Demographics

, , , , , , , , , , ,

Thinking with David Briggs and Ryan Burge: Whoa, is religious left really on rise (again)?

, , , , , , , , , , ,

If you know your religion-beat history, then you know this name — David Briggs, who is best known for his years with the Associated Press.

If you know your GetReligion history, then you know that — for 17 years — we have been saying that the “religious left” deserves more attention. This is specially true in terms of the doctrinal beliefs of people in these blue pews and how those beliefs help shape their politics.

It seems that, every four years or so — a telling interval — we see a few stories about a surge of activity on the religious left and how that will impact politicians opposed by the Religious Right. It’s like politics is the only reality, or something.

Thus, several readers noted this recent Briggs byline for the Association of Religion Data Archives: “The decline of the religious left in the age of Trump.”

Say what? Here’s the overture:

President Trump has had a powerful mobilizing effect on the liberal and secular left in U.S. politics.

But will religious liberals also play a significant role in getting out the vote for Democrat Joe Biden in November?

Almost immediately after the 2016 election, some commentators began heralding the likelihood that a revived religious left would emerge from what many liberals considered the ashes of Trump’s victory.

But such hopes may be based more on a wing and a prayer than solid evidence of any such new awakening. Rather, there are several signs indicating “a notable decline” in political activity among religious liberals.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , ,

Thinking with Ryan Burge charts: Whaddaya know? Some evangelicals are rethinking Trump

, , , , , , , ,

If you follow American evangelicalism closely, you know that there are quite a few divisions and fault lines inside the movement. I’m talking about evangelicalism as a whole, but this is also true among the infamous “white evangelicals.”

It’s true that, heading into the 2016 election, white evangelicals played a major role in Donald Trump’s success in the primaries. However, many evangelicals supported other candidates — including the most active evangelicals in Iowa. I continue to recommend the book “Alienated America” by Timothy P. Carney, for those who want to dig deeper on that subject.

In the end, about half of the white evangelicals who supported Trump in the general election really wanted to vote for someone else. They were voting against Hillary Clinton.

Now, there is evidence — thank you GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge, as always — that some white evangelicals have started to rethink their reluctant votes for Trump.

To be honest, I have been telling reporters, since 2016, to watch for this mini-trend. But, in the end, the force that will pull many of these voters back to Trump has nothing to do with Trump himself. The support is rooted in opposition to Democratic Party actions on crucial issues linked to abortion and also the First Amendment ( that’s “religious liberty” in most news reports),

While pointing readers to these recent Burge tweets, let me frame them with some material from an On Religion column I wrote two years ago about the whole 81% of white evangelicals love Trump myth. The bottom line? It’s the issues, not the candidate.

Most "evangelicals by belief" (59 percent) have decided they will have to use their votes to support stands on specific political and moral issues, according to a … study by Wheaton College's Billy Graham Center Institute, working with LifeWay.

This time around, 50 percent of evangelical voters said they cast their votes to support a candidate, while 30 percent said they voted against a specific candidate. One in five evangelicals said they did not vote in 2016.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

How will the mainstream news media perform during their future LGBTQ test?

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell and new Bostock decisions favoring LGBTQ rights, America’s mainstream media face one of their most challenging tests. Given ardent support for change among so many journalists, editors, business interests and cultural powers, can they manage fair coverage of religious traditions that resist both same-sex relationships and gender identity as a replacement for DNA biology?

This story will have legs in part because the Supreme Court rulings did not settle the clash between religious and LGBTQ rights. The media tend to leave Islam and Orthodox Judaism alone on these matters and are more tempted to aim incomprehension or outright hostility at Catholicism and evangelical Protestantism.

A New York Times op-ed on July 4th provided an interesting example. The author, Jeff Chu, a married gay who is a part-time staff educator at Central Reformed Church in Grand Rapids, Michigan, told of his frustration over long-running denial of clergy ordination because his Reformed Church in America (RCA) officially maintains traditional doctrines on sex and marriage.

Remarkably for a daily newspaper, the op-ed editors did not require Chu to discuss the kinds of developments treated in our June 17 Guy Memo. This denomination faces a policy showdown that was scheduled for last month and now postponed one year due to COVID-19. On June 30, an official panel that includes two New Yorkers issued the compromise plan that will come to the floor and could help Chu’s cause.

With that news peg, and considering that the faith has ministered in New York City for 392 years, the local daily might better have handled this as a hard news story, with Chu as a quotable case in point, or at least a feature centered on him. Under normal news canons, any article on this topic should include the last of the Five W’s and explain why the RCA has such a policy and why many believe it should be maintained, including some members at Central Reformed Church.

Too many journalistic accounts ignore this basic aspect of the story.

Also, in dealing with the ongoing conflict, the news media need to report on the important international aspect. Religious debates often know no national lines.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Thinking with Ratzinger and Burge: Concerning sex, marriage, doctrine and church decline

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

When historians write about the career of Pope Benedict XVI I predict that they will include a sobering quote that dates back to his life and work as Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger of Germany.

I am referring to that 2001 interview when — looking at trends in postmodern Europe — he put all of his hopes and fears on the record. I thought of this exchange during a Twitter dialogue the other day with GetReligion contributor Ryan Burge. Hold that thought.

Ratzinger had been candid before. German journalist Peter Seewald probed on this topic by noting an earlier quote in which Ratzinger said that the future church would be "reduced in its dimensions; it will be necessary to start again." Had the leader of Rome's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith changed his views?

That led to this famous reflection by the future pope. This is long, but essential:

[The Church] will no longer be able to inhabit many of the edifices she built in prosperity. As the number of her adherents diminishes … she will lose many of her social privileges. … As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. …

It will be hard-going for the Church, for the process of crystallization and clarification will cost her much valuable energy. It will make her poor and cause her to become the Church of the meek. … The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution — when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain. … But when the trial of this sifting is past, a great power will flow from a more spiritualized and simplified Church. Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , ,

Just a church-business story? Black pastor is new chairman of top Southern Baptist board

, , , , , , , , , , ,

In this coronavirus age, religion-beat reporters are, along with their newsroom colleagues, being deluged with invitations to attend virtual news events.

In some cases, these are “gatherings” that major newspapers would have staffed in the past, even if it meant shelling out travel-budget dollars for airplane tickets and hotel rooms. Those days are long gone, for 99% of reporters.

The problem now, of course, is that reporters have a limited amount of time and, in some cases, the decline in newsroom personnel is a problem. So which virtual-meeting URLs get clicked and which ones do not?

I thought about this because of an event that happened yesterday (June 17) linked to the biggest story in America, right now — #BlackLivesMatter protests and attempts by major American institutions to respond to them.

So this discussion of race and the church (Facebook Live archive here) involved the leader of America’s largest Protestant flock, the new chairman of its powerful executive committee and black church leaders from Philadelphia, Chicago, Baltimore-Washington, D.C. and Nashville.

Newsworthy? Maybe, maybe not. It is interesting to note that all of the participants were affiliated with the Southern Baptist Convention and the Rev. Ronnie Floyd, the CEO of the SBC’s executive committee, was the only white evangelical in the circle.

The other clergy participants: Rolland Slade, senior pastor of Meridian Baptist Church of El Cajon, Calif., and newly elected chairman of the SBC executive committee; Charlie Dates, pastor of Progressive Baptist Church in Chicago; Kevin Smith, executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware; and Willie McLaurin, vice president of Great Commission relations and mobilization of the executive committee; and K. Marshall Williams of Nazarene Baptist Church of Philadelphia.

As you would imagine, lots of the discussion focused on the hurt and anger that is fueling protests across America.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jess Fields meets Ryan Burge: As you would image, they're talking 'nones,' 'evangelicals,' etc.

, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

So here is the question: Is podcaster Jess Fields just going to work his way through the entire GetReligion team, sooner or later?

I think it would be logical to do that, since Fields is especially interested in topics linked to religion, current events and the impact of journalism on all of that. You can see that with a quick glance at his homepage at Apple Podcasts.

The other day, I spent an hour or so online with him and that podcast link was included in the GetReligion post that I wrote about Fields and his work: “Jess Fields got tired of short, shallow news interviews: So he started doing loooong podcasts.”

You may recall that Fields is a small businessman in Houston who also has worked quite a bit in nonpartisan think tanks linked to state and local governments. He is an Eastern Orthodox Christian, and that has affected a few of his podcasts.

So now he has had a lengthy chat (very long, even by Fields standards) with social scientist, and progressive Baptist minister, Ryan Burge.

Why not? Burge is all over the place right now — writing and chatting about the tsunami of charts, survey samples and commentary that he keeps releasing, day after day, on Twitter. He also showed up the other day in an NBC special:


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , , , ,

Faith-based colleges face waves of red ink: Thinking about a news story that won't go away

, , , , , , , , , , , ,

The headline on this Inside Higher Education piece seemed prophetic: “What Led Concordia Portland to Close?”

The date, however, was the Feb. 14, 2020. In other words, this story broke just ahead of the national wave of headlines about colleges and universities struggling to deal with scary economic realities linked to the coronavirus crisis.

This story was linked to the OTHER life-and-death crisis facing higher education — especially private schools and, to be even more specific, faith-based private schools. I’m talking about the demographic cliff that looms just down the road when the massive millennial generation has moved past its college years.

The Concordia Portland story had it all. Administrators had tried to grow their way out of the crisis, adding on degree programs and remote campuses that were not linked to their original mission. There was a strange deal with a third-party recruiting agency. Finally, there were theological tensions with the school’s doctrinally conservative denomination — the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod. This chunk of the story begins during an era when enrollments were headed up:

By all accounts, Concordia was massively successful. … Total enrollment more than doubled from over 3,000 students in 2012 to more than 7,400 in 2014, according to federal data. Much of that growth was among graduate students, where enrollment spiked from about 1,700 students to more than 6,000. Enrollment of adults aged 25 to 64 went from about 1,100 in 2011 to 3,697 in 2014.

Fast-forward several years to this week, and Concordia shocked the Portland area and many of its own students by announcing that it will close at the end of the spring semester. A statement from the institution said the university’s board decided to close after “years of mounting financial challenges” and a changing landscape for education.

Hold that thought. I am headed toward this weekend’s think piece from a former GetReligionista, Steve Rabey, writing at MinistryWatch.com.

Now, I took on some of these themes in an “On Religion” column the other day entitled “Concerning the coronavirus crisis and these Darwinian days in faith-based higher education.”


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , ,

Thinking with Ryan Burge and Rod Dreher: Where did all those American Catholics go?

, , , , , , , , , ,

Are you managing to keep up with political scientist Ryan Burge on Twitter?

Well, why the heck not?

Trust me, I know that it’s hard to keep up. I have a jam-packed online file on Burge items — he is a GetReligion partner — that I want to use and it keeps growing. You don’t have to agree with this progressive Baptist minister all the time (predictable people are of little use to journalists) to be able to see the trends and insights in his charts, graphics and bites of commentary that come with them.

The crucial skill here is the ability to spot the obvious, then jump to the trends that reporters really need to dig into.

Consider the item at the top of this weekend’s think piece. There are four lines of commentary and each one is worthy of coverage. Here’s the gist: Nones are still growing. The active members of evangelical and mainline churches are (independent of membership statistical trends) still going to church has much as ever. African-American Protestant churches are holding steady.

But it’s the bottom line that Rod “Benedict Option” Dreher focused on in a recent blog item:

What has happened to Catholics? I suppose it could be that Catholics still identify as Catholics, even if they have ceased to participate in the life of the Church. I’ve known plenty of Catholics who for all intents and purposes have ceased to be Catholic, but who still call themselves Catholic, despite being unfaithful to their baptism. Protestants who have ceased going to church tend not to continue to identify as Methodist, or Evangelical, or whatever. I would expect that natal Orthodox Christians who have ceased to practice the faith would nevertheless identify themselves as Orthodox to a pollster.

Still, that can’t explain the entire Catholic collapse, can it? I shared Burge’s tweet with a friend who is a churchgoing Millennial Catholic. It made him disconsolate and angry at the leadership class of the Church. “Well, what a friggin’ disaster,” he texted back. “And there will be only a shrug. Nothing to see here. Just another reminder of the Catholic dumpster fire.”

As always, Burge’s thoughts led to lots of interesting comments and questions.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , ,

Catholic media highlights trend in young people gravitating towards faith during pandemic

, , , , , , , , ,

The ever-evolving coronavirus pandemic has upended our world in ways no one could have ever expected. Journalists still don’t know where this story is going.

But one thing is clear. While death tolls climb and fall depending on which countries are effectively flattening the curve, the vast majority of those of us who are healthy and staying at home still have to deal with loneliness.

How does faith play a part in mitigating isolation? A survey released four weeks ago by Springtide Research Institute, which studies trends of those ages 13 to 25. What did they find? The survey revealed the following regarding young people, faith and the novel coronavirus. The following summary is long, but essential, especially for religion-beat professionals:

… For many young adults, shelter in place and social distancing provokes fear and uncertainty, leading to increased levels of isolation, loneliness, and anxiety. The survey found that the single most important way to mitigate loneliness is for trusted adults to reach out and connect with young adults.

* The survey consisted of a national panel of 508 respondents ages 18–25, with a margin of error of +/- 4% at a 95% confidence level, administered between March 24 and March 31, 2020.

* One in three respondents are sheltering in place alone.

* 63% of all respondents say that they do not feel as alone or isolated when people reach out to them.

* Among young adults who are sheltering in place with others, half still say that they feel alone, and nearly eight out of ten report feeling less lonely when a trusted adult from outside their household checks in on them.

* About 58% say they feel scared and uncertain, and 66% of those who feel this way say they don’t have anyone to talk to about their emotions. Thus, they feel isolated because no one is reaching out to them.

* Respondents are not experiencing a decrease in their faith; in fact, 35% increased their faith and 47% stayed the same.

* Nearly 46% have started new religious practices, and 43% have participated in at least one religious service online.


Please respect our Commenting Policy