Terry Mattingly

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Pope Francis says gender theory is part of 'global war' on marriage (journalists yawn)

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There he goes again.

You remember Pope Francis, of course. He’s the guy who, whenever he says something provocative (often speaking off the cuff, or during in-flight press conferences), journalists rush to file stories and editors serve up bold headlines. This is especially true whenever the Holy Father speaks about issues linked to sexuality and LGBTQ issues in particular.

Then happens on a fairly regular basis. Perhaps you have heard about the “Who am I to judge?” soundbite that is used over and over, almost always out of context?

So, in a way, it’s not surprising that Pope Francis has shared this thoughts on the theory at the heart of global debates about transgender issues.

What is surprising is that his statements have received little or no coverage in elite news media here in the United States. Now why is that? Let’s look at the top of a short Reuters report on the subject:

Pope Francis warned on Saturday of a "global war" against traditional marriage and the family, saying both were under attack from gender theory and divorce.
Francis made his comments in an impromptu response to a question at a meeting of the small Catholic community in the ex-Soviet republic of Georgia.
"You mentioned a great enemy of marriage: gender theory," the pope said in response to a woman who had asked about it being taught in schools. He did not elaborate.

Actually, he did elaborate in remarks just after that, but hang on for that update.


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USA Today somehow manages to offer faith-free 'lesser of two evils' White House feature

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I have been away from my computer keyboard, for the most part, this past weekend due to (a) what amounted to the major-league baseball playoffs starting early and (b) long flights from Southern California back to the hills of Tennessee, via Detroit for some reason known only to the airline gods.

It is that second activity -- sojourns in airports and airplanes -- that is relevant to my strong reaction to the USA Today political feature that ran under the headline, "A sharpened debate: Is it ethical to not vote this year for president?"

You see, I made that journey while wearing a t-shirt containing this statement about the current White House race: "Giant Meteor 2016 -- Just End It Already." By no means did this represent a scientific poll of the electorate, but it did spark some interesting conversations. (Yes, my #NeverTrump #NeverHillary stance remains intact.)

Here is the bottom line: I have no idea how USA Today published an update on the whole "lesser of two evils" angle of the current White House campaign without mentioning religion and, in particular, the plight of conservative Catholics, evangelical Protestants and members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Among frequent occupants of pews, the argument I keep reading and hearing can be stated like this: Yes, no one knows what Donald Trump will do since he is a reckless, unstable gambler with ethics as deep as an oil slick. However, on issues linked to the First Amendment and religious freedom (think U.S. Supreme Court) everyone knows that the only thing certain about Hillary Rodham Clinton is that she is a fierce warrior for the cultural left.

Here at GetReligion, we have been urging reporters to dig into the true Catholic swing vote -- which is Catholics who regularly attend Mass. I would assume the patterns there are similar to those found among evangelicals by Pew Research Center professionals when they did that poll showing (as covered by Christianity Today):

More than three-quarters of self-identified white evangelicals plan to vote for Donald Trump in the fall (78%). But they aren’t happy about it.


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Question for reporters, politicos and citizens: Is it dangerous to talk about religion?

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Question for reporters, politicos and citizens: Is it dangerous to talk about religion?

Several years ago, I took what I thought was a liberal course of action on a day when Facebook users were signaling, or shouting, their political and cultural views at one another. I changed the banner photo on my page to a red, white and blue semi-flag image that contained the text of the First Amendment.

Trigger warning: Here is that text again.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

At that point something interesting happened. I received several emails and messages, including several from former students, accusing me of hate speech for waving, so to speak, the First Amendment flag. It was clear, they said, that I did this to promote religious liberty.

What they were saying was perfectly captured the other day in a "Peaceful Coexistence" document released by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. This document played a key role in my "On Religion" column this week, as well as the latest GetReligion "Crossroads" podcast. Click here to tune that in.

The bottom line: The commission argued that "civil rights" now trump the First Amendment. As I noted in my column:

The commission stressed: "Religious exemptions to the protections of civil rights based upon classifications such as race, color, national origin, sex, disability status, sexual orientation, and gender identity, when they are permissible, significantly infringe upon these civil rights."
In a quote that went viral online, commission chair Martin Castro added: "The phrases 'religious liberty' and 'religious freedom' will stand for nothing except hypocrisy so long as they remain code words for discrimination, intolerance, racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia or any form of intolerance."

Castro added:


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Heaven and hell: (a) Evangelicals are weird, (b) Americans are confused, (c) both

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How do you write a logical, coherent news report about a survey that offers evidence that Americans are not the most consistent pack of people in the world when it comes to matters of absolute truth and eternal life?

That's the challenge facing journalists writing about a new LifeWay Research survey probing the current status of several ancient Christian doctrines in postmodern America.

Based on two early reports, it appears that the crucial question is whether the survey is newsworthy because it shows that lots of Americans are out of step when it comes to holding on to core beliefs in traditional Christianity or because it shows that evangelical Protestants are out of step with ordinary Americans.

First, here is the top of a Religion News Service piece -- "On God and heaven, Americans are all over the map" -- on this subject. Spot the approach.

(RNS) Two-thirds of Americans believe God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam.
The exception: Americans with evangelical Christian beliefs, according to LifeWay Research’s 2016 State of American Theology Study. Only 48 percent of evangelicals share the belief God accepts all worship.


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I pray thee, might this story on Lulu the therapy dog have needed 'scare quotes'?

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Well, what do you know?

Apparently there is a time and a place for just about everything and, in the field of news, that even includes the use of "scare quotes." Surf here for some discussions of the meaning of this hot-button term in modern semi-opinion journalism.

Now, anyone who has visited this blog more than two or three times probably knows that your GetReligionistas are not fond of "scare quotes" around religious terms that have perfectly fine, established meanings, thank you very much. Most of the battles right now, of course, are about religious liberty vs. "religious liberty." Oh, and "traditional marriage" is another one.

However, in this case I am going to argue (wait for it) that the Washington Post team probably needed to use scare quotes in the Health & Science feature that ran with this headline: "There’s a dog at this funeral home, ready to pray with you."

Come to think of it, I would have put some quote marks around a specific term in that headline. See if you can figure out which one, after looking at the overture:

“Lulu, say a prayer,’’ Matthew Fiorillo tells his 2½ -year-old goldendoodle. Hearing the command, Lulu, a therapy dog who comforts mourners at Ballard-Durand Funeral & Cremation Services in Westchester County, N.Y., puts her paws up onto the kneeler and tilts her head down.


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Baltimore Sun attempts to navigate complicated world of Orthodox iconography

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What we have here is a beautiful little feature story about a subject that is, literally, close to the heart and soul of any Orthodox Christian -- icons. The story ran in The Baltimore Sun, the newspaper that landed in my front yard for a decade, which means that it's about an Orthodox congregation that I have actually visited.

Iconography is a complicated subject on several levels, both in terms of the theology, the history and the craft itself. This story gets so many details right that I hesitate to note an error or, maybe, two -- one of mathematics (I think) and the other is, well, just a strange hole that would have been easy to fill.

First things first: Here is the overture.

As  Dionysios Bouloubassis picks up his paint brush at Saint Mary Antiochian Orthodox Church early one morning, the large canvas before him is blank but for the outlines of an angel he has sketched in pencil.
Swirling on reddish-brown pigment, he brings its wings to life. He fleshes out a Bible, then two hands to hold it. By nightfall, the cherub seems alive, its eyes gazing down from heaven.
The angel, a figure from the Book of Revelation, is one of 16 that Bouloubassis, a master iconographer from Greece, plans to paint and affix to the 60-foot dome inside Saint Mary, part of a years-long project in art and worship the Hunt Valley congregation launched in 2013.

So far so good. However, the very next paragraph contains a crucial error of history.

If all goes as planned, Bouloubassis will leave the interior of the year-old church covered in icons -- mural-sized renderings of Christ, the saints, angels and other religious images that have been part of the Orthodox Christian worship tradition for more than 1,200 years.

Where did that reference to 1,200 years come from?


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New York Times explores Big Apple Sufism; it is real Islam, you see, only with big changes

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There is much to compliment in the New York Times feature about one of the more mysterious and complex streams of Islam, a story that ran under the headline, "Sufi Sect of Islam Draws ‘Spiritual Vagabonds’ in New York."

The story clearly states, as fact, that many Muslims reject Sufism and its willingness -- in some settings, at least -- to edit or mold Islam into forms that appeal to spiritual seekers in the early 21st Century, even in some of the edgier corners of New York City.

The the big idea of this piece is perfectly obvious, as stated in this summary statement well into this long story:

... For all its liberal trappings, Sufism cannot be detached from Islam. “Sufism isn’t just a label you wear; it’s a state of being,” said John Andrew Morrow, an Islam scholar and author. “You can’t pick and choose parts of Islam, and you can’t mislead sincere people, drawing them into Sufism without telling them this is fundamentally linked to Islam.”

That's the big question: Can you pick and choose?

The story does not hide the fact that people are, in fact, picking and choosing. There are clear elements of Islamic doctrine that have gone missing, as the Sufi converts in New York City have embraced this faith.

Again, the story does not hide this. In fact, it celebrates it.


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Weekend thinker: Yes, turns out we did need another study, more news on 'Nones'

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GetReligion readers: Please raise your hand if you have read a news report that discusses the "Nones."

OK, I imagine that this is 100 percent of you. I would think that 90-plus percent of you have read a piece in the past week or so that references, in some way, the Pew Forum's famous "Nones on the Rise" research. I would be hard pressed to name a religion-news related survey, during the past quarter century or more, that has received more coverage.

"Nones," of course, fits better in a headline than the term "religiously unaffiliated," meaning the rising number of Americans -- especially the young -- who say that they no longer affiliate with any particular religious organization, tradition or even heritage.

One of the big problems with that blast of data in 2012 is that many people see the term "None" and immediately think that it means "none," in terms of people having no religious beliefs at all or interest in their own solo, improvised, evolving version of spirituality. Yes, think Sheila and her tribe.

Personally, I think the religiously unaffiliated numbers are tremendously important and I've been following that trend -- reading scholar John C. Green and others -- for more than a decade.

We need more research on this, especially in terms of how it affects (1) marriage and family demographics and (2) which religious traditions rise and which ones fall. The bottom line: Demographics is destiny.

This brings me to a recent Religion News Service feature that I think needs to stand on its own as a weekend think piece, pointing readers toward a new study building on all of those Pew numbers. Yes, the political spin is justified. Here's how this piece opens:

(RNS) A quarter of U.S. adults do not affiliate with any religion, a new study shows — an all-time high in a nation where large swaths of Americans are losing faith.


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Man, that's a tough question: Why isn't this football coach working on Sundays?

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College football Saturdays are back, so let's stop and ponder a journalism mystery linked to the new football coaching regime at the University of Virginia.

The feature at The Daily Progress in Charlottesville is pretty direct, starting with the headline: "Part of the Bronco way is no work on Sunday."

Bronco is not a reference to a mascot, in Wahoo land, but to the school's new head coach -- Bronco Mendenhall. Things are not off to a good start there, so times are a bit tense. Here is the overture:

The day after Virginia’s season-opening loss to Richmond, Ruffin McNeill, the team’s associate head coach and defensive line coach, did what he’s always done. He got up and went to work Sunday morning.
Problem was, when McNeill reached the McCue Center, home of Wahoo football, nobody was there. He went home, came back later, and nobody was there.
Cavaliers coach Bronco Mendenhall told everyone in the program that his philosophy has always been to take Sunday off during the season, and come back refreshed on Monday. McNeill didn’t believe it.
“Coach Ruff went back home and told his wife Erlene, they’re really not there,” Mendenhall chuckled during his weekly press conference on Monday. “He thought the BYU staff was just tricking him.”

So, gentle readers, why does this particular head coach not work on Sundays?

Did you catch that passing reference to "BYU"?


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