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Brazil story tip: More than one recent election has some interesting religion angles

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Brazil story tip: More than one recent election has some interesting religion angles

It doesn’t rank up there with America’s political earthquake, but there was a significant Oct. 30 election in Brazil that’s full of religious interest.

Senator Marcelo Crivella, the candidate of the young Republican Party who formerly worked as a bishop and gospel singer in a highly controversial church, was elected mayor of Rio de Janeiro, the city of 6.5 million that just hosted the Olympics.

He beat a socialist party opponent by a commanding margin of just under 20 points at the same time other conservative upstarts scored wins in local races across the nation. According to Britain’s The Guardian, the voting pattern “underscored the rise of religious conservatism” and the “demise” of the leftist Workers’ Party that dominated Brazilian politics over the past decade.

Crivella’s victory demonstrates the growing socio-political importance of evangelical Protestants. They now claim a fifth of the population in Latin America’s largest nation, which contains the world’s largest Catholic flock. Crivella won despite his past denunciations of Catholicism, homosexuality and popular Afro-Brazilian sects such as Candoble and Umbanda.

The mayor-elect is a follower of the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God (UCKG), a sizable “independent” body (not tied to “first world” Protestantism) founded and led by his uncle Edir Macedo, a major radio-TV mogul. His denomination claims 5,000 churches and millions of adherents in Brazil and has expanded across Latin America, Africa, Asia and Europe.

A story hook?


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Hello! 'The Book of Mormon' — the crude musical — leads to a religious conversion

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Just in case you don't memorize my every word, I thought I'd share again something I wrote last year about "The Book of Mormon" musical.

Trust me, there's a reason I bring up this topic now.

But first, here's what I said last time:

My wife and I saw "The Book of Mormon" musical when it came to Oklahoma City last year.
I had heard songs on the soundtrack and read news stories about the production, so I was curious.
I laughed a lot and squirmed a lot, too: Going in, I probably was naive. I'm one who tends to avoid even R-rated movies, so the extreme crudeness — language, sex objects, etc. — caught me off guard.

I was reminded of "The Book of Mormon" this week because of an excellent feature by Godbeat pro Holly Meyer with The Tennessean newspaper in Nashville:


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If Donald Trump seeks a Presbyterian pew in Washington, will he pick the mainline brand?

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I really had my hopes up when I saw this "Acts of Faith" headline in the Washington Post: "Will D.C. churches invite Donald Trump to come worship?"

As someone who worked in Washington, D.C., during much of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama era, I heard quite a bit of chatter related to the whole issue of presidents trying to go to church "for real," as opposed to occasionally finding a pew as a media event. There are, after all, legitimate security issues involved in a president going to the same sanctuary at the same time over and over. Plus, the security teams can be an inconvenience for other worshipers.

But people do talk. Washington is an amazingly small town, when it comes to people chatting about these kinds of symbolic issues (and my old office was only a few blocks from Obama's apartment during his short U.S. Senate stay).

Now we have Donald "Baby Christian" Trump coming to D.C., with a very photogenic family. What's the plan? Here is the overture of the Post story:

Every four or eight years, after the nation goes through the ritual of picking a president, some of Washington’s churches go through another ritual -- getting a president to pick them.
When Bill and Hillary Clinton came to town in 1993, preachers from Baptist (his denomination) and Methodist (hers) churches across town picked up their phones and their pens to invite the new first couple to their pews. After hearing from at least half a dozen congregations, the Clintons picked Foundry United Methodist Church on 16th Street NW, where they became active members.
George W. Bush, like Ronald Reagan before him, opted for the convenience of St. John’s Episcopal Church, just across from the White House. Ministers from numerous denominations tried to woo the Obamas, but the first family never picked one church, instead visiting many churches over the course of their eight years in the White House.

Hidden inside those summary paragraphs are some interesting news stories that never really got covered.


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Memory eternal, Cliff Barrows: A strategic voice inside the Billy Graham team

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Back in the mid 1980s, people were already starting to talk about the Rev. Billy Graham doing his "final crusades." Thus, when the Graham team came to town for the Rocky Mountain Crusade in 1987, that event was hailed as the great evangelist's last major event in Denver and the press handled it that way.

I was at the Rocky Mountain News (RIP) at the time and flew back to Charlotte, where I had worked for the Charlotte News and the Charlotte Observer, and then drove up into the mountains to spend most of a day interviewing Graham. I was planning on writing a magazine piece on Graham's marriage to the brilliant, and very independent, Ruth Bell Graham -- so we talked quite a bit about issues linked to marriage and family.

In that context, Graham made an interesting comment about the core team that built the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association and made the strategic decisions that set its course.

For some reason, he said, writers keep underestimating the role played by music director Cliff Barrows. The youngest member of the team was much more than the man who directed stadium-sized choirs and served as emcee for Graham events of all kinds. What they didn't understand was how important his voice was in private, offering counsel and advice at strategic moments, stressed Graham.

Now Barrows is gone, at age 93. Sure enough, the Associated Press obituary for Barrows -- at least the one I am seeing online -- is 126 words long and it seems even shorter than that. The basics are there, barely.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. (AP) -- Cliff Barrows, the long-time music and program director for the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association, has died after a brief illness. He was 93. ...
The two men met in 1945 while Barrows was on his honeymoon, and together they went on to form the association. Barrows traveled the world with Graham since his first crusade in Grand Rapids, Michigan, in 1947. Barrows also hosted the weekly Hour of Decision radio program for more than 60 years.

As you would expect, the tribute in The Charlotte Observer is much, much longer and captures more of this man's role in the Graham organization, even if key links are not made explicit.


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Working-class folks: What Bill Clinton knew, and Hillary Rodham failed to learn

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If you have followed Bill Clinton's career closely through the decades, as I have, then you know that at one point Southern and Midwestern Democrats thought that he was the future of the party, a centrist who could understand the concerns of working-class Democrats and even his party's moral conservatives.

After all, in Arkansas he was even willing to compromise and seek some kind of centrist position on abortion. Few remember that, over in Tennessee, the young Sen. Al Gore at one time had an 80-plus percent positive rating from National Right to Life.

But there always was a nagging problem, even before Bill Clinton's libido jumped into the national headlines. Her name was Hillary Rodham Clinton and it was pretty clear that she was 1960s Wellesley College right down to the core (even with her complex Chicago roots).

So when it came to issues of class, culture and (early on) even morality, there was Bill Clinton and then there was Hillary Rodham Clinton. This leads us to a news feature in the Washington Post that had to catch the eye of long-time Clinton watchers: "The Clintons were undone by the middle-American voters they once knew so well."

The byline was just as important -- David Maraniss. We're talking about the veteran reporter who wrote "First In His Class: The Biography of Bill Clinton."

Surely Maraniss would see the cultural, moral and religious ghosts in much of the coverage of Hillary's great defeat? That would be yes, yes and no. Here's the overture:

Few Americans knew the voters who rejected Hillary Clinton better than her husband. He lived among them growing up, and then studied them with a fanatical intensity during his political rise.
But now, with any notion of a dynasty dead and gone, one explanation for the stunning political demise of the Clintons might be the extent to which they moved away from a middle-American sensibility into the realm of the coastal elite, from McDonald’s to veganism to put it in symbolic terms, making it harder for Hillary to bridge the nation’s yawning social divide.


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Frank Pavone: Do media really get this radical Catholic priest?

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For Father Frank Pavone: If you can’t stop ‘em, shock them.

It’s a few days before the election and you want to grab the nation’s attention about the importance of abortion in its presidential candidate choices. How do you rivet the attention of a people dulled by the craziest election in U.S. history?

Put a dead male fetus on a church altar, then post it on your Facebook page, for starters. When the Rev. Frank Pavone did so on Sunday, it didn’t take long for the protests to pour in. The Washington Post, in a story by former getreligionista Sarah Pulliam Bailey, had the earliest and lengthiest story on Pavone’s ploy, so I’ll start there: 

Ahead of Tuesday’s presidential election, the Rev. Frank Pavone took an aborted fetus, laid it upon an altar Sunday and posted a live video on Facebook. Pavone, a Catholic priest who heads New York-based Priests for Life, said the fetus was entrusted to him by a pathologist for burial.
During an already heated and divisive campaign season, Pavone’s video has raised questions for some about what is appropriate antiabortion and political activism in the church. As of Monday afternoon, the video, which is 44 minutes long, had 236,000 views. In it, he holds up a poster of graphics of abortion procedures.
In Pavone’s Facebook appeal, he wrote, “we have to decide if we will allow this child killing to continue in America or not. Hillary Clinton and the Democratic platform says yes, let the child-killing continue (and you pay for it); Donald Trump and the Republican platform says no, the child should be protected.”

So I glanced over at Pavone’s Facebook page and read some of the 6,400 (as of Tuesday night) comments along with 407,000 views. I was amazed to see it was still on Facebook, which is usually quick to cut off any content that some reader thinks is offensive. Pavone was working full-time, it seemed, answering all the (mostly negative) comments. He asks why people are so angry about his displaying the dead fetus and not angry at the woman who aborted it.


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The liturgical color purple: Did Clintons make a statement about politics or faith?

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All over the world, millions and millions of Christians know what the color purple means.

More than anything else, it stands for seasons centering on the repentance of sins. Thus, it is the liturgical color for vestments and altar cloths that the truly ancient churches -- think Eastern Orthodoxy and the Church of Rome -- associate with Great Lent and also with the season known as Nativity Lent in the East and Advent in the West.

Of course, in the modern world Nativity Lent/Advent has been crushed by the cultural steamroller of Shopping-Mall Christmas (which already seems to be underway in television advertising). But that's another story, as in the actual cultural War on Christmas (as opposed to you know what).

Purple is also the liturgical color associated with royalty, as in Christ the King. In Western churches -- especially oldline Protestant churches -- most people link this connection with the purple candles in an Advent wreath. United Methodist churches retain some of these traditions through historic links to Anglicanism.

This brings us news-media speculations about why Hillary Clinton and President Bill Clinton elected to splash purple into their wardrobe when she gave her speech conceding that Donald Trump had won the presidency. Let's start with the top of this U.S. News & World Report take on the topic:

Hillary Clinton conceded the presidential election to Donald Trump on Wednesday in front of her husband, former President Bill Clinton, and her running mate, Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia.
Both Clintons made a bold statement with their clothing: Hillary donned a dark gray pantsuit with purple lapels and a purple blouse underneath, and Bill wore a matching purple necktie.
Throughout her campaign, Clinton has often sent a message with her fashion choices, so what did the purple ensemble mean?


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Mel Gibson and his 2016 multi-media tour: Can this fallen star ever repent enough?

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Mel Gibson, for years one of the most despised men in Hollywood, appears to be back on top with the release of a new film “Hacksaw Ridge.” This has brought together a delightful brew of movie reviews, Gibson gossip fests and interminable articles on how this industry pariah and renegade Catholic is trying to redeem himself, through a marathon of interviews in news and entertainment media.

There is valid religion-beat news here. It’s impossible to sidestep the faith factor in the story of how the maker of“The Passion of the Christ” has now come out with a movie about a Seventh-day Adventist conscientious objector who survives one of World War II’s bloodiest battles without so much as a gun by his side.

In one of those journalistic mixes of opinion and fact that are all too common in newspapers these days, the Los Angeles Times expounds on all this.

 At the recent Academy premiere of "Hacksaw Ridge," there was a 10-minute standing ovation.
Not terribly surprising, except it was for Mel Gibson.
Ten years ago, Gibson was the most hated man in Hollywood. First, during a DUI arrest,  he verbally assaulted police officers using anti-Semitic and sexist language. Then he was caught on audiotape threatening his then-girlfriend with rape and other physical abuse as well as dropping the N-word.
Forget standing ovations; many believed he would never work again.
But forgiveness, like everything else, has always followed a hierarchy in Hollywood. The elite — those who've won awards, broken box office records, sold successful franchises — are often welcomed back even as newbies like Nate Parker or middlings like Lindsay Lohan are cut loose. 


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Larger story behind the headlines: Why people keep fighting about Amy Grant's music

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Larger story behind the headlines: Why people keep fighting about Amy Grant's music

So why do people, decade after decade, keep arguing about the music and life of Amy Grant?

To understand these news stories, it really helps to connect them to other headlines linked to religious believers whose talents allow them to work in mainstream culture. Think about all those debates about the lives of Christian football players, such as Tim Tebow and Russell Wilson. Think about what happens when religious believers, left and right, produce bestselling novels. Think about all those news stories about what is and what is not a "Christian" film. Do the Christians who work at Pixar (and they are part of the mix) make "Christian" movies?

But if you really want to understand this week's Crossroads podcast (click here to tune that in), then I'd like you to take part in a little exercise that I have used for more than a decade in lectures on faith and popular culture.

Step 1: Watch the video at the top of this post, which is Faith Hill's stunning performance of "There Will Come A Day" during the "Tribute to Heroes" special a week after 9/11, a fundraising effort that was carried on just about every single television channel in existence.

Step 2: Now read the lyrics to this song, especially the triumphant final verse and chorus:

There's a better place, Where our Father waits, and every tear, He'll wipe away
The darkness will be gone, the weak shall be strong
Hold on to your faith, there will come a day ...

Song will ring out, down those golden streets
The voices of earth, the angels will sing
Every knee will bow, sin will have no trace
In the glory of His amazing grace ...
There will come a day ... I know there's coming a day

Step 3: Now ask yourself this question: Is this a "Christian" song, in terms of the marketplace of American music? That leads to another question: Is Faith Hill a "Christian" artist, in terms of the marketplace of American music?


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