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When I highlighted media coverage of a Senate investigation into televangelists, I excerpted a bit from an interview of Ole Anthony, who heads the Trinity Foundation. The foundation investigates televangelists and publishes The Wittenburg Door, a magazine of Christian satire. Most of what I know about Anthony, apart from occasionally reading the Door, comes from a lengthy profile in The New Yorker a few years back:
At the risk of not offending GR readers and generating few comments from said group, I offer a qualified endorsement of two stories about Rudy Giuliani’s Catholicism. A recent cover story in The New Republic linked Giuliani’s political outlook to his education in Catholic social teaching. Meanwhile, the latest Newsweek reports that Giuliani’s pro-choice stand will continue to draw outspoken opposition from traditional Catholics. While neither story offers sufficient perspective, each grasps an important truth about Giuliani: his Catholic upbringing continues to define him.
If you’ve not followed the decades-long theological debate between apologists for evangelical Protestantism and apologists for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, brace yourself. You’re probably in for an extended mass media discourse on those differences, at least until the primaries settle who will be the Republican nominee for president.
In my 11 years as a reporter, I can’t recall an editor or fellow journalist discussing the legal concept known as the “freedom of association.”
Republican leaders are often accused of manipulating religious Americans for their own ends. But what if Democratic leaders, who are courting religious voters, exploit them? Will reporters hold them responsible?
Sen. Charles Grassley, the top Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, is investigating six powerhouse prosperity-gospel televangelists to determine whether they are complying with federal tax laws. On Monday he sent letters to Benny Hinn, the fantastically named Creflo Dollar, Joyce Meyer and three others who flaunt the earthly wealth provided to them by their followers.
In The New York Times Magazine on Sunday, Mark Oppenheimer built a lengthy case that the philosopher Antony Flew is, amid painfully documented memory problems, being exploited by a few evangelical authors. Oppenheimer argues that There Is a God: How the World’s Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, “a book attributed to Flew and a co-author, the Christian apologist Roy Abraham Varghese,” bears far more editorial fingerprints by Varghese than by Flew.
When I interned at The New Republic, an editor there told me something about Andrew Sullivan that I have been turning over in my mind ever since. Sullivan doesn’t care about Christianity, he said. He does care about Catholicism, but only because he grew up in the faith. For years, I failed to grasp what this editor meant. But after reading Sullivan’s panegyric on behalf of Barack Obama and reflecting on it, now I do. Sullivan is a secularist. For all of his love of Catholic rituals, he rejects and, in a few instances, disdains its morality and theology, not to mention its authority.
