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.

In “The Jihadist Next Door,” Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Andrea Elliott’s Sunday cover story in The New York Times Magazine, Elliott turns her laser focus on the journey of one American youngster who decides to join a Somali terrorist group linked to Al Qaeda.

By going deep into one particular story, this long-form feature sheds light on bigger issues. But as I read her opening grafs, I worried that Elliott was going to give short shrift to the story’s religious dimensions.

Sentences like this one, which appeared high up in the story, teased the reader but were not immediately developed:

Brought up a Southern Baptist, Omar [Hammami] went to Bible camp as a boy and sang “Away in a Manger” on Christmas Eve.

On the second page of the 12-page story was another teaser:

Hammami’s journey from a Bible Belt town in America to terrorist training camps in Somalia was pieced together from interviews with his parents, sister, best friends and law-enforcement officials, as well as hours of home videos and passages from his e-mail messages, journal entries and hundreds of his postings on an Internet forum.

A later sentence seemed to link “Alabama’s conservative Christian culture” to a previous paragraph’s mention of Ku Klux Klan, but this may have been merely an unfortunate transition.

Once the stage is set, Elliott dives into her subject’s warring religious loyalties:

Yet for all of his social triumph, Hammami was consumed with a profound internal conflict. He didn’t know whether to be Muslim or Christian.

Omar was raised by a father who came to America from Syria and a mother who had Omar baptized in the local Baptist church. Somehow mom and dad found a way to make their two-faith marriage work, but as Omar grew older he became obsessed over questions of religious identity. In time began wearing Arabic robes to school and praying to Mecca at the flagpole where Christian students regularly gathered for their prayers.

We know Omar is headed for big trouble when he develops a more-fundamentalist-than-thou mindset and begins “searching for guidance on the Internet.” Before long he moves to Toronto, to join the Muslim community there, and on to Somalia where he rapidly climbs the jihadist ladder to emerge as a leader with his own YouTube recruitment videos. (He shows up at about 2:30 into the video featured at the top of this post.)

Dear Ms. Elliott: I am sorry I let a few early teaser sentences lead me to briefly doubt you. This is a great and fascinating (and disturbing) piece of journalism. I can only imagine the hard work you did to establish trust and communication with Omar’s family members and his jihadist brethren. And the hundreds of reader comments show that you have hit a nerve with your in-depth reporting.

Earlier today, we looked at a couple of media treatments of that abstinence study. Both the Washington Post and Associated Press coverage we looked at were much better than this Los Angeles Times story. It’s awful. Here’s a sample:

The George W. Bush administration poured tens of millions of dollars into federal funding for abstinence-only programs, most of them religious-oriented, with little or no evidence that they worked. And new data released last week showed that sexual activity, pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases are increasing among teens.

What are reporters Thomas H. Maugh II and Shari Roan talking about? Have they even read the Bush administration guidelines for funding of abstinence programs? Or, for that matter, for funding of faith-based groups? Do they really believe that “most” of the Bush administration funds went to religious-oriented programs? Really? Now, I’m not saying that in the bloated bureaucracy that is the federal government that funds aren’t misappropriated to religious charities that fail to follow the regulations for federal funds. (Indeed, the ACLU got Health and Human Services to agree to stop funding one group over concerns the funds were being allocated to a group whose program was, well, religiously oriented.) But if you believe that most federal funds for abstinence programs went to “religious-oriented” programs, you shouldn’t be writing on this topic.

And that’s not even mentioning the failure of this story to mention that non-abstinence programs receive the vast majority of federal funds for sex education. My previous post discussed how odd it is that studies showing the same rates of effectiveness for various sex ed programs are written up as failures for only one type of sex ed program (and it’s always the abstinence program that gets blamed or framed as the curriculum that shouldn’t be funded).

But what’s also interesting is how differently the Los Angeles Times portrayed the effectiveness of other forms of sex education. It claimed that the other forms of sex education used (one that encouraged abstinence but taught about birth control and one that taught about birth control) were also tremendously effective:

Other forms of sex education also worked, however, reducing sexual activity by about 20% and reducing multiple sexual partners by about 40%, according to the study reported Monday in the Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine.

It doesn’t explain which forms of sex education were successful. But compare that with what the Associated Press said:

The students, mostly 12-year-olds, were assigned to one of four options: eight hour-long abstinence-only classes, safe-sex classes, classes incorporating both approaches; or classes in general healthy behavior, which served as a control group. Results for each class were compared with the control group.

Two years later, about one-third of abstinence-only students said they’d had sex since the classes ended, versus nearly half - about 49 percent - of the control group. Sexual activity rates in the other two groups didn’t differ from the control group.

And the AP’s statement even seems to conflict with what the Washington Post says:

Over the next two years, about 33 percent of the students who went through the abstinence program started having sex, compared with about 52 percent who were taught only safe sex. About 42 percent of the students who went through the comprehensive program started having sex, and about 47 percent of those who learned about other ways to be healthy did.

If 42 percent of the students who learned about “safe sex” and abstinence had sex while 52 percent who learned solely about how to have “safe sex,” that seems noteworthy.

I don’t have access to the full study but these three summaries all seem to say different things. Either the other sex ed programs showed worse results than the control group, the same results as the control group or better results than the control group. That’s not hard to make happen when dealing with statistics but it does make you wonder about how studies are presented by the media.

We have a very complex and ugly story developing right now down in Haiti, one than calls up the demons of all the tensions that exist in that nation between Americans and Haitians and, it must be stressed, between competing religious groups inside Haiti.

But before we get into that, the Washington Post needs to run an immediate correction on a mistake at the top of this story:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI — Ten American Baptists who tried to leave Haiti with 33 destitute children were stuck in legal limbo Monday, with Haitian and U.S. officials negotiating over whether the church members should be prosecuted in the United States.

The Americans, Baptist church members from Idaho and other states, said they were taking the children to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic and deny any wrongdoing. But Haitian authorities said members of the group, who have little experience in international adoptions, did not have permission to leave the country with the children. On Monday, the church members were being held in a dank room at the judicial police headquarters, where they had not yet been charged, as Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive and other Haitian authorities met with U.S. officials to discuss their fate.

Fortil Mazar, a prosecutor in Port-au-Prince, said members of the group face kidnapping and child-smuggling charges. In Washington, a State Department spokesman said the United States is helping in the investigation but has not yet determined the “appropriate course” of action.

Now, if you know anything about the complex state of Baptist life in America, you know that there are American Baptists — as in members of the more liberal American Baptist Churches USA — and then there are Baptists who are Americans, which could mean that they could be members of the giant Southern Baptist Convention, members of hundreds of other Baptist bodies or simply members of completely independent Baptist congregations.

The lede says “American Baptists” — which is simply wrong.

The Post story does follow the trail, via the Internet, to the proper congregation. But the story does not pay attention to the status of that church, in terms of its national or state affiliations.

The Baptists said that they were simply saving the children, ages 2 to 12, in their care and that they had come from orphanages that had been devastated in the quake.

“The children were being taken to an orphanage in the Dominican Republic where they could be cared for and have their medical and emotional needs attended to,” said a statement on the Web site of Central Valley Baptist Church, which is based in Meridian, Idaho. “Our team was falsely arrested today and we are doing everything we can from this end to clear up the misunderstanding.”

Meanwhile, the SBC’s wire service has some crucial information on the identity of these Southern Baptists, who happen to be from Idaho (far outside the South, in other words):

Members of two Southern Baptist churches in Idaho are awaiting word on what a Haitian judge will decide Feb. 1 when he hears the case of 10 Americans accused of unlawfully trying to remove 33 children from Haiti.

Five of the 10 are members of Central Valley Baptist Church in Meridian, Idaho, and three are from Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls, including Eastside’s pastor, Paul Thompson. Two others are believed to be from other states.

“Both churches are very missions-minded and have sent members overseas many times,” said Rob Lee, executive director of the Utah-Idaho Southern Baptist Convention. “They went over to help. I really don’t believe they had anything less than perfect motives.” Lee said while he had been informed by email that the churches were planning trips to Haiti, the trips were not coordinated through the Utah-Idaho convention.

According to Clint Henry, pastor of Central Valley Baptist, the Baptists lacked one document at the Haitian border and returned to Port-au-Prince to get it, where they were confronted and detained.

For me, the most crucial information that is in the Baptist Press report — with credit given to the Associated Press — is in this section:

Henry said Laura Silsby and another member of his church started New Life Children’s Refuge before the earthquake as a way to help orphaned Haitian children. According to an AP report, given the living conditions for the children and the breakdown in government control, Silsby said she didn’t think about Haitian permission to take the children out of the country. She said they only had the best intentions and paid no money for the children, whom she said were brought to a Haitian pastor by distant relatives. …

Silsby and her team had been working with a Haitian pastor named Jean Sanbil of Sharing Jesus Ministries, AP said. The earthquake destroyed the orphanage facilities, and facing the chaos that followed the earthquake, the ministry team was trying to help Sanbil ensure the immediate safety and welfare of the children. Sanbil had made arrangements for housing the children temporarily in the Dominican Republic, and the team was working to help him transport the children there.

In other words, it appears — I stress appears — that the members of this Baptist team were working with a Protestant Haitian ministry called Sharing Jesus Ministries and that a Haitian pastor was working with them, including making some of the arrangements.

But one fact is not clear and it is crucial: Is “Sharing Jesus Ministries” actually an orphanage? In other words, were the Southern Baptists from America working with a Haitian pastor who was already in charge of the children in question, through connections in their families?

This is a crucial question for reporters, when investigating the hot, hot accusations of kidnapping and trafficking.

However, it is also clear that the religious tensions in Haiti between Protestants and Catholics, especially Catholics who have blended Voodoo practices into their daily lives, are at the heart of this story. As I have stressed all along (here is a crucial post to catch up), these tensions are powerful among the Haitians themselves, as well as between Haitians and American missionary workers.

Consider this passage in a USA Today blog post by veteran religion-beat specialist Cathy Grossman.

Are Haiti earthquake ‘orphans’ fair game for evangelizing? … Some critics say the race to remove Haiti’s children is culturally insensitive, if not downright illegal. Others are offended by the prospect of children from a Catholic culture being airlifted into evangelical institutions or families — losing their faith along with their families.

Valid questions, although it may be a rush to assume that all of the people in “a Catholic culture” are (a) Catholics or (b) practicing Catholics, a distinction that has been the subject of talks between Protestants and Catholics of good will for decades. The native Protestant presence in Haiti is rising rapidly, as has been mentioned in some press reports.

However, this time around there is a more basic question that must be asked first: Were the Baptists, in fact, working with Haitian orphans who had been brought, by their relatives or others, to an orphanage operated by Haitian Protestants where they were to be cared for and, one would assume, potentially adopted? In other words, had Haitians arranged this transfer of the children?

It seems that someone needs to talk to the pivotal Haitian figure in this story — Pastor Jean Sanbil of Sharing Jesus Ministries — pronto.

So a new study on the effectiveness of abstinence education came out and it’s interesting to look at how it’s being covered. First, let’s look at a story from the past about a study that showed that there was no difference in the effectiveness of abstinence programs and their counterparts that instruct teens in how to use birth control:

Study Casts Doubt on Abstinence-Only Programs

A long-awaited national study has concluded that abstinence-only sex education, a cornerstone of the Bush administration’s social agenda, does not keep teenagers from having sex. Neither does it increase or decrease the likelihood that if they do have sex, they will use a condom.

Two things to note. The first is how a study showing that there is no difference in the effectiveness of these two types of sex education programs becomes an indictment of only one. Why doesn’t the study cast doubt on programs that teach kids how to put condoms on penises?

The second point is how, well, “conclusive” the study is made out to be. The four communities studied become a “national study.” And while there were people who thought that the study did a poor job of separating out students who received both types of education or controlling for socio-economic factors — the lede is very cut and dry. The study “concluded” something very bad about all abstinence education.

Compare that with how the Associated Press reported a new study showing abstinence education to be highly effective in reducing and delaying sexual activity among youth compared to programs that teach children how to use birth control and condoms or combine abstinence messages with birth control instruction. The study, which appears in the American Medical Association’s latest Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, showed a surprisingly significant one-third decrease in rates of sexual activity compared to non-participants. And the decrease persisted a full two years after they attended the class. Students in the other programs showed no reduction in sexual activity or increase contraceptive use in the short or long term. OK, here’s how the AP’s Lindsay Tanner began her story:

An experimental abstinence-only program without a moralistic tone can delay teens from having sex, a provocative study found.

Isn’t that interesting? Some studies “conclude” while other studies merely suggest that something “can” happen. Why is that? And what in the world is up with that “without a moralistic tone” line? The reporter continues:

Billed as the first rigorous research to show long-term success with an abstinence-only approach, the study differed from traditional programs that have lost federal and state support in recent years. The classes didn’t preach saving sex until marriage or disparage condom use.

Instead, it involved assignments to help sixth- and seventh graders see the drawbacks to sexual activity at their age, including having them list the pros and cons themselves. Their cons far outnumbered the pros.

Now, I had to review abstinence curriculum for a story I wrote last year and the fact is that there is no one “abstinence-only approach.” Any reporter who has reviewed the curriculum of popular abstinence programs knows that it is improper to describe them as “abstinence-only.” That is the term favored by critics of abstinence programs and it’s a great term of polemics but that does not describe what the programs aim to do. The abstinence curricula I reviewed actually dealt very little with any discussion of avoiding sexual activity. For the most part, they aimed to teach youth how to set goals and achieve them, how to assess and avoid risky behavior, how to improve one’s self esteem. None of the programs I reviewed “preached” anything or even “disparaged” anything.

The fact is that Tanner’s opinions aren’t appropriate for the lede of a story about a study. These opinions and characterizations of abstinence programs do exist in the sex education thunderdome and it certainly wouldn’t be difficult to attribute them to someone from, say, Planned Parenthood. But they shouldn’t be in an AP story presented as fact.

I’m still completely uncertain how the abstinence program in this study, which shows such dramatically different outcomes, differs from some of the myriad other abstinence programs out there.

The Washington Post’s story on the study, written by Rob Stein, is better. The top of the story lays out the facts without too much editorializing. But then we also get this:

Several critics of an abstinence-only approach said that the curriculum tested did not represent most abstinence programs. It did not take a moralistic tone, as many abstinence programs do. Most notably, the sessions encouraged children to delay sex until they are ready, not necessarily until married; did not portray sex outside marriage as never appropriate; and did not disparage condoms.

It’s really weird for me to read a paragraph like this. And not just because both Stein and Tanner use some of the same phrases (I think they may have borrowed from the press release announcing the study).

The curricula I reviewed spent much more time on boosting self-esteem, achieving goals and avoiding risky behavior than discussing — much less disparaging — condoms or premarital sex. And I also wonder how we’re discussing “most” abstinence programs. I don’t know how many abstinence programs there are but has there been a good comprehensive review of the curriculum? Or are these reporters merely summing up their own research? If I hadn’t done my own review, I’d be much more accepting of these blanket statements. But something isn’t quite right about them. At least Stein’s story does note that there are other perspectives:

But abstinence supporters disputed that, saying that the new program is equivalent to many other well-designed abstinence curricula that are thorough, tailor their messages to students’ ages and provide detailed information.

“For our critics to use marriage as the thing that sets the program in this study apart from federally funded programs is an exaggeration and smacks of an effort to dismiss abstinence education rather than understanding what it is,” said Valerie Huber of the National Abstinence Education Association.

When dealing with a beast as complicated as sex education, it behooves a reporter to let the advocates battle it out rather than taking sides in the news pages. Some did better with that than others.

Six years ago today, Douglas LeBlanc clicked his Mac mouse and GetReligion was born as a small website on TypePad.

We had a simple goal, but one that was a bit hard to explain to folks on the outside.

GetReligion was not and is not a site about religion news. It’s a site about how the mainstream press struggles to cover religion.

Let me repeat that: GetReligion was not and is not a site about religion news. It’s a site about how the mainstream press struggles to cover religion.

From the start we have tried to praise the good and dissect the bad, while striving to talk as much as possible about basic issues of journalism craft. As journalists, Doug and I outed ourselves, at the very beginning, as traditional Christians of two different brand names who shared a passion about improving religion-news coverage.

We hoped that, within a year or two, we might be taken seriously. We hoped that we might even end up being listed as a religion-news coverage resource at Poynter.org or other mainstream journalism sites. That happened in a matter of weeks.

Since then the online numbers have continued to add up, especially after a few other writers joined the team.

Right now, we’re at 5,051 posts in six years.

As I type this, we’re at 62,302 comments and at least another 20,000 or so have been spiked for one reason or another — mostly because they are based on arguments about doctrine, not journalism.

There are 3,181 comments containing the word “Jerry.” That’s a shock. There are 1,477 containing the word “deacon,” which is lower than I expected. Some folks have gotta do what they’ve gotta do. That’s fine with us, if they want to talk about journalism.

The site’s birthday is always a good time to point back at that first post, the one called “What we do, why we do it.” Here’s how that opens:

Day after day, millions of Americans who frequent pews see ghosts when they pick up their newspapers or turn on television news.

They read stories that are important to their lives, yet they seem to catch fleeting glimpses of other characters or other plots between the lines. There seem to be other ideas or influences hiding there.

One minute they are there. The next they are gone. There are ghosts in there, hiding in the ink and the pixels. Something is missing in the basic facts or perhaps most of the key facts are there, yet some are twisted. Perhaps there are sins of omission, rather than commission.

A lot of these ghosts are, well, holy ghosts. They are facts and stories and faces linked to the power of religious faith. Now you see them. Now you don’t. In fact, a whole lot of the time you don’t get to see them. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.

The ghosts are still out there and we’re still trying to see them and write about them. We get to celebrate the fact that, even in tough times in daily journalism, there are some reporters who really know how to see the religion ghosts and write about them. There are some journalists who just don’t care or they even seem to want the ghosts to go away.

We will keep banging our head on this wall, because that is what we do. We remain committed to the belief that mainstream American journalism is important and that it will be improved by critics who love journalism, not hate journalism. There are many critics out there who actually hate mainstream journalism and we are not very fond of them, to tell you the truth.

So, what should we do to celebrate the past year?

In the past, the writers have posted our own summaries, like this “Take 5” roundup that I did last year. Surf around in the week and you’ll see the other posts in that series.

But this year — taking the advice of some folks in the comments pages — we want to hear from you.

So please cite your favorite posts from the year — two or three would be nice — and give us the links/URLs.

You can also point us toward the best contributions to the comment boards. If you only have one, that’s fine. The important thing is to take part. Tell us your favorite headlines, if the spirit moves.

Above all, please keep reading, please keep commenting and please keep sending us URLs from religion-news stories — good, bad and haunted — that you see in the mainstream press.

Thanks! If you send in a bunch of stuff I’ll try to create some kind of follow-up post later in the week.

Among the stories looking back at President Barack Obama’s first year in office, we’ve seen a few revisiting his worship life. More than a few readers sent in this story from ABC News, headlined “Holy BlackBerry! Obama Finds Ways to Keep the Faith During First Year in Office: Has the First Family’s D.C. Church Search Come to a Close?” Here’s the lede:

If church attendance is one measure of a man’s faith, then President Obama may appear to have lost some of his. The first family, once regular churchgoers, have publicly attended services in Washington just three times in the past year, by ABC News’ count, even bypassing the pews on Christmas Day.

Obama quit Chicago’s embattled Trinity United Church of Christ months before taking office in 2008 and has not formally joined a new one in his new hometown.

But sources familiar with the president’s personal life say Obama remains a faithful Christian while in the White House, practicing his beliefs regularly in private with family and the aid of his BlackBerry.

The story is actually quite charitable toward the president, citing the heavy burden on taxpayers and fellow churchgoers due to security concerns. One of the readers who sent in this story thought the reporters could have done a better job of exploring why the Obamas continue to engage in social outings (such as attending basketball games, going golfing or having dinner at local restaurants) while not attending church. There were a few points in the story where such a comparison should have been noted. However, the story hinted at what I believe is the biggest burden for presidents:

Incessant media attention is also distracting for any president trying to commune with God, exposing what is traditionally a private practice to public scrutiny, [Rev. Jim Wallis, an Obama friend and spiritual adviser,] said.

We pray for President Obama every week at my church. This isn’t a partisan thing — like many other liturgical Christians, the prayer of the church includes the country’s leader regardless of political affiliation. And when we pray for President Obama, I think of how grateful I am that I may attend my church’s Divine Services without having to have the media come in and exploit any parts of the liturgy or of my pastor’s excellent sermons. My pastor’s sermons are very concise but they still require a complete listen from start to finish. If you take any given line without the full context, you could get the wrong idea. The existence of this blog is a testament to the struggles the mainstream media have in understanding religious nuance. I am in no way defending the words of President Obama’s previous pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, but the legacy of the mainstream media reaction to his sermons makes it even more difficult for presidents to become members of a church during their time in office.

The ABC story is a good overview of the Obamas’ worship situation but it doesn’t exactly dig deep. For an exploration of the headline, it reverts to an old statement from the president that Joshua Dubois, who heads up the president’s faith-based office, sends him a devotional and quotes from other faiths to reflect on. There is no further discussion of this. On the other hand, the story does a good job of putting the Obama worship situation in some context of former presidents. The Obamas aren’t the first First Family to have trouble finding a church home.

I rather liked a story from a couple weeks ago on the same issue. It was published on the brand-new Daily Caller web site by White House reporter Jon Ward. Here’s how it handled the nut of the problem:

White House aides say privately that the president faces a problem: his presence at just about any church in D.C. is such a distraction that it turns what should be a personal and private experience - for the president, his family and every other worshiper - into a circus.

“I don’t think it’s disingenuous to say it creates a lot of havoc for the church,” said Michael Cromartie, vice president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

Sure, security is a problem. But it’s a problem wherever the president goes. I rarely think media navel-gazing is a worthwhile task, but in this case I wish the media would be a bit more reflective about how they have contributed to the problem of presidential worship life. We hear all the time about how the media used to let politicos chase skirts with immunity. I hope that permitting politicians to worship in peace isn’t also a relic of the past.

Happy Monday, everyone. If you’re catching up on stories from the weekend, consider three worth your time.

The first story takes place in Texas with the spotlight on Matt Chandler, the 35-year-old Texas pastor recovering from cancer. Call me melodramatic, but Eric Gorski’s story for the Associated Press reminded me just how much the religion beat will miss him. Somehow Gorski convinces his editors to give him the time and space to tell compelling, informative stories like this one. Here’s a section of his 2,500-word piece.

Matt Chandler doesn’t feel anything when the radiation penetrates his brain. It could start to burn later in treatment. But it hasn’t been bad, this time lying on the slab. Not yet, anyway.

Chandler’s lanky 6-foot-5-inch frame rests on a table at Baylor University Medical Center. He wears the same kind of jeans he wears preaching to 6,000 people at The Village Church in suburban Flower Mound, where the 35-year-old pastor is a rising star of evangelical Christianity.

Another cancer patient Chandler has gotten to know spends his time in radiation imagining that he’s playing a round of golf at his favorite course. Chandler on this first Monday in January is reflecting on Colossians 1:15-23, about the pre-eminence of Christ and making peace through the blood of his cross.

The Bible reference took me by surprise because I don’t see them very often in mainstream media reports. I can imagine most reporters might feel uncomfortable including references in their stories unless it’s hard to ignore. Perhaps some think they are giving the individual a platform to spout their religious views. While that might be a legitimate concern in some cases, this detail in the story gives us a nice, clear picture of Chandler’s thought process in dealing with cancer.

Chandler never thought such a trial would shake his faith. But until now, that was just hope in the abstract.

“This has not surprised God,” Chandler says on the drive home. “He is not in a panic right now trying to figure out what to do with me or this disease. Those things have been warm blankets, man.”

Chandler has, however, wrestled with the tension between belief in an all-powerful God and what he, as a mere mortal, can do about his situation. He believes he has responsibilities: to use his brain, to take advantage of technology, to walk in faith and hope, to pray for healing and then “see what God wants to do.”

“Knowing that if God is outside time and I am inside time, that puts some severe limitations on my ability to crack all the codes,” he says. “The more I’ve studied, the more I go, ‘Yes, God is sovereign, and he does ask us to pray … and he does change his mind.’ How all that will work is in some aspects a mystery.”

Even though Christians generally hold similar beliefs about God, Jesus, and the afterlife, Chandler might deal with his cancer differently than someone who believes that Christians have “free will.” Gorski’s piece does a nice job of exploring that a little bit through quotes from Chandler.

Yes, we’ve lamented the loss of Gorski. Fear not, though. Excellent religion reporters still toil away. Case in point: Bob Smietana, who wrote a piece for Sunday on how Churches of Christ are dropping an isolationist view.

Since the late 1800s, Churches of Christ, one of Tennessee’s largest faith groups, have believed their approach to church—singing without instruments in worship, interpreting the Bible literally, taking Communion weekly and banning women from church leadership—was God’s way.

That meant they kept mostly to themselves, shunned other Christians and did not participate in interfaith projects for the community.

In recent years, congregations like Otter Creek have adopted a more progressive view of their faith. They’ve added instruments to church services on Sunday nights and during the week. And they’ve begun cooperating with other faith groups, especially on charitable projects.

These might be subtle differences to the casual observer, but a sharp reporter like Smietana sees the significant shift for the group. He explains that the movement was founded in the 1800s because the founders believed churches of their day had split into too many denominations.

Those early Churches of Christ followed what they believed was the New Testament model for churches. That meant observing Communion every week, baptizing adults by immersion and having no ordained clergy.

The new churches also were autonomous, with no denominational structure. Because the New Testament doesn’t mention musical instruments, these new churches banned musical instruments from all worship services.

That remains true for most of the 258 Churches of Christ in the Nashville area. Statewide there are 1,443 congregations, with 166,302 members. Nationwide, there are 12,629 Churches of Christ with a total of 1,224,404 members.

My only question is whether this group is growing, declining or stagnant. Interesting story, though, with a lot of angles covered.

Finally, in The New York Times Sean Hamill writes about Father Moses Berry, a black priest of the Orthodox Church in America, who leads a 50-member parish and runs a museum for the black history of a nearly all-white town in Missouri.

Father Moses, 59, said he had spent much of his life on a spiritual quest that began in San Francisco in the late 1960s, included nearly a year in jail in Missouri on a drug charge that was later thrown out, and took a positive turn with his conversion to Orthodox Christianity. He was ordained, first in 1988 by an Orthodox church that he now considers “unauthentic” and in 2000 by the Orthodox Church in America.

When he returned here in 1998, after the death of an uncle who had willed him a 40-acre family farm, he had no intention of starting an Orthodox church in a town already served by 10 Christian churches of various denominations, let alone opening a black history museum.

…For Father Moses, his church and his historical work are inextricably linked.

“It’s all bound up in my faith,” he said. “That is, that we are all children of God and that we do have a shared heritage and not just a national heritage.”

I would have liked to read more about why Father Moses is in the Orthodox Church and the challenges he faces leading an all-white congregation. The author links his faith with his historical work quite nicely, though.

Those were my weekend picks. Were there other stories you found worth noting?

Gayle Haggard, the loyal wife of fallen evangelical mega-pastor Ted Haggard, was all over the mainstream media world (Oprah, “Today,” etc.) last week promoting her new book: “Why I Stayed: The Choices I Made in My Darkest Hour.”

With this book blitz, reporting on the Ted Haggard story has now officially moved from Chapter 1 in the Media Playbook (Hard news: Scandal) to Chapter 3 (Features: “Lifie”) without going through Chapter 2 (Analysis: What the heck is really going on here?). Readers would have benefited from deeper questioning.

Ted Haggard finally admitted his sins in November 2006 and was subsequently fired from the Colorado Springs megachurch he founded. He resurfaced in January 2009 when HBO broadcast Alexandra Pelosi’s gripping documentary, “The Trials of Ted Haggard” and he and Gayle appeared on Oprah’s show.

Late last year he started a new church down the road from his old congregation. At that point, some reporters (including local religion reported Mark Barna at The Gazette) did good analysis pieces that raised questions about Haggard’s suitability to lead.

All those questions have been forgotten in the wake of Gayle’s successful p.r. campaign (which was orchestrated by Tyndale, the Wheaton, Illinois-based evangelical publisher that learned a few things about big-league promotion with the Left Behind novels). Marcia Z. Nelson of Publishers Weekly’s Religion BookLine reports that Tyndale has already gone back to press after selling out a first printing of 75,000 copies.

The Haggard story has now evolved into the type of media events Neal Gabler called “lifies,” which are celebrity-driven, media-friendly stories about failure and redemption that serve up big, gooey life lessons for viewers.

Gayle Haggard presents readers and viewers with a powerful message of marital love, personal loyalty and Christian forgiveness, and I was particularly impressed by her interview with Meredith Vieira on “Today” and the piece by Adelle banks of Religion News Service.

But as the Haggards seek to find a new life and calling for themselves, important questions remain:
- Can we believe Ted when he says, as he did on Oprah last week, that after therapy, he has not had “one compulsive thought or behavior”?
- Even if that is true, is Ted now in a position to once again assume the mantle of pastoral leadership?
- Gayle Haggard has certainly suffered enough already, and her husband’s sins do not necessarily bar her from leadership. But is the “evangelical industrial complex” helping to return the couple to a form of shared leadership by publishing and promoting Gayle’s book?

Gabler’s “Life: The Movie” argues that entertainment has conquered reality. The Haggard saga, at least as it is currently being covered, is the latest in a long list of stories about tarnished evangelical, charismatic and Pentecostal leaders that demonstrates the truth of Gabler’s argument in religious circles.

Despite their frequent and often angry protests against pop culture, many Christians reveal that they are all too willing to submit to the marketplace—not any ecclesiastical authority—as the ultimate arbiter of who qualifies as a leader.

This isn’t the last we will hear from the Haggards. Perhaps next time around enterprising reporters will ask some of the tough questions about leadership and authority that have been lost in in the “lifies.”

I constantly tell my students that one of the hardest tasks in journalism is to write a balanced, insightful profile of a controversial person. This is especially hard to do here inside the Beltway, but that is not the topic of the day.

No, I want to praise S.C. Gwynne’s news feature in Texas Monthly about Episcopal, or we probably should say Anglican, Bishop Jack Iker of Fort Worth. You may know Gwynne’s byline from his years at Time and then in a wide variety of other settings.

This is another one of those stories about the local, regional, national and global conflicts in the Episcopal Church and, thus, the Anglican Communion as a whole. Iker is a conservative and, in fact, someone who is even out of step with most conservative Episcopalians in the United States in that he continues to oppose the ordination of women, a step embraced by many, if not most, evangelicals and charismatics.

Iker, thus, is a highly symbolic figure for the nation’s few remaining old-fashioned Anglo-Catholics, a man who is truly loved or hated depending on which pews a reporter visits on a given Sunday. This bishop has no problem talking with Catholic and Orthodox leaders, but struggles to make headway in talks with the principalities and powers of his own church — at least in North America.

So Gwynne has his hands full, writing for a Lone Star magazine with a long history of progressive journalism. Frankly, I think he did amazingly well.

However, I was especially interested in how he would handle — you knew this was coming — the inevitable timeline describing the history of the Anglican wars. I realize that this is a magazine piece, as opposed to a 600-word wire report, but check this out:

What happened in Fort Worth was part of a widening schism in the Episcopal Church, and in the larger Anglican Communion to which it belongs, that has been growing for decades. (The Episcopal Church is the American name of the Anglican Church, created by Henry VIII’s break with the Roman Catholic Church in 1534; Anglican churches operate in about 160 countries and have some 78 million members.) The discontent has its roots in the seventies, when the church made changes to its liturgy and decided to ordain women priests. There were also issues of Scripture, as growing numbers of Episcopalians questioned the literal truth of basic tenets of the faith: the Resurrection, the Atonement, the uniqueness of Jesus as savior. The rift opened wide in 2003 when a partnered gay man named Gene Robinson was consecrated by the church’s general convention as bishop of New Hampshire. Many conservatives went into open revolt, some parishes left, and nearly two thirds of the global Anglican church declared itself in “broken” or “impaired” communion with its more liberal American branch.

Then in 2006 the church did something that many of the more conservative Episcopalians could not bear: It elected a woman, Nevada bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, as its presiding bishop, the nominal head of the church. Schori was not only a woman — which to Iker and other conservatives meant that the church, in electing her, had turned its back both on the word of the Bible and on two thousand years of Christian teaching — but one who had voted for Gene Robinson and blessed same-sex unions. She believed that God’s revelation was ongoing (meaning that core doctrines of the church were liable to change) and was prone to saying things like “I simply refuse to hold the doctrine that there is no access to God except through Jesus. I personally reject the claim that Christianity has the truth and all other religions are in error.” This indeed ran counter to age-old teachings of the church. But her election proved that her views, while anathema to the majority of the Anglican Communion, were nonetheless in keeping with the mainstream of thought and practice in the Episcopal Church.

Hosanna! I think he gets it! This summary places the Robinson consecration and the election of Jefferts Schori in a doctrinal context — in relation to Iker, the majority of the global communion and the establishment of the U.S. church.

With those facts covered, Gwynne can return to talking to the conflict on the ground in Fort Worth, carefully talking to leaders on both sides and showing how this legal war could affect thousands of believers in pews from coast to coast.

I have to ask: Does this Gwynne guy actually have some church-history courses in his past? These are not your ordinary, run-of-the-mill fact paragraphs. May other journalists who are covering similar stories in their regions take note. Print this story out and file it for reference. I would be interested in hearing from Episcopalians on the left and Anglicans on the right about this. Do you see any factual errors?

Photo: Hey, I haven’t used it in at least a month.

In your spare time this weekend, consider taking a few minutes to read Devin Friedman’s lengthy GQ piece that gives the background leading up to the shooting of abortion doctor George Tiller. Scott Roeder was found guilty yesterday of first-degree murder for shooting Tiller. Tiller was an usher at the Reformation Lutheran Church in Kansas where he was handing out bulletins to people before he was shot on May 31, 2009. Friedman’s piece is very engaging and well written, and you feel like you get into the two men’s heads a little bit.

I was fairly pleased with how the author conducted numerous interviews and gives us many, many details to show various dimensions of the story. For example, I don’t remember the last piece I read that explicitly detailed what happens during a late-term abortion. I don’t exactly search for that in stories, but in this context, it’s helpful to get the full picture.

With the title “Savior vs. Savior,” I had high hopes that we might learn something about their respective religions. Unfortunately, while the story offers bits and pieces about Roeder’s and Tiller’s faith, the writer clearly decided at some point of his reporting process that religion was just a minor detail. This is the gist of what we read about Tiller’s church attendance.

George Tiller became a parishioner at Reformation Lutheran because he no longer felt welcome at his old church. There’d been some controversy within the Reformation congregation about whether or not to accept him. Over the years, as he showed up every Sunday, there had been some attrition. But everyone was now pretty galvanized. The ushers identified and dealt with any demonstrators who showed up.

The article never really explains Tiller’s faith at all, though. Similarly, the author mentions briefly in footnotes and once in the story that Roeder was interested in Messianic Judaism and described a conversion experience.

He started watching The 700 Club with Pat Robertson. At the end of the show, Pat Robertson would ask you to accept Jesus. And one morning when Pat Robertson asked, Scott got down on the floor and tried to pray, though he wasn’t sure he knew how. That was how he was born again. For the first time in a long, long while, he felt some hope, saw some light, and it was easy to move toward that from where he was.

This is how he was born again? Did Roeder use those words? More details, please.

He found the truth in lots of places. There was a period he sent money to a preacher down in Texas who would sell you a “miracle link” cloth that would connect you up with a miracle if you sent it back to him to put on his altar. He was exposed on TV as a fraud by Diane Sawyer.

This is interesting, but I’m wondering what this meant for Roeder’s faith? Did he become disillusioned after this period? What got him interested in Messianic Judaism? Does he consider himself a Christian, born again … or something? So we have some vague ideas about Roeder’s faith but nothing concrete.

NPR’s Neal Conan interviewed Friedman for “Talk of the Nation,” where Friedman talks about how Roeder was not in the mainstream of Christianity. “Eventually he becomes what’s called a, uh, a Messianic Jew, I think.” Perhaps his pauses suggest he considered it minor in his reporting. “He had troubled with the mainstream of that religion and so he sort of cobbled his theories together with some friends who were a little bit more fringe.” Here’s more from the interview:

Conan: You mentioned he was a member of something called messianic Jewish faith, not something I have much familiarity with it and from your description not something that’s closely we would regard as mainstream Jewry.

Friedman: No, it’s a Christian sort of basis. It’s like basically you’re a Christian but you believe that you should follow the laws of the Old Testament and by following those laws you’re considering yourself a Jew who believes in Christ. That’s the only way the savior is going to come back.

If an NPR reporter doesn’t know what a Messianic Jew is, GQ readers probably don’t either. Perhaps the reporter could have added a clearer explanation in the story. Later in the NPR interview, a caller also inquired about Roeder’s religion.

Caller: How much of an influence Roeder’s religious philosophy factored into his decision? … Was that the deciding factor in him becoming a murderer?

Friedman: In my opinion and in talking to him, I think that his beliefs informed his religion rather than the other way around. Coming to Kansas, I expected this monolithic community where everyone had the same beliefs religiously and they were on the same page and that’s where they went from. Really people were from all over the spectrum religiously. A lot of people I met who knew Scott from protesting vehemently disagreed with his religious views and basically thought he was totally wrong.

Caller: You’re saying that his beliefs just led him to find what he was looking for specifically within that religious context?

Friedman: Yeah, if I had to look for a motivating factor for this murder, he talked a lot about the information he gathered on the Internet.

Say that again? He expected a monolithic religious community?

Oh dear. Religion may not have been the motivating factor in Tiller’s work or Roeder’s decision to kill, but it deserves to be explored more in a basic profile, much less a 9,000-word piece.

As I mentioned the other day, media coverage of the annual March for Life in Washington, D.C., always offers conservative activists new opportunities to bash the mainstream press. As a journalist who has always worked in the mainstream, I frankly wish that the mainstream press would make their work a little harder to do.

What we have at the top of this post is a pretty typical example of this genre. It is full of movement code words and, I am sure, contains the kind of language — “pro-aborts,” for example — that will make people on the other side of the issue roll their eyes. It’s a conservative video from a conservative group.

However, it makes some valid points. Please watch it, to understand where these media critics are coming from.

For example, you know and I know that crowd estimates have become highly politicized here inside the Beltway. One side sees 100 people. The other side counts 1,000 people. I think it’s important for the press to quote the estimates on both sides, since the police are now reluctant to give estimates. It’s an imperfect science, at best.

But the CNN language that is quoted and shown? Get out of here. That’s just crazy stuff. And what can we say about the online piece from nonNewsweek? Here is the top of the item by Krista Gesaman:

Today is the 37th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the landmark Supreme Court case legalizing abortion, and droves of women are prepared to face rainy weather to support their positions during the annual Washington, D.C., demonstrations. But there will be one major difference with the demonstration route this year — it’s shorter.

“The organizers are getting older, and it’s more difficult for them to walk a long distance,” says Stanley Radzilowski, an officer in the planning unit for the Washington, D.C., police department. A majority of the participants are in their 60s and were the original pioneers either for or against the case, he says.

So this raises the question: where are the young, vibrant women supporting their pro-life or pro-choice positions? Likely, they’re at home. “Young women are still concerned about these issues, but they’re not trained to go out and protest,” says Kristy Maddux, assistant professor at the University of Maryland, who specializes in historical feminism.

Where to begin?

Well, as conservative media critic Matthew Balan noted, the folks at nonNewsweek could have started their research by reading, no, not Right to Life News, but their own sister publication — The Washington Post. In that newsroom, the rising tide of young marchers has in recent years turned into a theme that runs through the coverage.

But this is a case in which the conservative people that made this video could have strengthened their case by citing accurate, informed coverage, as well as bashing away at some of the inaccurate and often embarrassingly biased coverage that — this is painful to say — is out there, year after year.

The folks at ThineEyes.org could have, for example, included part of that recent Metro column in the Post by Robert McCartney, the one that opened like this:

I went to the March for Life rally … on the Mall expecting to write about its irrelevance. Isn’t it quaint, I thought, that these abortion protesters show up each year on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, even though the decision still stands after 37 years. What’s more, with a Democrat in the White House likely to appoint justices who support abortion rights, surely the Supreme Court isn’t going to overturn Roe in the foreseeable future.

How wrong I was. The antiabortion movement feels it’s gaining strength, even if it’s not yet ready to predict ultimate triumph, and Roe supporters (including me) are justifiably nervous. … In this case, I was especially struck by the large number of young people among the tens of thousands at the march. It suggests that the battle over abortion will endure for a long time to come.

Yes, it’s important for media critics to stress that their goal is to praise good journalism, as well as to spotlight the bad. Bashing away, year after year, can be balanced with praise for journalists who are striving to get the facts right.

It never hurts, for example, to point journalists toward one of the towering achievements in media criticism on this topic, which would be the famous 1990 Los Angeles Times series on media bias and abortion, written by the late David Shaw. In this case, the reporter himself was pro-abortion rights, but he was also pro-journalism. That series continues to be must reading, 20 years later.

Let’s close with one of its more famous passages:

… It’s not surprising that some abortion-rights activists would see journalists as their natural allies. Most major newspapers support abortion rights on their editorial pages, and two major media studies have shown that 80% to 90% of U.S. journalists personally favor abortion rights. Moreover, some reporters participated in a big abortion rights march in Washington last year, and the American Newspaper Guild, the union that represents news and editorial employees at many major papers, has officially endorsed “freedom of choice in abortion decisions.”

On an issue as emotional as abortion, some combatants on each side expect reporters to allow their personal beliefs to take precedence over their professional obligation to be fair and impartial.

And all of the fair-minded journalists said: Amen.

Grant Desme is making it to The Show. Just not the one Nuke LaLoosh dreamed about.

The decision by one of the Oakland A’s top prospects — he was considered a lock for the Majors one day — to leave baseball and enter seminary is a story that, quite remarkably, has gotten the attention it deserves by media outlets big and small, local and national.

The AP article offered the details you would expect — Desme is a lifelong Catholic who “kept his path quiet within the sports world” — but without much discussion of why he felt so compelled. I particularly liked this history lesson:

“Al Travers, who gave up 24 runs during a one-game career for a makeshift Detroit Tigers team in 1912, became a Catholic priest. More recently, Chase Hilgenbrinck of the New England Revolution left Major League Soccer in 2008 to enter a seminary.

It’s a good story, but I can easily image the AP’s Eric Gorski digging deeper into this story. That is, if the Godbeat was still blessed by his membership.

And what about the local paper, the San Francisco Chronicle, which isn’t exactly known for its sensitive treatment of the Catholic Church?

Pretty good. The overall story isn’t significantly different than the AP’s. But the structure and choice of quotes are. It starts:

“Baseball is a good thing, but that felt selfish of me when I felt that God was calling me more,” Desme said on a conference call. “It took a while to trust that and open up to it and aim full-steam toward him.

“I love the game, but I’m going to aspire to higher things.”

The decision was entirely unexpected. Desme said A’s general manager Billy Beane was shocked, and assistant GM David Forst made sure director of player development Keith Lieppman was sitting down before relaying the news.

“He was right on the verge of fame and fortune and glamour, and he’s denying all that,” Lieppman said. “He’s going in a totally different direction. Grant said it was a very powerful call, and that’s much more important.”

It’s interesting to see a baseball front office guy refer to someone’s ministerial calling. But that pales in comparison to the quote that closes the article:

“For those of us who were never good enough to make it to the big leagues, this is a head-scratcher,” one American League scout said. “But during this time in baseball when there’s so much lying and selfishness and hypocrisy, I’ve got to say I think this is very refreshing. This is someone who has his priorities intact. God bless him.”

God bless him, indeed.

Desme’s move reminds me of when Fernando Tatis, the only player to ever hit two grand slams in the same inning and off the same pitcher, returned to the Majors to fund the construction of a church in his native Dominican Republic, and MLB.com has a story saying that Desme isn’t that unusual.

If that’s true, I know one church softball league I need to stay out of.

This is a case where I know, in a few days, GetReligion readers are going to send me URLs for this Orthodox story when the mainstream media in America get around to covering it. Thus, I think I’ll go ahead and try to get ahead of the curve.

I imagine that there will be coverage, for all of the wrong reasons.

I certainly think that there should be coverage, for all of the right reasons.

Here is the top of the Moscow Times report that is causing a stir on the other side of the Atlantic. The headline is certainly an eye-opener: “Patriarch Blames Crime and Drugs for Haitian Quake.”

Russian Orthodox Patriarch Kirill said crime, drugs and corruption caused last week’s massive earthquake that killed tens of thousands of people in Haiti.

Kirill, speaking during a … visit to Kazakhstan, said the Haitian people bore responsibility for the calamity because they had turned away from God, the Ferghana.ru news agency reported late Monday.

“Haiti is a country of poverty and crime, famine, drugs and corruption, where people have lost their moral face,” Kirill was quoted as saying.

He compared Haiti with the Dominican Republic, which are located on the same Caribbean island. “I’ve visited the island divided between two countries, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. One of them is developing, while the other is affected by crimes, economic recession and political unrest. That part of the island was shattered by the earthquake,” he said.

While there is no mention of Voodoo in this text, I think it is safe to say that — to American ears — Kirill’s words are just as shocking as those of the Rev. Pat Robertson, which ignited a firestorm in the American media.

Will the mainstream media in America and Great Britain jump on these words in a similar manner? I’ll be honest: I totally understand why journalists may want to do so.

The theological principle here is quite similar to that offered by Robertson. The two men have simply accused the majority of the Haitian people of different sins. For Robertson, the Voodoo traditions centering on the worship of various spirits (Or is that “Spirits”? ) in addition to a greater God (Or is that “gods”?) represent a form of idolatry. The God of the Bible is not fond of idolatry. For the patriarch, other sins are involved in this national tragedy.

The crucial journalistic question, of course, is this: What did the patriarch actually say?

This is one reason that I hope the story draws some coverage, to flesh out some of the gaping holes in the Moscow Times report:

Asked to clarify Kirill’s comments, a church spokesman said … that the news report had “misinterpreted” the patriarch’s words and “taken them out of context.” The spokesman, Alexander Volkov, could not immediately clarify, saying only that a transcript of the speech would appear “later” on the Moscow Patriarchate’s web site.

A church scholar said Kirill’s comments had astonished his foreign listeners in Almaty, but they were quite ordinary to the Orthodox faithful.

“For those who often listen to Patriarch Kirill, such statements seem quite ordinary, but I know that some people in Almaty were amazed,” said the scholar, Alexander Soldatov, editor of the religious web site Portal-Credo.ru.

Kirill is known for his statements about large-scale disasters. Last year, he blamed the global financial crisis on the spiritual degradation of the world and called it a trial.

If you want to keep an eye out for that transcript, here is the link for the Moscow Patriarchate. This may take a while.

Some may find it strange that Kirill, in addition to making these controversial comments, has also expressed his condolences to the people of Haiti in their time of grief. Certainly, the International Orthodox Christian Charities (click here for info) have mobilized to send aid to Haiti. Of course, Robertson also repeatedly called for prayers for the Haitian people and urged his audience to give generously to efforts to pour aid into the stricken nation.

The bottom line: In Christian theology it is possible to believe that compassion and alms are Christian duties, while also believing that corporate sins may have mysterious consequences. The press likes this concept when it is applied to, oh, environmental issues and some aspects of American foreign policy.

Obviously this is a controversial and offensive stance in the modern world. It would be good if the press covered Kirill’s words and allowed intelligent, informed voices on both sides of this doctrinal debate to speak their minds. I am assuming, of course, that a transcript of what Kirill actually said is available, showing his words in context.

Meanwhile, the patriarch has also said:

“On these sad days, all Russian Orthodox believers and I condole with you and all residents of the island who have lost their relatives and loved ones,” the Patriarch said in a wire sent to Haitian President Rene Preval published by the Patriarch’s press service on Friday. The Patriarch said in the wire he is “praying for the prompt healing of the wounded and spiritual assistance to all those who have lost their housing, and also the strengthening of those who are now working on dealing with the aftermath of this natural disaster.”

Stay tuned.