All together now, religion-beat pros (and fans), let’s chant this together: L’Osservatore Romano does not equal the Vatican.

You’ve seen the headlines, right? L’Osservatore Romano runs an article on some controversial issue in Italy, or somewhere else in the world, and some journalists jump the gun and produce stories that say the Vatican, or even the pope, has released a statement that changes its stance on some crucial doctrinal, moral or cultural issue. You know, something like: “Vatican says that Dumbledore isn’t really gay.”

So here is a classic that is just right for today, care of the Telegraph. You’ll get a kick out of the headline, for example:

Vatican condemns Hallowe’en as anti-Christian

The Vatican has condemned Hallowe’en as anti-Christian, saying it is based on a sinister and dangerous “undercurrent of occultism”

As a regular reader noted, does the Vatican ever take a stance that is more nuanced than “condemned”? You’d never know it from most mainstream news coverage.

But that’s besides the point. Read the story and see if you can find a single statement in it that comes from the Vatican, let alone from a Vatican office that is charged with making pronouncements about holy days, liturgical questions, church traditions, etc.

First there’s the headline. Does the Vatican ever take a more nuanced
stance on anything besides condemning?

But that’s beside the point. Read the story and see if you can find any material that is actually from the Vatican. Instead we get:

The Vatican issued the warning through its official newspaper, L’Osservatore Romano, in an article headlined “Hallowe’en’s Dangerous Messages”. The paper quoted a liturgical expert, Joan Maria Canals, who said: “Hallowe’en has an undercurrent of occultism and is absolutely anti-Christian.”

Parents should “be aware of this and try to direct the meaning of the feast towards wholesomeness and beauty rather than terror, fear and death,” said Father Canals, a member of a Spanish commission on church rites.

OK, in addition to the problem with identifying the newspaper with the teaching authority of the Vatican, the article also misses a key point: Is the Vatican warning parents about Halloween, or about certain types of costumes and celebrations linked to Halloween? After all, the language — from a priest on a Spanish, not Vatican, commission — suggests that there are beautiful and wholesome ways to celebrate the holiday. Right?

Read on. There are other voices quoted and none of them are Vatican officials, let alone Vatican officials who make pronouncements on doctrinal matters.

As they say on ESPN: Come on, man!

Photo: How some Vatican critics view the current pope.

If you like articles that take readers on journeys to places where faith and culture intersect in new and unexpected ways, then you’ll enjoy reading Kate Shellnutt’s Chicago Sun-Times story, “Young Muslims use punk to loosen their religion.”

The notion of Muslims playing punk rock may seem like incongruous cultures — profanity-laden lyrics following the religion’s traditional greeting (“Salaam aleikum”), melodic Middle Eastern strumming punctuates noisy guitar feedback, purple and red mohawks and Arabic-scripted tattoos. But for the second-generation Americans leading this contemporary cultural movement, Muslim punk isn’t just an irreverent juxtaposition.

Bands like the Kominas call their blending of Muslim values and music performance taqwacore (“a term that fuses the words hard-core and taqwa, Arabic for piety”). The piety is certainly unconventional by orthodox Muslim standards:

With a rebellious attitude and unabashed criticism of both East and West, Muslim punk highlights the breadth of Islamic practice and piety. For this colorful crew, donning patchwork jackets and taking slow drags from hookah pipes, religion is more personal than institutional or dogmatic.

For the most part, the bands drink and smoke, in excess, despite Islam’s prohibition of both. When driving from coast to coast on tour, they’re not stopping to break out prayer mats for the obligatory five-times-a-day salat.

But just because they aren’t practicing Islam in the traditional way doesn’t mean they don’t still consider themselves religious Muslims.

“It’s infinitely more pious to be true to your heart, because that’s where religion really lives,” said (one musician).

This kind of faith language sounds familiar to anyone who has spoken to American youth about religion. But the taqwacore bands also exhibit a uniquely Arab angst:

While this generation’s immigrant parents remain loyal to their home countries, and Muslims in their 30s and 40s having more fully assimilated into American culture, the taqwacore group finds themselves in between.

“The younger kids are more religious, but also more civic-minded,” said Syed Ali, a sociology professor at Long Island University in Brooklyn, who researches second-generation Muslims. “They are very adamant about saying, ‘I am a Muslim,’ but also adamant about saying, ‘I am an American, and I have these rights and no one’s gonna screw with me.’”

Kudos to Shellnutt, a grad student at Chicago’s Medill School of Journalism, who explored both faith and culture with a sure hand. I only wish she had gone further in explaining the broader Taqwacore subculture, complete with its literature, films, and identity issues.

Every now and then, one of your GetReligionistas reads a story — usually about a controversy tied to culture and morality — and then says, in his or her heart of hearts, “You know, religion ought to be in here somewhere.”

We think we sense the presence of a religion ghost and, of course, chasing those ghosts is what this weblog is all about.

So we write out post and then, on the comments pages, someone will say, “Why is this a GetReligion issue? There’s no religion in this story.”

And we say, “Well, there should be.”

And the reader then says, “Well, the story also doesn’t mention iced tea, moon rocks, polkas or the shocking rise in teens wearing flip-flops when it’s 35 degrees, and it could have (or similar arguments). In other words, the reader is asking: What does religion have to do with this kind of argument about culture and morality (and, often, sexuality)? What’s faith got to do with it?

We then say that, statistically speaking, we are dealing with subjects that tend to be linked to religious beliefs and traditions here in America. And so forth and so on.

So you have been warned: Here comes another GetReligion post about the Roman Polanski case. I think I saw a ghost in that stunning Los Angeles Times feature the other day by Joe Mozingo about the shocking contents of the original testimony by the victim, Samantha Gailey. The double-decker headline read:

How a girl’s stark words got lost in the Polanski spectacle

Samantha Gailey, at 13, was unequivocal in her testimony against Polanski. But her account was turned into something almost benign.

It’s a long, long story and, at times, almost impossible to read. You know you are in rough territory when a young girl tries to describe an explicit act of oral sex as “cuddliness.” All of the details are here, in large part because the story is trying to make the case that — for a variety of cultural reasons — people in Hollywood and elsewhere had motivations for making the blunt details go away.

So what did one of the world’s most respected movie directors — at least in high, elite circles — plead guilty to doing, kind of, before later trying to say that he didn’t really do what he was accused of doing, or it wasn’t really that bad because, yada, yada?

Along the way, various people would scrub the core allegations into something more benign — a probation officer would deem the crime a “spontaneous” act of “poor judgment,” a prison psychiatrist would call it “playful mutual eroticism.”

But Samantha’s stark testimony has never been seriously impugned, in or out of court. When she sued Polanski years later for sexual assault, he pleaded the 5th when asked if he illegally gave her champagne and part of a quaalude pill, then performed oral copulation on her and sodomized her.

An extensive review of several thousand court documents, as well as numerous interviews, shows a basic dynamic defining the entire saga — one force trying to drive debate away from a young girl’s unshaken allegations, and another trying to reel it back in.

So where is the ghost? Well, what are these two forces in this tug-of-war? Or what are the forces that helped shape the moral visions of the groups on both sides of this debate about Polanski and his history of seducing young girls?

After all, as Mozingo notes much later in the story, the European media could not understand what was going on. What about the private life of this young American siren who was causing trouble for this great artist?

The European media … went to Samantha’s school and house, talked to her friends, trying to learn more about the girl whose allegations threatened to bring down a veritable cult figure in Europe, where Polanski was not-so-secretly dating a 15-year-old girl, Nastassja Kinski, with no public outcry, no arrest. Samantha was cast as the temptress.

So, finally, we get to the passage in which I sensed the presence of a ghost, a passage worth sharing with GetReligion readers.

At a crucial moment, Polanski’s fate depended, in large part, on the recommendations of a probation officer named Irwin Gold. Would this case evolve into a mere public relations fiasco or would people, responding to Samantha’s stark testimony, keep talking about — gasp — jail?

The victim’s testimony kept getting “scrubbed” clean of the nasty details in report after report. Finally, Gold openly wrote about his admiration for Polanski and the degree to which the director had risen above the great tragedies in his life. And, of course, Polanski was a living symbol of Hollywood and its culture.

Gold wrote:

“Possibly not since Renaissance Italy has there been such a gathering of creative minds in one locale as there has been in Los Angeles County during the past half century. … While enriching the community with their presence, they have brought with them the manners and mores of their native lands which in rare instances have been at variance with those of their adoptive land.”

And there you have the two forces that keep colliding in the Polanski case.

Now, if you look at history and if you look at the statistics that define American life, would you say that religion plays a rather important role in defining the “manners and mores” of the “native land” that keeps causing grief for many elite artists in Hollywood? In terms of facts and statistics, what are some the most stark differences between Europe and America, when you are dealing with questions of morality and public life?

Just asking.

One of my close friends — and fellow St. Louis Cardinals fans — is a wonderful Lutheran pastor who suffers from clinical depression. Earlier this year, he published a book titled “I Trust When Dark My Road.” The book (which you can download for free here) allows the reader to look deep into the heart, mind and soul of someone suffering mental illness. Many Americans, myself included, have depression or other related problems. And even for me it’s somewhat difficult to think that it afflicts pastors — as if wearing a stole somehow protects you from the problem.

So I was very grateful to see USA Today run a Religion News Service story about pastors and depression. It begins with the sad mention of a 42-year-old pastor in North Carolina who committed suicide in September:

Those who counsel pastors say Christian culture, especially Southern evangelicalism, creates the perfect environment for depression. Pastors suffer in silence, unwilling or unable to seek help or even talk about it. Sometimes they leave the ministry. Occasionally the result is the unthinkable.

Experts say clergy suicide is a rare outcome to a common problem.

But Baptists in the Carolinas are soul searching after a spate of suicides and suicide attempts by pastors. In addition to the September suicide of David Treadway, two others in North Carolina attempted suicide, and three in South Carolina succeeded, all in the last four years.

Being a pastor — a high-profile, high-stress job with nearly impossible expectations for success — can send one down the road to depression, according to pastoral counselors.

That’s one of the things I picked up from Peperkorn’s book as well as my personal knowledge of similar situations. Depression can be caused or exacerbated by a dizzying array of factors, but stress and being overextended and over-obligated can be big triggers. This story gets at that, looking at how some of the personality profiles that are common in clergy (being people-pleasers, for instance) can lead pastors to have major frustration with themselves. The story pretty much focuses on evangelicals and the south, but it gets a wide array of perspective in there anyway.

The president of a pastoral counseling center in North Carolina says that a pastor is like a “24-hour ER” who is supposed to be on call to everyone all the time. As a pastor’s kid, I can vouch for the unbelievable frequency of the 2 AM phone call or 4 AM doorbell. The same guy talks about the isolation and loneliness and lack of social support as well. Again, all of these things ring true for many pastors.

The article notes the frequency of depression in the general population (one in four women and 12 percent of men experience it at least once during their lifetime, according to the AMA) and says psychologists agree that it’s at least as prevalent among clergy. Then we learn about how few sufferers actually get treatment and how even fewer clergy do.

What makes the article so great, in my view, is that it looks at how theology might compound the problem for some pastors. One man is quoted as saying that clergy don’t talk about their depression because it violates their understanding of their faith:

[David] Treadway, pastor of Sandy Ridge Baptist Church in Hickory, was the exception. He told his congregation he was in treatment several months before his suicide. Still the shock was hard to absorb, co-workers said.

Rodney Powe, worship pastor at the church, said he only now understands depression is a mental illness. Christians who don’t experience depression trivialize it, he said. “We just say, “Come on, get over it. We have the hope of Christ and the Holy Spirit.”’ …

Society still places a stigma on mental illness, but Christians make it worse, [Matthew Stanford, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Baylor University in Waco, Texas] said, by “over-spiritualizing” depression and other disorders — dismissing them as a lack of faith or a sign of weakness.

I don’t know why I do this, but I read some of the comments to this article and grew disheartened. (Still, USA Today comments are not as bad as Washington Post commenters. Not sure why the Post has such bad trolls on their stories but I recommend you don protective gear before diving into that commenting pool.) People suggested that maybe pastors were killing themselves because “they come to realize that they’ve been wrong all these years,” needed to preach less morality or came to realize they couldn’t “impress people” anymore. Someone quoted Scripture to accuse people suffering from depression of being bad Christians and others also tried to argue that depression has no medical component and only a spiritual base.

The article talks about the “career” costs to seeking treatment but also how it’s becoming a bit more acceptable to get treatment. I would hope that more stories such as this that engage that hyper-spiritualization of the disease might help improve the situation for other sufferers.

The one thing I was left wondering about was how denominational support structures come into play. In other words, if you have a bishop or district leader to go to or a health plan that covers treatment for depression, does that help more than if you’re at a completely independent church?

Eleven years ago gay teen Matthew Shephard was beaten and left to die on a Wyoming fencepost. That was also the year three white men in a truck, in another sickening act of violence, pulled African American James Byrd behind them until he was dead. This past Wednesday, President Obama signed the Matthew Shephard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. In a fairly common practice, it was passed as part of a totally unrelated spending bill.

As this Associated Press story notes, the federal law has now been expanded to included crimes against people committed because of gender, sexual orientation and disability. The story by Ben Feller, which also includes a lot of detail on the spending bill, contained this interesting paragraph:

At the urging of Republicans, the bill was changed before it was passed in Congress to strengthen free speech protections to assure that a religious leader or any other person cannot be prosecuted on the basis of his or her speech, beliefs or association.

Feller doesn’t give details, but he does note what has been at the core of objections to the law: that it will constrain clergy and others who make public statements about homosexuality. In other words, does the law infringe on First Amendment protections and religious liberty? How are reporters writing about material objections to the hate crimes bill?

The best story I found (though it had its own problems) was a local one from Wyoming. But other articles either didn’t mention religious and free speech objections at all (they don’t go away because you ignore them), gave them scant attention, or fit the story into a particular ideological framework. That being said, I’m not sure from the coverage whether many editors considered this a standalone story, given where it seemed to end up — in online blogs.

Jeff Zeleny of the New York Times didn’t allude to objections in this brief “The Caucus” post — a straightup report on what happened without any outside opinions.

Here’s a sample of the second approach, from the USAToday.com website page “The Oval”:

Opponents called the hate-crimes bill unnecessary, noting that Shepard’s and Byrd’s attackers were convicted in state criminal courts. Some critics objected to the inclusion of hate-crimes legislation in a defense budget bill.

“The president has used his position as commander in chief to advance a radical social agenda, when he should have used it to advance legislation that would unequivocally support our troops,” said U.S. Rep. Mike Pence, R-Ind., chairman of the House Republican Conference.

Pence also argued that the law could be used to curb free speech rights, such as with religions that consider homosexuality a sin.

Yup, it is scandalous that Democrats and Republics tack totally unrelated amendments on to spending bills — and everytime it occurs, the other party is outraged, outraged, outraged. The bigger news here, however, are the constitutional issues, which get a scant sentence.

On the other hand, take this story from the Washington Times. There’s some good content here, but the author’s focus is on the “Obama gives gay rights activists what they want” pretty much to the exclusion of other threads.

Critics said that because the new law only adds harsher penalties for acts that are already illegal and subject to criminal prosecution, its main achievement is to move the nation toward the criminalization of politically incorrect speech.

“Bills of this sort are designed to forward a political agenda and silence critics, not combat actual crime,” said Erik Stanley, senior counsel at the Alliance Defense Fund, a Christian advocacy group.

“All violent crimes are hate crimes, and all crime victims deserve equal justice. This law is a grave threat to the First Amendment because it provides special penalties based on what people think, feel or believe,” Mr. Stanley said.

And that’s the objection of many conservatives and civil libertarians — that the law introduces a whole new class of what can be prosecuted in which the lines between permissible and impermissible speech aren’t clear.

By the way, if “minority classes” are being protected, then it’s the guys who ought to be happy. As far as I know, the census says that women are the American majority. None of the stories I saw really said anything about the other categories, like disability, now being federally protected — hmmm, I wonder why?

But how is this new law going to affect clergy and laypeople in the real world (grin) outside the Beltway? A story from the Wyoming Tribune Eagle offers us a practical point-of- view from a state which (unlike 45 others) doesn’t have hate-crimes laws.

Some Christians have expressed opposition to the bill because of a belief that it could criminalize pastors for preaching what the Bible says about homosexuality: that it is a sin to be repented like any other sin.

Opponents feel it could turn preaching the Bible into “hate speech,” and some fear that pastors could be blamed for a hate crime committed by someone in their congregation.

“I would never speak in a manner that would encourage someone to harm someone who is a homosexual,” the Rev. John Christensen, pastor at Trinity Lutheran Church in Cheyenne, said. “Clearly, no one should engage in an act of violence against a person because of (his or her) sexual orientation.”Still, the bill steps dangerously close to the line, he added.

“I do have some concerns about it,” he said. “I see it as a backdoor to censoring speech.”

Is it only Christians who object to the new law? Last I heard, Nat Hentoff hadn’t converted (this article, with a clear bias, nonetheless has some amazing links).

Also, progressives would dispute Baylie Evan’s comment about Bible passages and homosexuality. Since Evans doesn’t say what kind of Lutheran pastor Christensen is (is this a Missouri Synod parish?) you have one Lutheran pastor disagreeing with another (but wait, he’s actually Presbyterian).

But though I don’t think the extended block quotes technique serves the story well, Evans gives both sides ample quotes to make their points. I found the extended passage from Charles Haynes, a scholar with the First Amendment Center, particularly useful.

It’s unfortunate that so few writers cared to go that deeply into the possible effects of a bill on Constitutional rights. Care to wager whether we’re going to see a federal court case on one of these issues sooner right than later? Keep watching this space.

Picture is of the late Matthew Shepard

A couple of months ago, Elizabeth looked at a big Newsweek piece on polyamory and criticized it for its lack of depth, neglect of religious angles, and its unrealistic portrayal of poly communities. Well, compared to this CNN story with an attention-grabbing headline of “Mate debate: Is monogamy realistic?,” that Newsweek article was a masterpiece. Apparently the premise of this article is that in oldentimes, people were monogamous but in these complicated modern times, it’s a completely unrealistic virtue and should be dropped post haste.

First off, contra the headline, there’s absolutely no debate in this story. The first 33 — yes, 33 — paragraphs of the story are all about how irrelevant and old-fashioned monogamy is and the final five include a psychologist saying that “nature” has provided powerful incentives for monogamy that are still valid. But even if you make it to the nether reaches of the story, there’s no debate in the sense of two sides rebutting each other. Here, in fact, are the story “highlights” (their term) as described by CNN:

—Changing social mores, growing life expectancy prompt new questions about monogamy
—Mating for life is within the realm of human potential, but it’s not easy, evolutionary biologist says
—Some people try polyamory, or having relationships with several partners at the same time
—Americans are too surprised by infidelity when it happens, author says

Now, I don’t know what version of history they’re teaching A. Pawlowski and the story’s editors at CNN, but I’m pretty sure that fidelity in monogamy was never something achieved with perfection by any group of people at any point in history. Monogamy isn’t something that has been valued because it is easy or ubiquitous. In fact, it might be valued precisely because it goes against human nature.

The top of the story uses celebrity infidelities as an example of how “the realities of modern life” work before suggesting that serial monogamy — changing partners as your life changes — might be the way to go. And then:

For some, even serial monogamy seems too restrictive.

The 1970s introduced the concept of “open marriage” in which couples stayed married but were free to date other people.

More recently, polyamory — the practice of having romantic relationships with multiple people at the same time with the full knowledge and consent of all involved — has been getting a lot of attention.

“We found the expectation that one person should be our everything seemed unrealistic given our day and age. … It’s oddly pressuring to set up that scenario,” said Mark, who lives in Springfield, Missouri, and is in a polyamorous relationship. (He asked that his last name not be used for privacy reasons.)

So “some” reject monogamy. Some practiced “open marriage” (no stats on how that worked out on marriage success rates). And polyamory has “recently” “been getting a lot of attention.” This is less journalism than a poorly written freshman composition.

Mark, from the anecdote above, says that he and his wife both have partners and that they all get together to have dinner time-to-time:

“People describe polyamory as ‘poly-agony’ because of all the work you have to do to maintain things,” Mark said. “It’s just not normal to look over and see your wife with another man. I know a lot of people would have a real problem with that. I really don’t.”

Great quote. Now let’s ask some more questions. How does the addition of partners affect child-rearing, the avoidance of sexually transmitted diseases, obligations to spouse(s)? No room for that in this story. Instead we get a positive mention of a dating Web site that encourages married people to have an affair and a quote from a French author contending that monogamy, “which is really no more than a useful social convention,” will not survive. If that’s not enough, we get an entire section on how zee French are so much more sopheesticated about zis silly little monogamy. There’s this quote, which could launch into an interesting discussion:

“Americans are too surprised by infidelity when it happens. I think we go into marriage with perhaps unrealistically high expectations about human nature,” said Pamela Druckerman, author of “Lust in Translation.”

Unfortunately, the quote is just used to justify infidelity. The thing is that people do go into marriage with ridiculous expectations. I read this Michelle Obama quote in the upcoming New York Times Sunday Magazine cover story about her marriage that I just loved:

“The strengths and challenges of our marriage don’t change because we move to a different address,” she said. Mrs. Obama said “the bumps” happen to everybody all the time “and they are continuous.”

“The last thing we want to project,” she said, is the image of a flawless relationship.

You notice, when you’re married, that pop culture tends to obsess about relationships outside of marriage and pay very little attention to relationships during marriage. Sandra Tsing Loh may get published in The Atlantic regaling readers with her infidelity, divorce and rejection of marriage — but you don’t read too many articles about successful marriages. And when the media do discuss marriage, we get all sorts of absolutely childish characterizations — such as the idea that monogamy used to be easy and now isn’t.

And how big a role does religion play in marriage? For my husband and me, it’s everything. Even in our very short marriage of three years and two children, we probably wouldn’t have made it out of our first year without our faith in God. We pray, we use the Ephesians 5 model of marriage, we ask for forgiveness daily.

How big a role does religion play in this story about monogamy? It’s literally not mentioned. There is no discussion on either side of the aisle about religion, nothing about the sacrament of marriage, its spiritual components, or any role that religion might play.

OK, everyone. Think like a journalist for a moment.

I am sure that — in light of the facts on the ground — you are shocked, shocked to know that Episcopalians in the liberal Diocese of Massachusetts are not anxious to embrace Pope Benedict XVI and flee into the doctrinal embrace of the Church of Rome. Correct? You can see that, in terms of basic facts?

So forget about that as a moment, as you consider a few points of logic in a recent Boston Globe story about the Vatican rescue mission (viewing it from the point of view of the Anglo-Catholics who started petitioning Rome for help about a decade ago) into English territory.

Consider this chunk of the story:

The Vatican’s announcement last week that it would ease the way for disaffected Anglicans to join the Catholic Church prompted strong negative reactions from some progressive Episcopal priests and parishioners, who saw Pope Benedict XVI as capitalizing on divisions in the Anglican Communion over the ordination of female priests and an openly gay bishop. The Episcopal Church is the US branch of the Anglican church.

During his sermon at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Salem yesterday, the Rev. Paul B. Bresnahan said the Catholic Church was essentially offering itself as a “safe refuge for bigotry,” and he “must respectfully decline” the pope’s invitation.

“This really sends a terrible message to the gay community, as well as to women, which is half the population of the world,” he said in a phone interview. “It’s about time we embraced these folks in a kinder, gentler way than we are now.”

No, I am not that interested in the “bigotry” quote from Bresnahan. That’s a solid quote that expresses the stance that most mainstream Episcopal leaders have, when it comes to Rome, the Christian East and the growing Protestant churches around the world. You know that the pope would not be shocked to hear this quote from an Episcopal priest in Salem, Mass. Do you hear Benedict sobbing? Probably not.

Here is my main point. This quote also perfectly expresses how the Episcopal establishment views the doctrinal beliefs of most of the world’s Anglicans, numerically speaking.

Thus, I think the Globe — for reasons of simple logic — needs to rethink a key phrase in this section of the story. I refer to this statement:

The Episcopal Church is the US branch of the Anglican church.

The Episcopal Church has long been the U.S. branch of the Anglican Communion, one church in a communion of churches. It is also the U.S. branch that is currently recognized by Canterbury and the Church of England, and that is what matters the most — at this point in time. However, that status is currently in dispute, even in England. Should that be mentioned?

It is also a fact that the Episcopal Church is not the only branch of Anglicanism in the U.S. that is recognized — statistically speaking — by most of the world’s Anglicans. Some churches are already starting to cut those ties, while forming ties to the new, alternative Anglican provice in North America.

All of that is in process. The ultimate outcome is not known.

Thus, I would argue that this simple, blunt sentence fails to express — in terms of statistics and emerging facts — the current realities. It is impossible to state, at this point, the status of the Episcopal Church or the new alternative provice in such a short, blunt sentence. Readers need to know a few more facts to understand what is happening at the local, regional, national and global levels.

Steven Waldman, the founding editor of Beliefnet, resigned yesterday to join the Federal Communications Commission as the Chairman Julius Genachowski’s special adviser and head a commission on the state of the media in challenging economic times. Writing on his Beliefnet blog:

This is the most difficult (and surreal) post I’ve had to write. I’m leaving Beliefnet, the company I co-founded in 1999.

In mid November, I’ll be stepping down as President and Editor in Chief to lead a project on the future of the media for the Federal Communications Commission, the government agency that sets rules for the communications industry.

I can’t quite think of a suitable analogy. Perhaps it’s something like saying goodbye to your child as he goes off to college? (Except I’m the one leaving). I feel an intense mix of sadness, excitement and pride.

Typically, it’s only big news when people resign from politics. But Waldman’s transition is significant for two primary reasons:

It puts atop the FCC’s hierarchy an expert on religion and media and the intersection of the two and it creates a massive void for Beliefnet that will have to be filled by Waldman’s replacement.

So what has the general response been to Waldman’s move? Tough to say. I’ve seen scant attention paid.

MediaWeek and Variety offered short reports. From Variety:

The commission will be asked to make recommendations to ensure that the public’s news and information needs are being met and to “ensure a vibrant media landscape,” the FCC said in announcing Waldman’s appointment.

The process is sure to raise some eyebrows about a government agency making recommendations on the practices of private businesses. Genachowski cited the extraordinary circumstances at a time when the growth of digital media is threatening the financial underpinnings of traditional newsgathering orgs.

“A strong consensus has developed that we’re at a pivotal moment in the history of the media and communications, because of game-changing new technologies as well as the economic downturn,” Genachowski said. “It is important to ensure that our polities promote a vibrant media landscape that furthers long-standing goals of serving the information needs of communities.”

Julia Duin of the Washington Times, Sam Hodges of the Dallas Morning News and Cathy Lynn Grossman of USA Today each mentioned the news on their religion blogs. (Grossman’s, the most detailed, offers a little history of Waldman saving Beliefnet from Chapter 11 and of some of his big moments at the Internet venture that has become a staple of religion news.)

Maybe the big papers will catch up over the weekend. I sure hope so. So far the limited coverage has only focused on what Waldman will do at the FCC, but I’m more concerned about his replacement at Beliefnet, which, according to a press release I got announcing the transition, will be Beth Ann Eason, the current chief operating officer and general manager, on the business side and Ju-Don Marshall Roberts, the senior vice president and executive editor who recently came to Beliefnet after serving as managing editor of washingtonpost.com, on the editorial side:

Roberts, a respected leader among online editors nationally, led the Post digital efforts that helped win a Pulitzer Prize, and Peabody and Online Journalism awards.

Those are pretty solid Internet creds. But as anyone who reads GetReligion knows, there is a big difference between getting journalism and getting religion. Here’s optimistically hoping Roberts gets both.

So Time magazine has an interesting story about social scientists looking at a connection between clean livin’ and Windex. Apparently studies suggest that people behave better when they’re surrounded by the Refreshingly Clean Scent of Streak-free Windex. I don’t doubt this as my own behavior ranges from disorderly mayhem to prim and proper based on the state of my house. (Things aren’t so great right now, thanks for asking.)

Here’s an early paragraph:

It’s the Macbeth principle of morality, says Katie Liljenquist, professor of organizational leadership at Brigham Young University’s Marriott School of Management and lead author of the new study, to be published in Psychological Science. “There is a strong link between moral and physical purity that people associate at a core level. People feel contaminated by immoral choices and try to wash away their sins,” says Liljenquist. “To some degree, washing actually is effective in alleviating guilt. What we wondered was whether you could regulate ethical behavior through cleanliness. We found that we could.”

The story goes into the study — 28 participants in one and 99 in another — where Windex was spritzed into one room and the other left neutral. The folks in the citrus fresh room behaved more morally than the others.

All fine and good. But check out this paragraph:

Nevertheless, both morality researchers and olfactory scientists agree that people do strongly associate physical cleanliness with purity of conscience. It is the notion at the heart of adages like “cleanliness is next to godliness” and evidenced by the widespread use of cleansing ceremonies to wash away sins in various religions around the world. (Truth be told, that practice is merely an extrapolation of an evolutionary strategy to avoid disease.)

Truth be told? Truth be told? On what basis, exactly, is this “truth” told? You’ve got the words of Jesus (here and here, for instance) versus the truth claim of Catherine Elton, Time reporter.

Or as blogger Get Anchored notes:

What authority does our writer quote to back up her contention that cleansing ceremonies—like, oh, let’s say, baptism—“is merely an extrapolation of an evolutionary strategy to avoid disease”? For that matter, what authority could she quote for a view that is easy to suppose and impossible to prove?

Yeesh.

That little flash of pop-anthropology aside, the article is worth a read. I’m always fascinated with stories of links between soul and body. And, of course, Scripture has so much to say about the purity/aroma link, including this: “Thanks be to God, who always leads us in triumphal procession in Christ and through us spreads everywhere the fragrance of the knowledge of him” (2 Cor. 2:14).

For my part, I just wish stories of links between soul and body didn’t presuppose an evolutionary basis. It gets tiring. I mean sure, maybe Lady Macbeth’s character is extrapolating a dramatic arc from an evolutionary strategy. But maybe she was more motivated by the baptismal rite itself. Or maybe it was something else entirely.

There was a curious post on the Utne Reader web site entitled “Overloading God’s Servers” that warns:

“On Sunday, November 8, atheists will launch a coordinated prayer attack against God. Nonbelievers around the world will hurl a bevy of meaningless prayers at God, coordinated by Facebook, in an effort to inundate God’s prayer receptors and force them offline.”

Hmmm. Not sure what to make about that.

But does it provide sufficient reason to finally comment on an earlier Washington Post article focusing on the more than 150 million Facebook users (out of 250 million total users) who filled in the “Religious Views” portion of the social media site’s user profiles?

Staff writer William Wan set out an ambitious agenda for himself in his article, “Soul-Searching on Facebook: For Many Users, Religion Question Is Not Easy to Answer.”

Now Facebook users announce their spiritual identity with the stroke of a few keys. And what they are typing into the open-ended box offers a revealing peek into modern faith and what happens to that faith as it migrates online…

Amid the endless trivialities of social networking sites — the quotes from Monty Python, the Stephen Colbert for Prez groups, the goofy-but-calculatingly-attractive profile pics — the tiny box has become a surprisingly meaningful pit stop for philosophical inquiry.

One college student spent days to create this summary: “Love God, Love Others, Change the World.” Some take a lighter approach, like the young woman who filled in the blank in her profile with “Pastafarian.” Others wrestle with the challenge of summarizing their spirituality in 100 characters or less.

Wan asked Facebook representatives to provide him with statistical analysis. The results were less than scientific:

Not surprisingly, the most popular faith professed is “Christian” and the various denominations associated with it. The category is so dominant that for this list, Facebook’s statisticians insisted on combining such other designations as “Protestant,” “Catholic” and “Mormon” under the “Christian” label. As a result, the second most popular entry on the list is “Islam,” followed by “Atheist.”

“Jedi,” interestingly enough, makes an appearance at No. 10.

The complete catalogue of entries easily numbers in the thousands, Chin said. But even offbeat answers like “Seguidor del Wiccanismo” and “Heavy Metal” garner more than 2,000 users each. There is also, Chin noted with a laugh, a surprising number of people online who identify themselves as Amish.

Readers who may have expected more from Wan’s promised “revealing peek” into modern online religiosity finally get some good stuff near the end where he explores the concerns some Facebook users have about how their views will be judged by others. For example, one woman described her views as “Matthew 25” rather than Catholic.

“It’s a bit of code,” she said, “so people can make of it what they want.”

Such fear of judgment plays an outsize role in how young adults express their religious views online, said Piotr Bobkowski, a doctoral student at the University of North Carolina who is in the midst of a two-year grant-funded survey of religion on MySpace. He has found that a significant portion of privately religious young adults — almost a third in the case of Protestants — avoid identifying themselves by their traditional sects.

Many teens, Bobkowski said, prefer to portray themselves as spiritual but not religious: “That’s why you see all these little one-line creeds popping up.”

But why worry? Can’t one always edit one’s “Religious Views”?