Godbeat

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Is a 2022 Olympic boycott over China's treatment of Uighur Muslims a possibility?

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Is a 2022 Olympic boycott over China's treatment of Uighur Muslims a possibility?

I’m a big track fan, which is why one of my all-time favorite sports memories is watching from a nose-bleed seat at the Los Angeles Coliseum as Britain’s Sebastian Coe won the 1984 men’s 1,500-meter Olympic finals. But I also recall my excitement being dampened just a tad by knowing that Coe’s win was diminished by the absence that day of world-class Soviet bloc runners.

You’ll remember that President Jimmy Carter had pulled the United States out of the 1980 Moscow Olympics to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (sadly, almost 40 years later Afghanistan remains an open-ended U.S. foreign policy concern). More than 60 other nations joined the U.S.-led boycott.

As payback, the USSR pulled its athletes out of the following Summer Olympics, the Los Angeles games. More than a dozen other communist nations joined that boycott, hence the absence of many quality athletes and, in my mind, the need for an asterisk next to Coe’ name. (Ironically, Coe also won the 1,500 meters in 1980, which probably warrants a second asterisk.)

Jump forward to the present, which finds the U.S. and Russia, the rotting core of the old USSR, still at odds. But unlike the 1980s, China — then just a hint of the economic powerhouse it would become — is arguably as bad an actor today and at least equally as problematic for the U.S.

Guess what? The 2022 Winter Olympics is scheduled for China.

Given how horribly Beijing has persecuted its Muslim Uighur minority (plus the Tibetan Buddhists, underground Christian churches, and others, including ordinary citizens who disagree to any degree with the government’s heavy-handed policies), might another boycott of Olympic proportions be due?

The odds of that are long, for reasons I’ll enumerate below.


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A Pew Research Center study on the varying lengths of sermons in Christian churches? That'll preach

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When’s the last time you read a news story on sermon lengths?

Before this week, I mean?

If you follow religion news, you know that the Pew Research Center released a study Monday dubbed “The Digital Pulpit” and analyzing sermons in various Christian contexts.

It’s a fascinating topic, actually.

It’s also one that I don’t recall ever making headlines before. Of course, journalists get in trouble by making statements like that. So please feel free to educate me on past coverage if I missed it. That’s what the comment box is for.

From the Pew report, here is a rundown of the approach:

This process produced a database containing the transcribed texts of 49,719 sermons shared online by 6,431 churches and delivered between April 7 and June 1, 2019, a period that included Easter.2 These churches are not representative of all houses of worship or even of all Christian churches in the U.S.; they make up just a small percentage of the estimated 350,000-plus religious congregations nationwide. Compared with U.S. congregations as a whole, the churches with sermons included in the dataset are more likely to be in urban areas and tend to have larger-than-average congregations (see the Methodology for full details).

The median sermon scraped from congregational websites is 37 minutes long. But there are striking differences in the typical length of a sermon in each of the four major Christian traditions analyzed in this report: Catholic, evangelical Protestant, mainline Protestant and historically black Protestant.3

Catholic sermons are the shortest, at a median of just 14 minutes, compared with 25 minutes for sermons in mainline Protestant congregations and 39 minutes in evangelical Protestant congregations. Historically black Protestant churches have the longest sermons by far: a median of 54 minutes, more than triple the length of the median Catholic homily posted online during the Easter study period.

Both the Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey and The Associated Press’ David Crary produced interesting news stories on the study. The New York Times’ Elizabeth Dias did a quick item on the study, asking for reader input for a possible future story.


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After Brexit, will United Kingdom become an untied kingdom? If so, what about its churches?

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The British election December 12 was as dramatic as America’s in 2016. Some claim the smashing triumph of Boris Johnson’s Conservatives over Jeremy Corbyn and Labour means Donald Trump will be re-elected if U.S. Democrats likewise go hard left. Or not.

Whatever the U.S. ripples, the inevitable “Brexit” from the European Union is epochal for the U.K. 

Journalists should be pondering an equally historic possibility. Philip Jenkins, a Baylor University historian of religion whose Christian Century columns about overseas trends are always worth reading, posed the following on Patheos.com days before the Brits balloted.

What if Brexit turns the United Kingdom into an untied kingdom? What if the nation with the world’s fifth largest economy dissolves? What happens to ties between some of the churches that are involved?

In terms of history, not long ago we saw the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia break into assorted nation-states, and before that the Czechs and Slovaks split up.

England dominates the four segments of the nation officially named The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. Jenkins contends that today’s supposed “British” government sees itself "only in terms of England” and he predicts in coming years “the nation of Great Britain will have ceased to exist.”

A crackup’s first stage would be the departure of Scotland after 312 years. In a 2014 referendum, an impressive 45 percent of Scots voted to quit the U.K. The potential break was further demonstrated in the Britain-wide referendum that backed Brexit when a lopsided 62 percent of Scots voted to remain in the European Union. The pro-independence Scottish National Party surged in last week’s voting. Jenkins claims Scotland’s breakaway is now “just a matter of time.”  

Northern Ireland likewise voted to remain in the European Union, by 56 percent.


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Podcast: Why does GetReligion want to keep doing that journalism thing that we do?

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I have never really enjoyed listening to infomercials, to tell you the truth. But, like it or not, creating one of those was a small part of the agenda in this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

Yes, host Todd Wilken and I talked about GetReligion’s upcoming move to the Overby Center at the University of Mississippi, where I will also be a senior fellow linked to events focusing on religion, news and politics. I announced that in a post the other day with this headline: “Religion news, the First Amendment and BBQ: GetReligion will soon have a new home base.” And, yes, we talked about the fact that GetReligion needs to raise some money in order to do what we do in the future.

However, I think it’s significant how we got to that topic. We started off talking about the doctrinal wars over LGBTQ rights at George Fox University, which was addressed in this post: “Here we go again (again): RNS/AP offers doctrine-free take on George Fox LGBTQ battles.”

Readers can tell, just from that headline, that this story linked into many familiar GetReligion themes, including the crucial role that doctrine — whether academics call it “doctrine” or not — plays in defining life on private-school campuses, both on the left and the right. All to often (think “Kellerism”), journalists report and edit these stories as if journalists are in charge of determining what is “good” doctrine and what is “bad” doctrine.

There’s no need for an accurate, fair-minded debate when you already know who is right and who is wrong. Here’s a bit of that George Fox post:


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There's no way around it, saith Ryan Burge: Gray hair in the pews is an important story

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For years, your GetReligionistas have been saying that the aging of mainline religion — first on the doctrinal left and now in many conservative traditions, as well — is one of the most important stories of our, well, age.

Look at it this way.

Stage I: In the 1970s and ‘80s, America’s liberal mainline Protestant churches went into what now appears to be a demographic death dive (hello Anglicans in Canada). This created a massive hole in the middle of the public square that led to …

Stage II: Evangelical Protestants rise to become the new “it” factor in American life and politics. Evangelicals are still a massive piece of the religion marketplace, but now…

Stage III: Evangelicals are starting to show signs of age and their demographic trends are mixed. Keep your eye on statistics linked to baptisms and converts to the faith. And look at the ages of all those people in the “nones” category.

This leads to this week’s fascinating chart from Ryan Burge of Religion In Public.

Read on.


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Religion news, the First Amendment and BBQ: GetReligion will soon have a new home base

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All together now, let’s sing: “Turn, Turn, Turn.”

GetReligion. org has been around since February 1, 2004, and in Internet years that is a long, long time. Some of us — certainly me — have gained more than a few gray hairs in the process.

For several years now, I have known that I would retire from full-time work here at GetReligion when the clock struck midnight and we reached January 1, 2020. The question — logically enough — was whether this weblog would shut down or evolve back into something that I could do part-time, which was how things started out long ago.

The good news is that, well, we ain’t dead yet. The bad news is that we will have to do some major downsizing, which means we’ll have to make changes in the amount of content that we offer here. After nearly a decade, Bobby Ross Jr., has already put out the word that he is leaving GetReligion and will now be writing a weekly religion-news roundup for Religion UnPlugged that will also run elsewhere (including here, we hope).

Readers will not be surprised to know that — a sign of the times in which we live — the work we will be doing here in the future will require some fundraising. Visitors to the website will see more information about that sooner, rather than later.

But the big news today is that GetReligion will soon have a new home base, one linked directly to the First Amendment, which means work tied to freedom of the press and freedom of religion.

As of January 1, we will be based at the Overby Center for Southern Journalism and Politics, which is next door to the School of Journalism and New Media at the University of Mississippi.


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More Religion News Service turmoil as publisher Tom Gallagher makes a quick exit

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Well, that was quick.

It wasn’t all that long ago that Tom Gallagher, a corporate lawyer and columnist for the National Catholic Reporter, talked his way into a position as CEO of the Religion News Foundation and as publisher of its subsidiary, Religion News Service. He was someone who had friends in high places. The idea was that he was a fundraiser who’d bring religion news the money and respect that it deserved, plus he’d create the business model for a wildly successful nonsectarian producer of religion content.

Yes, he created havoc by firing or pushing out several people in order to do it (read my April 2018 story on that here), and he was making changes to how the RNF related to the Religion News Association, an independent trade association of religion reporters. (The RNF is its public charity arm.) I heard a lot of talk at the most recent RNA annual convention in Las Vegas about how Gallagher’s decisions helped drive the RNA into a $30,000 deficit.

But Gallagher remained the man on top — until now. He’s the person who’s squarely in the middle of the photo atop this post, which is a screen shot of part of the RNF board. He’s in the blue sweater.

Then yesterday, a press release popped up on the RNS website about its new interim leader, Jerry Pattengale, a professor at Indiana Wesleyan University and an executive with the Museum of the Bible in Washington, D.C. until he retired from the latter last year.

So Gallagher was out? By Tuesday afternoon, the RNF site had been altered to reflect new realities and Gallagher’s name was also off the RNS masthead.

That doesn’t sound like an amicable parting, does it?


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Breaking news: Man gives 10 percent of his income to charity — what a revolutionary concept

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Let’s not waste any time.

We need to get right to a recent scoop by Vox.

Here it is: According to the headline, a man has given at least 10 percent of his income to charity for 10 years running.

Yes, I know how amazing that must sound to everyone just hearing about it for the first time.

“What a revolutionary idea,” said one person (actually, lots of people) on Twitter.

“Huh,” suggested another. “If only we had a word for this. One syllable? Rhymes with Blythe maybe. I don’t know. Maybe this guy can invent the word.”

Great idea! I suggest we all think real hard and try to come up with such a word.

In the meantime, here is Vox’s lede:

Ten years ago, in November 2009, a philosopher at Oxford named Toby Ord set up an organization called Giving What We Can. His idea was to ask people to commit, with him, to donate at least 10 percent of their income every year to highly effective charities. Ord chose to donate to organizations working to fight global poverty.

This commitment, from a not particularly well-paid research fellow, earned Ord profiles at the time from the likes of the BBC, the Telegraph, and the Wall Street Journal.

Ten years later, over 4,000 people from a wide range of backgrounds — including hedge funders, prominent philosophers like the late Derek Parfit, 2019 Nobel laureate in economics Michael Kremer, and, uh, me — are on the list of signatories.

Ord is now a senior research fellow in philosophy at Oxford and has since cofounded the effective altruist movement with fellow philosophers Will MacAskill and Peter Singer. Giving What We Can is now part of a broader suite of organizations under the Center for Effective Altruism, trying to persuade people they can use their time and money to make the world a substantially better place by giving to good causes.

Alrighty.


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First in a series? Ambitious AP feature examines waves of stress hitting Catholic priests

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When covering complex, controversial subjects, the journalism educators at the Poynter Institute have long stressed the importance of paying attention to criticisms made by “stakeholders” linked to a story.

What’s a “stakeholder”? Basically, it is a person or group directly linked to the core issues and information included in a news story, people whose lives and work will be directly affected by this coverage.

That’s the first thing I thought about when I saw the ambitious Associated Press feature that ran with this headline: “US Catholic priests describe turmoil amid sex abuse crisis.” It’s an important article addressing a topic — waves of change sweeping over a declining number of priests — that would be hard to cover in a book-length report, let alone a newspaper feature.

What do the ultimate “stakeholders” — Catholic priests — think of this story?

As you would expect, the story had to find a way to focus — focusing special attention on the work of one priest who symbolizes larger trends. Thus, readers are introduced to the Rev. Mark Stelzer, a 62-year-old professor and chaplain at a Catholic college in Western Massachusetts who is also a recovering alcoholic who helps others wrestling with that demon. Now, he has been asked to serve as administrator at a nearby parish with 500 families. This brings us to the heart of this report:

Weighing on the entire Catholic clergy in the U.S. is the ripple effect of their church’s long-running crisis arising from sex abuse committed by priests. It’s caused many honorable priests to sense an erosion of public support and to question the leadership of some of their bishops. That dismay is often compounded by increased workloads due to the priest shortage, and increased isolation as multi-priest parishes grow scarce. They see trauma firsthand. Some priests minister in parishes wracked by gun violence; others preside frequently over funerals of drug-overdose victims.


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