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Start of a new year: Stories and trends to watch for on the Catholic beat in 2020

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There are no shortage of religion stories, but you already knew that. You wouldn’t be here — and we wouldn’t be doing this — if you also didn’t think so.

This time of year brings with it pieces looking back on the biggest stories of the year. It’s also a time to look ahead. The coming year will certainly be a busy one once again for journalists who cover Catholicism, Pope Francis and the church’s hierarchy.

The pontiff already made his claim for newsmaker of 2019 (and 2020) after a bizarre incident on New Year’s Eve that included slapping the hand of a woman who grabbed him in St. Peter’s Square in the same evening where he denounced domestic violence against women. The video went viral to start 2020 as the pope apologized for the incident on New Year’s Day.

With that, here are six of the biggest storylines and trends journalists need to watch for in 2020: 

The 2020 presidential election: Yes, there will be another presidential election this November. That means politics will dominate the news cycle and our everyday conversations. Yes, even more than it already has the past few years. Trump and the digital age has wrought news overload — even with coverage of religion news. Look for reporters to cover religion a lot, if the news is linked to the president and his Democratic challengers.

How Catholics vote will be a big storyline throughout the primaries and in the general election.


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BBC tells us where the next clash with radicalized Islam will be: In the Sahel

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It was a small news article about Niger, a country almost no one has heard of.

There’s been an attack on a base there that leaves 71 soldiers dead, BBC wrote. This area of the world has been heating up in a major way as a brew of toxic Islam mixed with the possibility of yet another caliphate being declared in the area at some point.

All this is taking place in the Sahel, the southern edge of the Saharan Desert.

How many news readers could find that on a map?

Militants have killed at least 71 soldiers in an attack on a military base in western Niger - the deadliest in several years.

Twelve soldiers were also injured in the attack in Inates, the army says.

No group has yet said it was behind the killings. But militants linked to al-Qaeda and the Islamic State group (IS) have staged attacks in the Sahel region this year despite the presence of thousands of regional and foreign troops.

Security analysts say the insurgency in Niger is escalating at an alarming rate.

Is the word “militants” these days so clear that everyone automatically knows that the adjective “Muslim” or “Islamic” goes with it? And what happens to those they attack?


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Final 2019 podcast: Oh-so familiar Top 10 religion stories list (with a few exceptions)

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Near the end of every year, the Religion News Association (the flock previously known as the Religion Newswriters Association) posts its list of the year’s Top 10 religion-beat stories.

It’s tough work, but somebody has to do it. I don’t envy the scribes who have to create the list of events that go on the ballot.

The archive on the RNA website only goes back to 2002, but I have been writing annual columns on this topic since forever, or close to it (click here for my Internet-era archive). As you would expect, this was the top of the final “Crossroads” podcast for 2019 (click here to tune that in).

When you’ve been studying lists of this kind for four decades, it’s easy to spot patterns. The RNA list will almost always contain:

* Some event or trend linked to politics and this often has something to with evangelicals posing a threat to American life.

* Mainline Protestants gathered somewhere to fight over attempts to modernize doctrines linked to sex and marriage.

* The pope said something headline-worthy about some issue linked to politics or sexuality.

* Someone somewhere attacked lots of someones in the name of God.

* There may or may not be a story about Southern Baptists waging war on one another for some reason linked to biblical authority.

This year’s RNA Top 10 was way more predictable than usual, in terms of offering sort-of-trend updates on old news. The No. 1 story, however, was truly big news:


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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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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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Neo-Pentecostal gangs on the rampage? That's a big story in Brazil, they say

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I have never been able to witness Brazil’s super-charged Pentecostal scene but I am still remembering how, 40 years back, no one ever thought that the world’s largest Catholic country would pivot so quickly toward Protestantism.

Back in the 1970s and ‘80s, we thought all of South America was a Catholic monolith.

We found out later that folks there were listening to radio broadcasts from the likes of the Rev. Jimmy Swaggart and other evangelists and finding out they actually had a choice when it came to churches. As this Washington Post article says:

In the past generation, Brazil has undergone a spiritual transformation like few other places on the planet. As recently as 1980, about 9 in 10 people here identified as Catholic. But that proportion has cratered to 50 percent, and will soon be overtaken by evangelicalism, which now accounts for one-third of the population.

The i story isn’t about statistics, actually. It begins by retelling how a radical Pentecostal group called the “Soldiers of Jesus” visit a spiritualist priest belonging to the Candomblé sect and orders him to either stop practicing macumba (his beliefs) or be killed.

It’s a decision more Brazilians are being forced to make. As evangelicalism reconfigures the spiritual map in Latin America’s largest country, attracting tens of millions of adherents, winning political power and threatening Catholicism’s long-held dominance, its most extreme adherents — often affiliated with gangs — are increasingly targeting Brazil’s non-Christian religious minorities.

Priests have been killed. Children have been stoned. An elderly woman was seriously injured. Death threats and taunts are common.


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Refugees from ultra-Orthodox Judaism get a sympathetic profile in the Washington Post

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The world is always fascinated when someone leaves a closed religious group for the outside world.

Think Amish teenagers fleeing the faith; family members leave the Westboro Baptist Church; women fleeing arranged marriages from Somalia to Pakistan and the peeling off of ultra-Orthodox Jews.

What’s up with the latter?

Turns out there’s a form of Orthodox Judaism extant in Israel that Americans barely encounter on our shores. Those are Jews whose lives are controlled from cradle to grave by strict Torah observance. But what if you want to leave?

The Washington Post tells you what comes next.

JERUSALEM — Ruth Borovski, doing a bit of homework, sat in a library and Googled “phosphate” on her smartphone.

That could not have happened 19 months earlier, when Borovski was a 27-year-old living within one of Israel’s cloistered ultra-Orthodox Jewish sects. Then, she had never heard of phosphate. Or of smartphones.

She says she had never seen a library. Now it’s hard to get her out of one…

Borovski’s race into the wider world started in 2018 when, trapped in an arranged marriage, she dialed the hotline of a -Jerusalem-based nonprofit called Hillel and said she wanted to leave her family and her community. With Hillel’s help, she became one of a growing number of Yotzim, or “Leavers,” who have bolted from closed religious communities into a secular world they are ill-equipped to navigate.

One assumes there were no children from this marriage, as the article mentions none.


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The Times reports on Ralph Drollinger's informal diplomacy: 'I'm really in this for the coffee beans'

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In The New York Times Magazine, Mattathias Schwartz has written an amazing 7,600-word feature story on Ralph Drollinger, who leads weekly Bible studies among members of President Donald Trump’s Cabinet. “How the Trump Cabinet’s Bible Teacher Became a Shadow Diplomat” shows what excellent work can emerge when a writer emphasizes reporting over opinion and when the subject of a story responds to a trustworthy reporter with transparency.

Schwartz refers to this dynamic about a third of the way in: “Part of Drollinger’s charm is rooted in his straightforwardness. For years, he has been publishing his weekly Bible studies online to help the public understand his agenda. ‘It gives guys like you the confidence of what it is I’m talking about,” he told me. “That’s good transparency.’”

Drollinger’s work is volatile. People for the American Way filed a lawsuit [PDF] in August 2018 demanding documents related to the Bible studies and charging the Department of Agriculture with disregarding Freedom of Information Act requirements. “The facts of this case are simple: Cabinet officials have every right to participate in Bible study, and the American people have every right to know who is influencing public officials and how,” said Elliot Mincberg, senior counsel and fellow at People for the American Way.

The website for Americans United lists only four items about Drollinger, and two of them date to his time of working in California, before he moved to Washington, D.C.

Schwartz’s feature is neither puffery nor a screed. A skepticism is implicit at various points, and for a feature published by the Times, the implicit tone is remarkably restrained.


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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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