Mainline

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Is this a 'big' story? NBC Out team celebrates ordination of trans pioneer on Lutheran left

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Once again, we need to pause and try to explain some of the X factors that enter into journalists deciding why a specific event or trend is a “story,” or even a “big story.”

Some “stories” seem to be similar, but they are not. In some cases, events or trends that touch the lives of several thousand people may draw little or no coverage, while events that involve a dozen or so people end up on the front page or at the top of a television newscast. Is this fair?

Several years ago, I described the puzzle this way:

A suburban megachurch builds a massive family-life center and it isn’t news. The same evangelical church builds a new parking lot that — in the eyes of its neighbors — clashes with zoning laws and the story goes straight to the front page. Meanwhile, the historic Episcopal parish in downtown decides to change a single window in its sanctuary (the original has been there since the facility was built, of course) and the story runs on A1 on a Sunday, with multiple photos.

I raise this issue, again, because of a recent NBC News story that caught the attention of a GetReligion reader. The headline proclaimed: “Transgender Latina makes history as Evangelical Lutheran pastor.” The reader’s question: Why did the ordination of this pastor of a small congregation deserve national attention?

For starters, it helps to know that this story was produced by the “NBC Out & Proud” team. That does raise questions about advocacy journalism. Can anyone imagine the existence of an “NBC Born Again & Proud” in that newsroom? How about “NBC Catholic & Proud”?

Here is the overture to this particular story:

Before coming out as transgender, Nicole Garcia prayed daily that God would “fix” her.


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Sad puzzle: Washington Post crime story mixes politics, religion, tolerance and personal pain

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I love a good detective story.

The Washington Post ran an incredible feature story recently that was, first and foremost, a detective story that offered piece after piece of a complex puzzle that mixed politics, religion, crime, clickbait news and an agonizing family drama.

I’ve been thinking about “The confession” for some time now, trying to figure out what to say when praising it. First of all, this story itself is about crime that rocked a rural heartland community and the struggles of the gay organist who faked an attack on the tiny liberal church that had hired him to help lead worship, even though he was not a believer.

The story of Nathan Strang and why he did what he did is, of course, at the heart of this feature. But what haunted me was what this story reveals about America life right now and all of the forces that are making tolerance and public discourse so difficult.

This is a must read and I will not dwell on all the details. What I want to set up is the pivotal moment — part politics, part religion — when a detective takes the first big step in solving the crime. Here is the overture:

BEAN BLOSSOM, Ind. — The knock on Nathan Stang’s door came just after 1 p.m. Stang, a doctoral student in music at Indiana University, answered the soft rapping that Friday wearing a blue bathrobe. Standing outside his apartment was a clean-shaven man dressed in beige slacks and a pink, checked shirt. 

“Hi, Nathan,” said Brian Shrader, a deputy with the Brown County Sheriff’s Department. “Remember me?” 

“Yeah,” Stang replied. It was Shrader who had interviewed him after an appalling act of vandalism at St. David’s Episcopal Church, where Stang played the organ and directed the choir.


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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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If there's a U.S. evangelical 'crisis', who are the 'evangelicals' that journalists are talking about?

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If there's a U.S. evangelical 'crisis', who are the 'evangelicals' that journalists are talking about?

Commentators who were respected, card-carrying evangelical Protestants as of June 16, 2015 (when Donald Trump announced) are saying their movement faces a “crisis” and its very name should be shelved as too politicized, at least in the U.S. A few celebrities unite with multitudes of grass-roots voters in linking evangelicalism with the Donald Trump-ified Republican Party.

Yet there are many non-partisan leaders like the Rev. Leith Anderson, who’s retiring after 13 years as president of the National Association of Evangelicals (NAE). He tells the savvy Adelle Banks of RNS that “I want the standard to be what the Bible teaches, not what the polls report.”

The media won’t be dumping the E-word any time soon. But amid the confusion and rancor, we do need to know what we’re talking about. Thus the value of the new Eerdmans paperback ”Evangelicals: Who They Have Been, Are Now, and Could Be.” This anthology of old and new articles was compiled by expert historians David Bebbington of Britain and Americans George Marsden and Mark Noll.

Self-identified evangelicals form the largest U.S. religious bloc, and the book has three potential uses for journalists. First, it could focus an analytical article. Second, it offers fine introductory background for writers who are new to this terrain. Third, those who already know a lot will learn some things.

Making definitions difficult, this fluid movement crosses denominational lines and combines formal church bodies, myriad independent congregations, “parachurch” agencies, traveling personalities, media, music and more. Some folks accurately labeled “evangelical” have other primary identities. And don’t forget the minority evangelical factions within pluralistic “mainline” Protestant denominations.

Look at things this way: Groups in councils of churches and the like have shared organizations without shared belief. Evangelicalism has shared belief without a shared organization. In defining such a loose phenomenon, journalists will be reminded of Justice Potter Stewart’s remark on pornography. “I know it when I see it.”


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Serious question: Is Buttigieg being gay a reason for his low support among black voters in the South?

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“If your mother says she loves you, check it out,” urges an old journalistic adage.

What about a prominent liberal pastor saying something? Should the news media check that out, too?

More on those questions in a moment. But first, I’ll back up and offer a little background: Pete Buttigieg, the South Bend, Ind., mayor who has emerged as a surprisingly strong contender for the Democratic presidential nomination, went to church Sunday in North Carolina.

As The Associated Press helpfully pointed out, Buttigieg even brought his own Bible to worship.

Along with AP, the Washington Post and the Raleigh News & Observer — and probably other news organizations that I missed — offered interesting takes on the white gay mayor’s visit to a church pastored by a prominent left-wing black activist. Give credit to the Post for noting that (1) Buttigieg is an Episcopalian, and (2) the church he visited is affiliated with the Disciples of Christ — both theologically progressive denominations.

The stories get into poverty and other crucial issues, but I’m going to focus on a specific point raised in all three articles: the connection, if any, between Buttigieg’s sexual orientation and his low support among black voters in the Bible Belt.

Let’s start with AP’s reference to that issue:

Buttigieg discussed topics from health care to climate change during the forum that followed the church’s Sunday service, to which a campaign spokesman confirmed that the mayor brought his own Bible. Even before the candidate began speaking, however, Barber sought to defuse a question that has proven thorny for Buttigieg in his struggle to break through with black voters: whether being gay plays any role in his troubles with a constituency that can trend more socially conservative.

Barber swatted away what he called the “false narrative” of division between African American and LGBTQ voters, and after the service reiterated that any portrayal of tension between the two communities is “not factual.”


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Des Moines Register offers master class on writing a slanted United Methodist-LGBTQ story

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I have never been a full-time police-and-cops reporter, but I have pulled an occasional shift on that difficult beat — which tends to involve lots of work with legal terms linked to crimes and trials.

At the same time, I have covered religion news in various capacities for 40-plus years and — this is a commentary on the divisive times in which we live — that kind of work also requires a working knowledge of legal lingo.

In the past, I have noticed that when someone is “charged” with breaking a law, that means there are debates about whether the person has committed the acts in question. In other words, officials have “charged” that a person did x, y or z, but there needs to be some kind of trial to determine if that charge is true.

With that in mind, please note the overture in this amazingly slanted Des Moines Register story — circulated via the USA Today Network — about another LGBTQ ordination conflict inside the bitterly divided United Methodist Church. Here’s the headline: “Iowa pastor facing church trial for being 'self-avowed practicing homosexual' takes leave of absence.”

An openly queer Iowa City pastor charged with "being a self-avowed practicing homosexual" in violation of United Methodist Church law will take an indefinite leave of absence, according to an agreement announced Wednesday.

A trial date had already been set when the Rev. Anna Blaedel requested a "just resolution," which focuses on "repairing any harm to people and communities," according to the Iowa Conference of the United Methodist Church. 

Blaedel, who identifies as queer and uses the pronouns they and them, expressed frustration and disappointment in a letter published in full by the Gazette. …

"Today we are naming together the truth that it is not currently possible for me to continue my ministry in the context of the Iowa Annual Conference, nor the UMC," wrote Blaedel, the former director of the Wesley Center at the University of Iowa. "That is not the truth I want to come to, but it has been, is being, revealed as true. ... I am no longer willing to subject my body and soul and life to this particular violence.

Now, let’s read this carefully.


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Think about this: Digging down into that all-to-familiar 'God gap' in American politics

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I think that the first time I encountered the term “pew gap” was in the middle-to-late 1980s, as the side effects of the post-Roe v. Wade era began to emerge.

That was when people started talking about the impact of the Religious Right on the Republican Party and the growing secularization of the elites at the top of Democratic Party structures, where old-school labor union Catholics were being replaced by various kinds of white-collar groups linked to academia and feminism.

At the end of the 20th Century, the “pew” or “God gap” was a given. I know that I have used it before, for this piece of the “Blue Movie” essay that The Atlantic ran in 2003 remains perfect:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors — and better indicators of partisan inclination — than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).


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Canada's Anglicans are vanishing and RNS can't find any conservatives to debate the reasons why

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Let’s play pretend for a moment. Let’s pretend that, sometime this year, a report is released showing that membership in a conservative religious flock — say the Southern Baptist Convention — had declined sharply. We are not talking about a slow decline seen in recent years. We are talking about a downward spiral that suggests a death-dive.

If this happened, I would expect reporters to allow the group’s leaders to react to the numbers and to take a shot at explaining them. You could say “spin” them, if you wish.

But clearly there would be critics who would have very different explanations of the decline. They would see connections between the red ink and the conservative denomination’s decisions and doctrines that affect its relationship with a changing culture. Reporters would probably talk to former members of this flock and ask why they used the exit doors.

Let me stress that it would be totally valid to seek this kind of input. This is a serious topic and people on both sides of the story would deserve a chance to speak their minds.

This brings me to a Religion News Service report about a remarkable set of church-membership numbers up in Canada. Here is the stunning overture:

(RNS) — A “wake-up call.” That’s what Archbishop Linda Nicholls, primate of the Anglican Church of Canada, called a new report showing there may be no members left in the mainline Canadian denomination in 20 years. …

“Projections from our data indicate that there will be no members, attenders or givers in the Anglican Church of Canada by approximately 2040,” said the Rev. Neil Elliot, an Anglican priest in Trail, British Columbia, who authored the report.

Elliot based his prediction on church statistics from 1961 to 2001, subscriber data to the “Anglican Journal,” the church’s official publication, and data from his own survey of the number of people on parish rolls, average Sunday attendance and regular identifiable givers across Canada.

“For five different methodologies to give the same result is a very, very powerful statistical confirmation which we really, really have to take seriously and we can’t dismiss lightly,” he told church leaders during the synod.

As you would expect, Anglican Church leaders were given lots and lots of room to react to this report, which was stunning — even though the trend lines have been in place for decades now. The story notes that the peak membership in the Anglican Church — 1.3 million in 1961 — was down to a mere 357,123 in 2017.

So what is missing from this story?


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Podcast thinking: Fred Rogers, Tom Hanks, the Good Samaritan and the ties that bind

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Anyone who wanted to know why the Rev. Fred Rogers did what he did needed to pause and think about two of the central facts in his career.

First, there was the name of the show that made him a television legend: “Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.”

Then there was the rite that opened every episode — the transition into the trademark sweater and comfy shoes — and the song that went with it. The crucial line was the thesis statement at the end: “Please, won’t you be my neighbor?”

That was a strange question to ask children. Why not ask them to be friends? Isn’t “friend” a more common word among kids than “neighbor”? In this day and age, many adults are struggling to be “neighbors,” a term with all kinds of implications linked to helping people simply because they are nearby and need help.

But Rogers had very specific reasons for doing what he did. His goal was was to deal with the kinds of big questions that sent him to seminary in the first place, before he was ordained as a Presbyterian minister, serving in a public ministry expressed in television broadcasting. He wanted to handle the kinds of subjects that trouble, and even frighten, children (and honest adults). We are talking about death, divorce, war, racism and, over and over, questions about why bad things happen to good people. The theological term is, of course, “theodicy.”

During this week’s “Crossroads” podcast, host Todd Wilken and I talked about the convictions that powered the work of Mister Rogers. Click here to tune that in.


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