The Atlanic

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Plug-In: Ida, abortion and Afghanistan: The best religion reads in stunning news week

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Plug-In: Ida, abortion and Afghanistan: The best religion reads in stunning news week

I was in Waverly, Tenn., reporting on the aftermath of historic flooding that claimed 20 lives as Hurricane Ida — “one of the most powerful storms ever to hit the U.S.” — made landfall in Louisiana on Sunday.

On Monday afternoon, as I was boarding a flight in Atlanta to return home to Oklahoma City, The Associated Press sent a “flash” — its designation for “a breaking story of transcendent importance” — about the chaotic end of America’s 20 years of war in Afghanistan.

Guess what?

The big news week was just getting started.

By midnight Wednesday, a divided U.S. Supreme Court had provided “a momentous development in the decades-long judicial battle over abortion rights.” The court declined, at least for now, to overrule a new Texas law that bans most abortions in the state, raising hope among abortion opponents and concern among abortion-rights supporters that Roe v. Wade could be jeopardy.

Also, Ida’s “weakened remnants tore into the Northeast and claimed at least 43 lives across New York, New Jersey and two other states in an onslaught that ended Thursday and served as an ominous sign of climate change’s capacity to wreak new kinds of havoc.”

The news just keeps coming, and I haven’t even mentioned COVID-19 — which continues to rage with cases and hospitalizations “at their highest level since last winter.”

Mercy.

Power Up: The Week’s Best Reads

1. Afghanistan’s arc from 9/11 to today: once hopeful, now sad: This is a powerful read by Kathy Gannon, Afghanistan and Pakistan news director for The Associated Press.

“A country of 36 million, Afghanistan is filled with conservative people, many of whom live in the countryside,” Gannon explains. “But even they do not adhere to the strict interpretation of Islam that the Taliban imposed when last they ruled.”


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New podcast: Religious wars over vaccines? They're more complex than those headlines

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New podcast: Religious wars over vaccines? They're more complex than those headlines

Once again, it’s time for some time travel on the religion beat — as we ponder the current state of news coverage about the COVID-19 mask-and-vaccine wars.

Think back to Easter a year ago. Church leaders were wrestling with the real possibility that they would not be able to worship during Holy Week and on the holiest day on the Christian calendar. This was got lots of ink from the press, with good cause. There appeared to be two camps: (1) Crazy right-wingers (many journalists saw Donald Trump looming in the background) who wanted face-to-face worship at any cost and then (2) sensible, sane clergy willing to move to online worship and leave it at that.

The reality was more complex, especially since some (not all) government leaders seemed to think that worship was more dangerous than other forms of public life. During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in), host Todd Wilken and I discussed how it’s easy to see the same patterns in news reports on bitter battles over COVID-19 vaccines. For some on the left — see this fascinating Emma Green piece at The Atlantic — super-strict coronavirus rules have evolved into faith-based dogma.

Now for that early COVID-19 flashback. In a post and podcast a year ago, I argued that this wasn’t really a simplistic story about two groups (good churches vs. bad churches), but one in which there were at least five camps to cover:

Those five camps? They are (1) the 99% of religious leaders who cooperated and took worship online, (2) some religious leaders who (think drive-in worship or drive-thru confessions) who tried to create activities that followed [government] social-distancing standards, (3) a few preachers who rebelled, period, (4) lots of government leaders who established logical laws and tried to be consistent with sacred and secular activities and (5) some politicians who seemed to think drive-in religious events were more dangerous than their secular counterparts.

Say what? … Why were drive-in worship services — with, oh, 100 cars containing people in a big space — more dangerous than businesses and food pantry efforts that produced, well, several hundred cars in a parking lot?

These five camps still exist and we can see them in the vaccine wars.


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Why would CBS News say that Archbishop Wilton Gregory was the first 'Black' cardinal?

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It was the kind of newsroom error that lights up Twitter, while also inspiring more than a few folks in cyberspace to say to themselves, “I need to let GetReligion know about this!”

I am referring to the headline at CBSNews.com that currently proclaims: “First Black American Cardinal said he hopes to begin on ‘positive’ note with Biden after contentious relationship with Trump.”

When that story went online, it said that Washington, D.C., Archbishop Wilton Gregory was the first “Black Cardinal” — period.

See the difference?

Other news organizations made the same error. At Axios, for example, the headline eventually morphed to become: “Wilton Gregory becomes first Black cardinal in U.S.” Note that the URL for that story still contains this: “www.axios.com/washington-archbishop-first-black-cardinal-catholic …”

However, was CBS that left this headline in place for more than a day, until the headline and story were finally corrected.

What was the problem?

For starters, there are currently 14 cardinals from Sub-Saharan Africa alone.

The big question, of course, is why writers and digital producers at a major news organization would, well, forget one of the most important news stories in global Christianity over the past decade or two.

We are talking about the rising tide of believers and leaders from the Global South, and the continent of Africa in particular, and impact of this trend on Catholicism, Anglicanism, Methodism, etc. (Click here for “The Next Christianity,” the 2002 cover story at The Atlantic by historian Philip Jenkins that put this trend on the front burner for journalists who “get” religion.)

Why did this happen at an organization as famous as CBS News?


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Atlantic essay on Poland asks: Why do religious biases seem to accompany populist politics?

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Atlantic essay on Poland asks: Why do religious biases seem to accompany populist politics?

“Who gets to define a nation?,” journalist Anne Applebaum asks in a piece she wrote for the latest edition of The Atlantic magazine. “And who, therefore, gets to rule a nation?

For a long time, we have imagined that these questions were settled — but why should they ever be?”

Newspaper, magazine and broadcast reports attempting to explain the moves toward nationalist-tinged political populism in a host of European nations, and certainly the United States as well, have become a journalistic staple, which makes sense given the subject’s importance.

Here’s one recent example worth reading produced by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat  that looks at the issue in light of the recent Swedish national election. His focus is whether the political center can continue to hold, and for how long?

So why single out this magazine essay by Applebaum, who is also a columnist for The Washington Post?

Because it’s a good example of how a writer’s deep personal experience of living within a culture for many years can produce an understanding that’s difficult to find in copy produced by the average correspondent who, at best, spends a few years in a region before moving on to a new assignment.

Granted, the American-born Applebaum has the advantage of being married to a Polish politician and writer. She herself has become a dual citizen of the U.S. and Poland, and is raising her children in Poland.

As a Jew, however, she retains her outsider status in Polish society. It's from this vantage point that she conveys how Poland’s shift toward right-wing populism has impacted the nation, and her. (Her piece is one of several published by The Atlantic grouped together under the ominous rubric, “Is Democracy Dying?”)

If it is dying, at least in the short run, she argues that in large measure it’s due to the sweeping demographic changes in Europe triggered by the large number of Muslim refugees and immigrants fleeing war, poverty and general chaos in Syria, Iraq, North Africa and elsewhere who have moved there.


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Real dangers in India, Indonesia and Brazil as the religious pendulum swings way right

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Human history may be explained as a pendulum that swings, uninterrupted, between religious and political extremes that have profound consequences for those affected. Our limited time here is no different.

This metaphor for perpetual change is currently swinging to the right in much of the world. A prime reason why, is that the most recent political and religious pull to the left failed to deliver on its promises of economic justice, political equality, and, perhaps most importantly, a sense of inner security and calm craved by all.

Impatient and needy creatures that we are, such failures inevitably shift the underlying gravitational momentum that sets the pendulum in motion. When liberal (pluralistic in outlook, government and rationalism viewed as essentially positive forces) views fail us, large numbers inevitably swing to the right. A similar dynamic occurs when right-leaning ideas (top-down tribalism, traditionalist “cures” for society's ills) leave us dissatisfied and feeling threatened.

The hope is always the same, of course; finding a quick, earthly salvation to get us through the day.

In recent days, several elite media stories about events in India, Indonesia and Brazil have illustrated the problematic impacts of the current global shift to the right. (I’m covering lots of ground here so rather than use wordy block quotes, please click on the links provided to better understand my point.)

All concern religious freedom issues. All illustrate how religious, and ethnic, minorities have been treated miserably by majorities who use religious and political dominance to trample the rights of the powerless.

You could argue that none of this is new, that it’s just more of the pendulum at work. And you’d be correct.

But I cite them here not because they're new under the sun, but simply as a reminder that the human desire to dominate those who are different -- religiously or otherwise -- continues to wreck havoc on the weakest among us.


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Looking at past and into future: Will Democrats consider compromises on religious issues?

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Let's take a trip into my GetReligion folder of think-piece guilt, shall we?

In this case, I would like to point readers toward a piece at The Atlantic by Michael Wear that ran about a month ago. The headline: "Why Democrats Must Regain the Trust of Religious Voters."

We could, after the narrow Doug Jones victory in the Alabama Senate race, change that headline to something that would look like this: "Why Democrats Must Regain the Trust of Religious Voters, when Running Against Candidates Other Than Roy Moore."

As I have said several times: Imagine if the Democrats had, in Alabama, selected an African-American pro-life woman as their candidate. The cultural conservatives who either boycotted Moore or wrote in a third-party candidate would have had a valid choice on the other side the ballot. Moore would have been the walking (or horseback) dead against a culturally conservative Democrat.

There are so many journalism stories -- local, regional and national -- linked to this issue, in religion and in politics.

In a way, this is similar to this question: Would Joe Biden have defeated Donald Trump, especially if he had shown a willingness to seek compromises on religious-liberty issues and abortion? I think I know the answer to that one, too. Hillary Clinton was just about the only candidate on earth Trump could defeat, in large part because of her loyalty to the cultural, political and, yes, secular/religious left (key Pew Forum data here).

So here is Wear's overture:

Democrats ignored broad swaths of religious America in the 2016 election campaign and the nation has suffered because of it. Yet calls for a recommitment to faith outreach -- particularly to white and other conservative or moderate religious voters -- have been met in some corners of liberal punditry with a response as common as it is unwarranted. Some quarters of the Democratic party would rather maintain rhetorical and ideological purity than win with a more inclusive coalition. For the sake of the country, the party must turn back to people of faith.

But here is the crunch paragraphs in this analysis piece:


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