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Greg Laurie goes Southern Baptist and newsrooms in Southern California are clueless

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I can’t say I’ve ever heard the Rev. Greg Laurie preach, but the evangelist is certainly a heavyweight in some circles. Which is why I was surprised to hear he was moving from life in a charismatic denomination to the Southern Baptist Convention.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise did a piece (which I found in the Orange County Register) on Laurie’s switcheroo nearly a month after Christianity Today reported on it. The writer of the Press-Enterprise piece might have done well to have googled Laurie’s name, as she would have found CT’s vastly better-reported piece.

As it was, this is what the newspaper reported on Monday:

Harvest Christian Fellowship will be joining the Southern Baptist Convention, the nation’s largest Protestant body with about 15 million members. The Rev. Greg Laurie, pastor and founder of the 15,000-member Harvest and its Harvest Crusades, announced the move in June.
Some theologians see this as Laurie’s official shift toward mainstream evangelicalism and worry that Riverside-based Harvest could be overshadowed by the denomination. Laurie has been seen as one of the biggest crusaders of Calvary Chapel, an association of evangelical Christian churches to which Harvest belongs. Calvary was born as a movement away from religious denominations.
But, in a statement, Laurie calls the new partnership an extension of the collaboration already taking place between Harvest and a network of evangelical churches that participate in the annual Harvest Crusades -- a Southern California Christian institution that’s drawn millions of people to stadiums and arenas around the world.

So far, so good -- although we could talk about whether the vague "evangelical" terms is the best way to describe the Calvary Chapel movement. Then:

Laurie, who has an office in Irvine, was not available for an interview last week, spokeswoman Laura McGowan said.
For Southern Baptist, which has been reported to be struggling with declining membership, this is a gain…

Yes, you read that right. it really did say, "For Southern Baptist" -- singular.


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Regarding a 'mainline' slide (yet again), a noted journalist raises questions to ponder

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Regarding a 'mainline' slide (yet again), a noted journalist raises questions to ponder

A previous Religion Guy Memo looked at Canada's spiritual landscape as it celebrates its 150th anniversary.

That item provoked an e-mail response worth pondering by journalistic analysts. The writer is Kenneth A. Briggs, a competitor and friendly colleague as religion editor of The New York Times during the Religion Guy’s early years writing for Time magazine’s religion section. Briggs, also an award-winner for his work at Long Island Newsday, later became a college teacher, book author and independent journalist in varied media projects.

Importantly for this context, Briggs is a certified mainline Protestant as a Yale Divinity School graduate and an ordained elder in the largest U.S. mainline denomination, the United Methodist Church (which granted him a “special appointment” for journalistic work).

First, Briggs asks whether the Religion Guy was “suggesting cause-and-effect” in stating that  both Canada and the U.S. “show remarkable losses for ‘mainline’ churches that have floated leftward”? These Protestants’ gradual numerical decline and liberal shifts this past half-century are established facts, but Briggs says the two could be simply “coincidental,” rather than that liberalism caused decline.

The Guy -- yes -- meant to imply that a shift toward more liberal doctrinal beliefs was one contributor to the unprecedented membership losses, with breakaways by local congregations, outright schisms, and individual members switching to other options or forsaking church altogether. Meanwhile, conservatives often held steady or gained adherents (though note the past decade’s smaller, but significant, decline for the staunchly conservative Southern Baptist Convention). 

Briggs calls that scenario -- linking doctrinal changes and numerical decline -- “evangelical boilerplate.”

The Guy must quickly add that factors other than liberalism played into church trends.


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When covering the Lutheran left, Minneapolis daily kindly omits sobering journalistic questions

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The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America is an amalgamation of three other Lutheran denominations, formed 29 years ago. When mainstream American journalists talk about "Lutherans," this is usually the crowd they are talking about.

The ELCA is also, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune reports, a church confronting changing times. In other words, this body is part of the ever-evolving world of liberal Protestantism, the "Seven Sisters" of the old mainline.

The paper's story begins with a typical journalistic scene-setter, at least the kind that is used when journalists are fond of the group that is being profiled:

Redeemer Lutheran Church is not your typical Lutheran outpost. Summer means the bike store and coffee shop are humming, kids camp and Zumba classes are in gear, and the young adults renting its apartments are mentoring children in this north Minneapolis neighborhood.
It represents a new model for the Lutheran Church, which is transforming itself to attract younger and diverse members, be more relevant to neighbors below its steeples and shake its image as a Scandinavian bastion best known for hot dish, Jell-O and Ole and Lena.

Anyone who regularly listened to Garrison Keillor's "A Prairie Home Companion" stemwinders about life in and around Lake Woebegone, Minnesota, will recognize the stereotype, even if Keillor was actually raised in a Plymouth Brethren congregation.

The Minneapolis paper continues explaining, however, There is a dark cloud on the horizon:

Minnesota, with the largest number of Lutherans in the nation, will be instrumental in shaping the future of the faith. Time is of the essence: 37 percent of the churches in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America -- the largest denomination in Minnesota and the U.S. -- now have fewer than 50 Sunday worshipers. ...
Membership at the ELCA plunged from 5.2 million in 1988 to about 3.7 million today. In Minnesota, numbers fell from 782,000 to about 679,000.


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This is why half of U.S. rolled its eyes over that 'Mike Pence won't eat alone with a woman' controversy

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Hey, remember the freak-out over "news" that Vice President Mike Pence won't dine alone with a woman (except his wife, of course)?

My GetReligion colleague Julia Duin covered the media storm when it erupted back in March:

Ka-boom. The mockery began.
Social media went nuts, excoriating Pence for being such a Neanderthal and worse. There were references to sharia law, for example. BBC asked: “Are Mike Pence’s Dining Habits Chivalrous or Sexist?” Clara Jeffery, editor of Mother Jones, fired off at least 15 angry tweets on the topic during a period of high dudgeon on Wednesday afternoon. Naturally, The Onion weighed in.
Jezebel.com had something so unprintable, I’m declining to link to it. Guess I get tired of media slinging the F-bomb around like it’s candy from a parade. That was pretty common during this Twitter tsunami.
The comments cascaded to a point that the Post did two pieces solely on reaction to the article. Gotta make click-bait hay while the digital sun shines.

Fast-forward three months, and a poll conducted for the New York Times confirms what roughly half of America already knew:


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Cardinal Pell coverage: Is the vast, hellish, agonizing Catholic sex crisis all about pedophilia?

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Significant, if somewhat muted, coverage continues of Vatican debates surrounding the sexual-assault charges against Cardinal George Pell -- one of the current pope's closest advisors.

If you look at this as a religion-beat case study, there are several issues to consider, building on my earlier post: "Bad day for Pope Francis: Sexual-assault charges against Cardinal Pell fuel media firestorm."

First, Pope Francis is a media superstar because of his reputation among journalists as a progressive on sexuality issues. Yes, it does help if one quotes only selected parts of what this pope says on issues of sin, confession, repentance and mercy.

Then there is the problem of how much to say about Pell's alleged victims. In practice, this boils down to two questions: (1) What should American journalists report about the controversial books (especially “Cardinal: The Rise and Fall of George Pell,” by Louise Milligan) emerging that reference the Pell accusations? Also, (2) should journalists continue to describe this as a story about pedophilia, alone, avoiding evidence that these crimes -- statistically speaking -- usually involve ephebophilia (illegal sex with under-aged boys and girls, in their teens)?

Why keep mentioning this rather technical point? I do so because I have interviewed experts on this topic (on the Catholic left and right) who stress that, in the past, many bishops were convinced it was more important to remove pedophiles from altars (because they rarely responded to therapy), while they held out hope for recovery among the far greater number of priests who had sex with teens.

Is there really a difference? Here is how one very blunt expert described the situation to me:

A 40-year-old man who wants to have sex with a 16-year-old Britney Spears is sick and disturbed and being tempted to commit a crime. But this man is not sick, disturbed and a criminal in precisely the same way as a 40-year-old man who wants to have sex with a 6-year-old Britney Spears.

The same would be true of a gay adult priest (click here for background). Discussing this fact leads to heated debates on both the Catholic left and right.


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Major news events among Episcopalians and American Anglicans: Still worth covering?

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It’s been more than 10 years since the conservative portions of various Episcopal dioceses began the Great Split-Off. That is, they left dioceses -- some of which had been around since the 18th century -- to form a new entity, the Anglican Church in North America, that billed itself as the truest representation of Anglicanism on the North American continent.

This didn’t go over too well with The Episcopal Church (TEC), as you may imagine, and many were the lawsuits filed by TEC leaders to keep their property, most of which they won. I covered churches in northern Virginia that lost everything in this battle. One church lost property they had already bought on which to build a new sanctuary. Another church lost millions of dollars in property that dated back to colonial times.

This was a big, big story year after year -- receiving major coverage from many major newspapers and wire services.

Take, 2007 for example. I was able to cover one of the ACNA’s formative sessions in Pittsburgh in 2008 and their inaugural assembly in 2009 in Bedford, Texas. As the two sides have drifted further apart and the Episcopal Church has continued losing membership, the secular media has almost stopped covering this story. Religion News Service is the one exception.

This is a shame, in that there’s still news going on.

The conservative Anglican journalist David Virtue, who has followed this story since the beginning, chronicled what happened at a recent gathering at Wheaton College near Chicago.

The Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) is planting one new church a week, Archbishop Foley Beach told delegates to the triennial gathering of some 1400 Anglicans, at Wheaton College, in the heartland of America's Bible belt. The ACNA also officially received The Anglican Diocese of South Carolina as the newest diocese with some 9,000 members -- the largest of 31 dioceses in the orthodox Anglican body. The diocese broke away from the Episcopal Church over the authority of Scripture and TEC's embrace of homosexuality and gay marriage in defiance of Lambeth resolution 1.10. ...


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Your weekend think piece: Is it really time to say 'Goodbye Nonpartisan Journalism'?

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There is no question in my mind about which "think piece" to share with GetReligion readers this weekend.

For more than a decade now, I have used "A History of News" by Mitchell Stephens as the source for some of the key lectures in my "Journalism Foundations" seminar at both the Washington Journalism Center and now the New York Journalism Semester at The King's College. I have also appreciated the input that this historian had in the solid, facts-based history corners of The Newseum in Washington, D.C., which my students visited through the years.

So my eyebrows went way up when I saw Stephen's byline atop that Politico piece with this headline: "Goodbye Nonpartisan Journalism. And Good Riddance. Disinterested reporting is overrated."

On one level, this piece is simply (a) part of the news media's anger and grief reacting to life with Donald Trump and (b) a historian noting -- accurately -- that American newspapers used to be fiercely partisan in the days before faster printing presses and the rise of the American model of the press (with its professional standards striving for accuracy, fairness and balance). 

Let's dive straight into this, with a massive chunk of his thinking near the top of the essay. Note that Stephens is completely focused, in this essay, on national politics. What does this have to do with the religion beat? Wait for it.

The big news in American journalism today has been that reporters, editors and producers at legacy journalism organizations have become so eager to dispute the more questionable pronouncements and proposals of the Trump administration. Increasingly, they are prepared to label the president’s wilder statements and tweets “falsehoods” or even “lies.” The big news is that many of our best journalists seem, in news coverage, not just opinion pieces, to be moving away from balance and nonpartisanship.
Is this the end of all that is good and decent in American journalism? Nah. I say good for them. An abandonment of the pretense to “objectivity” -- in many ways a return to American journalism’s roots -- is long overdue.


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So if pro-life Democrats huddle with top DNC boss, will it anger all those young Nones?

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So if pro-life Democrats huddle with top DNC boss, will it anger all those young Nones?

Does everyone remember that special U.S. House of Representatives election down in suburban Atlanta, the one that Democrats and Republicans poured millions of dollars into as a kind of referendum on President Donald Trump?

The winner, a Catholic conservative named Karen Handel, defeated a young aggressively secular outsider named Jon Ossoff.

That was a pretty big news story, right? And speaking of rather important national news stories, does anyone remember the provocative statement that Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez made a few weeks before that, when he proclaimed:

"Every Democrat, like every American ... should support a woman's right to make her own choices about her body and her health. This is not negotiable and should not change city by city or state by state." In fact, he added, "every candidate who runs as a Democrat" should affirm abortion rights.

So this week's Crossroads podcast (click here to tune that in) started with those two stories and attempted to connect the dots, building off my recent post that ran with this headline: "Who is Karen Handel, winner of that big Georgia race? Surprise! Press ignored a key angle."

The basic question: Would Handel, in a House district that Trump barely won, have been able to win if Democrats had been willing to run a candidate who was an old-fashioned, pro-life, culturally conservative, "Blue Dog" Democrat?

Ah, but would such a candidate be acceptable to the current DNC leadership in the age of Sen. Bernie Sanders and millions and millions of edgy, young, idealistic Democrats -- many of whom, according to researchers, would surely fall under the "Nones" umbrella? You remember the "Nones," as in the rising tide of religiously unaffiliated Americans? That's a big story, too.

So we have a big story linked to another big story linked to yet another big story. So one would assume that a Washington, D.C. meeting between the leaders of the group Democrats for Life with the aforementioned Perez, primarily to discuss the party's willingness to run pro-life candidates in House districts in places like Georgia, would attract quite a bit of news attention.


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A religiously intriguing lawyer joins Trump defense team as a key adversary exits  

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A religiously intriguing lawyer joins Trump defense team as a key adversary exits  

The addition of controversial attorney Jay Sekulow to President Donald Trump’s defense team is a wide-open invitation for journalistic personality stories. By all accounts, Sekulow, 61, is among America’s most zealous -- and effective -- religious litigators. He also hosts a daily radio show and has become an omnipresent Trump advocate on other media. 

Early coverage on his appointment left unexplored territory on the religion aspects of the sort noted by The Forward, the venerable liberal Jewish newspaper whose print and online editions reach a broad readership. Then The Washington Post published a June 27 jaw-dropper on Sekulowian finances.

More on money in a moment. If The Forward’s treatment seemed harsh, that’s certainly predictable. Sekulow has been in the middle of many social issues that are considered “conservative” while the paper has traditionally embraced socialists and liberal Democrats.

Moreover, Sekulow was raised in Reform Judaism, but became a “Messianic Jew” (that is, an evangelical Protestant of Jewish ethnicity) during college years at Mercer University, where he later earned his law degree. After work as a trial attorney for the IRS and a business lawyer in Atlanta, in 1990 he became chief counsel for the new American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), founded by the Rev. Pat Robertson.  

Like Trump’s top lawyer, Marc Kasowitz, Sekulow is no expert in the Washington, D.C., quicksand the President finds himself in. But he’s battle-hardened, having argued 12 cases before the U.S. Supreme Court in his religion specialization. Early on, Sekulow grasped that federal judges are less than ardent supporters of religious freedom claims and switched to a civil liberties strategy exploiting other Bill of Rights guarantees, winning for instance a 1987 Supreme Court OK for airport pamphlet distribution by Jews for Jesus.


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