International News

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Dear Time editors: The Kremlin is not a church. Dear CNN politicos: Churches are not mosques

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I have been on the road for almost a week, joyfully busy with family life.

I kept glancing at news email and, let's see, what was there to talk about?

That would be: Russia. Russia. And more Russia. Oh, and lots more Russia.

Among my fellow Orthodox Christians, there was lots of laugh-to-keep-from-crying chatter about a certain magazine cover.

It appears that Time magazine is still publishing and that the editors really thought that they nailed the whole nasty Russia is taking over the White House media storm with one image -- an image so strong, so perfect, that it didn't even need a headline. You can see that cover at the top of this post, of course.

I feel the need for some music, here, to capture the heart of this multimedia story. So please click here.

Now, here is how the Gateway Pundit site summed up what happened.

TIME Magazine has the Trump White House morphing into the Kremlin on this week’s cover.
But that’s not the Kremlin.
It’s an Orthodox Cathedral in Moscow.
Their cover is almost as phony as the fake Russian conspiracy. Almost.
TIME magazine mixed up the Kremlin with St. Basil Cathedral on its cover!
The Christians are coming!


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Podcast thinking: Do Pokemon Go protesters have a right to crash worship services?

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The other day, during my first GetReligion meditation on a nasty protester who invaded a symbolic Russian church while playing Pokemon Go, I asked readers to ponder a hypothetical case under what could be considered parallel circumstances.

I asked what German authorities would do if alt-right Holocaust deniers invaded Berlin's Ryke Street synagogue during worship, approached the Bimah, did some kind of mocking behavior and later posted a nasty, anti-Semitic video that offered an F-bomb version of a Jewish prayer.

Then I argued that, in a news account about this event, journalists would need to let readers know the details of what happened in that sanctuary. Did the protester interact with a rabbi? What service was taking place? What was being said in the prayers? Was the protester asked to leave? 

In other words, I was requesting basic, factual questions so readers could picture the scene. These were the same questions I thought journalists should have asked about that Pokemon Go video that a protester filmed during a prayer service at the Church of All Saints in Yekaterinburg, 900 miles east of Moscow. This sanctuary was built on the site where Czar Nicholas II and his family were executed by the Bolsheviks.

At the end of this week's "Crossroads" podcast (click here to tune that in), I thought of another "sacred" setting that might be relevant for U.S. journalists.

Instead of worship services, let's talk about Broadway. What if some Donald Trump supporters invaded a performance of "Hamilton," approached the stage, ignored requests to leave, and later posted a racist video about this act of symbolic speech? Would authorities have taken any kind of action?

To answer that question, wouldn't you need to know some of the actual details of what happened?


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How fares Protestantism upon its 500th anniversary? Depends on where you look

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How fares Protestantism upon its 500th anniversary? Depends on where you look

Ed Stetzer of Wheaton College (Illinois) furrowed many a brow with an April 28 Washington Post warning that “if current trends continue” without letup, Americans active in “Mainline” Protestant churches will reach zero by Easter 2039.

Talk about timing.

That bleak forecast -- mitigated by U.S. “Evangelical” Protestants’ relative stability -- comes in the 500th anniversary year of the Reformation. This massive split in Christianity was sparked by a protest petition posted by 34-year-old German friar and professor Martin Luther on All Souls’ Eve (October 31) of 1517.

The Protestant scenario is rosy at the world level, however, according to anniversary tabulations by the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (CSGC) at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, a standard resource for statistics and trend lines from 1900 to the present (media contact here).  

Director Todd Johnson scanned the situation for Stetzer’s blog at ChristianityToday.com with a 500-year infographic summary (.pdf here).

The CSGC anniversary report is especially useful because Pew Research Center’s comprehensive April update on world religions had numbers for Christianity as a whole but did not break out the Protestant segment. Pew does offer an estimate that 37 percent of the world’s Christians are Protestant if you include Anglicans and the burgeoning “Independents” in the developing world.

CSGC counts Anglicans as Protestant but treats the Independents, non-existent until the 20th Century, as a new, large, expanding and separate Christian branch from Protestantism. Despite some similarities, such churches lack direct ties with historic Protestant denominations.

From its 1517 start, Protestantism grew to claim 133 million followers in 1900, nearly doubled that by 1970, and more than doubled again to reach an estimated 560 million this year, with a projected 626 million by 2025. The faith exists in nearly all the globe’s 234 nations and territories.


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Ticking clock in Charlotte: Billy Graham has already answered the 'who comes next' question

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Journalists and religion scholars started talking -- seriously -- about the retirement of the Rev. Billy Graham back in the mid-1980s.

I remember that when the evangelist's 1987 Rocky Mountain Crusade was announced, people were already preparing lists of where he could go "for the last time" to do full-scale crusades before semi-retirement. It wasn't a long list.

In the 1990s, a news hook for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association was its efforts to extend the reach of crusades by using satellite signals to other locations -- multi-site events. That way, more people could hear Graham preach live, in real time, since he was really starting to limit the number of boots-on-the-ground events.

Of course, people were already asking the question: "Who is the next Billy Graham?"

Some of the nominees on those early lists are now approaching retirement.

I bring this up because of an interesting piece that ran the other day in The Charlotte Observer that, I imagine, gives us a hint of what that newspaper is planning for its memorial edition for the pulpit legend, who is currently 98 years old.

How many pages will there be in that special edition? How many new and pre-written stories will they run on the day after his death? Can you imagine receiving this assignment from your editor: Sum up the life of Billy Graham in one story. You have about 2,000 words. (Actually, I can imagine that. I already know that I will have 750 words, because that's the assigned length for my syndicated "On Religion" columns.)

You can see hints of what is to come in the current Observer feature's overture:

Who will be the next Billy Graham?
The Charlotte-born Graham is now 98, lives quietly in his mountain home in Montreat, N.C., and hasn't preached to a packed-stadium crusade in 12 years.


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About that Mike Pence speech: Are solid facts available on global persecution of Christians?

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From time to time, your GetReligionistas pause to remind readers that they should not blame reporters for the headlines that appear with their stories.

Sad, but true: There is nothing unusual about seeing a solid news report that gets messed up, for readers, by an inaccurate or misleading headline.

But what should we say when a story has a solid, focused headline, but the story's actual contents leave much to be desired?

Consider the Washington Post report about the speech last week by Vice President Mike Pence at the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians. I have no problems with the simple headline here: "Pence: America will prioritize protecting Christians abroad."

The key word is "abroad." And the top of the story -- obviously the source of the headline -- gets straight to some of the basics.

Vice President Pence sought on Thursday to reassure Christian leaders looking for the White House to focus more on the plight of persecuted Christians abroad.
“Protecting and promoting religious freedom is a foreign policy priority of the Trump administration,” the vice president said during a morning address at the World Summit in Defense of Persecuted Christians being held this week in Washington. Pence spoke to an audience who are grateful for the Trump administration’s statements of support for that cause but who are starting to question when the administration will take more concrete action.
Advocacy on behalf of people persecuted for being Christian is a topic “of enormous importance to this administration,” Pence said. Turning to speakers at the conference who were there to share their personal stories of persecution abroad, he said: “You have the prayers of the president of the United States. The suffering of Christians in the Middle East has stirred Americans to action, and it brings me here today.”

So far, so good. But if you read the rest of this story its pretty apparent that the Post team thinks that the American political angles in this story are way more important than the evidence that lots of Christians are dying around the world.


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Climbing K2 in dead of winter: Let's see, what do we know about Polish culture?

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I love long, detailed stories about mountain climbing -- even though I am not a climber.

It is true that, back in my Colorado decade, a younger and skinner version of myself hiked to the peaks of a trio of 14,000-foot mountains in the long, intricate Mosquito Range in the center of the state (near the mythical town of South Park). There was really no climbing involved, just hiking up and up and up slopes and then narrow ridges. Still it was most memorable (I dehydrated myself pretty bad). I still dream images from some of those vistas.

The beauty and danger found in high mountains must do a mental and spiritual number of some people.

Why do they do it? Yes, I know: Because it's there. But there is more to serious mountain climbing that that, and that sense of wonder is the intellectual and artistic backbone in a fine New York Times piece that ran with this epic headline (and stunning photography):

Scaling the World’s
Most Lethal Mountain,
in the Dead of Winter
For reasons of history and culture, Polish climbers are among the world’s most audacious. This winter, a group will attempt K2, the world’s most dangerous mountain.

Now, read that headline again. If you think like me, several ideas will jump out -- but especially the word "culture." When you think of Polish culture, what leaps to mind?

Hold that thought. Let's start with a summary paragraph that was the source for that headline:

These men will hike through knee-deep snow to a base camp at 18,645 feet, surpassing all but one mountain in the United States. Atop K2’s near-vertical slopes, glacial icefalls dislodge car-size hunks of ice. Winds at the summit reach hurricane strength, and temperatures can fall as low as minus 80 Fahrenheit.
The climbers could wait two months in their tents, in hopes the gales relent for a few days. They have no margin for error; K2 routinely kills those trapped on its flanks.
This is the way of the Polish climbers, who for reasons of history and culture have earned reputations as the greatest climbers of the Himalayas in winter. They are prisoners of their dreams.


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Must reporters take a man at his word? UK paper caught in a 'Quaker' conundrum

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“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, “it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less.” “The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master -- that's all.”

-- From "Through the Looking Glass," by Lewis Carroll

A story in a local newspaper in the U.K. caught my eye this week, raising questions on the nature of truth and the craft of journalism.  

The news that the Rev. Philip Young was standing for election to Parliament in the forthcoming General Election is of interest to the retired vicar’s family and friends -- and the electors of Suffolk no doubt. But I expect little notice to be taken of the news.

What I found of interest, from a professional journalist’s perspective, is the descriptors the subject of the story used in talking about himself. Young is identified as a retired clergyman of the Church of England -- but also as a Quaker and a Franciscan.

Young’s claim raises the philosophical question for journalists: to what extent may a person identify themselves? What shapes reality? Is it the social construction given by the subject of a story, or an outside arbiter -- an eternal truth, natural law, the Associated Press Stylebook? Which, to borrow from Humpty Dumpty, is to be master?

This issue arises on questions of gender these days. Is it Bruce or Caitlyn Jenner?


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How many news readers (and editors) knew the faith details of #ChibokGirls anyway?

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How many news readers (and editors) knew the faith details of #ChibokGirls anyway?

Let me be candid for a moment: Some of the implications of the topics we discussed in this week's "Crossroads" podcast (click here to tune that in) blindsided me and, toward the end of the session with host Todd Wilken, I got rather emotional.

We are talking about two things -- one in journalism, one in religious faith -- that I believe are tragedies.

First, we have the fact that Americans these days are not very interested in world news. Any journalist in the past third of a century or so who has looked at reader-interest polling knows this. As a rule, Americans don't know much about what is happening around the world and we are not all that worried that we don't know it. In my experience, this includes readers who are religious believers as well, I am afraid. Hold that thought.

This sad reality has, during the Internet-driven advertising crisis that is shaking the world of journalism, led media managers to make major cuts in the resources they dedicate to foreign news, as opposed to click-bait celebrity coverage and national political horse races.

 The second thing that jumped into this discussion -- #NoSurprise -- is that many journalists just don't get religion. In light of the realities just discussed, they have little incentive to spend much time or money covering complex religious issues on the other side of the world.

This obvious fact led to another sad theme in our discussion: Some of the powerful newsrooms that DO have the resources to cover world news (and are justifiably proud that they do this crucial work) also seem to place little value on getting religion. Let me stress that I am talking about their editors and foreign staffers, not the one or at most two people on the religion beat at The New York Times, the BBC and other elite and truly world-class operations.

This brings us to #ChibokGirls and the subject of persecuted Christians, and members of other religious minorities, around the world.

Connect the dots.


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Let's ask a few journalism questions about that Pokemon Go guy in the Russian shrine

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So, did you hear about the Russian blogger who paid a small legal price for playing Pokemon Go inside a highly symbolic Russian Orthodox sanctuary?

I sure did, and I'm not just talking about the coverage from BBC, The New York Times and The Washington Post. As you would imagine, Orthodox folks such as myself have been asked if we approved of this government action against an Internet-era provocateur.

Well, that is an interesting question. However, that isn't what I want to write about here. Much like the Pussy Riot case, I am interesting in a different pair of questions: What actually happened in that shrine? And could news consumers find out what happened, just by reading the news accounts?

So let's shift the focus for a second and consider a hypothetical case. Let's say that an alt-right Holocaust denier decides to enter a highly symbolic sanctuary -- perhaps Berlin's Ryke Street synagogue -- and walks around playing some kind of smartphone game in which he hunts demons, or monsters, or whatever. He then posts an anti-semitic video online. Ultimately, he ends up in trouble with law officials.

Now, there are several questions that I think would be crucial for journalists to ask in this case: (1) What sanctuary are we talking about? (2) Did this sanctuary invasion take place during a worship service? (2) Did the rabbi, or people working with him, request that the man cease and desist? In other words, was he warned that he was disturbing the peace?

It's one thing to walk around uninvited in a holy place doing nonsense. In terms of the law, it might be more offensive -- perhaps even a legal offense -- to do this during a prayer service. What if this alt-right wacko was asked to leave, to stop distracting people in the synagogue and refused? Several times?

Now, back to Russia. Let me stress, once again, that we are not debating the appropriateness of Russian law or actions in this case. We are asking if news consumers can figure out what actually happened in this event, simply by reading the news coverage.


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