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Royal wedding quiz: Must a 'Protestant' be baptized in order to become an Anglican?

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If you hang out much with Anglicans, you know that many are not fond of references to King Henry VIII, and especially the role that his private affairs played in the history of their church. I have, as a reporter, heard my share of complaints about that -- especially during the decade when I was an Episcopalian.

However, it is kind of hard to talk about the history of the English Reformation without mentioning the guy.

In the end, the Church of England split off from the Church of Rome. For most people, especially low-church Anglicans, this (a) makes it part of the wider world of Protestantism. However, it should be noted that some people argue that (b) the Anglican via media -- a "middle way" between Protestantism and Catholicism -- is its own unique form of faith. The odds are good that some Anglican readers will be offended by my description of (a), (b) or (a) and (b). This is complicated stuff.

This brings us, of course, to the love life of Prince Harry and faith identification of his live-in significant other turned fiance Meghan Markle.

We will start with an Evening Standard piece that caused a bit of Twitter buzz. The double-decker headline proclaimed: 

This is why Meghan Markle will need to be baptised before she marries Prince Harry
Kensington Palace has confirmed that Meghan Markle will be baptised before her wedding next May

It appears that this report has been removed from the newspaper's website, but here is a cached version, allowing readers to know what all the buzz was about. The crucial section said:

Meghan will begin the process of becoming a UK citizen and will also need to be baptised and confirmed before the ceremony as she is currently a Protestant.


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Football and religion: Two subjects that are hard to pry apart in East Tennessee

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Speaking of religion.

A long, sad and even tortured football season has come to an end here in the land of the University of Tennessee Volunteers, a season that began with the head coach already sitting on the hot seat of imminent disaster. Within a matter of weeks, #FireButchJones signs were popping up from sea to shining sea (Vols fans get around).

Eventually, Jones got fired -- despite the fact that his recruiting classes were consistently good to great.

This brings me to a story that ran this past week in The Knoxville News Sentinel, the newspaper that shows up in my driveway each morning. The headline: "UT Vols: Email links Butch Jones to tight end Daniel Helm's departure from Tennessee."

Now, if you only read the headline, you'd never sense the presence of an important religion ghost. But that's the thing about religion ghosts, especially here in this intensely religious corner of the Bible Belt -- they have a way just showing up.

At the heart of this sad story is Daniel Helm, a young man who -- as America's top-rated high-school tight end -- was one of Jones' star recruits in 2014. But Helm quickly left the Vols, landing at Duke University. Why did he leave? Here is the overture:

Daniel Helm had been gone from Tennessee for almost a year when his father sent an email to then-UT chancellor Jimmy Cheek.
The last paragraph of Steve Helm’s message read: “I made sure we got Daniel out of there before (Butch) Jones put him in a place where Daniel might have knocked him out. Then, my great straight A kid would have an assault charge. If a member of that football team does finally lose it with Jones and an assault charge is filed, we will provide authorities with everything we know as we will not let that man ruin a young kid’s life.”
Helm said Cheek never responded.

What does religion have to do with this story?

That's the big question. Let's walk through this step by step, since the religious themes only emerge at the end. My question: Why bury the Bible angle?


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Newsweek twists message Elizabeth Smart has been sharing with Mormons about sex

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The people who manage modern, digital newsrooms are -- to say the least -- under all kinds of pressure to print a never-ending stream of content with headlines and snappy story hooks that try to inspire readers to click, click, click those computer mouses (and maybe even visit an ad website every week or two).

This has led to all kinds of "you won't believe what happens next" editing, both in "news" reports and in graphics.

This has led to an increase in an old kind of news confusion.

In the past, it was perfectly normal for readers to wonder, every now and then, how a strange news headline ended up on top of a perfectly normal story. Your GetReligionistas have often reminded readers that reporters rarely, if ever, write their own headlines. Editors can make mistakes, too.

These days, it's no surprise that there's lots of confusion -- especially in newsrooms where journalists are asked to crank up their daily production count with various kinds of quickie articles. Often, the goal is to take a hot-topic story seen somewhere else, perhaps in a video that can be accessed online, and then combine a bit of that and a little more of this and quotes from other articles (attributed and backed with a URL) into a news product that rarely even requires a telephone call.

Hopefully, with a jazzy headline, this results in clicks.

I think that's what happened with a recent Newsweek article about a young Mormon woman who, after surviving a hellish kidnapping, has been speaking out on the need for religious leaders to be more sensitive when dealing with issues of sexuality, abuse and even trauma.

The headline that caught our reader's eye: "Elizabeth Smart, who changed Mormons' views on sex, is wary of religion."

Uh, #REALLY?


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A young GOP star's double life cracks, after evangelical leaders failed to call him out

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If I have learned anything in my 40 years working on the religion beat (and studying it), it's this: Repentance is really hard, even for the leaders of religious institutions.

Some would change that to say "especially" for the leaders of religious institutions.

This is true, I have found, for leaders on both the theological left and right (as anyone knows who has covered sex-abuse scandals among Catholic clergy). And many evangelicals choose to hide the sins of leaders. Ditto for leaders of liberal Protestant flocks.

As we are finding out during the current American tsunami of ink about sexual harassment and assaults, this trend is also found in Hollywood, inside the D.C. Beltway and elsewhere. That's rather obvious. It's also obvious that religious leaders should do a better job of handling sin than other folks. Some do. Many do not.

This brings me to an important Washington Post headline that many GetReligion readers made sure that I saw over the weekend: "How a conservative group dealt with a fondling charge against a rising GOP star." Similar stories ran elsewhere.

So how did Family Research Council leaders deal with the sins of Ohio Republican Wesley Goodman? They tried to shut him down, while seeking to keep things private and -- in the age of easy-to-copy emails -- got caught. This journalism truth is also clear: Many evangelical leaders, like their liberal-church counterparts, would rather line up for anesthesia-free root canals than cooperate with mainstream news reporters.

Here's the top of the Post story, which features tons of references to emails and documents to support key points:

On a fall evening two years ago, donors gathered during a conference at a Ritz-Carlton hotel near Washington to raise funds for a 31-year-old candidate for the Ohio legislature who was a rising star in evangelical politics.

A quick aside: Yes, I winced at the reference to "evangelical politics."


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Reporting on Paula White and the White House: Trying to tell her side of the story

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Those of you who may have read my lengthy profile on Paula White in this past Sunday’s Washington Post Magazine may not know that it was this GetReligion post a year ago and then this one that helped make the Post story happen.

Her spokesman, Johnnie Moore, noticed these posts, and contacted me to express thanks for their fairness.

Mercenary creature that I am, the wheels started turning in my head. A lot of publications, I thought, would be interested in knowing the inner life of this woman; the backstory behind her relationship with President Donald Trump and how she has hung on over the years despite scandals that would deck most people.

So I floated a trial balloon: Would Paula, I asked him, consent to appearing before dozens of journalists at the Religion News Association convention in Nashville in September? As a member of the conference committee, I was putting together a panel and I wanted her to be on it. Through Moore, she said yes. (Note: I’ll be referring to everyone by their last names in this piece except for Paula).

By this time, I was in contact with pros at the Post’s Sunday magazine, since I have written 14 stories either for the magazine or the Style section. Most of the pieces were several thousand words long, including my latest: A 2015 profile on Alice Rogoff, wife of inside-the Beltway billionaire David Rubenstein and (at the time) publisher of the Anchorage-based Alaska Dispatch News. T

he folks at the magazine were definitely interested in a story. Paula was on the road so much that I didn’t get through to her until June to explain what a story of close to 6,000 words would entail. We agreed that I’d spend three days following her around Washington, D.C. in late July.

Early in the afternoon of July 27, I was standing at the Northwest gate on Pennsylvania Avenue impatiently waiting for the right media person to allow me in. I didn’t know there was a titanic battle raging right then between communications director Anthony Scaramucci (who would be fired the following week) and chief of staff Reince Priebus who was about to be ousted.


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The surprising secret about that in-depth Washington Post Magazine profile of Paula White

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My apologies for the clickbait title.

But I had to get you here so I could congratulate a colleague: my fellow GetReligion contributor Julia Duin.

If you follow religion headlines, you've probably already heard about the Washington Post Magazine's in-depth — really in-depth — profile of televangelist Paula White and her role as pastor to President Trump.

Perhaps, though, you missed Duin's byline on the piece.

As she described it on Twitter, her magnum opus — 6,408 words in all — took four months to research and write.

I won't even pretend to be able to offer an unbiased critique of my colleague's work. But I will share a variety of tweets from the Twitterverse praising Duin's "fascinating," "fantastic," "must-read," "quite a meaty profile":


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Sex crimes and sins in the past: Pay attention to Bill Clinton's skilled use of the faith card

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Long ago, I was a strong supporter of Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, in part because of his early willingness -- as a Bible Belt Democrat -- to seek compromises on government policies linked to abortion. I was even more hopeful about the future of a young politico from Tennessee, Sen. Al Gore, whose pro-life voting record came in at 80-plus percent.

Yes, there was a time when both men were, in the context of the Democratic Party, clearly to the right of center on moral and cultural issues. They weren't "blue dog" Democrats, but they were close.

Things changed.

Now Bill Clinton is creeping back into the news during America's tsunami of headlines -- justified, methinks -- about sexual harassment and worse in Hollywood, inside the DC Beltway and elsewhere. On the cultural and political left, those who are concerned about the Harvey Weinsteins of this world, as well as accusations against one Roy Moore of Alabama, are being asked if they are rethinking their views on former President Clinton. As in this New York Times headline: " 'What About Bill?’ Sexual Misconduct Debate Revives Questions About Clinton."

This is an important story (ditto for this strong online essay at The Atlantic by the always readable Caitlin Flanagan). But as you read it, please see if you sense -- as I do -- the presence of a "religion ghost" (to use the GetReligion term).

You see, Clinton never really repented of his sins -- in legal and political terms. He outlasted his critics, on that front, and survived. Instead, as a progressive Baptist, he did his repenting in religious language that connected with Americans, but had little practical impact. I think that's a crucial element of the story of his survival.

Here is the overture of the New York Times piece:

WASHINGTON -- Another woman went on national television this week to press her case of sexual assault by a powerful figure. But the accused was not Roy S. Moore or Harvey Weinstein or Donald J. Trump. It was Bill Clinton.


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How ugly can the Roy Moore story get? That depends on who created 'Bernie Bernstein'

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Deep inside my ancient file cabinets packed with notes from the analog journalism era, there is a folder full of strange letters from readers.

Yes, we're talking pre-email. I still get an actual dead-tree-pulp letter every now and then.

This folder is dedicated to mail that is so strange, so bizarre, that I just can't throw this stuff away. The all-time worst/best latter was an epistle that was about 25 pages long -- typed on a manual typewriter -- describing, in excruciating detail, why biblical prophecies proved that Barbra Streisand is the Antichrist.

That's the first thing I thought about when I read the latest Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction stories out of Alabama. Yes, we're talking about the news coverage of that robocall in which a very non-Southern voice proclaims:

Hi. This is Bernie Bernstein. I’m a reporter for The Washington Post calling to find out if anyone at this address is a female between the ages of 54 to 57 years old, willing to make damaging remarks about candidate Roy Moore for a reward of between $5,000 and $7,000. We will not be fully investigating these claims however we will make a written report.

As you would expect, The Washington Post story on this incident is crucial. It's solid, but -- as a guy who lives in the Bible Belt -- it left me wondering about one element of the story. Hold that thought. Here is the top of the Post report:

A pastor in Alabama said he received a voice mail Tuesday from a man falsely claiming to be a reporter with The Washington Post and seeking women “willing to make damaging remarks” about Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore in exchange for money.
The call came days after The Post reported on allegations that Moore initiated a sexual encounter with a 14-year-old girl nearly four decades ago, sparking calls by leading Republicans for him to abandon his campaign for the U.S. Senate in a special election to be held Dec. 12.
Pastor Al Moore of Creola, Ala., said he received the call on his cellphone a little after 7 a.m. Tuesday from a private number, which he did not answer.


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When it comes to Roy Moore, the reality on 'evangelical' opinion is just as complex as ever

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Right now, it's hard to pause the raging waterfall of news (almost all of it, methinks, justified) about Roy Moore and his U.S. Senate candidacy long enough for rational thought. Good grief, just image the amount of ink he'd be getting if he was a married senator accused of hiring under-aged prostitutes or obtaining visas for his various girlfriends?

However, as always, there are interesting issues to discuss linked to a much abused and increasingly worthless religious label now used many times every day in American politics -- "evangelical."

The inspiration for this post on this familiar subject? That would be the recent Washington Post "Acts of Faith" headline that said: "Some Alabama evangelicals see Roy Moore as a man of Christian values. Others are torn."

Suffice it to say, "Alabama evangelicals" probably means white churchgoers on the doctrinally conservative side of the evangelical spectrum.

But never mind. That Post headline -- by noting a wide division among evangelicals, when it comes to Moore's fitness as a candidate -- is already miles ahead most of the chatter that I have seen on this issue in print and television coverage.

Sure, the piece opens with the usual more and more Moore shenanigans, when it comes to religion and courting his base. But there is also this:

Other evangelicals, though, feel the allegations force them to make an uncomfortable decision.


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