Yes, an Easter terror attack is symbolic: Some reports danced around facts on the ground

In the wake of the Brussels attacks, there were quite a few mainstream media reports noting that police were bracing for more terrorist attacks during the upcoming weekend.

Right, as if -- looking at the calendar -- this was just another weekend.

Why would police specifically need to worry about attacks on Easter, the most important holy day in the Christian faith? Of course, millions of Eastern Christians -- especially in the Middle East -- will face these fears again in the days leading up to Pascha (Easter) on the ancient Julian calendar, which is May 1 this year.

As it turned out, the other shoe dropped in Pakistan, not in Europe. Once again, some journalists -- especially in the early hours of coverage -- were not sure what to do with the very specific and very symbolic religious elements of this horror story. This morning's New York Times story still captures the tone-deaf approach of the early hours.

Check out this headline: "Blast at a Crowded Park in Lahore, Pakistan, Kills Dozens."

That seems to be missing a few crucial details, right? And here's the lede on that report:

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan -- A suicide bomber set off a powerful blast close to a children’s swing set in a public park on Sunday evening in the eastern city of Lahore, killing at least 69 people and wounding around 300, rescue workers and officials said.

The E-word finally showed up in the next paragraph:

The blast occurred in a parking lot at Gulshan-e-Iqbal Park, one of the largest parks in Lahore, said Haider Ashraf, a senior police official in the city. The bomb was detonated within several feet of the swings in a park crowded with families on Easter.

And the C-word appeared with an on-the-record quote from radicals claiming credit for the attack:


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Deseret News covers heaven: But how many voices does this story need to include?

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Anyone who has spent some time on the religion beat knows that religious organizations like to hold conferences about big, complex, interesting topics.

Covering one of these things is a great way to spend a day. Most of the time when you are sent to one, you end up hearing all kinds of articulate people talking about all kinds of interesting angles on what is usually a very interesting subject (at least it's interesting to members of the flock that staged the conference).

But there are challenges. For starters, what do you do if there are two really interesting presentations going on at the same time? Also, you can end up with dozens of interesting points of view competing for the lede of your story. How do you pick a winner? How does one decide which voice is the most newsworthy?

In the end, reading competing news accounts of the same conference tells you just as much about the reporters involved in the coverage as it does the content of the actual event.

If you want to see a perfect example of this syndrome, check out this recent story from The Deseret News about a conference focusing on a subject that is certainly interesting and potentially even newsworthy. But the topic is so massive, and the event drew so many interesting experts, that the result is kind of -- well, I'll let you be the judge of that.

How big is the subject? Let's start with the lede:

PROVO -- What lies beyond the grave?


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Mirror image question: No American coverage of the murder of Muslim merchant in Glasgow?

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It's time, once again, to look at the mirror image of a story that is in the news. We are, of course, in the final days of Holy Week for Western churches.

Let's change the context and flip the key details to create our mirror-image case. Let's say that, somewhere in Europe, the following tragedy took place. It is days before Ramadan and a Christian merchant, extending a hand of fellowship during these tense times, posted a message extending good will and affection for his Muslim neighbors as they entered a holy season.

Hours later, in our hypothetical story, one or two Christians enter the man's shop and brutally murder him, stabbing him repeatedly and then stamping on his head.

Police quickly make it clear that this was a "religiously prejudiced" attack.

Yes, this would be a major story in Europe. But do you think it would draw significant coverage from elite newsrooms on this side of the pond? Or would it be one of those stories that is ignored, other than in alternative media sources that come with political labels attached?

Now, what is the actual story? Let's turn to the BBC, which is hardly a minor news source:

A 32-year-old man has been arrested after a Glasgow shopkeeper was killed in what Police Scotland are treating as a "religiously prejudiced" attack.
Asad Shah, 40, was found seriously injured in Minard Road, Shawlands, at about 21:05 GMT on Thursday. He died in hospital. The incident happened hours after he apparently posted social media messages wishing his customers a happy Easter.
Police said both Mr Shah and the arrested man were Muslims.
A post on Thursday from an account that appears to be Mr Shah's said: "Good Friday and very happy Easter, especially to my beloved Christian nation x!" ...


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Obamacare case: RNS reports both sides, though little on those in between

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Yaayyy! Someone remembered that there are two sides (at least) to a controversy!

And it's not Normal, Moderate Americans vs. Those Nuts on the Right!

The Religion News Service does the right thing in a newsfeature about "two 20-something Christians, both motivated by faith," who were found in counter-demonstrations outside the U.S. Supreme Court.

At issue is that long-smoldering battle over Obamacare: whether it can require religious groups to provide contraceptives that they believe will cause abortions and kill embryonic humans. The Little Sisters of the Poor, along with six other plaintiffs, have taken the feds to court over the matter. The Supreme Court is expected to rule by summer or earlier.

For such a story, many mainstream media would have tried a blend of what tmatt calls the Frame Game and the Two Armies approach. On the liberal side, they'd single out a young, stylish, articulate woman. Her conservative opposition would likely be a middle-aged, overweight male who used bad grammar.

Instead of such cheap devices, the RNS article chooses two young female college students -- both of them even named Katie -- each spelling out sincere beliefs. It shows respect for both, allowing us readers to make up our own minds.

Here is how we are introduced to Katie Stone and Katie Breslin:


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Hey media, here's one way to overcome that tired 'anti-Muslim backlash' storyline

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The backlash is baa-aack.

More precisely, the "Muslim backlash" stories are back. Just check out the front page of Thursday's USA Today.

As for an actual backlash against Muslims in the U.S.? That's a subject of some debate.

Here at GetReligion, of course, we've touched on this topic again and again and again.

With your indulgence, I'll reference one more time what I said in the immediate aftermath of this week's Brussels terror attacks:

Key, again, is factual reporting that highlights the various strains of Islam (as we have said a million times, there is "no one Islam") and avoids the simplistic "Islamophobia" propaganda that plagued so much of the coverage last time.

USA Today, whose news coverage is to journalism what McDonald's cheeseburgers are to fine dining, didn't get the memo. But give the national newspaper credit for going all the way with its totally predictable, stereotypical approach. This is the online headline on the story featured in Thursday's print edition:


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Classic M.Z. Hemingway: Why do journalists settle for lite (or mangled) Easter news?

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There she goes, there she goes again.

What we have here is another classic example of M.Z. "GetReligionista emeritus" Hemingway spotting another cultural hook that is big enough, and hot enough, to cover as a valid religion-news trend.

To state the question bluntly: Has Easter evolved into the new Xmas?

Saints preserve us.

Please note that Hemingway -- writing at The Federalist of course -- is not predicting something along the lines of the dreadful church-state "War on Christmas" stories that, tragically, have become a permanent part of America's cable-TV and click-bait online news marketplace.

No, she is asking a more serious question, one captured in the double-decker headline on her piece:

The Easter Bunny’s War On Easter Is Going Too Far
If you celebrate Easter with fake bunny ears, you're set. But what if you celebrate Jesus' resurrection?

Journalists note: The Easter Bunny is not the secular state. It's the bright, shiny world of pop commerce, which is way more comfortable with candy than with theology.


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Nagging legal question: Will polygamy become the next same-sex marriage?

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Nagging legal question: Will polygamy become the next same-sex marriage?

Future-gazingjournalists take note: The question above is the lede of an article in the April edition of First Things magazine.

Author John Witte Jr. devoutly hopes the answer is no.

Witte, the noted director of Emory University’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, presents that viewpoint at length in “The Western Case for Monogamy over Polygamy” (Cambridge University Press). The issue arises due to the gradual legal toleration of adultery and non-marital partnering that culminated in the U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell opinion last June that extended such  liberty to same-sex marriage.

The high court’s wording leaves open whether polygamy laws still make sense. This is “becoming the newest front in the culture wars,” Witte writes, and legalization may seem “inevitable” after Obergefell. We've had federal district court rulings supporting religious polygamists that Utah is appealing at the 10th Circuit. The case involves a family from the “Sister Wives” cable TV show that has helped make polygamous families seem less offensive and more mainstream-ish.

Witte writes that aversion to homosexual partners has been based historically on religious teaching, but rejection of polygamy is quite different. Polygamy occurred in the Old Testament (and usually demonstrated resulting ills and family strife). But it was opposed by the non-biblical culture of classical Greece, and in modern times by Enlightenment liberals on wholly secular grounds. (For more on biblical and Mormon history, see this piece by the Religion Guy.)

Witte observes that multiple mates are the pattern among “more than 95 percent of all higher primates,” and yet human beings “have learned by natural inclination and hard experience that monogamy best accords with human needs.”


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Film at 11? Is it news that ISIS might crucify kidnapped Salesian priest on Good Friday?

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One of the hardest parts of being a reporter, on any beat, is trying to figure out what to do while you are waiting for the other shoe to drop.

Let's say that a major event has taken place and that you have written that story. However, you just know that there will be other developments. Do you try to get ahead of it and write an advance story about what MIGHT happen, about the developments that you know the experts are already anticipating, if not investigating? Then again, if lots of scribes do that, it's possible that they will influence the story that they're covering.

This happens all the time in political coverage. Right now, major newsrooms are cranking out stories based on the whole "what will the candidates do next in an attempt to stop Donald Trump, etc., etc." line of thought. It's speculation mixed with blue-sky planning.

As you would imagine, I am thinking about a specific story now looming in the background, as the churches of the West move through Holy Week toward the bright liturgical grief of Good Friday. I am referring to that note that I added the other day, at the end of a post with this headline: "Did gunmen in Yemen kill the four Missionaries of Charity for any particular reason?"

The hook for the post was a comment by Pope Francis in which he wondered why journalists around the world were offering so little coverage of the deaths of these four nuns. I added:

So what's the bottom line at this point, in terms of the pope's lament about the news coverage? Have we reached the point where attacks of this kind are now normal and, well, not that big a deal? Did these news reports really need to be clear about who lived and who died in this case? Did the faith element -- the "martyr" detail -- matter in the original coverage of these killings or did it only become valid when the pope said so?
Just asking. And does anyone else fear that we may soon see the missing priest in an Islamic State video?


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Pew Research survey on global religious gender gap deserves far more coverage

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Years ago while living in northern Virginia, I was a mentor to a Muslim family that had been forced out of Iraqi Kurdistan. One of the things I noticed about them is they were rarely at the mosque. The women (and there were four daughters in this family) never went, except when they needed a marriage contract signed. The father occasionally attended.

Now, I’ve sat in the women’s sections of certain mosques and it’s not a great experience. You can’t see or hear a thing, it’s unbelievably crowded and there are small children racing around. No wonder my Kurdish female friends never went. Compare that to most churches I’ve visited where the majority of worshipers were women.

There's a story there.

So I was not surprised to read about this gender difference in a Religion News Service piece chronicling Pew survey data on the phenomenon. Here’s what it said:

(RNS) Fewer men than women show up in U.S. churches, and women are markedly more likely to pray and to hold up religion as important.
But in Muslim nations, it’s the women who are missing in action at the mosque -- and yet they’re on par with men in upholding almost all the Muslim pillars of faith.
Those are among the top findings in a new Pew Research study of the gender gap in religion, drawn from data in 192 nations, released Tuesday (March 22).
The overall conclusion: Women, particularly Christian, are generally more religious than men worldwide. An estimated 83 percent of women around the world identify with a faith group, compared with 80 percent of men, according to the report.

Now that 3.5 percent percentage point gap may not seem like much, but it means that 97 million more women than men worldwide identify with a faith group.


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