Religious Liberty

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Weekend think piece: Pope John Paul II and his fight to save Polish culture and even Europe

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Let's make this a Polish think piece weekend, shall we?

How many more lives lived in the darkness of the 20th Century were more amazing than that of the late St. Pope John Paul II? How many other names go at the very top of the list, especially if you are looking for women and men who were warriors for peace, dignity and true tolerance?

When looking at the fall of the materialistic world of Communist Eastern Europe and, even, the Soviet Union, the question I have always asked has been this: What did John Paul II and when did he do it?

Obviously, we know quite a bit about the dramas that took place out in the open, in front of -- literally -- millions of people. But do we really know what took place behind the scenes? If Poland started the dominos falling, what role did this great son of Poland play behind the scenes? Every few years, if seems, we learn more amazing details.

Another question: How did John Paul II fail to win the Nobel Peace Prize at some point during that era? Can you think -- in this weekend after Brexit -- of better symbol of the values of the post-Christian Europe than that strange fact?

So that brings me to this weekend think piece, via The Catholic Exchange. The headline: "Pope John Paul II & the Secret History of Europe." This short piece focuses on the contents of a new film, "Liberating a Continent: John Paul II and the Fall of Communism." Here is the trailer for that documentary:


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Must we keep talking about Citizen Trump and evangelicals? We must, we must ...

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Must we keep talking about Citizen Trump and evangelicals? We must, we must ...

First things first: Why the nod to the classic farce "Blazing Saddles" at the end of the headline for this post?

Well, why not? Don't you sense the hand of comedy genius Mel Brooks behind the scenes in this election year? Believe me when I say, "I do, I do."

Thus, People keep asking me things like, "Why are we still talking about Donald Trump and the evangelicals?" Of course, the word "evangelicals" in this case has little or nothing to do with theology. It is a reference to one camp -- stress, one camp -- of mostly white evangelicals who at this point in time are either supporting Trump or who have not made up their minds on the issue.

We are still talking about them because no Republican has a chance to reach the White House in the era after Roe v. Wade without a massive turn out by these highly motivated voters. Republican winners also need strong support from conservative (think daily Mass) and middle-of-the-road (think Sunday Mass, most of the time) Catholics, but that's an issue very few people seem to be talking about. Has anyone heard a word from a U.S. Catholic bishop about anything for about six months?

We are also talking about Trump and this one camp of old-guard, white evangelicals (many can accurately be defined as "fundamentalists") because other evangelicals are talking about them, from the other side of a bitter and painful divide in pulpits and many pews. At this stage, even Trump's evangelical advisory team is packed with people who have not endorsed him.

So, once again, "Crossroads" host Todd Wilken and I, during this week's podcast, talked about the slow-motion train wreck that is Trump's campaign to get right with the God voters. Click right here to tune that in.


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Yes, we'll keep defending journalism essentials, even when faced with 'so-called' impartiality

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Apparently, the Los Angeles Times got Julia Duin's memo. Finally.

My fellow GetReligionista questioned last week why the news media seemed "to be ignoring a bill going through the California state legislature that would have a huge impact on dozens of religious colleges in the state and, eventually, the nation as a whole."

Julia wrote:

The matter has enormous implications for the rest of the country because, as we all know, what goes on in California doesn't stay in California.
If religious colleges lose their heads here – financially and doctrinally speaking – they can lose elsewhere too. So where the MSM in this debate? Are they simply unaware of how important religious higher education is in this state or don't they care?

Nearly a week later, the Times has the story.

Here's the opening paragraph:

Dozens of faith-based colleges in California are objecting to legislation that they say would infringe on religious freedom by allowing lawsuits from gay and transgender students who feel discriminated against because their sexual orientation conflicts with church tenets.


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Trump meets some evangelicals: Looking for drops of journalism in a social-media storm

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Let's face it, the Donald Trump semi-rally yesterday in New York City with 1,000 loyal or semi-sympathetic evangelical leaders was (a) the perfect viral event in the social-media era, (b) the logical outcome of religious conservatives' fears about the mainstream press (some of which are justified), (c) a nightmare for old-school reporters committed to personal interviews and real questions or (d) all of the above.

It's next to impossible to separate what may or may not have happened in this event from the tsunami of spin and invective that roared through social media.

Why? Well, because the only source materials reporters had to work with, in terms of obtaining direct quotes from the presentations by Trump and others, were clips circulating in social media. Most of these materials were put on Facebook by an African-American church leader, Bishop E.W. Jackson. One key clip is found here.

If the goal was to turn this into a news event that was almost impossible to cover, in a responsible and/or conventional manner, then the folks at United In Purpose got what they wanted. Yes, yes, I know: Have we reached the point where many reporters -- on left and right -- have next to zero commitment to fair coverage of the 2016 campaign? That's a valid question.

Meanwhile, I have no intention of trying to parse the evangelical vs. evangelical shouting on Twitter (and I say that as someone trying to write about these subjects in my Universal syndicate column). So what can we learn from the actual news coverage?

Not much. Some of the main players basically punted. Consider the top of this short report from The New York Times:


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Next on religious-liberty beat: Orthodox Jews organize against their former high schools

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Next on religious-liberty beat: Orthodox Jews organize against their former high schools

An important intra-Jewish dispute in the New York City area has been featured in parochial papers like The Forward and The Jewish Week, as well as in mainstream local news outlets, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the PBS-TV “Religion & Ethics Newsweekly” broadcast.

What happens next? Follow-up coverage should examine a significant religious liberty angle that’s  been downplayed or omitted in media accounts.

Three years ago, graduates of yeshivas operated by the strict Haredim or so-called “ultra-Orthodox” Jews, including Hasidic groups, founded Young Advocates For Fair Education (YAFFED.org). Their legal advisor is Norman Siegel, former executive director of the New York City Liberties Union. These Jews complain that their limited high school educations left them ill-equipped to support themselves as adults, and demand that the city and state education departments enforce laws on minimum school standards.

Last year YAFFED organized 52 parents, former students and former teachers to send officials the names of 39 New York City yeshivas where, they contended, boys receive inadequate general education. The officials promised an investigation but no progress has been reported. The campaign gained traction this year with two crackdown bills introduced in the state legislature in January and then in May.

Though state law mandates basic course requirements for religious as well as public schools, Haredi leaders strongly resist change, seeking to perpetuate their traditions and protect youths from secular influences. News accounts indicate politicians go along.

YAFFED Executive Director Naftuli Moster and Johns Hopkins University Professor Seth Kaplan co-wrote an op-ed in the Forward titled “Why Do Jewish Leaders Keep Ignoring Ultra-Orthodox Education Crisis?” They pleaded with non-Orthodox communal organizations like the UJA-Federation of New York to take up the cause.


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Journalism 101 lesson: What's wrong with this story on challenged Mississippi law?

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If you read GetReligion regularly, you know that we advocate a traditional American model of the press.

Under that model, journalists report news in a fair, impartial manner with statements of fact attributed to named sources.

When a news organization frames a story in such a way that clearly favors one side, it obviously fails to meet that standard.

Such is the case with Reuters' slanted coverage this week of a judge's decision concerning a challenged Mississippi law.

Did Mississippi, in fact, pass an "anti-LGBT law?" That is one side's perspective. But the other side argues that the measure is, in fact, a religious liberty law.

GetReligion has, of course, written about the Mississippi debate a time or two. Or three or four. Or, well, you get the idea


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Christian colleges on chopping block: Why are California newspapers ignoring the story?

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Years ago, I was assigned to write a series about the huge growth of Christian colleges in the United States and I got to select the 10 I wanted to profile. To no one’s surprise, four of them were in California because I wanted to go someplace warm.

 While enjoying the March sunshine, I also learned there are tons of Christian colleges all over the state, ranging from a Nazarene university on the ocean to a Catholic college in the orange groves east of Santa Barbara. Religious higher education is a huge industry in the Golden State and this has been the case for decades.

Sports and civil rights are important too, as everyone knows. That's why journalists everywhere, including California, did that full-court press the other day following the death of boxer Muhammad Ali. However, the media -- even newsrooms in California -- seem to be ignoring a bill going through the California state legislature that would have a huge impact on dozens of religious colleges in the state and, eventually, the nation as a whole.

There’s lots of great hot buttons in this story: religious freedom, gay students, employee rights, to name a few.

As you would expect, the alternative, "conservative" press is covering Senate Bill 1146 to the hilt. But the Los Angeles Times, which doused Ali's passing with more than a dozen stories in the past week, has not touched it. At least I could find nothing on their web site, not that of the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Weekly or San Diego Union-Tribune.

One exception is the Sacramento Bee, which ran a guest editorial and the following brief article:


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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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Kind of a GetReligionista clash: An alternative take on that big AP evangelical feature

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The other day our own Bobby "no pickles on my Chick-fil-a" Ross Jr. has some strong words of praise for an Associated Press story that tried to explain why American evangelical Protestants -- a phrase that almost always means white Republican conservatives -- are currently feeling rather down about their place in the public square.

The big idea of Bobby's post was to salute AP for dedicating plenty of space and effort to this topic. This wasn't your ordinary dash-it-off wire story. It offered lots of people space to share their views:

Thus, Bobby noted:

This 2,500-word piece -- about as long a story as you'll ever see on the AP wire -- has it all from a journalistic storytelling perspective:
• Regular people (such as the Kentucky pastor and others at his congregation).
• Respected experts (such as Lifeway Research's Ed Stetzer and Southern Baptist public policy guru Russell Moore).
• Real nuance (as opposed to boiling down the issues and concerns to cardboard caricatures, as so often happens).

Now this is where things get interesting, from a GetReligionista point of view.

This particular AP story has been promoted online for a week or so and people keep writing us with their own opinions of it. As often happens in the social media age, this piece has developed cyber-legs on Twitter and elsewhere. Thus, people keep asking: Will GetReligion offer a critique of the story?

Well, we explain, Ross already did.


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