Godbeat

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Big-think story: What does religious faith have to do with slumping global birth rates?

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“The End of Babies.”

That was the arresting headline on a hefty and significant lead article in The New York Times Sunday Review section for Nov. 17 about spreading international “reproductive malaise,” a.k.a what some are now calling the Baby Bust.

This is big stuff. Yes, there are religious implications here.

The Guy is old enough to remember apocalyptic journalism about a lethal “population explosion” heading our way. Now social analysts are issuing the opposite warning for some countries. Among other ills, when average ages rise this causes labor shortages, lack of children to care for aged parents and deficits in public and private pension funds with fewer younger wage-earners to carry the oldsters.

Government interventions to skew population can cause trouble.

China feared increasing hordes and long forced couples to have only one child. Combined with open abortion and gender favoritism, that has produced a dire shortage of marriageable women. David French of thedispatch.com notes the National Bureau of Economic Research found that California’s paid family leave, which you’d think would encourage more births, apparently reduced childbearing.

To keep the population from shrinking, a nation needs an average of 2.1 births per woman resident. Numbers fall well below that in e.g. Taiwan (1.13), Japan (1.42), Thailand (1.52), China (1.6), the United States (an all-time low of 1.7) and numerous well-off European nations like Denmark (also 1.7).

Denmark is a major puzzle in the Times piece by Anna Louie Sussman, working in partnership with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Affluent Danes are better able to cover the costs of child-rearing than parents in many countries. Denmark’s welfare state makes it as easy as possible to have children, with 12 months of family leave after birth, government funding for in vitrofertilization, and heavily subsidized day care.

So what gives?


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Why God continues to have a place at Thanksgiving tables and in Thanksgiving stories

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As millions of Americans sit down today to a turkey dinner with all their favorite side dishes, many will pause to say a prayer or otherwise give thanks.

That’s part of the story, after all. The one central theme to the holiday that endures to this day is the idea of giving God thanks. It’s the reason why the Pilgrims held a feast in the first place a year after making landfall in what is now Plymouth, Mass.

Even as a growing number of young people identify with no religion, Americans are still largely thankful to God. While the day is marked with football games and parades, it’s also true that Thanksgiving, one of the least commercial holiday’s celebrated in America, has a religious origin that has been debated ever since the Pilgrims marked the original Thanksgiving dinner in 1621 following their first harvest.

Two years away from the 400th anniversary of the holiday and days away from another Thanksgiving, historians and scholars continue to debate what the feast continues to mean for Americans. The holiday, while rooted in religious tradition, remains one of the things that ties modern secular society to this country’s colonial past. More than a Protestant holiday despite its roots, the day is celebrated by all denominations and viewed as uniquely American.

The day we now call Thanksgiving was observed by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians in October 1621. The feast lasted three days and, according to attendee Edward Winslow, was attended by 90 Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims, like the colonists that followed them, celebrated a thanksgiving several times a year when the harvest was plentiful. It was highlighted by attending church services and thanking God before a large meal. Throughout the American Revolution, a day was set aside for giving thanks. Connecticut, for example, was the first to do so. The biggest change by the 17th century was that politicians were the ones calling for a Thanksgiving rather than church authorities.


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Does the Vatican's quasi-official newspaper have a 'fake news' problem?

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The Vatican gets its fair share of coverage from news organizations around the world. Even those newspapers who don’t have a dedicated religion beat writer have Vatican coverage in its pages, either in the form of a foreign correspondent or via subscribing to wire services such as The Associated Press or Reuters.

It isn’t lost on Pope Francis that the news media ecosystem, saying this past May that journalists should use the power of the press to search for the truth and give voice to the voiceless.

Conservative news websites in the United States have increasingly set their sights on Francis in recent years. Catholic news sites that lean left doctrinally have also have a strong readership. Both need to be read by journalists who cover the Vatican and the pope. Another source they need to read is L’Osservatore Romano, a once great and influential newspaper that has over the years declined in both influence and stature.

For those who have never heard of it, L’Osservatore Romano is a daily newspaper printed in Italian with weekly editions in six languages, including English, and once a month in Polish.

The newspaper reports on the activities of the Holy See and owned by the Vatican — but is not considered an official publication. The Holy See’s official publication is the Acta Apostolicae Sedis, which acts as a government gazette. The views expressed in L’Osservatore Romano are those of individual writers unless they appear under the byline “Nostre Informazioni” (Italian for “Our Information”) or “Santa Sede” (Holy See). In other words, one needs a media literacy course in order to fully understand what this newspaper is reporting.

The publication founded in 1861 — and available at newspaper stands across Rome, via subscription and online — continues to play a major role in interpreting the papacy and the role of the Vatican in the loves of Roman Catholics around the world. Problematic for the Vatican’s semi-official newspaper has been its editorial standards as of late.


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Greek Orthodox leader arrested: Reporters who follow the money will hear all kinds of questions

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This is the kind of New York Times headline that tends to inspire emails that show up in my computer inbox: “Ex-Director of Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America Charged.”

In this case, we are dealing with an Associated Press report that has run all over the place — covering the latest installment in a long-simmering scandal that has created a major embarrassment for Eastern Orthodox Christians here in North America.

On one level, this is a Greek Orthodox story. However, I think that reporters need to understand that many Orthodox believers — in America and around the world — are intensely interested in what happens in this case.

Why is that? You see this scandal is linked to a highly symbolic 9/11 memorial project at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. Check out the images and emotional language used in the video at the top of this post, back when work finally started moving on the long-delayed project to rebuild St. Nicholas Orthodox Church.

Let’s start with the top of the AP report:

NEW YORK — The former head administrator of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America was arrested Monday on charges he embezzled over half a million dollars from the organization even as the church ran out of money trying to build a shrine to replace a church crushed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jerry Dimitriou, 55, of Greenlawn, New York, was freed on $150,000 bail after he was charged with two counts of wire fraud, accused of pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars illegally while serving as the administrator from 2000 until late 2017.

Dimitriou oversaw construction of a new church and Sept. 11 shrine at the World Trade Center until the project ran out of money in 2017. The St. Nicholas National Shrine, designed by renowned architect Santiago Calatrava and estimated to cost $50 million, was supposed to replace a tiny church that was crushed by the trade center’s south tower.

That $50 million price tag?

If you dig around you will find all kinds of other numbers for that, starting at $80 million and heading way, way higher. The funds for the project came from donors all over the place, with gifts both large and small.

So what went wrong? Here is some language in the new AP story. Read carefully:


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About those media reports that Rick Perry believes God 'ordained' Donald Trump to be president

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Rick Perry, the outgoing U.S. energy secretary and former longtime governor of Texas, stirred up a pre-Thanksgiving social media storm with his comments on Fox News about God’s role — as Perry sees it — in choosing the president.

Not surprisingly, some major media reports boiled down Perry’s perspective to say that Donald Trump was “ordained by God” to lead America.

That is an accurate but wholly incomplete assessment of Perry’s words.

“How media misinformation spreads...” is how one Twitter user — Steve Krakauer — characterized CNN Politics’ tweet.

The thing is, for those who bothered to click the CNN link, the actual headline and story (by religion editor Daniel Burke) were pretty good. The headline mentioned Trump and Obama, and Burke put Perry’s words — all of them — into a helpful context:

(CNN) Like a lot of evangelical Christians, Energy Secretary Rick Perry believes in a God who gets involved in every aspect of our lives -- including the election of Donald Trump as President.

"I'm a big believer that the God of our universe is still very active in the details of the day-to-day lives of government," Perry told Fox News in remarks aired on Sunday.

"You know, Barack Obama doesn't get to be the President of the United States without being ordained by God. Neither did Donald Trump."

Perry went on to say that being God's instrument on Earth doesn't mean that Trump is a perfect person. Echoing the argument of other white evangelical Christians, the Texas Republican went on to cite several biblical figures, including King David, whose private lives didn't always align with biblical standards.

Perry is just the latest evangelical Christian in the Trump administration to say they believe the President is divinely ordained.


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NYTimes highlights 2020 Democrats' unapologetic support for abortion rights, sans religion

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Is it possible to write a consequential news story on the role of abortion in the 2020 presidential race without mentioning religion?

The New York Times has attempted it with an in-depth piece on a survey it did on Democratic candidates’ positions on the issue.

The Times reports that 2020 Democratic contenders — all of them — “unapologetically support abortion rights.”

The lede boils down the survey’s major findings:

The Democratic presidential field has coalesced around an abortion rights agenda more far-reaching than anything past nominees have proposed, according to a New York Times survey of the campaigns. The positions reflect a hugely consequential shift on one of the country’s most politically divisive issues.

Every candidate The Times surveyed supports codifying Roe v. Wade in federal law, allowing Medicaid coverage of abortion by repealing the Hyde Amendment, and removing funding restrictions for organizations that provide abortion referrals. Almost all of them say they would nominate only judges who support abortion rights, an explicit pledge Democrats have long avoided. 

Very few support restrictions on abortions late in pregnancy. Seven say abortion pills should be available over the counter. Nine want a federal approval process for state abortion laws. And Joseph R. Biden Jr., whose ambivalence on abortion rights has been a theme for decades, is seeking to recast himself as a full-throated champion of them.

Click the link by Biden’s name, and a previous Times story delves into some of the issues related to the former vice president’s Catholic faith and his position on abortion. That’s a topic that we’ve covered at GetReligion recently (here and here, for example).

But the word “Catholic” does not appear in this new report on Democrats and abortion. Nor do terms such as “religion” and “faith” or even “pro-life” or “anti-abortion.”


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Think about this: Digging down into that all-to-familiar 'God gap' in American politics

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I think that the first time I encountered the term “pew gap” was in the middle-to-late 1980s, as the side effects of the post-Roe v. Wade era began to emerge.

That was when people started talking about the impact of the Religious Right on the Republican Party and the growing secularization of the elites at the top of Democratic Party structures, where old-school labor union Catholics were being replaced by various kinds of white-collar groups linked to academia and feminism.

At the end of the 20th Century, the “pew” or “God gap” was a given. I know that I have used it before, for this piece of the “Blue Movie” essay that The Atlantic ran in 2003 remains perfect:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors — and better indicators of partisan inclination — than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).


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This week's podcast: Why it matters that Canadian Anglicans are having a near-death experience

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Years ago, while I was still an Episcopalian, I tried to get a circle of clergy and journalists to collaborate on what I thought would be a classic work of religion-marketplace humor.

The basic idea: The creation of the definitive collection of jokes about Episcopalians and their unique approach to Christian life and culture. As one priest put it, the Episcopal Church is “NPR at prayer.”

The book never happened, but I learned lots of jokes that I didn’t know in all of the basic categories, from “how many Episcopalians does it take to change a light bulb” quips to jokes featuring “Episcopalians at the gates of heaven and/or hell.” But here was my favorite joke, as I heard it in 1993 (but with a few updates):

The year is 2030 … and two Anglo-Catholic priests in the back of National Cathedral are watching the Episcopal presiding bishop and her incense-bearing wife, an archdeacon, process down the aisle behind a statue of the Buddha, while the faithful sing a hymn to Mother Earth.

"You know," one traditionalist whispers, "ONE more thing and I'm out the door."

The whole point was that it’s hard for religious communions to die. In the end, there are always reasons for true insiders to hang on and hope the pendulum swings back their way.

But I remember that someone else had a joke — I don’t remember how it went — that centered on the idea that, after a few more decades of declining statistics, Anglican churches would be empty, except for elderly clergy at the altars whose salaries would be paid with endowment funds.

That joke cuts to the heart of the news story discussed in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

As background, here is the top of the Religion News Service story I critiqued in an post with this headline: “Canada's Anglicans are vanishing and RNS can't find any conservatives to debate the reasons why.”

(RNS) — A “wake-up call.”

That’s what Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, called a new report showing there may be no members left in the mainline Canadian denomination in 20 years.


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Friday Five: RNS/AP partnership, Mister Rogers, Chick-fil-A, personal story, Curmudgeon humor

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You can read it at The Washington Post. And at ABC News. And at the Charlotte Observer. And at many other news sites.

Yonat Shimron’s Religion News Service story this week on Megan Lively — headlined “The cost of coming forward: 1 survivor’s life after #MeToo” — is “out in wide release, thanks to our friends at The Associated Press,” notes RNS editor-in-chief Bob Smietana.

AP distribution of RNS content is, of course, part of the big partnership between the news organizations funded by an 18-month, $4.9 million grant from Lilly Endowment Inc. announced earlier this year.

An AP editor’s note on Shimron’s piece points out:

This content is written and produced by Religion News Service and distributed by The Associated Press. RNS and AP partner on some religion news content. RNS is solely responsible for this story.

That seems like an improvement on the note appended to the first RNS story (“US Latinos are no longer majority-Catholic, here's why” by Alejandra Molina) that AP distributed recently:

EDS: This story was supplied by Religion News Service for AP customers. The Associated Press does not guarantee the content.

RNS stories always have been distributed on the wire, but only a certain number of newspapers have subscribed to that content. The partnership with AP dramatically expands RNS’ reach, which is good news for the Godbeat.

Now, let’s dive into the Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: Speaking of AP, I posted Thursday on a lovely story by veteran journalist Ted Anthony exploring how Mister Rogers’ faith echoes in his hometown of Pittsburgh.

The feature is tied, of course, to today’s opening of “A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood,” starring Tom Hanks as Mister Rogers.


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