Race

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They're praying, singing after Alton Sterling shooting. But what are they praying, singing?

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I haven't watched the graphic video of Alton Sterling's shooting this week by police in Louisiana.

Truthfully, I don't want to see it (or the one of last night's shooting of Philando Castile by police in Minnesota).

The sobbing images of Sterling's 15-year-old son, Cameron, are painful enough to witness.

At its heart, the news out of Baton Rouge, La., is about law and justice — and state and federal authorities have pledged a full investigation to determine the facts, as reported on the front page of today's New York Times.

But there are hints, too, of holy ghosts in the coverage of this story. More on that in a moment.

First, though, let's check out the Times' lede:

BATON ROUGE, La. — The Justice Department opened a civil rights investigation on Wednesday into the fatal shooting of a black man by the Baton Rouge, La., police after a searing video of the encounter, aired repeatedly on television and social media, reignited contentious issues surrounding police killings of African-Americans.
Officials from Gov. John Bel Edwards to the local police and elected officials vowed a complete and transparent investigation and appealed to the city — after a numbing series of high-profile, racially charged incidents elsewhere — to remain calm.


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Who's not with the program? White evangelicals, according to RNS

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Who is out of step with the country? Oh, you know. It's the white evangelicals.

That’s the apparent upshot of a story by the Religion News Service on a new survey.  The study, by the Public Religion Research Institute, highlights anxieties among Americans about immigration, terrorism, discrimination and cultural change.

But for RNS, it seems to come down to a single social-racial-religious class: white evangelical Protestants.

Americans also are split on whether American culture and the country’s way of life have mostly changed for the better (49 percent) or worse (50 percent) since the 1950s.
And, the PRRI/Brookings report said, "no group of Americans is more nostalgic about the 1950s than white evangelical Protestants," with 70 percent saying the country has changed for the worse. Americans also split politically on the question: 68 percent of Republicans agree things have gotten worse, while nearly the same share of Democrats (66 percent) say times are better.

This despite the next paragraph, which says that overall, 72 percent of Americans agree that "the country is moving in the wrong direction" -- up from 65 percent in 2011. "And most (57 percent) believe they should fight for their values, even if they are at odds with the law and changing culture," the article adds.


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At anniversary of Emanuel AME attack, hometown newspaper provides more amazing coverage

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From the very beginning, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jennifer Berry Hawes and her newspaper, The Post and Courier of Charleston, S.C., have owned the story of the Emanuel AME Church shooting.

Just a few of the posts I've written over the last year praising Hawes, who covered the Godbeat full time before joining the Charleston paper's projects team.

To mark Friday's one-year anniversary of the attack on Emanuel AME, The Post and Courier produced a five-part narrative series written by Hawes.

This exceptional series takes readers behind the scenes of the shooting and the lives of those forever changed by it — and yes, Hawes once again nails the faith angle.

On Day 1 of the series, the chilling opening scene:

The assassin slinked past the Rev. Dan Simmons Sr. as the retired man of God lay dying in the church’s hallway. He slipped by an office where the pastor’s wife and little girl cowered under a desk. An hour earlier, the gunman, a young white supremacist with plans to start a race war, had strolled in through the heavy wooden side door just a few steps away.
Now, Polly Sheppard heard it slam shut behind him. Heavy silence descended.

 


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Wait a minute! What did Southern Baptists say about religious liberty for Muslims?

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Covering a national meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention can be a wild ride, even in these days when they "only" draw somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 "messengers" -- not delegates -- from local congregations. Back at the height of the historic SBC battles of the late 1970s and early 1980s, these gatherings would draw around 30,000 and up, hitting a high of 45,519 in Dallas in 1985.

These events are highly organized, but the simple fact is that reporters never know who is going to make it to a microphone and speak his or her mind. It could be a pastor from a tiny church in the middle of nowhere. It could be a former SBC president, who is standing alone but may, symbolically, be speaking for thousands.

You can see this practical, journalistic, issue at work at the top of this Religion News Service report on the meetings that just ended in St. Louis:

(RNS) Southern Baptists are usually the first to defend religious freedom. But when it comes to Muslims, some want to draw a line.
At their annual meeting in St. Louis, an Arkansas pastor said Baptists shouldn’t support the right of Muslims to build mosques, especially “when these people threaten our very way of existence as Christians and Americans.”
“They are murdering Christians, beheading Christians, imprisoning Christians all over the world,” said John Wofford of Armorel Baptist Church in Blytheville, Ark., on Wednesday (June 15).
On Tuesday, Wofford offered a motion calling for the removal from office of SBC leaders who supported the right of Muslims to build mosques. He was referring, among others, to Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which joined a legal document supporting a New Jersey group’s fight to build a mosque.
The chairman of the Committee on Order of Business ruled the motion out of order.

Note the word "some" in that lede.


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Black, white and vague: trying hard to decipher Southern Baptist racial unity efforts

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We've said it before, but Associated Press writers face an almost impossible task: providing real depth and insight in wire-service-length news reports.

Yes, the AP goes in depth from time to time — such as religion writer Rachel Zoll's deep dive inside the changing status of evangelicals in America, which I praised last week.

But typically, AP limits stories to 300 to 500 words.

By my quick copy-and-paste count, an AP story out today on Southern Baptists talking racial unity with a black Baptist leader is 532 words.

So perhaps it's no surprise that the piece falls short when it comes to backing up its generalizations and quoting relevant sources.

Let's start at the top:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (AP) — When Ferguson, Missouri, exploded two years ago with racial unrest that spread across the nation, the newly elected president of the Southern Baptist Convention was moved to action.
Together with an interracial group of his fellow ministers, the Rev. Ronnie Floyd penned an article that called on Southern Baptist pastors, churches and laypeople to repent of racism and injustice. "Silence is not the answer and passivity is not our prescription for healing," it read.
It was one of the most strongly worded denunciations of racism ever released by leaders of a denomination founded in a split over slavery, and it set in motion events leading to a "national conversation on racial unity" to take place at the SBC's annual meeting on Tuesday.
Speaking to the membership of the nation's largest Protestant denomination will be the Rev. Jerry Young, president of the nation's largest historically black denomination, the National Baptist Convention, U.S.A.


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Confederate flags and stained glass: Why can't journalists run more than one point of view?

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Years ago, I used to be a tour guide at the Washington Cathedral. We were called “cathedral aides” back in the mid-1970s and we wore purple gowns in the winter with cute purple berets. In the summer, we retained the berets, but wore summer garb with some purple in it. It was always a challenge to find the right color blouse I could wear with my outfit, but I loved memorizing the facts about all the gargoyles, chapels and the amazing stained glass the illuminated the place.

Some of those windows depicted scenes from U.S. history. What drew the most eyes was the blue, green, orange, red and white Space Window showing the universe with a tiny piece of moon rock embedded therein.

Meanwhile, my personal favorites were the brilliant-hewed windows by Rowan LeCompte who designed some 40 of the cathedral’s 200+ windows.

However, let it be noted that LeCompte did not design two windows that were in the news yesterday. I’ll begin with an account by the Washington Post:

Washington National Cathedral, one of the country’s most visible houses of worship, announced Wednesday that it would remove Confederate battle flags that are part of two large stained-glass windows honoring Confederate generals Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee. Cathedral leaders said they would leave up the rest of the windows — for now — and use them as a centerpiece for a national conversation about racism in the white church.
The announcement comes a year after the cathedral’s then-dean, the Rev. Gary Hall, said the 8-by-4-foot windows have no place in the soaring church as the country faces intense racial tensions and violence, even though they were intended as a healing gesture when they were installed…

Next comes a quote about the windows being installed in 1953. Then there is this very significant information, if one is looking at this story from a journalistic point of view. Please read carefully:


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News in the 2015 Southern Baptist statistics: Baptisms, babies and crucial ethnic churches

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As you would expect, reading the Religious News Service story about the continuing decline in Southern Baptist Convention membership statistics is rather different than reading the Baptist Press feature on the same trends.

This is exactly as it should be, since one is a secular wire service and the other is a denominational press office. However, it's interesting to note that neither of these stories buried the bad-news lede and both included interesting secondary issues that could point toward important news angles in the future.

Truth is, the slow decline of the SBC is several news stories rolled up into one.

Let's look at the very short RNS story first, starting with the hard-news lede:

(RNS) The Southern Baptist Convention is the largest Protestant denomination in the country, but it continues to lose members and baptize fewer people each year.
The latest statistics, compiled by LifeWay Christian Resources from church reports, show membership has dropped by more than 204,000, down 1.3 percent to 15.3 million members in 2015. It’s the ninth year in a row there has been a membership decline. Baptisms, which have declined eight of the last 10 years, totaled 295,212, a 3.3 percent drop, researchers said Tuesday (June 7).

So what is happening here? For starters the RNS report notes that another doctrinally conservative denomination -- the charismatic Assemblies of God -- experienced some growth in 2015.

This raises questions about the "Why?" element in this news story.


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Think pieces for a finals weekend: The extended Curry family talks hoops and faith

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Everyone is still trying to figure out Steph Curry and, you know, What. It. All. Means.

In this case the word "All" refers to Curry's life off the court as well as his often transcendent powers on it.

Of course, there's the basketball player that journalists need to deal with. But then there's Curry the man, Curry the black man and Curry the maybe not-black-enough man. This leads to Curry the husband, Curry the father, Curry the family man and, in a few cases, Curry the son of disciplined Christian parents who taught him right and wrong, as well as that lightning flash jumper (care of an NBA sharpshooter faith).

This week I ran into two very different stories that set out to deal with the mystery of Steph Curry and company.

Here is your challenge. Look at the two excerpts. Which of the following is an ESPN essay and which is from the magazine of the Fellowship of Christian Athletes?

First, here are two samples from a piece called "The Revolution," that starts with a focus on Steph's parents, Dell and Sonya Curry.

... Watching their highlight-reel child lead a once-woebegone franchise to great heights can be exhausting. Dell, a TV analyst for the Charlotte Hornets and a longtime NBA veteran, and Sonya, the owner and headmaster of a Christian Montessori school, live in Charlotte, North Carolina. Both their sons play for West Coast NBA teams (25-year-old Seth just completed his first full season with the Sacramento Kings). So whenever at least one of the boys is playing a West Coast night game and Dell isn’t traveling with the Hornets, he and Sonya stay up late to watch the games live, often toggling between TVs in separate rooms. A late tip in the Pacific time zone can mean Dell and Sonya aren’t falling asleep until 1:30 or 2 a.m.


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Sensing a ghost on NPR: So why did that white DC suburban family move to Anacostia?

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Truth be told, it's hard for your GetReligionistas to do much in the way of blogging about news reports that show up in media settings other than digital print or in video reports that make it into the sprawling universe called YouTube.

Take visual media, for example. When it comes to covering television news reports, we have found that the software gods rarely get along. It is rather hard, in some online platforms, to embed videos from the major video newsrooms. We are talking Tower of Babel level coding issues here, unless something -- like I said -- ends up on YouTube. Sigh.

And then there is radio. Luckily, NPR has a fantastic website that handles most of its content in a multi-platform manner, offering news consumers print versions of reports or transcripts of what went out on the air. That really helps.

But here is a case in which a faithful GetReligion reader who lives in DC Beltway-land thought she heard a religion-news ghost slip past during a feature on WAMU (American University Radio) in Washington, D.C.

If you follow the link she sent us, you hit a wonderful audio-only "Anacostia Unmapped" feature with this headline: "Meet The New Neighbors." ... You really need to listen to this piece in order to "hear the ghost." So click here and do so, please.

OK, what was the key moment?


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