they'll think or act alike in any given situation.

So people, if eHarmony rejects you, chances are you are complex, artistic, flexible and interesting. Or schizophrenic.

Talk amongst yourself.

Susan Isaacs is a writer, actor, and comedienne with TV and film credits including Planes Trains & Automobiles, Scrooged, Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, My Name Is Earl and more. She is an alumnus of The Groundlings Sunday Company and the author of Angry Conversations With God: A Snarky But Authentic Spiritual Memoir.

Click here to listen to Susan's appearance on Steve Brown Etc.

As I continue to read the New York Times coverage of the Maine vote, my mind drifted back to these lines from Daniel Okrent, the newspaper's former ombudsman, in his infamous 2004 column entitled "Is The New York Times a Liberal Newspaper?" News junkies will recall that his lede said bluntly, "Of course it is."

But on the subject of news "templates" or "maps," here is a thought for the second day of coverage, drawn from Okrent's survey of his newspaper's coverage in a host of sections:

… (For) now my concern is the flammable stuff that ignites the right. These are the social issues: gay rights, gun control, abortion and environmental regulation, among others. And if you think The Times plays it down the middle on any of them, you've been reading the paper with your eyes closed.

But if you're examining the paper's coverage of these subjects from a perspective that is neither urban nor Northeastern nor culturally seen-it-all; if you are among the groups The Times treats as strange objects to be examined on a laboratory slide (devout Catholics, gun owners, Orthodox Jews, Texans); if your value system wouldn't wear well on a composite New York Times journalist, then a walk through this paper can make you feel you're traveling in a strange and forbidding world.

And then on the specific issue of the day:

… (It's) one thing to make the paper's pages a congenial home for editorial polemicists, conceptual artists, the fashion-forward or other like-minded souls (European papers, aligned with specific political parties, have been doing it for centuries), and quite another to tell only the side of the story your co-religionists wish to hear. I don't think it's intentional when The Times does this. But negligence doesn't have to be intentional.

The gay marriage issue provides a perfect example. Set aside the editorial page, the columnists or the lengthy article in the magazine … that compared the lawyers who won the Massachusetts same-sex marriage lawsuit to Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King. That's all fine, especially for those of us who believe that homosexual couples should have precisely the same civil rights as heterosexuals.

But for those who also believe the news pages cannot retain their credibility unless all aspects of an issue are subject to robust examination, it's disappointing to see The Times present the social and cultural aspects of same-sex marriage in a tone that approaches cheerleading.

The Gray Lady is also capable of coaching, as well as cheerleading.

This brings us to a post-election A1 piece that caught my eye. Just to be right up front about this, please note that (a) I know that this is an analysis piece and that (b) I believe that the piece is a valid part of the Times coverage. With those points in mind, check out the piece that ran under the headline, "Gay Rights Rebuke May Change Approach." Here's the top of the story:

They had far more money and volunteers, and geography was on their side, given that New England has been more accepting of same-sex marriage than any other region of the country. Yet gay rights supporters suffered a crushing loss when voters decided to repeal Maine's new law allowing gay men and lesbians to wed, setting back a movement that had made remarkable progress nationally this year.

Maine, with its libertarian leanings, had seemed to offer an excellent chance of reversing the national trend of voters rejecting marriage equality at the ballot box. Instead, it became the 31st state to block same-sex marriage through a public referendum. …

State legislatures had been viewed as new allies in the fight for same-sex marriage after lawmakers in Maine, Vermont and New Hampshire approved such bills this year. But now, with Maine voters dealing a rebuke to their Legislature, it is far from clear whether elected
officials — including the president — will risk political capital on gay rights. Tuesday's defeat is also likely to further splinter a movement that has been debating the best tactics for success.

Thus, the purpose of this analysis piece is to allow debate on which tactics would work best for the gay-rights cause, given the fact that voters seem determined to deliver the movement defeats at the ballot box.

By the way, one or two opponents of gay-marriage are quoted, primarily to offer commentary on the tactics of the left.

Like I said, it's a valid analysis piece. It's rather like a talking-points memo for the gay-rights cause, but that is part of this national news story right now.

Here's my question: Can anyone imagine this analysis piece being half of a package — targeting a wider, national audience on this issue — that includes a similar analysis, one that is the same length and is reported with the same care, only focusing on the debate inside the other camp on what to do next?

Can you imagine an A1 Times piece that offers a similar set of talking points for those who favor a traditional definition of marriage, perhaps a report that focuses on the ongoing divide on the cultural right between those who favor laws promoting civil, secular same-sex unions and those who oppose any concessions on this issue at all?

That's a valid story, too. Ask the Rev. Rick Warren.

Here's one more thought, since I am a pro-newspaper kind of guy. In these troubled times for the Times, would it make both journalistic sense to print this two-sided package, as well as economic sense in light of the newspaper's goals of maintaining or even growing its base as a national news product?

Just asking. Why not cover material that would address issues both sides? Might this balanced approach even make activists on both sides a bit uncomfortable?

Just a reminder: Do not debate the issues behind the Maine vote. The goal is to discuss the Times and the journalistic product if offered to its readers, following the vote.

Professor Terry Mattingly writes the nationally syndicated On Religion column for the Scripps Howard News Service in Washington, D.C., which is sent to about 350 newspapers in North America. He's also a regular contributor at GetReligion.org and the author of the book Pop Goes Religion: Faith in Popular Culture.

nakedpastor is David Hayward. David is an artist trapped in a pastor's body. Go to nakedpastor.com for more cartoons, blog posts, art and insight from a pastor who's stark naked honest about church life.

When I am asked what the greatest value of a theological education is I always answer, “It shows you just how much you don’t know and how much more there is to learn.” I am prepared to argue that a person can be a great learner, and a great teacher, who has little or no formal training. I am not prepared to say that “self-taught experts” are the real solution to the church’s need for gifted teachers.

Daniel Boorstin also said that America was a “democracy of amateurs, a way of confessing the limits of our knowledge.” But America is now led by a professional class called the career politician. This, in my view, is a major problem with Congress as we now experience it. The results of this professional class arrangement are driving the people further and further from their government. The same is very often true in the typical church. The professional class is the clergy, or the theologians, and they are often there so that the rest of us can feel comfortable when we do not discover anything for ourselves.

As I see it there are two great dangers for American Christians. First, the tendency of far too many is to allow professionals to think for them. If they are comfortable with the teaching of certain professionals they can easily become deluded with a sense of security. But the opposite danger is very real too. A little knowledge can make some people very proud (“knowledge puffs up”). I am amazed at the books and sermons I hear from people who possess a deep sense of self-importance. They are generally given a platform because they have built up a “following” and their followers rarely stop to wonder if their heroes are genuine authorities. These authorities often develop a real unwillingness to discover anything new from serious scholars who are truly gifted teachers.

Remember, the first step to discovery is to remove the illusion of knowledge. Admitting that you don’t know as much as you think is a true gift.

John H. Armstrong is founder and president of ACT 3, a ministry for the advancement of the Christian Tradition in the third millennium. He is a former pastor and church-planter, of more than twenty years, the author/editor of eight books, and the author of hundreds of magazine, journal, and Web based articles. John has served as the editor-in-chief of ACT 3 Review: A Journal for Faith, Church and Culture since its origin in 1992. But most importantly, he is our go-to professional religionist.

Skip the rest of the conversation. Go back to that word “worthless.” “I know I’m worthless…”

Stifle your desire to start an apologetics lecture or otherwise instruct Neal in how to be a great Christian.

Think with me: where did he get the idea that he is “worthless?”

Wait, is someone saying “Well….isn’t that sort of what we believe? Compared to God we’re worthless.”

Listen there Bob- compared to God everything other than God is worthless. If you want to think on that level I’ll let you go tell Neal we have nothing for him because we agree, he’s worthless. Have a nice day.

What I want to know- and I want to know this about everything in my faith- is whether we learn from Jesus that we are “worthless?” Is that the message that comes to us in the incarnation? In the actions, teaching and life of Jesus? Does Jesus agree with Neal’s assessment of Christianity as “we’re worthless” and “Jesus died for us?”

What’s that Bob? If we start saying that we have any value, we’ll soon lose the Gospel because God has to sing us songs about how wonderful we are and he just wouldn’t be complete and happy without us. Doesn’t that mess with the Gospel fairly seriously?

I’ll agree to a point. The Gospel isn’t sentimental. I don’t think we need God turning into a thirteen year old girl with a crush; into someone telling us “you complete me.” Wrong turn.

What I want to know is if the lost sheep, that one, stupid, wandering lost sheep, was “worthless?”

Was the prodigal son “worthless?” Was the tax collector asking for God’s mercy “worthless?”

The woman caught in adultery felt worthless and the crowd had the rocks to cast their votes, but Jesus gave her worth. Mercy, compassion, love and worth.

Did he want her to walk away feeling worthless?

When the women and the apostle John stood at the cross, they saw the ugliness of sin and the greatness of God’s love. Did they feel worthless?

God’s love does something incredible. It gives those without worth a worth that nothing can measure. It isn’t the worth of their own worthiness and value. It is the worth measured only in the love of the one who loves you.

I often feel like junk. The love of my family makes me feel valuable. Not in a way that makes me arrogant, but in a way that gives me worth and humility at the same time.

That’s the love of God in the Gospel. Our creation as persons made in God’s image gives us worth. Our status as rebels amounts to our rejection of the value God places on us. God’s justice measures us as worthy of eternal punishment. God’s love, gospel and grace gives us worth measured in the precious blood and sacrifice of Christ.

Neal isn’t worthless, but his worth doesn’t come from within himself or out of himself. His worth comes from God whose loves comes with dignity, adoption, forgiveness, justification and blessing. We are adopted and given a new name. Not because of what we are, but because of what God sees in us through the eyes of his son.

The Gospel gives worth without pride, and teaches us who we are in the love of God.

Our “worthlessness” is the cup into which God pours his greatest gift: his own son, Jesus.

Michael Spencer, aka The Internet Monk, blogs at the top-rated www.internetmonk.com and has a book coming out next year pretty much guaranteed to hack off religious people. Especially if he can get Steve Brown to endorse it.

"He loved Big Brother."–George Orwell, 1984

1984 portrays a global society of total control in which people are not supposed to have thoughts that in any way disagree with the corporate state. There is no personal freedom. Snitches and surveillance cameras are everywhere. And people are subject to the Thought Police, who deal with anyone guilty of such thought crimes. The government, or "Party," is headed by Big Brother, who appears on posters everywhere with the words: "Big Brother is watching you."

George Orwell's story revolves around Winston Smith, a member of the Outer Party. When Winston meets and falls in love with Julia, they begin seeing each other secretly, thus embarking on an illegal relationship. They are eventually arrested by the Thought Police and placed into reprogramming.

Much of what Orwell envisioned in his futuristic society has now come to pass. Surveillance cameras are everywhere. The government, as we have learned, listens in on our telephone calls and reads our emails. The National Security Agency has developed incredibly pervasive devices to study and track our every move, including everything we post on the Internet. As the American military empire expands and the local police have become more militaristic, the threatening cloud of martial law hovers overhead. Political correctness–a philosophy that discourages diversity–is now the guiding principle of American society. Increasingly, we only have the "freedom" to believe what society wants us to believe. Hate crime legislation punishes motivation, thoughts and eventually so-called "hate speech." We are increasingly ruled by multi-corporations that are wedded to the state, while a celebrity-obsessed media has now become, by and large, the mouthpiece of the government. Much of the population is either hooked on illegal drugs or ones prescribed by doctors. Many of us have, so to speak, become consumer zombies walking comatose in shopping malls.

All of this has come about with little more than a whimper from a clueless American populace largely comprised of nonreaders and television somnambulists–one that no longer thinks analytically and is easy prey to smiling politicians promising change.

However, we have been warned about our ominous future in novels and movies for years. In fact, film may be the best representation of what we now face as a society on the verge of fulfilling Orwell's prophecy.

The following are ten of the best films on the topic.

Fahrenheit 451 (1966). Depicted here is a futuristic society in which books are banned, and firemen ironically are called on to burn contraband books. This film is an adept metaphor for our obsessively politically correct society where everyone now pre-censors speech. Here a brainwashed people addicted to television and drugs do little to resist governmental oppressors.

THX 1138 (1970). This is a somber view of a dehumanized society totally controlled by the state. The people are force-fed drugs to keep them passive, and they no longer have names but only letter/number combinations such as THX 1138. Any citizen who steps out of line is quickly brought into compliance by police equipped with "pain prods"–electro-shock batons. Sound like tasers?

A Clockwork Orange (1971). Here the future is ruled by sadistic punk gangs and a chaotic government that cracks down on its citizens sporadically. This film may accurately portray the future of western society that grinds to a halt as oil supplies diminish, environmental crises increase, traditional morality is destroyed and the only thing left is brute force.

Soylent Green (1973). The year is 2022 in an overpopulated New York City. A policeman investigating a murder discovers the grisly truth about what soylent green–the principal food for people–is really made of. The theme is chaos where the world is ruled by ruthless corporations whose only goal is profit.

Blade Runner (1982). In a 21st century Los Angeles, a world-weary cop tracks down a handful of renegade "replicants" (synthetically produced human slaves). Life is now dominated by mega-corporations, and people sleepwalk along rain-drenched streets. This is a world where human life is cheap, where anyone can be exterminated at will by the police. Sound familiar?

Nineteen Eighty-Four (1984). The best adaptation of Orwell's dark tale, this film visualizes the total loss of freedom in a world dominated by technology and its misuse and the crushing inhumanity of an omniscient state.

Brazil (1985). This vision of the near future is one replete with a merging of the fantastic with stark reality. Here a hapless clerk takes refuge in flights of fantasy to escape the ordinary drabness of life. The longing for more innocent, free times lies behind the vicious surface of this film.

V for Vendetta (2006). Society is ruled by a corrupt and totalitarian government where everything is run by an abusive secret police. A vigilante terrorist named V dons a mask and leads a rebellion against the state.

Children of Men (2006). It is 2027, and the world is without hope since humankind has lost its ability to procreate. Civilization has descended into chaos and is held together by a military state and a government that attempts to keep its totalitarian stronghold on the population. But hope for a new day comes when a woman becomes inexplicably pregnant.

Land of the Blind (2006). This dark political satire is based on several historical incidents in which tyrannical rulers were overthrown by new leaders who proved just as evil. A demented fascist ruler of a troubled land named Everycountry has two main interests: tormenting his underlings and running his country's movie industry. Citizens who are perceived as questioning the state are sent to "re-education camps" where the state's concept of reality is drummed into their heads.

Likewise, as Orwell's novel concludes, Winston and Julia are taken to the Ministry of Love as part of the reprogramming process. Since Winston fears rats, he is tortured with rats until his feelings for Julia are destroyed. As confirmation that he sees the new reality of the state, Winston writes that 2+2=5. The reprogramming is successful. He is cured. As the final sentence of Orwell's book concludes, "He loved Big Brother."

Constitutional attorney John W. Whitehead is founder and president of The Rutherford Institute and author of The Change Manifesto. He can be contacted at johnw@rutherford.org. Information about The Rutherford Institute is available at www.rutherford.org.

John W. Whitehead's weekly commentaries are available for publication to newspapers and web publications at no charge. Please contact marketing@rutherford.org to obtain reprint permission.

Don is out promoting his new book, A Million Miles In A Thousand Years, and I’m the warm-up act. Opening for Don is like opening for U2. Don’s books have sold millions. Blue Like Jazz became a best seller for a reason: it hit a nerve amongst younger Christians who didn’t fit in with their parents’ yuppie American Christianity; and many of those same Yuppie American Christian parents who discovered that the Yuppie American Christian Dream was a load o’ crap.

I am not knocking honest, biblical Christianity; but rather the pretty, shiny Churchianity where all questions are answered, every conflict ends in an altar call, everyone votes Republican, and y’all live your Best Life Now.

Anyone out there for whom that did not happen? Anyone underwater with a bad mortgage? Out of work? Kids on drugs? Spouse depressed? You depressed? Remember that phrase, “God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life?” Wondering what kind of alternate universe in which this life is called “wonderful?”

That’s what both Don and I are talking about on his "Million Miles" tour. The big story that God calls you to live actually involves conflict, trauma, and soul-searing character change. Call it the “The Feel-Good, Escapist Tour of 2009.”

Before you go running for your Prozac, just have a listen.

My book, Angry Conversations With God, begins when I hit forty and found myself loveless, jobless, and living over a garage. When a friend said my relationship with God was like a marriage, I decided to take God to marriage counseling. Of course the God that showed up for counseling was my twisted version of the real God. Over time God did change – into the real God. And man, the real God read me the riot act: if this was a marriage, I had married Him for his money – for what I could get out of him. Psyche! I had to learn to love God for better or worse; for richer or poorer, for fun and for free. I did not go quietly. But in the end, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. All those disappointments and heartbreaks became the tools God used to mature me into someone who could recognize and enjoy all the good he really had for me.

Don’s book goes a step further. When filmmaker Steve Taylor approached Don to make a movie out of Blue Like Jazz, Steve said Don’s real life was too boring. Don and Steve went to Robert McKee’s story structure seminar and learned the basics of storytelling. Don had an epiphany in that seminar: the same elements that make a good movie make a good life. A main character overcomes conflict to reach his goal. Further, the main character has to be someone we care about, and his goal has to be something big enough that we care, and something important enough that if he doesn’t accomplish his goal, people will die, lives will be ruined, hearts broken. We have to want this character to achieve that goal!

Personally, I would add that if the main character’s goal is a bad one, we pray he doesn’t get what he wants. Think of Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca. He wants to stay out of the war and punish Ingrid Bergman for breaking his heart. Soon he realizes he needs to help Ingrid and her husband escape Casablanca and rejoin the resistance movement. Thank God Bogart didn’t get what he wanted but rather what he needed.

Don’s book reflects on how editing his life for a movie called him to live a bigger story. He went on a bike trip to raise money to drill wells in Africa. He pursued a girl fully. His goals didn’t always end happily. But he led a big life, and became a bigger person for it. Don’s message: Live a big story. Live a beautiful story: a story that involves peril, conflict, and great stakes. A life that is worth living.

The first time I heard Don speak about this, a huge burden of guilt fell off me: if my life wasn’t easy at the moment, it wasn’t necessarily that I was screwing up; it was because life is hard and conflict is part of the story. And conflict is okay: whether it’s thrust upon you or you even cause it, God can take what you give him and work with that.

And you know? It was a feel-good moment; and not an escapist moment. It was a moment I was ennobled to step into the conflict and work through it to live a bigger story.

Every time I hear Don give this message on the tour, every time I see someone take his book home, I know they too will be challenged to live a better, more beautiful story than to simply own a Volvo or a beige condo somewhere.

We are traveling to another 60 cities all over the country. Come watch me do a segment of my solo show based Angry Conversations With God. Listen to Don talk about how Don dared to live a bigger story in A Million Miles In A Thousand Years. I bet you will leave energized and excited to live the bit story God has for you.

For more info about the tour, go to http://amillionmiles.com

Follow us on twitter: @donmilleris and @susanisaacs

Join Donald Miller on Steve Brown Etc. on October 16th.

Susan Isaacs is a writer, actor, and comedienne with TV and film credits including Planes Trains & Automobiles, Scrooged, Seinfeld, The Drew Carey Show, My Name Is Earl and more. She is an alumnus of The Groundlings Sunday Company and the author of Angry Conversations With God: A Snarky But Authentic Spiritual Memoir.