One-time presidential candidate Rev. Pat Robertson, who long has made controversial moral pronouncements on topics from Alzheimer's to the weather, says no more political endorsements from now on.

Robertson, 81, told The Associated Press this weekend that.

I've personally backed off from direct political involvement. I've been there, done that. The truth of the matter is politics is not going to change our world. It's really not going to make that much of a difference.

He said he "doesn't have the political influence he once did" from his perch as founder of the Christian Coalition and reigning host of the Christian Broadcasting Network's 700 Club, which marked 50 years on the air on Saturday. He said,

When I was in charge of the Christian Coalition I was available to mobilize grass-roots support for somebody. I don't have any army right now. It's just an opinion, and that isn't quite as good as it used to be.

Not that Robertson lacks for opinions. The AP offered a greatest hits of Robertson statements including:

• The federal courts, pornography, abortion rights and church-state separation angered God, allowing the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to occur.
• American agents should assassinate Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez.
• The debilitating stroke suffered by Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon was divine retribution for his decision to withdraw from the Gaza Strip.
• Haiti was cursed a day after a devastating earthquake.
• A man whose wife has Alzheimer's disease and was seeing another woman should divorce his wife.

But 90% of the CBN audience is overseas now and less interested in U.S. politics, Duke University professor David Morgan told AP. So maybe there's more marketing than morality at work here.

THINK ABOUT IT... Were you waiting for word of Robertson's political pick? Have his moral views mattered to you? Do they still?

Gays in the military can wed their partners on base with a military chaplain -- if the ceremony is in a state where gay marriage is legal and the chaplain's religious affiliation permits clergy to officiate at same-sex marriages, according to Religion News Service.

The CNN Belief Blog writes that the two paragraph Pentagon memo, made public Friday,

... carefully stops short of fully embracing the idea of same-sex marriage, saying that "a military chaplain's participation in a private ceremony does not constitute an endorsement of the ceremony by DoD" (the Department of Defense).

The chaplain corps has been in uproar over DADT -- pro and con -- for years and conservative Christian groups say ending the policy puts chaplains in a religious liberty bind. During the summer, the U.S.House of Representatives tried unsuccessfully to block gay weddings on bases.

But even for couples who do wed, benefits won't change much:

Existing standards of personal conduct, such as those pertaining to public displays of affection, will continue regardless of sexual orientation.

There will be no immediate changes to eligibility for military benefits. All servicemembers are already entitled to certain benefits, such as designating a partner as a life insurance beneficiary or as a caregiver in the Wounded Warrior program.

Happy New Year: Now, let's talk Israel politics.

That's how the high holy day of Rosh Hashana, which began at sunset Wednesday, may sound for many U.S. Jews. The 10 days between this day and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, are ones of deep reflection. And the synagogues are usually packed.

So this is the traditional time for rabbis to make a sermon pitch for support for Israel, the Jewish homeland, as part of living a life of responsibilty to the community, weaving religious beliefs with political Zionism.

But in recent years, the definition of exactly what it means to support Israel has become complicated. Certainly, in Israel itself Jews are fractious over exactly how they should proceed to establish a peaceful and secure future. Dissent is sharp and vocal from all directions.

But within American Jewish institutions discussing how best to support Israel is a fraught matter. Religion Newswriter of the Year award winner Michelle Boorstein at The Washington Post looked at rabbis' plans for Rosh Hashana sermons:

Recognizing the confluence of Jewish preaching and news about Israel, Kenneth Cohen, a Bethesda rabbi, recently wrote a resource guide to help colleagues talk about Israel during the holidays, which begin when Rosh Hashana starts at sunset Wednesday and end with Yom Kippur next week. The guide was funded by the Israeli Embassy and sent to virtually every rabbi in the country.

The Israel-funded Resource Guide, is unequivocal:

The only way to achieve a true and sustainable peace is through negotiations. A unilateral declaration of statehood violates the basic principle of a negotiated peace. Israel remains keen to engage in bilateral negotiations to resolve the conflict.

The Jewish Daily Forward finds rabbis are not in lock step in their concerns for Israel.

The younger rabbis, consistent with the younger generation, are more oriented toward social issues," said Steven M. Cohen, a prominent sociologist of American Jewish life who conducted the study for the Jewish Theological Seminary. "They have more concern in Israel for societal challenges and problems, [and] less concern with external threats than the older rabbis.

THINK ABOUT IT... Is it kosher to question the binding of Jewish religious beliefs and practices with any one particular political view on the Jewish state?

What? No wine? The Bishop of Phoenix Thomas Olmsted is crossing wine out of Communion at most Masses, limiting how often the chalice is offered to holy days and special occasions, writes Michael Clancy at the Arizona Republic.

Olmsted bases his unique decision on the Church's new translation of the liturgy for the Mass, called the General Instruction of the Roman Missal, and other church documents, which he says don't really require folks in the pews have wine as part of the Eucharist. The Catholic Church teaches that the bread and wine, when blessed by the priest, become the body and blood of Christ.

Clancy writes

The option of offering both bread and wine for Communion has been in place since 1975. Catholics never have been obligated to take both and, until 1975, the practice had been forbidden since the mid-1500s.

The dicocesan press release says

... bread alone makes it possible to receive all the fruit of the Eucharistic grace."

One diocesan priest, Rev. James Turner, told Clancy,

The majority of priests were stunned and aghast at the announcement, and I hear some are planning to meet to see how best to respond. While the bishop has the authority to make this policy change, there is no scriptural, theological or sacramental rationale that makes any sense.

Olmsted is a stickler for Church authority. He was last in national headlines in December when he stripped Catholic credentials off a Phoenix hospital founded by nuns when he disagreed with the hospital's decision to permit an abortion to save the life of a young mother with a life-threatening heart condition.

Clancy points out,

..No other diocese in the country is known to be following suit, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops told TheArizona Republic.

But a profile this summer in the Lincoln Journal Star of Bishop of Lincoln, Neb., Fabian Bruskewitz, reputed to be one of the most traditionalist bishops in the country indicated he has been following this approach long before the new Missal.

The new Missal -- a more formal, literally translated text and melodies for the prayers, chants and responses in the Mass -- goes into use in the English-speaking world Nov. 27, the first Sunday of Advent. The diocesan release didn't say how soon Phoenix Catholics could expect to see less of the chalice.

DO YOU THINK... Olmsted is leading the way back to tradition, or off the rails on this?

The new Baylor Religion Survey's findings that religious and economic views are fused together for many Americans intrigued me. So I ran it by two economists for their thoughts.

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Much of Baylor's findings "rang true" to economist Bill Beach, director of data analysis at the Heritage Foundation. He said.

I wouldn't go as far as saying God favors one economic system over another. I don't see a notion in the survey that government is inherently evil or inherently obstructionist but it can get in the way.

If you believe God has a plan for you, it's hard to work the plan and release the graces and talents you've been given if you have a growing dependency on government.

William Galston, a former domestic advisor to Bill Clinton, who now heads Governance Studies at the Brookings Institute, says the liberal view is equally interwoven in history.

If you are speaking to a main-line Protestant or Jewish audience or to those Catholics who stress social justice, the duty of society to the least among us has enormous influence.

There's a fusion between religiously based understandings of social justice —- including economic justice — with the development of liberalism in the 20th century.

DO YOU THINK ... your view of the economy is a matter of faith?

President Obama is "ramping up his 'God talk' for the re-election campaign," says political scientist John Green, director of the University of Akron's Bliss Institute of Applied Politics.

But Green and two other experts who track religious rhetoric in presidential politics speculate this strategy to connect with evangelical voters may not work for Obama.

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Green points out,

Obama didn't talk much about faith during his first two years in office and this has left 40% of Americans wondering just what, exactly, is his faith commitment. Now he is ramping up this kind of language and using it in the right kind of context.

Most recent examples: On Sunday, Obama recited Psalm 46 at the 9/11 memorial event in New York and quoted Psalm 30 that same night at a memorial concert at the Kennedy Center in Washington. In his televised national jobs bill speech, he declared,

We are one nation under God, we always have been and always will be.

These kinds of God mentions won't move the dial for conservative evangelicals but, Green says, they could be just right for ambivalent voters who "don't want a hard-edged faith shaping national politics."

David Domke, professor of communications at University of Washington, who tracks all religious references in candidates' speeches, said Obama's recent ways of raising God's name are big steps up from his routine "God Bless America" speech sign-off.

Domke calls this

Does Alzheimer's count as a kind of "death" when it comes to busting the marital vow 'Til death do us part?

Christianity Today broke the story and Manya Brachear at The Chicago Tribune took that question to ethics experts after televangelist Pat Robertson told a 700 Club caller that he could dump his stricken spouse to pursue other relationships because the memory-killing disease was "a kind of death." FOLLOW:Faith & Reason blog on Twitter

The Rev. David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University and author of the book Getting Marriage Right, told Brachear that Robertson might have been stumbling for an answer because evangelical Christians have never developed a clear theology for addressing rampant divorce in today's society.

Gushee pointed to the Gospels where, he said it's clear that "adultery, abandonment and abuse are the only legitimate reasons to end a marriage," Brachear writes.

Even so, Beth Kallmyer, director of constituent services for the Alzheimer's Association, which provides resources to sufferers and their families, told the Associated Press that divorce is uncommon among couples where one partner is suffering from Alzheimer's.

Michael Verde, an evangelical Christian who is founder and president of Memory Bridge, a non-profit that connects Alzheimer's patients with communities, said Alzheimer's victims experience profound loneliness and would be damaged by a spouse disappearing. Verde told Brachear:

Ask Pat Robertson: 'Is there ever a condition in which God would rightfully divorce us?' The answer is no."

Joni Eareckson Tada, wheelchair bound for decades after an accident and founder of Joni and Friends International Disability Center and popular speaker to evangelical audiences, was dismayed. In a press release, she said,

When a Christian leader views marriage on a sliding scale, what does this say to the millions of couples who must deal daily with catastrophic injuries and illnesses?

She said her center deals with

...thousands of couples who, despite living with serious disabling conditions, showcase the grace of God in their weakness every day. Marriage is designed to be a picture of God's sacrificial love for us.

DO YOU THINK... there's a moral exit from marriage vows if your partner is severely physically or mentally disabled? Is it 'a kind of death?'

Could it be that evangelicals were "snubbed" when no clergy were invited to the New York City official 9/11 memorial event?

Does it bother you that a rainbow of religious traditions -- but no conservative evangelical voices -- were invited to speak at the Washington National Cathedral's Sunday morning vigil?

Mollie Hemingway at the critique site Get Religion wondered why Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims but no Southern Baptists or pastors from the Lutheran Missouri Synod or the more traditionalist wing of Presbyterians were on the Cathedral program.

Other commentators thought the Episcopal Cathedral's clergy stood for the nation's scores of Christian denomination, just as the rabbi of Washington Hebrew Congregation, a Reform synagogue, stood for a dozen branches of Jewish tradition and so on.

Others argue some evangelicals didn't join the lineup at the microphones because they don't want to blend in to the scene.

After all, these are denominations that assiduously avoid sharing worship services with religions that disagree on core doctrines or fail to expressly insist that salvation is only through Jesus.

As Hemingway, a traditionalist Lutheran herself, points out:

We avoid civil religion and syncretistic worship. (Syncretism is a big word for mixing religions.)

Rev. Franklin Graham, who now leads his father's Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, stood outside the Washington National Cathedral in 2001. While his father spoke inside, Franklin served as a comentator with TV crews.

As this 10th anniversary neared, he wrote in Charisma News about how the sacrifice of innocent lives on that tragic date and thousands of service men and women in the subsequent wars is nothing compared to the "the debt each and every person owes to the Lord Jesus Christ for dying for our sins."

There's no call in Graham's column for brotherhood, forgiveness, mercy or interfaith understanding -- the themes of the services at Catholic Masses and interfaith services in Washington and around the country. His focus is always the same:

... Tell as many people as we can how they can be saved before it is eternally too late."

The daily devotion at BillyGraham.org for today concludes with a prayer: "Lord Jesus, Lamb of God, in adoration I thank You for the love that made You willing to suffer and die on the cross for my sin."

Rev. Rick Warren, pastor of the USA's fifth largest Protestant congregation, is holding his own 9/11 memorial prayer services in Southern California as his rebuttal to the clergy-free New York event.

Saddleback, which is affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention, has nine satellite locations in addition to its main campus in Lake Forest. All will hold special services, he wrote on his blog,

...to remember the hope we have in Christ despite the violence that was brought upon our country.

In 2001, clergy of the New York region held an interfaith prayer service in Yankee Stadium where Oprah Winfrey, famed for her spiritual cheerleading, served as the non-denominational host.

But in the aftermath, the head of the 2.6-million member Lutheran Church Missouri Synod's Atlantic Division, Pastor David Benke, was suspended. A higher officer of the national denomination in a letter that said,

Joining in prayer with pagan clerics in Yankee Stadium was an offense both to God and to all Christians."

Benke's suspension was later overturned by a denominational appeals panel. He still leads the district and the text of his 2001 prayer, for God to "un-bind, un-fear, un-scorch, un-sear our souls... in Jesus' name" is on the website.

In the end, on Sunday, there was an evangelical voice, albeit a mainline Protestant voice, at Ground Zero. President Obama recited Psalm 46.

DO YOU THINK ... all prayer, no matter who stands beside you, has equal merit? Or must you pray only with those who see God as you do?

With evangelical churches today, the word is 'big.'

Outreach Magazine is out today with its latest downloadable lists of the nation's top 100 largest Protestant churches and top 100 fastest-growing churches.

Leading large, as always, is Lakewood Church, Houston, with prolific author and TV broadcaster Joel Osteen at the helm. It's the size of some small towns.

But it also seems to have settled into the same grove of 43,500 people in weekend worship attendance for the past three years. Perhaps it's because overall growth is slowing for megachurches. Or perhaps that's because it's the one church at the top of the list that ignores the biggest trend of the last few years -- multi-site congregatons.

Next up:

• North Point Community Church, Alpharetta, Ga., led by Andy Stanley (27,429)
• Willow Creek Community Church, South Barrington, Ill., led by Bill Hybels (24,377)
• Southeast Christian Church, Louisville, Ky., led by Dave Stone (20,801)
• Saddleback Church, Lake Forest, Calif., led Rick Warren (19,742).

Saddleback is back in the top five with nine locations now.

Most multi-site churches make this work with a slew of "campus pastors" providing the kind of personalized touch of weddings and funerals while the founding pastor is the overall teaching voice, setting the doctrinal tone.

Of course, most of church-going Christian America still worships in congregations smaller than a few hundred with no fancy auditoriums or coffee bars in the loby to jazz up the experience.

Even so, the list comes packaged online with advice from experts such as a piece by sociologist Scott Thumma of the Hartford Institute of Religion Research at Hartford Seminary, who offers 10 lessons to learn from megachurches with their high-profile pastors. No. 4 on that list seemed to sum up several points:

Make it appealing, then make it challenging. Most visitors want to slip in anonymously and experience worship in a user-friendly manner. But don't leave newcomers at the "spectator stage." Christianity is about maturing in the faith. The goal of pastors and teachers is to help the body of Christ "become mature." Many megachurches provide intentional paths for new persons to move into deeper levels of the faith.

Ed Stetzer of LifeWay Research, which orchestrates the statistics for Outreach based on churches' self-reported numbers, observes that while big church pastors may have advice for start-up and smaller churches, they're out on the frontier themselves. Stetzer says:

The leadership territory for church leaders with attendance near or above 20,000 is such a small group that a lot of those folks have to figure out how to adapt with very little known or understood in "church" leadership circles. That used to be the case for churches over 5,000, now you have over 100 guys who could sit down with you and tell you how to do it.

Do you find the charm in a megachurch or prefer a more cozy setting for worship where you have a personal connection to the pastor?

Who has dominion over defining 'dominionism'?

It's the word of the month right now. Washington Post blogger/columnist Lisa Miller accused progressives and media of using it as a scare tactic to demonize evangelicals and beat up unfairly on Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry. Then the associate editor for the progressive voice, Religion Dispatches, whaled into Miller.

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Miller writes, in part, that "Evangelicals generally do not want to take over the world" and broadly describes "Dominionism" as...

... a Christian's obligation to be active in the world, including in politics and government. More narrowly, some view it as Christian nationalism.

... Extremist dominionists do exist, as theocrats who hope to transform our democracy into something that looks like ancient Israel, complete with stoning as punishment. But "it's a pretty small world," says (Mary) Worthen (who teaches religious history at the University of Toronto).

Mark DeMoss, whose Atlanta-based public relations firm represents several Christian groups, put it this way: "You would be hard-pressed to find one in 1,000 Christians in America who could even wager a guess at what dominionism is."

Peter Montgomery, an associate editor for Religion Dispatches and a Senior Fellow at People For the American Way Foundation, bites back:

Dominionism refers to a theological tenet at the core of the religious right movement -- that Christians are meant to exercise dominion over the earth...

It may be true, as evangelical leader Mark DeMoss says in Miller's story, that "you would be hard-pressed to find one in 1,000 Christians in America would could even wager a guess at what dominionism is." But it's certainly not true of the leaders of the religious right political movement. Their followers are hearing dominionist teaching whether they know it or not.

In Montgomery's piece there's plenty to fear as, he says, :

... a broad swath of conservative evangelical leadership to adopt a shared set of talking points, if you will, to unite theologically disparate elements in common political cause to defeat the Satanic/demonic enemies of faith and freedom: secularists, gays, liberals, and the Obama administration.

Can we set aside the question of "dominion" -- being in charge -- to look at a related set of questions? Here are mine:

Do you see anything wrong with being a political activist on behalf of God? Wouldn't human rights activists, peace activists and anti-poverty activists say they, too, are trying to carry out God's work on earth?