It may be hard to comprehend the twisted logic that led to this tragedy. But this much we do know – no faith justifies these murderous and craven acts; no just and loving God looks upon them with favor. And for what he has done, we know that the killer will be met with justice – in this world, and the next.

Although this paragraph will get the conservatives howling about political correctness:

This generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines and Coast Guardsmen have volunteered in a time of certain danger. They are part of the finest fighting force that the world has ever known.  They have served tour after tour of duty in distant, different and difficult places. They have stood watch in blinding deserts and on snowy mountains. They have extended the opportunity of self-government to peoples that have suffered tyranny and war. They are man and woman; white, black, and brown; of all faiths and stations – all Americans, serving together to protect our people, while giving others half a world away the chance to lead a better life.

Rep. Bart Stupak [D-Mich.] has reconsidered earlier legislation that would have given several acres of Coast Guard property in Cheboygan [Mich.] to a Christian school free of charge after constitutional law scholars pointed out that the land transfer would violate the First Amendment separation between church and state.

After Michigan Messenger reported on this issue in August, Americans United for Separation of Church and State contacted Stupak’s office and informed them that the legislation as written was unconstitutional.

Last week, Stupak, a Democrat from Menominee, wrote to the group and told them that he was changing the bill to require that the property be sold to the school at fair market value as required by law.

“They’ve made it really clear that the president right now is not supportive of a public commission of inquiry,” Killmer said in a phone conversation this morning.

Killmer has had better luck in Congress, where at least some Representatives support creating a House Select Committee to investigate torture. Although that would be more political than an independent commission, he said, at least it’s something. “There are a significant number of members of the House who know this isn’t done,” says Killmer, whose group has had more than 60 meetings with House members on the issue since June.

The religious campaign has made some headway on related issues, working with Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.), chair of the House Select Intelligence Oversight panel, to convince Congress to pass a bill that would require the taping of all interrogations of detainees in U.S. military custody. The House passed the bill last week as part of the 2010 Defense Authorization Act. It could be voted on by the full Congress next week.”Our constituents understand the need for videotaping interrogations,” says Kilmer, “and the videotapes have to be protected so they’re an ongoing part of our history. It’s one way of making sure it doesn’t happen again.”

The religious groups also hope to achieve a codification of the terms of President Obama’s executive order mandating that all interrogations follow the rules of the Army Field Manual, and that the U.S. basically follows the “Golden Rule” when it comes to interrogations: we don’t do to others what we wouldn’t want them to do to our soldiers.

Still, Killmer said, codifying this for the future isn’t enough. After all, we had a Convention Against Torture and that still didn’t stop the U.S. government from torturing people.

In addition to a commission that would expose everything that happened and why, Killmer and other religious leaders are exploring the possibility of asking the government for an apology.”I think it’s extremely important,” says Killmer. Other countries have taken that step, such as Canada, which apologized — and paid $10 million – to Canadian citizen Maher Arar who, with the help of bad intelligence from Canada, was sent by U.S. authorities to Syria for interrogation under torture.

“This was wrong behavior,” says Killmer of the entire U.S. “enhanced interrogation” practice. And an apology “would help grow the moral consensus that torture is wrong,” he says, something he assumed existed before 2001, but now isn’t sure.

“Dick Cheney gets more credence than I would have imagined,” says Killmer. “The American people are still wrestling with this stuff.”

Killmer and his colleagues were dismayed when a Pew Research Center poll last spring found that a majority of Catholics and even evangelicals believe that torture is sometimes necessary. “That says we have a lot to do,” says Killmer. His group has put together this short interfaith video on U.S.-sponsored torture which they plan to show at churches, synagogues and mosques across the country, in part to explain that yes, torture really is a violation of all the dominant religions in the United States, and to encourage believers to join the anti-torture campaign.

Whether religious support is ever going to be strong enough to get that official apology is another matter. Although the U.S. has apologized for some things in the past — the Japanese internment during WWII, and slavery — in both cases, it came many decades after the deed. Killmer is cautiously hopeful: “It would be terrific if this could happen much more quickly.”

The problem? The First Amendment’s pesky “Establishment Clause.” Read Brayton’s story here.

“I don’t belong to any such group,” Stupak said. “I rent a room at a house in ‘C Street.’ I do not belong to any such group. I don’t know what you’re talking about, [The] Family and all this other stuff.”

The Messenger also spoke with Jeff Sharlet, a contributing editor to Harper’s magazine who lived with The Family at another house and wrote a tell-all book about the group. Sharlet said he doesn’t buy Stupak’s proclaimed ignorance of the organization’s activities.

“When I lived with The Family at Ivanwald, a house for younger men being groomed for leadership, I was told that Stupak was a regular visitor to the Cedars,” Sharlet said. The Cedars is yet another compound owned by The Family, one that hosts weekly prayer events led by former Reagan-era Attorney General Ed Meese.

Sharlet said that Stupak had much greater involvement with the group than he is admitting, noting that the congressman was “a Family-assigned mentor to one of my brothers at Ivanwald.” That Ivanwald resident, Sharlet said, “regularly left for what he and others described as mentoring sessions.”

Another reason to doubt Stupak’s denials, Sharlet said, is that members of the organization and those who live at the C Street house are sworn to secrecy about what goes on there, as fellow resident Zach Wamp admitted to the Knoxville News in the wake of the recent scandals. That makes such denials less credible, Sharlet said.

You can read the full story at The Michigan Messenger.

And it’s only going up.

The Senate on Monday passed a bill to engrave “In God We Trust” and the Pledge of Allegiance — including “one nation under god” — at prominent spots in the 580,000 square foot visitor center. Speaking on the chamber floor just before the proposal passed unanimously, sponsor Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) said the changes are needed because the current design “conspicuously ignores America’s unique religious heritage and the role that heritage played in the founding of the Republic.”

Indeed, the original exhibits that are there now seem to suggest the federal government was the solution to all our problems in the fulfillment of all human aspirations — as if we were a government with a nation, instead of the other way around.

DeMint is normally one of the loudest fiscal hawks in Washington. But in this case, he says, the $150,000 cost is worth the trouble to correct “the historical whitewash of the original design,” to “welcome god” back into the center, and to highlight the “all important relationship between faith and freedom in America.”

BUMPER STICKER OF THE DAY… or at least the best one I have heard of this week: Warning! I’m a Bitter Gun Owner Clinging to His Religion. One should, indeed, be warned.

Really? The “Bittergate” eruption happened on April 11, 2008. You could buy stickers and T-shirts making some version of this joke within 24 hours.

President Barack Obama (WDCpix)

Within hours of the news that President Barack Obama would give the commencement address to this year’s graduates of Notre Dame University in South Bend, Ind., angry opponents of the decision founded a new Website, NotreDameScandal.com, where they could register their complaints and sign a petition asking the school to “halt this travesty.”

“Notre Dame has chosen prestige over principles, popularity over morality,” reads the petition. “Whatever may be President Obama’s admirable qualities, this honor comes on the heels of some of the most anti-life actions of any American president, including expanding federal funding for abortions and inviting taxpayer-funded research on stem cells from human embryos.” Within days, tens of thousands of people had signed on.

Image by: Matt Mahurin

“Virtually every media story for the first few weeks of this scandal cited our site and our petition,” said Patrick Reilly, the president and founder of the Cardinal Newman Society, in an interview with TWI. “There’s tremendous outpouring of support for the students who are opposing this outrage at Notre Dame. Some of them have said they’ll have nothing to do with Notre Dame if this goes forward.”

After eight years of only occasional disagreements with a Republican president, conservative Catholic activists have moved into the trenches to oppose Obama. They cite his repeal of the Mexico City rule, or “global gag rule” that banned providing federal money to international groups that promote or provide abortions, his stem cell compromise, and his cabinet nominees like Kathleen Sebelius, the pro-choice governor of Kansas, to argue that he is the most pro-abortion rights politician ever to ascend to the job. They are bolstered by new media outlets and organizations that did not exist at their current strength in 2000, the last time Catholics had to contend with a pro-choice president. At the same time, they’re encouraged by a series of high-profile statements from church leaders on political morality–including the 2004 declarations by bishops that they would deny communion to then-presidential candidate Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), and Pope Benedict XIV’s 2005 speech attacking the “dictatorship of relativism.” A small number of conservative groups, and a more newsworthy group of conservative bishops — 42 so far — are turning the Notre Dame speech into a watershed moment, while obscuring the fact that the president enjoys majority support from Catholics.

Reilly’s efforts have served as a window into the movement. The Cardinal Newman Society is recognized as the key advocate for conservative values at Catholic universities, but it is a relatively small organization. Reilly is one of seven employees of the group, loosely affiliated with the conservative Media Research Center, whose president L. Brent Bozell III serves on the Cardinal Newman Society’s board of directors. According to tax records filed in 2007, the organization runs on less than $1 million per year. The NotreDameScandal site itself is a modest project, using the exact same design, and same stock photos, as the Cardinal Newman Society’s own page. Nonetheless, the effort has put the group in the news and garnered more than 350,000 signatures. It’s bolstered claims that the group represents ersatz Catholic opinion, which wants Obama to cancel his speech and Father John Jenkins, president of the university, to apologize or step aside.

“I haven’t seen polling on this issue,” Reilly said, “but if you see them you have to do some parsing and ask: Are these faithful Catholics who are attending mass and living faithful to Catholic teachings? Among faithful, church-going Catholics there’s been tremendous support for our efforts. A lot of Catholic groups are dealing with the fact that Catholics across the United States have drifted and they need to take a stand.”

By defining the stakes in the Notre Dame fight, conservative Catholics are able to overcome two hurdles–the president’s popularity with Catholics nationally and Notre Dame students in particular. The piece of evidence most often cited to prove the president’s “Catholic problem” is a March 2009 Pew Research poll that revealed a steep drop in the president’s approval numbers among self-identified Catholics since the inauguration. But the poll gave the president a 59-28 favorable rating among all Catholics and a 47-41 rating among white, non-Hispanic Catholics. An April Pew poll gave the president high marks from Catholics on his handling of stem cell research, a decision that involved Catholic advisers. Obama carried Indiana in 2008 by a slim margin that included a win in St. Joseph County — which contains Notre Dame — and a win among Notre Dame students, who also picked Obama over McCain in a pre-election poll .

“Catholics are a diverse group of people,” said John Green, a senior fellow at the Pew Center for Religion and the Press, explaining the poll. “There’s been a decline in Obama’s numbers that’s not too far out of step with his decline overall. The rest of this, a lot of this, is internal politics between conservative Catholics and liberal Catholics.”

For Deal Hudson, the president of InsideCatholic.com, and a political guru who directed Catholic outreach for President George W. Bush and Sen. John McCain, that analysis missed the mark. “When you are trying to get the Catholic vote,” he said, “the first thing on the table is getting a speaking engagement at Notre Dame. I know. I’ve been there! The Obama political team did this and, I’m sure, expected some kind of backlash, but nothing like the watershed moment that this has turned into.”

The “watershed moment” has been heavily debated in Catholic magazines and web sites–World, Inside the Vatican, Catholic World News, LifeNews.net, the New Oxford Review–which have flowered over the last few years and which have aggressively covered the Obama decisions that have most upset conservative Catholics. The minor story of Georgetown covering up the monogram “IHS,” meaning “Jesus,” to make room for the staging of an Obama speech, has been aggressively covered. CNSNews.com–which, like the Cardinal Newman Center, is directed by L. Brent Bozell–published an enterprise piece asking whether the president would agree to wear the official robes at Notre Dame, since they are threaded with a prayer.

“Blogs can keep issues alive in a way that wasn’t possible before,” said George Neumayr, the editor of Catholic World Report, a conservative weekly. “The bishops are bombarded with complaints because of of the activity level of blogs and the ease with which people can contact the chancery. A bishop who’s receiving 1,000 messages is more likely to come out and at least make a statement about the most anti-Catholic president in modern history.”

The biggest problem for conservative Catholics has not been getting the Obama speech portrayed in the press as a scandal, but in distancing from some of the people trying to take ownership of the outrage. Randall Terry, the anti-abortion activist who converted to Catholicism in 2006, has moved temporarily to South Bend to mount protests against the school. Reilly, Neumayr and others accused Terry of being a trouble-maker and self-promoter whose effort–more than 30 full-time agitators, 50,000 letters to alumni that include postcards depicting dead fetuses, bringing fringe political candidate Alan Keyes to speak, and planning a rumored “alternate commencement for Notre Dame Heroes”–makes them look fringe. In an interview Terry said that American bishops were “directly responsible for Obama’s election” because they hadn’t spoken out against him politically. “The fabric of Notre Dame’s treachery was woven by American bishops,” said Terry, who also called Georgetown University “a house of political harlotry” for allowing Obama and Vice President Biden to speak there.

Terry laughs when the worries of other conservative Catholics are read back to him. “How can they delude themselves to think this war can be won in cyberspace?” he asked. “I always tell people that petitions are no more than a fundraising mechanism to gather your name and raise money from you. They’re scams. For them to say I shouldn’t be on the ground shows they are not culture warriors. If Martin Luther King had taken the advice of the Cardinal Newman Society, black people still be riding in the back of the bus.”

Catholic supporters of the president are trying to weather the storm and dispute the idea that Obama has a “Catholic problem.” Douglas Kmiec, a former Notre Dame professor and constitutional legal counsel to Ronald Reagan who endorsed Obama and published the election tract “Can A Catholic Support Him?” argued that Reagan had been met by protests when he gave his celebrated 1981 commencement speech. “No one thought,” said Kmiec, “that when Reagan came to accept his honorary degree he’d engage in a symposium where a bishop would give him the evangelium vitae on capital punishment, or the early draft of pastoral letter of American bishops on reducing nuclear weapons.”

Kmiec characterized much of the Notre Dame talk as politicized and unrepresentative of what Catholics think, especially the activity of Newt Gingrich, who became a Catholic this year.

“For Newt Gingrich to say, as a latter-day Catholic, that this president has ignored Catholic issues, means that he needs to go back to adult religious education class to learn more deeply about the social justice elements that he probably missed,” Kmiec said. “The notion that this president is not in line with those sentiments is not befitting of the former speaker, who was a former scholar, and who I admire as someone who normally has creative ideas.”

Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) (Zuma Press)

WASILLA, Alaska – Pastor Larry Kroon of the Wasilla Bible Church, where Gov. Sarah Palin attends services, calls on his congregation to make up their own minds about politics.

“I’m not the one you look to for policy—foreign, domestic or local,” Kroon said Sunday morning to a sea of 500 attendees. “I’m not the one you look to for analysis.”

Instead, Kroon challenges church members to hold him to task on his core religious mission, to help them discover the “wonder, glory and mystery of Jesus.” Though Kroon has said he does not push an ideological perspective, when the church faithful study the Bible, they tend to see the world through a conservative lens.

Palin has also been a member of the Assembly of God Church, where she gave a talk in June to high-school students urging them to pray that an Alaska gas pipeline and the war in Iraq fulfill “God’s will.”

In tapping Palin, who is ardently pro-life, Sen. John McCain’s Republican presidential campaign is hoping to galvanize the evangelical base of the party. Since Palin joined the ticket, all indications show that the Alaska maverick has lit a fire under the sleeping giant of the GOP Christian conservative base that had so far shown lackluster support for McCain. Evangelicals, who have often been overlooked in this campaign cycle, are suddenly becoming a critical demographic — thanks to Palin.

Bridging the “enthusiasm divide,” Palin has not entirely spelled doom for Sen. Barack Obama, who has some religious support of his own among progressive evangelicals.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

But the Palin pick did boost McCain’s efforts to court the religious right, regarded as among his biggest weaknesses. Back in 2006, McCain was accused of flip-flopping in supporting the late Rev. Jerry Falwell, having previously called him an “agent of intolerance.”

In contrast, conservative religious powerbrokers, like James Dobson, who had expressed scepticism about McCain, quickly took to Palin, a lifelong pro-lifer and card-carrying member of the National Rifle Assn. In the 24 hours hours after McCain announced his selection, his campaign raked in a record $7 million in Internet donations.

“She’s a devastatingly good choice,” said Jacques Berlinerblau, the author of “Thumpin’ It: The Use and Abuse of the Bible in Today’s Presidential Politics” and director of the Program for Jewish Civilization at Georgetown University. “From a religious perspective, Biden gave [Obama] nothing.”

Berlinerblau, who has not endorsed a presidential candidate, pointed out that the evangelical voting bloc does more for McCain than just energize voters in an abstract sense. These active churchgoers have a framework in place to bring out the vote, particularly in large churches. Churches like Palin’s, which enjoy non-profit tax status, are not allowed to endorse candidates, though pastors can freely discuss hot-topics like abortion.

“Infrastructure is almost synonymous with ‘church,’” Berlinerblau said. “Everybody knows what’s going on, [the pastor] just has to roll out the issues and everybody knows what he’s talking about.”

Though Berlinerblau predicts a backlash against such use of religious institutions in future elections, the pulpit could end up being a powerful political tool in 2008.

Obama does have an advantage against such mobilizing, compared to Democratic contenders of the past. The Illinois senator carries extra religious clout. During the Democratic and Republican primary seasons, a Time magazine poll found that among likely voters, 24 percent considered Obama “a person of strong religious faith” out of a list of prominent politicians, while about 15 percent of respondents said the same about McCain.

At the time of the poll, in May 2007, Time magazine pointed to a history of black Democratic politicians being associated with mobilizing their communities through Christian churches. Obama was perceived in this same context.

Considering that Sen. John Kerry appealed to the progressive wing of evangelicals and managed to siphon off about 20 to 22 percent of the evangelical vote in 2004, some experts say Obama has a good shot of holding some ground with the voting bloc.

Martin E. Marty, a prominent religion and culture scholar, said it’s important to remember that evangelicals are not a homogenous group.

“In the last eight years – the Bush years – there has been a great growth in the internal diversity of the group called evangelicals,” Marty said. “I don’t think many of them would depart from the criticism of abortion, but I don’t think they all give it the same priority.”

Marty noted that many evangelicals ascribe to a the social justice ethic outlined by Cardinal Joseph Berardin in 1983, the “consistent ethic of life” or seamless web. This philosophy opposes abortion but also euthanasia, war and the death penalty.

Factoring in these progressive evangelicals, Berlinerblau estimates Obama could be carrying as much as 24 to 25 percent of the voting bloc.

Now in a neck-and-neck race with McCain, Obama needs to hold onto them, particularly in swing states like Ohio.

“If Kerry had won 6 percent more evangelicals in Ohio [in 2004],” Berlinerblau said he calculated in researching his book, “he would have won the election.”

Midwestern evangelicals are perhaps a better target for the Obama campaign than elsewhere in the country, like the Deep South. Marty pointed out that in places like the upper-Midwest, residents are exposed to more of a mix of religious viewpoints that tend to foster less extreme views, making them more likely to support a more liberal candidate.

Just weeks ago, Obama’s Midwestern strategy was aimed largely at another voting bloc — independents. This group was expected to define the 2008 election, particularly with a maverick match-up between Obama and McCain. But. McCain’s choice of Palin has so shaken up the scene that evangelicals may once again emerge as the deciding vote.

In 2004, many observers had expected a less-energized evangelical vote. President George W. Bush, however, won more than 10 percent more of the evangelical vote in 2004 than he did in 2000, according the non-partisan Pew Research Center.

The question now is how much of the vote Obama will siphon off from McCain. It’s difficult to know exactly how the internal divisions of evangelicals break.

At services on Sunday, Kroon noted the difficulty of trying to understand who someone is — whether its Jesus or your hometown mayor.

“Look at us struggle,” Kroon said.

It felt a bit like a high-school gym or auditorium, with wood floors and an unfinished ceiling. The church was founded in the 1970s, though this building was completed in 2006.

A nine-member acoustic band opened the service with 30 minutes of Christian-themed songs — think loving God, forgiveness, humility, etc. It was a sea of about 500 folding chairs — all filled. Lights were dimmed so that the lyrics of the songs were easy to follow along with on the two large projector screens suspended from the ceiling on either side of the stage. The room’s focal point was a large, back-lit wooden cross.

When the music ended, Pastor Larry Kroon, a middle-aged, bearded man, greeted new-comers and, to my surprise, “the press.” A greeter at the front door had actually already given me a “welcome” goody bag — complete with a religious-themed CD and a green water bottle with the church’s “core commitments” listed on the side.

Kroon then said members of the press shouldn’t speak with anyone attending the service, or take photos. At this point, because I’m about an ounce better than paparazzi, I started to think about what the entrance looked like and where I’d most effectively snag people slyly. Kroon added he would not speak to the press on Sunday — so I signed up to speak with him Monday.

“Please don’t use this as a fishing pond for interviews,” Kroon said. Meanwhile, in my head, I was figuring that there’s a side exit people might use that would serve my purposes.

On the plus side, Kroon did go on to say that the press is a “gift from God.” He brought up Alexis de Tocqueville’s trip through the United States in the early 19th century and how the Frenchman identified two great American virtues– a free press and a free pulpit. Kroon was playing well with those of us in the back row, scribbling notes. I actually only saw TV camera crews on my way into the parking lot; I didn’t see any other reporters at the service.

Kroon, who kept the congregation engaged for the full 30 minutes he spoke, then touched on the positive experiences he had with the national media last week. The New York Times, Kroon said, sent a religion expert, who understood churches like theirs. Another reporter, from World Magazine, recognized authors in Kroon’s library.

Hearing this made me shift in my seat. TWI did not select me for this reporting trip because of my deep understanding of Christianity in America. In fact, it didn’t come up. The relevant factors were that I used to cover Alaska politics and still follow what’s going on up here. Unfortunately, 13 years of Catholic school and CCD didn’t seem like they’d win me any points here.

Kroon also noted that he was not the person to consult on policy — foreign, domestic or local. Church members would have to make those decisions for themselves. His job is to guide them in finding the “wonder, glory and mystery of Jesus” in scripture.

The Bible study portion of the morning, the central element of the service, focused on the first chapter in the Acts of the Apostles, which tells the story of Jesus meeting with his apostles to prove that he is alive. Jesus calls on his followers to be his witness and share his message with the “outermost points of the world,” as Kroon explained. Kroon stressed the importance of this message. One of the Wasilla Bible Church’s core beliefs is ministering to non-believers.

In conversation with some church-goers after the service, I was asked, earnestly, if I’m a believer myself. When I explained my Catholic background I received supportive nods. (So supportive that one woman gave me the email and phone number of her son, who lives in Washington.)

I spoke with two different couples — two lawyers and two entrepreneurs — about the role of the church in their own lives. They all agreed it’s a real community here. When I asked for their names, though, they hesitated — saying their pastor had suggested they not speak with reporters. When I tried to get them to reconsider by bringing up the de Tocqueville individualism message, they laughed.

Unfortunately, just as one church member was writing down directions to a beautiful area just north of Wasilla that she thought I ought to visit, a member of the church approached and said I was not allowed to interview anyone “on the premises.” My small group scattered in response.

At least I still have the number of the Alaskan ex-pat in DC.