Orange County Register

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Questions for journalists: What would it take for Catholic church attacks to become news?

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Questions for journalists: What would it take for Catholic church attacks to become news?

I am venturing into Clemente Lisi territory with this post, and I know that. However, there are questions about the national wave of attacks on Catholic churches and sacred sites that have started to bother me. Maybe this is a test case of how the post-American Model of the Press marketplace is really going to work? Just how biased is the acceptable bias going to get?

Let’s start here: If bad people attack African-American sanctuariess, is this a news story? The answer, of course, is “Yes.” Everyone agrees, with the exception of unrepentant racists.

Now, if bad people attack Roman Catholic churches, is that a news story? The answer appears to be “No.” This is news for “Catholic,” “religious” and “conservative” newsrooms. It appears to be a minor story, zip code by zip code, in local news. This violent trend is not news for elite, national-level media.

Why is that? Possible answers include: (a) These attacks are being done by people who are “good” in the eyes of journalists because their cause is just. (b) These are bad Catholic churches (they do not fly Pride flags, etc.). (c) There are just too many of these attacks for them to be considered “news.”

Finally, (d) if these attacks were news, public officials would have to ponder whether they are “hate crimes.” This would violate the unspoken law that it’s impossible to commit a hate crime against a group that has not been declared “oppressed” by The New York Times, National Public Radio, Yale Law School and others.

Would this trend be a story if the world’s second most famous Catholic delivered an Oval Office address on the subject? Maybe we will see, if President Joe Biden sees trouble brewing in New Hampshire.

Oh well, whatever, nevermind. Here is yet another one of those “local” stories: “Cross cut down at Santiago Retreat Center in Silverado Canyon, investigators looking for suspect.” The familiar details:

A 14-foot wooden cross at the Santiago Retreat Center was sawed down this week, leaving staff and counselors shocked while Orange County sheriff’s officials try to identify a suspect, authorities said.


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Plug-In: Generations of indigenous children snatched from families and churches took part

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Plug-In: Generations of indigenous children snatched from families and churches took part

For 120 years, Canada took Indigenous children from their families and forced them into residential schools run by Christian denominations — a practice that didn’t end until 1996.

Now, the discoveries of hundreds of unmarked graves at two former residential schools have rocked America’s northern neighbor, and the aftershocks have spread to the U.S.

Last month, the Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc First Nation announced that it had found the remains of 215 children near the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia. And this week, the Cowessess First Nation reported locating more than 600 unmarked graves at the former Marieval Indian Residential School in Saskatchewan.

The discoveries have brought a national reckoning over what Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau characterizes as “a dark and shameful chapter” of the nation’s history.

“I’m ashamed as a White Christian. I’m ashamed of what we did,” Kevin Vance, a minister in Regina, Saskatchewan, told me earlier this month. “I’m ashamed of all the racism and genocide that we concocted and that we did it in the name of Jesus. That’s just unbelievable to me.”

But the dark history isn’t limited to Canada: The news there “has magnified interest in the troubling legacy both in Canada and the United States,” according to The Associated Press.

As Susan Montoya Bryan of the Associated Press reports, the U.S. government “will investigate its past oversight of Native American boarding schools and work to ‘uncover the truth about the loss of human life and the lasting consequences’ of policies that over the decades forced hundreds of thousands of children from their families and communities.”

In the U.S. — as in Canada — Christian denominations are an important part of the story, notes veteran religion writer G. Jeffrey MacDonald, who wrote about American church-run boarding schools in 2018.

“The churches were not just complicit. They were participatory,” Christine Diindiisi McCleave, chief executive officer of the National Native American Boarding School Healing Coalition, told MacDonald then. “They received federal funding and helped carry out the policy.”


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Greg Laurie goes Southern Baptist and newsrooms in Southern California are clueless

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I can’t say I’ve ever heard the Rev. Greg Laurie preach, but the evangelist is certainly a heavyweight in some circles. Which is why I was surprised to hear he was moving from life in a charismatic denomination to the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise did a piece (which I found in the Orange County Register) on Laurie’s switcheroo nearly a month after Christianity Today reported on it. The writer of the Press-Enterprise piece might have done well to have googled Laurie’s name, as she would have found CT’s vastly better-reported piece.

As it was, this is what the newspaper reported on Monday:

Harvest Christian Fellowship will be joining the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant body with about 15 million members. The Rev. Greg Laurie, pastor and founder of the 15,000-member Harvest and its Harvest Crusades, announced the move in June.
Some theologians see this as Laurie’s official shift toward mainstream evangelicalism and worry that Riverside-based Harvest could be overshadowed by the denomination. Laurie has been seen as one of the biggest crusaders of Calvary Chapel, an association of evangelical Christian churches to which Harvest belongs. Calvary was born as a movement away from religious denominations.
But, in a statement, Laurie calls the new partnership an extension of the collaboration already taking place between Harvest and a network of evangelical churches that participate in the annual Harvest Crusades -- a Southern California Christian institution that’s drawn millions of people to stadiums and arenas around the world.

So far, so good -- although we could talk about whether the vague "evangelical" terms is the best way to describe the Calvary Chapel movement. Then:

Laurie, who has an office in Irvine, was not available for an interview last week, spokeswoman Laura McGowan said.
For Southern Baptist, which has been reported to be struggling with declining membership, this is a gain…

Yes, you read that right. it really did say, "For Southern Baptist" -- singular.


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Orange County Register scores with an evangelism story without the snark

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Read any positive stories about evangelists lately? Or evangelistic crusades? There's several reasons such narratives are missing in your typical daily news sheet, one of them being their increasing rarity and questions about their effectiveness. Another is that the spectacle of people walking the aisle to signify their conversion to Christianity is barely news these days. Which is why I was surprised to see the Orange County Register covering a Greg Laurie crusade. And not just Laurie's first crusade but his 26th. But here we have a reporter covering it like it's fresh and relevant:

Nichole Sanders vividly remembers the night she made the decision to have a relationship with Christ.
It was three years ago on a night of the Harvest Crusade. She rushed to the field at Angel Stadium with hundreds of others to pledge their new commitment to Christ. She looked up and was saluted by a digital banner, “Welcome to the family of God.”


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Trend or not? Evangelicals reportedly questioning the Bible

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Ted Olsen is managing editor for news and online journalism for Christianity Today, the popular evangelical magazine. He's an excellent journalist who recently co-authored an intriguing piece titled "Meet the Non-Christians Who Take the Bible Literally, Word for Word." As a matter of full disclosure, I write freelance stories for CT.

All that said, if Olsen has concerns about a news report on evangelicals (see the above tweets), then I'm inclined to agree. He has the street cred.

The Orange County Register (which earlier this year laid off veteran Godbeat pro Cathleen Falsani) reports that some evangelicals are rethinking the Bible and "growing numbers are asking whether their reading has become too rigid, too simplistic and too alienating."

The top of the story:


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