, , , , , , , ,

Who are the Yazidis of Iraq? (And why are they facing such bitter persecution?)

, , , , , , , ,
Who are the Yazidis of Iraq? (And why are they facing such bitter persecution?)

RACHAEL’S QUESTION:

I’ve heard of Yazidis but don’t know much about them. What are some basics of their beliefs?

THE RELIGION GUY’S ANSWER:

The genocidal effort by the “Islamic State” (I.S.) to exterminate devotees of this small Kurdish religion centered in mountainous northern Iraq is a great moral outrage of the era. The opponents’ bloodthirsty zeal exceeds even the persecution, enslavement, exile, and murder I.S. has visited upon Christians.

With Mosul as the current focus of coalition combat to expel I.S., note that just 36 miles northeast of that metropolis lies Lalish, the holy city of the Yazidi (also transliterated as Yezidi, Azidi, Zedi, or Izdi). It’s the site of the major shrine and pilgrimage destination, the tomb of 12th Century Sheikh Adi ibn Musafir, venerated as the founder (or co-founder) of the faith.

Yazidism is also in the news because refugee Nadia Murad Bassee has emerged internationally as the Yazidi voice for thousands of fellow young women subjected to kidnapping, sexual trafficking and rape at the hands of I.S.  In recent weeks she was awarded the Vaclav Havel Human Rights Prize, and shared the Andrei Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought with another Yazidi, Lamiya Aji Bashar.

Such hate has persisted over centuries and Yazidi annals count 72 previous waves of persecution. Muslim extremists find the Yazidis especially repellent and threatening. They are considered apostates from true Islam and thus deserving of death, and also as supposed “devil worshippers.”

In fact, this is a unique and lavishly syncretistic creed.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , ,

Chinese 'evangelical Trumplicanism?' Vancouver Sun floats a totally new buzz word

, , , ,

Sometimes there’s an unusual religious group out there that reporters don’t have the contacts or the linguistic abilities to crack. One such group are the 100,000 Chinese Christians in Vancouver, B.C. They’re too large to ignore but if you don’t know Chinese, it’s tough to get an entrée.

Actually, Vancouver has 400,000 Chinese total, so the 100,000 estimate may be a bit low. And so Douglas Todd, the religion blogger for the Vancouver Sun, has found a way around this problem by engaging a bilingual scholar who can interpret this people group.

What do you know? Todd discovered -- taking American politics all the way outside our borders -- that these folks are very pro-Trump. The larger question: Why does this matter and how it this linked to larger religion issues?

Here’s what he wrote last week:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is getting support from an unusual source -- Chinese evangelicals in Canada.
Social media in Canada is ablaze with Chinese Christians coming out in support of the bombastic would-be strongman. Trump’s Chinese supporters see him as a beacon of authoritarian stability in a world that could be headed towards apocalypse. The Chinese Christians also think Trump could ensure their ongoing prosperity.
“Trump … is (seen as) a dose of strong law-and-order medicine on the world stage,” says Assistant Prof Justin Tse, who studied Metro Vancouver’s more than 400,000 ethnic Chinese while obtaining his PhD in geography at the University of B.C.
Some Chinese evangelicals in Canada are supporting Trump to “ensure the stability of global markets through authoritarian law-and-order regimes,” says Tse, a visiting assistant professor in the Asian American Studies Program of Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences at Northwestern University, Chicago.
At my request, Tse wrote up a short analysis of Trump’s Chinese-evangelical support, in which he refers to the cohort as “Trumplicans.”


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , ,

In a town called Faith, voters offers clues on who exactly supports Donald Trump

, , ,

After chasing stories all over the United States, I found Faith — a town in South Dakota with a population of 421.

It turns out I'm not the only newspaper reporter drawn to Faith.

Tim Funk, award-winning religion writer for the Charlotte Observer, ventured there — to the Faith in North Carolina — for a front-page report over the weekend.

Funk's Faith story tackles questions perplexing many this election season: Who are the people supporting Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump? And why? (In all fairness, the exact same questions could be — and should be — raised concerning those on Democrat Hillary Clinton's bandwagon.)

Here's what I like about the Charlotte Observer's story (and regular GetReligion readers will note that I'm praising a newspaper I've criticized in the past): The reporter goes to a Republican-leaning town, paints a vivid portrait of it and actually listens to the people he meets.

Of course, I've always enjoyed these kind of small-town takeouts. In my Associated Press days, I recall writing one from Daingerfield, Texas, and another from Crawford, Texas.

But back to the Charlotte Observer piece: Funk's lede nicely sets the scene:


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , , , ,

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

, , , , , , , , , ,

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.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , ,

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

, , , ,

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:


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , ,

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

, , , , ,

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. 


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , , , ,

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

, , , , , , , ,

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."


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , , , ,

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

, , , , , ,

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.


Please respect our Commenting Policy
, , , ,

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

, , , ,

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.


Please respect our Commenting Policy