TruthBook Religious News Blog

Monday, March 02, 2009
Paul B. Farrell
MarketWatch

This is an entertaining and informative article, well worth the read. Please click on "external source" to access the complete article...

Take a few moments, read the "14 Secrets" below, then finish this simple sentence: "I'm the happiest (and richest) investor because ..."

Impossible? After all, we can't all be "the richest," let alone "the happiest." Yes you can. This is your life. Each of us in our own unique way can be "the happiest and also the richest" ... in your special way, in your world, all by yourself. You decide. Just do it.

Here are a few reminders, my Zen Millionaire's 14 secrets to being happy and rich. Maybe they'll jar your memory, maybe bring a smile, maybe help you see that at this one moment in time, in your own unique way, you really are the happiest, richest and luckiest investor living in the whole wide world:

1. Happiness is making others happy

2. Happiness is doing what you love (even if you're not doing it)

"Success is getting what you want," says Uncle Warren Buffett, the Oracle of Omaha. "Happiness is wanting what you get."

3. Happiness is some Cheerios and a warm puppy

For Peanuts' creator Charles Schultz, it's very simple: "Happiness is a warm puppy." And pure joy in Anna Quindlen's "A Short Guide to A Happy Life:" "Get a life in which you pay attention to the baby as she scowls with concentration when she tries to pick up a Cheerio with her thumb and first finger. Turn off the cell phone. Turn off your regular phone, for that matter. Keep still. Be present. Get a life in which you are not alone. Find people you love, and who love you." God bless Snoopy and cheery Cheerios!

4. Happiness is getting lost in whatever you're doing

5. Happiness is getting into action and doing what's right

6. Happiness is also doing nothing, just whistling

7. Happiness is faking it so good you really are happy

8. Happiness is more a bunch of little moments than big deals

9. Happiness is knowing when 'enough is enough'

10. Happiness is not being attached to money and stuff

Remember Henry Miller's famous opening line in "Tropic of Cancer:" "I have no money, no resources, no hopes, I am the happiest man alive."

11. Happiness is spending less than you earn

Americans know this truth, from Charles Dickens' famous formula: "Annual income, 20 pounds; annual expenditure, 19 pounds; result happiness. Annual income, 20 pounds; annual expenditure, 21 pounds; result misery."

12. Happiness is doing what you really love

13. Happiness is being of service ... to your world

In "The 7 Spiritual Laws of Success," Deepak Chopra says: "Everyone has a purpose in life, a unique gift of special talent to give others ... ask yourself, 'How am I best suited to serve humanity?' Answer that question and put it into practice.

14. Happiness is about being 'rich in spirit'

"Instead of focusing almost exclusively on our finances," says Ralph Warner in "Get A Life -- You Don't Need A Million To Retire Well," we "should be thinking about the things that truly make a difference in our later years; our health, spiritual life, relationships with family and friends, and having a plate full of interesting things to do."

Now add your comment, complete this sentence: "I am the happiest (and richest) investor because ..." The prize? It comes from within, an investment that will continue growing, making you richer in "spirit and in fact" as "you cause happiness wherever you go" today, and every day. And share this column: Email it to friends and loved ones.

Labels: happiness, money, Paul B. Farrell, service

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Friday, February 27, 2009

A Spiritual Guide for Economic Bailout

by Rabbi Michael Lerner

This is a very interesting and timely op-ed article concerning out present-day economic crisis - how it is different from any in the past, and how a different mind-set may be needed to solve it adequately.
Page 1 of 2 - Please click on "external source" for complete article.

White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel famously warned in November that "you never want a serious crisis to go to waste." But that is exactly what the White House and Congress have allowed to happen. Secular progressives are disappointed, but spiritual progressives are doubly so. This is a crisis that demands the deepest of revisions of our worldview and economics.

Certainly the Democrats have managed to do enough-in the way of restoring some of the programs cut by the Bush administration, helping the states deal with their own increasing budget deficits, and even initiating several new programs-for Congressional Democrats to feel they have prevailed. Next comes an even more massive bailout for the banks.

The underlying message of these measures is clear: to get out of a recession bordering on a multi-year depression, ordinary citizens must spend more money on consumer goods. This would generate jobs and help staunch a wave of massive layoffs that threaten to push official (and usually under-estimated) levels of unemployment up to 10 percent or more of the work force this year.

To progressives, this was a tremendously irresponsible misuse of the opportunity created by the crisis. The bank bailout was based on the old trickle-down economics that had been discredited by the years of Republican and neo-liberal policies that actually yielded the current meltdown. If you want to stimulate spending, progressives insist, give the money directly to those in need: Create a national bank to give loans to people who wish to buy homes or expand their businesses; provide funding to banks willing to forgive bad mortgages and renegotiate them to affordable levels; raise the minimum wage to a level that makes it a "living wage"; grant citizenship and rights to all the current illegal immigrants, making it easier for them too to spend more money on consumption; and fund a single-payer health care plan that would provide care for the 45 million-plus Americans currently uninsured (while simultaneously imposing strict cost controls on hospitals and other health-care providers).

Yet progressives too may be too limited in their thinking. The economic crisis is global and requires a global solution. Spiritual progressives insist that this is the moment for Americans to acknowledge to ourselves that our well-being depends on that of everyone else on the planet. Instead of each nation-state trying to develop policies meant to benefit only its own citizens, we need the world's major economic powers and representatives of the developing countries to cooperatively work out policies that dramatically reshape the way that we, the human race, produce and consume the resources of our planet.

A central part of such global thinking requires a new conception of efficiency, rationality and productivity. The old bottom line measured productivity and efficiency by how much money or material goods were produced. We need a "new bottom line" that evaluates corporations, government programs, laws, social policies, and even personal behavior by how much love and kindness, generosity and caring, ethical and ecological sensitivity, are produced and how much we are encouraged to respond to the universe with awe and wonder at the grandeur of all that is. Hundreds of years of capitalist excess made the old more narrow utilitarian attitude seem like "common sense," because it worked to generate an ever increasing accumulation of material goods.

But the societies that have bought into that old bottom line are now reeling from the economic collapse generated when tens of millions of people acted on the assumption that trumping all ethical and spiritual concerns was the obligation to maximize one's own material well-being regardless of environmental and human-relationship consequences.

Only a year ago it might have seemed "unrealistic" or "utopian" to imagine a new bottom line and a society reconstructed on that basis. But it is no longer so far-fetched when the government is spending trillions of dollars to repair a system that based itself on a fundamentalist belief that progress could be judged by how many things we accumulated. In my book The Left Hand of God (HarperSanFrancisco, 2006) I detail what this "new bottom line" might look like in our schools, corporations, health care, legal system and our approach to foreign policy.

Spiritual wisdom and daily spiritual practice may be needed by the entire human race in order of for us to develop the intellectual and psychological foundations for a green economy. There is a difficult balance to negotiate between improving the material well-being of the most oppressed and materially deprived citizens of the planet, while teaching the majority of citizens of the more advanced societies how to reduce their level of material needs. Many today feel deprived if they cannot get a new model car every few years or dramatic escalations in the capacities of their iphones and computers.

People have to get to the point where they no longer believe that their personal success is measured by how many new material gadgets, electronic devices, automobiles, apartments or houses, home furnishings, and exotic vacations they have.

Spiritual progressives believe it is time to bring into the democratic process a discussion of the kinds of consumption that are worth fostering and the kinds that actually contribute to the further erosion of our planet's life support system.

To some the conception of democratic control of an economy is going to be dismissed as nothing more than a slippery slope toward a "command economy" that failed when tried by the communists. Yet market fundamentalism is no longer an unchallengeable element of American faith, and the values of a New Bottom Line resonate not only with those of us whose spiritual consciousness already predisposes us to question the ultimacy of material accumulation but also to millions of Americans who can no longer believe that the planet can survive based on profligate consumption of its raw materials. Thinking through the details of building a society based on shared values and committed to treating the planet as more than a bottomless cookie jar-from which we can extract whatever we wish without fear of consequences-will not be easy, and will require the fostering of a new spiritual awareness. Too many liberals and progressives, lacking a spiritual and ethical foundation for making such choices, have simply embraced the notion that any kind of spending will get us out of the current crisis.

No wonder, then, that the Obama bailout seems so completely unfocused on achieving any particular social good (e.g. adequate health care, environmental repair, or elimination of domestic or global poverty). The Obama plan reflects the lack of direction or values orientation that bedevils most progressive thinking, and reminds us of the important role that spiritual progressives from Martin Luther King, Jr. to Mahatma Gandhi to Nelson Mandela have been able to play precisely because they have this other dimension in their thinking.

A spiritual progressive approach to bailout is badly needed for the U.S. This is the moment in which biblical ethics and the wisdom of spiritual traditions are actually more realistic than the plans of the capitalist economists. Ideas like the biblical prohibitions against waste; the command to be stewards of the planet; a legal system that obligates us to care for others (which thus transcends a system of rights based only on self-protection) -all these should no longer seem utopian, but instead recognized as matters of survival for the human race.

Even the amazing biblical view of a society-wide sabbatical takes on an attractive allure. Imagine an entire society that stops its production for a given year, and relies on the food, fuel and wealth that has been accumulated during the other six years and now gets redistributed equally to everyone for the sabbatical year, meanwhile freeing the entire population from work so that they can participate in everything from job retraining to get new skills to pure vacationing with the planet to democratic assemblies in which people collectively define their societal priorities for the coming six years. A sabbatical year for every person once in seven years is a practical work benefit that should be a right of all workers. But this takes on a whole different meaning and opens up amazing possibilities for everyone if everyone takes off the same year, creating a festival of freedom and creativity that would be experienced by many as a far greater reward than any material benefits that they were giving up because their society had taken itself off the productivity grid for a year. Yes, there could be enough food and fuel and health care-though this will take careful planning for many years before implementation. But the idea itself points us into unexplored terrain: what if we really didn't have to work all the time, what if the world and our own personal world could survive on less? If, instead of appearing to be a huge sacrifice, the reduction of consumption was experienced as part of an exciting spiritual journey, it might just be possible for us to get off the juggernaut of endless material "progress" before it destroys everything.

Don't we need to work to have enough money to buy food? Well, this begs the question. We have enough food for everyone on the planet. Money has become the distribution mechanism, making it possible for some people to have way more food than they need or is good for them, while others living only miles away, don't have enough money to buy the food they need. The same is true of health care, education, and even energy. By having a year in which these goods are distributed equally and for free may be the necessary first step toward making it possible for people on the planet to imagine a world in which money is no longer the arbiter of essential goods and services.

Labels: bailout, money, President Obama, Rabbi Michael Lerner, spirituality, the economy

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Tuesday, September 02, 2008

Locals respond to ’Net poll on removing ‘In God We Trust’

Published: August 29, 2008
By Cristin Ross

MSNBC.com has launched a “Live Vote” Internet poll on its Web site, asking “should the motto ‘In God We Trust’ be removed from U.S. currency?”

Of the 7,230,365 votes cast as of 11:45 a.m. Monday, 78 percent of those participating in the poll voted to keep the motto, compared to 22 percent voting to remove it from U.S. currency.

“That doesn’t surprise me,” said Kevin King, senior pastor of the First United Methodist Church-Jacksonville. “I think most people, particularly in this region, have a deep faith and believe this country was founded on that.

The Daily Progress’s attempts to interview a local atheist were unsuccessful.

MSNBC’s Web site acknowledges the poll is not a scientific survey. Phone messages left at MSNBC offices were not returned as of presstime today.

The poll stems from an Associated Press article, also published on the Web site, chronicling the efforts of Sacramento, Calif., atheist Michael Newdow to get the motto removed.

According to the AP article, Newdow filed a federal lawsuit last week, claiming the motto is “an unconstitutional endorsement of religion.”

Congress first authorized a reference to God on a two-cent piece in 1864. The action followed a request by the director of the U.S. Mint, who wrote there should be a “distinct and unequivocal national recognition of the divine sovereignty” on the nation’s coins.

In 1954, Congress inserted the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance. A year later, Congress required all currency to carry the motto “In God We Trust.”

“The placement of ‘In God We Trust’ on the coins and currency was clearly done for religious purposes and to have religious effects,” Newdow wrote in the 162-page lawsuit he filed against Congress.

Newdow’s latest lawsuit came five days after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected, without comment, a challenge to an inscription of “In God We Trust” on a North Carolina county government building.

In doing so, the justices upheld the Richmond, Va.-based 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which ruled that “In God We Trust” appears on the nation’s coins and is a national motto.

“In this situation, the reasonable observer must be deemed aware of the patriotic uses, both historical and present, of the phrase ‘In God We Trust,”’ the appeals panel ruled in upholding the inscription’s display.

Newdow, a doctor and lawyer, used a similar argument when he challenged the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools for containing the words “under God.” In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled he “lacked standing to bring the case because he did not have custody of the daughter he sued on behalf of.”

An identical lawsuit later brought by Newdow on behalf of parents with children in three Sacramento-area school districts is pending with the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, after a Sacramento federal judge sided with Newdow last September. The judge stayed enforcement of the decision pending appeal, which is expected to reach the Supreme Court.

Labels: "In God We Trust", atheism, Cristin Ross, currency, Michael Newdow, money, MSNBC, US Constitution

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Saturday, March 22, 2008

Money buys happiness if you spend it on someone else: study

Tom Spears, The Ottawa Citizen
Published: Thursday, March 20, 2008

OTTAWA - Money can't buy happiness, say the experts. But a Canadian psychologist says spending it can make us happier - as long as we spend it on someone else, not on ourselves.

Even giving away as little as $5 gives a measurable boost to our happiness for that day, says the study by Elizabeth Dunn's team at the University of British Columbia, and a colleague at the Harvard Business School.

She and her grad student, Lara Aknin, approached a small company in the Boston area. The boss was planning to give profit-sharing bonuses to employees, but the workers didn't yet know the details.

Then each employee got a cheque for between $3,000 and $8,000 (average $5,000). The psychologists waited a while, giving them time to spend the money.

Some bought motorcycles, some spent on vacations, on gifts, even a swing set for the kids.

"People who spent more of their bonus on others - either on gifts for others or on charitable donations - reported greater happiness," she says. (This is after taking into account how content they were to begin with.)

"In other words, people reaped greater happiness from the bonus if they spent it on others. Whereas spending it on themselves didn't really lead to any benefits," no matter how much money they received.

Lab studies on student volunteers backed up the same findings. (Students given free cash from $5 to $20 were told to spend it on themselves, or on others.)

And the findings held in a random survey of 630 Americans that asked about their level of happiness, their incomes, and how much money they tend to give to charity or spend on gifts.

The study team didn't distinguish between giving to strangers (through charity) and spending on others that the workers knew, such as relatives. A happy feeling that lasts for six to eight weeks, she notes, is a major effect. And the increase in the happiness of these workers showed up as very large.

"I know that it doesn't fit what most people would expect. We actually did a separate study... and found a significant majority of people felt they would be happier spending money on themselves" rather than on others, Ms. Dunn says.

And the religious side of this? That it's better to give than to receive, for instance?

"I'm not a very religious person," she confides. "But there are certain religions that really advocate giving, and religious people do tend to be happier. So perhaps one of the benefits of religion that previous research has documented lies in the tendency to advocate charitable giving."

She's not done yet. She wants to ask "exactly what is causing this effect? Is it that people start to feel better about themselves? Is it that relationships are strengthened? Is is that people are simply spending more time with others? We're just now investigating these studies."

Labels: charity, Elizabeth Dunn, happiness, money, Tom Spears

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Sunday, December 30, 2007

`Gospel of wealth' facing scrutiny

By ERIC GORSKI

The message flickered into Cindy Fleenor's living room each night: Be faithful in how you live and how you give, the television preachers said, and God will shower you with material riches.

And so the 53-year-old accountant from the Tampa, Fla., area pledged $500 a year to Joyce Meyer, the evangelist whose frank talk about recovering from childhood sexual abuse was so inspirational. She wrote checks to flamboyant faith healer Benny Hinn and a local preacher-made-good, Paula White.

Only the blessings didn't come. Fleenor ended up borrowing money from friends and payday loan companies just to buy groceries. At first she believed the explanation given on television: Her faith wasn't strong enough.

All three of the groups Fleenor supported are among six major Christian television ministries under scrutiny by a senator who is asking questions about the evangelists' lavish spending and possible abuses of their tax-exempt status.

The probe by Sen. Charles Grassley of Iowa, the ranking Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has brought new scrutiny to the underlying belief that brings in millions of dollars and fills churches from Atlanta to Los Angeles — the "Gospel of Prosperity," or the notion that God wants to bless the faithful with earthly riches.

The modern-day prosperity movement can largely be traced back to evangelist Oral Roberts' teachings. Roberts' disciples have spread his theology and vocabulary (Roberts and other evangelists, such as Meyer, call their donors "partners.") And several popular prosperity preachers, including some now under investigation, have served on the Oral Roberts University board.

Most scholars trace the origins of prosperity theology to E.W. Kenyon, an evangelical pastor from the first half of the 20th century.

But it wasn't until the postwar era — and a pair of evangelists from Tulsa, Okla. — that "health and wealth" theology became a fixture in Pentecostal and charismatic churches.

Oral Roberts and Kenneth Hagin — and later, Kenneth Copeland — trained tens of thousands of evangelists with a message that resonated with an emerging middle class, said David Edwin Harrell Jr., a Roberts biographer. Copeland is among those now being investigated.

The teachings took on various names — "Name It and Claim It," "Word of Faith," the prosperity gospel.

Prosperity preachers say that it isn't all about money — that God's blessings extend to health, relationships and being well-off enough to help others.

They have Bible verses at the ready to make their case. One oft-cited verse, in Paul's Second Epistle to the Corinthians, reads: "Yet for your sakes he became poor, that you by his poverty might become rich."

One of the teaching's attractions is that it doesn't dwell on traditional Christian themes of heaven and hell but on answering pressing concerns of the here and now, said Brian McLaren, a liberal evangelical author and pastor.

The checks and balances central to Christian denominations are largely lacking in prosperity churches. One of the pastors in the Grassley probe, Bishop Eddie Long of suburban Atlanta, has written that God told him to get rid of the "ungodly governmental structure" of a deacon board.

Some ministers hold up their own wealth as evidence that the teaching works. Atlanta-area pastor Creflo Dollar, who is fighting Grassley's inquiry, owns a Rolls Royce and multimillion-dollar homes and travels in a church-owned Learjet.

In a letter to Grassley, Dollar's attorney calls the prosperity gospel a "deeply held religious belief" grounded in Scripture and therefore a protected religious freedom. Grassley has said his probe is not about theology.

But even some prosperity gospel critics — like the Rev. Adam Hamilton of 15,000-member United Methodist Church of the Resurrection in suburban Kansas City, Mo. — say that the investigation is entering a minefield.

"How do you determine how much money a minister like this is able to make when the basic theology is that wealth is OK?" said Hamilton, an Oral Roberts graduate who later left the charismatic movement. "That gets into theological questions."

There is evidence of change. Joyce Meyer Ministries, for one, enacted financial reforms in recent years, including making audited financial statements public.

Meyer, who has promised to cooperate fully with Grassley, issued a statement emphasizing that a prosperity gospel "that solely equates blessing with financial gain is out of balance and could damage a person's walk with God."

Labels: blessings, Christian, church, Eric Gorski, Gospel, money, prosperity

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Friday, August 24, 2007

Kids Happy To Hang With Families: Survey Finds Teens’ Heroes Are Often Mom And Dad

Wednesday, August 22, 2007 — Time: 8:18:23 AM EST
By Erin E. O’Neill

When it comes to their children, many adults probably think being able to drive the family car, hang out with friends at the mall and play the latest video games are the keys to happiness.

Little do they know that a large percentage of today’s youth would much rather spend time with mom and dad than listen to music, watch TV or, yes, even hang out with friends.

Kyle Newhart, 13, of Marietta thinks quality time with his family is very important but his dad, Rod, is pleasantly surprised by the results of a recent Associated Press/MTV survey that puts spending time with family at the top of the heap of things that make young folks happy.

Kyle Newhart does count video games among his favorite pastimes but he also enjoys playing board games with his dad and mom, Anita. Dinner together, reading and road trips are also important to their family dynamic, according to Anita Newhart.

The survey of 1,280 young people, ages 13 to 24, included an extensive list of questions ranging from “What one thing in life makes you most happy?” to “Who would you say are your heroes?”

The top answer when young people were asked what makes them happy was their families. When asked to name their heroes, Spider-Man, Oprah Winfrey and Tiger Woods couldn’t compete with mom, who squeaked by dad by a mere 8 percent. Together, parents fared better than anyone else, including Martin Luther King Jr. and George Bush, as influences on their kids’ lives.

The nationwide survey was conducted online from a random sampling of households with landline telephone numbers, both listed and unlisted, according to The Associated Press. Web access was provided to those who needed it by the company Knowledge Networks, which conducted the survey.

The results of the survey aren’t as surprising to some people, however.

Cathy Harper, coordinator for The Right Path, works with many area youth and says the survey shows what she knew all along.

“Family time is very important,” Harper said. “Kids really do want parents and adults involved in their lives.

“Everybody needs to feel supported, even as we get older,” she said.

Overall, the survey is positive. However, a little more disheartening are results showing white youth to be happier than blacks and Hispanics and that overall stress levels are up compared to a similar study conducted in 1996.

What stresses kids out? For 18 to 24-year-olds, the major stressor is finances. For teens, it’s school that is the greatest concern.

The Newharts made the decision to take their son out of school in the fourth grade and homeschool him to the end of the year. Beginning in the fifth grade, Kyle was enrolled in online classes, which he continues. They said school stress was a major factor in their decision and now he is much less stressed over school work.

When it comes to family finances, Rod Newhart believes full disclosure is the only way to let kids know what is going on.

“Kids are a lot smarter and more aware,” he said. “Not talking about (finances) is a detriment.”

Harper agrees.

“Kids worry about finances because they hear their parents talking about it,” she said. “Parents need to talk to their kids to make them feel less stressed.”

And while money doesn’t rank among the things that make kids happiest, it does play a major role when it comes to funding education and recreation.

“Money can’t provide happiness,” said Harper, “but it does provide opportunities.”

A lot of activities are available for area youth, regardless of their financial abilities, due in part to programs through The Right Path, Ely Chapman Education Foundation and the Marietta Family YMCA. Harper does caution against spreading yourself too thin.

“Don’t be in 500 things,” she said. “One or two activities is fine. Have good family time. Even if you have dinner at 9 o’clock at night, do it together.”

Spiritual fulfillment also seems to play a big role in determining happiness, with 62 percent of those polled saying they believe that a higher power has influence over the things that make them happy.

These figures are encouraging to Roger Rush, minister of the Church of Christ at Sixth and Washington streets in Marietta.

“The survey is right on. Kids will be happiest when we give ourselves. Time with family coupled with religion helps to keep families together,” he said. “We try to focus on that.”

Rush has seen many of his young parishioners grow into successful adults in his 22 years with the church and he attributes that to a strong family unit.

“Kids that come from families who spend time together, worship together — those kids are thriving,” he said.

Labels: Erin E. O’Neill, family, happiness, money, spirituality, teenagers

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Monday, July 23, 2007

In Europe, God Is (Not) Dead

Christian groups are growing, faith is more public.
Is supply-side economics the explanation?

By ANDREW HIGGINS
July 14, 2007

Stockholm

Late last year, a Swedish hotel guest named Stefan Jansson grew upset when he found a Bible in his room. He fired off an email to the hotel chain, saying the presence of the Christian scriptures was "boring and stupefying." This spring, the Scandic chain, Scandinavia's biggest, ordered the New Testaments removed

In a country where barely 3% of the population goes to church each week, the affair seemed just another step in Christian Europe's long march toward secularism. Then something odd happened: A national furor erupted. A conservative bishop announced a boycott. A leftist radical who became a devout Christian and talk-show host denounced the biblical purge in newspaper columns and on television. A young evangelical Christian organized an electronic letter-writing campaign, asking Scandic: Why are you removing Bibles but not pay-porn on your TVs?

Scandic, which had started keeping its Bibles behind the front desk, put the New Testament back in guest rooms.

After decades of secularization, religion in Europe has slowed its slide toward what had seemed inevitable oblivion. There are even nascent signs of a modest comeback. Most church pews are still empty. But belief in heaven, hell and concepts such as the soul has risen in parts of Europe, especially among the young, according to surveys. Religion, once a dead issue, now figures prominently in public discourse.

CHANGING OPINIONS

In Europe, the cradle of the Enlightenment and secularization, issues of religion have figured prominently in recent public discourse. Below, some examples.

* * *

Sinéad O'Connor, Irish singer, caused a stir in 1992 by ripping up a photograph of Pope John Paul II on "Saturday Night Live" and shouting "Fight the real enemy!" She's now released "Theology," a collection of Bible-based songs:

"I adore religion and love it. Obviously, like anything, it has all sorts of negatives sometimes, as we all do," she told Beliefnet, a Web site. She described the photo-tearing episode as "an act of love for God, actually. But, also an act of rattling the bars of something that I do love, but I don't love [the Catholic Church] as much as I love God."

* * *

Gérard Depardieu, French film star known for his chaotic personal life, met Pope John Paul II in 2000 and was urged to play Saint Augustine, a 4th-century North African bishop who, after a dissolute youth, became a pillar of faith and one of the church's pre-eminent philosophers. Depardieu read selections of Saint Augustine's "Confessions" in Paris' Notre Dame Cathedral in 2003.

"I was heavy with spirituality without knowing it. I was touched by the light of Saint Augustine," Depardieu told the French Catholic newspaper La Croix. "Saint Augustine's quest touched me personally because it reflected by own fragility."

* * *

Sting, British rock star, was raised a Catholic, turned away from organized religion but has often talked about faith. On "The Oprah Winfrey Show," he said:

"Religion is an interesting word. It comes from Latin; it means to reconnect, reconnect with the world of the spirit. There are many ways to reconnect with the world of the spirit, not just through going to church or praying, you can reconnect through music, through the woman or the man you love. These are my roots to the sacred."

* * *

Oriana Fallaci, combative Italian journalist and lifelong critic of religion, grew close to the Catholic Church toward the end of her life. She met Pope Benedict XVI and praised him as a bulwark against Islam. She died in 2006, leaving her book collection to a university run by the Vatican.

"I am an atheist, yes. An atheist-Christian," she said in New York in 2005.God's tentative return to Europe has scholars and theologians debating a hot question: Why? Part of the reason, pretty much everyone agrees, is an influx of devout immigrants. Christian and Muslim newcomers have revived questions relating to faith that Europe thought it had banished with the 18th-century Enlightenment. At the same time, anxiety over immigration, globalization and cutbacks to social-welfare systems has eroded people's contentment in the here-and-now, prodding some to seek firmer ground in the spiritual.

Some scholars and Christian activists, however, are pushing a more controversial explanation: the laws of economics. As centuries-old churches long favored by the state lose their monopoly grip, Europe's highly regulated market for religion is opening up to leaner, more-aggressive religious "firms." The result, they say, is a supply-side stimulus to faith.

"Monopoly churches get lazy," says Eva Hamberg, a professor at Lund University's Centre for Theology and Religious Studies and co-author of academic articles that, based on Swedish data, suggest a correlation between an increase in religious competition and a rise in church-going. Europeans are deserting established churches, she says, "but this does not mean they are not religious."

Upstarts are now plugging new spiritual services across Europe, from U.S.-influenced evangelical churches to a Christian sect that uses a hallucinogenic herbal brew as a stand-in for sacramental wine. Niklas Piensoho, chief preacher at Stockholm's biggest Pentecostal church, says even sometimes oddball, quasi-religious fads "tell me you can sell spirituality." His own career suggests that a free market in faith is taking root. He was poached by the Pentecostals late last year after he boosted church attendance for a rival Protestant congregation.

Most scholars used to believe that modernization would extinguish religion in the long run. But that view always had trouble explaining why America, a nation in the vanguard of modernity, is so religious. The God-is-finished thesis came under more strain in the 1980s and 1990s after Iran, a rapidly modernizing Muslim nation, exploded with fundamentalist fervor and other fast-advancing countries in Latin America and Asia showed scant sign of ditching religion.

Now even Europe, the heartland of secularization, is raising questions about whether God really is dead. The enemy of faith, say the supply-siders, is not modernity but state-regulated markets that shield big, established churches from competition. In America, where church and state stand apart, more than 50% of the population worships at least once a month. In Europe, where the state has often supported -- but also controlled -- the church with money and favors, the rate in many countries is 20% or less.

Consider the scene on a recent Sunday at Stockholm's Hedvig Eleonara Church, a parish of the Church of Sweden, a Lutheran institution that until 2000 was an official organ of the Swedish state. Fewer than 40 people, nearly all elderly, gathered in pews beneath a magnificent 18th-century dome. Seven were church employees. The church seats over 1,000.

Hedvig Eleonara has three full-time salaried priests and gets over $2 million each year though a state levy. Annika Sandström, head of its governing board, says she doesn't believe in God and took the post "on the one condition that no one expects me to go each Sunday." The church scrapped Sunday school last fall because only five children attended.

Just a few blocks away, Passion Church, an eight-month-old evangelical outfit, fizzed with fervor. Nearly 100 young Swedes rocked to a high-decibel band: "It's like adrenaline running through my blood," they sang in English. "We're talking about Jesus, Jesus, Jesus."

Passion, set up by Andreas Nielsen, a 32-year-old Swede who found God in Florida, gets no money from the state. It holds its service in a small, low-ceilinged hall rented from Stockholm's Casino Theatre, a drama company. Church, says Mr. Nielson, should be "the most kick-ass place in the world." Jesus was "king of the party."

The message has lured some unlikely converts, including a heavily tattooed, self-described former mobster. "I've gone soft," says Daniel Webb, the son of an English father and Swedish mother, who spent five years in jail for illegal arms possession and assault. He was baptized, like most Swedes, in the Church of Sweden but never prayed. He went to church for the funerals of fellow hoods but scoffed at Christian sympathy for the meek.

Europe's upstart churches aren't yet attracting anywhere near enough customers to offset a post-World War II decline. But they are shaking up and in some places reviving the market for religion, argues Rodney Stark, a pioneer of religious supply-side theory at Baylor University in Texas.

Mr. Stark first developed the notion of a "religious market" in the 1980s as a way to explain America's persistent faith. It posits that people are naturally religious but that their religiosity varies depending on the vigor of what he calls religious suppliers. "Wherever churches are a little more energetic and competitive, you've got more people going to church," he says.

The notion that Adam Smith's invisible hand reaches into the spiritual realm has many detractors. Steve Bruce, a professor of sociology at Aberdeen University in Scotland, says market theory "works for cars and soap powder but it does not work for religion." Christianity in Europe, he says, has reached the point of no return, like a dying language doomed because too few people transmit its vocabulary to their children.

The Church of Sweden is also skeptical of the supply-side view. "We don't sell a product," says archbishop Anders Wejryd. With 1,800 congregations, he says, his church must cater to a spectrum of views. He says the Church of Sweden's more dynamic parishes, some of which mimic evangelicals' methods, are thriving.

Predictions that Christianity is doomed in Europe date back centuries. Writing in the early 1700s, Thomas Woolston, an Englishman, estimated it would die out by 1900. A century later, France's Auguste Comte proclaimed the end of mankind's "theological stage." Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels viewed religion as a symptom of capitalist ills that would be cured by socialism. More recently, the demise of Christianity in Europe has led to warnings that the continent risks becoming "Eurabia," a land dominated by Islam.

Conservative U.S. preachers and politicians curse European nonbelief and trumpet the religious values of America's pilgrim fathers. But Mr. Stark, the supply-side theorist, says America's religiosity is relatively recent. In 1776, he says, around 17% of Americans belonged to churches. That is about the same as the current proportion of the population in Belgium, France, Germany and the U.K. that worships at least once a month, according to 2004's European Union-funded European Social Survey.

In the U.S., the American Revolution ended ecclesiastical hegemony in the 11 colonies that had an established church and unleashed a raucous tide of religious competition. As Methodists, Baptists, Shakers and other churches proliferated, church-going rose, reaching around 50% in the early part of the 20th century, he says.

Europe never developed such a religious bazaar. The Church of Sweden, the Church of England, the Catholic Church in Italy and France, state-funded churches in Germany and others lost their de-facto "monopoly" status to other denominations over a century ago. But they retained their ties to the state and economic privileges.

Grace Davie, professor of sociology at Britain's Exeter University, compares them to "public utilities" -- institutions that people look to for basic services such as weddings and funerals but that don't demand day-to-day involvement. The Church of Sweden, for example, has a near-monopoly on death. Its broad property holdings, gathered since the 16th century, include most of Sweden's graveyards. The state still pays it to oversee funerals, even those involving Muslim rites.

Around 75% of Sweden's nine million people are nominally members of the "state church" -- though few ever worship and around 10% are avowed atheists, says Jonas Bromander of the Church's research unit. Sweden's evangelical churches, by contrast, have only 31,000 members, but they worship regularly and are growing, slowly, in number.

Tension between the Church of Sweden and would-be competitors goes back to the early 19th century, when early evangelicals were banished into exile. So-called free churches were later permitted but they remained in the shadow of the state-coddled Church of Sweden.

After World War II, the Church of Sweden followed the leftward direction of Swedish political life. The Ecclesiastical Department, the ministry that supervised the church, was headed for years by a prominent atheist. Liberal theology triumphed. Church attendance plummeted.

In the early 1980s, Ulf Ekman, a Church of Sweden priest, set up Livets Ord, or the Word of Life, an American-style congregation in Uppsala. His strict Bible-based message and charismatic preaching style attracted a flood of worshippers, and also controversy. The Church of Sweden stripped Mr. Ekman of his status as a preacher. The media denounced him as a cult leader bankrolled by America. The government investigated. Today, his church has around 3,000 active members.

A big impetus to the return of faith is fear of the future, says Elisabeth Sandlund, editor of Sweden's main Christian newspaper, Dagen. In Sweden and across Europe, old moorings are coming loose as cradle-to-grave welfare systems buckle. "People want something solid to hold on to," says Ms Sandlund. While working as a financial journalist, she started sneaking off to church and in 1999 eventually told her husband she believed in God. "He was not happy," she says.

Whether competition for believers actually boosts belief stirs bitter academic discussion. Measuring religiosity is difficult and each side cites different statistics. The latest data from a major research project that tracks churchgoing and belief in concepts such as God and soul, the European Values Survey, were compiled between 1981 and 1999. (They show a decline in faith in the 1980s followed by a leveling off and, for some indicators, a slight bump in the 1990s.)

To try to refute the supply-siders, Aberdeen University's Mr. Bruce points to Poland and Ireland, highly religious countries each dominated by a Catholic "monopoly church." Mr. Stark and those in his camp counter that market mechanisms in Poland and Ireland were trumped by the church's role as a vehicle for nationalism. More revealing, they say, is America's boisterous religious market and its high levels of religiosity.

One factor now spurring religious competition in Europe is the availability of state money that traditionally flowed almost entirely to established churches. It still does, but the process is more open.

In Italy, the state used to pay the salaries of Catholic priests, but in 1984 it began letting taxpayers choose which religious groups get financial support. The proceeds of a new "religious tax" of 0.8% are now divided, according to taxpayer preference, among the Catholic Church, four non-Catholic churches, the Jewish community and a state religious and humanitarian fund.

The result is an annual beauty contest ahead of a June income-tax deadline, as churches try to lure taxpayer money with advertising campaigns. Catholics get the lion's share -- 87% of nearly $1.2 billion in 2004, the last year for which figures are available. But according to a 2005 study by Italian lawyer Massimo Introvigne and Mr. Stark, the system "reminds Italians every year that there is a religious economy."

Sweden has also overhauled church financing. In 2000, the government gave up formal control of the Church of Sweden. With great fanfare it replaced what had been a church "tax" with an annual "fee," still collected by tax authorities, levied on Church of Sweden members.

For the first time, taxpayers were told what they owed in cash -- instead of being given just a percentage figure, which is typically under 1% of household income. Church of Sweden membership dropped abruptly, and the church launched a publicity drive pitching religion. Membership stabilized, though church-going continued to decline. Still, the established church last year received around $1.6 billion in membership fees via state tax collectors. The church also brings in some $460 million in funeral-and-graveyard administration taxes.

A government-run commission provides money to 28 registered religious groups outside the Church of Sweden, but these funds totaled only $7 million last year. Passion Church and other such ventures rely mostly on voluntary donations by their worshippers. This, says Kjell-Axel Johanson, an evangelical priest, keeps upstarts more in tune with their flock. He recently set up a new church that, unable to afford a permanent home, rents a bar for a few hours. "God doesn't care about packaging," he says.

Hotel chain Scandic, meanwhile, has reversed course. Before Christians mobilized, it planned to keep a few copies of the New Testament at the front desk, along with the Quran and Hebrew Bible. With the hotel under new ownership since April, Bibles are back in rooms. The Swedish arm of Gideons, a Bible distribution group, recently gave the chain 10,000 New Testaments in Swedish and English.

Write to Andrew Higgins at andrew.higgins@wsj.com

Labels: Andrew Higgins, Christian, church, Europe, evangelicals, faith, God, money, secular, supply-side economics, Sweden