Politics

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A reader asks: Is there a religion ghost in story of man arrested for popping 'Baby Trump' balloon?

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“Baby Trump” met his demise in Alabama over the weekend. Not for the first time, though.

Who, some might ask, is Baby Trump?

According to Heavy.com, he’s an “iconic” balloon that is “widely known as a symbol to protest the President.” Evidently, not everybody is a fan of Baby Trump. And perhaps, just perhaps, a holy ghost haunts the latest news involving the big balloon. More on that in a moment.

First, though, let’s meet Hoyt Hutchinson. ABC News reports:

A few dozen people were gathered in Monnish Park protesting the president's visit to the Alabama-LSU football game a half-mile away and holding various anti-Trump signs when a disapproving man approached the helium-balloon with a knife and slashed an 8-foot-long gash in its back. There were still two hours to kickoff in the college town when "Baby Trump" quickly deflated out and the balloon-stabbing suspect attempted to flee the scene, organizers said.

Tuscaloosa police said in a statement that officers witnessed the incident which led them to arrest Hoyt Deau Hutchinson, 32, and charge him with felony first degree criminal mischief. He was booked into the Tuscaloosa County Jail and held on a $2,500 bond. The slashing appears to have been premeditated as Hutchinson posted a Facebook Live video just hours before the incident saying he was "going down [there] to make a scene ... I'm shaking I'm so mad right now," he said. "I'm fixin’ to pop this balloon, without a doubt."

The Alabama Media Group adds more details to the story today, noting that the Baby Trump stabber gave a radio interview in which he cast his action as a case of “good vs. evil.”

“Seems like a ghost or two here,” said a reader who shared that link with GetReligion. “What church does he go to? What do they think?”


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Democrats' 2020 surprise: Should churches that oppose same-sex marriage lose tax exemptions?

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Democrats' 2020 surprise: Should churches that oppose same-sex marriage lose tax exemptions?

THE QUESTION: 

Should U.S. religious groups that oppose same-sex marriage lose tax exemption?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

At CNN’s recent “Equality Town Hall” for Democratic presidential candidates, co-sponsored with the LGBTQ advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, anchor Don Lemon prodded Beto O’Rourke on whether “religious institutions like colleges, churches, charities” should “lose their tax-exempt status if they oppose same-sex marriage.”

O’Rourke (who self-identifies as Catholic) immediately answered “yes,” because “there can be no reward, no benefit, no tax break, for anyone, or any institution, any organization in America” that opposes such rights. “As president, we’re going to make that a priority.” The other candidates on stage assailed discrimination without specifying tax exemption. O’Rourke has, of course, dropped out of the White House race.

Later, Pete Buttigieg (an Episcopalian in a gay marriage) agreed that religious organizations such as schools “absolutely … should not be able to discriminate” and remain tax exempt, but he said rival O’Rourke hadn’t thought through that penalizing houses of worship would create a divisive “war.”

If government were to tax income or property or end tax deductions for donations due to traditional beliefs on sexuality, the targets would include the Catholic Church, the two biggest U.S. Protestant denominations and the largest African-American church body, countless evangelical congregations, Eastern Orthodoxy, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Orthodox Judaism and all Muslim centers and mosques.

O’Rourke subsequently seemed to back off, emphasizing that exemptions should be denied tradition-minded agencies that provide public services like “higher education, or health care, or adoption,” whereas practices within religious congregations are not the government’s business. (That might mean the government wouldn’t impose tax penalties due to sermons, parish education or refusal of gay weddings and clergy ordinations.)

The tax proposal poses palpable danger for a vast number of U.S. institutions, whether congregations or religious schools and agencies.


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Los Angeles Times writes nice story about jail chaplains, with a few eyebrow-raising word choices

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There’s a lot to like about a recent Los Angeles Times feature on jail chaplains.

But there also are strong hints of holy ghosts as well as a few eyebrow-raising word choices. I’ll explain what I mean in a moment.

Let’s start, though, with the positive: This is an in-depth piece that offers a helpful primer on the state of jail chaplaincy in Los Angeles and even quotes experts such as Luke Goodrich of the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty.

The specific Times angle is that some religious groups have enough chaplains — all volunteers — while others, including Jewish and Muslim groups, have a shortage.

The narrative-style lede sets the scene:

There are days when Rabbi Avivah Erlick sits in her car outside Men’s Central Jail, too afraid to go in. She’s counseled hundreds of inmates, but sometimes she arrives downtown only to drive back home, not ready to face the sudden lockdowns, the stale air and the stories about violence and loneliness.

When she does go in, Erlick feels overwhelmingly behind. She used to be a part-time jail chaplain supported by a grant from the Jewish Federation, but it wasn’t renewed. Now she volunteers whenever she can. She spends hours updating her list of inmates to visit, which includes dozens more than she has time to see.

The work is too important to stay away.

“I listen — I’m the only person who does,” she said. “I went into chaplaincy because I feel so drawn to help people in crisis.”

Then comes this generalization:

The chaplains in the Los Angeles County jails, some of whom were once behind bars themselves, are united by a simple mission: remind inmates of their humanity. It’s a job they often do in one-on-one visits. They’ll tell jokes, share a prayer, teach a religious text, or simply listen.

I’m torn on that description of the simple mission: “remind inmates of their humanity.” I suspect a number of the chaplains — particularly the evangelical Christian ones — would be more specific and say their goal is to save the inmates’ souls.


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Jesus, sin, the cross: AP skips past an interesting quote by former Iranian revolutionary

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Every now and then, you hit a direct quote in a news story that makes you pause, scratch your head and say, “What?”

That’s what happened recently to a GetReligion reader who while looking at an Associated Press report about an interesting plot twist in the life of man who participated in one of the most important news events of the late 1970s.

Here is the headline that appeared atop the Journal Gazette (Fort Wayne, Ind.) version of this AP story: “Iranian student now regrets seizing embassy.”

Let’s look at the overture, reading down to the key quote:

TEHRAN, Iran — His revolutionary fervor diminished by the years that have also turned his dark brown hair white, one of the Iranian student leaders of the 1979 U.S. Embassy takeover says he now regrets the seizure of the diplomatic compound and the 444-day hostage crisis that followed.

Speaking to The Associated Press ahead of today's 40th anniversary of the attack, Ebrahim Asgharzadeh acknowledged that the repercussions of the crisis still reverberate as tensions remain high between the U.S. and Iran over Tehran's collapsing nuclear deal with world powers.

Asgharzadeh cautioned others against following in his footsteps, despite the takeover becoming enshrined in hard-line mythology. He also disputed a revisionist history now being offered by supporters of Iran's Revolutionary Guard that they directed the attack, insisting all the blame rested with the Islamist students who let the crisis spin out of control.

“Like Jesus Christ, I bear all the sins on my shoulders,” Asgharzadeh said.

Yes, that’s apparently what he said.

As our reader commented in an email: “He mentions Jesus taking on the sins of the world on his shoulders, and he is doing likewise. Might he have become Christian?


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It's time for journalists to ask: What has happened to the Vatican press office?

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Let’s start with a loaded question. But it’s a questions that journalists really need to ask, because of trends during recent events in Catholic life.

So here goes: Is the Vatican’s press office helping to push a progressive agenda that could forever change the Catholic church?

Here’s the background: The Pan-Amazonian Synod that ended over a week ago wasn’t without controversy, to say the least. The recommendations put forth regarding bestowing Holy Orders to women in the form of making them deacons is something Pope Francis has to make a decision on by the end of the year. Toss in the theological debate over the Pachamama statues present at the Vatican and at a nearby Rome church and there was no shortage of fodder for reporters and columnists.

That takes us to the Vatican’s press office, the people on the front lines of getting out the pope’s message to the world’s media.

Like the White House in the age of Trump, so too does the Holy See’s messaging need some further examination. Former White House Press Secretaries Sean Spicer, followed by Sarah Huckabee Sanders, were all placed under the news media’s microscope for their statements and actions — and rightly so. The PR men and women behind Francis also deserve similar examination by the press.

Long gone are the days of Joaquin Navarro Valls. A “suave, silver-haired Spaniard,” as the Los Angeles Times described him in their 2017 obituary, Valls was both a close confidant of Pope John Paul II and served for more than two decades as chief Vatican spokesman. He defined what it was to be the pope’s press man. And he defended church teachings while doing it.

Navarro-Valls, a lay member of the conservative Catholic movement Opus Dei, had worked as a foreign correspondent for the Spanish newspaper ABC when the Polish pope offered him the job as director of the Vatican press office. He was the first journalist to hold the post. He was the right man at the right time for a globe-trotting pope at a time when mass media was growing.

Fast-forward to the present. The backlash to Francis by traditionalists is based on convictions that he has politicized the church, wanting to transform it into a social service agency.


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Trump, same-sex parents and religious charities: News coverage mostly predictable and left-leaning

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It’s the same old, same old, so I promise I won’t take up much of your time with this.

But I did want to acknowledge — for those still paying attention to such things — the news late last week that the Trump administration will allow faith-based foster and adoption ministries to operate in accordance with their religious beliefs.

Of course, that’s not the way you saw the story presented if you read it in a typical major media outlet.

Yes, as always, most mainstream news outlets treated this as a case of #discrimination — and not against the aforementioned religious charities.

Instead, this was the headline and subhead at the New York Times:

Adoption Groups Could Turn Away L.G.B.T. Families Under Proposed Rule

The Trump administration seeks to roll back an Obama-era rule that classified sexual orientation and gender identity as classes protected from discrimination.

The Washington Post put it like this:


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Thinking along with Douthat and Burge: Where are the empty pews and why are they empty?

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I have been traveling the last few days — a national college media conference and a baptism involving family — and I failed let GetReligion readers take a look at some interesting Ryan Burge graphics linked to two of the dominant religion-news stories of our time.

One of the stories is, of course, the collapse of the safe, vague ground in the middle of the marketplace of American religion. It’s an equation that comes up at GetReligion all the time, with traditional forms of religion holding their own (signs of slow decline and slight growth in some sectors) while the rise of the religiously unaffiliated gets lots and logs of ink (with good reason).

In the middle of all that is story No. 2, which is the demographic death dive of the old world of mainline, liberal Protestantism.

So take a look the chart at the top of this post — especially that dramatic “X” created by the rise of the nones and the fall of the mainline middle.

So, some will say: This is just a projection, not a set of carved in stone facts. True, that. However, Burge is only attempting to project trends 10 years into the future. That’s not a giant leap, when you are using trend lines dating back four decades. (I’d like to see that chart enlarged to 1960 or so, which would give us the true peak of old Mainline power and cultural prestige.)

Now, keep that chart in mind while reading the following column by New York Times columnist Ross Douthat — “The Overstated Collapse of American Christianity.” Here’s a crucial piece of the intro:

… (The) new consensus is that secularization was actually just delayed, and with the swift 21st-century collapse of Christian affiliation, a more European destination for American religiosity has belatedly arrived. “In U.S., Decline of Christianity Continues at Rapid Pace” ran the headline on a new Pew Research Center survey of American religion this month, summing up a consensus shared by pessimistic religious conservatives, eager anticlericalists and the regretfully unbelieving sort of journalist who suspects that we may miss organized religion when it’s gone.


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Centuries of blood and faith: Why many Christians in Middle East look to Russia for help

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Centuries of blood and faith: Why many Christians in Middle East look to Russia for help

Whenever I travel overseas, I am always humbled by how much news consumers in other lands know about what is happening in America and around the world.

This sadness is linked to one of the saddest realities — for decades — in American journalism: American readers don’t seem to care much about international trends and news. Thus, far too many American newspapers dedicate little or no space to international news.

Now, combine that with the reality that has driven GetReligion for 17 years, which is the sad state of accurate, informed, fair-minded religion-news coverage in many, maybe most, American newsrooms (especially in television news).

So what happens when you put those two sad trends together? If way too many journalists don’t “get” religion and way too many news consumers don’t care much about international news, what do you think happens to coverage of complicated religion-news trends and issues on the other side of the planet?

That was the subject of this week’s “Crossroads” podcast. Click here to tune that in.

In particular, host Todd Wilken and I focused on the media’s struggles to cover the complicated religious realities in the Middle East — such as Russia’s role in Syria, in the wake of Donald’s Trump’s decision to abandon Kurdish forces in the northern rim of that troubled land, leading to a Turkish invasion that threatened many religious minorities.

The big idea: Of course Russia has economic and political interests in Syria, ties that have been there for many years. It would be stupid to ignore those realities. But what about the religious ties between Orthodoxy in Russia and the ancient Orthodox Church of Antioch, for centuries based on the Street Called Straight in Damascus? How do you cover Russia’s interests in Syria without even mentioning that?

Come to think of it: How can reporters (even in elite newsrooms like The New York Times) cover almost anything that happens in Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Israel and elsewhere without taking in account religious trends and history?


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Friday Five: Kanye, Joe Biden, Pachamama statues, Tree of Life, Paula White, advice for journalists

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A big “story” in the world of religion has been Kanye West.

Except — and here’s a sincere question — has anybody seen any actual reporting on the West/”Jesus is King” story in the mainstream press?

Every headline that I’ve come across falls into the category of reviews and opinions. For financial and other reasons (read: opinion is cheap; reporting is not), we live in an age where news organizations often will cover a story by having someone write a column about it.

Religion News Service, for example, has run op-eds headlined “Is Jesus king of Kanye’s bank account?” and “Why Trump — not Jesus — is at the heart of white Christian love for Kanye.” But has there been any actual news coverage at RNS or elsewhere?

Maybe I’ve missed the news stories. And if so, please share links in the comments section.

In the meantime, let’s dive into the Friday Five:

1. Religion story of the week: A story that did draw a lot of news coverage this week was a South Carolina Catholic priest denying Holy Communion to former Vice President Joe Biden because of his political stance on abortion.

I wrote about that earlier in the week and highlighted some of the major coverage.

Some readers have commented and asked if the media went to the priest — or vice versa. I do not know the answer to that question. Anybody seen that question answered in any coverage?


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