Social Issues

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It's true: Red and blue Americans literally don't know basic (religion) facts about each other

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Parson me, while I dig into my deep file of GetReligion guilt. In this case, for a week or so I have been trying to decide how to write a post about a Washington Post political feature in which the charts are absolutely crucial to understanding the material I want to discuss.

The graphics themselves are crucial to this post, because they contain information about religious and cultural issues that really didn't make it into the story.

In other words, to put this in GetReligion language, the religion-news "ghost" that I think will interest journalists and news consumers see can be seen more clearly in these charts than in the quotable material in the Post feature itself, which ran with the headline, "What a divided America actually hears when Obama speaks." I cannot, of course, cut and paste the charts over into this post.

So here's what needs to happen. First we will look at the opening of the piece and then you'll need to click over to the Post piece -- which we always urge readers to do anyway, to see context -- and look at the charts themselves. The overture for this long piece is as follows:

As President Obama spoke of the country’s deepening sense of alienation and anger last month, a teacher in Michigan listened, her eyes fixed on the stone-faced Republicans in the House chamber who in her view represented the problem. “Let’s get over the party lines and work together!” she tweeted during the president’s State of the Union address.
In Maryland, a retired lawyer was listening to the exact same words. He, too, was worried about the anger and division gripping the country, but as Obama spoke, his resentment toward the president only swelled. “Hearing him complain about political rancor is frankly nauseating,” he wrote.
The two tweets flashed across the Internet within seconds of each other, each in their own way capturing the country’s mood and the challenge facing the president in his final months in office -- not simply a partisan divide, but a deep mistrust that has become so entrenched that it seems to affect the very way Americans hear the president’s words and see each other.


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The Oscars put the spotlight on 'Spotlight' and on news reporting about religion

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The Oscars put the spotlight on 'Spotlight' and on news reporting about religion

GetReligion readers are well aware that quality news reporting in the print media, and investigative reporting, are continually sliding in America due to shrinking news holes, budgets and staffing. Nostalgia aside, this has obvious negative consequences for a republic.

On Sunday, Hollywood did its bit to boost the news biz by giving the best picture Oscar to the must-see “Spotlight,” correctly regarded as the best movie depiction ever of real newspaper work. The film, of course, depicts The Boston Globe effort that exposed the extent of Catholic priests’ sexual molestation in the area archdiocese thanks to shoe-leather fieldwork and documents gained by a strategic lawsuit and a state judge’s edict.

Let’s admit that the entertainment business will not weep over travail that afflicts Catholicism. However that should not obscure the fact that the entire church and its parishoners owe a deep debt to the Globe team for unearthing accurate information.

Along with the hurrahs, religion reporters and other news people should reflect on lessons to be learned from this episode. Put bluntly, where were the mainstream news media prior to the Globe’s 2002 publication? There’s a good article waiting to be written in coming days about who gave how much coverage and when.

Some analysts imply that nobody did much of anything prior to the Globe extravaganza. Not so. The Associated Press faithfully supplied the nationwide press corps with coverage, outrage by outrage. There were good articles in the Los Angeles Times, Newsweek, Time and elsewhere.

Yet truth is, while local dailies did their duty the national “mainstream” print media (that pretty much set the agenda for TV and radio news) failed to provide sufficient, sweeping examinations with dramatic display about the over-all Catholic abuse syndrome, as opposed to this or that individual case.


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Knoxville News Sentinel studies evangelicals in Tennessee: Where are the Trump fans?

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Greetings from East Tennessee.

If you know anything about the real East Tennessee, other than movie stereotypes about Hill people without shoes, then you probably know that this is a very distinct land that should have been its own state (as in the lost state of Franklin). This is also a region loaded with liberal arts colleges. Did you know that?

Now, at this moment in American politics, there are two other things you need to know about my part of the world.

First of all, this is one of the most intensely Republican regions that there is, anywhere. If you walk out your front door and throw a rock, you'll probably hit a Republican, a Republican's car or a Republican's house.

Second, religion is a very big deal in our neck of the woods and this fact shows up in research all of the time. This is the kind of place where, when your moving truck is still in the driveway of your new house, lots of people are going to show up and ask where you're planning on going to church.

This brings me, of course, to the battle for "evangelical" voters in the current race for the White House. The other day, The Knoxville News-Sentinel ran a piece on this issue with this headline: "Cruz and Rubio battle for evangelical vote in Tennessee."

Now, did you notice a word, a name actually, missing from that headline?

The first time that I glanced at this piece I thought that it was crazy that Citizen Donald Trump's name was not in that headline.


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Think 'Catholic' voters: Looking ahead to next round of Donald Trump vs. Pope Francis

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It's an important question, one that any serious journalist must take seriously as the pace begins to pick up in the race -- or at this point races -- for the White House.

How will candidate x, y or z fare in the contest to win the mythical "Catholic vote." Whoever wins the "Catholic" voters wins the race. Hold that thought.

This time around, of course, we have already had a collision between two of the world's most amazing public figures, each a superstar in radically different forms of "reality" media. I am referring, of course, to Citizen Donald Trump and Pope Francis.

Journalists love them both in completely different ways.

So let's pause, in this weekend think piece slot, and look back at three different thoughts related to that recent media storm involving the pope and the billionaire.

(1) The mass media is waiting, waiting, waiting for a second round. As M.Z. "GetReligionista emeritus" Hemingway noted at The Federalist:

Our media, currently in the throes of one of the most damaging co-dependent relationships with a candidate the country has ever seen, immediately ran with headlines about how Francis was definitively saying Trump is not a Christian. If Trump is like an addict whose illness is in part the result of family dysfunction, then the media are his crazy parents who can’t stop enabling him. Francis is playing the role of the out-of-town uncle who thinks he’s helping but is just furthering the dynamic. OK, maybe that analogy isn’t working. But there is no way that Trump suffers from being criticized by the Pope, and the media enablers get to spend even more time obsessed with their favorite subject.

(2) This brings me to a Columbia Journalism Review think piece by Danny Funt -- "How one letter changed the story in Pope v. Trump" -- that I really intended to point GetReligion readers toward soon after the controversy about what the pope did or didn't say about the state of Trump's soul.


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Both sides now: USA Today does a decent job covering LGBT flap in a Florida town

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Gol' durn, Florida is always full of surprises. In reporting a controversial school board meeting over LGBT rules, USA Today -- and its state affiliate Florida Today -- stuck pretty much to basic reporting, as opposed to editorial writing.

Even better, the national report is a nearly word-for-word re-post of the original Florida Today story, rather than some Beltway gloss. LGBT matters can get pretty heated, and so can school board meetings. So when they collide, it ain't always easy just to report. These stories do have a flaw or two, but they generally show a satisfying fairness and respect for all sides. We'll look at the flaws in a bit, but the top alone rates a hat tip:

MELBOURNE, Fla. -- Big crowds came out for a Tuesday evening meeting about a proposed non-discrimination and equal employment policy for lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people in Brevard Public Schools.
After more than 90 LGBT policy opponents spoke to the school board, the board voted to kill the proposed policy, and said it would hold a public workshop on LGBT issues down the road.
Nearly 100 people signed up to speak at the meeting, and most of those who spoke were in opposition to the LGBT policy.
Friar Demetri Tsigas of Melbourne, a Greek Orthodox priest, said that the opposition of people of faith like himself was something school board members should heed. "You can see the spirit of the town here," Tsigas said.  "This is not San Francisco, folks. This is Brevard County."

Friar? That's off the mark. However, that statement is something of a surprise, starting the quotes with a Greek Orthodox priest, rather than the typical "fundamentalist" who is then held up to scorn.

It is crucial to note the ratio of people attempting to speak in opposition to the policy, as opposed to those who defended it. This was a very tense, charged meeting.


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Dear New York Times editors: Did Harper Lee's faith have anything to do with her art?

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If you know anything about the South, then you know that there are, literally, United Methodist churches everywhere you go in the Bible Belt.

You also know that United Methodist churches down South are usually not as "conservative" as, say, their Southern Baptist counterparts, but they tend to be more conservative -- "evangelical" in some cases -- than UMC flocks in other parts of the country.

Thus, it is certainly interesting that the celebrated, and ultra-private, author Harper Lee was an active member in her local United Methodist congregation down in Alabama. That detail made it into the New York Times story about her funeral, since it's hard to cover a funeral without saying where it was held. However, the story managed to avoid any of the details of that rite of worship or of the implications of her faith for her life's work.

It's interesting to note that the very first pages of "To Kill a Mockingbird," published in 1960, include references both to Methodism and to its founder, the Rev. John Wesley. Hold that thought.

The Times funeral story does include this information about the setting:

MONROEVILLE, Ala. -- Friends and family from around the corner and across the country gathered here on Saturday to pay final respects to Harper Lee, the author whose Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about racial inequality in the South during the Jim Crow era inspired generations of readers.
A dense fog that had shrouded this small town lifted as mourners filed into the First United Methodist Church, which Ms. Lee attended for many years, for a simple, private service that lasted about an hour.


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Redeeming Gadsden County: New York Times offers a powerful look at an anti-crime program

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You know all those quotes about the need to be "in the present"? Well, they're also true for news media. Many stories these days have a thin, flinty feel because they're drawn from documents, websites and other articles.

Not so with the New York Times in its feature "Gadsden Finds God." The 500 words and 13 photos give us a vivid, sensitive look at how a rural Florida county united to help its worst-off people.

Gadsden County, in the Florida panhandle, is portrayed as troubled with overlapping problems of unemployment, under-education and juvenile crime. This despite the fact that Gadsden is just northwest of Tallahassee, the state capital and home of two leading universities -- Florida State and Florida A&M.

The Times found an unusual alliance combating the threefold plague: a judge, a sheriff and the school superintendent. The judge made sure to hear all county juvenile cases herself, emphasizing her local upbringing as a "daughter of the soil." The superintendent founded an alternative school for low-scoring students, with smaller classes and more support.  And the sheriff, Morris A. Young, hired a fulltime chaplain, Jimmy Salters, for the county jail.

Their combined efforts have contributed to some good numbers since Young became sheriff in 2004, says the newspaper: arrest rates falling by 75 percent and graduation rates rising from 40 to 65 percent. And the Times writer captures some of the intense emotions involved.

You don’t get passages like this while sitting at a computer in New York City:


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And there is one more thing: Did press hear what Pope Francis said about abortion?

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So Pope Francis had something to say about the theological views of one Donald Trump. You probably heard about that.

During the same in-flight presser while returning to Rome from Mexico (full transcript here), he also addressed a question about contraceptives and the Zika virus. You probably read about that, too. Maybe.

But what did he have to say about abortion, which remains a hot-button subject? Before we get to a very interesting Religion News Service commentary on that, let's flash back for a moment.

As anyone who reads elite newspapers knows, early in the Pope Francis era the mainstream press reported, over and over, that he had ordered Catholic conservatives to stand down when it came to fighting about abortion, marriage and other "culture wars" topics.

Remember that exclusive America interview? Of course you do. It is still be quoted whenever these topics come up in church discussions. Next to the out-of-context "Who am I to judge?" soundbite (that wasn't a soundbite), we are talking about some of the most popular Pope Francis language -- ever. Here's how I summed that up in a column at the time:

... The pope unleashed a media tsunami with a long, candid interview published exclusively in America and other Jesuit magazines around the world. While the pope talked about confession, sin and mercy, one quote leapt into news reports and headlines more than any other.
"We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible," he told the interviewer, a fellow Jesuit. "The teaching of the church ... is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time."

The strange thing is what happened next, right in the middle of that media storm. The pope addressed -- drawing next to zero coverage -- a gathering of Catholic gynecologists. And what did he have to say?


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Playing the Trump card: Newspaper spots evangelical 'identity crisis,' with little evidence

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"New school" evangelicals lean toward Donald Trump. Old-liners like Ted Cruz. That shows a "crisis" among evangelicals.

A guy in Washington said so. That's good enough for a newspaper advancing the South Carolina primary. Even if its own report doesn't bear that out.

Evangelicalism, "like the Republican party itself, finds itself in the midst of an identity crisis," the Kentucky-based Messenger-Inquirer declares confidently. That "fact" will split their votes between "new school evangelicals," who lean toward Trump, and more traditional believers who prefer Ted Cruz.

Dang, this newspaper is pretty sure of itself:

In new school churches, altars are often replaced by elaborate stages with light shows that rival backdrops from "American Idol" performances. Holy water fountains are converted into jacuzzi-sized baptism pools. For the purveyors of this flashier packaging of Christianity, it's all part of an effort to shepherd disenfranchised Christians back to Jesus, much in the same way that Trump is able to convert his own celebrityhood and financial success into a political following that attracts first-time voters.
"There's a self-identifying factor these new school evangelicals have with Donald Trump," said Dean Nelson, chairman of the Douglass Leadership Institute, a socially-conservative Christian coalition network based in Washington D.C., that is not affiliated with any candidate.
Cruz, meanwhile, is going after more traditional evangelicals, many of whom frown upon the material trappings of the emerging new school movement. Nelson said that they focus more on the Bible's teachings and place less emphasis on personal wealth. It's a church culture, Nelson said, that's more akin to ultraconservatives like Bob Jones and they're more likely to be conservative hard-liners on social issues, just like Cruz.

What's wrong with this appraisal? Well, gee, what isn’t?


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