Worship

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Thinking about St. Benedict: Emma Green looks at one extreme option in Kansas

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Several years ago, I took a copy of The Atlantic Monthly with me on a non-stop flight from Baltimore to the Los Angeles area. I was still reading it when the plane landed on the West Coast. And that was before Emma Green arrived.

As I have stated before here at GetReligion, Green’s work is magazine-style analysis, yet she is also doing hard reporting as part of that mix — reporting that often drives hard-news beat reporters to have to consider expanding their sources and the points of view included in their work. At times, it seems like we could feature Green in this “think piece” slot every weekend.

This time around, she headed to a state that I am beginning to frequent for family reasons. Kansas is not for everyone, but it is an interesting and unique culture — a real place. It’s as far south and west as you can go and still be in the Midwest, with it’s strong emphasis on family and community. How many public parks are there in Wichita? (The answer is 144.)

Here is the headline on Green’s new piece:

The Christian Withdrawal Experiment

Feeling out of step with the mores of contemporary life, members of a conservative-Catholic group have built a thriving community in rural Kansas. Could their flight from mainstream society be a harbinger for the nation?

The big idea, of course, is that these believers are withdrawing, as much as is possible in this hyperlinked world, from one culture in order to defend another. At the heart of it all is faith and family.

But is this specific community the emerging norm? Here is the overture:


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There's no way around it, saith Ryan Burge: Gray hair in the pews is an important story

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For years, your GetReligionistas have been saying that the aging of mainline religion — first on the doctrinal left and now in many conservative traditions, as well — is one of the most important stories of our, well, age.

Look at it this way.

Stage I: In the 1970s and ‘80s, America’s liberal mainline Protestant churches went into what now appears to be a demographic death dive (hello Anglicans in Canada). This created a massive hole in the middle of the public square that led to …

Stage II: Evangelical Protestants rise to become the new “it” factor in American life and politics. Evangelicals are still a massive piece of the religion marketplace, but now…

Stage III: Evangelicals are starting to show signs of age and their demographic trends are mixed. Keep your eye on statistics linked to baptisms and converts to the faith. And look at the ages of all those people in the “nones” category.

This leads to this week’s fascinating chart from Ryan Burge of Religion In Public.

Read on.


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First in a series? Ambitious AP feature examines waves of stress hitting Catholic priests

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When covering complex, controversial subjects, the journalism educators at the Poynter Institute have long stressed the importance of paying attention to criticisms made by “stakeholders” linked to a story.

What’s a “stakeholder”? Basically, it is a person or group directly linked to the core issues and information included in a news story, people whose lives and work will be directly affected by this coverage.

That’s the first thing I thought about when I saw the ambitious Associated Press feature that ran with this headline: “US Catholic priests describe turmoil amid sex abuse crisis.” It’s an important article addressing a topic — waves of change sweeping over a declining number of priests — that would be hard to cover in a book-length report, let alone a newspaper feature.

What do the ultimate “stakeholders” — Catholic priests — think of this story?

As you would expect, the story had to find a way to focus — focusing special attention on the work of one priest who symbolizes larger trends. Thus, readers are introduced to the Rev. Mark Stelzer, a 62-year-old professor and chaplain at a Catholic college in Western Massachusetts who is also a recovering alcoholic who helps others wrestling with that demon. Now, he has been asked to serve as administrator at a nearby parish with 500 families. This brings us to the heart of this report:

Weighing on the entire Catholic clergy in the U.S. is the ripple effect of their church’s long-running crisis arising from sex abuse committed by priests. It’s caused many honorable priests to sense an erosion of public support and to question the leadership of some of their bishops. That dismay is often compounded by increased workloads due to the priest shortage, and increased isolation as multi-priest parishes grow scarce. They see trauma firsthand. Some priests minister in parishes wracked by gun violence; others preside frequently over funerals of drug-overdose victims.


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Washington Post sends travel pro to Waco, producing feature with big God-shaped hole

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I am sorry, but I cannot resist another trip to Waco with a blue zip code travel writer.

Once again, I confess that my interest is, in part, rooted in my amazement that Waco has become a major player in Texas tourism. That’s still stunning news for me, as someone who called Waco home for my history/journalism undergraduate and church-state master’s work at Baylor University.

GetReligion readers — especially those in Texas or anyone with shiplap inside their homes — may recall that religion played a major role in the edgy coverage that I dissected here: “BuzzFeed moves in to fix up all those happy tales about Magnolia folks and their 'new' Waco.”

Now, the powers that be at The Washington Post have dispatched travel writer Andrew Sachs to the Heart of Texas to see what all of the fuss is about. The headline: “Waco, Tex., needed fixing. Luckily, Chip and Joanna Gaines had the tools.”

So, what could be worse that somewhat snarky sociological analysis that assumed fans of Donald Trump were hiding behind every oak tree in Waco and, certainly, at Antioch Community Church, the evangelical base for many of the people active in the Magnolia success story?

Apparently, someone at the Post decided that religion had absolutely nothing to do with the events unfolding in Waco and nothing to do with why millions of people are flocking there as tourists. The Gaines family has all the “tools,” but faith is not part of this big picture.

Let’s walk through this first-person travel piece looking for faith-based content. First, there is this:

After five seasons of “Fixer Upper,” Waco and the Gaineses seem as inextricably linked as New York City and “Queer Eye” (the original quintet, not the Atlanta remake).


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Washington Post offers look at five country music myths and misses a familiar ghost

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I have been feeling my inner music-beat writer stirring a bit, as of late. Maybe, like Pete Townshend, I’m getting old. Then again, my East Tennessee home is a short drive from the birthplace of country music, and only slightly further from Nashville.

Thus, my eyes tend to focus a bit when I see this kind of headline in a blue-zip code elite newspaper, in this case the Washington Post: “Five myths about country music.”

Yes, this did run as a “perspective” piece in the Outlook section, so I am not looking at this as a news piece. Instead, I am simply noting an interesting chunk of this country-music flyover, since I would argue that it points toward a familiar news “ghost” in popular culture. I am referring to the prominent role that religion and religious imagery plays in country music and how that helps shape its audience.

Here is the overture of this piece by Jocelyn Neal, a music professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of “Country Music: A Cultural and Stylistic History,” from Oxford Press.

Love it or leave it, country music — with its whiskey-soaked nostalgia and crying steel guitars, its trains, trucks and lost love — is a defining feature of the American soundscape. This fall, Ken Burns’s documentary series, along with an outpouring of Dolly Parton tributes on NPR, Netflix and the stage at the Grand Ole Opry, has trained a spotlight on the genre. Still, myths infuse many people’s understanding of country music — and some of them are integral to its appeal.

Something seems to be missing there.

Let’s turn to an alternative summary statement, provided by someone who knew quite a bit about this topic — Johnny “The Man in Black” Cash. Asked to state his musical values, he said:


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Separation of church, state and pot: NYTimes says religious liberty issues here are not a joke

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Think of it as one of the defining mantras of America’s church-state orthodoxy: state officials are supposed to avoid getting entangled in deciding what is good doctrine and what is bad doctrine. They are, of course, allowed to worry about matters of profit, fraud and clear threat to life and health.

However, the legal powers that be have also had wrestle with other questions tied to the stunningly liberal (in the old sense of that word) framework created by the First Amendment: Who gets to decide what is a “religion” and what is not? How does the state decide who is sincere and who is, well, sleazy?

You can see all of these issues rumbling about in an important New York Times piece that I have been trying to sort out for some time now. This topic has been covered before (click here for earlier GetReligion posts), but this story — in my opinion — probes deeper. Here is the sweeping double-decker headline:

Inside the War for California’s Cannabis Churches

Illegal marijuana dispensaries outnumber legal ones more than three to one in California. What’s the role of the cannabis church?

Now, church-state experts have — at the U.S. Supreme Court and in Congress — wrestled with issues related to religious rights that involve drugs that are or have been illegal. It’s natural to ask if these religious organizations are offering rites incarnating centuries of religious traditions and doctrines (think Native Americans and peyote) or are they modern innovations to help people avoid laws they do not accept?

At first, I thought that money questions were going to completely dominate this Times piece — which is understandable. Is the Jah Healing flock a church or a cannabis storefront? I was glad when broader church-state issues entered the discussion.


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Why God continues to have a place at Thanksgiving tables and in Thanksgiving stories

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As millions of Americans sit down today to a turkey dinner with all their favorite side dishes, many will pause to say a prayer or otherwise give thanks.

That’s part of the story, after all. The one central theme to the holiday that endures to this day is the idea of giving God thanks. It’s the reason why the Pilgrims held a feast in the first place a year after making landfall in what is now Plymouth, Mass.

Even as a growing number of young people identify with no religion, Americans are still largely thankful to God. While the day is marked with football games and parades, it’s also true that Thanksgiving, one of the least commercial holiday’s celebrated in America, has a religious origin that has been debated ever since the Pilgrims marked the original Thanksgiving dinner in 1621 following their first harvest.

Two years away from the 400th anniversary of the holiday and days away from another Thanksgiving, historians and scholars continue to debate what the feast continues to mean for Americans. The holiday, while rooted in religious tradition, remains one of the things that ties modern secular society to this country’s colonial past. More than a Protestant holiday despite its roots, the day is celebrated by all denominations and viewed as uniquely American.

The day we now call Thanksgiving was observed by the Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians in October 1621. The feast lasted three days and, according to attendee Edward Winslow, was attended by 90 Native Americans and 53 Pilgrims.

The Pilgrims, like the colonists that followed them, celebrated a thanksgiving several times a year when the harvest was plentiful. It was highlighted by attending church services and thanking God before a large meal. Throughout the American Revolution, a day was set aside for giving thanks. Connecticut, for example, was the first to do so. The biggest change by the 17th century was that politicians were the ones calling for a Thanksgiving rather than church authorities.


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Greek Orthodox leader arrested: Reporters who follow the money will hear all kinds of questions

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This is the kind of New York Times headline that tends to inspire emails that show up in my computer inbox: “Ex-Director of Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America Charged.”

In this case, we are dealing with an Associated Press report that has run all over the place — covering the latest installment in a long-simmering scandal that has created a major embarrassment for Eastern Orthodox Christians here in North America.

On one level, this is a Greek Orthodox story. However, I think that reporters need to understand that many Orthodox believers — in America and around the world — are intensely interested in what happens in this case.

Why is that? You see this scandal is linked to a highly symbolic 9/11 memorial project at Ground Zero in lower Manhattan. Check out the images and emotional language used in the video at the top of this post, back when work finally started moving on the long-delayed project to rebuild St. Nicholas Orthodox Church.

Let’s start with the top of the AP report:

NEW YORK — The former head administrator of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of America was arrested Monday on charges he embezzled over half a million dollars from the organization even as the church ran out of money trying to build a shrine to replace a church crushed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

Jerry Dimitriou, 55, of Greenlawn, New York, was freed on $150,000 bail after he was charged with two counts of wire fraud, accused of pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars illegally while serving as the administrator from 2000 until late 2017.

Dimitriou oversaw construction of a new church and Sept. 11 shrine at the World Trade Center until the project ran out of money in 2017. The St. Nicholas National Shrine, designed by renowned architect Santiago Calatrava and estimated to cost $50 million, was supposed to replace a tiny church that was crushed by the trade center’s south tower.

That $50 million price tag?

If you dig around you will find all kinds of other numbers for that, starting at $80 million and heading way, way higher. The funds for the project came from donors all over the place, with gifts both large and small.

So what went wrong? Here is some language in the new AP story. Read carefully:


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Think about this: Digging down into that all-to-familiar 'God gap' in American politics

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I think that the first time I encountered the term “pew gap” was in the middle-to-late 1980s, as the side effects of the post-Roe v. Wade era began to emerge.

That was when people started talking about the impact of the Religious Right on the Republican Party and the growing secularization of the elites at the top of Democratic Party structures, where old-school labor union Catholics were being replaced by various kinds of white-collar groups linked to academia and feminism.

At the end of the 20th Century, the “pew” or “God gap” was a given. I know that I have used it before, for this piece of the “Blue Movie” essay that The Atlantic ran in 2003 remains perfect:

Early in the 1996 election campaign Dick Morris and Mark Penn, two of Bill Clinton's advisers, discovered a polling technique that proved to be one of the best ways of determining whether a voter was more likely to choose Clinton or Bob Dole for President. Respondents were asked five questions, four of which tested attitudes toward sex: Do you believe homosexuality is morally wrong? Do you ever personally look at pornography? Would you look down on someone who had an affair while married? Do you believe sex before marriage is morally wrong? The fifth question was whether religion was very important in the voter's life.

Respondents who took the "liberal" stand on three of the five questions supported Clinton over Dole by a two-to-one ratio; those who took a liberal stand on four or five questions were, not surprisingly, even more likely to support Clinton. The same was true in reverse for those who took a "conservative" stand on three or more of the questions. (Someone taking the liberal position, as pollsters define it, dismisses the idea that homosexuality is morally wrong, admits to looking at pornography, doesn't look down on a married person having an affair, regards sex before marriage as morally acceptable, and views religion as not a very important part of daily life.) According to Morris and Penn, these questions were better vote predictors — and better indicators of partisan inclination — than anything else except party affiliation or the race of the voter (black voters are overwhelmingly Democratic).


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