Politics

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Thinking about Xavier Becerra: A conservative Catholic checklist of sure-fire news stories

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First things first. Yes, the following think piece is from a conservative Catholic news source.

But there are times when doctrinally conservative Catholic folks need to read the National Catholic Reporter. And this is a time when doctrinally liberal Catholics — and journalists, especially — should read and mark up an article from the National Catholic Register.

Here’s why: This essay contains a long checklist of valid story ideas, as in issues from the past that are almost certain to come up again in the near future. You can see this in the long, long second line in this Register headline:

What a Xavier Becerra HHS Could Mean for Catholics

Becerra’s record in California shows that he, perhaps more than any other state attorney general, has been willing to wield the power of the state to enforce pro-abortion policies against religious and pro-life groups.

Now it’s true that, for conservative Catholics, this story is packed with potential public-policy nightmares, in terms of their impact on traditional Catholic groups and ministries. Can you say “Little Sisters of the Poor”?

At the same time, many — but not all — Catholic liberals will cheer if some of these policy showdowns come to pass.

In terms of doctrine and church-state law, Catholics on the left and right will have radically different views of Becerra being handed this crucial high ground in the culture wars. Evangelicals who lead colleges and universities will be concerned, as well.

But that’s beside the point, if one looks at this piece through the eyes of a religion-beat professional (or even an open-minded scribe on the political desk) who is looking for valid stories to cover. Journalists need to read all of this, but here are a few items that demonstrate what I am saying. Spot the potential stories in this passage:


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Hong Kong media titan Jimmy Lai jailed: Do journalists realize he's an outspoken Catholic?

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If you have followed events in Hong Kong for several decades, then you know this name — Jimmy Lai.

Journalists certainly should know that name, since this free-swinging billionaire founded Apple Daily, one of the city’s most popular newspapers. Using his clout as a businessman and as a publisher, he has been one of the most outspoken defenders of human rights in the face of crackdowns by Communist authorities.

One other thing: Lai is concerned about freedom of speech, freedom of the press and freedom of religion. There’s a logical reason for that, since he is an outspoken Catholic and one of Hong Kong’s best known Christian leaders. See this recent Catholic News Agency story: “Catholic Hong Kong activist Jimmy Lai — ‘The Lord is suffering with me’.”

Surely journalists know that Lai wears several hats during pro-democracy protests — a role that has landed him in jail, without bail. To state this in American terms, Lai is trying to promote both halves of the First Amendment, since freedom of conscience affects both the press and religious institutions. That has been obvious during all the hymn-singing (click here for Julia Duin post on this topic) in Hong Kong protests.

Don’t elite journalists know all of that?

It would appear that this is not the case, considering a faith-free story that ran recently at The New York Times with this headline: “Jimmy Lai, Hong Kong Media Tycoon, Is Denied Bail on Fraud Charge — Mr. Lai, who founded the pro-democracy newspaper Apple Daily, was ordered jailed until April.” Here is some crucial material at the top of the story, which has a Hong Kong dateline:

The detention of Mr. Lai, 72, came a day after three leading Hong Kong activists were sentenced to prison for participating in a protest last year, the latest blow to the territory’s pro-democracy movement.

The Chinese government imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong at the end of June, and Mr. Lai became the law’s most high-profile target in August, when he was arrested along with his two sons and four executives of his media company, Next Digital.

But the new fraud charges are unrelated to the security law. Rather, they accuse Mr. Lai of violating the terms of the lease of Next Digital’s headquarters, the public broadcaster RTHK reported.

This is a classic, and rather obvious, example of what GetReligion writers have, since Day 1, called a “ghost” — as in a crucial religion-news hook that is mysteriously missing in an important story.


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The end is near! Here's a 2020 end-of-the-year feature with an online religious hook

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We cannot say goodbye to 2020 fast enough, what with a disease-ridden planet and, in the United States, a remarkably rancid political fight and aftermath.

So here is a safe prediction: Mainstream news-media professionals and their loyal readers will be more enthusiastic than usual about this-year-is-ending articles.

Consider BibleGateway.com, which claims to be "the world's most-visited Christian Website," and articles it posted here and here about the themes, words and sentences that dominated 2020 scriptural searches. This site provides searchable full texts of dozens of English translations of the Bible as well as in many other languages.

The Gateway data have been noticed by editors at a handful of religious sites but not, so far as The Guy could find, outlets for general audiences that would also be interested.

The story could be enriched beyond the initial press releases by asking Gateway content manager Jonathan Petersen (616-656-7159 and jonathan.petersen@biblegateway.com) for more details on the number of people who searched for each item and how trends have varied over recent years.

A few specifics to get you thinking about this. Four subject areas generated 10 times more searches in 2020 than 2019.

First, societal-related terms such as justice, equality, oppression and racism. The results directed searchers to such verses as "when justice is done it brings joy to the righteous, but terror to evildoers" (Proverbs 21:15) and "learn to do right; seek justice; defend the oppressed" (Isaiah 1:17).

Second, "pandemic" and disease-related terms hit a high point during the spring lockdown, with searches pointing to "I will take away sickness from among you" (Exodus 22:25) and "I will bring health and healing" (Jeremiah 33:6).

Theme three was politics and government. Bible references included the urging of prayers "for kings and all those in authority, that we may live peaceful and quiet lives in all godliness" (1 Timothy 2:1-2) and the perpetually debated "let everyone be subject to the governing authorities" (Romans 13:1f).

Fourth, there was the inevitable increase of interest in Bible prophecy, Jesus Christ's Second Coming and the end times.


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SCOTUS flips script on COVID-19 worship bans, but Francis Collins of NIH urges closures

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First New York.

Now California.

With the addition of a fifth, solidly conservative member — new Justice Amy Coney Barrett — the U.S. Supreme Court has flipped the script on months of legal battles over pandemic-era worship gatherings.

“It is time — past time — to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques,” Justice Neil Gorsuch wrote last week as the 5-4 court blocked New York from imposing strict attendance limits on religious services.

Then on Thursday, the court “sided with a California church protesting Gov. Gavin Newsom’s pandemic-related restrictions on indoor worship services,” noted the Washington Post’s Robert Barnes. The brief, unsigned order returned the issue to lower court judges and “suggests the state’s ban on indoor services is likely to fall,” reported the Los Angeles Times’ David G. Savage.

In San Francisco, Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone has complained that the city’s “treatment of churches is discriminatory and violates the right to worship,” as explained by the Catholic News Agency. For more details on the California battle, see Sacramento Bee writer Dale Kasler’s story this week on churches defying Newsom’s order.

In related news, the Deseret News’ Kelsey Dallas highlighted a clash over in-person classes in religious schools in Kentucky. And Boston.com’s Nik DeCosta-Klipa covered Massachusetts Gov. Charlie Baker’s concerns over “COVID-19 clusters stemming from religious gatherings.”

Here in my home state of Oklahoma, Gov. Kevin Stitt has refused to issue a statewide mask mandate that might help slow the spread of COVID-19. But he declared Thursday a day of prayer and fasting over the coronavirus, as reported by The Associated Press’ Ken Miller.

Amid a surge in COVID-19 hospitalizations and deaths nationally, a top public health official Thursday “called on religious leaders to keep their worship spaces closed, despite rising protests from some church leaders,” according to NPR’s Tom Gjelten:


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How should Biden-era Americans understand 'religious freedom' and First Amendment?

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THE QUESTION:

What does American “religious freedom” now mean?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Protection of Americans’ “free exercise” of religion has been guaranteed by the Bill of Rights for 229 years and counting.

Until recently, people generally agreed on what this means. The debates involved whether this constitutional right should be exercised or restricted in specific, unusual situations. For example, the Supreme Court has permitted the Santeria faith to conduct ritual slaughter of animals, and exempted Amish teens from mandatory high school attendance laws.

Now this principle is swept up into culture wars that divide the population and the two political parties. In October, the Brookings Institution, a moderately liberal think tank, issued a lengthy white paper titled “A Time to Heal, A Time to Build” with recommendations on religion policy for the U.S. president. It states that the older consensus “began breaking down as new issues emerged, particularly around the struggle for LGBTQ equality.” Brookings consulted 127 experts on church and state for this document, though few were from the so-called “religious right.”

Consider some history: Back in 1993, Democrats were central in passage of the federal “Religious Freedom Restoration Act.” Then-Congressman Chuck Schumer, who is Jewish, introduced the bill in the House, where it won 170 co-sponsors and easily passed by voice vote. In the Senate, Ted Kennedy, a Catholic, was the Senate co-sponsor with Republican Orrin Hatch, a Latter-day Saint, and the act was approved 97–3. President Bill Clinton, a Protestant, enthusiastically signed it into law.

The act states that government cannot “substantially burden” the “exercise of religion,” even when the burden applies to people generally, unless limiting of the freedom is “the least restrictive means” to further a “compelling governmental interest.” Those whose freedom is wrongly suppressed have the right to “obtain appropriate relief” in court. (This restored prior U.S. Supreme Court doctrine that the court had shelved in its 1990 Smith ruling.)

That was then.


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Podcast: NYTimes op-ed offers sharp media criticism on SCOTUS and religious liberty

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In light of trends in the past year or so, the op-ed page of The New York Times was the last place I expected to find sharp media criticism focusing on the U.S. Supreme Court, the First Amendment and, to be specific, religious liberty concerns during the coronavirus pandemic. Miracles happen, I guess.

Here’s the context. There was, of course, a tsunami of press coverage of the 5-4 SCOTUS decision overturning New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s aggressive rules controlling in-person religious services in New York. Frankly, the coverage was all over the place (and let’s not get started discussing the Twitter madness) and I had no idea how to write about it.

Thus, I was both stunned and pleased to read the recent Times op-ed that ran with this headline: “The Supreme Court Was Right to Block Cuomo’s Religious Restrictions.” That essay provided the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” podcast (click here to tune that in).

This op-ed was written by a former federal judge named Michael W. McConnell, who directs the Constitutional Law Center at Stanford Law School and Max Raskin, an adjunct law professor at New York University. While their essay includes lots of interesting information about the logic of the recent ruling, GetReligion readers will be interested in its commentary on how the decision was viewed in public discourse — including media coverage.

Here is a crucial block of material at the top that includes some specific facts that would have been appropriate in news stories:

Unfortunately, the substance of the decision has been drowned out by a single-minded focus on judicial politics — the first evidence that President Trump’s appointments to the court are making a difference. Maybe that is so. In the first two pandemic-related worship-closure cases to get to the court this year, it declined to intervene by 5-to-4 votes, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining the Democrat-appointed justices in deferring to state regulators. Last week’s decision went in favor of the Catholic and Orthodox Jewish plaintiffs, with the chief justice in dissent.

But politics is a distorted lens for understanding the case. Looking to the substance, six justices agreed that the Free Exercise Clause was probably violated by the governor’s order. The restrictions, which are far more draconian than those approved by the court in the earlier cases, are both extraordinarily tight and essentially unexplained. In red zones, where infection rates are the highest, worship is limited to 10 persons, no matter how large the facility — whether St. Patrick’s Cathedral (seating capacity: 2,500) or a tiny shul in Brooklyn. Because Orthodox Jewish services require a quorum (“minyan”) of 10 adult men, this is an effective prohibition on the ability of Orthodox women to attend services.

In other words, many journalists and public intellectuals — I am shocked, shocked by this — decided that Trump-era political divisions were more important than information about the legal and religious realities at pew level.


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Why would CBS News say that Archbishop Wilton Gregory was the first 'Black' cardinal?

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It was the kind of newsroom error that lights up Twitter, while also inspiring more than a few folks in cyberspace to say to themselves, “I need to let GetReligion know about this!”

I am referring to the headline at CBSNews.com that currently proclaims: “First Black American Cardinal said he hopes to begin on ‘positive’ note with Biden after contentious relationship with Trump.”

When that story went online, it said that Washington, D.C., Archbishop Wilton Gregory was the first “Black Cardinal” — period.

See the difference?

Other news organizations made the same error. At Axios, for example, the headline eventually morphed to become: “Wilton Gregory becomes first Black cardinal in U.S.” Note that the URL for that story still contains this: “www.axios.com/washington-archbishop-first-black-cardinal-catholic …”

However, was CBS that left this headline in place for more than a day, until the headline and story were finally corrected.

What was the problem?

For starters, there are currently 14 cardinals from Sub-Saharan Africa alone.

The big question, of course, is why writers and digital producers at a major news organization would, well, forget one of the most important news stories in global Christianity over the past decade or two.

We are talking about the rising tide of believers and leaders from the Global South, and the continent of Africa in particular, and impact of this trend on Catholicism, Anglicanism, Methodism, etc. (Click here for “The Next Christianity,” the 2002 cover story at The Atlantic by historian Philip Jenkins that put this trend on the front burner for journalists who “get” religion.)

Why did this happen at an organization as famous as CBS News?


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Hey, New York Times editors: Did painful Thanksgiving dinners really begin in 2016?

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Apparently, no one knows where the saying came from, but by 1840 or so variations were appearing in etiquette guides: “Never talk about religion or politics,” especially at the dinner table.

This wisdom made the leap to popular culture in 1961, when the philosopher Linus commented in a Peanuts comic strip: ““There are three things I have learned never to discuss with people — religion, politics and the Great Pumpkin.” The Great Pumpkin is, of course, a faith issue for Linus.

Now, with that timeline in mind, please consider this follow-up question: Before 2016, does anyone remember reading waves of mainstream news stories near Thanksgiving built on horror stories about bitter political arguments around the extended-family holiday table? I mean, surely loved ones in the past argued about Richard Nixon, the nature of the Trinity, Bill Clinton’s private life, the quality of the modern hymn “On Eagles Wings” or other hot-button topics in religion and politics (or both)?

What happened in 2016 that suddenly made this a must-cover issue in elite newsrooms? Maybe this topic suddenly became urgent, for some reason, among journalists who had escaped heartland zip codes and found their true selves by moving to New York City and Washington, D.C.?

The New York Times published an archetypal feature of this kind the other day that ran with this dramatic double-decker headline:

Families Have Been Torn Apart by Politics. What Happens to Them Now?

Unlike 2016, when conflicts emerged over political choices, this time many are centered on the legitimacy of the result itself.

The overture follows the formula that readers have seen dozens of times in the past four years.

Tho Nguyen’s parents, who immigrated from Vietnam, were always Republican. They are Catholic and oppose abortion. Four years ago they voted for Donald Trump.

But nothing prepared Ms. Nguyen, 25, a medical student in Kansas, for how much politics would divide her family over the next four years, as her parents became increasingly passionate about the president.


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Biden and the US bishops: Compromise crafted by 'Uncle Ted' McCarrick still in place

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Biden and the US bishops: Compromise crafted by 'Uncle Ted' McCarrick still in place

While doing groundwork for the pivotal South Carolina primary, Democrat Joe Biden went to a local church to do what he does on Sundays -- go to Mass.

What happened next made headlines, raising an issue that looms over the president-elect's personal and political lives. The priest at St. Anthony's Catholic Church in Florence declined to give Biden communion.

"Holy Communion signifies we are one with God, each other and the Church. Our actions should reflect that," said Father Rev. Robert E. Morey, in a press statement. "Any public figure who advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of Church teaching. As a priest, it is my responsibility to minister to those souls entrusted to my care."

The priest, a former attorney with the Environmental Protection Agency, ended by saying: "I will keep Mr. Biden in my prayers."

Biden told MSNBC: "That's just my personal life and I am not going to get into that at all."

Nevertheless, Biden continued to make his faith -- he is a "devout" Catholic in news reports -- a key element of the campaign, as he has throughout his career. He also pledged to defend Roe v. Wade, to the point of codifying the decision into national law.

Catholic conservatives and liberals remain divided on how the church should respond, a tension demonstrated in a carefully worded statement by Los Angeles Archbishop José H. Gomez, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

"The president-elect has given us reason to believe that his faith commitments will move him to support some good policies. This includes policies of immigration reform, refugees and the poor, and against racism, the death penalty and climate change," said Gomez, after the recent online USCCB meeting.

However, it is obvious that Biden's actions have clashed with "fundamental values that we hold dear as Catholics," the archbishop added. This includes supporting the federal funding of abortions, the return of the Health and Human Services contraceptive mandate and passage of the Equality Act, a sweeping LGBTQ rights bill that could lead to "unequal treatment of Catholic schools," said Gomez.

"We have long opposed these policies strongly. … When politicians who profess the Catholic faith support them, there are additional problems. Among other things, it creates confusion among the faithful about what the Church actually teaches on these questions."


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