Worship

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DeSantis as 'culture warrior' or theocrat: Coverage depends on a newsroom's worldview

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DeSantis as 'culture warrior' or theocrat: Coverage depends on a newsroom's worldview

A Republican politician with presidential aspirations visits a Christian college. What happens next, in terms of the way the event is covered by the mainstream press, is predictable — during this era of niche news, with stories written to appeal to the beliefs of specific political flocks.

The politician in question is Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and the school is Hillsdale College in Michigan. The visit took place this past February and was used as an example in a recent Miami Herald article of DeSantis’ mingling of faith and politics.

This is how the paper opens its Sept. 13 piece:

While visiting a private Christian college in southern Michigan that wields influence in national politics, Gov. Ron DeSantis rephrased a biblical passage to deliver a message to conservatives.

“Put on the full armor of God. Stand firm against the left’s schemes. You will face flaming arrows, but if you have the shield of faith, you will overcome them, and in Florida we walk the line here,” DeSantis told the audience at Hillsdale College in February. “And I can tell you this, I have only begun to fight.”

The Republican governor, a strategic politician who is up for reelection in November, is increasingly using biblical references in speeches that cater to those who see policy fights through a morality lens and flirting with those who embrace nationalist ideas that see the true identity of the nation as Christian.

That’s followed by the thesis:

He and other Republicans on the campaign trail are blending elements of Christianity with being American and portraying their battle against their political opponents as one between good and evil. Those dynamics have some political observers and religious leaders worrying that such rhetoric could become dangerous, as it could mobilize fringe groups who could be prone to violence in an attempt to have the government recognize their beliefs.

The article has no problem finding experts who warn of impending danger.


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Memory eternal: The quiet, yet very public faith, of Queen Elizabeth the Great

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Memory eternal: The quiet, yet very public faith, of Queen Elizabeth the Great

Before wearing the Imperial State Crown, Queen Elizabeth II knelt at the Westminster Abbey altar for a moment of silent, private prayer.

The three-hour coronation in 1953 contained myriad oaths and symbols, but the most ancient rite -- Archbishop of Canterbury Geoffrey Fisher anointing Elizabeth with holy oil -- sought the highest possible blessing on her life's work and eventually her death.

"Our Lord Jesus Christ, the Son of God," he prayed, "who by his Father was anointed with the oil of gladness … that by the assistance of His heavenly grace you may govern and preserve the people committed to your charge in wealth, peace and godliness; and after a long and glorious course of ruling a temporal kingdom wisely, justly and religiously, you may at last be made partaker of an eternal kingdom."

Televised for the first time, 27 million BBC viewers watched what Oxford don C.S. Lewis called the "tragic splendour" of this drama.

“Over here people did not get that fairy-tale feeling about the coronation. What impressed most who saw it was the fact that the Queen herself appeared to be quite overwhelmed by the sacramental side of it," he noted, writing to an American friend.

It was "a feeling of (one hardly knows how to describe it) -- awe -- pity -- pathos -- mystery. The pressing of that huge, heavy crown on that small, young head becomes a sort of symbol of the situation of humanity itself: humanity called by God to be his vice-regent and high priest on earth, yet feeling so inadequate."

Few could have imagined that the woman many now call "Elizabeth the Great" would reign for 70 years, striving to lead by example after the suffering of World War II and into an age in which humanity would be united by the Internet, terrorism, pandemics and other challenges.


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An old question that's back in the news: Why can’t non-Muslims visit Mecca and Medina?

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An old question that's back in the news: Why can’t non-Muslims visit Mecca and Medina?

THE QUESTION:

Why does Islam ban non-Muslims from the holy cities of Mecca and Medina?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum is among the last people Saudi Arabians might want to listen to. Yet he penned a Wall Street Journal op-ed last month urging Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to end Islam’s long-standing ban against non-Muslims entering the faith’s two holiest locations, Mecca, where the Prophet Muhammad issued the Quran and founded the religion 14 centuries ago, and Medina, where he led the first Muslim regime.

This prohibition hit the news when Gil Tamary, an American Jew and TV journalist in Israel, illicitly slipped into Mecca to record material and broadcast a much-hyped 10-minute travelogue. Muslims have enforced the ban so carefully, Pipes reports, that only 18 non-Muslims are known to have ever entered Mecca, including Tamary and two others in recent decades.

The violation of sacred space provoked an international furor among not only Muslims but Israelis and westerners who feared a rise in hostility. The regime has filed criminal charges against Tamary and his Saudi driver. Tamary apologized and said his intent was to “showcase the importance of Mecca and the beauty of the religion” and thereby foster religious tolerance. Guess again.

But cheerleader Pipes thinks Tamary “boldly challenged an archaic status quo that the world unthinkingly accepts. Bravo to him for breaking a taboo. . . . He deserves respect, not condemnation.” Pipes even wants unspecified international organizations to lobby for open access with the Saudis.

Pipes did not mention another exclusionary policy noted in the U.S. State Department’s 2022 religious freedom report. Saudi Arabia strictly forbids all non-Muslim houses of worship nationwide, though private or secret Christian gatherings are known to occur.


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Podcast: What will Queen Elizabeth II tell the world about her faith with her funeral liturgy?

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Podcast: What will Queen Elizabeth II tell the world about her faith with her funeral liturgy?

This week something unexpected happened after I filed my national “On Religion” column, something that I have never seen before in my decades of religion-news work.

What? A retired literature professor responded to my column with a poem.

The topic was easy to predict. Like millions of other people around the world, but especially in Great Britain and the Commonwealth, I have spent many hours watching (primarily on British television) the rites and public drama surrounding the death of Queen Elizabeth II.

I will post the column at GetReligion at the usual time this weekend, after it has run in most newspapers linked to the Universal syndicate. But the podcast team decided to go ahead and use it as the hook for this week’s “Crossroads” (CLICK HERE to tune that in), since so many people are talking about the death of the queen. Here is a short clip from that column:

Throughout her life, Queen Elizabeth II understood the symbolic importance of kneeling, according to former Durham Bishop N.T. Wright. After one Church of England synod, she privately expressed surprise — disappointment, even — that worshippers in Westminster Abbey simply lined up to receive Holy Communion, instead of kneeling.

“Kneeling was important to her,” said the popular author, in a “Premier Christianity” tribute. In his encounters with her, Wright found the queen “very friendly and clearly a very devout, what we would consider ‘old fashioned’ Church of England Christian. I remember thinking during more than one Christmas broadcast, she has just preached the Gospel to the nation in a way that perhaps nobody else could have done.”

In response to the column, a reader raised in Canada — but best known for his work at Baylor University in Texas and at Peking University — wrote a poem and sent it to me.

David Lyle Jeffrey, now a distinguished senior fellow at Baylor’s Institute for Studies in Religion, noted that he has never considered himself a “royalist,” but the queen’s death is certainly a time to explore the “essence of her admirable Christian character and gracious reign.” The former Baylor provost and literature professor entitled the poem “Regina Exemplaris (An exemplary queen).” Here is how it ends:


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NBC News promotes its own Satanism-scare report, which is itself a kind of scare-news device

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NBC News promotes its own Satanism-scare report, which is itself a kind of scare-news device

I have always found it interesting when major news organizations conduct a public-relations blitz — primarily with messages to other journalists — promoting one of their own news reports.

Obviously, the message to other journalists is this: We deserve praise for doing this story. The implied message is usually: We were brave to do this story. Now, all you other newsroom folks should follow our courageous example and cover this story, too.

In this case, we are talking about an NBC News press release with this dramatic double-decker headline:

NBC NEWS: SATANIC PANIC IS MAKING A COMEBACK, FUELED BY QANON BELIEVERS AND GOP INFLUENCERS

Baseless Accusations Are Branding People As Satanist Pedophiles At The Speed Of The Internet — Just Ask A GOP Prosecutor Who Recently Lost Re-Election.

There are several levels to This. Big. Story.

(1) There is a totally valid story about Internet-based attacks against a progressive Republican — David Leavitt, the prosecuting attorney for Utah County — attempting to smear him with wild stories about Satanic, cannibalistic attacks on children. Leavitt is active in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the younger brother of a former Utah governor, Mike Leavitt.

(2) There is a valid, and by now very familiar, story about QAnon, politicians, pedophiles, cannibalism, pizza and, of course, the work of Satan in one form of another (hold that thought). If you have followed GetReligion, you know that we think the world of QAnon conspiracy theories is important and worthy of tight, fact-based coverage.

(3) There are some, repeat “some,” Republicans on the right fringe who now rush to connect Satanic worship to all kinds of trends in the free-for-all that is modern American culture. These politicos have been known to blur the line between organized, public Satanic religious groups and the secret world (it’s hard to know the size of this phenomenon) of people attempting to practice dark arts of various kinds.

(4) There are many conservative, and very mainstream, religious believers who openly state their beliefs that incarnate evil — as in the biblical Satan — is at work, on one level or another, in activities including child abuse, domestic violence, terrorism, warfare, etc. Yes, some believe that using permanent forms of gender-transition surgery and puberty blockers on children fall into this category.

It’s important to note, however, that someone like Pope Francis saying that he sees Satanic forces at work in our world is not the same thing as people making accusations against, for example, the specific and official Church of Satan. Yes, Pope Francis has probably used more Satan-based language than any pope in several generations, including on some issues linked to the Sexual Revolution.

This NBC News report takes the important story at level (1) and links it to level (2) — which is valid. The problem, from my journalistic point of view, is that NBC News then attempts to take some poll-based information about questions at level (3) and even (4) and then blend that material with (2) Qanon and the (1) attacks on someone like Leavitt, arguing that belief in the reality of incarnate evil (a mainstream Christian belief, as in this Catholic Catechism reference) is creating a wider trend that threatens American democracy, or words to that effect.


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More Elizabeth II coverage: Washington Post goes deep on her Billy Graham contacts

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More Elizabeth II coverage: Washington Post goes deep on her Billy Graham contacts

Confession: I am still paying next to zero attention to American telly when it comes to rites linked to the death of Queen Elizabeth II. I’m tuned into BBC World and, via YouTube, streaming Sky News.

The few times I’ve flipped over to the major U.S. networks left me with the same impression as before — that the Royal Family is viewed as kind of a cleaned-up version of the Kardashians, with the queen as a sad, nobel celebrity matriarch. See this earlier post: “Elizabeth the Great: Why do many journalists choose to edit faith out of her Christmas talks?”

I think the big gaps (other than details about her faith) have been any sense of (a) the gravitas added by her World War II service, including her work driving an Army ambulance. Also, it’s poignant that, (b) until the stunning abdication of King Edward VIII, she was raised with zero expectation of becoming queen. This relatively normal childhood (until age 10) created tight ties to her parents and shaped her views on family.

Yes, the BBC has had a very heavy emphasis on the admiration for the queen seen in mainline, establishment churches and minority faiths. At some point I would like to know if the admiration for Elizabeth II common among American evangelicals also exists in the UK. Click here for a roundup of that, including these typical remarks from Bishop Andrew Forster of the Church of Ireland:

"Throughout her life she set Christ, and his message and his teaching, as the primary thing that has helped her and blessed her and I think made her into the incredible monarch, sovereign that she was."

Bishop Forster described the late Queen as the "grandmother of the nation".

"Maybe it was because people understood that she had an understanding of some of the issues that we might face behind closed doors, some of the issues of increased frailty, of family strife — there was that sense of a grandmotherly figure who understood the challenges of life," he said.

In my previous post, I noted that a Washington Post feature about the queen’s “most memorable remarks” that said her public appearances were “peppered with words of wisdom, faith and occasionally personal reflections.” There was content about her Christmas messages, while omitting any faith content.

However, the religion desk — veteran Sarah Pulliam Bailey (a former GetReligion contributor) — went in depth on one of the most interesting religion-news angles from the queen’s long life: “Fact checking ‘The Crown’: Queen Elizabeth’s faith and her close relationship with preacher Billy Graham.”


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Elizabeth the Great: Why do many journalists choose to edit faith out of her Christmas talks?

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Elizabeth the Great: Why do many journalists choose to edit faith out of her Christmas talks?

The Queen is dead. God save the King.

It’s hard to edit the religion content out of that equation. However, when journalists are asked to deal with the death of the queen who was, it can be argued, the most famous woman of the past 100 years, there are plenty of important, “real,” issues to deal with other than the state of her soul and her Christian faith.

I spent most of yesterday afternoon and evening watching the BBC Global coverage of the death of Queen Elizabeth II, as opposed to, shall we say, American “telly.” The BBC focused on the death of one of the greatest, if not “the” greatest, monarchs in Great Britain’s history. There were many references to her Christian faith. American television, for the most part, offered discussions of the death of a great celebrity. If I have been too harsh with that judgment, please send me some quality URLs.

How to approach this totally justified tidal wave of coverage? I think the easiest way to search out the religion-beat content is with two specific online searches.

First, search Google News for “Queen Elizabeth” and “Christmas.” Elizabeth the Great was known, of course, for her dignified and timely Christmas addresses — an essential part of the season for Brits and those who love all things British. The vast majority of the mainstream-media obits for the queen contain references to her Christmas talks — sort of.

What did she say in these very personal messages? That’s the key.

This leads to my second Google News search, for “Queen Elizabeth” and “Christian.” This is where the mainstream press — unless I have missed something, somewhere — offer, well, something like this. In the religious press, readers will find many, many pages of content, such as this feature from Premier Christianity, a niche UK religion website: “Queen Elizabeth II served Christ.”

There was, however, this Washington Post feature with a hopeful title: “Queen Elizabeth II, in her own words: Her most memorable remarks.” After all, it did include a section with this title: “Annual Christmas speeches.” These talks were, readers are told, “peppered with words of wisdom, faith and occasionally personal reflections from the nonagenarian.” However, this is what the Post offered:

“In the old days the monarch led his soldiers on the battlefield and his leadership at all times was close and personal. Today things are very different,” she said in her first televised Christmas broadcast in 1957. “I cannot lead you into battle, I do not give you laws or administer justice but I can do something else, I can give you my heart and my devotion to these old islands and to all the peoples of our brotherhood of nations.”


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Is celebrity culture eroding American evangelicalism? This publishing insider says 'yes'

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Is celebrity culture eroding American evangelicalism? This publishing insider says 'yes'

Evangelical Protestantism, by most accounts the largest camp in American religion, has run into various troubles lately, as The Guy and many others have chronicled.

Now there’s ample Internet buzz about Katelyn Beaty’s diagnosis of one factor in a new book from a major evangelical publisher that’s well worth coverage: “Celebrities for Jesus: How Personas, Platforms, and Profits are Hurting the Church.”

Make that hurting the “White Evangelical” church.

The type of personality cults she describes are pretty much absent in “mainline” Protestantism, Black Protestantism (there are some glaring exceptions in the health-and-wealth world), Catholicism and other U.S. religious bodies. By coincidence, Rodney Palmer, an American Baptist who teaches preaching at Palmer Theological Seminary, echoed her concerns just last week in an article for the progressive Baptist News Global website.

Inevitably, Beaty has much to say about the media that we practitioners and consumers should ponder.

She’s a well-marinated evangelical as author, former print managing editor of flagship Christianity Today magazine and currently a New York-based acquisitions editor with Baker Publishing Group, one of the majors whose Brazos Press division published “Celebrities.” (Note the company’s other book imprints: Baker Books, Baker Academic, Bethany House, Chosen, Revell.)

For this reason, The Guy finds especially newsworthy — and gutsy — Beaty’s chapter treating the evangelical book industry, which is said to pour “jet fuel” on the type of fandom, branding and marketing she decries.

The bottom line, here: This bite-hand-that-feeds angle alone offers a strong story theme that journalists could draw from this book.


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In praise of the humble news Q&A: God, Lt. Dan and spiritual motivations for public service

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In praise of the humble news Q&A: God, Lt. Dan and spiritual motivations for public service

It would be hard to name a form of journalism more “humble” than a simple Q&A piece about a celebrity or someone else who has found his or her way into the news.

The journalist produces a short introduction and then, theoretically, gets out of the way.

Yes, the news organization still controls the narrative — as in asking the questions and then publishing edited versions of the questions and the answers. In practice, readers encounter this bit of journalism-speak: “This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.” (I often advise newsmakers to record these interviews for themselves, allowing them — if necessary — to post transcripts of what went down.)

This brings me to a recent Knoxville News Sentinel feature about actor Gary Sinise, whose work with injured veterans and first responders was bringing him back to Knoxville for the 2022 Medal of Honor Celebration. His public-service work on these issues is rather logical because of his famous role as Lieutenant Dan Taylor, an angry wounded warrior who finds his way back to wholeness in the movie “Forest Gump.”

Here at GetReligion, we often ask why so many journalists, when writing about public figures of this kind, tend to leave facts about religion out of the mix. This is especially problematic when the person being profiled has, on numerous occasions, made it clear that faith is one of the defining elements of his or her life. To cut to the chase: It’s harder to do that kind of crude editing when offering what is supposed to be a verbatim transcript of an interview.

There were zero “religious” questions about in this interview, even though Sinise has for years talked openly about his faith. But the humble Q&A format allowed the actor to talk about his life on his own terms. Here is an example of that in a discussion that is at the heart of the feature:

Knox News: You've played Lt. Dan, but also directed a production of "Tracers," a story about wounded Vietnam vets, in the '80s. You've been very involved with veterans in your show career, how has that influenced your work as a philanthropist?


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