Before the Happy Holidays get here and we meet in the streets and malls for our seasonal riots of self-indulgence, before our keen spiritual perceptions become dulled with a thousand movies about Camden Town and Mount Crumpit, we might reflect on recent events.

It is obvious to both church-attenders and church-abstainers that there is something seriously wrong with pulpit and altar.

We can't help observing that when a gang of religious celebrities ostentatiously signs a declaration on life, marriage and religious liberty, religion is not in the bloom of its youth. That there should follow a raging debate about how some came to sign it and others did not, we might wonder if religion is worth our notice. From what I've learned, this statement reveals a significant disagreement over the meaning of the Gospel!

Isn't that inspiring? I think we can put to rest any looming threat from "organized religion".

I love it when Fundamentalists tell us they are serious and then continue marketing the same insipid, meaningless, irritating rituals their children have rejected and which we'd be humiliated to bring our friends to watch. Do serious people trivialize their god like this?

Almost as much, I love it when an Evangelical grand poobah steps out of the movement's baronial publishing houses to express concern over the superficialities he's discovered on the internet.

Some day—and it won't be today—it may occur to believers that if churchmen make a statement on life, marriage and religious liberty and it only succeeds in revealing their misperceptions of the Gospel, we'll have rounded a scenic bend.

If the Evangelical church cannot identify the Gospel it was given, can it be trusted to carry it to the world? If it persists in its mawkish self-indulgence and trinket-mongering, does it even have a message of repentance worth bringing to us? And if it has no call to repentance, why should people listen to anything it says? Because it claims "a 2,000-year tradition of proclaiming God's word, seeking justice in our societies, resisting tyranny, and reaching out with compassion to the poor, oppressed and suffering"?

Instead we get "devotion to human dignity"? How Dickensian.

Please! I can't speak for every last soul on the earth, but just speaking for myself I don't care to hear what these people have to say about dignity.

When the Son of Man cometh, will he find devotion to human dignity on the earth?