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Seriously? New York Times story on GOP schism is silent on 'pew gap' issues (updated)

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As you would expect, the political experts at The New York Times have noticed that, once again, war has broken out between the populist and country-club wings of the Republican Party. Thus, they produced a very interesting piece that ran under the headline, "For Republicans, Mounting Fears of Lasting Split."

This story will be interesting, to GetReligion readers, just as much because of what the editors left out, as well as that they put in. They correctly stress that, this time around, the GOP leaders face fundamental differences on a host of crucial issues such as immigration, rising tides of refugees and how far to go in battles with radical forms of Islam.

It is also interesting that, over and over, the piece equates the candidacy of Sen. Ted Cruz with that of billionaire reality-TV star Donald Trump. The implication is that they are appealing to many of the same voters and that there isn't much difference between the two.

But what is missing? To be blunt: Religion.

So, do you remember the "pew gap"? Apparently, it is completely gone or is now irrelevant in GOP debates, as well as the nation has a whole. Is that really true in the GOP? It must be true, because the Times team -- in this crucial piece about the threat of a GOP split -- completely ignores religious and moral issues (even as the U.S. Supreme Court faces case after case linked to religious liberty issues).

So what is the "pew gap"? Many people used to incorrectly claim that religious people vote for Republicans and non-religious people vote for Democrats. While it is true that highly secular and religiously unaffiliated voters are crucial in the Democratic coalition, there are also religious believers active in doctrinally liberal flocks -- which makes them a perfect fit in the modern Democratic Party. However, a crucial "pew gap" fact is that liberal religious groups tend to be smaller in terms of numbers.

If you are looking for the roots of the "pew gap" -- the fact that people who frequent pews are more likely to vote Republican -- then it's hard to top the 2003 Atlantic Monthly essay called "Blue Movie," written by Thomas Byrne Edsall. This is a flashback, of course, to a campaign dominated by Bill Clinton, not Hillary Rodham Clinton.


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Big foreign datelines: London (think Canterbury) next week, Moscow long-term ...

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Big foreign datelines: London (think Canterbury) next week, Moscow long-term ...

Though U.S. media often downplay foreign news, astute religion writers will be closely watching London next week and Moscow in the longer term.

London:  Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has called a Jan. 11–16 meeting with 37 fellow “primates” who head the national branches in the Anglican Communion.

Some analysts consider it a make-or-break moment on whether this global body of as many as 85 million adherents can hang together. Most stateside journalists won’t make the trek to England but will want to develop Yankee angles with the assistance of  The AP, Reuters, YouTube, British news dailies and Anglican websites, official and otherwise.

This is the latest and possibly the culminating event after years -- decades really -- of wrangling over biblical authority and interpretation, especially whether to accept partnered same-sex priests and bishops, and gay marriages. The fight pits the liberal Episcopal Church in the U.S., led by brand-new Presiding Bishop Michael Curry, and Archbishop Fred Hiltz’s Anglican Church in Canada, over against large and growing national churches in Africa and the “Global South.” Welby’s own Church of England is stuck somewhere in between.

Welby hopes he can maintain some titular leadership as the “Communion” evolves into a looser federation to allow leeway on faith disputes. But doctrinal conservatives seem prepared to reject such schemes and walk away. Already they have formed the Global Fellowship of Confessing Anglicans (“GAFCON”) as an alternative international body that claims to represent the majority of world Anglicanism’s membership, especially in terms of believers currently active in pews.

GAFCON is chaired by the archbishop of Kenya along with primates from the provinces of Congo, Nigeria, Rwanda, South America, Sudan, and Uganda, plus Archbishop Foley Beach of the Anglican Church in North America -- a schism from the U.S. and Canadian denominations -- who’s supposed to be present for at least some of the London discussions.


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Flashback 2015: Jewish news, an all-pope Top 10 list and trends on evangelical left

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OK, here is one final set of some Top 10 religion stories lists for the now distant 2015. If you have missed the previous installments, click here and then here to back up a post or two and catch up. There was also an end of the year "Crossroads" podcast.

One of the reasons that journalists dig into these kinds of lists, especially those prepared by leaders in specific religious flocks, is to learn about stories that may not have made headlines at mainstream news sites -- yet.

So here are three lists of this kind. Once again, please put any 2015 Top 10 lists that I missed in our comments pages.

We will start with A. James Rudin, a name familiar to all journalists who cover events and trends among Jews in North America and elsewhere. This Top 10 Jewish news events list was prepared for Religion News Service, but the link is to The Washington Post. You have Bernie Sanders, Nostra Aetate and a rabbi scandal or two. However, his top story is one that has been growing in importance for more than a decade, one sure to grow in importance with the rise of the Islamic State.

1. Anti-Semitic attacks escalate across Europe.
In January an Islamic terrorist killed four Jews inside a Paris kosher market, and in February a terrorist killed a synagogue guard in Copenhagen. The number of French Jews moving to Israel grew during the year.

Then there was this story, which our own Ira Rifkin flagged early on:

3. The BDS campaign gathers force.

In June, the General Synod of the United Church of Christ approved a resolution calling for the denomination to divest and boycott certain companies doing business with Israel.


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Flashback 2015: Revealing Top 10 lists from Religion Dispatches and Patheos Evangelical

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So far, your GetReligionistas have shared quite a few Top 10 story lists marking the end of the year -- like here, here, here and here, with an attached podcast here. These have ranged from the Religion Newswriters Association list to that of the Associated Press. I found it interesting (commentary here) that the top AP story -- period, as in the top story in the whole world -- was a religion news story, but that wasn't the top story in the RNA poll. Go figure.

Obviously, I find these lists fascinating, in part because they show us (a) just how complex the world of religion news really is and (b) the unique points of view (which can, in some cases become biases) that affect how scribes and editors see the world of religion news. There is much to learn in these lists, both for news professionals and news consumers.

In the next couple of days I will be posting a number of additional lists covering religion news in 2015, from a variety of different points of view.

Please let me know if I missed one or two that you would like to see posted.

Let's start with the Religion Dispatches list of the "Ten Religion Stores That Went (Mostly) Missing in 2015." The whole idea here, of course, is that these are stories that, from the point of view of Peter Laarman, SHOULD have received more coverage in the past year.

Read them all. But here are a few that caught my eye:

2. The struggle of the Black Church to come to terms with #BlackLivesMatter.
In some cities there has been visible conflict between Old Guard pastors (many of whom still identify with the 20th century civil rights movement) and the New Guard of fearless youth, many of whom are not shy about showing contempt for the pastors.


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'Twas the church that faded first, the flock inside the crumbling Christmas church

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If you know anything at all about Christian theology and vocabulary, you know that the word "church" has multiple meanings.

For reporters working at the local level, the there are two definitions that matter the most. You can hear them when church people talk and they sound something like this, when encountered in the wild.

You may hear someone say, "My family has been part of First Baptist Church for three generations." The word, in this context, refers to the actual body of believers in this congregation. If the building was damaged and these folks had to meet in a local school gymnasium, they'd still be First Baptist Church.

But you also hear people refer to the building as the church, as in, "Go two traffic lights and turn left at St. Stephen's Church. It's the church with the really tall steeple."

This brings me to that nice "Building Blocks" feature that ran in The New York Times the other day under this headline: "Church With Ties to Famed Christmas Poem Is in Need of Repair." Which poem? That was clear in the lede:

What was stirring were not creatures.
It was worse. Much worse. The soft patting sounds that the Rev. Stephen Harding and I heard inside St. Peter’s Church Chelsea -- the “Christmas Church” that owes its existence to Clement Clarke Moore -- came from rainwater. It percolated through the tin-and-timber roof and the lath-and-plaster Gothic ceiling vaults, dripping down to the balcony floor.


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An elite newspaper kisses President Obama's liberal brand of Christianity, but here's what they left out

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"Merry Christmas! Our president is too Christian for America!"

That's how one person — in an email subject line to the GetReligion team — boiled down today's mammoth, front-page Washington Post story on "The quiet impact of Obama's Christian faith."

Now, the fact that an elite, inside-the-Beltway newspaper seems to really love Obama's brand of faith won't trigger any breaking news alerts.

Obama is, after all, the kind of Christian even a non-Bible-thumping journalist could love. GetReligion's editor, Terry Mattingly, has described the president this way: "a liberal believer who made a profession of faith and joined the United Church of Christ, a denomination that has long represented the left edge of free-church Protestantism." 

What prompted today's 3,000-word Post homage to Obama's faith? There appears to be no strong time element. Instead, this is one of those evergreen stories on which the writer noted on Twitter that he worked for a while.

 

"Hope it is revealing," the writer said in that same tweet.

Is it revealing? Yes and no. 

On the positive side, I enjoyed reading the Post story and appreciated the behind-the-scenes insight into some of Obama's perspective concerning his Christianity and its role in his policy approaches. I found myself thinking: This story would make a great "West Wing" episode. 

Imagine this opening scene, only with real-life Obama instead of the fictional President Josiah Bartlet:


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Zero news coverage? Episcopal Church's new leader cleans house (including a possible spy)

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Let's play a journalism game for a minute, one that we have played before here at GetReligion (for an example, click here). We call it the mirror-image game.

Let's assume, for a second, that the Southern Baptist Convention elected a new president. Then, shortly thereafter, three of the convention's top leaders were purged -- perhaps the phrase would be "placed on administrative leave" -- because of accusations of misconduct while on the job.

Oh, and there were some really strange and shady things in the recent past, like reports of top Southern Baptist leaders spying on each other -- literally.

Do you think that this story would receive any mainstream coverage? Would that draw coverage in The New York Times, the Associated Press and/or regional newspapers?

What if the official Southern Baptist press agency all but ignored the story? Would that serve as a red flag for mainstream coverage, or would that be an effective signal to reporters that there is "nothing to see here, so move along"?

What if this happened at Focus on the Family? Or how about the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops?

Now let's look in the mirror image. Way back on Dec. 11, the new leader of the Episcopal Church -- Presiding Bishop Michael Curry -- released a letter, care of the denomination's official news service, that said in part:

I need to inform you that on Wednesday I placed on administrative leave Bishop Stacy Sauls, Chief Operating Officer, Samuel McDonald, Deputy Chief Operating Officer and Director of Mission, and Alex Baumgarten, Director of Public Engagement. This is a result of concerns that have been raised about possible misconduct in carrying out their duties as members of senior management of the Domestic and Foreign Missionary Society.


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Bah, humbug! The annual quest to find a valid Christmas news story

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Bah, humbug! The annual quest to find a valid Christmas news story

Brace yourself, religion-news consumers, because we are entering the days appointed for "Christmas stories," care of journalists at major magazines, newspapers and television networks.

"Christmas stories" are very similar to "Easter stories." The only requirements, in most cases, is that they have something to do with religion, provide colorful art (festive or tear-jerking) and, if at all possible, allow the use of the name of the season in the headline.

In newsrooms without religion-beat specialists, general-assignment reporters probably hide under their desks about two or three weeks before Dec. 25, trying not to catch the eye of the assignment editor who has been given the thankless task of finding this year's alleged "Christmas story" for A1.

The quest for a valid "Christmas" news story was the topic that "Crossroads" host Todd Wilken and I tackled in this week's podcast. Click here to tune that in.

You can end up with some really strange, usually shallow, stories this time of year. Our own Julia Duin recently took a look at one of these quickie stories, from The Denver Post.

Long ago, in a city that will not be named, I saw a classic example. One of the big weekly newsmags had a cover story on the whole "does prayer work" question. A week or so later, the daily newspaper had an A1 story -- literally with praying hands and a rosary, if I recall -- about trends in prayer.

You could tell, looking at the sources quoted, that an editor had seen the magazine cover and had walked into the newsroom, found a reporter who was looking the other way, tapped them on the shoulder and said, "We need a (insert holiday name here) story. It looks like prayer is in the news. Go write me a story about prayer."


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Denver Post paints local religious scene with too broad a brush

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This is that time of year when under-researched or over-generalized articles about religion sprout up around the country.

Usually, an editor has realized that Christmas is around the corner and someone needs to throw together a piece about religion. It helps if the story as good color art. Content and a strong news hook? Maybe. Maybe not.

This seems to be the case in a recent piece that ran in the Denver Post. It certainly has one of those broad, sweeping trend-story headlines: "Here's what's bringing millennials back to churches."

The newspaper's former religion writer seems to have moved to the health beat and there being no specialist currently on the beat, the assigning editor nabbed a writer who is the Post's travel and fitness editor. Her street cred is that she has collaborated with a Catholic priest on a book, which may be why she took on the story excerpted below: 

Five friends cluster for conversation among hundreds pouring out of a Sunday service at Flatirons Community Church in Lafayette. The five are in their 20s and 30s. And at this church, they don't stand out for their age or their attire -- it's easy to come to church dressed casually when the pastor gives the sermon in jeans and a hoodie.


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