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Washington Post offers a rather simple story about complex Indonesian debates on sex

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If you study a map of the world, it is hard to find many nations that are much more complex -- at the level of geography, culture, religion and history -- as Indonesia.

For starters, the nation's population of 250 million-plus is spread, as any travel agent will tell you, over an archipelago of 17,508 islands -- with five major islands and 6,000 others containing populated areas.

Indonesia is also the world's largest Muslim-majority (86 percent of the population) nation and it's approach to Islam is strikingly different, in many ways, than the Arab cultures of the Middle East. In many ways, Islam in Indonesia and Asia functions as a third major form of this complex faith, along with the better-known Sunni and Shia streams.

This brings us to a recent Washington Post story, offering a highly Western take on what some would consider a "culture war" conflict in Indonesia. The rather bland headline: "Indonesia’s top court weighs ban on sex outside marriage." The story, for the most part, is dominated by rather vague references to conflicts between "progressives" and "conservatives."

Also, I read this story more carefully after receiving a note from my colleague Ira "Global Wire" Rifkin noting, "Tremendous hole in this piece: what about non-Muslim Indonesians? There are many Hindus in Java, Christian Chinese, Sikhs and others living there."

Yes, let's watch for that, too. Here's the overture:

JAKARTA, Indonesia -- Indonesia’s highest court is deliberating whether sex outside marriage should be made illegal in the world’s third-largest democracy, in the latest push by conservative Islamist organizations to restructure the country’s relatively secular legal code.
If the court revises the law to forbid casual sex, gay sexual relations would become illegal for the first time in Indonesian history, and straight unmarried couples could face prosecution.


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Halloween church show: Washington Post peeks at the trend without passing 'judgment'

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I don’t usually jump into a story without an intro, but the Washington Post's lede on Judgement House is pretty vivid:

SOUDERTON, Pa. — She stepped into the pitch-dark room, illuminated only by eerie flames, as the sound of moans and shrieks rose over the ominous music. A hooded figure, dressed in black, leapt from the darkness to hiss in her ear.
Shadeilyz Castro burst into tears.
When the shaken 10-year-old left the room, clinging to her aunt, she was not talking about witches or goblins — she was talking about the Bible. "I have to read it more," Shadeilyz said. "With my brother. I have to talk to him. He doesn’t read it much."
Judgement House did its job.

The Post, in turn, does a more-than-decent job of telling the literally torturous story of Judgement House programs -- "all sorts of earthly tortures (kidnapping, child abuse, drug abuse, a hidden pregnancy)" -- through the lens of Immanuel Leidy’s Church, near Philadelphia. It's intense, maybe shocking -- and a bit flawed -- but not cynical.

The last is not unimportant: This topic is ripe for ridicule, if the reporter is so inclined. But WaPo tells the story, quotes the people on their feelings, and rejects the usual "trip to the zoo" contempt of many secular media:


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This Bible Belt paper just discovered some interesting folks -- they're called 'evangelicals'

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Just more than a week before the election, The Oklahoman — Oklahoma City's daily newspaper — has identified a group of Oklahoma voters who could play an outsize role in my home state's balloting.

These voters — "made up of mostly white members of Protestant churches that profess a born again-centric theology" — have a special name.

They're called "evangelicals."

OK. OK. I'm being a little facetious about my local newspaper — to which I subscribe and for which I worked nine years as a reporter and editor. But Sunday's front-page story has a certain "go to the zoo and see the evangelicals" feel to it.

Let's start with the lede:

The path to victory in an Oklahoma election goes through the pews of the state’s evangelical churches. And while the number of self-proclaimed evangelicals has declined in recent years, it remains one of the state’s largest voting blocs and is instrumental in deciding everything from the result of state questions to Oklahoma’s seven presidential electoral votes.
As a part of America’s Bible Belt — if not the buckle — Oklahoma’s likely voting population on Nov. 8 is estimated to be 55 percent evangelical, according to SoonerPoll’s analysis of likely voters.

According to a pollster quoted by The Oklahoman, the Bible Belt state has a total of 1.1 million voters expected to participate in the Nov. 8 general election. That includes "over a half million people identifying as evangelical."

Apparently — and amazingly — none of those evangelical voters were available for comment for the newspaper's story. That is, unless you count the Republican congressman quoted toward the end. He, presumably, will vote for himself.

Then again, if you were writing a story about giraffes at the zoo, would you actually quote any of the giraffes at the zoo? I mean, really. 


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C'Mon Washington Post! Tell us more about that new Smithonian religion expert

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If you pay attention to sports, and I know that some GetReligion readers do, then you are probably familiar with the ESPN "C'Mon Man!" feature.

The whole idea is rather simple. When a player, referee or fan does something strange or inexplicable -- usually it's an embarrassing mistake -- this phrase is what you are allowed to shout at the field or television screen. When this happens in journalism today, people make references to spitting coffee on keyboards.

However, I do not drink coffee. So we are going with a "C'Mon Man!" reference when dealing with an interesting detail in that short Washington Post feature that ran the other day with this headline: "The Smithsonian now has its first religion curator since the 1890s."

Let me be clear: There is a lot of fun and fascinating material in this piece. I just have a question or two about the need for follow-up on one prominent detail right at the top. Let's see if you can spot it.

Peter Manseau was born for this job.
The son of a priest and a nun, Manseau was meant to be a scholar making sense of religion. Now his job, as the Smithsonian’s first curator of religion in more than a century, is to remind Americans of our nation’s religious history, in all its diversity, messiness, import and splendor.
“You can’t tell the story of America,” he said, “without the role of religion in it.”

Yes, I am talking about that phrase noting that Manseau is the "son of a priest and a nun."


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Time for a Christian Smith flashback: Writing about that whole nailed-to-a-cross thing

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If you were going to select a short list of the most infamous articles ever written about the mainstream press and the religion-beat, surely Christian Smith's "Religiously Ignorant Journalists," which ran in Books & Culture (RIP) back in 2004, would be near the top of the list.

As you would expect, it drew the attention of the newly formed GetReligion.org weblog, with an early post under this headline: "Are journalists too ignorant to cover religion news?"

Smith made several interesting points about language on the religion beat, not the least of which was a riff on the many ways that journalists tend to abuse the term "evangelical." His key point: Why don't editors hire more professionals trained to work on the religion beat, the way they do on other highly complicated -- yet respected -- beats?

Yes, the reason I am bringing this up again is that a faithful reader sent us yet another case of a mainstream, national publication offering a unique or shall we say innovative approach to ordinary religious language.

Hold that thought. Here's the famous overture of Smith's piece:

Today I received a phone message from a journalist from a major Dallas newspaper who wanted to talk to me about a story he was writing about "Episcopals," about how the controversy over the 2003 General Convention's approval of the homosexual bishop, Gene Robinson, would affect "Episcopals." What an embarrassment. How do I break the news to him that there are no "Episcopals"? Actually, they are called Episcopalians. Of greater concern, I wonder how this journalist is going to write an informed and informing story in a few days about such an important and complex matter when he doesn't even know enough in starting to call his subjects by their right name.

What I have learned, however, over the years, is that this journalist is not alone in his ignorance.


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Atheist ranks aren't solid, even in politics, says an eyebrow-raising RNS piece

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Atheists differ strongly on views of religion, of themselves, even what group to join; Richard Dawkins famously compared organizing atheists to herding cats. But I'll confess that I never thought of political differences also -- not until I read a new story from the Religion News Service.

The article is couched in terms of the presidential race -- as almost every American news story this season seems to be -- but have patience. It's a fresh approach to a little-reported facet of religious (or non-religious) life.

RNS veteran Kimberly Winston starts with the event that may have gotten her attention: a video by atheist blogger Hemant Mehta. He gets pretty strident in his opposition to Trump and to whoever supports him:

"I don’t want a president who couldn’t even explain evolution. I don’t want a president who can’t tell fact from fiction and seems to believe anything someone tells him on Twitter," Mehta says in a recent You Tube video that has garnered a lot of attention in atheist corners.
"If I wanted to hear people whose best evidence for their belief is, ‘Well, some people have said,’ then I’d go to church."
So, Mehta, best known as "The Friendly Atheist"  on his popular blog, will vote for Hillary Clinton — and he spends more than seven minutes trying to persuade other atheists to do the same because, he believes, she — a lifelong Methodist — is the only candidate who shares their core values of separation of church and state, LGBT equality and science-based education.

Winston then reveals what may surprise: Despite their commitment to pluralism and liberal politics, Democrats cannot expect a bloc vote from atheists.  "For some, the choice is not clear," the story says of the 2016 race.


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Does megachurch pastor Paula White deserve to be trashed? Yes, says The Forward

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While many Christians of the evangelical and charismatic variety have run for cover whenever a discussion of Donald Trump comes up, others have run into the spotlight. One of the latter is Pastor Paula White, a Florida preacher who’s the closest thing the candidate has to a spiritual guide.

I first became aware of Paula back in 1994, when I encountered her second husband, Randy, at a prayer meeting I was assigned to cover for an article on the “holy laughter” movement so popular 20+ years ago. They were a husband-and-wife team leading the 10,000-member Church Without Walls in Tampa. 

As the years went by, Paula’s star went up as she founded her own media ministry in 2001, which included a TV show. By the time I heard her preach several years later at the National Church of God in Fort Washington, just east of Washington, DC, I was amazed at the wardrobe, her confidence and the professionalism of her entourage.

Recently, The Forward, a news and commentary publication that until last year was known as The Jewish Daily Forward, ran a piece proclaiming “David Trump’s favorite female evangelist wears a Jewish prayer shawl -- just like him,” referring to an incident last month where Trump was presented with a prayer shawl by a pastor, which I wrote about here. Here’s how it starts:

High Holiday appeals for money are nothing new to North American synagogue-goers.
But for sheer chutzpah, few could compare with the Yom Kippur video appeal from Paula White, Donald Trump’s most visible evangelical supporter.
White stares into the camera, with cascading blond hair and Botox-swollen lips. She tells those on her ministry email list that this is Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, “God’s most holy day of the year [in a] supernatural miracle–working season.”
For the next three-and-a-half minutes, White, 50, explains why viewers need to contribute “sacrificially” to her Orlando-based organization -- $10,000, or just a thousand –- on this special day.


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Is this news? Evangelicalism's weakness extends well beyond turmoil of 2016

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Is this news? Evangelicalism's weakness extends well beyond turmoil of 2016

Starting Nov. 9, the media will be clogged with political pontifications. Here are a pair of major themes for those on the religion beat.

(1) What happened with white Catholics, the perennial religious swing voters? How about blue-collar white Catholics?

(2)  What’s ahead for demoralized evangelical Protestants after a campaign that divided them and undermined their clout?

Journalists should also ponder whether evangelicalism’s major weakness extends well beyond politics. So said the Rev. Russell D. Moore in the annual First Things magazine Erasmus lectureship on Oct. 24. He’s the chief socio-political spokesman for the huge Southern Baptist Convention and a fierce moral critic of Donald Trump, especially on racial and ethnic issues. His speech critiqued the candidate -- without ever uttering his name.

However, Moore’s major theme was that many evangelicals’ Trumpism is merely a sign of weakness that at root is intellectual. He said to influence America’s “post-Christianity culture,” religious conservatives must develop stronger “public arguments” on moral questions and on “why and how Christianity matters.” That, in turn, will require much more “theologically rigorous” thinking. (The video of this important address is at the top of this post.)

Many observers over the years have said that for all its innovations and energy, U.S. evangelicalism is all too weak intellectually, thus limiting cultural influence.


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Yes, we read that viral story on reporters #Biased against Trump. Here are five key thoughts ...

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"This Washington Post piece is worthy of some love," said a friend who sent me the link.

"By all means, grab it," said GetReligion editor Terry Mattingly when I shared it with our team.

Both my friend and tmatt recognized that this story is likely to resonate with GetReligion readers, even if it doesn't have a direct religion angle. 

I'm talking about the Post's Style section feature this week on #Biased political reporters who don't hold back their true feelings (read: negative feelings) about Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

The Post's lede:

News reporters are supposed to keep their opinions out of the stories they write and air. Twitter, it seems, is another realm entirely.
With the political campaigns staggering into their final days, mainstream reporters otherwise obligated to objectivity — or at least a reasonably balanced, non-argumentative account of events — have taken to Twitter to unburden themselves of their apparently true feelings about the race.
The primary target of their derision and general snark: Donald Trump.
Trump was “really just asking for it with this venue,” tweeted New York Times political reporter Alex Burns the other day, when Trump gave a speech in Gettysburg, Pa. “Like a losing caucus candidate speaking in Waterloo, IA.”
Over news that Trump held a rally in Bucks County, Pa., outside Philadelphia, wherein Trump pledged to put “our miners back to work,” Burns commented, “Like going to Manhattan and pledging to defend sugar subsidies. Really great,” he tweeted.
Burns has had plenty of company in the dump-on-Trump arts. Michael Hirsh, national editor of Politico’s magazine, let fly after a colleague confessed his exhaustion with covering the Republican nominee. “The entire nation needs a vacation from a certain person. #LetItEnd,” Hirsh tweeted, apparently referring to Trump.
His Politico colleague Ben White offered his own one-word take on news that Trump had used donors’ money to buy copies of his book “Art of the Deal”: #scampaign,” he tweeted.
Editors have long tried to keep reporters’ opinions out of stories by excising them from unpublished copy. But social-media platforms such as Twitter and Facebook give scribes a direct and unfiltered publishing platform, enabling them to address thousands or even hundreds of thousands of followers without a meddlesome editor standing in the way.


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