Evangelicals

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Does the Trump phenomenon tell us something about state of American religion?

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Does the Trump phenomenon tell us something about state of American religion?

The news media are understandably going ga-ga over Donald Trump’s unconventional campaign for president and its surprising success. What would analysts of U.S. popular religious culture tell journalists about the long-term trends this displays, especially regarding evangelicals who are at the heart of today’s Republican coalition?

Some themes to test out:

To begin, a mid-July Washington Post/ABC poll showed Trump is by far the current favorite among white Republicans who identify as evangelicals, at 20 percent (compared with 24 percent among Republicans as a whole). Yet Trump spurns characteristics thatpious churchgoers would have wanted not so long ago. Are those values changing, or is the old-time religion  losing its grip on the nationalsoul?

Let's leave aside Trump's signature issue of immigration, on which evangelicals hold various views, and turn to this:  A campaign joke making the rounds says Trump believes so much in traditional marriage that he’s had three of them. Some figure triple marriage and double divorce undercut Newt Gingrich’s Bible Belt showing in 2012. It’s possible  Democrat Adlai Stevenson was hurt by his divorce three years before the 1952 campaign, though he did not remarry. Hard to know since he was up against the Eisenhower tsunami.

Most pundits figured Nelson Rockefeller’s divorce and 1963 remarriage to Margaretta (“Happy”) Murphy doomed his 1964 presidential prospects. The remarried Ronald Reagan broke the taboo in 1980, yet he remains the only U.S. President to have been divorced. Along with that, actor Reagan overcame conservative Protestants’ longstanding suspicion toward Hollywood and the entertainment industry.

Marital issues lead into gender issues.


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Franklin Graham's $880,000 annual compensation: Charlotte Observer asks how much is too much

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Usually, wherever two or three microphones are gathered, Franklin Graham seems to be there.

The voice of Graham — son of renowned evangelist Billy Graham — is missing, though, from an investigative report this week by the Charlotte Observer.

The North Carolina newspaper reports that it made repeated requests to interview Franklin Graham last week but that he was not available.

However, Graham's lack of availability did not prevent the newspaper in his home state from producing a fair, solid piece of journalism:

Six years ago, Franklin Graham decided to give up his pay as head of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association.
“I feel that God has called me to this ministry and that calling was never based on compensation,” he wrote then in a memo to the BGEA staff.
But since 2011, at the urging of the Charlotte-based ministry’s board of directors, Graham has been receiving a salary again.
That’s in addition to the more than $620,000 he receives for his other full-time job, leading Samaritan’s Purse, an international relief agency based in Boone. His 2013 compensation from Samaritan’s Purse alone made him the highest-paid CEO of any international relief agency based in the U.S., according to data provided by GuideStar, the world’s largest source of information on nonprofit organizations.
Graham’s total compensation last year from the two charities was more than $880,000, including $258,667 from BGEA.
That total is less than the $1.2 million he received in 2008, but it’s still more than some nonprofit experts consider appropriate.


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Jewish & Christian? Weekend think piece I would have posted, except I was driving on mountain roads

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When I was growing up Southern Baptist in Texas, the "intermarriage" issue that everyone talked about was unions of Baptists and Catholics, especially Cajuns. Some people worried that folks involved in these marriages would lose touch with their faith -- period -- and that children would be raised either confused or apathetic.

It wasn't until I hit graduate school at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign that, while doing a readings class on trends in post-Holocaust Jewish life, I hit a large body of material about interfaith marriages between Christians and Jews and the their impact on Jewish demographics.

Then, in the early 1980s, I moved to Denver and ended up covering story after story linked to the famous Denver Jewish Population Study of 1981. Although this study touched on a wide variety of issues, the one that everyone ended up focusing on was the rising number of interfaith marriages and how many of the resulting children were being raised, in any meaningful sense of the word, as Jews.

It was the front edge of a national wave of debate on this topic that continues to this day. Hold that thought.

The moment that I remember the most vividly was a seminar in which a rabbi, putting a poignant spin on some of the data, pled with parents in interfaith marriages not to raise their children in both faiths at the same time. Pick one, he said, because the dual-faith approach actually teaches children that faith is confusing and irrelevant. A child in an interfaith home who is raised Christian has a better chance of choosing to practice the Jewish faith later in life than a child "raised in both," since most of these children end up with no meaningful faith at all.

Today, we would say that this rabbi was warning that most children "raised both" end up becoming "nones," joining the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated.

This brings me to an interesting think piece in The Forward that, literally, I saw on my smartphone yesterday during a break in my family's drive back to Oak Ridge from some downtime in the North Carolina mountains.


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So, is this America's most unlikely interfaith dialogue?

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So, is this America's most unlikely interfaith dialogue?

With scant media attention, leading U.S. thinkers from The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (a.k.a. Mormon) and Evangelical Protestantism have been holding regular dialogue meetings the past 15 years. This is a good moment for religion writers to examine where things stand between these two dynamic faiths.

That’s because the talks are pausing temporarily as participants issue a new anthology: “Talking Doctrine: Mormons & Evangelicals in Conversation” (InterVarsity Press). The book’s editors, who’ve led the dialogue to date, are top sources for journalists: Robert Millet, former religious education dean at the LDS Brigham Young University, and Richard Mouw, retired president of Fuller Theological Seminary.

The two sides constitute the most unlikely dialogue partners imaginable, despite their concord on moral issues in the socio-political realm. They are past antagonists and current archrivals in evangelism. Participants were sometimes branded sell-outs, especially on the Evangelical side. Defending his participation,  Dennis Okholm of Azusa Pacific University says, “I have learned more about my own orthodox faith and how to articulate it with greater accuracy and sophistication -- and love.”

Adding to the unlikeliness, the two sides insist they teach the one true Christian faith but have remarkable differences. The LDS church, in fact, insists that all authentic Christianity vanished by the 2d Century and God needed to restore the authentic faith and church authority uniquely through American founder Joseph Smith Jr.

The book is disappointing in that participants offer no shared statement to define agreements and disagreements. The anthology might be more useful if it had printed verbatim some key doctrinal papers presented in the talks with responses from the other side.


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Backpacker heads out into the woods and gives Trail Life USA a fair shot

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There is the Boy Scouts of America story, which is complex and getting more so every minute -- especially among decision-makers for American Catholics and leaders of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Journalists are covering these stories, of course.

Then there is another story that could be covered, one that focuses on the people in religious flocks that are not interested in compromising on centuries of basic doctrines about marriage and family. There have been a few stories about these folks, but, so far, they have been rather thin and packed with stereotypes.

The former Boy Scout in me is interested in knowing what happens to the folks who have left. I'm interested -- as an Eastern Orthodox layman -- in some of these other options because I know that many members of Orthodox parishes are starting to look for ways out of the Boy Scouts. But do they want to join some kind of hyper-Evangelical Protestant alternative?

I'm happy to report that a freelancer linked to Backpacker Magazine -- a bible, of sorts, for people who wear out more than their share of hiking boots and rain slickers -- has turned out a serious story about Trail Life USA, one of the largest of the faith-friendly alternative camping-and-outdoors operations.

The key: This story focuses more on what boys are doing in these troops out in the woods, as opposed to what their lawyers are saying in courtrooms. There are sections of this piece that will make the palms of Unitarian Universalists or urbane Episcopalians sweat.

I also appreciated that reporter Patrick Doyle, who works out of Pittsburgh, didn't focus on a Trail Life unit in, let's say an evangelical megachurch in Bible Belt, Mississippi. He focused on a troop in a northern setting, based in a mainline Protestant flock. Here is the overture, focusing on the roots of this troop:

Boy Scout Troop 452 has been meeting at Concord United Methodist Church in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, as long as there’s been a troop, nearly 70 years.
But this isn’t the usual weekly gathering of the boys and their scoutmaster, Richard Greathouse. This meeting is just for their parents.


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Hard-hitting journalism on Baptist church's acceptance of same-sex marriage? Not exactly

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"Hard-hitting religion journalism," said the subject line on an email from a GetReligion reader.

Methinks that reader enjoys the fine art of sarcasm.

The friendly correspondent shared a link to a front-page story in today's Greenville News in South Carolina.

The story concerns a Baptist church — which disassociated itself from the Southern Baptist Convention in 1999 — deciding to embrace same-sex marriage.

At 1,900 words, the Gannett newspaper's report on "One church's journey" is long enough to be considered in-depth. But hard-hitting journalism it most definitely is not.

If newspapers wrote love songs instead of news articles, this is how one might go — complete with the reporter tweeting unabashedly about the church's "amazing transformation."

Here's the first verse:

The conversation at First Baptist Church Greenville took place well before the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision this summer to legalize same-sex marriages.
The dialogue was bold — particularly for one of downtown Greenville’s influential legacy churches that in its earliest years served as a birthplace for revered Southern Baptist institutions.
Would the congregation be willing to allow same-sex couples to marry in the church?
To ordain gay ministers?

 


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Ghostbusters: Solving faith mystery of CEO who cut his $1 million salary to pay employees more

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Back in April, we spotted a holy ghost in the coverage of a Seattle CEO.

As you may recall, Gravity Payments founder Dan Price cut his own $1 million salary to pay all his employees at least $70,000 a year.

That post asked:

Could Price's weirdness have something to do with his Christian faith, if, as I am assuming, he is a Christian? A blurb on Seattle Pacific's website says one of the books that influenced him was"Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger."
My quick Googling didn't turn up any news reports that mention Price's religion. Nonetheless, I can't help but think a holy ghost might be haunting this story.

Three-plus months later, a GetReligion reader points us to an update from the New York Times.

Thank you for the tip, Christopher!

I must agree: This in-depth piece does a nice job of solving the faith mystery.


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Did GOP candidates really avoid moral and religious talk when courting black voters?

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If you follow trends among African-American voters, you know that they tend to be more conservative on moral and social issues than other key players in the modern Democratic Party coalition. There have been some small shifts among younger African-Americans on issues such as abortion and gay rights, but the basic trends can still be seen.

So, African-American voters are more culturally conservative than most other Democrats, but they have remained very loyal when venturing into the voting booths -- especially in the Barack Obama era.

But one other factor should be mentioned. If Republicans are going to find any black voters that are willing to cross over and ACT on their more conservative values, it is highly likely that those voters will be found among those who frequent church pews. That isn't surprising, is it?

Thus, I would like GetReligion readers to dig into the following Washington Post story that focuses on attempts by GOP candidates -- including Dr. Ben Carson -- to recruit some additional black voters to their cause. The headline gives zero clue as to what this very long political story is about: "Clinton takes a swipe at Jeb Bush’s ‘Right to Rise.' "

What are readers looking for?

Well, personally, I find it interesting that the story contains, as best I can tell, zero references to religious, moral and cultural issues. Even in the material from Jeb Bush. Even in the references to the remarks of Carson, who is, of course, an African-American religious conservative who rarely gives a speech without talking about social issues.


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Yes, we saw that rather stunning Gawker quote about God and the mainstream press

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For years, I have heard religious leaders -- yes, most of them conservative types -- ask reporters whether or not they go to church. It's not a nice question and, I would argue, it's not the right question to ask if the goal is to understand why the mainstream press struggles to cover religion news.

The goal of this question, essentially, is to show that an unusually high percentage of the scribes and editors in newsrooms are godless heathens who hate religious people. Now, I have met a few of those heathens in newsrooms, but not as many as you would think. I've met my share of "spiritual, but not religious" journalists and quite a few religious progressives. I once heard a colleague quip that the only place that the Episcopal Church's "Decade of Evangelism," in the 1990s, was a success was in newsrooms.

As I have said before on this blog, there are plenty of non-believers who do a fine job covering religion news. Then again, I have met believers who could not report their way out of a paper bag.

No, the question religious folks should be asking journalists -- when reporters are sent to cover religion events -- is this: How long have you covered religion news and what did you do,  professionally and/or academically, to prepare for this work? In other words, stop asking journalists religious questions and start asking them journalism questions.

If you want to see a "Do you go to church?" train wreck, then check out the following commentary (and then some) from Hamilton Nolan at Gawker that as been making the rounds.


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