REELING IN THE YEAR
By RAY WADDLE

Year 2007 will …

-- mark the start of a 30-year civil war in Iraq.

-- witness deeper disagreements among evangelical Christians about the moral priority of global warming, poverty and AIDS in Africa.

-- see Democrats start to moderate their stand on abortion.

-- yield an 11th-hour opportunity for peace between Palestinians and Israel.

Those were new-year predictions among experts this week on PBS’s Religion and Ethics Newsweekly (Sundays at 5:30 p.m. on digital cable WNPT2).

Guests Rachel Zoll of the Associated Press and writers E.J. Dionne and Jeffrey Goldberg offered trends to watch. Upcoming benchmarks include: Anglican leaders meet in February in Tanzania hoping to keep their global denomination together despite conflict over homosexuality. Pope Benedict travels to Brazil in May to shore up Latin American Catholicism, which is losing members to Pentecostal-style churches.

The PBS show wisely avoided sensational prophecies. Predicting religious news is fascinating but futile. Events that end up dominating the year are the sudden calamities and high-profile missteps no one could have guessed.

The top story of 2006, according to the Religion Newswriters Association (RNA), was last spring’s violent Muslim reaction to satirical cartoons of Muhammad published in Europe. Newsmaker of the year was an entire community, the pacifist Pennsylvania Amish who rallied together and upheld forgiveness after the shooting deaths of schoolgirls in their midst.

Eclipsing nearly everything else was the year’s lengthy roll call of deaths of public icons, spiritual and otherwise. The roster included Coretta King, Adrian Rogers, Betty Friedan, J. K. Galbraith, Milton Friedman. Also Don Knotts, Billy Preston, Buck Owens, Wilson Pickett, Robert Altman, William Styron, Jeane Kirkpatrick. I could go on: Lou Rawls, Peter Benchley, Billy Cowsill, Dennis Weaver, Caspar Weinberger, Louis Rukeyser, Lloyd Bentsen, Aaron Spelling, Syd Barrett, Mike Douglas, Mickey Spillane, Maynard Ferguson, Red Auerbach, Jack Palance.

The final week shook us with the passing of James Brown (spiritual father of funk), Gerald Ford (the last moderate president before culture war radicalized public religion) and Saddam Hussein (whose swift execution sobered the world on New Year’s weekend and re-ignited debate about capital punishment).

President Ford’s funeral at National Cathedral this week should be an enduring 2007 highlight for its televised dignity. Never does a traditional church service, complete with scripture readings, usurp the benumbed parade of soaps and game shows on a Tuesday morning. It was a religious witness more meaningful than a thousand televangelists’ tears.

Despite the folly of trying, let’s offer three other trends for 2007:

-- China the economic power emerges as a spiritual power with the surge of a home-grown Christianity.

-- Debate intensifies over political differences between island Islam (places like Indonesia) and desert Islam (Mideast).

-- Wicca gets more attention. It is, by some measures, the fastest growing religion in America.

Here’s one more: A “wear-your-Sunday-best” movement gains speed to protest the T-shirt-and-flip-flops casualness of U.S. worship attendance. You read it here first.

(Columnist Ray Waddle, a former Tennessean staffer, can be reached at ray@raywaddle.com.)