Catholicism

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Mini-media storm: Trump guilty of using meds created with help of abortion tissue?

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A few days ago, an article was floating about on Facebook with a headline proclaiming that “Trump’s antibody treatment was tested using cells originally derived from an abortion.”

Say what?

With the article in the MIT Technology Review was a photo of President Trump standing with Supreme Court Justice nominee Amy Coney Barrett. This led to copycat articles in several other publications, some of which had to run corrections on their misleading headlines.

The MIT piece began with a religion angle

This week, President Donald Trump extolled the cutting-edge coronavirus treatments he received as “miracles coming down from God.” If that’s true, then God employs cell lines derived from human fetal tissue.

The emergency antibody that Trump received last week was developed with the use of a cell line originally derived from abortion tissue, according to Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, the company that developed the experimental drug.

The Trump administration has taken an increasingly firm line against medical research using fetal tissue from abortions. For example, when it moved in 2019 to curtail the ability of the National Institutes of Health to fund such research, supporters hailed a “major pro-life victory” and thanked Trump personally for taking decisive action against what they called the “outrageous and disgusting” practice of “experimentation using baby body parts.”

That was about as far as most people read the piece. Now what are the chance that Trump knew or cared anything about cell lines? Surely he had a lot of other stuff on his mind while at Walter Reed.

Two of my predictably liberal friends had posted links to the piece along with comments about Trump’s hypocrisy.

“I guess he’s only anti-abortion unless it benefits him.”

“Unbelievable hypocrisy!”

“His doctors at Walter Reed Hospital are under the commander-in-chief.”

I protested to both these friends, saying the article was a cheap shot because it made out like Trump sat up in his hospital bed and approved the fact that his meds had come from an abortion. The folks I addressed didn’t care.

I get that Facebook is the domain of idiots. Noting that the MIT piece was dated Oct. 7, I wondered how they knew about the president’s drug cocktail. Sure enough, Rep. Ted Lieu, a Democratic congressman out of California who runs a non-stop feed trashing Trump, posted this two days earlier.


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Yin-yang of Washington Post on Amy Coney Barrett: Wait. Pope Francis embraces charismatics?

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It would appear that the goal on the cultural and religious left is to find a way to link Judge Amy Coney Barrett to all of that strange charismatic Christian stuff like healing and speaking on tongues while avoiding anti-dogma language that would raise warning flags for Sunday-morning-Mass Catholics. She may as well be a fundamentalist Protestant!

Here is the Big Idea that is right up top, in a story that uses the term “handmaid” 11 times — early and often.

Oh, this will also require tip-toeing around the awkward fact that millions of charismatic Christians are found in Latino and Black pews — Catholic and Protestant.

Will this play a role in the hearings that are getting underway as I type this? We will see.

In the branch of the Democratic Party known as Acela Zone journalism, the key to the news coverage has continued to be a steady drumbeat of references to the word “handmaid,” which in cable-television land calls to mind all kinds of horrible fundamentalist terrors, starting with sexual slaves in red capes and white bonnets.

It’s hard to know what to write about the People of Praise-phobia angle of this story right now, since your GetReligionistas have been on it for some time now. See my podcast and post here: “Why is the 'handmaid' image so important in Amy Coney Barrett coverage?” Also, Julia Duin’s deep dive here into 40 years of history linked to the People of Praise and charismatic Christian communities of this kind. There there is Clemente Lisi on three big questions that reporters need to face linked to Barrett’s faith.

There are too many elite news stories on the handmaid angle to parse them all, so let’s focus on that recent Washington Post feature from a team led by the scribe who brought you the hagiography of Christine Blasey Ford during the confirmation hearings of Supreme Court Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh.

For starters, this would be a good time to remind readers that reporters rarely play any role in the writing of the headlines atop their work. The headline on a piece such as this one primarily tells you the angle that editors thought would launch it into social-media circles among the newsroom’s true believers. Thus we have: “Amy Coney Barrett served as a ‘handmaid’ in Christian group People of Praise.”


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That (overlooked) 2020 Al Smith dinner served up blunt appeals to Catholic swing voters

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That (overlooked) 2020 Al Smith dinner served up blunt appeals to Catholic swing voters

During a normal White House race, the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner allows the candidates to don formal attire, fire snappy one-liners and make subtle appeals to Catholic voters.

But nothing is normal in 2020. Thus, Joe Biden and President Donald Trump used this year's virtual dinner to preach to Catholic voters in swing states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida. The event produced few headlines, coming a mere six hours before Trump announced his positive test for COVID-19.

Saluting Catholic progressive, Biden offered a litany about the pandemic, race, the recession and climate change. He warned that many Americans have lost faith "in one another, in truth, in science and reason."

The current pope, Biden stressed, embraced him during a 2013 White House visit, offering comfort shortly after brain cancer took his son Beau's life.

"Pope Francis took the time to meet with my entire family to help us see the light through the darkness," said Biden. "I live in an amazing country … where an Irish Catholic kid like me from Scranton, Pennsylvania, would one day befriend a Jesuit pope. But that's who we are as a country -- where anything is possible when we care for one another, when we look out for one another, when we keep the faith."

While stressing that he is guided "by the tenets of Catholic social doctrine" -- helping the "least of these" -- Biden didn't mention his vow to codify Roe v. Wade if the Supreme Court overturns that decision or his promise to reinstate policies requiring the Little Sisters of the Poor to cooperate in providing birth control and abortifacients to staff. He didn't mention his decision to officiate at the same-sex wedding of two White House colleagues, an action clashing with church doctrine.

It was logical for Biden to avoid providing fresh ammunition for critics. But the speech, once again, trumpeted his Catholic credentials.

"Joe Biden's choice to run explicitly on the claim that he is a faithful Catholic squarely places on the table his claim to be a faithful Catholic," stressed legal scholar Robert P. George of Princeton University, writing on Facebook. He is a Catholic conservative who has also been a consistent critic of Trump.

“No way out of this, folks," he added. "It's not, or not just, Biden's critics who have raised the issue. It's the Biden campaign. …


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Brace for SCOTUS wars: Three big questions people keep asking about Amy Coney Barrett's faith

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It’s been two weeks since President Donald Trump officially nominated Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court. Right on cue, Barrett’s Catholic faith and religious life became the focal point of news coverage, particularly by the secular press.

What has ensued is an exercise among journalists — particularly in elite newsrooms — to question Barrett’s fitness for the lifetime position, particularly because of her religious beliefs.

For many people in elite zip codes, this is life-and-death territory, since Barrett would give the Supreme Court a solid 6-3 conservative majority on some issues.

The nomination — taking place just weeks before the Nov. 3 presidential election — has already triggered a nasty tug-of-war between Republicans and Democrats. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell has pledged to hold a vote, leaving Democrats with very few options to halt it. In retaliation, Democrats have threatened to pack the Supreme Court with as many as 15 members (from the current nine) should Joe Biden win the race and his party gain a Senate majority in 2021.

Barrett, 48, currently serves on the Seventh Circuit in Chicago, a position she attained after being nominated to the bench by Trump. Barrett, who also teaches at Notre Dame Law School, was one of Trump’s finalists for the Supreme Court two years ago, but he instead went with Brett Kavanaugh.

As Election Day draws near in an atmosphere of near chaos, both the Trump and Biden campaigns have made appeals to communities of faith — particularly Catholic voters in the Rust Belt states of Ohio and Pennsylvania — by highlighting issues they believe resonate with them. In Pennsylvania, Biden has seen his lead widen in recent weeks. It remains a key battleground state with a very large Catholic voting bloc that Trump needs to win.

Overall, Catholics, according to recent polling, favor Biden — but traditional Catholics do plan to join evangelicals and vote for the president. Trump’s pick will certainly serve as an overture to faith voters like evangelicals and a segment of white Catholics who tend to be politically conservative.

With religion so crucial to this campaign season, here are three things you need to know about Barrett’s faith:


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A 40-year history of People of Praise that many journalists might like to know

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Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination has brought renewed attention to a part of the American charismatic movement that has been a source of controversy for 40 years. Sadly, very few journalists understand “intentional Christian communities,” or “covenant communities,” which were major fixtures on the American religious scene from the late 1960s to the early 1990s.

Barrett grew up in a family affiliated with one such community -- called People of Praise -- in South Bend. Before her name came to the fore a few years ago as possible Supreme Court material, the only people who knew about these groups were religion reporters who were plying their trade more than 30 years ago.

Even then, People of Praise wasn’t making headlines. You had to be a specialist in Pentecostal-charismatic movements (as I am) to know what they were.

Today, reporters struggle to explain a type of Christianity that was cutting edge during Jesus Movement days but feels very foreign now. And so you get a mishmash of reportage and opinion ranging from the Wall Street Journal’s guest editorial on the benefits of People of Praise to Newsweek’s truly awful story that had to be corrected. There are too many other examples to even survey them.

So, we’re going to get a brief history.

Before I do that, I want to spotlight two outlets that have done a good job of reporting on Barrett, starting with a Vox piece by Constance Grady that correctly explained why the nominee has erroneously been connected to the “handmaids” in People of Hope, a Catholic charismatic group in New Jersey. Grady writes:

One of the weirder ways this debate has played out since Barrett was first discussed as a potential Supreme Court nominee is the fight over whether or not People of Praise, the group she belongs to, is also one of the inspirations for The Handmaid’s Tale. In Margaret Atwood’s 1985 dystopian novel (and its recent TV adaptation), fertile women are forced to live as childbearing slaves called handmaids. The group isn’t an established inspiration for the book — but the story has developed legs anyway.

Do read the whole of it, because it explains how several publications made stupid mistakes when covering the People of Praise/People of Hope mixup.

The other is a Politico story that takes one on a tour of People of Praise education and ministry sites in South Bend.


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There they go, there they go again: New York Times views #ACB through eyes of conservative women

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I recently raised a few eyebrows with a post that — #TriggerWarning — praised The New York Times for a piece about Judge Amy Coney Barrett and why her nomination for the U.S. Supreme Court was so symbolic for cultural and religious conservatives. The headline on that post: “Speaking of people being praised: New York Times offered solid, old-school story about Barrett.”

Why was that Times report so important?

Well, no surprise here, but it was crucial that the team that produced the story include a religion-beat professional — as opposed to coming from the Donald Trump-era political desk. I also noted:

… Here is the key point I want to make: Unlike many Times stories in recent years, almost all of this material comes from qualified sources (left and right) whose names are attached to their opinions and the information they provided. There are attribution clauses all over the place, just like in Times of old.

Lo and behold, the Times followed up on that story with another religion-team feature that dug deeper on a perfectly valid point that was hinted at in the previous feature. Here’s the double-decker headline on that second story, which drew quite a bit of praise from conservatives on social media:

For Conservative Christian Women, Amy Coney Barrett’s Success Is Personal

Judge Barrett is a new kind of icon for some, one they have not seen before in American cultural and political life.

This is another fine story. However, I have one criticism of it that some may find a bit ironic, or even hard to take seriously.

The story does a fine job of demonstrating that the pro-ACB women are not a simplistic choir of cloned conservatives each with precisely the same point of view in terms of politics and culture. For example, it’s clear that some of these women are not all that fond of Trump the man or even the president. What unites them are commitments to specific values and concerns about specific moral, cultural and political issues.

This is where Judge Barrett comes into the picture. They applaud her because of her personal life, faith and choices, as well as her intellectual prowess and sparkling legal career.

So what is missing? The story briefly mentions the fierce opposition to Barrett, but never digs into the views of progressives — thus allowing Barrett supporters to debate them.

Yes, this is a Times story that needed MORE on-the-record material from the cultural left.


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Plug-in: Do religious conservatives really care what Trump says about them in private?

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Every 24-hour news cycle seems to bring a new alleged scandal involving President Donald Trump.

If you believe the headlines, Trump has referred to Americans who died in war as “losers” and “suckers.” He has avoided paying federal taxes. And he has — according to McKay Coppins of The Atlantic — secretly mocked his Christian supporters. (Click here for tmatt’s “Crossroads” podcast and post on this topic.)

My question is: Does it matter from a political standpoint?

“The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain,” Coppins wrote this week. “In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion.”

But while Trump critics hyperventilate over such stories, voters knew about his propensity to be a jerk before they elected him.

Even in his public statements, the Republican incumbent typically sounds more like a blabbering professional wrestler than a prominent world leader. (Did you catch the debate the other night?)

With all that in mind, I thought Michelle Boorstein, the award-winning religion writer for the Washington Post, had a spot-on response to Coppins’ report.

“What's the evidence that conservative Christians support Trump because of his attitude towards THEM,” Boorstein asked on Twitter, “vs. his willingness to advance his policy priorities?”

“Exactly,” replied John Daniel Davidson, political editor for The Federalist. “Most conservative Christians couldn't care less what Trump thinks about them.”

Which is why, it seems to me, his policies and his nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court (more on that in a moment) matter more to his base than anything he might say.

• • •

One obvious update: Generally, I put the finishing touches on this column on Thursday night.

That was the case this week, so I wrote and scheduled “Weekend Plug-in” before President Donald Trump revealed early Friday morning that he and first lady Melania Trump have tested positive for the novel coronavirus. As The Associated Press put it, the “stunning announcement … plunges the country deeper into uncertainty just a month before the presidential election.”


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Podcast: Anyone surprised that a rich Yankee Republican laughs at Bible Belt folks?

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First things first: This week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in) was recorded before the stunning news that President Donald Trump and his wife Melania tested positive for COVID-19.

As you would expect, Twitter was immediately jammed with thoughts (of all kinds), prayers and more than a few curses. Quite a bit of the friction was linked, of course, to Trump’s many connections with religious conservatives of various kinds.

As it turned out, host Todd Wilken and I had talked about a subject that is directly related to all of that. I am referring to the advocacy journalism blast at The Atlantic that ran with this double-decker headline:

Trump Secretly Mocks His Christian Supporters

Former aides say that in private, the president has spoken with cynicism and contempt about believers.

This was the article that I received more email about during the previous week than any other. As a rather old guy — in terms of decades of exposure to coverage of religion and politics — this piece sounded so, so, so familiar.

The bottom line: Lots of country-club people at the top of the GOP food chain have always — behind closed doors — viewed religious conservatives with distain and distaste. That’s big news? Does it surprise anyone that Trump is even more raw in his humor about certain types of religious people (hold that thought, we’ll come back to it) than others in his New York City-South Florida social circles?

Here are two key chunks of this McKay Coppins essay:

The president’s alliance with religious conservatives has long been premised on the contention that he takes them seriously, while Democrats hold them in disdain. In speeches and interviews, Trump routinely lavishes praise on conservative Christians, casting himself as their champion.


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Feeling Godforsaken? A dark night for people who care about religious issues in public life

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At some point during the primaries leading up to the 2016 election, I decided that I was going to stop watching the alleged “debates” between the candidates.

It was better for my health — physical and spiritual — to tune them out and then read transcripts, if there was anything relevant that I needed to know on issues crucial to me. Yes, I am talking about the First Amendment and religious liberty.

During that campaign I went further and decided that I would not allow Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton onto my television screen. I was trying, you see, to take anger and emotions out of the process, as much as I could. I’m not joking.

Based on what I am reading — and saw last night in about 30 minutes of Twitter — this remains a solid strategy.

So the big news last night had to do with Joe Biden and Trump downplaying the radical fringes of their tense coalitions?

Trump did a “Proud Boys” call out, while refusing the clearly condemn the alt-right. Biden basically said that antifa was an “idea,” not a network of organizations that, in the dark of night, has been violently hijacking demonstrations about race and justice.

Did I get that right? Help me out here.


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