Religious Liberty

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What Meryl Streep said, kind of: LA Times offers Hollywood values (minus you know what)

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First things first: I confess that I would pay money to hear Meryl Streep read the ingredients off the side of a cereal box and she could choose the accent she used. I'm a fan. However, to continue my confessions, my reaction to the Twitter storm about her Golden Globes sermon (text here) is rather mixed.

Any reader of this blog knows that I am with her when it comes to cheering for the press to play a watchdog role with the Powers That Be. I would back that argument no matter who is in the White House, not just during GOP (or whatever Citizen Donald Trump is) administrations. As a First Amendment liberal, I would also like to see her cheer for freedom of speech, freedom of association and the free exercise of religion.

But here is my main question, after reading some of the press coverage: Is Streep actually on Trump's payroll?

She could not have given a speech that helped Trump more and, perhaps, hurt the mainstream press more than the one she gave last night. As a #NeverTrump (and #NeverHillary) voter, this has nothing to do with protecting Trump. No, Streep poured more gasoline on the old Hollywood values fires, a fact explored -- kind of -- in a massive Los Angeles Times reaction package on Hollywood, values issues and Trump (and to a lesser extent, Trump voters).

What does this have to do with religion-beat coverage?

Absolutely nothing, in this case. That's bad.

You know that whole "Does Hollywood get the religion market" thing? Don't expect to read about that in this tsunami of digital ink. Maybe there is some thoughtful material in there on entertainment colliding with faith, morality and culture issues, but I couldn't find it before the Times firewall shut me down.

The key statement can be seen in one bold headline: "The notion of a liberal agenda in Hollywood is absurd."


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Final 2016 yearenders: The Atlantic on religion and politics; RNS mourns sad, sad, tragic year

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Did you know that, when it comes to religion and public life, there were both winners and losers in the year 2016?

Honest. There were.

Even with the wailing and gnashing of teeth in elite newsrooms, it is pretty clear that some people in pulpits and pews ended the year in either a good mood or, to be honest, in a divided state of mind. Many felt they had dodged what they saw as the worst-case scenario.

Once again, I am referring to the key fact at the heart of coverage of white evangelical voters in the 2016 campaign -- the fact that the evangelicals who voted for Donald Trump were divided between those who supported Trump and those who felt they had to risk voting for him because of their fears of Hillary Rodham Clinton's clearly stated views on issues linked to religious liberty. There were also millions of Catholics and Mormons in that same predicament.

One more time! Let me point readers toward this Christianity Today analysis of research by the Pew Research Center. That prophetic mid-summer headline: 

Pew: Most Evangelicals Will Vote Trump, But Not For Trump
With half of voters dissatisfied with both presidential candidates, white evangelicals primarily plan to oppose Clinton.

Now, in one of the last 2016 Yearenders that I saw, Atlantic Monthly captured a bit of this some won, some bitterly lost and many just felt relieved atmosphere in post-election America. It also -- even from it's left-of-center editorial view -- noted the role that religious-liberty debates played in all of this. So consider these two chunks of that roundup:


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Year-beginner for 2017: Sarah Pulliam Bailey, and moi, see more battles over religious liberty

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Year-beginner for 2017: Sarah Pulliam Bailey, and moi, see more battles over religious liberty

Ever since the 1980s, I have been telling editors and journalists that conflicts about religious liberty were going cause some of the biggest news stories on the American horizon.

Anyone who has been reading GetReligion since 2004 knows that I've been saying that, over and over. Amen If you listen to this week's "Crossroads" podcast, looking ahead into 2017, you're going to hear more about that. No apologies.

The roots of this concern run back to my graduate-school work in Baylor University's church-state studies program, where -- in 1977-78 -- we could hear the early rumblings of what would become Bob Jones University vs. United States case.

Why is that important? Do you remember this crucial moment in the U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell debates about same-sex marriage?

JUSTICE ALITO: Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax­ exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same­-sex marriage?
GENERAL VERRILLI: You know, I, I don't think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it's certainly going to be an issue. I, I don't deny that. I don't deny that, Justice Alito. It is, it is going to be an issue.

That's why religion-beat patriarch Richard Ostling, in his recent pair of memos looking ahead to 2017, stressed that religious-liberty cases -- linked to LGBTQ issues, again -- would remain on the front burner for major American newsrooms. Click here and then here for those two Ostling posts.

You can see the same themes again, over and over, in the recent "Acts of Faith" year-beginner piece at The Washington Post by religion writer Sarah Pulliam Bailey (yes, a former member of the GetReligion team). The headline: "Here’s what we think will be the major religion stories of 2017." Here is the overture:

The new year could be turbulent for religion in America.


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Washington Post Catholics vs. trans rights story summons up whopping sense of, yep, Deja Vu

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One of the benefits of having been among the first wave of Monty Python fans when the BBC comedy first hit these shores is that some of their skits, such as the one about Déjà Vu, hang around in the dim recesses of one's memory.

Then, a modern-day news article pops up to bring this to the forefront.

My thanks, then to the Washington Post for reminding me of a funny bit of comedic brilliance. Sad to say, brilliance is not the word that comes to mind when reading their recent report on a group of Roman Catholic business owners suing to block an Obama administration rule it claims would force Catholic doctors and hospitals to perform "gender reassignment" surgery in contravention of church teachings.

From the article:

Gay and transgender rights groups said the health rule offers critical protections for transgender people because they often struggle to receive appropriate care from physicians and hospitals.
“What the rule says is if you provide a particular service to anybody, you can’t refuse to provide it to anyone,” said Sarah Warbelow, the legal director for the Human Rights Campaign. That means a transgender person who shows up at an emergency room with something as basic as a twisted ankle cannot be denied care, as sometimes happens, Warbelow said. That also means if a doctor provides breast reconstruction surgery or hormone therapy, those services cannot be denied to transgender patients seeking them for gender dysphoria, she said.

To its credit, the Post doesn't introduce the pro-directive side until the fifth paragraph, but the HRC attorney gets to share their viewpoint before the Catholic side gets its spokesman heard.

Couple that with a photo of trans-rights protestors leading the online version, and it's not difficult to imagine a soupçon of "Kellerism" (click here for more on this GetReligion term) had jumped on the Amtrak Acela express train from the Manhattan quarters of The New York Times to drop in on the Post's offices.


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Just in time for new year, one state debates ending government-sanctioned marriage

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Way back in 2004 — during Season 6 of the Emmy Award-winning television drama "The West Wing" — a congressman raised the idea of banning marriage. All marriage.

With two-thirds of Americans then opposed to same-sex nuptials, a gay Democrat identified as "Rep. Benoit" proposed getting the government out of the marriage business.

"If the government can't make it available to everyone, I want us out of the business entirely," Benoit said to Josh Lyman, chief political adviser in the fictional Josiah Bartlet administration. "Leave it to churches and synagogues, and, of course, casinos and department stores."

Lyman chuckled and brushed off the suggestion.

Fast-forward more than a decade: A majority of Americans support same-sex marriage. The U.S. Supreme Court has legalized it. And amid ongoing battles pitting gay rights vs. religious liberty, some real-life lawmakers wonder if the answer might be removing the government from the process.

The Associated Press reports on a Missouri legislator's proposal to do just that:

JEFFERSON CITY, Mo. (AP) — A Missouri Republican saw last year's debate over a proposed constitutional amendment that would have protected businesses that deny services to same-sex couples bring lawmakers to tears and grind legislative work to a halt. His solution: Take state government out of marriage completely, for both gay and heterosexual couples.
"You can stop spending so much emotional energy on the issue, and we can move on to other things," state Rep. T.J. Berry said, adding, "I'm treating everybody the exact same way and leaving space for people to believe what they believe outside of government."
His bill, filed ahead of the 2017 legislative session, would make Missouri the first state to recognize only domestic unions for both heterosexual and same-sex couples, treating legal partnerships equally and leaving marriages to be done by pastors and other religious leaders.


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Parade of 2016 yearenders: Crux takes several looks at surprising year in Catholic news

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So how much Catholic news was there in 2016.

Apparently quite a bit, and we are not just talking about angry Catholic voters in depressed corners of the Rust Belt, as in Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.

Thus, the journalists in the team at Crux didn't produce one list of Catholic stories, when preparing to mark the end of 2016. They went with four lists, I think. Maybe there are more.

It won't surprise you that the ever quotable Pope Francis got one list all by himself. Of course, there's quite a bit of info linked to Amoris Laetitia and the reaction to it. 

Then there's a list of developments at the global level. This includes updates on clergy sexual abuse and the persecution of Catholics in various locations. However, the section that I think will interest most readers is the take on the role of faith in the Brexit debates, battles over the treatment of refugees and the struggle to define what is and isn't "European," in terms of thinking about the future.

Finally, there is an essay with this headline: "Looking back at 2016, the Year of Surprises: Church in the U.S." Yes, the elections get some digital ink. However, the really interesting material is related to the elections on the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. Here is a long chunk of that:

... The election of Cardinal Daniel DiNardo of Galveston-Houston and Archbishop Jose Gomez of Los Angeles as president and vice-president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops just ten days after Trump captured the White House was also noteworthy.


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Parade of 2016 yearenders: Christianity Today offers lists blitz, including election Top 10

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So how many 2016 yearender lists did the Christianity Today news, commentary and, well, devotional team crank out?

Frankly, I'm not sure that I got them all.

Unless I missed it somehow, what you will not find here is a traditional Top 10 list of the year's major religion news stories and trends. Did I miss that somehow? If I did, someone let me know. Just leave a comment with the URL and I will update this.

I especially appreciated the list offering the magazine and website's top 2016 stories focusing on the persecution of the church around the world -- a topic that trends to point to a wide variety of important topics linked to the safety of religious minorities in general.

You also have the Top 10 CT articles of the year, the Top 10 conversion stories, a list ranking the year's cover stories, the year's top news-blog items and even the Top 10 Christmas stories.

But you knew that this one was coming, right? There is also a Top 10 list of Christianity Today's most-read articles about the 2016 elections. Here are a few of those headlines to scan.

Click here to read the whole list.


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Parade of 2016 yearenders: tmatt tweaks the official RNA poll results, saying ...

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While Donald Trump's crusade to win the White House was the top story of 2016, journalists in the Religion News Association saluted the brash billionaire's opponents by giving their top honor to the Muslim parents who made headlines by denouncing him.

Khizr and Ghazala Khan, the Gold Star parents of U.S. Army Captain Humayun Khan, who died in Iraq, shared the Religion Newsmaker of the Year honor. The Khans made a dramatic Democratic National Convention appearance to proclaim that Trump's proposed temporary ban on Muslims entering the country would be unconstitutional.

The RNA description of the annual poll's No. 1 story stressed that Trump received "strong support from white Christians, especially evangelicals. … Many were alarmed by his vilifying Muslims and illegal immigrants and his backing from white supremacists. GOP keeps majorities in Congress."

The No. 2 story continued: "Post-election assaults and vandalism target Muslims and other minorities. Some assailants cite Donald Trump's victory as validation. Critics denounce the appointment of Stephen Bannon as White House strategist over his ties to white supremacists." News related to Trump appeared in three other RNA Top 10 stories.

While white evangelical votes were crucial, I would have stressed two other religion trends linked to Trump's stunning win.

The first was captured in a mid-summer Christianity Today headline that, citing Pew Research Center polling, stated, "Most Evangelicals Will Vote Trump, But Not For Trump." Pew found that more than half of white evangelicals were upset about 2016 White House options and said their aim was to defeat Hillary Clinton, not support Trump.

Election Night plot twists also showed that Clinton lost because she lacked support from Rust Belt working-class Democrats, many from Catholic, labor-union homes that twice backed President Barack Obama.

The RNA Top 10 selections did not include items linked to bitter battles over religious liberty, Obama White House orders on transgender rights or the Supreme Court opening caused by the death of Justice Antonin Scalia.


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Part II: New Year’s observations on matters religion writers will want to be watching

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Let's continue with some of the themes we were discussing in the previous Religion Guy Memo, in which I offered some predictions on what kinds of news items and trends religion-beat specialists will want to anticipate during 2017.

Watch for the U.S. Supreme Court to schedule the oral arguments in three complex cases consolidated under Advocate Health Care Network vs. Stapleton. At issue: Special pension exemptions for religious organizations other than churches. The Atlantic headline for a piece on this says the outcome “could bankrupt religious schools and hospitals.”

The speaker list for the customary Jan. 21 interfaith service at Washington's Episcopal cathedral the day after President Trump's inauguration will be worth coverage and comment. Will any ranking Muslim leaders agree to participate? Will any observant Jews appear even though it's the Sabbath day? Will Southern Baptist spokesman Russell Moore or other #NeverTrump clergy be invited?  

The NRB International Christian Media Convention in Orlando Feb. 27–March 2 will be a handy place to collect evangelical hallelujahs (and any lamentations) about the Trump Presidency. Headliners include Kelvin Cochran, fired as Atlanta fire chief over anti-gay statements; Alan Sears, whose Alliance Defending Freedom litigates religious-liberty cases; the Rev. Jonathan Falwell, who leads father Jerry’s local church; and radio pundits Steve Deace and Hugh Hewitt.

Yes, Virginia, there are pro-evolution evangelicals, and biologos.com plans a March 29 – 31 conference in Houston about “the rich harmony between modern science and biblical faith.” Speakers include British New Testament scholar N.T. Wright, Wheaton College Old Testament Professor John Walton (author of the controversial “Lost World of Adam and Eve”), and Christianity Today Executive Editor Andy Crouch.

Speaking of Bible debates in the news.


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