Godbeat

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Pay attention to this sect-run news source. It's a growing force in pro-Trump media universe

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Up for a brief journalism quiz? Of course you are — or so I will assume. Let’s begin.

Name a news outlet that publishes separate English-language additions for the United States, Canada, Australia and Europe, and also offers its product in 21 other languages spoken around the globe. That’s even more than offered by Reuters, the most widely translated international wire service, which offers 16.

Need more hints? OK.

This mystery outlet is run by a faith group that claims tens of thousands of adherents in more than 70 nations. The group burst on the scene in the late 20th century and has been harshly persecuted by its homeland’s ruthlessly authoritarian government.

Additionally, the same faith group sponsors a traveling cultural dance extravaganza (no peeking until the quiz is over, please) that, until the coronavirus epidemic largely shut down live performances, advertised widely on American television and at local malls.

Still in the dark?

It’s motto is “Truth and Tradition” and, as of this writing (this past Monday) it’s declined to join the preponderance of other news media — including Fox, heretofore among the staunchest of pro-Trump media platforms — that have called former Vice President Joseph Biden the 2020 presidential-election winner.

As of this date, our mystery news source has even declined to place Michigan or Wisconsin in the Biden win column — not to mention Pennsylvania, Arizona or Nevada — maintaining that it will not do so until all of President Donald Trump’s legal ballot challenges have been resolved.

Have you guessed the platform in question?

The answer is The Epoch Times, published by the spiritual, and fervently anti-Beijing, movement known primarily in the West as Falun Gong. The movement, while a relatively new formulation, draws its philosophical roots from ancient Chinese Buddhist, Taoist, Confucian and folk traditions.

Over the years, GetReligion writers have mentioned Falun Gong — along with underground Christian churches, Tibetan Buddhists and Uighur Muslims, and others — in dozens of posts focused on the persecution of religious minority groups in China.

So why mention Falun Gong, also know as Falun Dafna, yet again?


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What role does religion play in U.S. Supreme Court justices' nominations and decisions?

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THE QUESTION:

What role does religion play in Supreme Court justices’ nominations and decisions?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

By a thin margin, Amy Coney Barrett won confirmation to the U.S. Supreme Court without the quizzing about her devout Catholicism — like Senate Democrats Diane Feinstein raised with Barrett’s lower-court nomination and Kamala Harris with another judicial nominee.

Nevertheless, the media pushed this theme, including her involvement with People of Praise, a close-knit community of “charismatic” Catholic families.

This was perhaps the most intense discussion of a nominee’s religion since Louis Brandeis (a justice 1916-39) became the Court’s first Jew following the agony of history’s longest confirmation process, with 19 hearings. Ostensibly, critics questioned his entanglements as a Boston lawyer, but Democratic stockbroker William F. Fitzgerald gave the game away by regretting the nomination of a “slimy fellow” with a “Jewish instinct.”

A smaller dustup involved Democratic nominee Hugo Black (on the Court 1937-71). He was denied the usual automatic deference granted a fellow U.S. Senator when reports emerged that as a young lawyer he joined the Ku Klux Klan, with its hatred of African-Americans, Catholics and Jews. Journalists only proved his KKK membership after a strong Senate vote for confirmation.

The Brandeis breakthrough launched an unwritten tradition of the Court’s “Jewish seat,” also filled by the religiously agnostic Benjamin Cardozo, who overlapped with Brandeis (1932-38), Felix Frankfurter (1939-62), Arthur Goldberg (1962-65) and the unfortunate Abe Fortas (1965-69). After a long gap, Ruth Bader Ginsburg began her celebrated tenure (1993-2020). There was also a “Catholic seat” line with Pierce Butler (1923-39), Frank Murphy 1940-49), William Brennan (1956-90) and Antonin Scalia (1986-2016).

The first Catholic on the Court was Chief Justice Roger Taney (1836-1864), who is not loudly hailed because he wrote the Dred Scott decision that’s widely blamed for precipitating the Civil War.


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Election 2020: It ain't over 'til it's over, but familiar religion-news hooks are already obvious

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The political recriminations will be flowing in coming weeks, months and years.

Why was the Joe Biden campaign effort so astonishingly (yes) "sleepy"? How could Donald Trump do so well when so many people kept telling pollsters they find him unnerving if not repellent, and bemoan his handling of the COVID-19 crisis? And speaking of polls, why did the nation’s elite media — once again — let them slant coverage, and can their distortions ever be remedied?

With control of the White House and U.S. Senate still undecided as this is written, The Religion Guy underscores a quote: "There's something going on out there that most of the media have been missing." That's from Jim VandeHei, the savvy co-founder of both Politico.com and then Axios.com, speaking on devoutly Democratic MSNBC Wednesday morning. He added, "Obviously Donald Trump and the Republicans are the big beneficiaries of that as we sit here today, even if Trump loses the presidency."

The Guy chimes in with the related observation that Democrats and sectors of the media continue to miss or misplay the religion factor in America’s cultural divide. This will require careful reconsideration following the recounts, legal games, Electoral College vote December 14 and state certifications of Senate winners.

Newswriters' analysis of religion and what happened should note data the experts at Pew Research Center posted October 26 and on October 13. Note well that Pew echoed many others in giving Biden a healthy 52- 42 margin over Trump among registered voters.

Pew found predictable pre-election enthusiasm for Democrat Biden among Black Protestants (by 90 percent), Jews (70 percent, though less among regular worshippers while the Orthodox minority leaned GOP), and Hispanic Catholics (67 percent, but hold that thought).

Then there's the big new constituency of "nones" with no religious identification (71 percent). That’s another theme GetReligion has been stressing for a decade. Democratic dependence on non-religious citizens presumably affects the party's lack of affinity for religious interests. The 2020 returns may tell reporters whether that is a mistake.

Trump's coalition per Pew consisted of white "evangelical" Protestants (78 percent support), non-evangelical white (i.e. "mainline") Protestants (53 percent) and white Catholics (52 percent). The Guy figured it would be hard for Trump to eke out a win unless he could do somewhat better with that last group. Repeat after me: Arizona, Florida, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin.


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Attention Sean Feucht and evangelical leaders: Hatred of the press is hurting your cause

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Theologian Karl Barth had the most wonderful advice for preachers back in the day: Teach with a Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.

If only more conservative religious leaders would try that. I’ve been in journalism since I was 16 and I’ve never seen the hatred against the media that I see among today’s evangelical Protestants, and I suspect conservatives in other traditions aren’t far behind.

I ran into this as I was reporting on singer/politician Sean Feucht and his “worship protest” concerts for Politico for a piece that ran Oct. 25. Getting rebuffed whenever I tried to interview him got rather tiring when I noticed how he was tweeting his vexation with media coverage while planning a huge Christian concert on the Mall that day.

Note to public figures: When you continually refuse to give reporters access, don’t be surprised when their coverage isn’t what you’d like.

I first invited Feucht to be on a panel for the annual conference of the Religion News Association in late September. Even though he wasn’t on the road that week, his spokeswoman, Whitney Whitt, would not make him available. Here he had an amazing opportunity to tell his side of the story to 123 reporters and editors from around the country and he couldn’t be bothered.

Then I got an assignment from Politico to describe this man and why he was running around the country having these mask-less and non-socially distant concerts that were infuriating officials in a number of the cities in which he appeared. Whitt finally said I could have 10 minutes of his time. But when I called, he wasn’t there.

The spokesperson then said she’d messed up the time zones (he was on Central and I was on Pacific), so I reminded her that the ethical thing to do — when it’s their fault the interview didn’t happen — was to re-schedule as soon as possible. She ignored me from then on.

This guy had run for political office earlier this year. He’d showed up at the White House late last year and snagged a photo of himself with Vice President Mike Pence (shown with this blog post) and made it into a campaign poster. He then started getting major backing from Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley for his unorthodox open-air worship rallies.

Note to Feucht and evangelical/charismatics like him: If you’re going to run with the big boys, you need to ramp up your professionalism. I repeat: Any time you get involved in politics, you should expect to intelligently engage with liberal as well as conservative media. Refusing to answer their calls is an insane media strategy, one that is guaranteed to lead to one-sided coverage.


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Tick, tick, tick: RNS offers logical religion-news angles to watch (other updates to come)

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Trust me. It isn’t easier going through this election day when you are not committed, on any level, to either of the major party candidates.

I do have a sense of foreboding. Maybe it was seeing all the pictures of workers boarding up the downtown stores in lots of blue-zip-code megacities. That makes me think that they believe that there is a chance of a Donald Trump victory or, at the very least, mass chaos linked to complications counting ballots.

What will tomorrow look like?

Does anyone remember 2000? I stayed up until Al Gore declined to concede and, thus, had to be careful when writing the On Religion column I had planned, based on one of the final speeches of Democrat Joe Lieberman, the vice presidential nominee.

Around dawn, I wrote these lines:

But wait. This week's soap opera also demonstrated that America remains divided right down the middle on issues rooted in morality and religion. There is a chasm that separates the heartland and the elite coasts, small towns and big cities, the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts, those who commune in sanctuary pews and those who flock to cappuccino joints. …

Uh, other than the Boy Scouts sliding left (and into bankruptcy), what part of that sad litany would you change right now?

I will be writing again tonight and tomorrow morning. Thus, I appreciated the Religion News Service guide to some of the religion-angle hooks to watch carefully tonight. Most of these have received tons of GetReligion attention in recent months or years, but here are some crucial points from that news-you-can-use feature:

* Democrat Joe Biden owes his nomination to African-Americans — especially churchgoers — in South Carolina. Now he needs a big turnout from Black churches in Pennsylvania, Georgia and elsewhere. RNS noted:


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Here we go again, 2020 version: Five revealing questions to ask on Election Night

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In Tuesday’s big vote, politics matter.

So, too, does religion.

On Election Night, here are five revealing questions that Godbeat pros will be asking:

1. Was President Donald Trump able to maintain his overwhelming level of support — roughly 80% in 2016 — among White evangelicals?

“If that number is significantly lower, I would think it has to do with younger evangelicals and maybe women evangelicals getting fed up,” said Kimberly Winston, an award-winning religion reporter based in California.

The pre-election outlook? Trump is “losing ground with some — but not all — White Christians,” reports FiveThirtyEight’s Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux.

On the flip side, Christianity Today’s Kate Shellnutt highlights evangelical voters who express “more faith in Trump” than they did four years ago.

2. What difference did Catholic voters make, particularly in all-important swing states?

NPR religion correspondent Tom Gjelten notes that in 2016 “it was not the evangelicals who carried Trump to victory but Catholics, a group he had rarely mentioned in his speeches.”

Gjelten explains:

Despite losing the popular vote, Trump reached the presidency in large part because he won traditionally Democratic Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, all states in which Catholics outnumber evangelicals by significant margins.

Religion Unplugged’s Clemente Lisi, The Atlantic’s Emma Green and the Columbus Dispatch’s Danae King offer more insight on this key voting bloc. This is has also been a major topic in GetReligion coverage of American politics for more than a decade, especially in the work of Richard Ostling and Terry Mattingly.

3. How did various subgroups — Mormons, Muslims and even the Amish among them — influence the outcome?

Trump’s campaign has made a “concerted effort” to expand support among Arizona and Nevada members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the Salt Lake Tribune’s Lee Davidson reports.


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Demons are in the details: Reporters may want to write serious Halloween stuff this year

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Let’s make this a holiday feature story day here at GetReligion.

In addition to the Thanksgiving coverage memo from our patriarch, Richard Ostling, I would like to offer a “think piece” link to all of those reporters who are out there — right now — writing stories about (a) conservative Christians who don’t celebrate Halloween at all, for some reason or another, (b) megachurches that hold “You could go to hell” haunted houses full of fake blood and images of sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll or (c) churches that attempt safe versions of the holiday, keeping kids off the street and (d) congregations of all kinds who plan to have safe, socially distanced activities in 2020.

OK, that last one is completely valid, but rather tame.

Truth is, lots of religious believers wrestle with Halloween for a variety of reasons — including people who would simply prefer to emphasize the feasts of All Saints Day and All Souls Day. Lots of churches will hold events with children in costumes — dressed up as their patron saints.

Then there’s the whole question of Hollywood providing all the occult-scary imagery for this event, along with the rather recent trend toward young adults in skimpy, sexy “fill in the blank” costumes.

So with all of that in mind, let me ask reporters to consider doing a feature this year on how clergy, parents and believers in ancient churches wrestle with these issues. I am referring to an op-ed at The Washington Times by a friend of mine, Father Andrew Stephen Damick — who is an online apologetics scribe working with the Antiochian Orthodox Church here in America. Here’s the double-decker headline:

Should Christians participate in Halloween?

Halloween is about demons. No, that's not a problem

The essay starts exactly where journalists tend to start when thinking about stories of this kind:

Every October, Christians trash each other on social media over Halloween. Is it harmless costumes and candy? Participation in the occult, cavorting with demons? Co-opting a pagan holiday?

Christians believe demons are real. The Bible talks about them. Most Christians agree that you should stay away from them.


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With 400th anniversary, those Plymouth Pilgrims will make the ideal Thanksgiving feature

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A brave band of sectarian Protestants facing a harsh winter ahead stepped ashore 400 years ago to establish Plymouth Colony, England's second foothold in America following Jamestown.

The date was December 18, but most readers probably think about these "Pilgrims" on Thanksgiving Day, which is patterned after their legendary 1621 harvest feast with Native American guests.

Print and broadcast media professionals who are already planning Thanksgiving features could not do better with sourcing than to debrief award-winning historian John G. Turner of George Mason University (jturne17@gmu.edu, 703-993-5604) about his timely book "They Knew They Were Pilgrims: Plymouth Colony and the Contest for American Liberty" (Yale University Press).

The Pilgrims were supposed to arrive at New York harbor, but were lucky to land safely anywhere due to leaks and damage on the Mayflower.

Their "first Thanksgiving" was apparently no formal observance of gratitude to God, and the menu was probably fish and venison, not wild turkey. Whatever Plymouth Rock signified, the colonists subjected it to later neglect. The acclaimed "Mayflower Compact" was not the New World's first constitution but a hasty bare-bones agreement.

Since Plymouth was absorbed in 1691 into the wealthier Massachusetts Bay Colony, run by rival "Puritan" Christians, many historians have dismissed it as an unimportant backwater. But Turner uplifts the Pilgrims' significance, then balances their contributions against their sins, well summarized in this National Review piece. The most important story theme for journalists is the role of these pioneers at the beginnings of American democracy, human rights and religious liberty.

The Pilgrims received hosannas as democratic pioneers from 19th Century boosters like John Quincy Adams and Daniel Webster, but Turner says they "were neither democrats nor theocrats."

The colony was run by the believers, but did not require everyone to join the church or attend worship. They did, however, make everyone pay taxes to support their churches. They fled England to escape religious persecution, yet sent Baptists and Quakers into exile. (To be fair, in most countries religious dissenters faced prison or worse.)

State and church leaders were both elected, and lay elders shared power with the clergy -- all rather foresighted and with far-reaching implications.


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Thoughts from a reader: What I wish my Christian friends knew about journalists (like me)

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Several weeks ago, I heard from a GetReligion reader named Rob Vaughn who wanted to get something off his chest.

I was immediately interested in what he had to say because he was a mainstream television journalist — 30-plus years as an anchor at WFMZ in Allentown, Pa. — who also happens to have two graduate degrees from a seminary.

The proposed title of his piece: “What I Wish My Christian Friends Knew About The News Media.” I told him that GetReligion has never run guest pieces — maybe one or two in 17 years — but that I would welcome a chance to look at his text and get back to him.

A day or two later I made a few suggestions and noted that I am constantly getting requests to write and speak on a related topic — how modern news consumers can seek out and find news sources that are still trying to do old-school news that attempts to be balanced, fair and accurate. I suggested that he lean that direction, perhaps with a bullet-list of some strategies about news consumption.

Vaughn ended up with a commentary fit that was a natural fit for Religion Unplugged, operated by my former colleagues at The Media Project. Here’s a crucial chunk of what he wrote:

My church friends are right: many journalists don’t “get” religious conservatives; many don’t even know any personally. Reporters, like all humans, flock together socially with like-minded people. But the reporters I know want to learn, to overcome their ignorance. …

One day an editor with whom I worked at Associated Press Radio phoned a well-known liberal group for comment on a “women’s issue” she was covering. When I told her about a conservative women’s group she didn’t know of, she was glad to call them, too — even though she was personally very liberal. She was a professional and wanted to make her story better.

The problem is what conservative (but fiercely #NeverTrump) writer David French calls the “ideological monocultures” found in many, especially elite, newsrooms. The bottom line: most journalists in those environments hold “progressive” views — especially on social issues.

That’s old news.


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