Get Religion is a national and global journalism site focusing on how the mainstream press covers religion news in politics, entertainment, business and sports.
Normally we look at mainstream media, but I came across an essay in my church body’s monthly newspaper that is worth sharing. In The Reporter, veteran foreign correspondent and former religion editor at UPI (and my friend and fellow Lutheran) Uwe Siemon-Netto looks at how the mainstream media treat Christians and, conversely, atheists. He notes Christopher Hitchens’ fawning reception by CNN’s Lou Dobbs, among other examples.
It’s almost the Gregorian chant of liberal religion, and you don’t need to attend many inquirer’s classes before hearing it: “We take the Bible too seriously to take it literally.” Yet it’s usually the same people who talk the most about biblical literalism, as if it were a metastasizing cancer in American culture. By percentage, very few Americans engage in the sort of biblical interpretation that will deprive them of coffee in the morning or a blood transfusion in the emergency room.
In the discussion of a previous post about coverage of the Kathy Griffin brouhaha, Religion News Service reporter Kevin Eckstrom says the following about his piece:
Eve Conant of Newsweek has written a curious article: In trying to describe Democrats learning to speak the patois of evangelicals, she writes in a style that is nearly tone deaf to evangelical culture.
USA Today‘s op-ed page on Monday had a nearly full-page opinion piece on a degree offered at Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary that could include a concentration in homemaking. The catch is that it’s offered exclusively to women.
This USA Today story has been in tmatt’s infamous GetReligion Guilt file for some time now, but I could not throw it away. It seems that, with the Pew Forum on such a roll, religion-beat reporters are awash in interesting poll data about religion, values, politics, etc. In other words, we are still in the aftershocks of the “values voters” and “pew gap” political earthquakes of 2000 and 2004.
It seems that some GetReligion readers are sensitive about the burning issue of whether God cares which teams win and which teams lose athletic contests and whether the prayers of the sports warriors play any role in determining the outcome of contests.
Nancy Gibbs has done a great job in the latest Time of discussing the agonizing details involved in the trial of Warren Jeffs, the prophet of the Fundamentalist Church of Latter Day Saints. Jeffs is being tried as an accomplice to rape on the grounds that he insisted on a girl, then 14, marrying her first cousin, despite her weeping protests that she was not ready. Jeffs’ defense attorneys argue he cannot be held accountable for what went on in the newlywed couple’s bedroom.
