Clergy

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Lone wolf pastor of tiny 'Baptist' church in California scores national PR win for ... What?

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It's time to head back into the confusing world of nondenominational and totally independent churches. There are thousands of them, many of which can accurately be called "fundamentalist." Most are very small and they are often dominated by the personality of a founding pastor. However, in this rather post-denominational age, there are more than a few independent megachurches with several thousand members.

Journalists, please consider this question: In terms of news value, which matters more, a statement by the pastor of an independent flock (with no connection to a larger regional or national body) with 200 or so members or a statement by leaders in a denomination with, let's say, 15 million members?

Let's think about that dynamic in light of a story that has received major news attention in the wake of the hellish massacre in the Pulse gay bar in Orlando.

Raise your hand if you are surprised that there were a few self-proclaimed fundamentalist leaders out there who said some wild and truly hateful (and heretical) things about the massacre.

Let me stress: It is perfectly valid to cover these statements. However, our earlier question remains: How important are these leaders and their churches, how representative are their voices, in comparison with the leaders of major denominations, seminaries and parachurch ministries? Also, it is crucial that readers be given information that places these wild statements in context, that lets them know that these voices are small and isolated.

In other words, the goal is to avoid doing what USA Today editors did with their story that ran with this headline: "California Baptist pastor praises Orlando massacre."

Now, is this "California Baptist" as in a reference to a Baptist pastor who happens to be in California or is it to a pastor linked to a major body of California Baptists, such as the California Southern Baptist Convention?


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Wait a minute! What did Southern Baptists say about religious liberty for Muslims?

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Covering a national meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention can be a wild ride, even in these days when they "only" draw somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 "messengers" -- not delegates -- from local congregations. Back at the height of the historic SBC battles of the late 1970s and early 1980s, these gatherings would draw around 30,000 and up, hitting a high of 45,519 in Dallas in 1985.

These events are highly organized, but the simple fact is that reporters never know who is going to make it to a microphone and speak his or her mind. It could be a pastor from a tiny church in the middle of nowhere. It could be a former SBC president, who is standing alone but may, symbolically, be speaking for thousands.

You can see this practical, journalistic, issue at work at the top of this Religion News Service report on the meetings that just ended in St. Louis:

(RNS) Southern Baptists are usually the first to defend religious freedom. But when it comes to Muslims, some want to draw a line.
At their annual meeting in St. Louis, an Arkansas pastor said Baptists shouldn’t support the right of Muslims to build mosques, especially “when these people threaten our very way of existence as Christians and Americans.”
“They are murdering Christians, beheading Christians, imprisoning Christians all over the world,” said John Wofford of Armorel Baptist Church in Blytheville, Ark., on Wednesday (June 15).
On Tuesday, Wofford offered a motion calling for the removal from office of SBC leaders who supported the right of Muslims to build mosques. He was referring, among others, to Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which joined a legal document supporting a New Jersey group’s fight to build a mosque.
The chairman of the Committee on Order of Business ruled the motion out of order.

Note the word "some" in that lede.


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Kind of a GetReligionista clash: An alternative take on that big AP evangelical feature

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The other day our own Bobby "no pickles on my Chick-fil-a" Ross Jr. has some strong words of praise for an Associated Press story that tried to explain why American evangelical Protestants -- a phrase that almost always means white Republican conservatives -- are currently feeling rather down about their place in the public square.

The big idea of Bobby's post was to salute AP for dedicating plenty of space and effort to this topic. This wasn't your ordinary dash-it-off wire story. It offered lots of people space to share their views:

Thus, Bobby noted:

This 2,500-word piece -- about as long a story as you'll ever see on the AP wire -- has it all from a journalistic storytelling perspective:
• Regular people (such as the Kentucky pastor and others at his congregation).
• Respected experts (such as Lifeway Research's Ed Stetzer and Southern Baptist public policy guru Russell Moore).
• Real nuance (as opposed to boiling down the issues and concerns to cardboard caricatures, as so often happens).

Now this is where things get interesting, from a GetReligionista point of view.

This particular AP story has been promoted online for a week or so and people keep writing us with their own opinions of it. As often happens in the social media age, this piece has developed cyber-legs on Twitter and elsewhere. Thus, people keep asking: Will GetReligion offer a critique of the story?

Well, we explain, Ross already did.


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Hey Washington Post editors: Why is Donald Trump in trouble in Utah? Think about it

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For many elite journalists, it has been the big, nagging existential question for more than a year: Who is to blame for the rise of Donald Trump?

For starters, his popularity must have something to do with a revolt among blue-collar and Middle Class white Americans. The press seems to get that, in part because this trend can also be linked to some of the supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders.

But from the get go, journalists have been fascinated by the fact that some religious conservatives have -- no matter how outrageous the past actions of the proud playboy called The Donald -- been willing to forgive Trump's many sins against faith and family.

In other words, when in doubt, blame all those yahoos on the Religious Right.

The problem, of course, was the evidence that the more religious conservatives, you know, spent time in pews and pulpits the less likely they were to support Trump, especially with any sense of enthusiasm. The split between "cultural evangelicals" and the leadership class in their churches kept showing up in the exit polls. And what about Catholics? And Mormons? Is there a reason that someone like Mitt Romney is the face of the #NeverTrump world?

The bottom line: How can journalists cover the "lesser of two evils" story that dominates this year's White House race without weighing the moral and religious issues linked to that dilemma? What kinds of voters are in the most pain, right now, as they contemplate a choice between Trump and Hillary Rodham Clinton?

This brings me to two items from The Washington Post that I am convinced are linked. It appears that the political editors at the Post don't see it that way.

Let's start with this headline at the reported blog called The Fix: "This new Utah poll is amazingly bad for Donald Trump." At the heart of the story is a truly shocking set of numbers, if you know anything about GOP life.


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Powder-puff press: Tutu's daughter marries a woman, and media hand her the mic

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"Tell us how the bad men hurt you": As she often does, M.Z. Hemingway adroitly blends humor and precision in finding the nugget of a story.  Her suggestion for a GR post on the daughter of Desmond Tutu was devastatingly accurate, not only for the BBC but for the Guardian.

The Reverend Canon Mpho Tutu van Furth recently married a woman -- an atheist, at that -- and now she's complaining that the church yanked her preaching license. And the BBC and the Guardian help her complain. Not just by reporting her quotes, but enshrining every word as gospel.

Here we go with the BBC:

Reverend Canon Mpho Tutu van Furth followed her father into a life in the Anglican church, but when she decided to marry the woman she loved, she had to leave.
She married her long-term Dutch girlfriend, Marceline van Furth, in a small private ceremony in the Netherlands at the end of last year, but they went public last month when they had a wedding celebration in Cape Town.
"My marriage sounds like a coming out party," explains Ms Tutu van Furth.
"Falling in love with Marceline was as much as a surprise to me as to everyone else," she tells me.

At least the BBC quotes church law: "Holy matrimony is the lifelong and exclusive union between one man and one woman." So why is Tutu van Furth making an issue of it? To advance what she calls a "very important conversation'" about same-sex marriage:


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Do Lutheran deacons matter? St. Louis Post-Dispatch clarifies this rather hot debate

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Deacons are quite the discussion topic in the news these days, ever since Pope Francis stated he favored a study to clarify whether the church could admit women to this church office, as our own Richard "Religion Guy" Ostling recently explained.

Catholics aren’t the only ones chatting up the topic. One conservative branch of American Lutheranism is talking about whether to cut back on the number of applicants to the diaconate.

Catholics began including men, almost always married, in a permanent diaconate back in the 1970s after Vatican II. The Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod began doing so in 1989. Both efforts have proved amazingly popular, so much so that the Lutherans are wondering if there’s too much of a good thing.

Recently, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch weighed in on this, so we come in near the beginning of the piece. This passage is quite long, but essential:

“This is the heart of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, a conservative-leaning network of 6,000 churches whose roots are in northern Europe. Though the headquarters is in Kirkwood, more than 2 million members are spread across the country.
Like other mainline churches, the synod struggles to find new blood in the U.S. -- both in the pews and at the pulpit. The decline helped motivate some men often in remote and inner-city areas, to bypass four years of seminary training to serve a congregation in need.
Lutheranism has always been built on a tension between ordained clergy and what is called the priesthood of the believer, or the laity, and over who can do what. While the pool of men -- the church ordains only men -- answering the call to enter seminary and serve as pastors has shrunk in recent decades, some want to enforce higher standards on ministers who aren’t ordained and strip away the so-called “Licensed Lay Deacon” credentials.


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Will Catholicism admit women deacons or deaconesses to ranks of ordained clergy?

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Will Catholicism admit women deacons or deaconesses to ranks of ordained clergy?

THE QUESTION:

What are the reasons the Catholic Church might, or might not, ordain women in the clerical rank of deacon? (Almost all Q and A topics are posted by our online audience, but The Guy decided to pose this timely question himself.)

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Catholicism’s long-simmering discussion about whether to ordain women into the clerical ranks as “permanent deacons” took a dramatic turn May 12 when Pope Francis said he’ll form a commission to study the issue. His promise came during seemingly off-the-cuff answers to questions during a Rome session with the International Union of Superiors General, whose members lead nearly 500,000 nuns and sisters in religious orders.

Without doubt, female deacons would be a major change. Liberals hope — and conservatives fear — that permitting women to be deacons would be a step toward allowing female priests. However, that’s a distant prospect if not an impossibility considering Pope John Paul II’s absolute prohibition in his 1994 apostolic letter “Ordinatio Sacerdotalis.”

To explain that term “permanent diaconate”: The order of deacons in the early church gradually dwindled over centuries so that eventually ordination as a “deacon” became a mere stepping-stone for men on the path to priesthood. (That usage occurs in Anglican and Episcopal churches. Lutheran deacons, male and female, fill a permanent office, not a temporary one. Baptists use the deacon title for lay members who govern congregations with the pastor.)

Catholicism’s Second Vatican Council (1962-65) restored the “permanent diaconate” as a third, separate and ongoing ministerial order in its own right that is subordinate to priests and bishops. Particularly in North America, which has half the world total, such deacons help ameliorate the shortage of priests.


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Lost opportunity: What the Philly Voice puff piece on Leah Daughtry could have been

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It must be getting close to election time, as fawning articles about Democratic politicians and God are getting more numerous.

Not so with GOP candidates. Their religious practices, whether it be Mitt Romney, Rick Santorum or Ted Cruz, are always treated as worthy of a wacko-meter. But the Democrats get treated with respect, whether it’s Bernie Sanders’ Judaism or Hillary Clinton’s United Methodist beliefs. They are mainstream.

Recently, the Philly Voice decided to scrutinize the Pentecostal beliefs of one such official; someone we’ve written about in the past because of the anemic reporting on her.  Sadly, this most recent piece doesn’t fail to disappoint:

The Rev. Leah Daughtry, the woman tapped to oversee the Democratic National Convention, first scrutinized her Pentecostal upbringing while a student at Dartmouth College. The act was not unlike many young adults who weigh the lessons of their youth.
Far from her childhood home of Brooklyn, New York, Daughtry posed herself a couple of questions: Is there a God and, if so, what is her relationship to the divine?


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Will the waning Barack Obama administration rewrite religious hiring rules?

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Will the waning Barack Obama administration rewrite religious hiring rules?

Church-and-state disputes are a hot beat and it's getting hotter all the time.

We have religious objections over the government’s transgender bid to control school toilets and locker rooms nationwide, the Supreme Court’s bounce back of the Little Sisters’ “Obamacare” contraception case, states’ debates over whether merchants can decline gay wedding services on religious grounds, and much else.

Media coverage to date shows little interest in how church-state policy might be affected by a President Clinton, or a President Trump, or the jurists on Donald Trump’s recent Supreme Court list, or a Justice Merrick Garland. Will this be raised at a big June 9-11 “religious right” confab in D.C.? Speakers will include Trump and former challengers Cruz, Fiorina, Huckabee, Kasich, Paul, and Rubio, plus House Speaker Paul Ryan and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell.

Meanwhile, interest groups are ardently lobbying the Obama Administration to change religious hiring policies during its waning days. At issue is application of the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) under the 2007 “World Vision memorandum” (click for .pdf) from the Bush Administration’s Department of Justice.

World Vision, a major evangelical organization, had landed a $1.5 million grant to provide mentoring for at-risk youths. The memo ruled that it’s legal for such religious agencies fulfilling service programs through  federal grants to consider religious faith in their hiring. The Obama White House has thus far resisted pressure to abolish that policy, most recently in a Feb. 22 letter from ranking Democrats in the U.S. House.


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