Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
It’s hard to deal with life in the faith-based-politics era without running into the work of researcher John J. DiIulio Jr., the Democrat (and Roman Catholic) who briefly headed up President Bush’s faith-based outreach to religious groups that try to help their neighbors.
It isn’t news when the officially edgy Style section of The Washington Post prints a lengthy feature story that opens like this:
My fellow Godbeat scribes, I come to you today to ask a question that has been bothering me for several weeks.
Sen. Hillary Clinton’s ability to be an effective member of Congress’s upper chamber is directly tied into her affiliation with a lawmakers’ prayer group sponsored by the Fellowship. It was in this group that Clinton first started turning herself into “the consummate Washington player,” as documented by Joshua Green in the cover piece of the November Atlantic.
Remember that pre-Easter slate of stories attempting to debunk Christianity? There was the shocking lost “Gospel of Judas” story. The Jesus walked on an ice floe (not water) that forms once every few millennia story. The Jesus’ father was a Roman soldier named Pantera story and the Jesus didn’t die on the cross so much as pass out after being doped up story.
A day before the David Kuo book leaked onto the airwaves, conservative commentator Tucker Carlson said on The Chris Matthews Show that “the elites in the Republican Party have pure contempt for the evangelicals who put their party in power.” Republicans were pandering to the values vote by bringing up gay marriage, all the while holding contempt for evangelicals, Carlson said. Was this a faint rumble or was this old news to those closely covering Bush’s faith-based initiative?
Daniel Burke, Peter Sachs and editor Kevin Eckstrom of Religion News Service put out an edgy pre-election feature package on Thursday focusing on one of this blog’s favorite topics — the religious left. The headline even referenced this blog (at least, I like to think so) by saying, “With the Help of a Dozen, Democrats Learn to ‘Get Religion.’”
We have had some lively discussion in the past week on my recent post raising questions about how mainstream reporters should handle, or try to avoid, questions about Mormon doctrines that strike many traditional Christians as wrong or, at the very least, worthy of debate. The spark for the discussions, of course, is a possible Mitt Romney bid for the White House. Click here for a recent Salt Lake Tribune piece linked to this.
I realize that I am tiptoeing around the edge of the blogosphere rumor mill, but I want to comment on the much-discussed Los Angeles Times piece by Johanna Neuman about those terrible Religious Right people seeking a “Pink Purge” of gay staff members in strategic Republican offices.
