Race

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AP reports churches transcend racial barriers after Mississippi arson — but do they really?

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Being a media critic means sometimes asking pesky questions about warm-fuzzy storylines. 

Please forgive me for being that guy, especially on the day before Thanksgiving.

And if I'm just being a crank, feel feel to tell me so. In fact, this is one of those rare cases where I'd love to be persuaded that I'm wrong.

But here's the deal: The Associated Press has a story out of Mississippi today with this inspiring headline:

2 Mississippi churches transcend racial barriers after arson

However, after reading the story, my annoying question is this: Are they really transcending racial barriers? 

The lede sets the scene by highlighting the racial divide in many churches nationwide:

GREENVILLE, Miss. (AP) — Back in the 1960s, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. observed that Sunday morning is the most segregated time of the week in America, a fact that remains true in many communities today.
But three weeks after their church in the Mississippi Delta was mostly destroyed by arson and someone spray-painted "Vote Trump" outside, an African-American congregation has been welcomed into the church of its white neighbors.
The bishop of Hopewell Missionary Baptist Church, Clarence Green, says the generosity of First Baptist Church of Greenville demonstrates that "unlimited love" transcends social barriers. And his host, First Baptist's senior pastor James Nichols, says their brothers and sisters in Christ are welcome to stay as long as they need a home.
The Hopewell congregation, about 200 strong, is holding services a mile away at 600-member First Baptist. The guests are using the chapel, a space with dark wooden pews and bright stained-glass windows where small weddings and funerals are usually held. It's on the downtown campus of First Baptist, a few steps from the larger main sanctuary.


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A word from Australia: Rural voters ruled 2016, but journalists should keep an eye on ...

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As you would imagine, I am still digging through stacks and stacks of emails and (digital) news clips in the wake of the Election Day earthquake and the news-media meltdown that followed. You don't even want to know the size of my email in-box right now.

While doing that, I came across a think piece on the election results -- from Australia, of all places -- that contained a useful typology that journalists might want to study. This is especially true for reporters who are sincerely interested in what happened with American evangelicals, especially those in predominately white congregations.

It helps to know that the author of this piece. the Rev. Michael Bird, is an Anglican priest and theologian, linked to Ridley College in Melbourne, who also blogs and writes essays of this kind for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. The bland and rather wonkish headline on this particular piece was: "US election: Why did evangelicals vote for Donald Trump?"

The key to the piece is that this is not the question that interested him the most. The heart of the essay focused on another question that should be more interesting to journalists: Who are these Americans who everyone keeps calling "evangelicals" and leaving it at that?

Early on, Bird notes that he was in Houston during the GOP primaries and delivered a lecture attended by quite a few conservative Christians.

I began my talk by asking three questions: Why don't Americans use the metric system? Why is the cheese orange? And who are the evangelicals who are voting for Donald Trump?
I got a response of riotous laughter because just about everyone there supported Ted Cruz and hoped a local Texan would defeat the vulgar New Yorker. I asked the last question because, among my hundreds of American evangelical friends, colleagues, and acquaintances, I could count all of the Donald Trump supporters I knew on one hand.


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Your weekend think piece: Rumors that 'white' Christianity is dead may be off a bit

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It's amazing how many different subjects people are arguing about in the wake of the shocking White House win by Citizen Donald Trump.

There is, of course, the whole CNN "whitelash" angle, which fits nicely with trends -- real ones, trends seen in the exit polls -- that make the Democratic Party establishment feel better about itself.

Then there is the more specific, and accurate, point that Hillary Rodham Clinton lost the White House because of a culture gap between her campaign (as opposed to those run by her husband) and the labor, working-class, heavily Catholic culture of the pivotal "Rust Belt" states -- such as Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

You put all of that together, while highlighting the valid religion-trends angles, and you get a headline like this from The American Conservative magazine (a journal of cultural conservatism, not Republican Party orthodoxy):

White Christian Apocalypse?
That’s not what it means for America to become majority-minority.

Now, the byline on this think piece belongs to a scholar whose work is familiar to any modern reader interested in global and national trends linked to Christian life and demographics -- that of historian Philip Jenkins, best known as the author of "The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity" and numerous other important books. He currently holds a joint appointment as professor of the Humanities in history and religious studies at Penn State University and as distinguished professor of history at Baylor University.

This piece is must reading for anyone seeking to understand trends linked to the potential influence of the church -- minus ethnic adjectives -- in the coming decades. Most of all, Jenkins believes that journalists and other public thinkers need to adopt a broader definition of the word "white." Thus:


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Red counties and blue collars: As it turns out, folks in America's heartland still exist

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Help me out here, readers.

I have been traveling so much in the past few weeks that lots of things I have read and heard have merged into a kind of fever dream in my 60-something brain. Somewhere out there I saw an advertisement for a last-moment fundraiser by liberal comedians who described their program as "like the Blue Collar Comedy tour," only for "smart, moral people" -- or words to that effect.

Did I just dream that? It's a perfect statement of half of what happened last night and this morning. In the end, Hillary Clinton did not get enough votes from blue-collar Democrats and lots of other people who used to be in the old Democratic Party coalition that included the Midwest and large parts of the Bible Belt.

When I wrote my Election Day post about the religion and culture angles hidden in Tennessee's rural vs. urban divide, I didn't realize that I was, in effect, writing about the whole United States. Click here for a final NPR verdict on the numbers, with rural areas going 62-34 percent for Donald Trump and cities voting for Hillary Rodham Clinton to the tune of 59-35 percent.

City people are happy with America, just like London people were happy with life trends in the European Union. The people in depressed towns and smaller cities? Not so much. The 2016 election map, broken down by counties, is going to be Jesusland: The Sequel.

As the exit poll numbers roll out, we are going to find out all kinds of religion-angle things that we already knew.


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The Tennessean surveys a deep-red state: Might religion play big role in its political divides?

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So here I am in New York City on Election Day, typing away at my desk at The King's College near the corner of Broadway and Wall Street -- which means I'm about two blocks from a Trump tower in Lower Manhattan.

I imagine that things will get pretty wild in some corners of New York City tonight. However, my mind is very much on the past, present and future in the hills of East Tennessee. In other words, I'm thinking about politics and religious folks.

You see, East Tennessee is about as old-school Republican as you can get. Forget Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. East Tennessee's Republican roots go all the way back to the Civil War era (see this New York Times piece on "The Switzerland of America").

But there are at least two other Tennessees, symbolized by the other two stars on the flag. The hills are one thing, while Nashville and Memphis are radically different cultures.

Once upon a time, Tennessee voted for Bill Clinton. Soon after that, it turned its back on native son Al Gore. While the mountains are historically Republican, the political story in the rest of the state centers on the decline of old-guard Southern Democrats and the now dead Democratic Party coalition that included Bible Belt farmers and laborers, as well as urban elites.

Donald Trump will carry Tennessee with ease tonight, I imagine, but I have met very few old-school Republicans in the hills who are happy about that. I have, however, wondered about the deep-red tint of the rest of the state, other than blue patches in the big urban zones.

Thus, I read with great interest the Tennessean piece that ran with this headline: "Tennessee politics: State increasingly split along urban-rural lines." That headline tells you what editors in Nashville think.


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In a town called Faith, voters offers clues on who exactly supports Donald Trump

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After chasing stories all over the United States, I found Faith — a town in South Dakota with a population of 421.

It turns out I'm not the only newspaper reporter drawn to Faith.

Tim Funk, award-winning religion writer for the Charlotte Observer, ventured there — to the Faith in North Carolina — for a front-page report over the weekend.

Funk's Faith story tackles questions perplexing many this election season: Who are the people supporting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump? And why? (In all fairness, the exact same questions could be — and should be — raised concerning those on Democrat Hillary Clinton's bandwagon.)

Here's what I like about the Charlotte Observer's story (and regular GetReligion readers will note that I'm praising a newspaper I've criticized in the past): The reporter goes to a Republican-leaning town, paints a vivid portrait of it and actually listens to the people he meets.

Of course, I've always enjoyed these kind of small-town takeouts. In my Associated Press days, I recall writing one from Daingerfield, Texas, and another from Crawford, Texas.

But back to the Charlotte Observer piece: Funk's lede nicely sets the scene:


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New York Times magazine profile turns former Wheaton College professor into a heroine

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When I saw the New York Times magazine was running a lengthy take-out on Larycia Hawkins by a Wheaton graduate, I hoped it would shed some light on her beliefs and motives. The article was far more textured and nuanced than other efforts I'd seen.

And yet. One of the photos of Hawkins -- posed with decorative purple scarf wound about her head and left shoulder while her right shoulder remained uncovered except for a black spaghetti strap dress underneath -- gave me some pause.

This wasn’t a hijab we were seeing here. It was a decoration. If Hawkins showed up on the streets of certain majority Muslim countries (think Iran, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia) dressed like that, she might not make it out in one piece.

Members of the GetReligion team have already written a lot about about Professor Hawkins, so bear with us once more. The article starts thus:

Three days after Larycia Hawkins agreed to step down from her job at Wheaton College, an evangelical school in Wheaton, Ill., she joined her former colleagues and students for what was billed as a private service of reconciliation. It was a frigid Tuesday evening last February, and attendance was optional, but Wheaton’s largest chapel was nearly full by the time the event began. A large cross had been placed on the stage, surrounded by tea lights that snaked across the blond floorboards in glowing trails.

The college chaplain read from a psalm and then:

Philip Ryken, the college’s president of six years, spoke next. His father had been an English professor at Wheaton for 44 years, and he grew up in town, receiving his undergraduate degree from the college. “I believe in our fundamental unity in Jesus Christ, even in a time of profound difficulty that is dividing us and threatening to destroy us,” he told the crowd. “These recent weeks have been, I think, the saddest days of my life.” It was the night before the first day of Lent, the 40-day season of repentance in the Christian calendar.
Wheaton had spent the previous two months embroiled in what was arguably the most public and contentious trial of its 156-year history. In December, Hawkins wrote a theologically complex Facebook post announcing her intention to wear a hijab during Advent, in solidarity with Muslims; the college placed her on leave within days and soon moved to fire her. Jesse Jackson had compared Hawkins with Rosa Parks, while Franklin Graham, an evangelist and Billy Graham’s son, declared, “Shame on her!”


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Hey, Washington Post political scribes: So religion will have zero impact in GOP civil war?

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Throughout this depressing White House campaign, Washington Post coverage has been split in a really interesting way when dealing with religion and American politics. This trend continued in a new piece that ran with this headline: "As Trump delivers his Gettysburg address, Republicans prepare for a civil war."

As has been the norm among elite news media, the Post has run its share of breathless "Evangelicals love Donald Trump!" reports.

That's fine. Strong support for Trump among a significant minority of white evangelicals has been a major trend, along with the fact that many others in that camp have reluctantly concluded (Christianity Today report here) that they have to vote for the Donald in order to accomplish their primary goal -- defeating Hillary Clinton, the candidate of the moral and cultural left.

However, when dealing with the politics of the White House race, the Post political desk has basically ignored the role of religious faith in both political parties and among the surprisingly large number of #NeverTrump #NeverHillary voters who have frantically been seeking third-party options. This "horse race" coverage has been amazingly religion free.

With that in mind, let's look at a key early chunk of the Post Gettysburg story:

It was ironic that Trump chose Gettysburg, the site of one of the most decisive battles of the Civil War, for his speech. Win or lose, Republicans are probably headed toward a civil war of their own, a period of conflict and turmoil and a reckoning of potentially historic significance. That debate has already begun, as the tension between Trump and House Speaker Paul Ryan has shown throughout the year. It will only intensify after Nov. 8. ...
The Republican presidential nominee has not only failed to unify the GOP; but his candidacy has also intensified long-standing hostility toward the party establishment among the grass-roots forces backing him. That tension has made it harder to find a solution to a major problem: The Republican coalition now represents growing shares of the declining parts of the electorate -- the inverse of what an aspiring majority party should want.

Note the "grass-roots" reference.


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Genetics, ethics, race and playing God: StatNews profiles an intriguing researcher

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Every so often, an article appears that is written with such grace and taste from an unexpected source. I’d never heard of StatNews.com, a year-old web site covering medicine, health care and life sciences started by John Henry, the billionaire owner of The Boston Globe.

Recently, it produced a piece about a Harvard genetics professor, who seems to be an agnostic, reaching out to the religious community to explain the latest research about the human genome. It could only have been done by someone who knows the genetics field but who could also grasp the theological objections by people not so familiar with it.

We are talking about big, big questions here.

RANDALLSTOWN, Md. -- Is the human genome sacred? Does editing it violate the idea that we’re made in God’s image or, perhaps worse, allow us to “play God”?
It’s hard to imagine weightier questions. And so to address them, Ting Wu is starting small.
Last month, the geneticist was here in a conference room outside Baltimore, its pale green walls lined with mirrors, asking pastors from area black churches to consider helping her.
Wu’s research focuses on the nitty-gritty of the genome; her lab at Harvard Medical School studies the positioning and behavior of chromosomes. But she’s also interested in improving the public’s understanding of genetics. She has gone to classrooms and briefed congressional aides. She has advised the team behind “Grey’s Anatomy.”
At a time of unprecedented access to genetic tests and plummeting costs for genetic sequencing, Wu believes people should know what scientific advances mean for them. The challenge is empowering communities that are skeptical of science because they have been underserved or even mistreated in the past.

The writer cuts to the chase, explaining that the issue is genome editing.


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