Remember that reporter vice I discussed last week? If you need a refresher: Reporters and people and people are prone to temptation and maybe the greatest temptation of a reporter on deadline for a story they aren’t married to is to rely, often over-rely, on previously quoted experts.

This is the way little-known academics or think-tank folks or advocacy organizations become go-to sources. That’s not to say sometimes the reputation isn’t deserved; in many cases it is. But even when it is deserved, there is a dearth of voices that begins to appear over the life cycle of a newsworthy story.

This appears to not be an issue for Lance Benzel, a reporter for the Colorado Springs Gazette. The proof is in the pudding. The pudding is Benzel’s version of the story about the Pagan worship site at the Air Force Academy, which was the impetus for my previous reporter-vice post.

The article is short and sweet, but does what’s necessary. Benzel includes a great detail about the design of the cross, which was made with two railroad ties, and, more importantly, revealed facts that all his competitors at the big papers, the folks who parachuted in, missed. For example:

Wiccans, pagans and other followers of Earth-centered religions have been active on campus for at least a decade, and are now among 14 religious groups recognized under a program that sets aside time for cadets to worship on their own, said cadet wing chaplain Lt. Col. William Ziegler III.

“We’re here to serve as caretakers to support every cadet’s religious freedoms,” Ziegler said of Special Programs in Religious Education, or SPIRE.

Really? Every story I read suggested that if it ain’t evangelical, then it ain’t welcome at the Air Force Academy.

Benzel, like the AP and unlike the Los Angeles Times, also talks with the lay leader of the AFA’s Pagan group, Tech. Sgt. Brandon Longcrier. (I’m still shocked Longcrier didn’t make it into the LAT piece.) And, shocker, no mention of Mikey Weinstein here, though Benzel still — miraculously — managed to mention the sentiment that the academy did not take the cross incident seriously enough.

Longcrier charged the academy downplayed his Jan. 17 complaint about the incident, which he called a hate crime.

Unlike in the LAT article, this allegation wasn’t in the lede and wasn’t overemphasized, and no part of Benzel’s reportage felt like it was based on a press release. All in all, well played.

If you want to be truly depressed, read this New York Times report that ran under the headline: “Bleak Portrait of Haiti Orphanages Raises Fears.” Here’s the start of Ginger Thompson’s report from Port-au-Prince:

The floors were concrete and the windows were broken.

There was no electricity or running water. Lunch looked like watery
grits. Beds were fashioned from sheets of cardboard. And the only
toilet did not work.

But the Foyer of Patience here is like hundreds of places that pass as orphanages for thousands of children in the poorest country in the hemisphere. Many are barely habitable, much less licensed. They have no means to provide real schooling or basic medical care, so children spend their days engaged in mindless activities, and many die from treatable illnesses.

Haiti’s child welfare system was broken before the earthquake struck. But as the quake shattered homes and drove hundreds of thousands of people into the streets, the number of children needing care grew exponentially.

The bottom line: Haitian authorities have every reason to believe that orphaned, abandoned and needy children are ending up in the hands of people whose motives are certainly much worse than the now infamous 10 Baptists from Idaho who remain at the center of an international media frenzy.

Many children are on their way to being sold as servants and sex slaves. Some of these victims are passing through “orphanages.” Many more are not. As the Times noted:

While there is no evidence that the Americans, who said they were trying to rescue children in the aftermath of the earthquake, intended any harm, the ease with which they drove into the capital and scooped up a busload of children without documents exposed vast gaps in the system’s safeguards. …

At the front lines of the system are the orphanages, which run the gamut from large, well-equipped institutions with international financing to one-room hovels in a slum where a single woman cares for abandoned children as best she can.

Most of the children in them, the authorities said, are not orphans, but children whose parents are unable to provide for them. To desperate parents, the orphanage is a godsend, a temporary solution to help a child survive a particularly tough economic stretch. Many orphanages offer regular family visiting hours and, when their situations improve, parents are allowed to take their children back home.

The Southern Baptists from Idaho said claim that the purpose of their short-term, independent mission was to set up just such an orphanage — across the border. The claim that some of the true orphans were candidates for adoption and that those with family in Haiti were not. The reporting in the Times has repeatedly demonstrated the confusion surrounding these claims, with new questions being raised in almost every report.

Then there is the even darker world of the criminal networks. Were the Baptists caught because they were not corrupt enough?

There is no precise count of the number of orphanages in this country, the number of children living in them, or of the children who are victims of trafficking, although Unicef estimates that number in the tens of thousands per year. The authorities said thousands of those trafficked were sold as servants, known as restaveks, to well-to-do Haitian families. Others, officials say, are smuggled into the Dominican Republic to do domestic and agricultural work, often in appalling conditions. …

Haitian authorities acknowledge that the fledgling efforts of a financially struggling government long plagued by corruption have proved little match for the highly organized, multimillion-dollar criminal networks.

After reading the latest wave of reporting on this case, I have two main questions — especially since it is clear that the members of the Idaho team were outsiders who do not speak Creole.

(1) While the Americans were said to have lacked at least one crucial document when they tried to cross the border, who obtained and filled out all of the documents that were already in their possession? Who handled the earlier contacts with the government?

(2) Who were the Haitians who handled the contacts with the distressed local parents, before and after the Idaho team arrived? Who communicated the terms of the offer? Who, supposedly, received the consent of these Haitian parents?

In other words, who served as the bridge between Laura Silsby, the controversial businesswoman who led the Idaho team, and its partners on the ground in Haiti? As another Times report notes:

Family and friends of the group members have said little critical of Ms. Silsby or the churches that helped promote the trip. Mr. Lankford said that he was not sure how well his family members knew Ms. Silsby, but that their understanding was that logistical and legal details in Haiti were “being taken care of.”

Haitian officials say Ms. Silsby lacked documentation to take custody of and travel with the children. A lawyer in Haiti for the group, Edwin Coq, suggested to reporters this week that Ms. Silsby might face a difficult prosecution. … When Mr. Coq was asked about the other nine Americans, he echoed their friends and relatives here: “completely innocent,” he said.

The stories keep spiraling back to a central question: Who made the arrangements on the ground in Haiti, handling the contacts with the families and the incomplete contacts with the government?

The odds are very good that they speak Creole.

Even though officially I was rooting for the Indianapolis Colts, that was a very enjoyable Superbowl game. Both teams really deserved to be at the game and it was, overall, very well played.

But wow were many of the commercials I saw awful. (To be fair, I was making Lester LeBlanc’s jambalaya and was distracted as well by my children. I missed many ads.)

Anyway, we were midway through the first quarter when my husband and I were aghast at the misogyny and the portrayal of men as bumbling idiots. Now that I’m a mother, I actually worry about the messages some of these advertisements impart. They teach children that woman’s only value is sexual and that men can only resent women, not respect them. One ad actually took the position that adult behavior (e.g. picking up after one’s self) is so odious and emasculating that it means men can fight back by picking out their own mid-level car. Sad.

To be sure, there were some positive messages in commercials — this Dove ad portrayed men in a positive light and this Google ad strongly supported marriage and children — but by and large advertisers seemed to be aiming for an audience of subliterate haters of ladies. But hey, I’m married to a man who values me more than his tires (yep, one company actually tried to sell tires by having a husband choose them over his wife).

I actually think that respect between the sexes is an important topic fraught with religious ghosts. My own views on the respect that should be accorded to men and women are religiously based and my religious tradition encourages strong men and women and encourages the sexes to honor each other. But I doubt we’ll see much discussion of whether advertising should aim higher than this year’s Superbowl advertisers did, much less whether such a discussion would include religious voices.

The Associated Press wrote up an overview of the commercials with a much more favorable view. Marketing reporter Emily Fredrix said the overall message of the advertisements was humor:

The commercials got off to a funny start Sunday night on CBS, with companies like Anheuser-Busch and Coca-Cola going straight for chuckles. … But not every commercial was strictly humorous. Automaker Toyota aired several pregame ads to reassure worried owners after its recalls connected with accelerator problems.

And a commercial by conservative Christian group Focus on the Family, perhaps the most anticipated ad of the night, hinted at a serious subject although it took a humorous tone too. Heisman winner Tim Tebow and his mother talk about her difficult pregnancy with him and how she was advised to end the pregnancy — implying an antiabortion message — but ended with Tebow tackling his mom and saying the family must be “tough.”

Um. Wrong. You can view the Focus on the Family ad above. Tebow and his mother do not talk about her difficult pregnancy or how she was advised to end it. It didn’t end with Tebow tackling his mom but that did happen in the middle of the 30-second spot. Speaking of, how hard is it to correctly report on a 30-second commercial? And you’d think the reporter would be highly incentivized to report accurately, considering that hundreds of millions of people watched the ad. There was also a pre-Superbowl ad featuring the Tebows. But that ad doesn’t mention abortion or advice to end a pregnancy either. You can view that one here. Our colleague Brad apparently watched “the rest of the story” at the Focus web site and even there, he said, the discussion was about the special plan God had for Tebow’s life.

Here’s the actual text of the Superbowl ad, if you’re interested.

The New York Times didn’t mention the ad in its wrap-up piece but the advertising reporter did write extensively about it in his live-blog of the evening’s ads. It’s apparent that he comes to his job with a particular angle. He, oddly, praised one ad that suggested pics of hottie Megan Fox could be so steamy as to come between gay lovers (he said it was an example of “inclusion” as opposed to the “exclusion” marked by CBS refusing to sell advertising to gay dating site ManCrunch.com.). But I thought this excerpt from his description of the actual Superbowl ad was interesting:

The spot was slick and well done; a casual viewer might not have any idea it was from an organization as opposed to abortion as Focus on the Family. It used a production style and tone that is typical of Oprah Winfrey: upbeat, seemingly free of ideology, including chirpy music.

The appearance of the spot has opened a debate on whether advocacy and issue ads belong on a Super Bowl, which has become an unofficial midwinter American holiday. If the answer is yes, there may come a time when watching the Super Bowl will be like watching TV in a swing state like Ohio or Florida the Sunday before a presidential election, with commercials taking sides showing up every couple of minutes.

Now, I know that other advocacy and issue ads aired during the Superbowl. This political ad for Rick “The Nerd” Snyder ran in Michigan. Here in DC, we got one from the Employment Policies Institute decrying the national debt.

And yet even though actual Superbowl viewers have been treated to actual advocacy ads all the time (even if sold through their local networks), this seems to be the meme that folks are running with. Here, for instance, is Yahoo! Sports’ Jay Busbee saying that until yesterday, all Superbowl ads stayed very far away from the “charged worlds of politics, religion and morality.” I would argue that all marketing and consumption decisions are moral decisions but even if you don’t take such an expansive view, I’m sure we can all agree that Superbowl ads (mini-movies, really) frequently deal with moral issues. This Audi ad that aired yesterday, for instance, took on the environmentalist movement even as it touted a pro-environment message. Moral and political messages, there.

The Yahoo! article raises some interesting questions about whether Tebow can be an effective spokesman in the post-Tiger Woods-scandal world if he only appeals to pro-life consumers. Many of the questions raised would make for good articles:

Certainly, one of America’s most fundamental rights is that every organization has the right to speak its piece. And if said organization happens to have the millions necessary to buy airtime during the Super Bowl, there’s a valid argument for allowing them to do so. But what about the many millions who look at the Super Bowl as an escape from the thorny political and moral issues of the day, who want nothing more than to watch some football and laugh at a few amusing ads along the way? Should money and political ambition trump the original purpose of the game? Do we need to have moral and ethical discussions involved in every corner of our lives? Or is that exactly what we need?

You know, I’m not sure I see much of a difference between being treated to ads featuring the objectification of women, the emasculation of men, and the glorification of consumerism — and issue advocacy ads. Fact is, I might prefer the latter, no matter who they’re from. Still, it’s funny to see so many in the media treat the former advertisements as pure and holy and the latter as somehow corrupt.

What were your favorite ads? Have you seen any good or bad media coverage of the Superbowl ads, paying particular attention to moral or religious issues?

Well, this is Super Sunday and all of that, so it’s fitting that young master Brad started us off with a God and the gridiron post.

I’ve already seen a Pam and Tim Tebow advertisement several times during the pre-game show this afternoon — which may have well as started last night — and the contents seemed very tame, in terms of being a major event in the Culture Wars. I wonder if there is a stronger ad coming during the game itself. Normally, you don’t call something a “Super Bowl ad” unless it airs after the kickoff.

Meanwhile, Sarah Pulliam Bailey is on a train heading out oh Washington, D.C., where she has been trapped by snow for several days. She’s trying to get to Philadelphia, where she thinks she will have a better chance to break through the crush at the airport. Tell me about it. My flight out of Baltimore today was canceled (trying to get to Indianapolis to start six days of visiting campuses in the Midwest). Will I get out tomorrow? Who knows.

This part of the country is really buried in snow today. So be patient if you are waiting for Sarah responses to comment-page stuff. She hopes to be online later.

Still, there is another way to get her on the blog today. The other day, she wrote an op-ed page commentary for the Wall Street Journal that ran with the headline, “Where God Talk Gets Sidelined — Sports journalists are reluctant to tackle faith on the field.” Here’s a crucial section of the piece:

Peter King, a senior writer for Sports Illustrated, admits his own skepticism when players bring up their faith after a game. “I’ve seen enough examples of players who claim to be very religious and then they get divorced three times or get in trouble with the law,” Mr. King said earlier this week. “I’m not sure that the public is crying out for us to discover the religious beliefs of the athletes we’re writing about.”

Faith is the belief in things unseen. Sportswriters are trained to write about the observable. “One of the problems that we have is determining the veracity of a person’s claim that he has just won this game for his Lord and Savior Jesus Christ,” Mr. King said.

In the Baltimore Sun before last year’s Super Bowl, Washington Post reporter Rick Maese characterized his fellow journalists as “notebook-toting cynics who worship at the altar of the free media buffet.” But he softened his language and cut his colleagues some slack when I spoke to him recently. A sports reporter might write one story with a strong religion angle and feel like the idea is no longer fresh for the next athlete he covers, Mr. Maese told me. “It’s not like the reporter’s going to bring an athlete’s beliefs or religious affiliation up out of the blue,” he said. But “if that’s something the player cites as a motivating factor, I don’t think you’re telling the full story if you don’t explore that angle a little bit.”

Read it all. The key, for me, has always been for reporters to treat religious claims as more than faith lingo. Check it out. Do some reporting. Ask for some statistics about church involvement and giving. Try to find evidence that the claims are true.

In other words, be skeptical — not silent. See if the athletes are walking their talk. Journalists are allowed to do that.

Enjoy the game and watch the coverage for religion ghosts.

It’s Super Bowl Sunday, which means today is a super day to discuss coverage of faithful football coaches. Although, in this case it’s two former Super Bowl winning coaches. One, Tony Dungy, is taken on a new role of mentor to troubled players. The other, Mike Holmgren, is the new czar of the Browns and the second biggest macher in Cleveland, right after King James.

Both Dungy and Holmgren recently received major profiles on ESPN.com and in the Plain-Dealer, respectively. What was wonderful about both these reports was the degree of attention they directed at the Godly motivations for both these men. Let’s start with the Dungy piece, where the Godtalk was teased in the “Higher Calling” feature head:

Dungy, whom close friends have called a messenger of God, cuts a different figure from many of his peers, one born of faith, the loss of a child and commitment. He believes deeply in his powers to reach and rehabilitate by listening, by extending to others in ways that seem to expand his borders beyond the self while also feeding it. It seems as though his reclamation projects are not the only people Dungy is attempting to make whole again. …

He cannot, of course, provide redemption. Messengers do not have that power. Although it is a role he says he has never actively sought, it is also one Dungy does not discourage. He has accepted the mission, and the rare and subtle combination of nationwide respect and moral authority have transformed Dungy into one of sport’s most powerful figures, and he is at once aware that he must gauge whether those seeking his help are only using him to launder their soiled images or truly desire redemption.

“The people I’ve tried to invest in, whether they are famous or unknown, it has always been with people who are going to try to do the right thing,” Dungy said. “There may be some people I chose not to work with and they may have been willing to do the kind of work I didn’t think they were capable of, and thus I was wrong about them. But there hasn’t been that person yet who fooled me, who I was willing to put my time into and then found out they weren’t willing to make any effort.”

At the top of that list is Michael Vick. This past fall there was also Oregon’s star running back LeGarrette Blount. Reporter Howard Bryant asked Dungy whether he talked about Christianity with his mentees. He did, but said that wasn’t a requisite to his counseling.

The article, which builds up the theme that Dungy is the sporting world’s moral messiah, ends with a section referring to him as the very noble successor to Arthur Ashe. It’s a reference lost on me, but, as a fellow Bruin, I have the utmost respect for the late great Ashe.

This closing section makes some passes at the manifestations of Dungy’s faith, which I had been waiting for, and takes a swipe at his conservative politics. But it doesn’t really answer the religious background questions in the way I would have expected a profile of this depth — especially one that is so keyed into the religious import of Dungy’s life and work. This seems to be a recurring problem in stories about Dungy’s faith.

In fact, this is a general problem sportswriters have. Even when we’re talking about Kurt Warner.

That’s what made the Plain-Dealer’s profile of Holmgren so remarkable. First, if you had forgotten that Cleveland was a football town and that the Browns were once football royalty — under Otto Graham they made 11 straight championship games, winning eight — just read the 2,000 article welcoming Holmgren to town:

For the 6-5 hulk of a man with a gentle, embracing glow about him, it’s family and faith, friends and then football, in that order.

Technically, I think that is slightly out of order, and not because football should be first. But Bill Lubinger goes on to give us a decent window into the religious underpinnings of a football giant:

“These are very grounded people,” said family friend Sue Gost, director of events at North Park University, a Christian liberal arts college on Chicago’s northwest side.

Owned by the Evangelical Covenant Church, in which generations of the Swedish-bred Holmgrens have been devout members, North Park is where Kathy Holmgren, Mike’s wife of 38 years, their four grown daughters and two sons-in-law graduated. It’s also where the five-sport, $4 million Holmgren Athletic Complex stands as a tangible sign of their significant financial contributions.

The Holmgrens, who have six grandchildren, met at 13 while on their families’ annual church summer camp vacations in the Santa Cruz mountains. They professed their mutual interest by writing their names on a water tower.

He jokes that zeroing in on his life’s partner so young proves his eye for talent. Their union in 1971 also cemented their faith in the Covenant Church, which not only guides the Holmgren family spiritually but their involvement in international missionary work. They recently attended a service at Bethany Covenant Church in Lyndhurst, where the pastor is a North Park graduate and family acquaintance.

“In life it can get to be too hard sometimes and I don’t know if you don’t foundationally have something to hold on to other than just being, I don’t know how people do it,” he said. “I guess I don’t wear it on my sleeve. I’m not out there banging the pulpit all the time, but it is who I am.”

The more I read this story, the more I liked it. That may be because it was structured how I imagine I would have structured it. The writing is good and though some questions go unanswered, and you long for a little more depth, Lubinger gives about as much detail about Holmgren’s religious life as one could hope for in a story of this nature.

When I broke into mainstream religion writing about 1980, one of the leaders of Religion Newswriters Association was Louis Moore of the Houston Chronicle, which during that era had one of America’s dominant religion sections.

I met Moore when I was a Baylor University undergraduate, in part because we was a Baylor alum and, thus, we shared a mentor — the legendary journalism professor David McHam. Moore worked in the mainstream as a religion-beat specialist and then went into newspaper management.

Eventually, his strong Southern Baptist ties and credentials kicked in and he became a national level press-office executive for the nation’s second largest religious group, working first in public affairs and then in foreign missions. Today he runs a small publishing house called Hannibal Books.

Moore has always been the kind of guy who speaks his mind, as demonstrated in “Witness to the Truth,” his recent memoir about his life on both sides of the reporter’s notebook. Click here if you want to read my Scripps Howard News Service column about his views on secrecy and candor in the halls of Southern Baptist power, both among “moderates” and conservatives.

All of this is to say that, on his own blog, Moore has shared his thoughts on the sad situation down in Haiti. Suffice it to say, he understands that — since Southern Baptist congregations are free to do just about whatever they want to — the ability of the convention’s official International Mission Board to control the situation was limited.

However, that does not mean that there are no lessons that can be learned here. After sharing an anecdote about a similar train wreck that once happened in North Korea, Moore writes:

Southern Baptist leaders quickly note that what happened in Haiti was the work of individuals from an autonomous, independent congregation. You can almost hear them throwing in the disclaimer “overzealous.” Technically correct, these leaders act shocked and bewildered over the situation. For political as well as legal reasons, they are trying to stay aloof from the embarrassing circumstances while offering compassionate prayers for the 10 people and their families.

Nevertheless, someone needs to ask the central question here — Are denominational leaders truly innocent and non-culpable in this and other situations? The policy of the SBC is for volunteer mission groups from autonomous, independent congregations to go worldwide to witness to any and every people group in the world — and they truly mean to every people group in every country in the world, with no exceptions. This has been the policy of the SBC for at least 15 years. SBC leaders over and over preach the need for presenting the gospel to every people group on the planet.

The natural corollary of that dogma is that people are going. Individual Southern Baptists from autonomous, independent congregations are streaming overseas at ever-increasing numbers. Denominational leaders are not even sure how many are going; they just know large numbers are heeding their pleas. The question is, are Southern Baptist leaders truly preparing these hoards for the inevitable conflicts and difficulties volunteers such as the Idahoans … encountered?

And, for Moore, what is the bottom line? Remember that these words are coming from a very outspoken and very conservative evangelical:

Now is the time for SBC leaders to step forward and to take responsibility for their actions in preaching the message of “go” but not providing the proper training to keep missteps such as the ones in Haiti from happening. Better yet, some ranking SBC leader, who has been preaching the “go” message, ought to step up to the plate and volunteer to be imprisoned in the place of the 10 people now being held in that country.

By all means, read it all.

Photo: From a slide show featured on the home page of the SBC’s International Mission Board. Members of Shiloh Baptist Church in Port-au-Prince ask for prayers as they gather outside what’s left of their church building. Four church leaders, including the pastor, Bienne Lamerique, were killed in the quake.

I attended my seventh National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, so it’s been fun to read journalists’ interpretation of the snake handling going on there.

Just kidding. Most of the coverage I’ve seen seems focused on President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s address, including their expressed concern over Uganda’s anti-homosexuality bill. Here is a section of a Washington Post’s report about that:

The prayer breakfast has been held in Washington for more than half a century, and every president since Dwight D. Eisenhower has taken part. The watchdog group Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington had written a letter asking Obama to boycott the event, saying its sponsor, the Fellowship Foundation, is a “shadowy religious association” that preaches “an unconventional brand of Christianity.” It also said the group is linked to efforts by Uganda’s political leadership to pass anti-gay legislation, including the death penalty for HIV-infected people convicted of having sex with someone of the same gender.

And just like that, a reporter can quote allegations that have been made by an advocacy group and call it journalism. Why doesn’t Michael A. Fletcher do his own reporting to find out whether The Fellowship, which hosts the breakfast, is linked to the bill? I guess that would take more work than simply linking to the Huffington Post.

I’ve harped on this before, but The New York Times also seems adamant in their efforts to connect The Fellowship to the Ugandan legislation. The latest report from the usually excellent reporter Laurie Goodstein appears to indicate that she did not attempt to contact anyone in Uganda. Here are the sections of her report that try to make the connection between The Fellowship and the Ugandan legislation.

The objections are focused on the sponsor of the breakfast, a secretive evangelical Christian network called The Fellowship, also known as The Family, and accusations that it has ties to legislation in Uganda that calls for the imprisonment and execution of homosexuals. …

More recently, it became public that the Family also has close ties to the Ugandan politician who has sponsored the proposed anti-gay legislation. … Wayne Besen, executive director of Truth Wins Out, a gay rights group, said he initiated the prayer-hour idea because many religious Americans who attend the breakfasts have no idea about the connection to the Family and the anti-gay legislation.

It seems odd that an international newspaper would not try to go to the source of the conflict. Has anyone attempted to talk to someone in Uganda about the alleged connection between the Ugandan legislation and The Fellowship?

Meanwhile, back to the prayer breakfast itself. There has been a little kerfuffle over Obama’s mispronunciation of corpsman. The bigger mistake, I think, was Obama’s mispronunciation of the name of Joshua DuBois, who heads the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships. I thought I was mishearing things, but I watched the C-SPAN video again and then listened to an NPR clip. Yep, DuBois’s name is pronounced Du-bwa. I don’t think journalists should play gotcha journalism, but he mispronounced someone’s name in his own administration.

As I was reading reports, I stumbled on the correction to The Caucus blog post at The New York Times. I don’t like to take glee in reporter’s mistakes, but GetReligion readers might find it particularly interesting.

An earlier version of this post quoted incorrectly from comments by President Obama, who referred to the Tower of Babel, not the “tower of babble.”

It’s an honest mistake, but perhaps it could be attributed to some biblical illiteracy at the Times.

Finally, aside from a brief mention, few of the reports noted that former Florida Gators quarterback Tim Tebow gave the closing prayer. I’ve been getting e-mails about how CNN decided not to air Tebow’s prayer (subsequently not aired on C-SPAN), so maybe that has something to do with it. He didn’t give a pro-life plea, so sure, maybe it’s not that newsworthy. But why is the shoddy video I took on my cell phone getting more than 9,000 hits already?

To the Washington Post copy desk:

I know it’s a really busy day, with the blizzard blowing in and all, but I wanted to make sure that your received a copy of the following letter from a strategic leader of the American Baptist Churches/USA. I think I received at least three copies of it by email yesterday and it seems that it was sent to news organizations across the nation.

Then again, I’m a journalist who specializes in covering religion news. People send me things like this all the time.

The wording in this online version focuses on broadcast journalism, although I could have sworn that I received a neutral or print version.

Dear Sir or Madam:

As I watched your report of the Baptists arrested for suspicion of kidnapping the children, I was concerned about mis-communication in your report. While the people involved are Baptists from the United States, they are not American Baptists, a title belonging to the churches who are part of the American Baptist Churches/USA based in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Please correct this in future broadcasts.

The American Baptist Churches/USA are very involved in earthquake relief through our partnerships in Haiti as well as through our missionaries there. We do not want any misunderstanding of our work.

Sincerely,

Ruth Clark
President, Board of International Ministries

I hope that this letter is helpful. Words matter, on the religion beat — kind of like politics, or sports, or the food page.

Sincerely,

Terry Mattingly
GetReligion.org

Oh well, whatever, nevermind.

I realize by now that many GetReligion readers really do not care about this picky little journalism issue. However, the American Baptists care about it and that’s enough for me. There are plenty of ways to get around this particular issue in news style while writing stories about the now infamous Southern Baptists from Idaho.

You think? Alas, here’s the latest from the Post:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — Ten American Baptists who said they wanted to save orphans after Haiti’s earthquake were charged with child kidnapping Thursday in a case that has raised fears about the trafficking of minors.

The Americans, most of whom belong to a Baptist church in Idaho, were arrested last week after they tried to enter the Dominican Republic in a bus loaded with 33 children, ages 2 to 12. The group’s attorney here in Port-au-Prince, Edwin Coq, told reporters that nine of his 10 clients had little idea what they were doing.

Note, please, the “American Baptist” wording is still in the lede. Note, also, the missed opportunity to simply add the word “Southern” in front of the words “Baptist church” at the start of the second paragraph.

Nowhere in the article is there a word — zero, zip, nada — that tells readers anything about the denominational affiliation of this ill-fated mission project. Then again, that might require explaining that, while this group is from a Southern Baptist congregation, it was acting totally on its own, not in cooperation with foreign missions efforts planned by the Southern Baptist Convention (the nation’s second largest religious group, after the Catholic Church). It might require explaining something about how Baptists work.

How did another major news organization open a similar update on this story? Let’s try the New York Times:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti — Ten Americans who tried to take 33 Haitian children out of the country last week without the government’s consent have been charged with child abduction and criminal conspiracy, as Haitian officials sought to reassert judicial control after the Jan. 12 earthquake.

The Americans, most of them members of a Baptist congregation from Idaho, had said they intended to rescue Haitian children left parentless in the quake and take them to what they described as an orphanage across the border in the Dominican Republic. But they acknowledged failing to seek approval to remove the children from Haiti, and several of the children have at least one living parent.

This story contains all kinds of new information on the case and, as in previous efforts, the Times has been talking to Haitians and focusing on other trends that have helped turn this case into an international incident.

It’s also interesting — note the video at the top of this post — that some journalists have discovered that there are Haitian religious leaders linked to this story. In fact, the Baptists from Idaho claim that Haitian pastors and former Haitians made most of the arrangements that set this train wreck in motion. So far, however, I have seen no evidence of legal authorities focusing on the Haitian connections. Clearly, this story is not going away anytime soon.

The Times report ends with yet another wrinkle in the case, yet another reason for making a capital case out of the misadventures of this independent Baptist group:

One expert said that by pursuing the case Haitian authorities seemed to be trying to make a point.

“Haiti’s decision to prosecute the Baptist missionaries may be motivated, in part, by the need to show its own people and the world that it is a viable entity that is tackling the grave problem of international child abductions in Haiti,” Christopher J. Schmidt, a lawyer with Bryan Cave L.L.P. in St. Louis who has been involved in multiple cases of international kidnapping, said in a statement.

An American expert said that. I wonder what people think in Haiti?

In conjunction with yesterday’s annual prayer breakfast in Washington D.C., everybody’s got politics and religion on their mind. Or perhaps more appropriately, the religion of our politicians. The Washington Post’s Anne Kornblut saw it as a fitting occasion to reexamine the religiosity of the President. The headline on the piece, “Obama’s spirituality is largely private, but it’s influential, advisers say” seemed to appropriately reflect the complexity of the issue, so I had high hopes for the story.

Those hopes were misplaced. A colleague of mine at the newspaper where I work described the piece as “Chicken soup for the presidential soul.” He was deriding the piece, but I don’t think that tart summation is altogether inaccurate:

When Obama appears at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington on Thursday morning — a regular presidential ritual — it will mark the rare occasion when he puts religion in the foreground. In that appearance, he will discuss “the need for civility in the public square, and how Americans can work together in a spirit of goodwill,” a senior administration official said.

Yet close advisers to the president said the role of faith, while subtle, has been noticeable in and around the Obama White House. One senior official described the president as “a prayerful guy.” Another said that Obama has consulted religious leaders less often for his own personal guidance than for help walking through major public decisions — such as during the Afghanistan review process, when he sought advice on the ethical implications of war.

I realize that the delicate tango the White House press corps dances with its West Wing sources has been problematic long before Obama assumed office, but you can’t get “a senior official” to go record as describing the President as a “prayerful guy”? Yeesh.

It would also be interesting to know more details about how the president relies on religious leaders to puzzle out decisions, as that Afghan review process tidbit hints at. But no such luck. I was hungering for more detail throughout the piece:

At other moments, Obama prays privately, his advisers said. And when he takes his family to Camp David on the weekends, a Navy chaplain ministers to them, with the daughters attending a form of Sunday school there.

More than a year into his presidency, Obama has not chosen a church in Washington, and has attended services just four times. No single figure has assumed the role of spiritual adviser — publicly, at least — or filled the vacancy created when Obama disavowed his former Chicago pastor, Jeremiah Wright.

Okay, so Obama has not chosen a church yet — but he has a Navy chaplain minister to them on the weekends at Camp David and gives his daughters religious instruction. I’m interested in knowing more about who that chaplain is. Does he come from a specific denomination or tradition? (Yes.) How exactly are the Obamas going about their worship life and religious instruction (other than with the aid of Blackberries)? I’m sure I’m not the only one curious about this.

That said, religion is a private matter to some people and I respect that. Certainly, even the President shouldn’t feel compelled to broadcast every aspect of his faith. But if Obama is now keeping his religion under wraps, I think that should be critically explored. He wasn’t exactly private about his faith on the campaign trail and was previously not shy about offering his opinions on the subject of religion in his books and in other settings. If he’s suddenly private about his faith now, doesn’t that require some critical examination? For instance, did the Jeremiah Wright debacle have anything to do with the sudden desire privacy?

But instead of looking at some of those questions, we get a series of softballs floated across the plate for various administration officials to hit out of the park:

A third senior adviser, Valerie Jarrett, said Obama’s private religious beliefs have helped sustain his temperament during trying times in office. “Part of that even temperament comes from his faith which is an important component,” Jarrett said. Asked why the public did not hear much about his faith during his first year in office, she nodded and said, “He’s had a lot on his plate.”

Also another small nit pick, the article refers to “Joshua Dubois, director of the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships.” DuBois spells his name with capital B. Not exactly a major error, but worth noting. All in all, I have to say this article is a major coup for the White House press office, but I don’t think it exactly burnishes Anne Kornblut’s escutcheon. She’s done much more thoughtful work than this.

It’s been a while since we’ve heard from Richard Cizik, who ably served as the National Association of Evangelicals’ liaison to Washington, D.C. for decades.

In a 2008 interview with NPR’s Terry Gross, Cizik tested the limits of evangelical political orthodoxy by revealing that he liked Obama and was growing more favorable to civil unions for gays.

Within days, he was out of a job, following in the footsteps of leaders of the National Religious Broadcasters and the Evangelical Press Association who had years earlier been given the right foot of fellowship after angering powerful, conservative gatekeepers within those organizations.

Now Cizik is back with a new organization and a new agenda. He told Newsweek’s Lisa Miller all about it in a Newsweek Web Exclusive.

America’s evangelicals exiled their leader for insufficient orthodoxy. Now he’s back, and he’s unrepentant.

After a year of keeping a low profile, Cizik is “making a comeback,” as he puts it. This week he announces the formation of the New Evangelical Partnership for the Common Good, a group devoted to developing Christian responses to global and political issues such as environmentalism, nuclear disarmament, human rights, and dialogue with the Muslim world. Cizik’s partners in this effort are David Gushee, a professor of Christian ethics at Mercer University who has written extensively on torture, and Steven D. Martin, a pastor and filmmaker. For years, Cizik has been saying that the evangelical right needs to reframe its politics, to walk away from divisive name calling and find common ground with opponents, even on hot-button issues like abortion and gay marriage. “We are evangelical in our roots and orientation, but we aren’t going to work only with evangelicals,” explains Gushee.

There are plenty of potential landmines in a story like this, but Miller expertly avoids most of them. Miller does a particularly good job of moving beyond black-and-white stereotypes to place Cizik in a broader context of an evangelical movement that is both evolving and still predominantly conservative on several issues.

Critics will say that Cizik has gone soft or, worse, that he’s allowed himself to be co-opted by the left: he’s the token conservative evangelical with the progressive agenda who gets trotted out as evidence that conservative evangelicals no longer care about the issues that once mattered so much to them. (This broad point of view, though embraced by many in the left-wing press, is not supported by polls. Younger evangelicals are concerned with a broader range of issues than their parents, especially environmentalism and the developing world, but they are more conservative on abortion.) In any case, Cizik shrugs these criticisms off. “I am, at heart, a centrist evangelical. I am more pro-life than [Sojourners founder] Jim Wallis is, actually. I am what we should be—that is, post-ideological. We are to be about healing, not division. We are not to be subservient to ideology, but above it.”

Cizik says he represents a tradition of evangelicalism going back to the beginning of the 20th century—to Francis Schaeffer and Carl Henry, evangelicals who were strictly orthodox, but advocated a broad engagement with the world. “I’m not some upstart who’s trying to conjure up a new vision,” he says. “This goes back a long way.”

Miller’s piece is entitled “Redemption.” It’s unclear who or what is being redeemed. Is it Cizik or evangelicalism?

And it would have been nice to hear what conservative evangelicals think of Cizik’s new venture. (Here Miller’s role as a columnist may be the reason she doesn’t fulfill the obligations of a reporter.)

Still, this is a solid article that successfully guides readers through one side of a very complex story.

This may or may not be the last time that I write about “The Blind Side” movie. It’s hard to tell.

I mean, who knows? Sandra Bullock may win the Oscar and accept Jesus as her personal savior on live television while waving that little golden man and then there would be another round of mainstream media coverage. Right? Stranger things have happened, with this flick.

As it is, “The Blind Side” is one of the symbolic best-picture nods that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has tossed to the heartland, like crusts of artistic bread, in an attempt to woo a few more eyeballs to the television screen at showtime.

Here’s the way the Los Angeles Times put it:

They are precisely the kinds of movies hardly ever nominated for the best-picture Oscar — a tear-jerker sports film, a space-alien thriller and an animated feature with a flying house and talking dogs — but the populist pleasures “The Blind Side,” “District 9” and “Up” all made the final cut for the top Academy Award.

Concerned that a steady stream of challenging, often little-seen art movies were dominating the Oscars and deflating TV ratings, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences doubled this year’s best-picture race to 10 contestants, and the results … were exactly as intended: the inclusion of movies that have sold a boatload of tickets.

That’s candid.

The reason that I bring this up is that I have, for quite some time now, been intending to praise a recent Times piece about the story behind the story of the making of “The Blind Side,” a newsy feature that just nailed the importance of the movie, in terms of how it fit into the marketplace of postmodern Hollywood.

You see, nobody ever thought that this was going to be a hit “Christian movie,” or even a tiny little Fox-Faith-esque movie for church ladies. The story behind this movie is much stranger than that and reporter Rachel Abramowitz really dug down into the details of the hurdles that writer-director John Lee Hancock had to clear to get this true-life story to the screen.

You just have to love the lede:

After Julia Roberts turned down the starring role, executives at 20th Century Fox met with writer-director John Lee Hancock with a plan for “fixing” the script for his proposed movie “The Blind Side”: Why not change the leading part from a pistol-packing Southern supermom to a man and redraft the film as a father-son story?

It didn’t matter that the film was based on the life of Leigh Anne Tuohy, a white Memphis interior decorator who along with her family adopted a 350-pound, homeless African American teenager, Michael Oher, and helped him become an academic success and football phenomenon who today starts for the NFL’s Baltimore Ravens. If Roberts didn’t want to do the movie, they would only make it with a male lead.

The studio powers that be deny that, of course.

But this episode spotlights the movie’s basic problem. No, it wasn’t the Christian content that was the problem, although that had to scare a few people in corner offices at major studios.

No, the problem was that “The Blind Side” appealed to too many different kinds of people. In a niche world, it’s appeal was simply too, too, too — broad. Well, $240 million later, that niche theory is being questioned, perhaps even by studio executives.

“The Blind Side” was “a feathered fish” that didn’t fit their marketing pigeonholes. “It’s not really a sports movie, although it’s got sports in it. It’s also not a chick flick,” though it was written for a female star. “My take on it was … there was something for everybody,” Hancock said. “That’s a suspicious thing for people to hear. They don’t trust that.” …

The perceived box office weaknesses of “The Blind Side” turned out to be its strengths. The film is attracting a diverse audience, people who might live together but rarely attend the same movies: football fans, older women, infrequent filmgoers and that huge swath of the American public that attends church every Sunday.

So there. And don’t forget the fact that the movie connected with African-American audiences, especially families and, yes, the people who pack pews in predominately black megachurches.

Family ties — literally — didn’t hurt either. One of the major funders of the film has a son who dates Collins Tuohy, as in the daughter of the steel-magnolia main character and, thus, the sister of the adopted gridiron hero Oher. Blessed be the ties that bind, as people say in the Bible Belt.

There were some optimistic people who thought that this “Good Samaritan” story might hit $75 million and raise some eyebrows. Yes, it did help that Bullock signed on for $5 million upfront and a higher than normal percentage of the profits, including DVD sales. Smart move, lady.

Read this story, if you care about the future of mainstream movies in this era of digital niches. The Los Angeles Times started writing about this little movie really early — before it was a giant in the red-zip-code marketplace. This audience was hiding right out there in the wide open.

You know, newspaper editors might want to read this story, too.

A few months ago, when the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America voted to affirm gay clergy in “monogamous” relationships, tmatt noted that the word has different definitions among gay theologians.

Some take the traditional definition, arguing that gay unions are forever and that those taking vows must remain sexually faithful to one another. “Twin rocking chairs forever,” as tmatt put it. Others say it means serial monogamy, much like the definition used by most heterosexuals today who engage in sexual relations prior to marriage and who divorce easily. This definition requires sexual fidelity for each relationship, so long as it lasts “Twin rocking chairs for right now.” And then there’s the definition that says that gay, lesbian and bisexual Christians must be “emotionally” faithful to a partner but can have secondary sexual relationships that don’t threaten the primary “monogamy.” You can read more about these ideas here.

When the ELCA had its vote, there was very little discussion in the media of what the new requirement for gay clergy meant. What did the “monogamy” definition mean? The gay press has done a great job of covering this discussion over the years. This view of sexual monogamy is not a point of shame for the gay community and the gay press has discussed, debated and codified the feature that is present in many gay relationships.

But for some reason, the mainstream media has steadfastly avoided the topic. And they still do, by and large. But there was this rather surprising column or blog post in the New York Times last week that dealt with the issue head on. Judged as an objective news article, it would not hold up too well.

However, this was a classic Got news? piece for this here blog. While fully endorsing a view of marriage without fidelity, “Many Successful Gay Marriages Share an Open Secret ” broke some news that has been hidden from most readers.

The article appeared in The Bay Area Blog, which features coverage of public affairs, commerce, culture and lifestyles in the San Francisco region. It was penned by Scott James, who is described as “an Emmy-winning television journalist and novelist who lives in San Francisco.” He publishes his award-winning books, which are sexually explicit explorations of gay themes, under the name Kemble Scott. He is an open supporter of legalizing same-sex marriage. His most recent book challenges assumptions about sexual morality by having a protagonist who disseminates health across the planet via gay sex. Anyway, here’s the gist of his provocative and interesting piece:

As the trial phase of the constitutional battle to overturn the Proposition 8 ban on same-sex marriage concludes in federal court, gay nuptials are portrayed by opponents as an effort to rewrite the traditional rules of matrimony. Quietly, outside of the news media and courtroom spotlight, many gay couples are doing just that, according to groundbreaking new research.

A study to be released next month is offering a rare glimpse inside gay relationships and reveals that monogamy is not a central feature for many. Some gay men and lesbians argue that, as a result, they have stronger, longer-lasting and more honest relationships. And while that may sound counterintuitive, some experts say boundary-challenging gay relationships represent an evolution in marriage — one that might point the way for the survival of the institution.

New research at San Francisco State University reveals just how common open relationships are among gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. The Gay Couples Study has followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.

That consent is key. “With straight people, it’s called affairs or cheating,” said Colleen Hoff, the study’s principal investigator, “but with gay people it does not have such negative connotations.”

I’m not sure if the description of the study’s findings is written up as well as it could be. If 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their primary relationship with the knowledge and approval of their partners, that’s an utterly fascinating, and newsworthy statistic. Still, I’m curious about the remaining half. What percentage of those surveyed have sex outside of their primary relationship but don’t have the knowledge and/or the approval of their partners? It seems like a key piece of information.

The headline refers to such open relationships as “successful.” And note the adjectives in the excerpt above. Later we learn that such relationships are a mark of “evolution,” show “fresh perspective,” “insight,” and “innovation.” While it’s not exactly labeled as such, the article has a definite point of view. And while it does a fantastic job of interviewing actual gay people (something that is lacking in too many stories about gay issues), the article doesn’t include any critical perspectives at all. That’s not a strength.

Certainly there’s at least one person in the world who thinks that sex with multiple partners is not the key to a successful marriage, right? And I’m not just talking about advocates of traditional marriage vows, or advocates of spousal fidelity. We don’t even learn how this study will be responded to by people such as Andrew Sullivan (lately seen breaking even his own record for insanity) and others who have argued that same-sex marriage needs to be legalized as an important way of curbing promiscuity and encouraging monogamy in the gay community.

The bottom line, though, is that this study breaks news. Really interesting and important news.

It looks at one of the most fundamental institutions in society and what that institution means for various people who seek to take part in it. This affects religious institutions, such as the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, and others that require monogamy for gay clergy. This also could have far-reaching ramifications for religious freedom, as lesbian law professor Chai Feldblum argues. So why is this relegated to a regional blog posting?

Reporters have a very, very bad habit. It’s a vice I discovered while still a cub reporter at the UCLA Daily Bruin and watched colleagues fall prey to over the years that followed. I’ve got to admit I fell victim a few times too.

See, reporters are people, and people are prone to temptations, and when you’re a reporter on deadline, and you’re writing a story about something you know nothing about, you’re tempted to turn to someone who has been previously quoting as an expert on the subject you know nothing about. Later, this story might be subsumed into a reporter’s beat, but instead of then searching around for the real experts, it’s easier to keep turning to the same “expert” quoted in the first story.

This is the way little-known academics or think-tank folks or advocacy organizations become go-to sources. That’s not to say sometimes the reputation isn’t deserved; in many cases it is. But even when it is deserved, there is a dearth of voices that begins to appear over the life cycle of a newsworthy story.

Journalists know this, and KPCC’s John Rabe had some fun with this two years back, saying the station’s “Off-Ramp” program was imposing a 17-month moratorium on using Joan Didion quotes in stories about Southern California:

Reaction was mixed. … Bill Boyarsky, Erwin Chemerinsky, Connie Rice, Jack Kyser, and even Shirley Bebich Jeffe could not be reached for comment.

Those folks who couldn’t be reached for comment? They’re all legitimate experts on different topics of regular import to SoCal newspapers and radio stations. Unfortunately, they are some of the only voices Southern Californians hear.

I thought of this while reading yesterday an article in the Los Angeles Times about the Air Force Academy’s new area for Earth-based religions:

But its opening, heralded as a sign of a more tolerant religious climate at the academy in Colorado Springs, Colo., was marred by the discovery two weeks ago of a large wooden cross placed there.

“We’ve been making great progress at the Air Force Academy. This is clearly a setback,” said Mikey Weinstein, a 1977 graduate of the academy. He is founder of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, and has often tangled with the academy over such issues.

Weinstein is an oft-quoted voice for stories about the Christianization of the military. Whether or not he deserves it is your call. Certainly, he’s put in the leg work.

Weinstein blew through The Jewish Journal offices when I was working there in 2007. From a column my boss wrote about Weinstein’s mission:

Even Abe Foxman, the taurine head of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), doesn’t talk to Weinstein any more. “He said to me, ‘Why do you have to be so nasty? You’ll just make them madder.’”

When Abe Foxman finds you abrasive, imagine what the non-Jews think.

What bothered me about this story was not that Weinstein was quoted, though I’m certain that a better voice could have been found for the prime real estate of the third paragraph, but that it appears the LAT reporter relied on him almost entirely to shape the tone and perspective of this piece.

His name appears in eight of the article’s 20 paragraphs. In the Associated Press version of this story, which doesn’t even mention the cross that the LAT says “marred” this “sign of a more tolerant religious climate,” doesn’t quote Weinstein once. And unlike the LAT, the AP at least talks to someone who is a practicing Pagan. Kind of seems relevant.

This is not to say that the angle to the LAT article wasn’t a good angle, maybe even more important than the AP’s grand opening approach. But a reporter for any newspaper, let alone a former member of what used to be the Big Four (LAT, NYT, WaPo, WSJ), should know better than to just turn to one monotonous voice.

GetReligion readers who are closely following that twisted story of the Southern Baptists from Idaho and the case of the 33 Haitian “orphans” — the quote marks will be explained shortly — need to know that there has been an important development.

A reporter from the Associated Press has found, and interviewed, one of the Haitian pastors who was supposed to have been doing the set-up work for the 10 Baptists from America who have been caught in the middle of an international media storm.

Do they deserve to be in that storm and, of course, in a Haitian jail? They certainly made serious mistakes and the New York Times has dug up some strange information about the rather shoddy nature of their operation back in Idaho. More on that later.

First, let’s walk our way through some of the claims by Pastor Jean Sainvil, who admits that the Americans failed to fill out the proper paperwork in Haiti. Oh, and it seems that this pastor now lives in Atlanta?

The 10 Baptists from Idaho were arrested at the border after authorities said they tried leaving the country without papers. An orphanage director also said many of the children had parents. But Pastor Jean Sainvil, who returned to Atlanta last week from Haiti, told The Associated Press the children and their relatives knew of the missionaries’ plan.

“They did not act foolishly in any shape or form. They acted with a good heart. These kids desperately needed help and they did everything they could have done to help,” said Sainvil, a Haitian-born pastor who leads a suburban Atlanta church. “I don’t think they stepped over the line, they just didn’t know the full process.”

This is interesting since the Americans seemed to have been saying that Sainvil was in charge of paving their way, in terms of making arrangements.

It is also clear here that Sainvil is not the person in charge of the orphanage mentioned in previous stories.

Keep reading:

Sainvil said he worked with Idaho-based New Life Children’s Refuge as an unpaid consultant because of his knowledge of Haiti’s customs, his background as an orphan himself and his fluency in French Creole and Spanish. He traveled with the missionaries to the orphanage, and said he agreed to a plan that would send a busload of them across the border even though some of the children still had living parents.

“When we think orphanage, it’s someone without a mother and father. In Haiti, it’s not the case,” he said, saying that many children in orphanages there are given up by parents who cannot care for their children. After last month’s devastating earthquake, he said, the need for help was even greater.

“These parents are homeless and hopeless,” he said. “Everybody agreed that they knew where the children were going. The parents were told, and we confirmed they would be allowed to see the children and even take them back if need be.”

The children whose parents were still alive were to be kept in the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. Officials there were to help the parents get visas to visit and work to reunite them in Haiti, he said. The plan for those without parents was still murky, though Sainvil said some of them could have been put up for adoption.

So “orphans” are not always orphans, even though they live in an orphanage.

Now, that is this pastor’s side of the story and what he is saying certainly contrasts quite a bit with details reported elsewhere. However, it is a plausible story, especially if one reads all the way to the end of that New York Times story mentioned earlier.

Early on, this story includes some of the details that point to the low-quality — at best — nature of the Idaho operation. These details about the planned facility in the Dominican Republic certainly jump off the page (ditto for the strange detail from Idaho):

In addition to providing a swimming pool, soccer field and access to the beach for the children, the group, known as the New Life Children’s Refuge, said it also planned to “provide opportunities for adoption,” and “seaside villas for adopting parents to stay while fulfilling the requirement for 60-90 day visit.”

An empty house in an unfinished subdivision in Meridian, Idaho, is listed on the nonprofit incorporation papers filed in Idaho for the organization. The address was listed in November on papers Laura Silsby filed to establish New Life as a nonprofit. Two days after the papers were filed, records show, Ms. Silsby sold the house at a substantial loss. Signs in front of the house on Tuesday offered it for sale as a foreclosed property.

But things get really interesting near the bottom, where several controversial threads are woven together — showing just how complex this story is, once you have made it past the cable news reports.

Several parents denied accusations that they had been given money for their children, or that they wanted their children to be put up for adoption.

They trusted the Americans, they said, because they arrived with the recommendation of a Baptist minister, Philippe Murphy, who runs an orphanage in the area. A woman who answered the door at Mr. Murphy’s house said he had gone to Miami. But she also said that he did not know anything about the Americans.

So we have another Haitian pastor involved in this transaction — another Protestant, operating in a land of great tension between Protestants, Catholics and those who blend Voodoo and elements of Catholic tradition.

Who is Pastor Philippe Murphy? Is he the leader of the orphanage — surely Protestant — that the Idaho Baptists worked with to find these children? Why has this Haitian pastor gone to Miami? One more question: Are the Baptists from Idaho major funders of his orphanage?

After my first post on this subject, several people — in the comments section and in emails — claimed that I was trying to defend the Baptists from Idaho. That was not my intent.

What I was saying is that early stories raised all kinds of practical, factual questions and that journalists might want to slow down and try to find out if some of the claims being made by the Americans were true. There may be enough sin and tragedy in this story to cover all kinds of people in Haiti — Americans, Haitian pastors, a government official or two and perhaps even some desperate parents. Who, for example, is making claims that some of the parents were given money in exchange for their children?

After these two stories, I have more questions than before. This is not comforting.

When Scott Brown, R-Mass., was elected to the U.S. Senate a couple of weeks ago, I noted the lack of media coverage of his religious views. I had just assumed he was Roman Catholic since no one had said anything. Turns out he’s Protestant and belongs to a type of church that normally doesn’t get much media coverage.

Boston’s NPR news station WBUR ran a story yesterday about his church and its views on public policy. But it also attempted to describe the church’s teachings. Reporter Monica Brady-Myerov began her piece by describing Brown’s church — the New England Chapel. It sits in an industrial park and worship is accompanied by a rock band:

National church leaders said the sermon is the most important part of Sunday services. The chapel posts recent sermons on its Web site. One by Pastor Chris Mitchell encourages people to pray for Haiti after the earthquake:

“The best thing that we can do here is pray, and hopefully that you develop some kind of prayer trigger or prayer reminder in your life and if you didn’t, you can, you know, starting this week, you know, do something like take your watch off your normal hand and put it on your other hand and then every time you feel it, saying, ‘Well that feels weird over there,’ it reminds you to pray.”

Prayer, and the centrality of God, are some of the key components of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, a Protestant Christian denomination. The church has fewer than 300,000 members in the U.S. and Canada, mostly in Michigan and Iowa.

There has to be a more specific way to describe the CRC than pointing to prayer and the “centrality” of God. Few Protestant church bodies wouldn’t fit that description. Still, it’s nice that the reporter aimed to describe the teachings of the church. She notes that the chapel began as part of an evangelical movement to grow the church body 10 years ago.

The church body is probably best known for its Calvin College and the story quotes some of the professors there. Most of what I know of the church comes from knowing a bit about its history. Like my church body, the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, the CRC is featured in D.G. Hart’s Lost Soul of American Protestantism. That book describes those Protestant church bodies that historically rest neither on the mainline left nor the evangelical right but, rather, are confessional in nature. This means that they tend to be focused more on salvation than politics, worship over pietism, etc. I was reminded of that when reading this portion of the story:

New England Chapel breaks from the Christian Reformed Church guidelines because it follows a modern translation of the Bible called “The Message” as its primary text. It’s a paraphrase of the Bible that was published in segments, mostly in the 1990’s.

To give you an idea of how it’s written, here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Genesis in “The Message”:

First this: God created the Heavens and Earth - all you see, all you don’t see. Earth was a soup of nothingness, a bottomless emptiness, an inky blackness. God’s Spirit brooded like a bird above the watery abyss.

“The Message” is meant to bring the New Testament to life for those who haven’t read the Bible

Interesting. Of course, Genesis isn’t in the New Testament. Still, I love details such as this and pointing out differences between the denominational guidelines and individual congregational practices.

While the church body has long had a bit of tension with American evangelicalism, I wondered if the church’s history as a confessional Protestant church body didn’t explain these remarks:

The church focuses on nurturing a personal relationship with God through Christ. Rev. Jerry Dykstra, the executive director of the Christian Reformed Church in North America, said politically it’s a conservative church.

“On the spectrum, I think it probably falls in the middle area of Protestant churches in the United States,” Dykstra said. “In terms of being conservative or liberal, I’d say it’s on the conservative side but much more towards the middle.”

Much of the article deals with trying to “pin down” where the church stands politically. I wish that, in addition to the other worthy folks quoted, the reporter could have spoken to Hart or someone like him who could explain that not all Protestants can be so easily labeled.

After talking about how Brown has been working to help raise funds for an abbey in his hometown, and learning that the sisters pray for him daily and thank him for all his work, we learn:

Scott Brown does not wear his Christianity on the sleeve of his barn jacket. He didn’t thank God in his victory speech and rarely mentions prayer or church. Still, people will be watching to see how Brown votes on a number of issues and what, if any, impact his faith will have on his voting.

I completely understand what the reporter is trying to say. But if wearing something on your sleeve means making one’s views known, should public mentions of church be more important or legitimate than public displays of charity? Are there ways to “wear” one’s Christianity other than public shoutouts to God? Apart from Brown in particular, I think it’s not quite right to say that only those politicians who briefly allude to their religion at campaign parties wear their faith publicly. Worship attendance, personal piety and charity can also be public manifestations of one’s Christian faith.

In any case, this NPR story was wonderfully informative and a great idea for the local affiliate in Boston.