Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
As “Meet the Evangelicals” pieces go, Time‘s cover package this week is high-quality work. It revisits familiar faces (Billy and Franklin Graham) but also introduces names that would be less familiar even in some evangelical circles (Luis Cortes, Douglas Coe). The photographs show these evangelicals in their natural elements, looking relaxed, friendly and smart.
GetReligion fell silent last week on the several stories about Rolling Stone rejecting an ad for Today’s New International Version Bible. Why?
Hanna Rosin of The Washington Post has written a fairly good analysis for The Atlantic of religious believers’ role in the 2004 election. The central insight of the essay comes in this remark from Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission: “I’ve got more in common with Pope John Paul II than I do with Jimmy Carter or Bill Clinton.”
One of the most important facts to remember in discussions of red zones and blue zones — right up there with the reality of allegedly red people pigging out on blue culture all the time — is the fact that the blue zones coalition consists of both highly religious people and people who are secularists.
Salon offers religion coverage only occasionally, but sometimes its quality compensates for the lack of quantity. Kimberley Sevcik’s 5,500-word report on Christian party animals is a fine example of what Salon does best: Treating evangelical believers as an exotic species, much like a shrieking peacock.
The three major broadcast TV networks stepped in a deep cowpie by turning away a witty ad from the United Church of Christ, and the UCC likely will gain more attention through news reports than it would have through the ad.
As you would imagine, legions of readers from around the world saw fit to email us copies of David Brooks’ op-ed page tribute to the great evangelical Anglican apologist John Stott. Nothing causes evangelicals to cut and paste and then click send (or forward) as much as a kind word for traditional faith in the pages of the Bible of the blue zip-code elites.
Here’s another story from the tidal wave just after the election that has continued to bother me a bit. The headline was “G.O.P. Adviser Says Bush’s Evangelical Strategy Split Country” and the basic concept was that the Christian right has totally taken control of the Republican Party, according to veteran GOP consultant Arthur Finkelstein. It now has veto power over the party’s choice for president. (Hear that, Rudy?) Early on, he says: “From now on, anyone who belongs to the Republican Party will automatically find himself in the same group as the opponents of abortion, and anyone who supports abortion will automatically be labeled a Democrat.” Actually, if you read that statement in a mirror, you’d have a pretty good summary of the 2004 Democratic Party platform.
I was stuck in a Southern California airport for a few hours the other day and, of course, this meant spending some quality time with a dead-tree-pulp edition of the Los Angeles Times.
