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Birth control and the Bible belt: The Atlantic says they're mutually exclusive

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You’ve got to hand this to The Atlantic; at least they are trying to do interesting religion stories, which is a lot more than I can say about certain other national magazines. And every so often, I think: They get it, as there’s a story that shows unusual insight.

More often than not, though, there’s a lot of insight all right, but it only involves one side of the issue. Such is their June 14 offering: “Can the IUD Revolution Come to the Bible Belt?” Being that copper IUDs were invented in the 1960s, this headline is telling us that the Bible Belt is a good half century behind the times.

There’s very little religion mentioned in the story. But, the main photo for the piece shows two hands holding an open book.

On one page is a T-shaped IUD. On the other is a similarly shaped wooden cross. That's subtle. Reading further:

AMARILLO, Texas -- In the dimly lit, one-room portable building, Abril Vazquez held up a beige, bulbous model of a human tricep. The high-schoolers had pushed their desks into a circle. Vazquez invited them to pass it around. When they pressed down into the fake flesh, they could feel the rigid shape of a rod about the size of a toothpick.
“What does that do again?” a boy asked. The kids ranged in age from 14 to 16, and some seemed like their minds were in the process of being blown.
“It's birth control,” said Vazquez, who works at a reproductive clinic in town. “It releases hormones into her body in small doses and in even amounts.”
“How does it get in there, Miss?” another boy said.


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Lone wolf pastor of tiny 'Baptist' church in California scores national PR win for ... What?

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It's time to head back into the confusing world of nondenominational and totally independent churches. There are thousands of them, many of which can accurately be called "fundamentalist." Most are very small and they are often dominated by the personality of a founding pastor. However, in this rather post-denominational age, there are more than a few independent megachurches with several thousand members.

Journalists, please consider this question: In terms of news value, which matters more, a statement by the pastor of an independent flock (with no connection to a larger regional or national body) with 200 or so members or a statement by leaders in a denomination with, let's say, 15 million members?

Let's think about that dynamic in light of a story that has received major news attention in the wake of the hellish massacre in the Pulse gay bar in Orlando.

Raise your hand if you are surprised that there were a few self-proclaimed fundamentalist leaders out there who said some wild and truly hateful (and heretical) things about the massacre.

Let me stress: It is perfectly valid to cover these statements. However, our earlier question remains: How important are these leaders and their churches, how representative are their voices, in comparison with the leaders of major denominations, seminaries and parachurch ministries? Also, it is crucial that readers be given information that places these wild statements in context, that lets them know that these voices are small and isolated.

In other words, the goal is to avoid doing what USA Today editors did with their story that ran with this headline: "California Baptist pastor praises Orlando massacre."

Now, is this "California Baptist" as in a reference to a Baptist pastor who happens to be in California or is it to a pastor linked to a major body of California Baptists, such as the California Southern Baptist Convention?


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Christian colleges on chopping block: Why are California newspapers ignoring the story?

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Years ago, I was assigned to write a series about the huge growth of Christian colleges in the United States and I got to select the 10 I wanted to profile. To no one’s surprise, four of them were in California because I wanted to go someplace warm.

 While enjoying the March sunshine, I also learned there are tons of Christian colleges all over the state, ranging from a Nazarene university on the ocean to a Catholic college in the orange groves east of Santa Barbara. Religious higher education is a huge industry in the Golden State and this has been the case for decades.

Sports and civil rights are important too, as everyone knows. That's why journalists everywhere, including California, did that full-court press the other day following the death of boxer Muhammad Ali. However, the media -- even newsrooms in California -- seem to be ignoring a bill going through the California state legislature that would have a huge impact on dozens of religious colleges in the state and, eventually, the nation as a whole.

There’s lots of great hot buttons in this story: religious freedom, gay students, employee rights, to name a few.

As you would expect, the alternative, "conservative" press is covering Senate Bill 1146 to the hilt. But the Los Angeles Times, which doused Ali's passing with more than a dozen stories in the past week, has not touched it. At least I could find nothing on their web site, not that of the San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Weekly or San Diego Union-Tribune.

One exception is the Sacramento Bee, which ran a guest editorial and the following brief article:


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Euphemism in the news? We debate 'abortion care' terminology in front-page report

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My friend and former colleague Kenna Griffin loves to "talk nerdy" about the intricacies of journalism.

That description probably fits GetReligion's behind-the-scenes discussion over two words that appeared in a Sunday front-page story in The Oklahoman — the Oklahoma City metropolitan daily where Kenna and I both used to work.

A question from reader Brandon Dutcher sparked the dialogue by our team:

You doubtless saw The Oklahoman’s front-page story on the new abortion clinic coming to Oklahoma City. One sentence in particular jumped out at me: “Burkhart did not get involved in women's rights work to provide abortion care in underserved communities — but that's where life led.”
Am I being overly sensitive here, or is the phrase “abortion care” inappropriate for a straight news story? Why not just say “provide abortions”?
My Orwellian alarm bells are going off, but I’m curious to know if anyone else sees anything amiss here.

A little background: I wrote a recent post praising an earlier Oklahoman story on the planned facility by religion editor Carla Hinton. The Sunday story about which Brandon inquired was written by Carla, a friend with whom I worked for nine years, and Jaclyn, a health reporter of whom I am a big fan. (In other words, these are not people I am in a hurry to criticize.)


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Wait a minute! What did Southern Baptists say about religious liberty for Muslims?

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Covering a national meeting of the Southern Baptist Convention can be a wild ride, even in these days when they "only" draw somewhere between 3,000 and 7,000 "messengers" -- not delegates -- from local congregations. Back at the height of the historic SBC battles of the late 1970s and early 1980s, these gatherings would draw around 30,000 and up, hitting a high of 45,519 in Dallas in 1985.

These events are highly organized, but the simple fact is that reporters never know who is going to make it to a microphone and speak his or her mind. It could be a pastor from a tiny church in the middle of nowhere. It could be a former SBC president, who is standing alone but may, symbolically, be speaking for thousands.

You can see this practical, journalistic, issue at work at the top of this Religion News Service report on the meetings that just ended in St. Louis:

(RNS) Southern Baptists are usually the first to defend religious freedom. But when it comes to Muslims, some want to draw a line.
At their annual meeting in St. Louis, an Arkansas pastor said Baptists shouldn’t support the right of Muslims to build mosques, especially “when these people threaten our very way of existence as Christians and Americans.”
“They are murdering Christians, beheading Christians, imprisoning Christians all over the world,” said John Wofford of Armorel Baptist Church in Blytheville, Ark., on Wednesday (June 15).
On Tuesday, Wofford offered a motion calling for the removal from office of SBC leaders who supported the right of Muslims to build mosques. He was referring, among others, to Russell Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which joined a legal document supporting a New Jersey group’s fight to build a mosque.
The chairman of the Committee on Order of Business ruled the motion out of order.

Note the word "some" in that lede.


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Kind of a GetReligionista clash: An alternative take on that big AP evangelical feature

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The other day our own Bobby "no pickles on my Chick-fil-a" Ross Jr. has some strong words of praise for an Associated Press story that tried to explain why American evangelical Protestants -- a phrase that almost always means white Republican conservatives -- are currently feeling rather down about their place in the public square.

The big idea of Bobby's post was to salute AP for dedicating plenty of space and effort to this topic. This wasn't your ordinary dash-it-off wire story. It offered lots of people space to share their views:

Thus, Bobby noted:

This 2,500-word piece -- about as long a story as you'll ever see on the AP wire -- has it all from a journalistic storytelling perspective:
• Regular people (such as the Kentucky pastor and others at his congregation).
• Respected experts (such as Lifeway Research's Ed Stetzer and Southern Baptist public policy guru Russell Moore).
• Real nuance (as opposed to boiling down the issues and concerns to cardboard caricatures, as so often happens).

Now this is where things get interesting, from a GetReligionista point of view.

This particular AP story has been promoted online for a week or so and people keep writing us with their own opinions of it. As often happens in the social media age, this piece has developed cyber-legs on Twitter and elsewhere. Thus, people keep asking: Will GetReligion offer a critique of the story?

Well, we explain, Ross already did.


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Take down that Confederate flag: Southern Baptist Convention rejects a symbol of the past

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You may not have noticed, but there are actually two mass shooting stories in the news this week. One is the ghastly murder of 49 people in the Pulse nightclub in Orlando.

The other is the startling news that the Southern Baptist Convention has denounced the Confederate flag as a symbol of hate and bigotry.

Shooting story? The latter hearkens back to June 2015, when Dylann Roof shot nine people dead at a church in Charleston, S.C. As one result of the public revulsion at the act, South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley took down the Confederate flag taken down at the Capitol.

Now the Southern Baptists, convening in St. Louis, are following suit -- though not without some opposition, as the Religion News Service reports. Veteran RNS writer Adelle M. Banks ably captures the striking symbolism:

The Southern Baptist Convention, born in 1845 in a split over its support for slavery, passed a resolution calling for Christians to quit using the Confederate flag.
"We call our brothers and sisters in Christ to discontinue the display of the Confederate battle flag as a sign of solidarity of the whole Body of Christ, including our African-American brothers and sisters," reads the resolution adopted Tuesday (June 14) at the convention’s annual meeting in St. Louis.
Former Southern Baptist President James Merritt, who said he was the great-great-grandson of two Confederate Army members, helped draft that language, which included striking a paragraph that linked the flag to Southern heritage: "We recognize that the Confederate battle flag serves for some not as a symbol of hatred, bigotry, and racism, but as a memorial to their loved ones who died in the Civil War, and an emblem to honor their loved ones’ valor."

As a longtime specialist on evangelical Christianity, Banks also quotes one of the most-qualified Southern Baptists: Russell Moore, president of the its Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission. Moore says the convention "made history in the right way," and that it's "well past time."

Banks collects other eager quotes. An Alabama minister and author calls the action "the most wonderful surprise." A spokesman for the denomination’s executive committee says the convention delegates decided to "take one bold step."

Even more vivid prose ran in the Washington Post:


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Why a wounded Orlando survivor begged God to 'take the soul out of my body'

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Powerful.

So, so powerful.

That's the only way to characterize Orlando survivor Patience Carter's description of the hell that she endured at the Pulse nightclub early Sunday.

In a front-page story today, the Los Angeles Times puts readers in the middle of the heartbreaking scene.

The lede from the Times:

ORLANDO, Fla. — As Patience Carter and two friends cowered inside the handicapped bathroom stall, injured and pinned by a crush of bleeding bodies, the gunman who opened fire in the Pulse nightclub kept talking.
“He said, ‘Are there any black people in here?’ I was too afraid to answer,” said Carter, who is African American.
Carter continued: “There was an African American man in the stall with us... he said, ‘Yes, there are about six or seven of us.’ The gunman responded back to him saying that, ‘You know, I don’t have a problem with black people, this is about my country. You guys suffered enough.’”
Carter, a slight 20-year-old NYU student from Philadelphia, had just arrived in Orlando, Fla., for her first night of vacation.
On Tuesday she and others who sought refuge in the side-by-side men’s and women’s restrooms during Sunday’s attack recounted how the gunman barked orders, claimed to have accomplices and laughed during the attack, which took 49 lives.
They also described how those trapped in the restrooms played dead, reached out to police by phone and tried to arrange their escape.

The Associated Press, CBS News and the local Orlando Sentinel are among other news organizations sharing Carter's story.


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Byzantine maneuvers: There's more to this Orthodox council story than Russia vs. Istanbul

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Anyone who has worked on the religion beat for a decade or two probably knows the answer to this "lightbulb" joke, because it has been around forever (which is kind of the point).

Question: How many Orthodox Christians does it take to change a lightbulb?

The answer is: Lightbulb? What is this "lightbulb"? (The point is that lightbulbs are modernist inventions that some heterodox folks might use in place of beeswax candles.)

However, I have heard another punchline for this joke that is highly relevant to the struggles that some journalists are having as they try to cover the long-delayed, and now stalled, Pan-Orthodox Council, which was supposed to open this week in Crete (previous post here).

So ask that lightbulb question again, but this time answer: Change? What is this "change"?

I have received emails asking me what is going on with the gathering in Crete. Most of these emails include a phrase similar to this: "What is Russia up to?" Well, there's no question that the Church of Russia -- far and away the world's largest Orthodox body -- is a big player. But to understand what many Orthodox people think about this gathering, you need to think about that lightbulb joke and then ponder how they would respond to this headline that ran the other day at Crux.

Leading cleric says Orthodox Church’s ‘Vatican II’ is a go

Disaster! Yes, a theological adviser to Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew of Constantinople said something like that.


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