There is some seriously conflicting information out there right now concerning Crystal Cathedral founder the Rev. Robert H. Schuller. The Los Angeles Times, which has the more recent story, explains:

Crystal Cathedral’s senior pastor Sheila Coleman expressed outrage in an interview Sunday after rumors spread across the media and Internet that her father, famed televangelist Robert H. Schuller, was stepping down.

“Dad is not retiring,” she said. “I told [the congregation] that Dad’s role would not be changing and mine would not be changing.”

The media storm started when the Orange County Register reported that the 83-year-old Schuller announced his departure during the morning service at the Garden Grove cathedral. The Associated Press picked up the Register story. And within the hour, dozens of papers and media sites picked up the AP article and Twitter was buzzing with the news that the man who created the empire behind the popular weekly Christian TV show “Hour of Power” was moving on. Wikipedia added to its entry that Schuller was retiring.

As of 10:15 am PST, neither the Orange County Register nor The New York Times, which ran the AP story under the headline “Founder Retires From Megachurch” — had changed its tune. Twitter still hasn’t caught up.

The AP, 10 hours ago, ran an “updated” version of the story, which was the sorriest attempt I’ve seen to get around running a correction:

The 83-year-old Schuller will take on a new role as head of the church’s board of directors.

Coleman told the Los Angeles Times that the move is not a retirement for her father, that he will still make appearances at the church and continue to preach “until the day he dies.”

Previously the AP had hidden behind the reporting of the OC Reg. It’s events like this that remind me that, at least on occasion, the Associated Press is the local TV news of print journalism.

So what happened with the OC Register? The paper opened its story with something of an obit intro, followed by the “announcement” that Schuller was going to be the new head of the church board and then this quote:

“I’m very proud that Sheila has earned her doctorate at the University of California, Irvine, and that this university has declared her to (have earned) a distinguished alumnus award,” Schuller told his congregation during the 9:30 a.m. service. “Congratulations, I’m very proud of her.”

It’s difficult to imagine that a televangelist of Schuller’s skills couldn’t give a better, to-the-point quote about why his daughter was fully taking over and why he was stepping aside. But that’s all the OC Reg offered. While we are at it, please note this as well: Shouldn’t that first reference to his daughter, under Associated Press style, be the Rev. Sheila Coleman? I would imagine that the elder Schuller is legally ordained, as well. You think?

Meanwhile, where is the rest of this story? Was there any? Was this a reporting snafu or just a matter of he said, she corrected? The LAT appears to have answered those questions. And it doesn’t look good for the Register.

Part of the blame likely falls on circumstances. This story “broke” on a Sunday. That’s not usually a day when religion reporters — if the paper even has them on staff — are just sitting around the newsroom listening to church sermons on the police scanners.

And with that in mind, I thought the LAT did a good job.

The story was fairly short, but considering that it was a story clearing up a non-story, the length is sufficient. And the context was impressive for reporters who previously had not covered the schism between Schuller and his son, Robert A., that put Coleman into (hour of) power. They even worked a quote from Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary, about whether Coleman would be able to have the success that her father did.

Of course, this non-story says some uncomfortable things about the continuing evolution of the news business.

I don’t want to call it a devolution, because so many good things have come from the added speed and readership of stories being analyzed on blogs and shared on Twitter. But, not surprisingly, when stories are inaccurately reported the first time around, a lot more people get the misinformation — and you can expect that far fewer people are re-tweeting that Schuller didn’t retire.

PHOTO: The Rev. Sheila Coleman, fronting the church that her father built.

I must confess that my first post about the Beliefnet.com sale, which included information on the conservative roots of the buyers, ended with a gentle note of snark.

Keep your eyes open and help us watch for mainstream coverage on this. Watch the New York Times, in particular, which I imagine will be tempted to jump on the Religious Right takeover angle.

To which reader H.E. Baber of San Diego responded:

Not. Here’s the NYTimes article.

This is one of those cases in which I am ecstatic to have been wrong. However, instead of a hard-news story, what “Beliefs” columnist Mark Oppenheimer has given us is a interesting look at what the rise and fall and the semi-rise and fall of Beliefnet can tell us about the state of religion on the World Wide Web and, perhaps, in post-doctrinal America. We start, of course, with the bad guy — Rupert Murdoch:

… Mr. Murdoch’s News Corporation sold the pioneering religion Web site to the owners of Affinity4, a company run by evangelical Christians and, according to its Web site, is dedicated to “the sanctity of the family.” It is another owner and another incarnation for Beliefnet, an online magazine that has survived since 1999 by nurturing every aspect of our conflicted spirituality. It has united angels and yoga, monotheism and meditation. Beliefnet has become America.

When Steven Waldman, an alumnus of Washington Monthly and Newsweek magazines, founded Beliefnet in 1999, it was dedicated to journalism and theological conversation; it was a good resource to learn the difference between Sunni and Shiite, or Baptist and Methodist. The Harvard theologian Harvey G. Cox Jr., the evangelical seminary president Richard Mouw and the journalist James Fallows were all early columnists; the books editor was Lauren Winner, now a professor at Duke.

However, that interfaith vision did not sell.

What came next was, well, the rise of a kind of theological shopping channel. So out went the namebrand columnists (for the most part) who were paid at op-ed rates. In came the bloggers who were paid by the traffic they generated for this online community of communities. However:

… (This) was not the community for whom Mr. Waldman had started the magazine. His readers were not looking for investigative news (although they did enjoy commentary about religion in politics; as late as 2008, the site’s “God-o-Meter” analyzed religious discourse during election cycles). Many in the Beliefnet community were not even looking for religion. They wanted spiritual diet advice, depression curatives, tips on the best organic cleaning products.

On the Web, Beliefnet’s editors discovered, the usual mode of magazine courtship was reversed: they could call on the readers every day, rather than wait for the readers to pick them up on a street-corner newsstand. Thus did the Beliefnet newsletters, little bits of inbox flirtation, become its most popular service.

The bottom line: People didn’t want information. They wanted a kind of vague, non-judgmental help — in the form of listservs and prayer circles in which they were communing with people they would almost certainly never meet in a religious context involving doctrine and face-to-face contact. It was niche, digital spirituality, pure and simple.

It says so, so much that the megachurch evangelicals who now own the site are insisting that they will not change its approach to marketing safe, non-threatening fog.

By all means read it all of this essay. Also, please note how well this fits the view of religion in American that is emerging from the statistics generated by the Gallup team, George Barna & Co., the Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life and others. Right now, America consists of about 10 percent of dedicated non-believers or true religious liberals on the left, about 10 to 15 percent of dedicated religious traditionalists on the right and, in the middle, is OprahAmerica.

However, please note that there is a flip side of this coin. How well is this vague approach to eternity doing, when it comes to long-term commitments?

The headline on the Times column said: “An Enduring Religious Web Site Is Poised for a Next Phase.” Really? Beliefnet may be an “enduring” site in Internet terms, but, so far, it has certainly not been as enduring as, let’s say, the parachurch organizations of the 1950s (think Campus Crusade for Christ) or even the 1980s (think Focus on the Family). Are there similar groups on the left? I am sure that there are. However, my observation is that the theological fog that defines our age is widespread, but those attempting to build institutions while using this approach find that its impact is far from “enduring.”

Are there stories in the fog? Of course. Are there stories on the dedicated extremes to the left and right? Of course. Good luck at covering all of that.

I was reading Pope Benedict XVI’s recent speech to the Vatican’s diplomatic corps when I came across this quote:

Sadly, in certain countries, mainly in the West, one increasingly encounters in political and cultural circles, as well in the media, scarce respect and at times hostility, if not scorn, directed towards religion and towards Christianity in particular.

Well, the Washington Post’s “On Faith” panel says the Pope is all wet. Sort of. On Faith editors Jon Meacham and Sally Quinn posed the following question to the panelists:

Media biased against Christians?

Fox News analyst Brit Hume said “widespread media bias against Christianity” was to blame for criticism of his suggestion that Tiger Woods should embrace Christianity to find redemption. “Instead of urging that Tiger Woods turn to Christianity, if I had said what he needed to do was to strengthen his Buddhist commitment or turn to Hinduism, I don’t think anybody would have said a word,” Hume told Christianity Today. “It’s Christ and Christianity that get people stirred up.”

Sarah Palin and other conservative Christians have made similar claims. Is there widespread media bias against Christianity? Against evangelicals such as Hume and Palin? Against public figures who speak openly and directly about their faith? Against people who believe as you do?

And a quick look at the panelist answers is interesting. Rabbi Brad Hirschfield says bias against Christianity is real, but also understandable. Secular Coalition for America President Herb Silverman says the only bias on display against Brit Hume was against pomposity. Gustav Niebuhr wonders what’s the big deal since Jesus said Christians would be persecuted for their beliefs. C. Welton Gaddy says the notion is silly. Atheist apologist Daniel Dennett says it’s about time that the religious were under more intense scrutiny by the media. Professor of Islamic Studies John Esposito says religious bias begins at Fox News. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite says that Palin and Hume are merely reaping what they sowed. Rabbi Jack Moline says that Hume had no integrity. Comparative religions professor Matthew N. Schmalz says it’s Hume who is biased against pluralism. And author and reporter Susan Jacoby says the idea is ludicrous (and that Michael Gerson’s piece in the Post really angered her).

Only one of the panelists, Fuller Theological Seminary President Richard Muow, agrees that the media is biased against Christians.

So for those keeping score at home, that’s 10 Washington Post/Newsweek “On Faith” panelists saying that the Pope and Brit Hume are crazypants or get what they deserve and one panelist saying he thinks that they have a point.

Maybe this was just a particularly clever experiment from the minds of Meacham and Quinn to prove the point?

To be sure, I actually enjoyed many of the answers from the panelists, but I’m just kind of wondering if this is what the folks at the Washington Post/Newsweek “On Faith” site think is a representative look at American religious views.

Ross Douthat addressed the point in his most recent column gave his take on the matter in his most recent New York Times column:

Liberal democracy offers religious believers a bargain. Accept, as a price of citizenship, that you may never impose your convictions on your neighbor, or use state power to compel belief. In return, you will be free to practice your own faith as you see fit — and free, as well, to compete with other believers (and nonbelievers) in the marketplace of ideas.

That’s the theory. In practice, the admirable principle that nobody should be persecuted for their beliefs often blurs into the more illiberal idea that nobody should ever publicly criticize another religion. Or champion one’s own faith as an alternative. Or say anything whatsoever about religion, outside the privacy of church, synagogue or home.

A week ago, Brit Hume broke all three rules at once.

Read the whole thing for his interesting take on the situation. It may surprise you.

Unless Mitt Romney gets picked to be John McCain’s VP nominee, the mainstream media may completely forget about that major news story from earlier in the primary season: Mormonism. Without that news hook, most reporters have moved on to different topics — debunking Christianity and shark attacks, or something.

But the Salt Lake Tribune is always on the Mormon beat. And I really enjoyed a recent piece by Peggy Fletcher Stack, the paper’s religion reporter. Noting that the president of Fuller Theological Seminary Richard Mouw was calling for more dialogue with the Latter-day Saints, Fletcher Stack explored the possibilities and barriers to such dialogue:

Not all Mormons think Mouw’s proposal is feasible.

The difference between Evangelicals and Mormons is more than theological, says Kathleen Flake, who teaches American religious history at Vanderbilt University. It’s also organizational and systematic.

Evangelicals are only loosely organized around a set of principles; not least emphasizing the primacy of the Bible over theology, Flake says. Latter-day Saints, on the other hand, “are tightly organized around an enlarged canon of Bible-based narratives. These are loosely employed to express personal conviction of God’s contemporary and revelatory immediacy.”

Mouw’s invitation for official, Vatican II-like negotiation makes sense, she says, “only if you think that Evangelicals and Latter-day Saints have a theology sufficiently systematized to speak definitively. It seems to me that neither does.”

Talking is good, Flake says, “but it’s never going to be official, only academic.”

Rather than a boring story about the evangelical proposal and official response from the Latter-day Saints, Fletcher Stack actually takes it to the next level. She shows some of the challenges inherent to dialogue between the two non-systematic beliefs.

The rest of the piece looks at conversations between evangelicals such as Muow and Latter-day Saints over the last decade:

“They’ve been good discussions,” Mouw said in a phone interview. “We really disagree about things but at the same time, we have gotten to a place where there’s trust between us.”

In a 2004 speech before a packed audience in the Mormon Tabernacle on Temple Square, Mouw chastised his fellow Evangelicals for sinning against Latter-day Saints by misrepresenting their views to others in order to debunk Mormonism.

“It’s a terrible thing to bear false witness,” Mouw said. “We’ve told you what you believe without first asking you…I remain convinced there are serious issues of difference that are of eternal consequence, but now we can discuss them as friends.”

This bit of color is also helpful. So often we see the mainstream media work from the notion that dialogue can only happen between people who are not dogmatic. All in all, Fletcher Stack moves beyond press release journalism to an interesting story.

After one brief palate-cleansing look at decent stories on the same-sex marriage issue, we can now return to the mainstream media’s attack on defenders of traditional marriage. At this point, I’m not sure how inadvertent the biased stories are.

Take this feature from yesterday’s Los Angeles Times. Headline:

California’s gay marriage law revives religious debate over homosexuality

Some cling to literal reading of religious texts. Others call for new interpretations.

One would think that in a year such as this, when Barack Obama got in a spot of trouble for characterizing some rural voters as Bible-clingers, the copy desk would be more sensitive to the word. Some “cling” to the Bible as written while others “call for” new interpretations? Are you kidding me? That is just a shameful and stupid headline.

Perhaps those of us that “cling to” the idea that journalists should at least try to be unbiased in their reporting can comfort each other. Unfortunately, reporter Duke Helfand doesn’t really improve things with his story, which purports to look at the Scriptural battles over gay marriage:

“Homosexual intimacy is out of bounds. It’s not what God created us for,” said Richard Mouw, president of the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena.

Mouw cites Romans 1 in the New Testament that decries men and women abandoning “natural relations” and men “inflamed with lust for one another” committing “indecent acts with other men” — behavior that carried death as punishment.

Behavior that carried death as punishment under what law? Jewish? Roman? But Mouw is talking about New Testament teachings. And unless some new verses have been added to Romans recently, I don’t recall Paul calling for the death penalty for homosexual behavior. I mean, unless reporter Duke Helfand is taking the exegetical position that what Paul is doing in his Romans sermon is calling for the death penalty to be imposed on those who sin in general — be it sexual sins, pride, envy or any of the other sins he enumerates in that chapter. To the Christian, the wages of sin may be death — but that’s kind of the whole point of the “good news” of the Gospel.

Anyway, Mouw’s views are followed by the Rev. Mel White’s, former Fuller professor who got married to his male partner on Wednesday:

“The Bible says as much about sexual orientation as it does about toasters or nuclear reactors,” White said. “We have to grow with the times.”

Other clergy reject the scientific argument and say homosexuality is a choice.

I’m not sure why Duke Helfand didn’t write the entire story about this huge piece of breaking news. Science has decided this contentious issue? Sure, scientific studies on this topic are conducted all the time — but has there been a definitive conclusion? Have we found the elusive gay gene? What’s more, many clergy are opposed to homosexual behavior whether it’s innate or immutable. So it’s sort of a silly statement either way, designed to make it seem like there are good people (the scientific types) versus bad people — the idiots who have no basis in reason or science for their awful, backward views.

The entire story is more of an instructional guide for how to argue against traditional religious opposition to homosexuality as opposed to an objective piece of journalism:

Theologians and biblical scholars trace the origins of the dispute to a handful of passages in the Torah, New Testament and Koran.

Perhaps the most frequently cited is Leviticus 18:22: “You shall not lie with a man as one lies with a woman: It is an abomination.”

The passage from the Torah is repeated, with slight variations, in Christian scripture, which, like the Jewish text, orders death for violators. The Koran also denounces homosexuality, in Chapter 7, Verse 81: “For you practice your lust on men in preference to women: You are indeed a people transgressing beyond bounds.”

This is just another bizarre passage. It belittles the issue to cast it as a dispute over a “handful” of passages. The teachings about homosexuality — no matter which side you’re on — are about much more than a handful of Scriptures. There is an entire ethic — woven throughout Scripture — about sexuality in which homosexuality is just a part. There are also 2,000 years worth of tradition and church teaching about the matter.

And is Helfand aware that Christians also hold the Torah as Scripture? The Torah — aka the books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy — may be called the Pentateuch or the Law by Christians but they’re the same books of Moses. Perhaps someone should tell the reporter that they say the same thing. But as for New Testament passages on homosexuality, there is no death penalty, as we mentioned. So Helfand’s writing is just a mess in that last paragraph.

He quotes a Roman Catholic priest saying that the church teaches that homosexuals are to be treated with love and respect but that society does not have the authority to redefine the natural and divine institution of marriage. But that argument is only placed there so that it can be countered:

But other clergy criticize what they see as a selective analysis of the texts. Jesus condemned divorce and remarriage, they point out, but that hasn’t stopped many Christians from splitting and remarrying.

The Old Testament not only denounces adulterers and children who curse their parents, it demands the death penalty for both. It prohibits sex between husbands and wives during menstruation, even though theologians acknowledge the practice occurs without any formal reprimands.

This is not journalism. And no editor should ever permit Helfand to perform any exegesis of any Scripture at any point in the future. This reads like something Bill Maher or Christopher Hitchens would write, except not as erudite or witty. Where oh where is Stephanie Simon? How can the paper have fallen from those heights so quickly?

Anyway, Helfand quotes the director of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at Berkeley’s Pacific School of Religion saying that everybody without exception reads the Bible selectively and that all texts need to be interpreted with regard to the culture and society that they were written in. He shows how the issue has been debated in Conservative Judaism and in some sectors of Islam. The piece then ends with an obligatory quote from Father Thomas Reese, the Larry Sabato of religion stories.

You’ve got to hand it to Helfand. In a sea of bad stories related to California’s same-sex marriage ruling, he’s one big fish.

As always, please keep comments focused on media coverage.

The other day, I raised a question or two — as I tend to do — about a Los Angeles Times story on an interfaith gathering of scholars to address scriptures that appear to “assert the superiority of one belief system over others.”

If you read the Times story, it would seem that all of the Christians, Jews and Muslims in this forum were pretty much on the same page, with few if any sparks of disagreement. It was, frankly, one of those “Can’t we all just get along?” stories that suggested a bright future for Unitarian-Universalist evangelists. However, I also noted:

Late, late, late in the story we learn that one of the other speakers at the forum was the Rev. Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary. If I am not mistaken, Fuller is an evangelical Protestant seminary with Reformed theological roots. Did Mouw agree with the other scholars who were quoted by the Times? Was Mouw so out of line that he could not be quoted? If he was in step with the others, that would be a big story in and of itself.

As it turns out, Mouw has responded to my questions in a comment on that post, and I think it’s important to pull it out to the front page and let more GetReligion readers see it. We do that from time to time when people directly involved in stories and posts write us. So here is what the Fuller Seminary president has to say, in full:

I will try to clarify, as much as I can in some brief comments, my take on the important questions you raise.

It was an interesting conference. Each group was asked to talk about texts within their own tradition with which they have struggled. We were not all expected to deal with overtly inter-religious questions. I dealt with Romans 13, since it is a classic locus for evangelical discussions of political authority. But my Fuller colleague Love Sechrest, a young New Testament scholar dealt with some key texts in Galatians on Christ abolishing the law — what she said would have been approved of in any evangelical gathering.

For the record, I was interviewed by the LA Times reporter afterward, and she asked me what I thought of dialogues like this. I said — and she chose not to quote me in the story — that I believe that we need to be in dialogue, and to come with a willingness genuinely to learn from others. But, I quickly added, we do believe that Christ alone can save. My own view on this has been set forth publicly on many occasions. Dialogue with other religions has to aim at three goals: one is learning from others; another is working together for the “shalom of the City” (Jer. 29); but in all of this we must always be ready to point to the Jesus as the only One who is mighty to save. I am willing to allow some mystery in how Jesus actually gets ahold of people — but he alone is the Way.

I also had a fine conversation with a young woman rabbi who certainly did not think me wishy-washy on these matters. “Are you saying that your religious perspective is right and mine is wrong?” she asked. I responded: “I am saying that what is non-negotiable for me is that Jesus of Nazareth is the promised Messiah. That is simply something that we disagree about. You think I am wrong in saying that, and I think you are wrong in denying it. This is a fundamental disagreement.”

There are doctrinal points here that form a kind of spectrum of beliefs about the nature and identity of Jesus Christ and how one does or does not end up in heaven or hell.

In this case, the key is how readers have read Mouw’s statement that he is willing to “allow some mystery in how Jesus actually gets ahold of people.” Do people have to walk an aisle in a particular church? Are the good works and the honest faith expressed in other world religions enough to make someone what many Catholic theologians would call an “anonymous Christian,” a person who is saved by the grace of Jesus Christ, even if they do not believe in Jesus Christ. What about people who explicitly reject Jesus? What about the afterlife? Is the human soul still free to change (think C.S. Lewis and his book The Great Divorce) after death, or does free will end at the grave?

There are many, many variations and I urge you please, please, please not to get started arguing about them in the comments pages.

The key here is whether the Times report on the conference was seriously weakened by the omission of Mouw’s words of dissent or disagreement. I would argue that some kind of balance was needed and, as it turned out, there were voices in the room that tried to provide balance or, at the very least, more nuance.

Just what I needed — more GetReligion guilt.

Last weekend, I was out in Southern California (just as the winds started to pick up) and had a chance to read the Los Angeles Times every day on dead tree pulp, rather than trying to find my way through the digital version online. That means you have a chance to pick through all of the pages of the physical newspaper and look for ghosts. Sure enough, there are lots of them. Feel those guilt pangs?

This time, there was a story back in the local news section that offered a perfect example of the dreaded tmatt trio. Let’s see if you can spot the “trio” issue that shows up.

The story by reporter K. Connie Kang focused on a meeting in Los Angeles in which a collection of scholars and clergy — Christian, Jewish and Muslim — met to wrestle with the “dark side” of their traditions, those “problematic” scripture passages that appear to teach that some things are true and other things are not true.

Wait, that isn’t how the story puts it. It says the discussion focused on scriptures that appear to “assert the superiority of one belief system over others.”

Like what, you ask?

… (The) Rt. Rev. Alexei Smith, ecumenical and interreligous official of the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles, quoted from the Gospel of Mark: “Go into the world and preach the gospel to the whole creation. He who believes and is baptized will be saved; but he who does not believe will be condemned.”

Rabbi Reuven Firestone, director of the Institute for the Study of Jewish-Muslim Interrelations at Hebrew Union College in Los Angeles, mentioned a series of texts, including a verse from Deuteronomy: “For you are a people consecrated to the Lord your God: of all the peoples of the earth the Lord your God chose you to be His treasured people.”

And Muzammil H. Siddiqi, chairman of the Fiqh (Islamic Law) Council of North America, quoted from the Koran: “You who believe, do not take the Jews and Christians as allies: they are allies only to each other. Anyone who takes them as an ally becomes one of them — God does not guide such wrongdoers.”

Now, rest assured that none of these scriptures actually mean what they appear to mean, according to the scholars. And rest assured that the Los Angeles Times does not quote anyone who disagrees with the scholars on this particular panel, which I would assume is composed of “moderates.”

The whole story left me with some questions:

• When quoting strong statements of religious doctrine, journalists usually soften these statements by noting that this is the viewpoint of the person speaking.

For example, a person may be quoted as saying that he — singular — believes the Bible teaches that sex outside of marriage is sin when what the person was saying is that the Catholic or Orthodox churches have taught that doctrine for 2,000 years. There are very few of these cushy statements in this article. These scholars are allowed to speak in absolutes. Why?

• Does the Roman Catholic Church officially teach that salvation is possible outside of the grace of Jesus Christ? That would appear to be the case, based on this article. Is something missing here?

• Late, late, late in the story we learn that one of the other speakers at the forum was the Rev. Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary. If I am not mistaken, Fuller is an evangelical Protestant seminary with Reformed theological roots. Did Mouw agree with the other scholars who were quoted by the Times? Was Mouw so out of line that he could not be quoted? If he was in step with the others, that would be a big story in and of itself.

Now, check your scorecard. And here are the three questions in the tmatt trio once again. These are, of course, the questions that I have found — as a journalist — highly useful in finding out where Christian leaders fit into a spectrum of belief between left and right. These questions always yield interesting information.

1) Are biblical accounts of the resurrection of Jesus accurate? Did this event really happen?

(2) Is salvation found through Jesus Christ, alone? Was Jesus being literal when he said, “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. No one comes to the Father except through me” (John 14:6)?

(3) Is sex outside of marriage a sin?

However, at this event it was a rabbi who was allowed to make the final statement that summed up the day and, thus, the unchallenged big idea of the Times report.

Rabbi Mark S. Diamond, executive vice president of the Board of Rabbis of Southern California, which co-sponsored the event with Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Conn., said all people of faith need to “take ownership of their most difficult texts, wrestle with them — not run away from them — but confront them, where appropriate, set them in their proper historical context. …

In some instances, he continued, people of faith need to say to themselves, “This is part of my sacred tradition, but I reject it. I find this text offensive. It goes against my own morality, and it goes against what I believe God expects of me in the world today.”

Many people would say “amen.” Many would not. Does the Los Angeles Times realize that?

If you type the word “evangelicals” into Google Images, the art attached to the top of this post is the very first thing that turns up. This tells us quite a bit about how most Americans now define the vague word “evangelical.”

Even Wikipedia is better than this strictly political image and — horrors — you can see the battles over what the word means by reading the start of the “evangelicalism” entry at that mixmaster site:

The word evangelicalism often refers to a broad collection of religious beliefs, practices, and traditions which are found among Protestant Christians and some Catholics. Evangelicalism is typified by an emphasis on evangelism, a personal experience of conversion, biblically oriented faith and a belief in the relevance of Christian faith to some cultural issues. Historically, the movement began in the early 18th century as a response to Enlightenment thinking. It stressed a more personal relationship with God at the individual level; as well as activism based upon one’s biblically based beliefs.

Current media usage of the term (especially in the United States), is often synonymous with conservative Protestant Christians. This is only partly accurate, as the movement embraces a wide range of expressions of faith around the four core characteristics.

Notice, again, the entire history of the term Protestant, yet somehow we now have Catholics who apparently vote evangelical, which means there are Catholics who are now evangelical Protestants. The terrible phrase in the Wiki definition is the one that says evangelicals share a “biblically oriented faith” — which could mean just about anything. Thus, all the confusion. But it is not my intent to open up that subject for debate, yet again.

No, what caught my eye this time was a recent New York Times story by veteran religion writer Laurie Goodstein, which makes a solid attempt to add some clarity on the diversity of “evangelical” views on at least one issue that is hard to label as “liberal” or “conservative.”

Thus, the headline: “Coalition of Evangelicals Voices Support for Palestinian State.” This coalition is stressing that both Jews and Palestinians have rights “stretching back for millennia” to territory in the Holy Lands. These leaders have issued a letter calling for the creation of a Palestinian state that includes the “vast majority of the West Bank.”

Now, who are these people?

The letter is signed by 34 evangelical leaders, many of whom lead denominations, Christian charities, ministry organizations, seminaries and universities.

They include Gary M. Benedict, president of The Christian and Missionary Alliance, a denomination of 2,000 churches; Richard J. Mouw, president of Fuller Theological Seminary; Gordon MacDonald, chairman of World Relief; Richard E. Stearns, president of World Vision; David Neff, editor of Christianity Today; and Berten A. Waggoner, national director and president of The Vineyard USA, an association of 630 churches in the United States.

“This group is in no way anti-Israel, and we make it very clear we’re committed to the security of Israel,” said Ronald J. Sider, president of Evangelicals for Social Action, which often takes liberal positions on issues. “But we want a solution that is viable. Obviously there would have to be compromises.”

Once again, you can see how hard it is to use political labels in this context — especially in a short news report.

What in the world does it mean that Sider and company often take “liberal positions on issues”? That is simply far too vague. What issues? Is it “liberal” to favor economic justice? Is that politically “liberal” or theologically “liberal”? Sider, by the way, is consistently pro-life and a doctrinal conservative on sexuality issues.

You can see this struggle later in the article, as well:

In the last year and half, liberal and moderate evangelicals have initiated two other efforts that demonstrated fissures in the evangelical movement. Last year, they parted with the conservative flank by campaigning against climate change and global warming. This year, they denounced the use of torture in the fight against terrorism. Some of the participants in those campaigns also signed this letter.

I do not fault Goodstein in any way for this confusion between political “evangelicalism” and doctrinal “evangelicalism.” Truth is, the word is all but meaningless right now. The reporter is caught in an impossible situation.

However, by the end of the piece Goodstein manages to squeeze in an authoritative voice (and I must confess that he is a friend and former teaching colleague of mine) who can crisply note the nature of the doctrinal debate that looms behind this debate over Israel and Palestine.

There is a crucial theological difference between Mr. (John) Hagee’s views on Israel and those expressed by the letter writers, said Timothy P. Weber, a church historian, former seminary president and the author of “On the Road to Armageddon: How Evangelicals Became Israel’s Best Friend.”

Mr. Hagee and others are dispensationalists, Mr. Weber said, who interpret the Bible as predicting that in order for Christ to return, the Jews must gather in Israel, the third temple must be built in Jerusalem and the Battle of Armageddon must be fought.

Mr. Weber said, “The dispensationalists have parlayed what is a distinctly minority position theologically within evangelicalism into a major political voice.”

Now, most run-of-the-mill newspaper readers who make it this far are almost certainly going to have to ask, “What in the world is a dispensationalist?” And, there is no way around it — this is another big word worth arguing about.

But at least it’s the right word and a highly precise one at that.

The editors of GetReligion have commented frequently on Jon Meacham’s work, in part because he has shown such a frequent and keen interest in religion coverage. To his credit, Meacham has kept that interest keen since becoming the editor of Newsweek. Indeed, last week offered a fine competition between Newsweek and Time for best religion-based cover story (about which more in a subsequent post).

On a more timely note, however, Meacham has joined forces with Sally Quinn of The Washington Post to create a new religion blog called On Faith. Today’s Post featured a full-page ad for On Faith that played on the classic joke of “A priest and a rabbi walk into a bar,” and Post reporter Caryle Murphy, who frequently covers religion news, is On Faith’s producer.

Quinn’s presence makes On Faith especially interesting. Quinn informs readers that she declared herself an atheist at 13:

And I was a committed atheist all of my life. My view was that more evil had been done in the name of religion than anything else in the world.I saw no redeeming value in it at all. Then I met Jon Meacham and we began talking.

Now Quinn approaches religion with the enthusiasm of a reporter on an exciting and challenging new beat, though this closing paragraph in her biography is too precious by half:

I still don’t know what to call myself. Years ago I went to the opening of “How To Succeed in Business without Really Trying” on Broadway. There was a moment when the star, Robert Morse, sang to himself in the mirror, “You have the cool clear eyes of a seeker of wisdom and truth.” That sounds good to me.

As a joint effort of Newsweek and The Washington Post, On Faith should soon leave our humble little blog far behind in Web readership ratings. On Faith already is riding one of Meacham’s favorite hobby horses: “If some religious people believe they have a monopoly on truth, then are conversation and common ground possible?”

To answer such questions, On Faith has gathered a group of On Faith Panelists that should be the envy of any interfaith panel discussion. The full list does not stray far from the favored pundits of mainline and liberal faith, including Karen Armstrong, Lauren Artress, Marcus Borg, John Dominic Crossan and everybody’s favorite celebrity Wiccan, Starhawk. By my count, On Faith welcomes eight panelists who are on the right edge of the political or theological spectrum: Lyle Dukes, Richard Land, Al Mohler, Richard Mouw, Michael Otterson, Cal Thomas, Rick Warren and George Weigel. OK, I’ll add Mohammad Khatami, in the interfaith goodwill of On Faith. That’s 9 out of 62, a ratio that should make media-savvy conservatives feel right at home.

Image credit and Web commerce where it is due: Kinky Friedman.

A few readers have written me asking my opinion of the news stories that are starting to apppear about TheDaVinciChallenge.com, the website that the public-relations professionals at Grace Hill Media have set up to promote and/or debate the upcoming movie about you know what.

Then again, a few readers have noticed that I am listed among the writers who have agreed to write pro bono articles for this website. I have, in fact, agreed to write a short article on this topic: “Who is Dan Brown?” It is, of course, almost impossible to answer this question, which seems to be precisely the state of affairs that the author himself wants to maintain. This makes it rather hard for journalists to do serious, balanced writing about his books and his beliefs which, again, may be the point.

I have my doubts about how many moviegoers will dig into the “challenge” website, but there is always some chance that it may point a few mainstream journalists toward critical Da Vinci wars commentary by people other than, let’s say, the Revs. Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell and the usual cable-news suspects.

But wait, Laurie Goodstein of the New York Times notes that the “R-word, the next generation” is still in the mix:

The site, thedavincichallenge.com, will post essays by about 45 Christian writers, scholars and leaders of evangelical organizations who will pick apart the book’s theological and historical claims about Christianity. Among the writers are Gordon Robertson, the son of the television evangelist Pat Robertson and co-host of their television show, “The 700 Club,” who is writing about how early Christianity survived; and Richard J. Mouw, the president of Fuller Theological Seminary, a leading evangelical school in Pasadena, Calif.

Dr. Mouw, who contributed an essay on, “Why Christians Ought to See the Movie,” said: “It’s going to be water cooler conversation, so Christians need to take a deep breath, buy the book and shell out the money for the movie. Then we need to educate Christians about what all this means. We need to help them answer someone who says, ‘So how do you know Jesus didn’t get married?’”

Actually, I would stress that there are more than a few writers involved in the website who are not evangelicals or, like me, even Protestants. Goodstein also noted that Grace Hill Media is also seeking more Roman Catholics to write for the site, which is fitting since the novel is viciously anti-Catholic, almost to the point of parody. The site needs at least a dozen or so Catholics, including more than a few who hold traditional Catholic beliefs.

The other major fact missing from coverage so far is the matter of funding. Is anyone willing to discuss how many dollars (hundreds of thousands? millions?) the church historians at Sony are investing in this attempt to help shape the debate of this controversial movie?

As you would expect, many evangelical Protestants are doing that evangelical Protestant thing they do, arguing that people need to see the movie in order to evangelize the lost who go to see it and walk away with questions. As someone who has made that argument many times in the past, about many different movies, I do think it makes more sense to attempt apologetics before resorting to PR-friendly boycotts.

Veteran Godbeat scribe Mark I. Pinsky of the Orlando Sentinel offered this summary of that argument, as made by evangelist Josh McDowell (who has a new book on the topic):

“I don’t attack Dan Brown. I don’t attack the book,” says McDowell, who is on the staff of Orlando-based Campus Crusade for Christ. “Let’s see where fact leaves off and imagination begins. It’s a marvelous opportunity to be positive. The main purpose of my book is to reinforce their belief and placate their skepticism. If you look carefully, truth will always stand.”

McDowell and Campus Crusade, a worldwide ministry with more than 20,000 staff members and volunteers, seem to have accepted this truth. … So instead of fighting the wave of popular culture or urging a boycott, Campus Crusade is pushing McDowell’s book, which is aimed at young moviegoers and tries to spin their interest in an evangelical direction. McDowell says he wrote the book after distraught parents told him their children had read the novel and, as a result, walked away from their faith.

But does this mean that people need to see the movie? Why not read the book, since one would assume that it is the better statement of Brown’s beliefs? Why not read the book and then some of the books dissecting the book?

Stay tuned. This is just getting started.

While the 2008 Presidential elections seem a long way off — and we are still appropriately focused on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina — I found a bit of presidential politics surprisingly refreshing. Here is an article in this month’s Washington Monthly on “Mitt Romney’s Evangelical Problem.”

In a country with only one non-Protestant president, the idea of a Mormon president would likely take awhile to get used to, and Amy Sullivan takes the difficult subject of religious doctrine head on. “To evangelicals, Mormonism isn’t just another religion. It’s a cult,” writes Sullivan.

Doug noted last month that The Atlantic touched upon the issue in a Romney profile for its September issue, but not enough attention has been paid to the elephant in the room when it comes to a Romney presidency.

Here’s how Sullivan frames it, as an issue of religious tolerance:

Americans have indeed become more religiously tolerant, but the first Mormon to run for president will clearly have to change some minds. In the late 1960s, the percentage of Americans who said they would not vote for a Jewish or Catholic presidential candidate was in the double digits; by 1999, those numbers had fallen to 6 and 4 percent, respectively (roughly the same as the percentage of voters who say they wouldn’t vote for a Baptist). Compare that to the 17 percent of Americans who currently say they would have qualms electing a Mormon to the White House. That number hasn’t changed one whit since 1967, the year that Romney’s father considered a presidential run (he abandoned the effort after making a gaffe about how the military “brainwashed” him into supporting the Vietnam War).

Some of this anti-Mormonism is a fairly fuzzy sort of bias, based mostly on rumors and unfamiliarity and the vague feeling that Mormons are kind of weird. It’s a wobbly opposition that can be overcome by good public relations that defuses concerns about the religion and shifts focus to the personality of the candidate. This is how someone like Romney gets elected in a blue state like Massachusetts, where even Republicans are generally tolerant.

Sullivan’s perspective is influenced by her childhood. Raised in a Baptist church, she was taught early that members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints were members of a cult, “a stronghold of Satan.”

More from Sullivan:

Evangelical Christians consider Mormonism a threat in a way that Catholicism and even Judaism are not. The LDS Church, they charge, has perverted Christian teachings to create a false religion. As John L. Smith, a Southern Baptist who runs Utah Mission — an organization that tries to convert Mormons — told Christianity Today: “Mormonism is either totally true or totally false. If it’s true, every other religion in America is false.” To be tolerant of Mormonism is to put evangelical Christianity at risk. And to put a Mormon in the White House would be to place a stamp of approval on that faith.

Southern Baptists have been particularly vocal about labeling the LDS Church a “cult.” In 1997, the denomination published a handbook and video, both with the title The Mormon Puzzle: Understanding and Witnessing to Latter-day Saints. More than 45,000 of these kits were distributed in the first year; the following year — in a throwing down of the proselytizing gauntlet — the Southern Baptist Convention held its annual meeting in Salt Lake City. Around the same time, a speaker at the denomination’s summit on Mormonism declared that Utah was “a stronghold of Satan.” When Richard Mouw, president of the evangelical Fuller Theological Seminary, tried to repair relations with the LDS community by apologizing on behalf of evangelicals during a speech in the Mormon Tabernacle last year, his conservative brethren lashed out. Mouw had no right, they declared in an open letter, to speak for them or apologize for denouncing Mormon “false prophecies and false teachings.”

And if/when the primary race gets nasty, as Sullivan adequately points out, religion will be an issue:

It’s likely that Romney’s primary opponents and prominent religious leaders will publicly take the high road, remaining mum on the issue of his Mormonism. But, says Marshall Wittman, former political director of the Christian Coalition and later an aide to McCain, “so much in the primaries takes place under the radar. It’s never publicly said, but it takes place in emails and word of mouth.” The push-poll script writes itself: “Would you be more or less likely to vote for Mitt Romney if you knew he was a Mormon, and that Mormons believe in polygamy?”

Part of my thinking leads me to believe that a Romney campaign would do some good in raising a discussion on who Mormons are and what they believe. The other part of me thinks the political arena is the wrong place for that; it would just get too nasty. One thing is for sure: journalists love the idea of a Romney campaign because of how different it would be, and with the supposed rise in power of the voting bloc known as the evangelical right, the story is all the juicer.

A news report by The Washington Post’s Caryle Murphy and a column by Frank Rich of The New York Times both explore the question of whether pornography helped create the atmosphere of abuse and sexual humiliation at Abu Ghraib prison.

Murphy reports on a meeting that occurred at St. John the Apostle Catholic Church in Leesburg, Va. Paul Vitz, a professor of psychiatry at New York University and author of Psychology as Religion: The Cult of Self-Worship, states the indictment of American pop culture concisely:

“For a large number of young people today, particularly young men, the only moral framework they get is through the popular media,” including computer games and Web sites bursting with violence and sex, Vitz added. “When people immerse themselves in the pornography and violence of American pop culture, it’s not surprising it has consequences. It’s a no-brainer.”

Richard Mouw, dean of Fuller Theological Seminary, agrees on the horrid nature of sexual humiliation and warns against Muslim-bashing:

“This kind of sexual humiliation, it’s bad enough to any human being,” Mouw said. “But when it also violates deep convictions Muslims have about nudity and having [their] private parts exposed in front of other men and acting out homosexual things and being humiliated by women in your nakedness, it’s deeply violating.”

Mouw, who questioned the moral justification for the war in Iraq before the U.S. invasion, said he believes that antipathy to Muslims may also have contributed to the atmosphere in which the sexual abuse was allowed to happen.

“I think the overlay on this is a very strong tendency in our culture to demonize Muslims … that goes beyond what we did ideologically in our definition of” Germans and Koreans in past wars, Mouw said. “It’s all tied up with a very strong religious warfare kind of mentality — that they’re on a jihad against us and we need to respond in kind.”

The Rev. Gerard J. McGlone, a Jesuit and professor at Johns Hopkins and Georgetown universities, takes the self-examination further, though, and uses absolutist language to condemn an absolutist strawman:

“When you say, ‘I can, in the name of God, go after all these Islamic people and Iraqis and treat them in whatever way I want’ … it’s bad theology and toxic morality because anything I do in the name of God is justified,” McGlone said.

Even for those who say they are not fighting Islam, the Jesuit priest added, “the good versus the evil paradigm is in place. This is absolute bad morality besides being bad foreign policy. The world is not black and white … and this is dominating the military right now.”

But McGlone is the peaceful soul of reason compared to Rich, who yet again flogs Mel Gibson, evangelicals and Catholics for their tacky taste in films:

Audiences of evangelicals and Catholics defied critics and made “The Passion of the Christ” one of most profitable films ever produced. Catholics regard the film as a thoroughly Catholic spectacle, focused as it is on the Virgin Mary and Jesus’ suffering. Yet Mel Gibson, a traditionalist Catholic, built an audience with screenings in evangelical megachurches, even hiring Billy Graham’s public relations man. Many evangelicals embraced the movie as a way to strike a blow of their own in the culture wars.

Rich delivers one powerful zinger, however, in challenging the notion that porn culture breaks cleanly along the borders of blue and red America:

Phil Harvey, the president of the North Carolina-based Adam & Eve, one of the country’s largest suppliers of mail-order adult products, said in an interview last week that his business has “for years” been roughly the same per capita throughout the continental United States, with those Deep South bastions of the Bible Belt, Alabama and Mississippi, buying only 10 percent fewer sex toys and porn videos than everyone else. Even residents of the Cincinnati metropolitan area — home to Citizens for Community Values and famous for antismut battles over Larry Flynt and Robert Mapplethorpe — turned out to be slightly larger-than-average users of porn Web sites, according to a 2001 Nielsen Internet survey.

Many cultural conservatives would have no trouble agreeing to this much: Sexual exploitation is evil, regardless of whether it occurs in Abu Ghraib or in the pages of mainstream porn magazines. And, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn observed many years ago, the line between good and evil runs through every human heart.