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RNA poll: Trump dominates 2016, but was not (#Really) Religion Newsmaker of the Year

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RNA poll: Trump dominates 2016, but was not (#Really) Religion Newsmaker of the Year

So when did Citizen Donald Trump win the White House? 

You could make a case that it was when Hillary Rodham Clinton kept going to see the musical "Hamilton" over and over, rather than taking her husband's advice and making a few campaign trips to visit with angry working-class, labor-union Catholic families in the deeply depressed corners of Rust Belt states like Wisconsin and Michigan.

Or maybe the key moment in the cultural earthquake that topped this year's Religion News Association Top 10 religion-stories poll -- the subject of this week's Crossroads podcast -- actually took place in 2015.

That's what David Bernstein argued in a Washington Post analysis that ran with this headline: "The Supreme Court oral argument that cost Democrats the presidency." He argued that the crucial moment in this campaign took place on April 28, 2015, during debates at the U.S. Supreme Court (.pdf transcript here) that led to the 5-4 decision on the Obergefell same-sex marriage case.

JUSTICE ALITO:  Well, in the Bob Jones case, the Court held that a college was not entitled to tax­ exempt status if it opposed interracial marriage or interracial dating. So would the same apply to a university or a college if it opposed same­sex marriage?
GENERAL VERRILLI: You know, I, I don't think I can answer that question without knowing more specifics, but it's certainly going to be an issue. I, I don't deny that. I don't deny that, Justice Alito.  It is, it is going to be an issue.

From that moment on, argued Bernstein, it was clear that -- for millions of doctrinally conservative religious believers in various faiths -- the future of the Supreme Court and the First Amendment's free exercise of religion clause was going to be the No. 1 issue in the 2016 presidential race. I totally agree with his take on that. Hold that thought.


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More Paula White? Trump's inauguration clergy picks create media buzz and bombs

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After Donald Trump’s transition committee announced the names of six faith leaders to appear at his inauguration three weeks from now, you would think it had announced the coming of the Antichrist, judging from some of the press reactions.

The spite fest that erupted Wednesday afternoon was mainly directed toward the lone female invitee.

Disagree with the Rev. Paula White's theology as you may (many conservative Christians do), but tell me: Is she that evil? 

First, the better stuff. From CNN, we get the list: 

Donald Trump's inaugural committee announced Wednesday six faith leaders who will participate in the swearing-in ceremony of the President-elect.
Archbishop of New York Cardinal Timothy Michael Dolan; Reverend Dr. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference; and Paula White, pastor of New Destiny Christian Center will offer readings and give the invocation.
Rabbi Marvin Hier, dean and founder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center; Rev. Franklin Graham, president of Samaritan's Purse and president of the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association; and Bishop Wayne T. Jackson, senior pastor of Great Faith Ministries International will also offer readings and give the benediction.

You’ve got a Catholic, Jew and four Protestants, including a Hispanic, a black man, a white man and a white woman.

Making a perfectly valid and essential point, YahooNews noted that Rodriguez disagrees with Trump on a lot of stuff. 


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Ask a few more questions? Vandals take some shots at Russian church here in USA

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I realize that this recent news report out of Georgia is probably not a big deal.

Journalists had little cause to ask a few questions that some might consider a bit paranoid. After all, we are talking about bullet holes in a church, not a mosque.

Plus, Georgia is way down in Bible Belt country. There are lots of people down there with guns, to be sure, but not many who are likely to be violently angry about the many, many negative news headlines (think Syria, wiretaps, Vladimir Putin, etc.) linked to Russia.

There is some chance that those crazy Southerners where just, you know, running around shooting guns in the air, because they do things like that. However, these maybe-random shots happened as Christmas -- using the Gregorian date, Dec. 25th -- was approaching, as opposed to taking place during the often wild festivities of New Year's Eve.

So here is what happened, to cut to the chase. This short, short story -- "Church finds bullet holes through building, welcome sign" -- comes from the Fox 5 channel:

FORSYTH COUNTY, Ga. -- Forsyth County deputies are searching for the vandals who shot a church’s sign and house of worship.
“I hope it’s teenagers. I don’t see it being something more than that, it would be more troubling,” said Father Eugene Antonov of the Joy of All Who Sorrow Russian Orthodox Church.
Church members discovered multiple bullet holes through walls of their house of worship under construction, the windows and the front welcome sign.


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2016 in review: A GetReligionista reflects on his Top 10 most-viewed posts

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Journalists love year-end lists.

It's our way of filling holiday space with content we've already produced so we can focus on more important things, like family, Christmas lights and New Year's celebrations.

Um, just in case my boss is reading this (instead of watching "It's a Wonderful Life" for the umpteenth time), what I meant to say was: "Year in review" lists are a great way to reflect on the past year while thoughtfully looking ahead to the new one. 

I write four posts a week for GetReligion. In a year, that adds up to more than 200 times that I share my critiques of religion news coverage (or lack of coverage) by the mainstream media. 

Since you do me the courtesy of reading my posts and frequently commenting on them — both here on the website and via channels such as Twitter and Facebook — I thought you might be interested in my most-read posts of 2016. 

There's a mix of sports, politics, entertainment, human interest, Godbeat news and culture war stuff among my top 10. And yes, Donald Trump figures in two of the top three posts.

Drum roll, please ...


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About those Filipino Catholics: What does it mean when a murderer is elected president?

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In an increasingly insecure world, blow-back politics -- the lurch to the right after years of liberal government stumbles and outright failures -- has increasingly taken hold in the democratic West. We've seen it in Poland and earlier this year in Great Britain (Brexit).

It also goes a long way toward explaining how electoral long shot Donald Trump became President-elect Donald Trump.

How all this ends is anybody's guess. But let's hope it's not like the Philippines, where right-wing, electoral populism has birthed its deadliest spawn. That's where self-confessed murderer President Rodrigo Duterte has taken charge.

This week he uttered what arguably were his most outrageous comments yet. The Washington Post reported it thusly:

In his latest controversial statement, Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, known for his bloody anti-drug war that has killed thousands, threatened to throw corrupt officials out of a helicopter, saying he has done it before, to a kidnapper, and won't hesitate to do so again.
“I will pick you up in a helicopter to Manila, and I will throw you out on the way,” Duterte said in Tagalog in front of a crowd in the Camarines Sur province Tuesday, according to GMA News. “I've done it before. Why would I not do it again?”

Yes. The people of the Philippines, an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic nation, freely voted into office a man who brags about his extra-judicial killing of those he judged to be incorrigible drug dealers and abusers, and others. And his henchmen follow his lead. And the Filipino people say they're, by and large, just fine with it.

This despite the fact that their church leaders openly and repeatedly condemned Duterte.


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Surface-level journalism: New York Times fails to cover heart and soul of pro-Trump town

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In my Associated Press days in Dallas, I helped cover Texas developments in President George W. Bush's 2004 re-election campaign.

Those stories ranged from analyzing the grassroots war for popular votes in the red state to highlighting a rare Lone Star county that split on Bush-Gore in 2000. Yes, I tackled religion-related angles, too, exploring "How would Jesus vote?" and explaining the political appeal of a Bush speech to the Knights of Columbus.

But one of my most memorable Bush-related pieces involved a furor over the president's "hometown paper" endorsing Democratic challenger John Kerry:

CRAWFORD, Texas (AP) — Signs at the bank, the cafe and the Bottlinger Grain bins all declare Crawford – the proud home of the president’s ranch – as “Bush Country.”
So when the Lone Star Iconoclast, a tiny weekly that bills itself as Bush’s hometown paper, endorsed Democrat John Kerry, there was hell to pay.
Local businesses pulled their ads and banned the paper from their stores.
“We felt a little betrayed,” said Larry Nelson, manager of the Crawford Country Style, a downtown shop that sells “Luvya Dubya” trinkets and other Bush memorabilia.
Most folks in Crawford (pop. 705) wholeheartedly support the re-election of the man whose “Western White House” made their speck on the map famous. Eighty-two percent voted for President Bush in 2000.
The paper’s publisher, W. Leon Smith, said he never expected such a hostile response. He knew “a person or two might pull an ad, that we might lose a subscriber or two.”
“But this has turned a little more vicious,” said Smith, 51, wearing a decade-old knit tie and ink pens in his white shirt pocket.

Twelve years later, as normally reliable Republican editorial pages backed Democrat Hillary Clinton in droves, media organizations ranging from NPR to Time to Vanity Fair all asked the same basic question: Do newspaper endorsements even matter anymore?

Short answer, based on Donald Trump's stunning victory on Nov. 8: Nope. Nada. Not at all.

But as the New York Times reported this week, endorsements definitely mattered in certain locales — just not in the way that journalists who wrote pro-Clinton editorials might have hoped. (That old editor in Crawford might have warned them.)

Here in my home state of Oklahoma, the Times focused on the backlash over the Enid News & Eagle — founded in 1893 — endorsing a Democratic for president for the first time in its modern history.


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Cardinal Tobin's impressive rise to power doesn't need dose of New York Times snark

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This article on Newark’s incoming Catholic cardinal sure starts well, as the New York Times evidently thought enough of the man to send a reporter to flyover country to ferret him out and dig for some deep details.

But then, a few red flags began to rear their heads. Instead of being merely a profile of an interesting man plucked from the ecclesiastical backwater of Indianapolis, I began to see a different narrative.

Want to guess what subjects complicated matters in this otherwise fine profile?

Here’s how it starts:

INDIANAPOLIS -- For about a year, the guys at the gym just called him Joe. He lifted weights in the early mornings wearing a skull-printed do-rag. He worked out on the elliptical, wiping it down when he was done.
Then one day Shaun Yeary, a salesman at a landscape supply company, asked him in the locker room what he did for a living. “I used to be a priest,” Joe recalled telling him. “And now,” he said, his voice growing quieter so as not to scare anyone in earshot, “I’m the archbishop of Indianapolis.”
“I was like, for real?” Mr. Yeary recalled. “This guy is benching two and a quarter!” -- gymspeak for 225 pounds.
Joe, also known as Cardinal Joseph W. Tobin, recently became one of the 120 men in the world who will choose the next pope. But he wants to be judged by his actions, not his lofty position in the Roman Catholic Church.

After another few sentences on the man’s humility:

… he is just the kind of leader Pope Francis is elevating to realign the church in the United States with his priorities.
As the pope has made clear over the past three years, fancy lifestyles, formality and regal titles like Prince of the Church are out of style for cardinals. So is an emphasis on the divisive issues of abortion and same-sex marriage, even though the church’s underlying position on those issues has not changed.


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Hollywood discovers God! Again! Seriously, this New York Times piece is worth reading

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I've been around the Godbeat scene so long that I can remember the days when journalists would wait four of five years before they would write the same Big Trend Story all over again.

You know the ones I'm talking about. Things like the whole "Death of the Religious Right" story or the latest update on "Why megachurches are getting bigger." And did you know that interfaith marriages are a big deal in modern Judaism?

Another one of the standards has been the "Hollywood discovers that religious people watch movies" story. Because of my longstanding interest in this topic (hint, hint), I have been watching journalists discover this trend over and over ever since "Field of Dreams" and  "Home Alone." Hey, do you remember Michael Medved? Then in 2009, The Los Angeles Times even interviewed me about the roots of this trend behind the hit movie, "The Blind Side."

You can blame Mel Gibson and "The Passion of the Christ," of course, but there is more to this evergreen story than one or two big-ticket items.

Still, I was cynical when I saw this New York Times headline the other day: "Secular Hollywood Quietly Courts the Faithful." I expected another quick-turn news feature about this "hot topic."

In this case I was wrong. The basic message of this in-depth business feature was that this is a topic that is not new and that it is not going away, in part because Hollywood has entered an era in which making profitable niche-market films is almost as important as making special-effects blockbusters. And then there is the trend of evangelical churches adding massive video screens to their sanctuaries, so that preachers can spice up their sermons with video clips.

Instead of settling for shallow coverage of the latest wrinkle in this old story, this Times piece went for the deep dive. Here is the overture:

The Rev. Roderick Dwayne Belin, a senior A.M.E. Church leader, stood before a gathering of more than 1,000 pastors in a drafty Marriott ballroom in Naperville, Ill., this month and extolled the virtues of a Hollywood movie.


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'Twas the week before Christmas and all through The New York Times, the Kellerisms were ...

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If there's a cliché we might do better without, it could be the phrase "War on Christmas." As we head out of cultural Christmas and into the actual 12 days of the Christmas season, let's reflect on that just a bit.

Actually, The New York Times and I might agree about that cliche thing. Of course, the difference is that my opinion is expressed here as a blogger. The Times, on the other hand, puts its position forward in a news article. (And while I write this on the Third Day of Christmas, it's still worth looking back a bit, I believe, as we brace for next year.)

Such an adherence to Kellerism -- the journalism "doctrine" that editors at the Times know who is right and who is not on moral, cultural and religious issues -- isn't surprising. Coming a few days after top Times editor Dean Baquet admitted his reporters "don't get" issues of religion, however, it is a bit of a chin-scratch: Do editors over there, you know, talk to each other?

Here we go:

The idea of a “War on Christmas” has turned things like holiday greetings and decorations into potentially divisive political statements. People who believe Christmas is under attack point to inclusive phrases like “Happy Holidays” as (liberal) insults to Christianity.
For over a decade, these debates have taken place mainly on conservative talk radio and cable programs. But this year they also burst onto a much grander stage: the presidential election.
At a rally in Wisconsin last week, Donald J. Trump stood in front of a line of Christmas trees and repeated a campaign-trail staple.

(Along with the whole talking-to-each-other thing, I also wonder if it is now standard operating procedure for each and every Times article on controversial subjects to have a mandated reference to the soon-coming 45th President of the United States, one Donald J. Trump. If so, it's gonna be a long four years, I'm guessing.)


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